The time-on-target had been a mixture of variable time, impact and cluster ammunition that stretched in a one kilometer box with the canal on the south side, Castleman Avenue on the east, the river on the west and Elmwood Avenue on the north, and it had flayed the Posleen in the pocket. There had been thousands, tens of thousands at least, of the centauroids preparing to push across the river and most of them had been killed outright by the fire. The bodies of the Arabian horse sized aliens were strewn across the shattered rubble of the city, three and four deep in spots.

This left a ruined wasteland of piled rubble, scattered bodies and the wispy miasma of propellant fumes, smoke and dust that lingered over a battlefield. But in that fire-laden mist, shapes were moving.

Some of the Posleen, many of them even, had survived the initial time-on-target and were now reacting to the walking barrage. Some were running away and others were standing up and waiting for it to come to them. But a few were learning the human trick of finding cover. It was hard with a variable time barrage; to avoid the slashing overhead shrapnel of VT required overhead cover and the damage of the last few weeks of constant battle had destroyed most of that. But some few of them dove for remaining cellars and bunkers. And they would surely be back after the barrage moved on.

The battalion moved to its first phaseline, the high banks of the river, and flopped to its belly as if it were one beast. The suits had activated their cloaking holograms and the only sign of their presence was a brief series of mud splashes. Some of the survivors of the barrage had been God Kings, however, and they used their sensors to track on and fire at the cloaked combat suits.

The humans responded immediately, the mass fire of the battalion seeking out the better armed God Kings for lethal attention, but the far more numerous "normals" were now aware that there was an enemy on their flank and they turned towards the threat and opened fire more or less at random.

Most of the fire was high, but some of it was punching into the ground and even into the troopers of the battalion. It was under these conditions that the ACS proved its worth. Hunkered flat to the ground as they were, they made poor targets at best and most of the rounds that hit them, that would have demolished a Bradley fighting vehicle, glanced off harmlessly.

Not all of them, though, and Slight grunted again when she saw the first data lead go dead from her company. The location and name of the trooper, Garzelli from third platoon, flashed briefly on her heads up then faded. She didn't allow herself to focus on it, she just noted it and marked it for pickup. Her first sergeant would have done the same thing, but no harm in being sure.

She looked up at the heights overlooking the battlefield. The slope was actually sharp and the battalion was enjoying some cover from the Posleen that were massed above. They had not been under the hammer of fire and were fresh; when they moved to engage things would be hot and Bravo would be in the thick of it.

Most of the remaining fire on the flat had been suppressed, however, and she noted and passed the battalion commander's orders to begin the movement to the next phaseline.

This was when it got a tad tricky. Only one of her platoons, third, was actually going to be "on-line" with the rest of the battalion, the other two were going to be echeloned to provide cover for the left flank. This required that the two platoons wait as the battalion moved forward and string themselves out like beads along that side. She waited until about half of them had started forward and then moved out herself. After a few steps she stumbled and looked down at the Posleen she had tripped over. It was impossible to tell if it was a God King or a normal, the entire front half had been devoured by one of the 155mm impact rounds. But there was enough left to get in her way and as they progressed it was only going to get worse. She was having a hell of a time watching the whole company while also watching out for herself and she sometimes wondered how in the hell O'Neal did it.

Mike didn't even notice, consciously, the icon for friable ground, but he stamped down, shoving his boot through the chest cavity of the Kessentai then kicking to free it as he moved on. The symbology for the ground around him would have been impossible for anyone else to read, a hyper-compressed schematic showing ground level and conditions. The original schematic had replaced a lower screen view that he had originally used after falling through ice a couple of times. Then the half screen of images had been compressed laterally until all that was left was an inch high readout stretching all the way across his view.

His "view" of the battle, after five years of command, was nothing but a mass of icons and graphs; an external view was nothing but a distraction. He ran his eyes across the readouts with satisfaction. All the companies were moving out in good order and Captain Slight was doing an excellent job getting Bravo in position along Elmwood Avenue. Sooner or later the mass of Po'oslena'ar around the Strong Memorial Hospital, what was left of it, was going to come tear-assing down in a tena'al charge and smash into Bravo like an avalanche. As long as they waited until Bravo was fully in the groove it shouldn't matter. And so far all was in the green.

A couple of the bridges were showing as questionable, the icons outlined in yellow. He didn't bother to try to find out why; his AID was processing data from a thousand sources and any of it could have led to that conclusion. Over the last few years Shelly had become remarkably adept at gauging the quality of units and if she said the bridges probably would take a bit longer than anticipated to move into the hot zone she was probably right. Another screen showed the symbology for the Ten Thousand getting into position.

There were high buildings across the river and he noted the fact that Kessentai on the heights were beginning to drop. The snipers of the Ten Thousand were obviously getting into the act, using both their own weapons and tripod mounted "teleoperated" systems. At those ranges, though, it was unlikely that they could get rounds into the power storage compartments of the tenar, which was unfortunate; when one of the .50 caliber sniper rounds hit the storage crystals the unstable matrix tended to turn into a good copy of a five-hundred-pound bomb.

The battalion had reached the Conrail line, and he ordered a short stop to get everything set. The Reapers, who had been responding to calls for fire all along, yanked charging tubes out of the huge ammo baskets welded on their backs while the regular ACS troopers checked ammunition levels and shifted as necessary. The standard suits carried hundreds of thousands of the depleted uranium teardrops but the grav-guns fired nearly five hundred a second. This meant that the suit troopers occasionally had to worry about running out of ammunition, a situation that would have been considered impossible before the war.

Bulbous bodied medic and engineer suits moved forward supplying additional ammunition to the fighters and checking on the dropped data links. Such damage usually meant that the trooper was terminal, a DRT or Dead Right There in the cold battlefield parlance of the medics, but occasionally it was just massive suit damage that the trooper had survived. In that case, nine times out of ten, the medic would leave the trooper anyway.

A few troopers had fallen back from the fight with serious injuries or damaged weapons. Usually anything that penetrated a suit was fatal, but, again, if the trooper survived the initial shock the suits would keep them alive until pickup, sealing the injury, debriding the wound, attacking infection and either putting the trooper out or shutting down the nerve endings depending on the tactical situation. And even such injuries as lost limbs were, at worst, an inconvenience as O'Neal was well aware; he came away from Diess with only one functioning limb. Regeneration and Hiberzine were perhaps the two greatest boons the Galactics had presented to humans and the suit troopers well knew it; most of the veterans had lost at least one limb at some point.