Captain Callahan watched from his commander's hatch as they advanced forward. Thousand of armored personnel carriers entered the obstacle-ridden maze the tanks had just passed through although they now had the added obstacles of dead tanks and live tanks caught in a massive traffic jam to go around and weave through. Like the tanks, the APCs began to draw heavy laser fire from the Martians as soon as they were forced to bunch close together. This fire did not come from the Martian armor, however. It came from high on the pillboxes, from the heavily fortified Martian anti-tank positions.
APCs blew up all around them. There was no warning, no way to tell which APC was targeted until it simply flashed and exploded, shredding and incinerating everyone inside. Callahan watched in horror, trying to discern some sort of pattern to the death and destruction, trying to give himself some sort of reassurance that something other than random chance was at work here. He was woefully unsuccessful in this venture. An APC blew up right next to his, taking out one of his squads, and then five more blew up somewhere else, both in front and behind, some close enough for the concussion to rock him. It was as random as anything could be. There was no skill involved in surviving here. It was simply luck.
The tanks lining the anti-tank ditch began to fire their main guns, plastering the upper sections of the pillboxes with eighty-millimeter fire. The APCs began to fire their sixty-millimeter guns at these positions as well. It looked impressive enough as explosions, smoke, and debris obscured the entire top half of the pillboxes but the frequency of the laser fire coming back at them did not ease up even a little bit. APCs continued to flash and explode all around them.
Callahan checked his command screen as they bumped and bounced over the last two hundred meters before the dismount point. His company was now down three complete squads — one lost during the attack on the first line, one lost in the staging area, and now, one lost in the advance to the main line. Fortunately all were from different platoons and many of his platoons had been reinforced with an extra squad due to the shortage of APCs. He made sure his communications gear was set to the command channel. He keyed up and addressed his platoon leaders.
"Listen up, guys," he said, his voice strangely steady despite his terror. "Dismount is in just a few seconds. They're gonna pour every conceivable kind of fire they got on us the second we step out of these APCs. Get your men through the tanks and into that anti-tank ditch as quick as possible. Don't return fire at the pillboxes. Small arms fire ain't gonna do shit to those positions. Get everyone into the ditch where we'll at least have defilade from everything but the arty and the mortars. We'll regroup and then move in from there to the base of the pillboxes. Is everyone clear on that?"
One by one they responded that they were clear.
"Very well," he said. "Things are gonna be ugly the next hour or so. Keep the faith, keep pushing forward, and God willing we'll be standing inside Eden soon. Remember, we got the numbers on them. Let's use them wisely."
No one answered him. The APCs began to grind to a halt a few seconds later. The ramps swung down and he and his men emerged into a living hell of noise, confusion, and death. Explosions hammered into them as proximity fused one hundred and fifty millimeter shells and eighty-millimeter mortars came raining out of the sky. Men were blown to pieces, arms, legs, heads flying off, bodies ripped in half and tossed about. Bullets were streaking in from everywhere, machine gun fire, single shots, three round bursts, cutting others down like ducks in a shooting range. Blood vapor and dust filled the air, making it difficult to see. Callahan watched the sergeant and two of the men from the squad he was with shot down the moment they stepped away from the relative safety of the APC's rear end.
"Down!" he yelled on the command channel. "Get your men on the their bellies! Crawl to that fucking ditch and get inside!" With that, he followed his own advice and threw himself to the ground.
Gradually all the men in his company, in the other companies, in the two battalions tasked to take the pillboxes, did the same. This kept them safe from most of the small arms fire since the tanks were now able to block it. It did very little, however, to protect them from the artillery and the mortars. They continued to boom up and down the line, spraying lethal shrapnel onto the marines below, sending clouds of blood vapor welling upward in their wake.
The first of the troops reached the line of tanks and paused there, trying to regroup a little before pushing forward to the ditch. Callahan reached the rear of one of the tanks — as of yet unscathed in any way — and raised himself up to a kneeling position just behind the right tread of the vehicle. A quick check of his forces screen showed he'd lost thirty of the one hundred and fifty men he'd dismounted with, including one of his lieutenants.
"This will not be a clusterfuck," he told himself, knowing even as he spoke the words that he was lying. "I won't let it."
Another wave of artillery shells came arcing in, exploding up and down the line, killing or maiming more men. Callahan heard shrapnel bouncing off the tank he was hiding behind, saw two more of his men go down.
By this point the men from his company were mixed up with men from the other companies, even men from other battalions. It was not quite a panicked run yet but it was heading that way. More than two hundred men rushed from the cover provided by the tanks and moved across the open ground, heading for the ditch. More were shot down by the small arms fire. Callahan saw one man try to cross in front of a tank just as it fired its main gun. The shell did not explode but the sheer power of the muzzle blast blew the man into hundreds of pieces, scattering some of them more than thirty meters away.
"Christ," Callahan muttered, trying to pick out the path he would take for his own dash.
The first wave of men reached the edge of the ditch and threw themselves inside. Another wave followed right after them. That was when his lieutenants began to scream on the command channel, something incomprehensible. He heard the word "rebar" and "impaled" several times. The rest was gibberish. At the edge of the trench the third wave of men suddenly halted, trying desperately to avoid going in, this despite the fact that small arms fire was cutting them down as they stood there.
"What the fuck is going on?" Callahan demanded. "Somebody chill the fuck out and give me a report!"
"Beyers here, sir," said the lieutenant in charge of his fourth platoon. "The Martians have rebar sticking up from the bottom of that ditch! They've sharpened the points into spears! We couldn't see it because of all the dust that's blown in there. The men went down and... fuck, sir... I never seen nothing like this. They're impaled down there!"
"Jesus fucking Christ," Callahan said, horrified.
Men began to pile up at the edge of the ditch. Others, panicked, not knowing what was going on, slammed into them. Many fell in. The panic increased when the machine gun and rifle fire picked up in intensity, slamming into them. And then another wave of artillery fire, targeted directly over the tanks where most of the other men were piling up, started to explode above them. More men from the tank positions rushed forward, pushing more men from the front into the ditch. Fights broke out and several men on the edge began to shoot at their own troops with their M-24s, desperate to avoid being pushed over.
The force of the troops pushing from behind was much greater than the resistance of the troops trying to stand firm on the edge of the ditch. Dozens and then hundreds fell in. At this point those on the edge stopped hesitating and simply allowed themselves to be carried in. Callahan thought he had an idea why the resistance had stopped.