Greenies

Chapter 24

Eden Theater — behind the WestHem line, 16 kilometers east of the Jutfield Gap

September 14, 2146, 1612 hours

Five hundred and eleven Martian tanks had entered the valley from the Sierra Madres to the north or from the Overlook Mountains to the south to make the surprise attack on the WestHem artillery guns. The mission had cost them sixteen tanks in the brief, but violent exchange with the battalion of tanks guarding the guns. The rest, having completed their primary mission, were now heading west at the best possible speed, their intent to go after their secondary target: The WestHem supply trains, which were sitting back towards the gap in case resupply of the main force became necessary.

Inside one of the tanks toward the middle of the formation, Zen Valentine sat in the commander's chair, looking at the telemetry on one screen and the Intelligence briefing on the other.

"Targets are eleven klicks away, stationary, spread out over one and a half klicks of ground," he told Belinda and Xenia. "The supply column consists of sixteen trains with fifteen cars per train. Each train is towed by six modified tanks. Do not waste time or energy engaging the towing tanks. They are pulling engines only and they have no defensive or offensive capabilities. Xenia, you'll know them when you see them because they will be stationed at the front of each train and they have no cannons."

"Got it," Xenia said, looking at an identification photo of a towing tank on her own screen.

"The column is protected by twenty-four mobile SALs," Zen went on. "They are currently deployed in a circle around the formation. Don't worry about them either. They're bad news for the Mosquitoes but they can't hurt us."

"Right," Xenia agreed. She already knew this, of course — it was basic armor school training — but it was good to go over such things for clarity before going into battle.

"Now, onto what we do have to worry about," Zen said. "There is a battalion of main battle tanks and a battalion of infantry guarding the column from ground attack. The tanks are grouped into squads and platoons and deployed throughout the perimeter of the column. The infantry is mounted in APCs and they are grouped in the middle of the column. Intelligence says the infantry units are equipped with portable anti-air and portable anti-tank lasers.

"Our platoon is assigned to armor suppression on the northeast side of the column. When we engage, our primary targets will be the tanks, the APCs, and any dismounted infantry troops. Xenia, remember to stick to your zone. There are a thousand WestHem tanks fifteen to twenty minutes behind us so if we're going to do any damage to that column, everyone has to stick to their assignment. Got it?"

"Got it," she said.

"If you manage to clear all the tanks in your zone you can start hitting the supply cars themselves. Ammunition carriers are the primary target followed by hydrogen carriers and then oxygen carriers. Remember, it will take at least two and maybe as many as four shots in exactly the same place to penetrate the armor on those cars. Take your shot and then put your second shot right on the hot spot you just created and then, once you're recharged, do it again."

"Fuckin' aye," Xenia said, feeling her heart hammering in anticipation. "Do you think we'll be able to knock out all the guard tanks as quick as we did back at the guns?"

"Hopefully," Zen said. "And we're getting a little help in that too. Command says that four flights of Mosquitoes are inbound to hit the tanks before we get there. Hopefully they'll do us some good."

"Four flights?" Belinda asked. "That's only eight planes."

"That's all they can spare," Zen said. "The rest of them are pounding on the APCs moving in on the line."

"Oh well," Xenia said. "It leaves more targets for me then, doesn't it?"

"Fuckin' aye," Zen said.

Brian and Matt were one of the planes inbound to deal with the armor. They had been in the plane now for the past twelve hours, landing only to refuel every few hours and then going right back up again. Both men were very tired and very sore, particularly Matt, who still sported an open wound on his gluteus maximus that screamed with pain every time they pulled a turn higher than two Gs — which was to say every turn they made during their firing runs. He could feel wet blood squishing around in the saturated bandage every time he shifted position, could feel rivulets of it running down onto the back of his leg, collecting in the wrinkles where the ill-fitting biosuit he'd stolen from Xavier Goodhit didn't quite provide the proper pressurization.

"How's the ass, kid?" Brian asked as they screamed through one of the valleys. "You holding up?"

"I forgot all about it until you mentioned it," Matt told him.

"You sure?"

"Hey, boss," Matt said, "how many times I gotta tell you? It's just some skin off my ass."

Brian nodded, although he believed Matt's words about as much as he believed the big three military briefings. "You just let me know if it gets too bad. The last fuckin' think in the solar system I need is to have my sis pass out from pain."

"You know it, boss," Matt promised. "You're turning right to two-eight-three in five, four, three, two, one."

"They cut to the right above a shallow series of hilltops between to mountains, pulling 2.8 Gs according to the meter on their screens. Matt bit his lip against the pain, feeling a fresh glut of blood come pouring out of his body. When they leveled out he took a few deep breaths as the pain slowly faded out. He looked down at his telemetry screen again, trying to memorize the locations of all the tanks in the enemy formation so he wouldn't have to search too hard on the firing run. The WestHems had twenty-four mobile surface-to-air lasers protecting that supply column and twenty-four SALs in such a concentrated area meant they were cutting their exposure time down to three seconds to reduce the risk of being felled by a lucky shot.

"Look at all those tanks we put down there," Brian said after taking a brief glance down at his own telemetry screen.

"Hell yeah," Matt said enthusiastically. "More than five hundred of them. They destroyed those mobile guns in ten minutes, man! Ten fuckin minutes to do what we couldn't do after tryin' all night and all day! How the hell did they get that many tanks in the rear?"

"They had to have moved them in over the mountains," Brian opined.

"Is that possible?" Matt asked. "We fly over them mountains all the time. I never saw nothin' down there it looked like you could drive a tank over."

"Let alone five hundred of them," Brian said. "I don't know. I can't think of any other way they could've done it short of driving all the way around the mountains and coming in from behind the LZ itself. That would be a trip of more than four hundred klicks. They would've had to refuel at least twice and probably three times."

"And how would they have gotten by the LZ?" Matt asked. "There's still almost a regiment of tanks guarding that and they have visual from the Sierra Madres to the Overlooks. No way five hundred tanks just strolled by without being seen."

"Well... however they did it, they did it and they killed the shit out of that mobile arty."

"Ready to change your bad opinion of General Jackson now?" Matt asked.

"I don't know," Brian said. "I'll admit that the massive flanking maneuver was a stroke of genius, but don't forget there's a trade-off."

"What trade-off?"

"They neutralized the arty so the ground pounders won't have to get pulverized into oblivion anymore. That's good. And now they're going after the supply column to keep the WestHems from resupplying. That's good too — if it's successful. But don't forget, while those five hundred tanks are out here, the main line is now missing more than a third of it's tank support to help fight off the main thrust. If they push through the main line because we don't have enough tanks to fight them off... well, they'll occupy Eden in a few hours. If that happens this whole brilliant maneuver was for nothing, wasn't it?"

"Well... yeah, I guess you have kind of a point there."

"I sure as shit wouldn't want to be one of those poor slobs in the trenches," Brian said. "When those WestHem marines start moving on them a lot of them are going to get a lot worse than just some skin off their asses."

They flew on, making another course change and then another, their wing following their motions blindly, acting on faith in Brian's skills and Matt's navigation. Soon they reached the IP.

"Thirty seconds to target," Matt said. "I'm picking up multiple search radars and active IR from the column. Nothing strong enough to get a hit off us. Mostly leaky signals coming around the peak."

"Static," Brian said, screwing up his concentration to the max. "Your lasers?"

"Charged and ready," Matt said. "I'm gonna try to hit two tanks per pass but three seconds ain't much time when they're scattered among the supply train."

"Do the best you can," Brian said. "That's all you can do. You got my vectors?"

"When you clear the last hill cut hard right to two-seven-seven. When the carrot moves cut right again to zero-zero-three and pull up to three-four-seven meters AGL."

"Got it," Brian said. "And here we go."

They shot out over the valley and cut hard to the right. Matt felt the sting in his ass again, felt more blood gush out, but he hardly noticed, so intent was he on the mass of targets that suddenly appeared on his screen. He saw towing tanks and SALs and dozens upon dozens of tanker cars and boxcars. But the targets were more than six kilometers away and the plane was moving fast. Matt wasn't able to spot and turn his targeting recticle on an actual main battle tank until they were already turning back toward the mountains and safety. He pushed the firing button for cannon number one and saw the distinctive double flash of a direct hit. A second later, before he could even begin to target a second MBT, they were back in the hills, all the targets gone from his screen. This was one more tank then their wing managed to hit.

"Damn," Matt mumbled. "Only one hit."

"You'll do better next time," Brian said. "It's a bitch of a mission. You got our return course up?"

"Left to two-nine-eight in three, two, one," Matt said.

They circled around again, coming in from further to the west this time and targeting the rear of the formation. Once again Matt was only able to hit one tank but this time the wing managed to hit two. As they disappeared back into the hills there came an eruption of flashes from the SALs as they opened up, trying desperately to make one of those coveted lucky shots. The two planes disappeared without incident. They then came in from the east again two minutes later. This time Matt managed to hit two tanks and the wing hit one.

"Now we're sucking some clit!" Brian said as he dove into the safety of the hills once again.

In all the eight planes made five runs apiece. None of them were hit by the SALs although Brian and Matt's wing had one of the lasers pass within two meters of them (they would never know this, however, and so therefore would never be bothered by how close to death or capture they'd come). In all they managed to kill a grand total of twenty-seven of the fifty-eight tanks of the protection battalion before they were recalled.

"Why are they pulling us back?" Brian asked. "We're on a fuckin' roll here."

"Our tanks are moving in," Matt replied. "They'll be in engagement range in less than thirty seconds."

"All right then," Brian said. "Wish them luck. Get us a course back to the main line so we can take out a few more APCs before we have to go in for fuel."

"You'll have it in one minute, boss," Matt told him.

Four hundred and ninety-five Martian main battle tanks waded into the supply column, forming a semi-circle around it, and began to fire their lasers. The lead tanks in each sector, including the one crewed by Zen, Belinda, and Xenia, were tasked with anti-armor duties. The rest went after the tanker cars and the ammunition carriers.

"Target, tank!" Zen called out to Xenia as two tanks in their line suddenly exploded. "One o'clock. Get the fucker, X!"

She got him, blowing a hole in it and sending the turret flying with a single shot. She panned back and forth, searching for more tanks and found one peeking out between two of the supply cars. It's lasers flashed and two more Martian tanks exploded. Xenia fired on it, killing it.

The first of the ammunition carriers went up a few seconds later. There was a brilliant flash and the entire car was ripped to shreds, the concussion enough to overturn the two adjacent cars in its line, the shrapnel ripping into one with enough force to cause it to explode as well. This overturned two of the hydrogen carriers. Soon, other ammo cars began to explode too.

"They're reporting that three shots will take out an ammo carrier," Zen said. "They have to be exactly in the same place though, not just overlapping a little."

"I got another tank," Xenia said, panning that way, waiting impatiently for her laser to recharge. "It just came into my zone. It's not firing at the moment."

"Probably recharging," Belinda said as she brought them in a little closer.

Xenia's charge light came on. She fired at the tank and watched it explode. "Target down," she said. "You see anything else in the zone, Zen?"

"No more MBTs in our zone," he reported. "It sounds like we already got most of them across the board. Start hitting the hydrogen carriers."

"Fuckin' aye," she said, putting her targeting recticle on one of the cylindrical cars. When the charge light came on she fired, hitting it dead center and causing a bright flash to flare. As the flare faded there was a solid heat signature left behind. She kept her recticle directly on it until the other cannon was charged. She fired. The flash came again and the heat signature grew brighter. She waited impatiently until the first charge light came on again. She fired. Once again there was a bright flash but no penetration of the tank.

"Damn, that is some tough-ass armor plating they got there," she said.

Her other cannon reported charged and she fired for the fourth time. This time she achieved a burn-through of the armor. The results weren't all that dramatic. The side of the tanker buckled open and a cloud of vapor suddenly rushed out at high speed, engulfing the car for a few seconds before rising into the air and dissipating. Though hydrogen was one of the most flammable gases in existence there was not enough oxygen in the Martian atmosphere for it to burn even when a high intensity laser seared into it. But drama wasn't what they were going for here. The gas was all gone for that tanker, floating in the Martian atmosphere now, useless to the WestHem marines who relied on it to fuel their military machines.

Ammunition cars began to explode with more regularity now, scattering the cars around them, occasionally causing secondary explosions, a few times causing chain reaction explosions of four or five cars at a time. Within five minutes the entire column was in tatters, with overturned cars and debris lying everywhere. A giant but brief fireball erupted at one point when the dissipating hydrogen from one tanker mixed with the dissipating oxygen from another tanker and was penetrated by one of the lasers, thus fulfilling the three requirements of combustion — fuel, oxidizer, and ignition source.

"That was some shit," Xenia said, blinking her eyes to clear the afterimages the flash had caused. The concussion from the blast had been strong enough to rock their tank.

"That ain't propaganda," Zen agreed.

While Xenia went to work on her next target a platoon of dismounted marines suddenly appeared from the carnage, anti-tank lasers in their hands. "Zen!" Xenia said, alarmed as they began to set up their shots.

"Keep firing," Zen said. "I've got 'em." He grabbed the controls for the 4mm machine gun and put his recticle on the center of the platoon. He opened up, spraying bullets across them, killing many, and causing the others to go diving for cover back in the carnage. Other tanks took up the cause as well, sending their own machine gun fire after them. A few sent eighty-millimeter shells in their direction, proximity bursting them and blowing the exposed marines to pieces. The threat from the dismounts was neutralized before they could get off a single shot.

"All units," a voice said in Zen's ear. "Lead elements of the WestHem tank forces are now less than eight klicks out. Disengage and begin moving to the pre-planned egress point."

"We're pulling out," Zen said as Xenia ruptured an oxygen tanker. "Cease firing, X. B, get us the fuck out of here. Course should be on your screen now."

The Martian tanks turned away from the supply column and began to run at high speed away from the carnage they'd caused. Half headed northwest, the other half southwest, their plan to disappear the same way they'd come: into the mountains.

It was a good plan but it hadn't taken several things into account. They hadn't counted on an entire regiment of WestHem tanks to be less than ten minutes behind them and they hadn't counted on the fact that the survivors from the supply column would radio command and let them know the direction of travel of their tormentors as they'd left. Thus the WestHem tanks in pursuit of them divided into two, half chasing after the northern section, the other half after the southern. The last thing not taken into account was how long it would take to get more than two hundred tanks through a small opening between the hills and into the pass beyond it. A bottleneck quickly developed on both egress points, with lines of tanks waiting impatiently for those in front to clear the pass. And that was how the lead elements of the WestHem tanks found their enemy when they came into range.

"We're under fire!" Zen announced as tanks began to explode all around them. "Xenia, get the cannons turned around and start returning it!"

She did as she was told, turning and looking out on a landscape that was now dotted with main battle tanks, their lasers flashing. She immediately began to shoot back, exploding two of them within ten seconds. Her heart hammered in fear as she waited for her cannons to recharge.

The other tanks massed near the pass turned their cannons on the WestHems as well. There were plenty of targets and as the tanks continued to work their way into the mountains an epic slaughter developed on both sides as tanks exploded left and right, as flashes of lasers winked from every direction.

"We're forming up in lines," Zen told Belinda. "A lot of us are overlapping fire or blocking each other's shots. Get us moved twenty meters right."

"Moving," Belinda said, hitting the accelerator and moving the T-bar, lining their tank up against the others near them. Two of them exploded suddenly and she almost panicked. "Zen, when do we get out of here?"

"When command calls our squad and tells us to move," Zen said. "Until then, we hold and try to keep them off of us."

It went on for the better part of ten minutes. The WestHem tanks stopped their advance and spread out to give themselves better firing positions. The Martian tanks did the same and the intensity of the battle picked up, with tanks on both sides blowing into oblivion with horrifying regularity.

"Okay, we're up!" Zen suddenly said. "Get us the fuck out of here, B!"

"Goddamn right," she said, turning them around and putting the accelerator to the floor.

They rumbled across the last of the flatland, heading for the opening. They were less than fifty meters away from safety when the entire tank suddenly shuddered and spun violently to the left. Zen felt himself slammed against the side of the tank from the violence of the centrifugal force. They spun, bounced, tipped onto their side momentarily, and then finally shuddered to a halt.

"Motherfuck!" Belinda exclaimed.

"Report, B!" Zen said.

"They got the left tread," she said. "We're immobile."

"Goddammit!" Xenia said. "Twice in one fucking war is too much for this shit!"

"Everyone out!" Zen ordered. "Start heading on foot for the pass!"

They popped their hatches open and scrambled out. Like last time, they didn't bother grabbing their weapons. Once their feet were on the ground they began to move as quickly as possible towards the opening. On both sides of them other Martian tanks went screaming past, all of them avoiding hitting the pedestrians, none of them stopping to help them however.

They were twenty-five meters away when an eighty-millimeter shell, fired from one of the WestHem tanks, came screaming in. It exploded prematurely and off-target — a result of the targeting difficulties caused by the marines' continuing unfamiliarity with Martian atmospheric pressure. Even so, it sent a hail of deadly shrapnel flying toward them at suicidal speed. Most of the fragments passed over the top of them but not all. A good portion slammed into Zen, who was taking up the rear, ripping through the left side of his biosuit and tearing into his body. He thumped to the ground, breathless, feeling pain unlike anything he'd ever imagined before.

"Zen's down!" Xenia said, stopping in her tracks and rushing over to him.

"Goddammit, no!" Belinda cried, doing the same.

"Go," Zen gasped at them. "Get the fuck out of here! Forget about me!"

"Fuck that shit," Xenia said. "B, grab his uppers. I'll get the lowers."

"I can't... breath," Zen said. "I think I'm done for. Leave me."

"You ain't gonna die, Zen," Belinda told him. "Not today. We're getting your ass outta here. Now shut up."

He shut up. He no longer had the energy to talk anyway. The two women picked him up by the handles on his biosuit and began carrying him toward the entrance to the pass. Another eighty-millimeter shell streaked towards them and exploded. Once again it was too high over their heads. The concussion knocked them to the ground but the shrapnel missed them entirely. Belinda and Xenia slowly picked themselves back up and moved on.

They were forced to carry Zen partially up the side of the hill that guarded the pass in order to avoid the continuing rush of tanks that were making entry on the flat ground. They scrambled down the other side to where the pass opened up, to where some of the tanks were starting to spread out and encircle the hill.

Xenia got on the emergency channel and called command, giving their location and letting them know they had a gravely injured soldier with them. Command vectored one of the spare tanks over to them. It pulled up and stopped just at the base of the backside of the hill. The commander — someone they didn't know — popped his head out of the hatch and spoke to them on the emergency channel.

"You need to climb up on the sides," he told them. "One of you get the injured guy on the tread guard and hold him there. We're gonna take you to the rendezvous at the valley."

"Great," Xenia muttered. "Riding on the outside again."

"We need to stabilize Zen a little first," Belinda said. "Let's put him down."

"Hurry the fuck up," the commander said. "Those WestHem tanks are gonna try to follow us in here."

Zen was barely conscious now, his breathing rapid and shallow, his eyes half-lidded, seeing little. His suit was leaking in several places, where holes too big to seal on their own had been ripped. There was no active bleeding — at least not externally. Xenia pulled out the emergency supplies from her own suit and used the sealer to cover the holes. That was about all they could do.

"We need to get a medic to him as quickly as possible," Belinda told the commander.

"Command says special forces teams from the arty site are being flown out to the rendezvous point. They have medics with them. Will he make it that far?"

The trip to the rendezvous point in Gibbons Valley was nearly twenty minutes. Xenia and Belinda looked at each other doubtfully. "I guess he's gonna have to," Xenia finally said.

They hefted him up onto the tread guard, laying him flat on his back, his head towards the front of the tank. Xenia climbed onto the turret just above him and curled her legs around his chest. She held onto the twenty-millimeter cannon. Belinda climbed up a little further towards the back, holding onto the main hatch handle and curling her legs around Zen's legs.

"Okay," Xenia said. "Let's do it."

"We'll keep it slow," the commander promised. "There are a few up and down portions."

"We'll hold onto him," Xenia said forcefully. "I'm not letting another one fall."

The commander looked at her quizzically and then disappeared back inside his tank. A moment later they began to move. Xenia and Belinda both held on.

Meanwhile, the rest of the tanks — those that had survived the battle — had made it inside the pass. The WestHems tried to follow them in, intent upon finalizing the revenge mission they'd been sent on, but the commander of the Martian tanks had already foreseen this. Two companies of tanks had been assigned as rear guards and had positioned themselves atop hills just inside the pass — their cannons pointing downward towards the narrow entrance. Every time a WestHem tank attempted to enter it was blown to pieces. Within five minutes the pass was choked with burned out tanks and the WestHem commanders had lost their taste for the pursuit and pulled back.

When the tank bearing Belinda, Xenia, and the injured Zen pulled into Gibbons Valley they were directed to the center of the small valley where a landing zone had been established. Sitting on the ground here were two hummingbirds, their ramps open. Three soldiers bearing the extra camouflage of special forces members came trotting over to them. The lead soldier held up five fingers to them, indicating which short-range channel they should switch down to. Xenia and Belinda both did so.

"I'm Sergeant Fargo," the lead soldier told them. "This is Corporal Wong and Corporal Horishito. How bad is your guy here?"

"Pretty fuckin' bad," Xenia said. "He took shrapnel from an eighty in the back. He's having trouble breathing."

Fargo looked down at him and winced. "You ain't shitting," he said. The poor bastard's face was a visible shade of blue beneath his helmet. He was barely breathing at all now. "Let's get him to doc right away. Priority."

"Right," said Wong, reaching over and grabbing the upper handles on Zen's suit.

"We'll carry him," Xenia said forcefully, jumping down onto the ground and grabbing the handles away from her.

Wong nodded. "Suit yourself," she said, unoffended. She stepped back.

Belinda grabbed the lower handles and they picked him up, carrying him thirty meters over to a triage area where about two dozen other wounded were being attended by two medics. They set him down in a clear area.

"Brandy," Fargo said, talking to Mike Branderson, his squad medic, "come and look at this one. He's pretty bad."

"Coming, sarge," Branderson said, picking up his pack and trotting over. He took one look at Zen and muttered an obscenity. He then knelt down and pulled out his scanner.

"How is he?" Xenia asked when the medic finished the scan.

"He has a tension pneumothorax and his left kidney got shredded which is causing internal bleeding," Branderson said, reaching into his pack and pulling out a wicked looking device that resembled a small jackhammer with a needle on the end.

"What does that mean?" Belinda asked.

"The internal bleeding ain't too bad at the moment," Branderson said. "The problem is the tension pneumo. His lung is punctured and the air he's breathing is leaking out of it and getting into his chest cavity, causing pressure to build up. That's made the lung collapse and it's starting to wrap around his heart and keep it from beating. It'll strangle his heart in a few minutes if I don't relieve the pressure." He shook his head. "I'm surprised it hasn't done it already."

"Can you fix it?" Xenia asked. "I've been through a lot with this asshole."

"Doc's the best," Wong said, kneeling down next to her. "If he can be fixed this is the man to do it. He's a dip-hoe in Eden when he's not out here yelling at us to drink our fucking water."

Xenia looked up at her and smiled gratefully. "Thanks," she said. "You're Lisa Wong, right? The first bitch in the special forces?"

"That's me," she said. "You've heard of my exploits I take it?"

"Everyone's heard about you," Xenia told her. "You're famous, especially the part about that fight you had in training in the locker room."

"Oh yeah, that," Wong said. "I was just trying to establish my place in the hierarchy of things."

"Did you really squeeze off his windpipe until he started flopping like a fish?" Belinda asked, repeating the current rumor of choice about Wong's training days.

"Uh... yeah," she said. "Something like that."

"I also heard about you from other people," Xenia said. "I'm a friend of a friend of the guy who flies with your partner from the police department."

"I guess that makes us friends ourselves, doesn't it?" she asked.

"Okay," Branderson said, putting the tip of the needle against the upper left portion of Zen's torso. "Here we go."

"What is that thing?" Xenia asked him.

"An outside, trans-biosuit decompression needle," he replied. "It'll go through the suit and into his chest cavity to let the air building up escape. That should decompress the lung." He pushed the button on the top and the entire device jolted in his hand. Zen moaned and twisted his head a few times. There was a pop that was audible even in the thin air and a stream of bloody vapor began to expel from the top of the needle.

"Is it working?" Belinda asked.

Branderson nodded. "It's actually easier to decompress someone outside than it is in the city," he said. "The low atmospheric pressure is a big help. In fact we have to dampen down the draw on the way out to keep from decompressing his entire chest cavity and sucking his lung out through the needle.

Within a minute Zen's breathing began to normalize, the breaths deeper and more effective. His face began to turn from blue to a color that was merely pale. He came awake a little, enough to start screaming in pain.

"Get him some Vexal," Branderson told Xenia. "Fire him up with double dose."

"Isn't that too much?" Xenia asked.

"No," Branderson said. "It'll slow his heart rate down so the kidney won't bleed as bad. Now stop questioning me and do what the fuck I say!"

She did what the fuck he said, accessing his control panel and directing his suit to inject two shots of the potent painkiller — one into his right thigh, one into his right arm. Within a few minutes the screaming faded out and Zen began to relax. By this time Branderson had installed an intraosseous line in his tibia and was pushing synthetic blood and further sedation through it. Zen relaxed even more and some of his color started to come back.

"Okay," Branderson said, nodding in satisfaction. "He's doing a lot better. Sometimes I think I really am God, you know?"

"That's what we think, Brandy," Wong told him.

"So he's gonna make it?" Xenia asked.

"I think so," Branderson said. "He's tagged priority and he'll be on the first hover out of here but as long as he gets to surgery in the next sixty minutes, I think he'll pull through."

Aboard the WSS Nebraska, Mars orbit

1645 hours

General Browning was livid, his anger directed at the man who had planned this campaign.

"How in the hell could something like this happen?" he demanded of him. "Enemy tanks in our rear? How did they get there? Did they just stroll right through our line? Or maybe the greenies have some sort of teleportation device that we've never been told about?"

Major Wilde was still stunned at how quickly everything had changed in the Eden theater. They had been within an hour of victory, maybe two, their guns poised to obliterate the Martian anti-tank positions, which would have allowed their APCs to drive right up to the very edge of the open ground before their infantry positions. And then, in an instant, the guns had fallen silent, attacked by more than five hundred Martian tanks that had appeared from nowhere. And if that wasn't enough, those tanks had then gone after their supplies, ripping into the column and destroying heavily armored boxcars and tankers that had been thought to be invulnerable to attack. "We don't know for sure, sir," he answered. "My best guess is they somehow sent those tanks through the mountains."

"Through the mountains?" Browning said. "That's your theory? Do those greenies have roads through those mountains that we're not aware of? Do they have tunnels and bridges to take them through the passes? I sure as hell never saw anything like that on the overheads."

"They have no roads through there," Wilde said, "but they have done extensive mapping and surveying of the area — much more extensive than anything we have. They might've been able to formulate a route through."

"Impossible," Browning spat.

Wilde shook his head in frustration. "It doesn't really matter how they did it, sir," he told his boss. "What matters is that they did and that we must now deal with the consequences of it."

"How bad did this hurt us?" Browning asked.

"This hurt us badly," Wilde admitted. "They killed all but eleven of the mobile guns. Those that survived I've ordered back to the LZ."

"Can't they do us some good on the attack?" Browning asked. "We should keep them forward to provide what support they can, shouldn't we?"

Wilde shook his head. "There's not enough of them to make a difference," he said. "All that would happen if we moved them forward is the remaining Martian 250s would pop them off one by one, probably before they got off more than a half a dozen rounds apiece."

"I see," Browning said. "So will we still be able to take that city by nightfall?"

"We still outnumber them by a considerable margin," Wilde said. "Although that margin has gone down since their reinforcements from Proctor are continuing to arrive with regularity. Still... the margin is high enough that victory is possible."

"So we can do it," Browning said.

"Theoretically," Wilde said. "It will be costly though. The men will have to advance through open ground guarded by concrete pillboxes and hull-down tank and APC positions. They'll be raining artillery and mortars down on them. And when they get through the open ground they'll have to clear each and every one of those positions one by one."

"I don't give a rat's ass how costly it is," Browning said. "I just want to know how long it will take. I promised the media we'd be standing in Eden by sunset tonight!"

Wilde couldn't suppress a sigh. Browning didn't give a damn about the thousands of lives that would be lost. All he cared about was keeping to the timeline he'd promised the media. "We'll either be standing in Eden tonight," he said, "or we'll be defeated, with many of our troops captured and on their way to POW camps."

"What do you mean?" Browning asked. This, at least, alarmed him to some degree.

"There will be no second chance here," Wilde explained. "The initial reports I'm getting from the supply column are that two hundred and twelve of the two hundred and forty supply cars in the train have either been destroyed completely or have had their contents released into the atmosphere. Of those that are left, most are overturned or pinned in by the remains of those that were destroyed. There will be no way for us to resupply any of the units in the field. This includes ammunition for the infantry troops, charging batteries for the portable SALs and the portable ATs, and shells for the tanks and APCs. Most notably it also means we have no way to refuel our vehicles. Getting the APCs back in the event we have to retreat will be very tight."

"I don't want to hear you talking about retreat," Browning said forcefully.

"I'm just trying to lay out the possibilities, sir," Wilde said. "The APCs might be able to make it back if they came back slow but the tanks we sent out in pursuit of the Martian tanks... well, they have just enough fuel to make it back to Eden and fight for an hour or two. They won't make it more than twenty kilometers if they have to pull back."

"There will be no pull back!" Browning said forcefully. "Talking about what you have to do if defeated means you're already half-convinced that will happen! I won't tolerate this any more, Wilde. We will push forward and we will take that city! Is that clear?"

"We'll try, sir," Wilde said. "There's not much else to do at this point."

"Now that's the spirit," Browning said. "You and I will be standing in the lounge of the Eden spaceport by midnight. Mark my words."

"Yes sir."

"Okay. Now that we've agreed to that, how about you tell me your thoughts for making it happen?"

Typical, Wilde thought, feeling his ulcer burning again. He tells me what we're going to do and then asks me how to go about doing it. "Well, sir," he said. "It's my thought that we should concentrate the bulk of our firepower and our infantry advance on the center of the Martian line."

"What about the flanks?" Browning asked.

"We don't need to worry much about the flanks at this point. If we punch through that line and get behind it we'll be able to move into the MPG base itself. All we need to do is secure a corridor large enough to move our people in. We breach into the base and pour as many marines through the hole as we can. Once the base is occupied the Martians on the flanks will be effectively cut off from their supplies and equipment."

Browning nodded wisely. "I like it," he said. "I like it a lot."

"As I said, sir, it's bound to be costly but it's the option with the most chance of success. The units are staging now, ready to move in at your order. I suggest you update your movement orders and get them moving. Every minute we sit here another one of our APCs gets blown up by the Martian aircraft or the special forces teams."

"Then I'd better get on that right away," Browning said. "Do you have those movement orders drawn up for me?"

Wilde sighed again. "Give me about ten minutes sir and I'll have a detailed advance plan for you."



MPG Headquarters, New Pittsburgh

1700 hours

General Jackson was well beyond expressing outrage and condemnation at Laura Whiting when she came strolling into his office, once again completely alone, without benefit of a single one of her security detail. It had gotten to the point where she simply came and went as she pleased, walking on the meanest of the New Pittsburgh streets, riding unescorted on the MarsTrans, just like she was another middle-aged woman out to see the sights.

"Sometimes I wonder," Jackson told her as she sat in the chair next to his desk, "if you're actually trying to get yourself killed, Laura."

"Why on Mars would I try to do that?" she asked him.

"I don't know," he said. "As long as I've known you and as close as we've been over the years, even I don't always know what's going on in that brain of yours."

"Sometimes I don't either," she said. "I was just over at NP General Hospital, visiting some of the wounded." She frowned. "There are a lot of them to visit over there."

"Yeah," he agreed. "I won't argue with you there. How was their morale?"

"Much better than I would have thought, actually," she said. "They all seem to think we're going to hold this city. They're proud to have been a part of that. A few of them even cried when they saw me."

"That's good," he said. "I think the fighting spirit of our people is going to be a major factor in this thing — something the WestHems haven't counted on."

"So you think we're going to hold New Pittsburgh?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yes, I think we're going to hold it. The WestHems have taken a hell of a beating clearing our first lines here. They're in the middle of their refuel and rearm about twelve klicks west of the main line. Best estimates say they've taken at least fifteen percent casualties so far, that their tanks have been cut down by almost forty percent, and their APC are down at least thirty percent. Like in the first phase, a lot of them had to walk forward from the Red Line. We're keeping the pressure on them with arty, air attacks, mortar attacks, and special forces attacks. When they move forward to the main line we'll chop them up like hamburger. I think they just might break under the pressure at that point. Even if they don't, I don't think they have enough men or enough ammo to push through, not with our positions still intact."

"That's good news indeed," Laura said, pleased. "I'm really fond of this city and I'd hate to have to leave it."

"Me too," Jackson agreed.

"And how about Eden?" Laura asked. "I understand your flanking maneuver was successful in its mission?"

"It was," Jackson said, "but at considerable cost. They moved through the mountains undetected and caught the WestHem mobile guns completely by surprise, killing all but eleven of them according to telemetry sent to us from the peepers. They then went after the WestHem supply column. Our air strikes took out about half of the WestHem tanks guarding the column and the tanks themselves took out the rest in the first five minutes of the attack. We then blasted and blew up more than ninety percent of the cargo, fuel, and oxygen cars. Unfortunately the marines responded quicker and in larger numbers than we'd anticipated. It took us longer to get our tanks back into the safety of the mountains after the attack then we thought it would. We were engaged by a superior force of WestHem tanks on the north and the south egress points. This cost us one hundred and twelve tanks."

Laura shook her head quietly. "So many," she said.

He nodded. "Most of those were kills too. It's really hard to live through a direct hit from an anti-tank laser. We only collected twenty-three wounded from the engagement — all of them the victims of machine gun fire or eighty millimeter shrapnel after they went out on foot after their tanks were disabled by indirect hits."

"They're safe now?" she asked.

"Yes, the wounded have all been flown out and transferred to Eden hospitals. The tanks and their crews are staging in the Gibbons Valley ten klicks north of the main valley or the Cypress Valley twelve klicks south of it. We're going to fly some cargo carriers fitted with hydrogen and oxygen tanks out to them so they can refuel. I'm hoping to have them in the air before dark but... well... it's an improvised solution and you know how those go."

"I surely do," she said. "So tell me about the battle for Eden. How are we doing on the main line? I understand you've wiped out their artillery and their supplies but you're also down five hundred tanks. Will we hold? Can we hold?"

Jackson sighed, a little of the strain he was under showing in his face. "They can push through our lines," he said. "If the person directing them up there — I'm inclined to think it isn't really Browning since he's a blithering idiot — if he's even halfway competent at his job, he'll order them to concentrate on the center and push hard to break through and get into the MPG base there."

"They can?" she asked.

"It is certainly within the realm of military possibility," Jackson said. "We weren't able to cause the sort of attrition we strive for on their march forward. We were too busy dealing with the consequences of that damn air strike on our heavy guns. If not for that, Eden would be in the same position right now as New Pittsburgh. The Eden area marines were able to march almost intact right up to the main line. Our reinforcements are arriving but they are not all present. We're still shoving them piecemeal into their assignments as they come off the trains and half of the tanks are still in transit."

"So they hold too much of an advantage?"

"Not necessarily," he said. "But they do hold a significant advantage at this point in time. We're estimating anywhere from three and a half to one to almost four to one in ground troops. That's what makes their success militarily feasible. If they apply themselves to their task, they might just push through."

"You're not answering my question, General," Laura said sternly. "Will they succeed?"

"I can't say one way or the other," he said. "That's what I'm trying to tell you. It is possible for them to take Eden with what they have out there facing what we have out there. The question is, do they have the will to do it?"

"The will?"

"The will," he confirmed. "If they do take Eden, it's going to be costly for them. Their APCs and their tanks will be able to move up to within 300 meters of our main line positions but they're going to be in killing boxes subjected to intense AT fire. Their ground troops are going to have to advance over open ground that's been pre-sighted long before by our artillery crews and mortar crews and that's overlapped by fields of fire from our infantry crews. They're going to have to advance through all that and take our pillboxes one by one until they open up a corridor big enough to put troops through towards the city. All of that is going to cost them a lot of men. Their bodies are going to be littering that battlefield. That's where the will to fight comes in. My hope is that we've already sapped that will, not from the colonels and the generals that sit back in the rear or up in orbit and give the orders, but from the captains and the lieutenants and the sergeants that have to follow those orders. They will be the ones paying the price out there. We have to pin our hopes on those men making the decision that that price is too high to pay for a shithole planet like this."

"And that's what MPG doctrine has been all about, right?" she asked.

"Right," he agreed. "At least for this war. It's carried us this far. Let's see if it will carry us for a few more hours. If it does, we'll never have to rely on hope again."

"Amen," Laura said. "A-fucking-men."

Callahan was looking out through the main camera installed in his APC, staring east, towards the high-rises of Eden, which could now be seen poking upward into the sky. They were ten kilometers west of the Martian main line of defense, preparing to assault it. It was the second time Callahan had been in this particular position. The first time he'd risked a lengthy prison sentence to defy orders to advance. This time he knew he would be going forward.

Everything was quiet, which was an almost eerie sensation after all he'd been through. Their artillery had stopped firing ninety minutes before — quite abruptly, almost as soon as it had started. The official explanation was that technical difficulties had prevented artillery support. Callahan knew that was a bunch of bullshit. He was technically savvy enough to tap into some of the other operational channels and had heard the truth: that hundreds upon hundreds of Martian tanks had somehow gotten into the rear and massacred their mobile guns. They had also attacked the supply column. The word on the damage done was a little sketchier in this case but it sounded like they'd killed most if not all of the cars. That meant the supplies they carried — the fuel, the ammunition, the food packs, the drinking water, and the very air they were breathing — was now all that they had to finish the campaign with, for better or for worse. They either had to take Eden with this next attack or they would be forced to return to the LZ in defeat. Even then some of them might not make it back — particularly the one thousand tanks that had abruptly turned around and chased after the "technical difficulties" hampering the mobile guns.

The Martian artillery had stopped about ten minutes ago, tapering off as the APCs and tanks pulled into this staging location. He liked to think that they were finally out of shells to fire but he knew this was nothing but a pipe dream. They had stopped firing because there were no exposed troops for them to hit. Once they moved forward and stepped out of the protection of the APCs that fire would start up again, with proximity fused shells raining death down upon the advance.

Callahan stopped looking through the camera and switched the view on his screen to the schematic of the battle plan for his company. They were part of a multi-battalion advance on two of the pillboxes covering the main line. They would advance between a series of tank traps and right up to a vast anti-tank ditch that ran the entire length of the line. There they would dismount and cross the ditch, moving across three hundred and twenty meters of open ground to the base of the pillboxes, which were concrete reinforced structures standing nearly sixty meters high and connected to each other and the other pillboxes by a network of concrete reinforced trenches that ran behind them. As to how many Martian soldiers each pillbox would hold, that was a figure that was mere speculation. Intelligence guessed no more than a platoon of infantry and maybe a squad or two of anti-tank teams up on the top level. Callahan's estimate was a little more pessimistic. Since the Martian rail system had not been bombed the Martians had probably reinforced their positions with units from Proctor or Libby. He wouldn't be surprised if there was company strength, maybe even a little more, in each of those pillboxes, all of them with but one goal in mind: Kill enough marines to keep them from taking this position.

It was going to be bloody out there, perhaps the bloodiest battle they'd fought in so far. Men were going to die in large numbers, blown to pieces by artillery and mortars, by eighty millimeter shells fired from tanks, gunned down by rifle fire and machinegun fire and twenty millimeter cannon fire. There was simply no way around that. Callahan would be out there, directing his men in this battle and his fate would be placed back in the hands of random chance. He would simply have to hope that none of those bullets or shells had his name on them. His luck had carried him this far. Would it carry him for a few more hours?

He tried to push these thoughts out of his head. Failing at this task he tried to at least push them back to the rear a bit. With this he enjoyed a little bit of success. He looked down at the schematic again, changing the view to the overall plan for the battle. It was simple and militarily sound, which made him wonder if they'd sub-contracted out to the Martians for its conception. There would be a powerful and hopefully overwhelming thrust on the Martian positions covering a two-kilometer section of the line. The positions north and south of the center would be ignored. The goal was to punch through and secure a path for the engineers to breach the outside of the Martian Planetary Guard base. If that could be done, the city would fall. It was nothing more than a brutal lunge pitting superior numbers against superior positions — the same sort of tactic the Chinese had used in World War III to overwhelm position after position on their advance south through Canada and the western United States. Swarming, it was called, and using it the Chinese had made it from the shores of Valdez in Alaska all the way to the Columbia River on the Washington-Oregon border in less than eight months. They had done this using tanks and aircraft far inferior to the ones the Americans were using to battle them.

But they were stopped, the logical section of Callahan's brain insisted on telling him. We stopped them at the Columbia and again in the high desert region of southern Idaho because they reached a point when they just couldn't overcome the firepower being wielded against them.

"Shut up," Callahan mumbled, unaware that he was speaking aloud to his own mind. "That was different. We only stopped them after eight months of being pushed back, after thousands of battles for thousands of positions. This is only a single battle."

His brain had nothing to say to that. His emotions, however, were sending one overriding signal out to the rest of his body. Fear.

His communications computer beeped once, indicating an incoming message from command. He looked down at it and swallowed, feeling that fear well up and threaten to overwhelm him.

ALL UNITS: COMMENCE ADVANCE TO YOUR TARGETS. WE'LL SEE YOU IN EDEN

As the WestHem forces prepared for the final battle for Eden, Jeff Creek was doing what most of the other infantry soldiers assigned to the reserve (and many of the front line soldiers as well) were doing. He was catching up on some much-needed sleep. He and Drogan had found the back of the agricultural truck a bit too crowded for this endeavor and had found a nice boulder about thirty meters away to lean against. The pockets of his biosuit were now stuffed with fresh magazines, food packs, and waste packs — the bounty from the resupply trucks that had been sent out. His M-24 was curled up in his lap, the safety on, the chamber empty of the first round. He was snoring softly, his dreams not entirely pleasant. At some point a three-quarters asleep Drogan had leaned over to get more comfortable and had ended up with her head on his thigh, her own weapon slung over her back.

Someone shook him and he came awake instantly, his hands instinctively grabbing the M-24 and raising it, searching for trouble. He looked around to see what was going on and found himself looking into the face of another soldier in a biosuit. The face behind the helmet shield was Xenia's. She was smiling and holding up three fingers.

He put his rifle down and quickly reached for the communications controls, switching down to channel three in the short-range bank. "Xenia," he said, still trying to figure out if this was a dream or not. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I might ask you the same thing," she said with feigned huffiness. "I go away for a little bit and I find you with some other woman in your lap?"

"Jesus," he said happily. "You really are here. How? Why? Were you on the flanking mission?"

The story of the flanking mission had filtered down shortly after the WestHem artillery barrage — which had just been gearing up to full fury — fell suddenly and mysteriously silent. No one knew where the information had come from but suddenly the rumor that several battalions of Martian tanks had somehow made it into the WestHem rear had begun to circulate. No one had wanted to believe the rumor at first — mostly because it was good news in a battle where that staple had been in short supply — but the continued silence of those guns gradually made believers of them and before long the rumor took on the weight of a fact.

"Yeah," Xenia said. "I was on it. There were more than five hundred tanks that went."

"I was worried sick about you," he told her. "When you disappeared from the forces screen... I didn't know what to think."

"I know," she said. "It was operational security. They cut off our communications as soon as we started heading for the rally point."

Jeff squirmed his way out from beneath Drogan. Her head thumped to the ground and she awoke, startled, reaching for her weapon. She saw Jeff standing up and relaxed. Without even bothering to see who he was talking to she curled up, shifted position a little, and then fell promptly back to sleep.

"I envy her," Xenia said. "I haven't been able to sleep since they put us out here."

Jeff put his arms around her and gave her a hug. She returned it happily although, as was always the case when showing affection while dressed in a biosuit, there was something fundamental missing from the embrace.

"I'm so glad to see you alive," he told her. "I haven't been able to think about anything else."

"I know how you feel," she said. "I've been thinking about you quite a bit too."

"I love you, Xenia," he said meaningfully.

She smiled. "I know," she told him. She said no further on that subject. She couldn't bring herself to.

Jeff took this in stride. At least she was still here to give him conflicting emotions. "How did you flank them?" he asked. "Did you go through the mountains? That's the main story everyone is passing around but no one is sure."

"I guess I can tell you now," she said. "The mission has been de-classified. We went over the mountains, about two hundred and fifty to the north, through the Sierras, the other half through the Overlooks. We were in the group that went north. We climbed and crawled over the mountain passes for five hours and came out behind the WestHem lines. We wiped out their mobile guns and then went after their supply cars and wiped them out too."

"That's fuckin' bad-ass!" Jeff exclaimed. "What are you doing back here?"

"We got hit by WestHem tanks when we were trying to egress," she said. "They did a number on us, blew up about a hundred of our tanks."

"Jesus," Jeff said.

"Ours got hit in the tread just before we made it through the hills. We had to bail out. Zen got hit with some shrapnel from an eighty round. It tore him up pretty good."

"Is he dead?"

"I don't think so," Xenia said, smiling a little. "Belinda and I dragged him out of there. We rode on the side of another tank until we got to the LZ they put down for us. A medic saved his ass out there and put him on a hover. The last I heard was they thought he was gonna make it as long as they got him to surgery."

"I hope he's all right," Jeff told her. "Zen's a good guy."

She nodded. "Yeah. So anyway, since we didn't have a tank, the special forces teams that helped us at the LZ gave Belinda and I a lift back to the base." She shook her head. "Scared the living shit out of me. Humans were not meant to fly. I think that scared me more than the fuckin' battle did. Anyway, once we got back they told us there were some desertions from the tank crews assigned to the 12^th ACR. They asked us if we wanted to go out and help fill the vacancies. We need every tank we can get out here since more than a third of what we normally have are out of business. We agreed to go. Belinda got assigned as a driver one out towards the north side and I got assigned as a gunner on one towards the south. I was on my way out there to report for duty but I found you on the forces screen and decided to come by real quick and tell you I was all right."

"I'm glad you did," he said. "Really glad."

"And what about you?" she asked. "Are you all right? I see a couple of patches on your biosuit there. Did you get hit?"

"Yeah," he said. "I did. Just before we pulled back from the Blue Line. It was an arty shell. The same one that killed Hicks. He absorbed most of it. Blew his whole chest open. He never knew what hit him."

"I'm sorry," Xenia said. "He was my friend too. I'm gonna miss him."

"Just like a fuckin' Thruster," Jeff said, feeling a tear wanting to form in his eye. "Doesn't know when to hit the fuckin' floor."

"How bad did you get hit?" Xenia asked him, running her finger over the patch on his left flank.

"I got some shrapnel in my side and a couple of little pieces in my thighs. Nothing big. No major vessels or organs hit. Doc patched me up the best he could. I'll live." He shrugged. "At least for now."

"Yeah," Xenia said, looking off towards the west. "They'll be moving in anytime now."

They both stared off into the distance, towards the specters of the concrete pillboxes standing sentinel over the city. All was quiet now. There wasn't even any outgoing artillery or mortar fire. That would soon change.

"How's Belinda?" Jeff asked her.

She gave him a sour look. "Do you really care?" she asked. "Or are you just trying to be polite?"

He shrugged. "I'm not really sure," he replied. "I know you care about her very much and that if anything happened to her you would be upset. I don't want you to be upset."

"I tried to seduce her out there," she said.

"In a biosuit?" he asked.

"In a greenhouse. That's where we staged before we headed into the mountains. We were able to push our biosuits down."

"I see," Jeff said. "And what happened?"

"She wouldn't do it," Xenia said. "I was horny as hell, Jeff. I'd just let some greasy loader feel up my tits in exchange for half a pack of smokes and I was hotter than hell. I attacked her when we got in the tank and she pushed me away."

"Because you wouldn't say you loved her?"

"I did say I loved her," she said. "She still wouldn't do it."

Jeff was stunned, feeling jealousy worming through his body. "You said you loved her?"

"I was desperate," Xenia said. "I blurted it out to her. Apparently she didn't think I really meant it."

"Did you?"

She sighed. "I don't know," she said. "I don't know anything. I care for her very much. I care for you very much. It might be love — hell, it probably is. I'm just afraid to say it."

"Why?" he asked.

"Because I think if I say it to one of you or to both of you... that you'll die out here, that I'll be signing your death warrant."

"That's crazy, Xenia," he said.

"I know. It's something that happens in movies on MarsGroup and intellectually I know that saying what I feel — what I might be feeling — won't have any effect on your chances out here. We're in a war and any one of us could be killed. I've almost been killed so many times I can't count them anymore. And you... you're walking in the fuckin' valley every time those WestHem marines come at your position. I just can't bring myself to make a declaration like that, not while this is all going on."

"I understand," he said. "But I don't agree." He reached up and took the sides of her helmet in his gloved hands, turning her head to face him. "I love you, Xenia. I want you to know that, to fuckin' understand that. At least that way if you die out here you'll die knowing that someone loves you, that someone will cry over you."

"That's sweet, Jeff," she said.

"Yeah," he said, "sometimes I come up with them, don't I? And... well... as much as I hate to admit it, I know that Belinda feels the same way about you. She loves you too."

"Christ," Xenia said. "Why are we even talking about this now? We could all be dead in another thirty minutes."

"That's true," Jeff said, "but we might all be alive when this is over too. What's gonna happen then?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Me either, but we're all gonna have to do something about this situation, won't we?"

"Too much to think about right now," Xenia said. "This is exactly why I won't say... won't say how much I care for you."

"Well... at least we're getting somewhere, huh?"

A signal suddenly blared over the command net, piercing into their ears. They looked at each other, both knowing the time had come.

"All units on the Eden MLD," a voice spoke over the channel. "WestHem units are moving in towards the line. Estimate contact in ten minutes. Forces screens are being updated every six seconds."

"I need to get to my tank," Xenia said. She grasped his hands, squeezing them, and then blew him a kiss. "I'll see you when it's over. We'll talk more then."

"Fuckin' aye," he told her.

She turned and began trotting off. Within seconds she was out of his view. He wondered if he would ever see her again.