"Creek, displace!" sergeant Walker commanded him. "They're starting to pound on your position again."
"Right, sarge," he said, pulling the barrel and the body of the heavy machine gun backwards, removing it from the firing port.
The gun he had been assigned weighed almost a hundred kilos even in the reduced gravity of outside. It was fed by a drum that contained nine hundred 7mm depleted uranium, armor-piercing rounds. It could fire that drum empty — if he so desired — in less than forty-five seconds, although he generally shot in short bursts. The barrel was cooled by a liquid nitrogen circulation system that made it unnecessary to ever change barrels. The entire unit was clipped to a rail that ran the length of the pillbox just beneath the firing ports. He folded it upward now and then slid to the left, pulling it along its rail until he reached the last firing port on the southwest corner. He then pushed it back downward and slid it out through the firing port. He looked outside, searching for his next targets in his zone of responsibility.
The landscape he looked out over was a scene of almost incomprehensible death and destruction. Out beyond the main anti-tank ditch, in the area that was called "the armor maze", were hundreds of smashed and burned WestHem tanks and APCs with hundreds of dead and gravely wounded marines lying in groups all around them. Other, undamaged tanks were interspersed around them, their main guns flashing as they launched more eighty-millimeter shells, their anti-tank laser cannons flashing as they tried to kill the entrenched armor. Undamaged APCs added their fire as well and a steady, seemingly endless stream of more continued to appear from over the horizon, making their way into the tank maze to disgorge more marines to come charging into the maelstrom. Artillery rounds exploded out among the advancing troops with steady regularity and bullets continued to fly in high volume, cutting into any exposed men out there. A cloud of smoke and dust had billowed into the sky, illuminated by the setting sun. Most disturbing, however, was the fog of red vapor that was intermingled with the smoke and dust. It was barely noticeable over the armor formations but thick enough to cast a shadow over the anti-tank trench. It was blood, Jeff knew, the blood of thousands of dead and dying marines. Thousands were dead, but still they kept swarming forward, seemingly undaunted by their losses.
"Shift your fire to the trench now, Creek," Waters ordered. "They're starting to make it out of there."
"Right," Jeff said, pushing the barrel downward a bit. His zone of responsibility had been the APC staging area prior to this, the area where the marines were leaving the relative safety of their armored vehicles and starting to push forward to the trench. He'd mowed down dozens in the past ten minutes, raking his fire up and down the line, putting his targeting recticle on one group after another, shooting some while they were running, some while they were crawling, others while they were trying to hide. Those that made it to the front of the tanks were being engaged by other platoons, other heavy machine guns. As they'd actually jumped into the trench itself Jeff had found himself feeling almost sorry for the poor bastards.
"We got rebar in those trenches," one of the 2nd Infantry guys had told him earlier. "It's sticking up almost a meter from the bottom and spaced every half a meter. The ends have been sharpened with a steel grinder until the tips are fine enough to sew with. The dust covers them up. They won't know until the start jumping in there."
"How do you know about it?" Jeff had asked.
"Who the hell do you think maintains the trench?" he'd asked. "And that's not the only surprise we got in store once they jump into the trench."
And indeed it hadn't been. Once the trench was full of marines the mortar squads, using impact-detonating shells, had started to drop their rounds right into the trench. It was a maneuver they'd practiced time and time again in pre-war days with helium-filled practice rounds, all of the coordinates from every conceivable position, using every conceivable atmospheric pressure pre-programmed into each weapon's memory. That was when the cloud of red fog had started to get really thick.
"It's over for them," Jeff had exclaimed happily. "There's no way in hell they can live through that!"
"I wouldn't be too optimistic," Walker returned. "Remember, there's almost two hundred thousand of the motherfuckers out there. No matter what we do, they're still advancing."
Walker had been right, of course. Within minutes of the first mortar shells dropping into the trench, the marines had started climbing out the other side. It had been sporadic at first, with those being tossed up easily shot down, usually before they could even get their feet beneath them. But now they were starting to come up faster, one after the other, all along the length of the trench. The gunners were cutting them down, leaving their corpses spread all over the open ground, but it was starting to get hard to keep up.
Jeff saw that a group of about sixty had just emerged all at once in his sector. He opened up on them, starting at the right side and raking his fire to the left. They spun and fell, their legs chopped out from, their heads exploding, their chests and stomachs ripped open. Drogan and the others added their fire as well, picking up any stragglers. But by the time they'd taken out everyone in that wave another wave of more than a hundred had emerged in their place, all of them running as fast as they possible could toward the base of the pillbox.
"Why can't we get some fucking arty on them?" Jeff asked as he opened up again, mowing six of them down in one burst.
"The range is too short," Walker responded, firing a three round burst of his own. "We're less than two klicks from the guns, remember?"
"Yeah," Jeff said, firing another burst at the marines closest to their goal. "I guess so. Maybe they should shift the mortar fire back though."
"It's killing a lot more of them right where it's at," Walker replied. "They're trapped in there with spikes underneath them, mortars blowing the shit out of them, and gunfire in front of them. If this don't break their will to fight, nothing will."
It didn't break their will to fight. They kept pouring out of the trench like ants, moving forward relentlessly despite the brutal losses they were taking. The tanks and the APCs guarding the spaces in between the pillboxes opened up on them, air bursting eighty and sixty millimeter shells directly in front of them, blowing others to pieces with their twenty millimeter cannons, but still they came on. Soon the inevitable happened and several groups managed to make it all the way across and disappear from sight. They were now directly underneath the front wall of the pillbox.
Callahan's heart was hammering in his chest as he felt the blessed safety of the concrete pillbox up against his back. His breath was tearing in and out of his throat, his legs and back trying to cramp up on him, adrenaline flooding through his body like a potent and possibly malevolent drug. Somehow he had made it, running across that open ground while other men were shot down and blown up all around him. The man running next to him had been hit with twenty-millimeter fire and had been cut in half. The man on the other side had been hit with heavy machine gun fire, blowing his back open and sending most of his internal organs out onto the battlefield. But Callahan had not even had so much as a close call. None of the bullets had even come close to him.
"My luck can't last much longer," he said when he'd recovered enough to speak.
He looked around him, seeing very few familiar faces among the two dozen or so men who had managed to make it here with him. There was absolutely no order to the advance, no cohesion of any kind. It was simply a bunch of terrified men running for their lives. That needed to change if they were going to get any further.