"What could they possibly be up to?" Browning asked. "We've beaten them. There's nothing they can do now but run away like the cowards they are."
"I suppose," Wild said. "I still wish I could see what they're doing down there."
Sierra Madres Mountain Range, 60 kilometers northwest of Eden
1220 hours
Belinda Maxely could feel nervous sweat running down the back of her neck, pooling in the junction of her helmet and the top of her biosuit. Her hands gripped the T-bar of the tank tightly, her feet rested gingerly on the control pedals — one on the accelerator, one on the brake. They were climbing again, traversing a bumpy, rocky, uneven rise between two mountains at a slope of more than thirty-five degrees. The turbine engine was whining with power as the treads slowly pulled them upward at about five kilometers per hour. In her view screen she could see the rear of the tank in front of her, the slope of the ground she was traveling on, the pink Martian sky, and the jagged peaks she was passing through rising high above on each side. To her left, unseen but she knew it was there, was a drop into a canyon that lay less than two meters away. And the ground they were on was sloping in that direction by more than twelve percent.
Xenia couldn't take the tension of not knowing what was going on any more. She unclipped her harness and popped the hatch over her head open. "I need some fresh air," she told Zen who dutifully chuckled at her weak joke.
She stood up, pushing her head through the hatch and immediately regretted it the second she looked to the left. She saw a steep cliff dropping more than two hundred meters into a rocky gorge. From her perspective it seemed mere centimeters away from their left tread. "Oh my fucking God," she whispered, feeling suddenly dizzy and sick to her stomach — a sensation worse that what she experienced during lightening.
"What's wrong?" Zen asked, having heard her transmission.
"Nothing," she said, tearing her eyes away from the sight. She quickly ducked back down and slammed her hatch shut, vowing not to look outside anymore.
They were the forty-third tank in a single-file line of 253 of them. As Zen had told them, their mission was to perform a flanking maneuver to get into the WestHem rear area. And, as Belinda had pointed out, there was no way to do that in a conventional manner without passing through the impenetrable WestHem line. So they were going with the unconventional, a plan that was considered impossible for tracked vehicles of any kind and especially tanks, to accomplish. They had entered the nearer peaks of the Sierra Madres Mountains and were slowly working their way westward by climbing and then descending, turning and then turning back, passing over ground that had never been trod upon by humans let alone driven upon by vehicles.
"Coming up to the top," Belinda said, watching as the tank in front of her disappeared from view. She checked her map display and saw that immediately after starting back down she would have to turn right to a heading of two-eight-four, which would keep her on an even narrower and steeper sloped stretch of the mountain instead of sending her over a cliff.
"I don't remember them telling us we would have to climb fucking mountains when I signed up for the tank corps," Xenia said, sitting back in her seat and keeping her eyes tightly shut.
"I know what you mean, X," Zen replied. "I mean, getting fried by a WestHem laser is one thing. At least it's over quick. Falling off a cliff and tumbling five hundred meters down... well... that's something else."
"Can you guys shut your asses?" Belinda barked at them. "I really need to concentrate for this next part."
They shut their asses. Belinda gave them a little bit of acceleration as the slope before her momentarily increased to forty-three percent. The front of the tank rose up, so all she could see was sky for a second, and then it suddenly nosed downward as she went over the rise and started downward. She saw immediately why she needed to make the right turn. There was nothing but a sheer drop-off directly in front of her. Her own stomach did a few flip-flops but she forced herself to wait until the navigation carrot on her screen swung to the right. When it did, she pushed the T-bar to the left, slowing up the right tread enough so the left tread could push her through the turn. She felt the entire tank slide a little to the left, towards the drop-off, and she goosed the accelerator just a bit, pulling them through it. The slide stopped but the tank, now traveling downhill on a thirty-eight degree slope, started to pick up an alarming amount of speed. She braked as harshly as she dared, slowing them before they could run into the tank in front of them. She only hoped the tank behind them would do the same.
It did and they slowly worked their way down a twisting, turning area of drivability until they were in the narrow gorge below.
"Okay," Belinda said, "we've scraped through that one. We're gonna drive four klicks through this gorge and then we got one more climb and one more descent before we get back into the foothills."
"So you're saying we might actually make it there in one piece?" Xenia asked.
"We might," she said. "This last one looks like the toughest of all though."
"I'm surprised we made it this far," Zen said. "I thought they were fuckin' dusted when they told us we would drive through the mountains. I guess the mapping software we got from Air Ops was pretty good shit after all."
The mapping software he was talking about was the same software the Mosquitoes and the Hummingbirds used to wind their way through these same mountains. It had been developed over the past twenty years and even beyond and was based on countless surveys by laser and radar equipped satellites that had mapped every square centimeter of the mountain ranges with every point measured for exact altitude and slope. This information had been meant to assist pilots and systems operators to plan their flight routes through the area without hitting the large, immovable object known as the ground. It had never been intended to assist ground vehicles in traversing those same mountains but, when turned to the task, and with the assistance of several super-computers in the possession of the MPG, it had done just that, plotting a continuous route in which the slope, width, and rate of climb or descent was within the parameters in which a main battle tank could operate. That route was a twisting, turning snake and some of the passes — such as the one they'd just traversed — were right on the margin of passable and impassable, but it had been deemed possible and the mission had been given the green light.
It would have been easier, of course, to simply travel through the smaller foothills at the base of the mountains. There would have been more room to maneuver, the paths wider and less steep, the ultimate distance much shorter, which would have left a much wider safety margin of fuel and oxygen remaining for their actual mission. But the foothill approach was quickly ruled out due to detection concerns. There was simply too many places where the WestHem marines in the field might have spotted the column of tanks as they'd passed by, too much possibility that the dust they raised with their treads — even though it was being minimized by their slow speed — could have billowed up enough to be spotted.
They reached the end of the gorge and turned to the south, following a cut where a Martian stream had once drained. They began to climb, bumping over rocks, occasionally sending little landslides downward to clatter on the tanks below. Halfway up they turned back to the east, following a tributary of that former stream for half a kilometer before turning back to the south again up a steep slope to a ledge that overlooked the gorge on the other side. The pace here was particularly slow, less than two kilometers per hour but slowly, softly, they made it up and over — the clearance between the path and the drop-off less than a meter now.