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 12th 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."