Semper Mars:

Book One of

the Heritage Trilogy

Ian Douglas

Contents

Map

Prologue

“Christ, CJ! You can’t let them do this to us!”

One

This wasn’t the first time the Marines had ventured into…

Two

“How’s it working now?” Garroway asked, slipping into the seat…

Three

Kaitlin Garroway took the second-floor door out of Herb Simon…

Four

Sergeant Gary Bledsoe, USMC, stood at his sandbag-encircled post on…

Five

“Snakebite, this is Basket. Excalibur. I say again, Excalibur.”

Six

“All right, people!” Colonel Lloyd bellowed. “Listen up! We got…

Seven

Kaitlin Garroway peered out the cabin window at a sky…

Eight

“I never thought I’d see the day,” Garroway said, “when…

Nine

The last pale glow of the sunset had long since…

Ten

It was just past midnight, the time of the day…

Eleven

Most of the Marines in the barracks area were asleep.

Twelve

“I talked to Doc Casey,” Garroway told the others at…

Thirteen

“So, you got your lines down?” Garroway asked. It was…

Fourteen

It had been eight days since Kaitlin had seen Yukio,…

Fifteen

According to the data displayed on the seatback screen, the…

Sixteen

It was, Garroway thought, one of the oddest-looking marches in…

Seventeen

Mark Garroway watched his daughter’s face on the Mars cat’s…

Eighteen

The president looked a lot older now than he had…

Nineteen

The Star Eagle Michael E. Thornton, a single-stage-to-orbit SCRAMjet transport,…

Twenty

“So,” Mark Garroway said in what he’d intended to be…

Twenty-One

“Cheyenne Mountain, Shepard,” Colonel Dahlgren said, peering into the telescopic…

Twenty-Two

They’d broken out of the narrow canyon that stretched across…

Twenty-Three

Thirty hours after the MMEF’s triumphant return to Mars Prime,…

Twenty-Four

“Down!” Caswell cried, throwing herself facedown into the sand. “We’re…

Twenty-Five

Kaitlin was on the floor in the den playing chess…

Epilogue

Marine Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway walked through the automatic doors of…

Other Books by Ian Douglas

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

2039
PROLOGUE

MONDAY, 6 JUNE

Office of the Chairman of the

Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS)

The Pentagon, Washington, DC

0950 hours EDT

“Christ, CJ! You can’t let them do this to us!”

General Montgomery Warhurst teetered between radically opposing strategies, storming and pleading. The five-star admiral seated behind the broad and brightly polished oak desk before him was not only his commanding officer, but his friend. He and Admiral Charles Jordan Gray went way back. They’d been middies together at the Naval Academy, Warhurst in the Class of ’08, Gray in the Class of ’07. Since their postings to the five-sided squirrel cage, they’d attended one another’s social affairs, had barbecues in each other’s backyards, and shared the same wry disdain for Beltway politics. For them, the old Marine-Navy rivalry was a seal on their friendship, banter and laughing bluster over a couple of beers.

But, by God, Warhurst wasn’t going to let them kill the Corps, wasn’t going to let C. J. Gray kill the Corps, not if he had one thin, ragged breath.

Gray gave him a sad smile. “What’s the matter, Monty? Trying to save your job?”

“That’s not funny. I may be commandant of the United States Marine Corps, but every Marine is a rifleman first. I’d resign in an instant if it would change this. You know that. I’d give my life for the Corps, CJ. I goddamn would.”

The smile vanished. “Jesus, Monty, I know how you feel, but—”

“Do you?” Warhurst gestured at the four-meter flatscreen dominating the wall behind Gray’s desk. The display repeated in hand-high letters the document called up by the admiral’s wrist-top. The words “HR378637: The Unified Military Act” showed at the top of the neatly formatted document in punch-to-the-stomach bold. “The BBs’ve been whittling away at us for years now, cutting our appropriations until we’re damn near running on empty. Now it’s…this.”

Warhurst stopped himself. He was breathing hard, and he could feel the rising flush in his face, feel the blood hammering at his temples. His meds monitor would be kicking in any second now if he kept this up, but, damn it, the BBs—Pentagon slang for “Beltway Bastards”—never failed to raise his blood pressure.

And now they were trying to kill the Corps. His Corps!…

“There’s not a damned thing I can do about it,” the admiral said, shaking his head. His gaze flicked to the left, to the large, 3-D image of a grinning civilian on the wall to his right. “Archy’s backing this thing, and that means it’ll have the president’s approval.”

“Severin is a political hack. He’s also an Internationalist—”

“May I remind you that Archibald Severin is secretary of defense, which makes him our political hack. That means you, me, and the rest of the Joint Chiefs answer to him…and after him the NSC and the president. They pass the word, and we snap to attention, say ‘Yes, sir,’ and politics never rears its ugly face.”

“Everything in Washington is politics, CJ, and that includes the Pentagon and everyone in it. You know that as well as I do.”

“Maybe. But the final word comes from a document you may have heard of: the Constitution, remember? It says we work for the politicians. Not the other way around.”

“I never suggested any different. But this Unified Military Act is political. You know it. I know it. And there’s a political way to fight back.”

“And what might that be?”

“Public opinion.”

The admiral groaned, shifting in his chair. “Jesus, Monty—”

“It’s worked before. Truman? A century ago?” President Harry S Truman, a former artillery officer in the Navy, had come that close to shutting down the Marine Corps in the years immediately after World War II, declaring it to be unnecessary. Public opinion, however—the opinion of Americans who remembered names like Wake, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima—had secured a place for the Corps, by law, in the National Security Act of 1947. And that wasn’t the first time Washington politicians had tried to kill or dismember the Corps. Congress alone had tried it on no fewer than five separate occasions between 1829 and the 1940s.

And each time, public opinion, in one way or another, had played a part in rescuing the Corps from the budget cutters’ hatchets.

“I know that look,” the admiral said. “You’ve got something in mind, or you wouldn’t be in here waving your arms at me.”

Warhurst bent over, picked up the briefcase he’d set on the thick-carpeted floor when he’d entered the CJCS’s office ten minutes before, and set it on Gray’s desk. Touching the lock points, he opened it wide and extracted his PAD, which he slid across the desk, screen up.

Gray picked the thin panel up, his touch awakening the screen. He frowned as he read the document displayed there.

“Mars? You want the Marines to go to…Mars?”

“To safeguard American interests there, CJ. The same way the Marines have safeguarded American interests all over this world.”

Gray touched the turn-page corner of the PAD. “How big an operation is this?”

“The logistics are laid out on page five,” Warhurst said. “I’m suggesting one platoon, twenty-three men. Plus an HQ element. Thirty men in all.”

The admiral paged through several more screens. “Very complete.” He looked up at Warhurst, one white eyebrow askance. “And it’s certainly topical. But you can’t be serious.”

Warhurst reached across the desk and tapped a touch-point on the Personal Access Device. There was a moment while the PAD searched for the office’s network channels, and then the flatscreen behind the admiral’s desk flashed to a new set of uploading images. Gray swiveled in his chair to watch the display, which tinted the room with its ruddy glow.

Red sand and ocher stones littered an uneven, rolling ground as far as the eye could see, beneath a sky gone eerily pink and wan. An American flag hung from a mast in front of a cluster of pressurized domehuts, a tiny symbol of national defiance stirring listlessly in the thin wind. On the horizon, miles away but looming large enough to seem much closer, was the mountain. It reminded Warhurst sharply of Ayers Rock in the Australian outback, monolithic, vast, and red in the distance-chilled sunlight. The surface was sand-polished and smooth, its original angles, planes, and swellings worn down by the wind erosion of five hundred millennia, but the features were still discernible.

Or so some said. There were still voices—and powerful ones, at that—insisting that the so-called Cydonian Face, the Face on Mars, was a natural feature, a kind of cosmic prank elicited by shadows, coincidence, and the irrepressible human will to believe.

This despite the latest reports from Cydonia Base.

“In five more months,” Warhurst said, “Columbus will cycle past Mars and deliver her payload. They used a sealed hab payload, as was their right by the International Space Commerce Treaty…but Intelligence tells us the passengers include fifty soldiers of the Second Demibrigade, Legion Étranger—French Foreign Legion—in the service of the United Nations. That’s more soldiers than we have scientists on Mars, right now…and they’ll be armed, where our people are not.”

Admiral Gray turned away from the flatscreen, scowling. “I needn’t remind you, surely, that the administration is fighting for its life, right now. And trying like the devil to keep a low profile where the UN is concerned.”

“I’m well aware of our current…foreign policy,” he replied. The way he said it added the words lack of in front of the word foreign.

“And how is sending thirty US Marines to Mars supposed to defuse a situation that is just a step or two short of outright war?”

“Maybe it doesn’t,” Warhurst said. “But maybe the president would like an option that doesn’t have us ducking for cover every time some two-bit dictator in South America or Asia sneezes and blames us. Maybe stationing troops on Mars to safeguard our interests—and we’re still allowed to do that, I remind you, under the charter—maybe that would convince Geneva to back off and cut us some slack.”

Gray tapped several touchpoints on the PAD. The image of America’s xenoarcheological station on the bitterly cold and windswept Cydonian plain remained on the wall flatscreen, but Warhurst’s proposal came up on the PAD display. “Hmm. And, just incidentally, it ingratiates the Marines with the American public, eh?”

“Maybe the American public is tired of getting kicked around by those two-bit dictators, too, CJ.”

“Maybe. And maybe Congress won’t want to shut down the Marine Corps while thirty Marines are on their way to protect our people on Mars.” Suddenly, he grinned, a cold and lopsided showing of teeth. “My God. SECDEF and State are going to shit their pants when they see this.” He paused and shook his head. “Damn it, Monty, why the stick up your ass? Maybe Archy and the rest are right, and it’s time to let the Corps retire, with dignity. With honor. Warfare has changed in the last century, you know…or haven’t you been paying attention? Marine amphib ops like Inchon and Tavrichanka are things of the past. We’ll never see a major amphibious landing again, not when satellites and space stations make secrecy impossible in any deployment. Do you want the Corps to end up as nothing more than the Navy’s police force?”

“There are still a few things us Marines do that the other services don’t,” Warhurst replied. He looked down at the desk top for a long moment. “I’ll tell you, though, CJ. The reason, the real reason, doesn’t have that much fact or experience or science behind it. You know I have a son in the Marines. Ted’s planning on making it his career. And his son, my grandson, Jeff. Eleven years old. He commed me just the other day to tell me he was going to be a Marine. Like his daddy. Like me. What the hell am I supposed to tell him, CJ, if they kill the Corps? The tradition? It would be like killing part of who we are.”

Gray sighed. “There aren’t any easy answers, Monty. You know that. The UN is pushing, pushing hard, to reduce all national militaries to a minimum.”

“I’ll let the politicians worry about disarmament,” Warhurst said. “What I don’t want to see is my son’s face…or Jeffie’s, when I have to tell them that the Marines are being shut down, that their country doesn’t need them anymore.”

“A hell of a note,” Gray said, “proving we need them by sending them to Mars.”

“The Marines,” Warhurst replied, “always go where they’re needed.”

2040
ONE

WEDNESDAY, 9 MAY

Cycler Spacecraft Polyakov,

three days from Mars Transfer

1517 hours GMT (shipboard

time)

This wasn’t the first time the Marines had ventured into space, not by a long shot. On February 20, 1962, Colonel John Glenn, United States Marine Corps, had become the first American in orbit, thundering into space atop a primitive Atlas-D booster. Of course, Navy astronauts were quick to point out that Alan Shepard, a former US Navy aviator and test pilot, had been the first American in space nine months earlier, even if his suborbital flight—with a full five minutes in zero G—had also been the shortest spaceflight in history.

Major Mark Alan Garroway did not think of himself as an astronaut, even though he’d been in space for seven months, was drawing astronaut’s flight pay, and was watching now as Mars drifted past the command center’s main viewport. He was a passenger—in effect, he was extremely expensive cargo—aboard the Polyakov, one of four cycler spacecraft set to shuttling between Earth and Mars in the past decade. He was a Marine, and as far as he was concerned, sharing bridge watches with the ship’s three officers—two Russians and an American—did not make him an astronaut. That distinction was reserved for the glory boys and girls of NASA’s Astronaut Corps and the Russkii Kosmonaht Voiska. Marines liked to boast that every Marine was a riflemen first, and that any other job description—whether that of AV-32 pilot or combat engineer, of electronics and computer specialists like Garroway or the goddamn commandant of the whole goddamned Corps—was at best a minor elaboration.

Garroway was still less than enthusiastic about this mission, even after seven months in space. The routine had swiftly become tedious, especially after the magnificence of the blue and cloud-smeared Earth faded to nothing more than a brilliant, blue-white star. It was the sameness of life aboard ship, day in and day out, that ground away at his nerves, convincing him that this time, finally, once and for all, when the mission was done and he got back home, he was going to retire from the Corps at last. That tour-boat concession in the Bahamas was looking better and better with each passing watch. Kaitlin, his daughter, had been accusing him of going soft, lately, in her frequent v-mails. Well, maybe she was right. It was hard to stay gung ho for twenty-five years in a Corps dying of slow starvation…and with nothing much to show for it but a ticket to Mars and a hell of a long tour away from home.

Mark Garroway was the second-highest-ranking officer in the Marine Mars Expeditionary Force, a thirty-man unit comprised of a single, specially assembled weapons platoon on special deployment…very special deployment. General Warhurst himself had put this op together, a last-ditch attempt at saving the US Marines from the Washington compromiser corps. Tradition might dictate that Garroway was a rifleman first, but he rarely thought of himself as such these days. He was forty-four years old and had been in the Corps for almost twenty-five years. A mustang, he’d started out as an enlisted man, an aviation electronics specialist. When he’d re-upped after his first hitch, however, the Marines had paid for him to finish his interrupted tour at college, including stints first at MIT, and later at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and his area of expertise shifted from straight avionics to the obtuse, complex, and frequently highly classified electronics found in military communications, robotics, and AI computer systems. By then, of course, he’d received his commission, and he spent most of the next ten years working on classified programs at half a dozen research labs, from Aberdeen, Maryland, to Sandia, New Mexico, to Osaka, Japan.

His communications electronics expertise was the reason he was a part of the MMEF. Technically, he’d volunteered as a CE Tech for the Marine Mars Expeditionary Force, but no less a Corps luminary than General Montgomery Warhurst had personally requested that he accompany the expedition, and so far as Garroway was concerned, a request by the commandant of the US Marine Corps was a direct order—a politely disguised one, perhaps, but a direct order all the same.

Garroway’s primary responsibility on the mission was to oversee the maintenance of the Marines’ computers and electronic gear—especially the microcomp circuits that controlled their battle armor, commo gear, and assault rifles. Vital work, certainly, but considerably less than a full-time job. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he was also Colonel Lloyd’s executive officer, his second-in-command, Garroway thought he would have gone mad from the boredom by now.

His eyes followed the stately drift of Mars past the control deck’s windows. He still hadn’t accustomed himself to the strangeness, the alienness of the world. At the moment, it looked like a small and seriously diseased orange, its overall yellow-ocher coloration interrupted by patches, streaks, and smears of dark browns and grays. The north polar ice cap was a slender glimmer of sun-dazzled white. That band of black and dark red along the equator was almost certainly the Valles Marineris…the Valley of the Mariner Spacecraft. Despite over a year of study, he could recognize little else in the way of surface features save the polar cap and the three dark smudges of the Tharsis volcanoes.

And then the Polyakov’s slow rotation carried the planet past the edge of the window, and he was looking at stars and emptiness once more.

To his left, Commander Joshua Reiner reached up and tapped one of the monitor displays on the console above his workstation in that annoying way people have of trying to chivvy delicate electronics into proper operation. “Hey, Garroway?”

“Yeah?”

“We got a fault in camera sixty-two. No picture.” Reiner tried upping the gain on a volume control. “No sound, either.”

“Is the thing on?”

“Yup. Readouts say it is, anyway. Must be a loose connection.”

Garroway snorted. Trouble with electronic systems was always dismissed as “a loose connection,” even when the whole system was solid-state, with no wires to come loose in the first place. Pivoting his seat, he took a look over Josh’s shoulder, verifying that the system was on, but without sound or picture.

“Huh. I see what you mean.” The control-deck console was receiving a visual feed, but the screen was black. The sound, though, appeared to have been switched off.

“Storm cellar,” Reiner said, identifying the location of the dead camera. “It’s done this a few times before. Probably nothing major, but we have to log the failure for maintenance, y’know?”

“I’d let it go,” Garroway replied, leaning back in his seat. He was pretty sure he knew what the problem was “See if it fixes itself.”

“Um. Trouble is, old L&M’s on his way up there.”

“Eh? Why? When?”

“He’s logged for…let’s see.” With a few taps on his keyboard, Reiner called up a schedule on one of his monitors. “Here it is. Platoon weapons assembly drill, RSHF, 1530 hours.”

“Oh, shit,” Garroway said, glancing at the digital time readout on a nearby bulkhead. He’d prepared that schedule last week but forgotten that a drill was on for today.

“Yeah. And you never know if he’s gonna want a vid record of the drill.”

“Yeah, roger that.” He pushed back from his console. “I’d better get up there before he does. Cover for me here?”

“You bet.”

Garroway walked across the control deck, ducked low, and stepped through the open hatch into the transport-pod accessway. He moved carefully; spin gravity at the control-deck level was currently only about two-tenths of a G, and a careless move could send him slamming into the overhead.

“L&M” stood for “Lloyd and Master,” the wry sobriquet of Colonel James Andrew Lloyd, the MMEF’s commanding officer. The name was strictly unofficial, of course, used only behind his back by those who had to work with him. Lloyd was a stickler both for regulations and for proper form. His weapons drills aboard the cycler spacecraft had made him notorious; what, the ship’s astronaut crew frequently asked one another in Garroway’s hearing, could possibly be accomplished by drilling Marines in disassembling and reassembling their weapons in zero G? It wasn’t as if they would need to accomplish the feat on Mars, where one-third gravity kept the inner workings of their M-29s conveniently anchored.

Technically, Lloyd held no more authority aboard the cycler than any of the other Marines—or the civilian scientists, for that matter. The ship’s commanding officer was Polkovnik Natalia Filatinova, and she was the one who set the standards by which the men and women in her charge behaved. Nevertheless, old L&M wouldn’t like it if the storm shelter was used for…unofficial activities.

Garroway touched the transport-pod call key mounted on the bulkhead between two lockways. Several moments dragged past, and then he heard the chunk-hiss of a connection being made, and the sealed airtight door swung ponderously open.

A man clambered out, tall and dark-skinned, mustached, clad in a NASA-blue coverall. Two mission patches adorned his left shoulder: the light blue flag of the United Nations, and the circular sword-on-Mars emblem with the letters OEU:AE.

Organisation des Nations unies: Armée de l’Espace. The United Nations’ Space Force.

“Monsieur Colonel Bergerac,” Garroway said, stepping aside to clear a way for him.

“Hello, Major.” The man’s English was perfect, his eyes cold. “Going down? Or up?”

“Up, monsieur.”

“Ah?” He questioned with eyebrows and a cocking of the head.

“An electronic fault. Nothing serious.” Grateful that the French colonel seemed uninterested in pushing the question further, Garroway ducked through the lockway and into the transport pod beyond. A touch of a keypad sealed the lock behind him, and then, he was climbing up one of Polyakov’s three two-hundred-meter arms.

He didn’t like Bergerac. The man was a cold fish, and he clearly didn’t like Americans, a dislike made sharper by the current state of cold-war standoff between the United States and the United Nations. Intelligence had reported the suspicion that Bergerac and the three officers traveling with him to Mars were carrying sealed orders of some kind for the UN troops already there, and Garroway was inclined to believe it. The man acted as though he was brooding over some dark and enjoyable secret.

He felt a mild giddiness as the transport pod continued rising up the strutwork tower. There were no windows, so he couldn’t gauge his progress visually, but he could feel the spin gravity dwindling away to almost nothing. Polyakov was designed like a three-bladed propeller on a slender shaft. The strutwork blades supported the hab modules, control deck, and labs some two hundred meters out from the central spine, where one revolution in forty-five seconds mimicked the 0.38-G surface gravity of their destination. On the inward leg of the cycle, the ship’s rotation would gradually be increased to two revolutions per minute, working the Earth-bound passengers up to nine-tenth’s of a G by easy steps.

At the hub of the cycler were the supply modules, fuel, air, and water tanks, the docking bays for cycler shuttles, and, at the end of a long boom extending five hundred meters clear from the rest of the ship, Polyakov’s GE pressurized-water 50 MWe fission reactor.

And, because of the sheer mass of its shielding, Polyakov’s storm cellar was also mounted on the spine, just down the hub from the multiple docking collars, core transport-pod accessway, and main airlock. Only rarely was the big module referred to by its official name, the Radiation Shielded Hab Facility, or RSHF. Usually, it was called simply the “storm cellar,” and with good reason…even if the cycler’s out-is-down spin gravity dictated that Polyakov’s crew had to go up to reach it. Solar flares were infrequent hazards of flight, but when a small patch of the sun’s surface suddenly brightened by a factor of five or ten times, spewing high-energy particles out in a deadly cloud, there was no way that a spaceship en route between worlds—locked by fuel requirements and the laws of physics into its slow-arcing orbit—could turn around and return to port…or even take evasive action, for that matter. The storm cellar was the one compartment aboard ship large enough and heavily shielded enough to give the cycler’s crew and passengers a chance of surviving if they were caught by a bad flare.

It was also, by reason of its relatively remote location, one of the very few places on board a cycler where someone could leave the crowded hab modules and find a little precious privacy….

“Storm Cellar”

Cycler Spacecraft Polyakov

1524 hours GMT

Sex in zero G, David Alexander thought, was wonderful…though it could be even more exhausting than its tamer, gravity-leaded incarnation. The novelty of no up or down, no on top or underneath, as the coupling pair twisted in a thin, hovering mist of drifting sweat droplets, brought an exotic newness to this most ancient of recreations.

Carefully, he leaned back a little, so he could focus on the dozing face of his lovely partner, framed in a golden splash of hair adrift in zero gravity, and as he did, he felt—again—that tiny, nagging pang of guilt. Alexander was married, but not to this woman. It had taken a lot of loneliness—and the rather heavy-handed rationalization that his marriage to Liana was all but over anyway—to get him to the point where he’d surrendered to the very considerable temptation. Mireille Joubert was a beautiful woman and an intelligent one; she clung avidly to the European notion of cosmopolitan maturity that saw nothing wrong with two adults enjoying recreational sex, whether either of them was married or not.

Mireille Joubert. Her first name was difficult…and a delight. She’d had to coach him on the pronunciation, which came out something like mere-ray. He turned his gaze to a drifting wad of clothing a few meters away, remembering fondly how frantically the French woman had shucked off her jumpsuit. Two emblems adorned her suit’s sleeve—a blue UN flag, and a round patch displaying the Cydonian Face. He could just make out the words embroidered around the patch’s rim: Expédition Xenoarchéologique de l’Organisation des Nations unies.

He frowned. There were some who would say that their lovemaking was treason. Well, screw that. Mireille Joubert was his colleague, on her way to Mars to assume her new position as director of the UN archeological oversight team there, a small group of men and women assigned by Geneva to monitor US discoveries and excavations at Cydonia.

He didn’t really give a damn about the political situation, and his only interest in the reports of UN troops on Mars—or of the Marines, for that matter—was to marvel at the stupidity of sending soldiers to the red planet instead of more scientists. He, for one, intended to work closely with his UN colleagues, and the hell with international tensions. Technically, the UN team had no real authority on Mars, though their reports and recommendations could bring political pressure to bear back in the United States on the agencies and foundations sponsoring the Mars digs. Aerologist Dr. Jason Graves, already on Mars with the thirty-some US and Russian scientists on the planet, was the head of the Planetary Science Team. Alexander had worked with the man before and doubted that there would be a problem with his liaison with Joubert. She certainly didn’t seem to think there was a problem with their fraternization.

Alexander started to ease his way from the woman’s sleeping embrace, but the movement set them slowly tumbling, and she opened her eyes. “Mmm. You are wanting to do it again?” Her long, naked legs, clasped about his hips, tightened. He’d thought he was sated, but he could feel the stirrings of renewed interest as she moved against him.

“Do we have time?”

“Quelle heure est-il?”

He knew a little French. She had been teaching him. He glanced at the time display on his wrist-top. “Uh…almost fifteen-thirty.” Shipboard time followed military and European usage, with a twenty-four-hour clock.

“Ah, well…I must go over the site plans with LaSalle at sixteen….”

He sighed. “Perhaps we’d best undock, then.” Zero-G sex, for obvious reasons, had picked up a lot of spacecraft maneuvering terminology. “Docking,” “probe insertion,” and “docking-collar contact” were favorites.

She pulled him closer, nuzzling his ear and enveloping his head in a sweet-smelling, drifting blur of golden hair. Her hips moved in interesting ways. “Oh, but we have much time yet….”

He groaned—happily—then surrendered to warmth and growing hunger. He still felt clumsy with Joubert, even after…what was it? Five times. Or six. He wasn’t sure. Their first time in the storm cellar, they’d used a Velcro strap to keep themselves tied together at their waists; any movement in zero G could have unforeseeable action-reaction repercussions, and when both partners were moving enthusiastically it was difficult to stay docked.

Joubert, though, was an expert at this sort of thing. Either she’d done it before, lots, he thought, or she was a damned fast learner. Superbly acrobatic, she used her legs to keep them tightly joined, flexing knees and thighs like an equestrian to give the necessary friction.

The motion started them turning again, a slow tumble through the mist of their lovemaking. Lazily, he reached out with one arm and caught a stowage-bin handle, checking their spin. Space was precious aboard a cycler. Much of the hexagonal chamber’s interior space was taken up by supply bins anchored by bungee cord and Velcro to the room’s inner surfaces. Fifty or sixty people could have squeezed into the shelter at once if necessary—hab compartments in microgravity acquire a third dimension that makes them far roomier than the same volume of space on Earth—but it would have been a ghastly exercise in claustrophobic conditioning. There were no windows, of course. Ports would have compromised the shelter’s armor. He’d often wished that he could look out into space during one of these sessions….

A metallic thump sounded somewhere close by.

Alexander reared back from Joubert, startled, his heart pounding harder now. The cycler was always noisy, especially here at the hub, where the rotors that kept the hab modules turning provided a constant background hum, and the effects of uneven solar heating on the stationary spine made a sound like far-off thunder. The sounds were muffled, though. Air pressure aboard the cycler was kept deliberately low, which meant that sounds didn’t carry well. This had been close…and very loud.

There was only one thing it could have been—a transport pod docking with the hub spin-connector module.

Shit!…

“Mireille, someone’s coming!” he hissed, disentangling himself. “Quickly! Get dressed!”

Too late. The storm cellar’s hatch leading to the connector mod was already swinging inward. Alexander recognized the lanky, backlit form of Major Garroway crouched in the opening, holding the hatch open but keeping his head primly turned away.

“If there’s anyone in here pulling inventory,” Garroway called loudly, “they’ve got about two minutes before Colonel Lloyd, Lieutenant King, and twenty-six Marines come barging in for weapons drill!”

“Right!” Alexander yelled back. “Almost done!”

Garroway pulled the hatch closed with a muffled clank, and the two of them were alone again…at least for a couple more minutes. They began grabbing for floating items of clothing. His T-shirt was carefully wrapped around the lens of camera sixty-two, mounted on a corner of the bulkhead. He decided to leave it in place until they both were more fully dressed.

With a rattling snort, he forced a sharp intake of air past blocked nasal passages. “What do you think?” he asked the woman. “Is the smell in here too bad?”

Polyakov was the newest of the fleet of four Earth—Mars cyclers, assembled in 2037, but she’d still acquired a zoo of ripe aromas from the tiny, claustrophobic communities that had accompanied her on two circuits from Earth to Mars and back. Fortunately, seven months of living aboard had dulled Alexander to the stench enough that he scarcely noticed anything now…and when he’d entered the microgravity hub of the assembly, nasal congestion settled in and pretty much killed whatever olfactory senses he might have had left.

Despite that, he could detect the heavy muskiness hanging in the hot air, mingled odors of sweat and passion.

“Ohh, David,” the woman said with coy amusement. “How romantic….”

“We don’t want them to know, do we?”

Joubert gave a delicate shrug, then folded her knees to her bare breasts and slipped both legs at once into her red panties. “And if they know,” she said, “it is that they will simply be jealous, yes?”

“I’d kind of like to avoid that if we can,” he said, reaching for white briefs adrift in the air.

She smiled, playful. “Ah. You are afraid your wife finds out?”

“It’s not that.” Well, not entirely. At the moment, he was more afraid of the teasing he was likely to get from the other Americans aboard Polyakov. Four Team scientists, plus thirty US Marines, and the one Navy guy, Reiner, who was with the ship’s regular crew. That was a hell of an audience.

The compartment tumbled lazily about his head. He had his underpants on at last, but he was having trouble imitating the woman’s casual flexibility with the coveralls, and he kept getting both feet tangled in the same leg hole. Damn it all. You’d think that after seven months he’d have managed to learn how to dress himself….

Well, to be fair, he’d not had to dress in microgravity except for the few times he’d come up here with Joubert, one of the distinct advantages of having spin-gravity hab modules. How was it that she could be so graceful with no more practice than he’d had? Already dressed, she anchored herself from a handhold on the bulkhead, then grabbed his shoulder to brace him as he finally slid into the garment and zipped it up. Moving to the bulkhead, he untangled his T-shirt from the camera lens and switched the unit’s sound back on. Swiftly, then, he used the T-shirt as a towel, trying to soak up some of the swirling mist of various bodily excretions in the air.

A second clang sounded from the next compartment. A moment later, the hatchway banged open and a file of Marines in Class-Three armor began crowding boisterously through into the long, hexagonal chamber.

“Fall in! Fall in!” one Marine was shouting. He wore a gunnery sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve.

“Whee-oo!” another shouted as he squeezed through the hatch. “I do believe I smell fresh puss—”

“As you were, Donatelli!” the gunny sergeant, catching sight of Joubert and Alexander before the others did. “There’s a lady present!”

“Surely ya don’t mean me, Gunny,” a hard-muscled woman Marine growled as she pushed into the compartment.

“He said ‘lady,’ Caswell. Not hormone-junky.”

“Screw you, Marchewka.”

“Silence! Fall in at attention!”

The crowd fell uncomfortably silent after that, each Marine grabbing on to a handhold to anchor himself more or less in line with the others. Alexander eyed them with distaste…ten or fifteen men and women who were suddenly making the storm cellar as confining as the inside of a walk-in safe. They carried rifles and wore partial armor—breastplates and open helmets, worn over dark green BDUs. The breastplate shells were made of an artificial laminate that took on the color of its surroundings, but that hadn’t stopped most of the Marines from customizing the things with some artistic touches of their own. Mange la merde was scrawled in red on one Marine’s armor. Dirty UNdies read another. Alexander scowled. No wonder America’s relations were so bad with the rest of the world, if these were her ambassadors.

Alexander decided that he and Joubert had better clear out before the way was completely blocked. He took a last, surreptitious look around to make sure there wasn’t any clothing adrift, then started moving toward the hatch. Joubert followed.

“Gangway, people!” the sergeant snapped. “At ease and make a hole! Civilians comin’ through!” The line of Marines hauled themselves back out of the way, giving the two of them just enough room to squeeze past. Released from attention, several Marines whispered among themselves, and someone giggled.

“Uh…excuse me,” one called out, “but did one of you lose something?”

Alexander paused at the hatch, turning in time to see a lacy, bright red bra drifting past the faces of grinning men and women. Joubert, with far more aplomb than Alexander was feeling at the moment, snagged the garment, and darted ahead through the hatch. Alexander followed, clumsily, as laughter exploded behind him.

In the connector module outside, Alexander came face-to-face with Major Garroway, who was clinging to a bulkhead beside the transport-pod hatch. The module, which was locked to the rotating hub collar, was turning slowly with a heavy, grinding sound, though here at the very center of rotation, the spin gravity at the walls was still practically nonexistent. According to the lights on the control panel, a second pod was on the way, carrying, no doubt, the rest of the MMEF section. The pods, which worked in tandem like Swiss Alpine elevated cars to preserve the cycler’s spin, could carry only about fifteen people at a time. The second car would be here any moment, and then things would really get crowded.

With a loud clunk and the hiss of matching pressures, the second pod arrived, and the hatch opened up. Another line of lightly armored men and women spilled out, moving rapidly across the module toward the storm-cellar hatch. Last out was a tall, ebony-skinned Marine in fatigues, wearing the silver eagles of a full colonel at his collar. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, glaring at the two civilians.

“Uh…inventory, Colonel Lloyd,” Alexander replied. “Just…uh…checking the stuff the arky teams’ll need at Cydonia.”

Lloyd gave them a single brief, penetrating, and disdainful look, then followed the rest of his men into the cellar.

Alexander let the major and Joubert clamber into the waiting pod ahead of him. From the still-open door of the storm cellar, he heard Lloyd’s familiar bellow. “All right, people. Enough skylarking!”

The cellar door boomed shut, cutting off the voice. Alexander clambered through the pod hatch and grabbed a handhold next to the major.

“Thanks,” Alexander told him. “For the warning, I mean.”

“Yeah.” Garroway’s voice was hard and cold. His eyes were on Joubert…or perhaps it was the UN flag on her sleeve he was staring at.

If he doesn’t like it, Alexander thought viciously, then screw him!

Alexander hated the very idea of US Marines on Mars, hated the politics, hated the twisted, jingoist, nationalistic interests that pretended that such things were necessary. They had come to Mars to do science, vitally important science, with the discovery of the Cydonian ruins, and troops were only going to get in the way.

Well, maybe they’d be able to ignore them. After all, it wasn’t like there was a war on.

TWO

VIDIMAGE—JANICE LANGE AT NET NEWS NETWORK ANCHOR DESK.

LANGE: “In Geneva, today, President Markham concluded his fifth straight day of talks with UN Director General Villanueva, announcing that, although much work remains before the outstanding differences between the United States and the United Nations can be fully resolved, he is confident that real progress is being made.”

VIDIMAGE—THE PRESIDENT ADDRESSING A CROWD OF REPORTERS AND NETHAWKS.

PRESIDENT MARKHAM: “The United States of America is not now, nor has it ever been, engaged in any plot or cover-up involving the Martian artifacts. The joint US-Russian expedition to Mars is carrying out its research and investigations for the benefit of all humankind. We welcome the presence of UN observers and scientists at Cydonia. We welcome their assistance. The discoveries made there so far are…are astonishing in their implications for humanity, for everyone on this planet, and there’s enough work there that needs doing for us to be very happy when anyone offers to lend a hand.”

VIDIMAGE—DEMONSTRATORS OUTSIDE THE UN HEADQUARTERS SHOUTING, WAVING FISTS, AND DISPLAYING SIGNS READING “US MILITARY OUT OF SPACE!” AND “ALL POWER TO THE UN!” LONG SHOT OF PRESIDENT MARKHAM LEAVING BALCONY AS SOME DEMONSTRATORS THROW STONES AND UN POLICE STRUGGLE TO MAINTAIN A PERIMETER.

LANGE: “Large numbers of demonstrators protested the president’s Geneva visit outside UN Headquarters.”

VIDIMAGE: A PROTESTER, A WOMAN WITH A SIGN READING “US STAY HOME.”

PROTESTER (in translation): “America’s been grabbing the world’s resources for years! Now they’re trying to rape the other planets like they’ve raped the Earth! Well, we’re here today to tell them that we’re not gonna stand for it anymore!”

VIDIMAGE—JANICE LANGE AT TRIPLE-N ANCHOR DESK.

LANGE: “In other news today, Secretary of State John Matloff rejected as ‘absurd’ renewed calls for a UN-mandated plebiscite to determine the political future of the American Southwest. Representatives of the Hispanic America Alliance told reporters today that there would be no peace for America until the formal creation and recognition of the nation of Aztlan.”

VIDIMAGE—RIOTERS IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES OVERTURNING A POLICE CAR AND THROWING STONES, AS TROOPS MOVE IN BEHIND CLOUDS OF TEAR GAS.

LANGE: “HAA members seek the creation of the new state from territories in Northern Mexico and from the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. Armed confrontations in the region between HAA protesters and military and police authorities have so far resulted in at least two hundred deaths….”

WEDNESDAY, 9 MAY

Cycler Spacecraft Polyakov

1546 hours GMT

“How’s it working now?” Garroway asked, slipping into the seat on the control deck next to Reiner. He didn’t like microgravity and was glad to get back to a place where up was up and down was a place you could sit.

The Navy astronaut looked up at the monitor. “Seems to be fine, now. Vid and sound.” He cocked an eyebrow at the Marine. “Underpants?”

“T-shirt.”

“Man, nice work if you can get it. Who was it?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Garroway lied.

It was an open secret with the cycler’s crew that passengers frequently used the storm cellar as a place for some precious, hard-to-get privacy. Different commanding officers handled the problem in different ways. Many continued to adhere to the old policy, born of NASA’s long-standing dread of bad publicity, of forbidding sexual liaisons during extended space missions; others reasoned that liaisons were going to happen no matter what the rule books said, and so long as they didn’t create problems for the crew or mission as a whole, they were probably best ignored.

Normally, Garroway wouldn’t have been interested in how the other cycler passengers passed their too-plentiful free time, but he was still angry at the realization that the storm cellar’s occupants this time had been Alexander and the Joubert woman. Damn it all, the political situation was confused enough right now, without those two attempting their own brand of détente.

Reiner was obviously still interested in the identities of the two up in the cellar, and Garroway decided he wanted to avoid the issue. He moved his chair so that he could peer across Reiner’s shoulder at the screen. “Let’s have a look.”

Colonel Lloyd was floating at the far end of the crowded compartment, while the enlisted Marines were gathered into two lines running the chamber’s length. Their torso armor had almost perfectly blended with the white bulkheads, with random, dark olive streaks where the active camouflage was picking up arms and legs from nearby Marines. Each Marine had his or her assault rifle hanging in the air in front of him, together with a small cloud of metallic pieces, rods, springs, and oil-glistening parts.

Reiner turned up the gain on the volume. “…faster, people,” Lloyd was saying, his voice a drill-field growl. “Faster! The enemy is not gonna wait for you. Pick it up, pick it up!”

Hands flew as the Marines snatched pieces out of the air, each movement precise, smooth, and almost machinelike in its control. They appeared to be reassembling their rifles, and the number of floating stray parts steadily dwindled.

One Marine, Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky, completed the drill and brought her assembled rifle to port arms with a sharp slap as her hand smacked the plastic stock. Two more finished up—slap-slap!—an instant later, and then all of the Marines were bringing their rifles up to signal completion in a ragged chorus of skin on plastic. It was a remarkable demonstration, Garroway thought. In microgravity, even the slightest movement tended to give you a push in the opposite direction, and many rapid movements could accumulate a lot of drift or spin if you weren’t careful. The Marines of the MMEF appeared to have mastered the art of balancing move with move to keep their bodies more or less motionless.

Lloyd waited until the last Marine snapped home the bolt and brought the weapon to port arms, then touched a button on his wrist-top. “Not good enough, people,” he growled. “Not good enough by thirty seconds!”

“Damned robots,” Reiner said. When Garroway looked at him, he shrugged. “Sorry, Major, but it seems like such a waste. Like close-order drill, you know? Great back when armies lined up in nice neat rows and had to go through loading and firing by the numbers, like two or three hundred years ago, but pretty useless in a modern war.”

“I’d say it’s a pretty good exercise of self-control and discipline, wouldn’t you?”

Reiner chuckled. “Well, the next time I need a rifle stripped down and put back together in zero G, I’ll sure as hell know who to go to. Shit, why’s he making them wear armor in there? O1’ Poly’s been around her circuit two and a half times, now, and she hasn’t been attacked by space pirates once!”

On the screen, Lloyd was grinning at the Marines with what could only be described as sadistic anticipation. “All right, people. Since you keep falling asleep at this evolution, we’ll try to make it a little bit more challenging. We’ll do it again!” Suddenly, the screen went black. “In the dark! Ready…begin!”

The sound of clicking and snapping clattered from the speaker, until Reiner dialed down the gain once more.

Garroway thought about replying to the astronaut’s jibe, something about discipline under pressure, or even about needing to learn how to work in the cumbersome armor without letting it turn you clumsy…but decided at last that it wasn’t worth it. Reiner was Navy, and there were some things a squid just couldn’t understand.

The fact was that Reiner had hit pretty close to the mark, talking about drills evolved from combat necessities centuries old. There’d been a lot of talk lately about the US Marines becoming obsolete, and scuttlebutt aplenty about the reason for this deployment. Garroway was pretty sure the MMEF was a political chip in some unseen, high-stakes game, a means, possibly, of keeping the Corps alive when a number of very powerful people and organizations wanted to kill it. And it was true that President Markham was beating the drum pretty loudly during his reelection campaign this year—“our brave young men and women, serving America’s interests far from this blue Earth….” The United States was increasingly isolated in a hostile world, and her citizens were clinging tightly to symbols of American might, tradition, and security.

None of which addressed the real question. Was the Corps obsolete? Didn’t the Marines simply duplicate functions now handled by the Army?

Well, maybe they did. What of it? Garroway was mildly surprised to find that he didn’t really care, one way or the other, what became of the Corps.

It wasn’t that he disliked the Marines. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Marines had introduced him to advanced electronics, paid for an outstanding college education, and let him work on some absolutely fascinating projects, from communications software to advanced AI. The trouble was that he’d pretty much reached the end of the opportunities that the Corps could provide. How, he often joked with his daughter, could the Corps possibly top a trip to Mars? In fact, he’d been passed over for promotion twice now, a sure sign that he was never gonna make it to light colonel. He was at the top of his field inside the Corps, but there was no place else to go. To realize his true potential, he’d have to reenter the world of civilians. His background would land him a position at Pittsburgh’s Moravec Institute easily—he’d worked there for a time on a government-sponsored AI project, five years ago, and he knew some people who could pull some strings—but right now he was less interested in continuing with AI communications software than he was in the Bahamas…specifically in opening a charter hydrofoil and submarine tour boat service for rich vacationers. That was the extent of his ambition at the moment, a dream that had very little to do with the Corps.

More than one of the people he’d worked with over the past few years, people including Colonel Lloyd, had accused him of going ROAD—Retired On Active Duty—marking time, in other words, until he was a civilian once more.

Well, maybe that was true, in a way. It was a bit ironic, actually, that he should find himself a member of the MMEF, occupying a billet that a few thousand other Marines would have given their teeth for, and he didn’t really want to be here. Two more years—a planned fifteen-month deployment on Mars, followed by a seven-month transit home aboard the cycler Columbus—and he’d be out of the Corps. With all the military cutbacks lately, he shouldn’t have any trouble resigning his commission, and a month or two after that he’d be on the beach at Nassau, alternately soaking up the sun and soaking the rich tourists.

“Well,” he said at last, after a long silence had passed, “all the routine traffic is up-to-date. I guess I’ll head back to the hab.” He stretched. “I still have five minutes’ shower credit left over from last month, and I think I’m gonna luxuriate.”

“Enjoy,” Reiner replied. “And thanks for your help. I don’t know what we’ll do if the cameras go out in the shelter again on the Earth-bound leg.”

“Oh, you’ll manage, I’m sure.” He jerked a thumb at the monitor. “You won’t have so many passengers on board. Maybe the romantic ones can use their cubicles, like normal folks.”

“Nah,” Reiner said, shaking his head. “Zero G is too much fun.”

“Oh? How would you know?”

“Classified information, Major. I’ll never tell.”

Garroway caught a transport pod and took it down to the hab-mod level, where the spin gravity now measured .38 Gs, the same as on the surface of Mars. There were two hab modules attached to the outermost rack of the cycler’s A-arm. His quarters were in Hab One, which was reserved for officers, female Marines, and civilian passengers. The twenty-two enlisted male Marines were quartered together in Hab Two’s tiny open dorm. Crowding was bad in both habs—worse in Two than in One. At least the Marine officers were quartered two to a compartment. He shared his semiprivate, closet-sized quarters with the MMEF’s supply officer, Captain Gregory Barnes.

As he stepped through the lock module into Hab One’s small rec lounge, he nearly collided with Mireille Joubert. “Major! Hallo. I wanted to thank you for your, ah, timely warning.”

“It was nothing.” He’d not meant for his voice to sound cold, but it did anyway.

“It would have been most embarrassing….”

“Excuse me, Miss Joubert—”

“It is Doctor Joubert, but I wish you would call me Mireille.” She cocked her head to the left. “We have made this voyage all the way from Earth, seven months, now, and we have not had much opportunity to get to know one another. Perhaps it is time we did so.”

Garroway raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think that would be such a good idea, ma’am,” he said, a little stiffly.

“Why? Because I work for the UN?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“I am not one of Colonel Bergerac’s thugs,” she said, lifting her chin. “I am a scientist, an archeologist. Whatever differences your nation might have with the UN, they should not affect you and me.”

“Mmm. To tell you the truth, Dr. Joubert, I feel more kinship with Bergerac’s ‘thugs,’ as you call them, than I do with you and your UN observers. In my opinion, it’s misguided UN policy and the demands being made by your bureau that have created this crisis. Not my government. And not the MMEF.”

“Did I say that it was?”

“The opinion the UN has about Marines on this expedition is well enough known, I think. As are the UN’s opinions about American sovereignty.” He gave her a wintry smile. “Funny. I always thought you French would fight to the death to keep your national sovereignty.”

“And who says we do not, monsieur?” she flared back. “France is still free. Still sovereign…within very broad and liberal boundaries.”

“If that’s your story, you stick to it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, they warned us back at Vandenberg that we shouldn’t discuss politics with you people.”

Pushing past her, he entered his cubicle and pulled the accordion-pleated door shut.

What he didn’t need right now was to be reminded about politics. The political situation on Earth seemed to be worsening almost week by week, with the increasing pressure to cave in to UN demands. Russia and the United States of America were the last two major powers on the planet that had not signed the UN Reorganization Charter of 2025. That document called for the establishment of a United Nations government that would have jurisdiction over the national governments of the world, the gradual abolition of all national militaries, and new international laws and regulations governing the exploitation, shipment, and sale of the world’s resources.

The reasons for the growing concern—no, the growing world panic—were easy enough to see. The problems had been around for a long time, growing steadily, growing as quickly, in fact, as the world’s population, which currently stood at something just over nine billion people. Global warming, the subject of speculation as far back as the 1980s, had proved to be not speculation but hard fact for forty years or more. Sea levels had risen by half a meter the world over, and they were expected to rise by another meter or so before the century’s end. Rising sea levels—and disastrous storms—had killed millions, and driven tens of millions more into refugee status. Precious agricultural land in Bangladesh and coastal China and the US Gulf Coast had been swallowed up by the advancing tides. As nations like the United States and Russia finally ended their dependencies on fossil fuels and polluting industries, the poorer nations of the world had finally reached the point where they could become rich…but only by embracing the air-, land-, and sea-destroying industries that the US and others were now abandoning. Acid rain generated by China was destroying forests in western Canada, and the Amazon rain forest was all but gone now, replaced by ranches and acid-pissing factories. The last of the oil was swiftly vanishing; other raw materials vital to civilization—copper, silver, titanium, cobalt, uranium, a dozen others—were nearly gone as well. Things were bad enough that the Geneva Report of 2030 had declared unequivocally that all of the world’s nations had to be under direct UN control by 2060 if certain key controls on population and industry were to be successfully put into place.

No wonder the whole world was casting the US and Russia as villains, holdouts selfishly clinging to outmoded sovereignty simply because they feared a little thing like dictatorship….

Garroway wasn’t sure what the answer was, wasn’t even sure if there was an answer. The US, though, had been arguing for years that two new factors were about to break the deadly cycle of poverty and scarcity on Earth once and for all, if the industrialized nations of the planet would just cooperate long enough to make use of them.

The first was the wholesale industrialization of space, where power from the sun could be collected on a never-before-imagined scale and applied to industries that should not be allowed to pollute or endanger the planet. In another few years, perhaps, orbital industries could start making a real difference in the mess on Earth. The question was whether or not they would be in time….

The second factor, of course, was the discovery of artifacts on Mars, artifacts representing a technology that was old five hundred thousand years before humans had domesticated animals, developed an alphabet, or dreamed of riding ships into space. The Martian artifacts, the discoveries at Cydonia, in particular, in the shadow of that huge and enigmatic Face, were the reason humankind had at last ventured to the red planet in person.

They were also, unfortunately, the reason the Marines had been sent to Mars.

“Storm Cellar”

Cycler Spacecraft Polyakov

1602 hours GMT

“All right, people,” Colonel Lloyd bawled. “I’m gonna have mercy on you poor slimeballs. Report back to the barracks hab and get squared away. You have one hour before I pull personal inspection. Then chow. Right? Gunnery Sergeant, take over this detail.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“Dismissed!”

Lance Corporal Frank Kaminski looked at his buddy, Corporal Jack Slidell, and grinned. Slider grinned back, then reached above his head to one of the white storage modules strapped to the storm-cellar bulkhead and gave it a loving pat. The readout on the module said BATTERIES, GERMANIUM-ARSENIDE. “Hey, Ski!” Slidell called out. “Wanna quick charge?”

“Shit, Slider!” Kaminski said. He glanced toward the hatch, where Gunnery Sergeant Knox and Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky were ushering Second Section through to the transport pod. “Ice it, huh?”

Slider just laughed. “Yeah, I’ll ice it. I could use a nice cold one.” He rotated in the air, catching Ben Fulbert by eye. “How about it, Full-up? Ready to party?”

Kaminski glanced at the other Marines still in the storm cellar. Sometimes, Slider could be just a bit too brash for his own good…and if he screwed things for them now, just a few days out from Mars…

“Hey, Slider!” Ellen Caswell said, floating up next to them and catching herself with one hand on the bulkhead. “You and Ski got extra duty tonight, capische?”

“Aw, fuck,” Slider snapped back. “Again? Fuck this shit….”

“Fuck it yourself, Slider. You two can clean out the head cubicle before taps.” She reached out and thumped his breastplate, right above the garishly scrawled Mange la merde. “The Man didn’t like your graffiti. Especially with a French national present.”

Slidell grinned at her around the wad of gum in his mouth. “Yeah? And what was that Frenchie civilian doin’ up here, anyway? Diggin’ for buried treasure?”

“The head, shithead. Make it shine. And scrape that shit off your shell.”

He tossed her a jaunty mock salute. “Aye, aye, sergeant, sir, ma’am!”

Kaminski sighed. After seven months, he was getting to know the tiny lavatory facility in the enlisted barracks very well. Slidell was his fire-team partner, and Corps discipline held both men responsible for infractions that reflected on the fire team as a whole. Hell, Fulbert and Marchewka were probably giving silent thanks that the shit detail hadn’t hit the entire squad. Slidell had a peculiar talent for drawing fire.

“Ice it down, Slider,” Kaminski said. “We’re in enough trouble already.”

“Shee-it,” Slidell drawled as Caswell flexed her knees and launched herself across the compartment toward the hatchway. “What’re they gonna do, send us to fuckin’ Mars?”

Hang on a little longer, he told himself. Things’ll be better when you hit dirt. Space was short, and tempers frayed in a situation where, paradoxically, there were too many people for the available space and too much work for the available people. The current TO&E for a Marine weapons platoon called for five-man squads—a pair of two-man fire teams and a squad leader—organized two squads to the section, two sections to the platoon. Kaminski was in First Squad, First Section; Slider, Sergeant Marchewka, and Lance Corporal Ben Fulbert were his squadmates, while Sergeant Ellen Caswell was both First Squad leader and First Assistant Section leader. Gunny Knox also wore two hats, as First Section leader and as Lieutenant King’s assistant platoon leader.

With so small a force—a weapons platoon of twenty-three men and women, reinforced by a headquarters element of seven more—there was lots of double-hatting going on, and the Marines, rather than being mere passengers on the cycler transport, were expected to do their share of maintenance, cleaning, and general scutwork. The real problem, though, was the fact that the MMEF platoon was so damned top-heavy in the ranks. The lowest rank aboard was E-3—lance corporal—and there were lots of corporals and sergeants, more than was usual for a typical weapons platoon. And when shit flows downhill in the military, it lands on the low man on the pole.

Part of the deal, in fact, was that all personnel in the MMEF would keep their current ranks until the end of the mission, which was expected to last the better part of two years, a measure designed by some desk-flying bureaucrat Earthside to keep the platoon from getting even more top-heavy than it was already from sheer time-in-grade attrition. Where they were going, there were no replacement depots or work pools to replace the lucky SOB who made E-4. That wasn’t really as bad as it sounded. All of them were getting flight pay, hazardous-duty pay, and hardship pay enough to more than make up for the financial shortcomings of the arrangement. When they got back to Earth, most of the guys on their first hitch, Kaminski among them, would have their four in and have the choice of accepting a double promotion—Kaminski would have a shot at sergeant—or returning to civilian life with one hell of a nice separation pay packet.

Kaminski knew what he was gonna do. Four years for him was a great plenty. He would put in his hitch, and in another 745 days he would be out of here, out of the Corps and back to being a carefree civilian.

With lots of money waiting for him, too. Surreptitiously, he reached up beneath his breastplate, tugging at his BDU blouse to make sure the flag was still wrapped around his waist. Slidell saw the gesture and laughed. “Still there?”

Kaminski nodded. “Good thing, with all these damned PIs.”

“You just keep it there, Ski, out of sight. Ha! Man, we’re gonna clean up when we get back, right?”

“Aw, fer…” Kaminski shook his head. “Why don’t you tell everyone, Slider?”

“Tell us what?” Sergeant Witek, one of the HQ element people, asked.

“Nothin’,” Kaminski said, a little nervous. There wasn’t anything wrong with what he was doing. But the other guys probably wouldn’t understand….

As far back as the Mercury program in the early 1960s, astronauts had carried small and easily transported items with them into space—toy space capsules, coins, even stamped envelopes that could be postmarked in space…items that would be worth a hell of a lot to collectors upon their return. This was a joint venture. It had been Slidell’s idea to take something that might serve as a souvenir…and Kaminski’s idea that the souvenir should be a flag, an American flag. He wore it day and night wrapped around his waist beneath his T-shirt, because if Knox or one of the other senior NCOs found it in his gear locker during an inspection, he’d be cleaning that lavatory cube all the way back to Earth, and likely they’d confiscate the flag, which would be worse. The idea was to have everyone sign it after the mission was over; Slidell claimed he knew a guy in San Diego who could put an artifact like that up for auction. God, a flag signed by fifteen or twenty of the Marines who’d actually been to Mars ought to fetch thousands….

“All right, First Section!” Knox called out. “Hit the hatch!”

Making sure his M-29 ATAR assault rifle was securely strapped to his back, Kaminski joined the other Marines as they single-filed through the hatch and out to the transport pod. “Hey, Slider? What the hell do they want with US Marines on Mars, anyway?”

“Shit, why does the brass ever do anything?” Slidell replied. “To dump on the enlisted guy.”

Which seemed as good an answer to Kaminski as any he’d heard so far.

THREE

WEDNESDAY, 9 MAY: 1705 HOURS GMT

Carnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

1305 hours EDT

Kaitlin Garroway took the second-floor door out of Herb Simon Hall onto the elwalk and headed for Schenley Park. Two exams down, three to go, plus her final project, and then she was off to Japan. She needed to work some more on her project this afternoon, but first she needed to clear her mind. After being closed up all morning, she was eager for the sight of trees and grass and blue sky.

The weather was something she really liked about Pittsburgh, the variety of the seasons, the spectacular explosion of fall colors, the sharp joy of spring after an icy winter. The dull sameness of the weather at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, where her dad had been stationed before his junket to Mars and where she’d lived before she entered college three years ago, had sometimes made her ready to scream. She laughed. Yukio thought she was nuts, but then his part of Japan was a lot like Southern California. Small wonder he hated the winters here.

Resting her hand lightly on the railing, she ran down the steps from the elwalk to ground level and walked down the hill into the park. What exactly did she feel for Yukio? She’d liked him from the moment they’d met last fall, in the Japanese Room of the International Center, and for the past few months, they’d been spending more and more of their free time together. Kaitlin wasn’t scared of the words, “I love you,” and had certainly used them with Yukio, but did those words necessarily imply a lifetime commitment? Was she ready for a lifetime commitment?

Maybe she didn’t need to know. Maybe it was enough to know that she loved him, that she enjoyed being with him and talking with him about everything. Well, everything except politics, but then who does like to talk about politics? Her parents had never agreed on politics—that’s what her dad said, at any rate; her mother had died before Kaitlin was politically aware—and they got along beautifully. She and Yukio had just recently started talking about the possibility of a long-term relationship, and now with their upcoming trip to Japan, she found herself thinking about it a lot.

Yukio wanted to introduce her to his family, and she knew enough about Japanese protocol to know what that meant. She and Yukio both considered themselves to be Internationalists, not in the sense of wanting the UN to take over everything, but in the sense of being citizens of the world. Would Yukio still feel that way if it came to a choice between her…and his family? If his family wouldn’t accept her, would he be willing to live in the States permanently? Come to think of it, suppose they did accept her. Would she be willing to leave her country behind, to make a permanent home in Japan?

She shook her head. Too much serious thinking with nothing in your stomach is a no-good way to make decisions. She really wished she could talk to her dad about this, but somehow she hadn’t been able to tell him about Yukio, and she wasn’t entirely sure why. She hadn’t even told him about the trip to Japan. Not that she needed to, of course. She was of age, she had her own passport, and she was paying for the trip out of money she’d earned. But it had been a long time since she’d kept a secret from her father. She grinned. Usually the two of them kept secrets from others.

She reached her favorite tree, a sprawling black walnut, and sat down, first unhooking her PAD case from her hip belt. Taking her PAD out of its case, she carefully unfolded it and propped it up on her knees, keying it to download her v-mail. The usual departmental garbage—she’d have to check through it later to make sure she wasn’t missing anything important. She still hadn’t been able to write a filter good enough to catch everything she needed to see. She’d once accused Namir, the department head, of deliberately writing department memos so obscurely that a programmed filter wouldn’t be able to extract the substance. “Well, if your filter isn’t good enough, Kaitlin,” he’d said with an irritating twinkle, “perhaps you’d better write one that is.” Naturally, she’d risen to the challenge, but just as naturally, Namir had increased the obfuscatory nature of his memos. She grinned. She’d learned more about self-enhancing systems writing and rewriting those damned filters than she had in three years of classes. Namir’s method was brutal, but it worked.

Hmm, what else? A few vids from friends, nothing critical. Nothing from Yukio, but that wasn’t surprising. They’d planned to meet here after his exam, so the only reason for him to comm her would be to tell her that he couldn’t make it. Notice of the Zugswang meeting tonight. She keyed in a reply, saying that she was planning on being there. A few games of chess would be the best preparation she could think of for her physics exam the next day. More study at this point would only fry her brain.

Ooh, great, a message from Dad. Kaitlin checked her wrist-top for the current time and then tapped a key to give her GMT, the Greenwich Mean Time that all spaceships and all space expeditions ran on. Only four hours difference now that Daylight Savings had kicked in, so it was late afternoon on the Polyakov. He mostly wrote her at night. When he wrote at other times, it was usually because he had something special to say, something beyond the trivia of day-to-day life aboard a cycler bound for Mars. She snorted. As if he didn’t know full well that anything that happened on board the Polyakov was fascinating to her. She’d been space-happy since…since she didn’t know how long. At least since she saw her first Vandenberg launch, but the genesis of her space fever was a lot earlier than that.

She remembered her mother reading to her a lot when she was little. Her dad had told her that a lot of the books her mother read to her were stories about spaceships and other planets and alien beings, books she later devoured for herself. Books by Heinlein and Asimov, Longyear and Brin, Zettel and Ecklar. It was infuriating. Here her dad was going off on a trip she’d give her eyeteeth for, not to mention certain other less mentionable parts, and he didn’t care! He’d rather be on a beach in the Bahamas than on the sands of Mars! She was gonna have to comm that man a lecture. If he didn’t learn to enjoy walking where no human had walked before…well, she wasn’t sure what she’d do to him, but it wouldn’t be pleasant, she could assure him of that.

She tapped on the vid icon on her PAD. It swelled and morphed into a waist-up view of a Marine major, with the stark gray wall of his hab behind him.

“The top o’ the morning to you, Chicako,” he said with a grin, “or whatever time it is when you see this.” She grinned in return. The pet name her dad had given her when she was six and in love with everything Japanese meant “near and dear,” and only he and Yukio were allowed to use it. “Well, it’s been another exciting day in the old Poly, dodging asteroids and space pirates again. To keep from dying of boredom, I’ve actually resorted to some of those science-fiction books you gave me. The problem is, of course, that the realistic ones are boring and the unrealistic ones keep reminding me of how boring the real planet is likely to be. Take this one I’ve been reading lately, for instance.” He held his PAD up in front of him. “Red Planet by that buddy of yours, Robert Heinlein.”

Buddy of mine! Come on, Dad. He’s been dead for fifty years.

“What I’m thinking is, if there were any aliens down there where we’re going, like there are in that book, well, then this trip just might be worth something. But you know, Chicako, I just can’t see that investigating rocks is worth the investment of thirty Marines. I can’t help but feel that we’re being used somehow.” He shook his head and chuckled. “What am I talking about; of course, we’re being used. We’re supposed to be used. I guess what I mean is that we’re not being used properly. We’re not being used as a tool, we’re being used as a pawn in some vast political game that I don’t understand. But I can tell you, I don’t like it.”

He looked away for a long moment. “Something else I don’t like,” he said finally, turning back to face her. “This…uneasy dance we’re doing with the UN. I know we have to let them use our cyclers by treaty, but why we’re letting them horn in on our explorations on Mars is beyond me. Do they really think we’d hog all the goodies? I don’t know.”

“There’s something that happened today I want to tell you about. It…it disturbed me, and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe you can help me make some sense out of it. So long, Chicako. When next you see me, I’ll be on the beach.” His mouth twisted in a wry grin. “No ocean, unfortunately, but it’ll be nice to have ground underfoot again. Till then.” His face stayed on the screen for a full second and then dissolved into a string of numbers—the rest of his message was in code.

They’d started writing in code right after her mother died. A big, grown-up seven-year-old girl didn’t really want to put down in writing that she was scared, that she missed her mommy, that she wished her daddy could be home with her instead of being stationed overseas. So her dad had taught her a simple substitution code so she could say all those things without anyone else knowing what she was saying.

Over the years their codes became more and more sophisticated, until now they were using a Beale code, guaranteed unbreakable without the book the code is based on. And that was the beauty of it. It could be any book; it was simply necessary that the two parties agree on the book and, specifically, on the edition of that book. For the Mars trip, the Garroways had agreed on a 2038 reprinting of Shogun, a twentieth-century novel about sixteenth-century Japan. Kaitlin had downloaded both the book and her own Beale code translation program to her dad’s wrist-top before he’d left for Vandenberg.

Since then he’d used the Beale code routine for a part of just about every letter he’d sent her, but in the seven months that he’d been gone on the Polyakov, he’d only used it once or twice for more than a one- or two-liner. She paged down and estimated that, decoded, the message would probably run four or five paragraphs.

Kaitlin selected the text and ran her Beale code routine, wishing she could talk to him. V-mail was great, but there were still limitations. On the other hand, if he were here in person, he probably wouldn’t talk about what was bothering him. He was a very private person. Maybe writing about whatever it was that had happened was the only way he could let it out.

As she began to read the translated text, she found herself growing cold. “Consorting with the enemy,” he called it. Just because the woman was working for the UN? What is this? It’s not as though we’re at war or anything. She wondered what her father would think of her relationship with Yukio and was suddenly very glad she hadn’t told him about her proposed trip to Japan.

A shadow fell over her PAD, and she looked up, startled. The backlit figure looming above her raised his hands in mock horror. “I didn’t do it! Honest! Whatever it was, it wasn’t me!”

She quickly tapped on the screen, hiding the message in the background. “Oh, it’s just Dad,” she said, as Yukio coiled down beside her.

“Ah.”

Kaitlin folded up her PAD and tucked it back into its case. “And just what does ‘ah’ mean?” she asked.

He smiled. “It means that occasionally experiencing a lack of harmony with one’s paternal ancestor appears not to be an exclusively Japanese trait.”

“Ah.”

“Exactly.” He began twining his fingers through her hair. “Have I mentioned lately that I love you, Chicako?”

She grinned. “Not since we got out of bed this morning, Snow Boy,” she replied, using a rough translation of his name. She put her arms around his neck to greet him properly. “You’re good for me, did you know that?”

“Mmm,” he murmured as he responded warmly to her kiss. “You’ve said something about that a time or two before, I believe.”

After a long moment, she pulled back. “You know, I’m kind of glad I stopped by the Japanese Room that day.”

He nodded. “Me too. But we would have met eventually. It was fated.”

Kaitlin looked quizzically at him. “Do you believe that? Do you really believe everything will work out for us?”

He turned very serious eyes toward her. “Those are two distinct questions, Kaitlin. Ones that do not necessarily have the same answer.”

There was no response to make to that, so she made none. She knew what he meant; there was no point in going over it again. Instead she opened her belt pouch and pulled out the two quick-pak lunches she’d picked up earlier at the campus store.

“The landing is only a few days away now, isn’t it?” Yukio asked as he produced two cold-bottles out of a hip pouch. He thumbed them open and handed one to her.

Kaitlin took a sip and then another. “Mmm, kiwi, that’s good.” She pressed a button on her wrist-top to check the calendar. “Yes. Three days. They should rendezvous with the landers Saturday morning.”

“It is not a Japanese sentiment, but I…I envy them.” He tore off the lunch pack’s lid and started to eat it.

Her mouth quirked in a wry grin. “It’s funny, isn’t it. Here the two of us are, dying to go into space. And there’s my dad on his way to Mars, and he doesn’t even want to be there! He keeps complaining about being bored!” She picked a processed seabar out of her lunch and started chewing on it.

“Is that what was…bothering you?”

She swallowed and took a deep breath. Might as well talk about it. “No. It was politics again. Damn, I hate politics!”

Yukio shrugged. “Politics is nothing more than two people trying to decide if they can share a bowl of rice, or if one of them will use his sword to ensure that all the rice is his. It is as much a part of being human as breathing.”

“Well, then maybe being human ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Why can’t people just work together without all this stupid squabbling? Why can’t we take care of each other instead of fighting over who gets the scraps?”

“It is not in our heritage to be kind to others when we haven’t enough for ourselves. Altruism is not a survival trait, Kaitling.”

She grinned at his deliberate mispronunciation of her name. Yukio was proud of his English, justifiably so, and this past year had delighted in adding English puns to his repertoire.

“Well, I’m not entirely sure what the bowl of rice is, in this case, but the guys with swords seem to be two of the archeologists. Actually, the problem seems to be that they’re not using their swords but Dad thinks they should. I don’t know. I think this metaphor is getting bent all out of shape.” She finished up the seabar and started in on the edible packaging.

“There are lots more where that one came from.”

She laughed. “Maybe I should just try to tell the story straight. Dad feels strongly that Americans should not be…intimate with UN personnel. In fact, he went so far as to call it ‘consorting with the enemy.’ Can you believe that?”

Yukio was silent for so long that she wondered if he’d heard her. “Yukio?”

He started. “I am sorry. I think my father would find your father’s sentiment…not difficult to understand. There is considerable tension now concerning the possibilities of what may be discovered on Mars. I believe…I fear that it could lead to war.”

“But that’s absurd! Whatever we find there, it’s gonna take years to figure out even what it is, much less how we can use it! Why would we go to war over something like that?”

“Because people aren’t always sensible, my love. Because a perceived advantage can be as strong a reason to fight as a real advantage.”

“What would Japan do? What does your father say?”

“If the UN and the US were at war?” Yukio shook his head. “It is hard to say. We have treaty obligations to the United Nations, it is true…but my country is always loyal to itself first. I believe we will try to stay out of the fighting, if we can. I do not know what my father believes.”

“Well, maybe we can ask him in person next week.”

Yukio made no reply. Kaitlin let the silence drag on for a while, looking closely at him. Something was bugging him, but she knew better than to try to get anything out of him before he was ready to talk. He was a lot like her father in that respect. But she could sometimes get away with badgering her father when he was trying to keep things from her. If she did that with Yukio, he would just clam up even more.

“Kaitlin,” he said finally. “I need to talk to you about our…proposed trip.”

Proposed? She’d thought it was settled. She clamped down on the questions she wanted to ask, giving Yukio the space to say things in his own way.

“I have received orders from the Space Defense Force. I must report to Tanegashima in twelve days.”

She was stunned. She’d known, of course, that Yukio was technically in the military—he was here in the US, after all, to study the advanced electronics he needed as a space-aviation specialist—but he was supposed to be on a two-year study leave, or whatever they called it. They weren’t supposed to suddenly call him back, not now when—

She stopped herself. You’re a grown woman, Kaitlin, she told herself. Start acting like one.

“What’s the reason for the sudden recall?” she asked in what she was delighted to hear was a calm voice. “Did they give any explanation?”

“My orders say merely that I am assigned to Tanegashima Space Base for a possible upgrade in my flight status. They don’t even say how long I am expected to be there. But I received a vidmessage from my father. Because of his position with the government he frequently has access to information that is withheld from ordinary mortals. The impression I receive from his words is that this is a temporary assignment only, that I will be permitted to return here next fall to continue my studies. He implies that we are simply putting on a good face for our allies.”

“Did you know that something like this might happen? I mean, I thought the deal was that you would complete your studies before going back into the service.”

Yukio had finished his lunch, box and all. He picked up a small stone and began carving into the dirt at the base of the tree. “You say, ‘going back into the service.’ But, Kaitlin, I have never left. I am a chu-i in the Space Defense Force—you would say a ‘lieutenant’—and I have always been under orders. I must follow those orders and fulfill my duty.”

“Funny,” she said, brandishing a dessert roll at him. “I always thought of you as chocolate creme, not chu-i.”

Either he did not catch her pun, or he ignored it. He took a deep breath and looked straight at her. “We will have to cancel our trip, or at least postpone it. Perhaps you can come out later, when I know—”

“Why?”

Yukio looked startled, and then his face went cold and expressionless, and Kaitlin bit her lip. He seemed so Westernized, so…American, most of the time that she often forgot that he was still obedient to shikata, the way of doing things that is so distinctly Japanese. Interrupting a speaker when the two are equals was more than rude, it was disruptive of the wa, or harmony, that all Nihonjin strive for.

“Sumimasen, Toshiyuki-san.” She bowed her head, instinctively turning to Nihongo for her apology. The two of them spoke a mixture of English and Japanese with each other, but some things just didn’t come out right in English. “O-jama shimashita.”

“Daijobu, Chicako.” He reached out and stroked her cheek. “I try to be open to Western ways, but sometimes I still just…react. After living here for a year I see much that is good in your openness, in your willingness to try new things, to change, but I find sometimes that I am still tied to the old ways. And the old ways must change if we are to take advantage of all the future has to offer.”

“But there is good in the old ways, Yukio.”

He nodded. “Yes. We must find a way to continue the growth of the past one hundred years without losing that which makes us what we are. It is…difficult.

“When we planned this trip, it was with the understanding that we would be traveling together, that I would introduce you to my family, yes, but also that I would show you around the country. This I can no longer do. I will probably be free from duty most evenings, but Tanegashima is six hundred kilometers from Kyoto. Even traveling by hydrofoil and maglev, it would be impossible for me to come home for anything less than a weekend.”

“But couldn’t I meet you there?” Kaitlin countered. She polished off the last of her package and washed it down with a slug of kiwi drink. “You’re right, it’s a long way from Kyoto, but your home’s not the only possibility. If I couldn’t actually go to the base, maybe I could meet you at Kagoshima or Miyazaki. There are probably youth hostels there, same as there are in Kyoto.”

“But still I would be working, and I do not even know if I will have evenings or weekends off.”

“When do you have to report? What day?”

“A week from Monday.”

“Well, then we’d still have three days together, I’d get to meet your parents, your family, and after that…You seem to have forgotten that I have my own reasons for wanting to go to Japan.”

Yukio picked up his stone again and continued his scraping. “You truly wouldn’t object to being on your own in my country?”

She raised one eyebrow. “Is my Nihongo that bad?”

He grinned and tossed the stone at her. “You speak it fluently, and you know it.”

“Precisely. So we leave next Thursday as planned. Right?”

“One final question. These are…dangerous times. Do you really think it will be safe for you to travel to a country allied with the UN?”

“The idea of war over Mars is ridiculous, Yukio. Mexico, I’ll grant you, is a problem, with the Aztlan question and everything, but even if that flares up, I can’t see Geneva putting Japanese troops on American soil to deal with it. Look, I know our countries are technically on different sides, but Japan has resisted the UN-sanctioned embargoes. We’re still trade partners. I just can’t see that there would be a problem. It’s not as though we’re talking about going to Colombia or France!”

Yukio shook his head. “I did not want to prevent you from going to Japan, but I wanted to make sure that you knew what the situation was.”

Kaitlin grinned. “Yukio, my love, you couldn’t have kept me from going to Japan if you’d tried, and that’s not my Western individualism talking. That’s money talking. Maybe rich kids like you can contemplate with equanimity losing a couple thousand bucks on a canceled SCRAMjet fare, but I can’t. I’ve been saving up for a trip to Japan ever since I was old enough to rake leaves, and I’m gonna be on that Star Raker next Thursday, whether you’re there or not.”

FOUR

FRIDAY, 11 MAY

United States Embassy

Mexico City, República de

México

1453 hours local time

Sergeant Gary Bledsoe, USMC, stood at his sandbag-encircled post on the portico outside the Embassy Residence, watching uneasily as the crowds gathered in the plaza beyond the front gate. Many carried signs, some in Spanish, most—displayed for the reporters and vidcams—in English. YANQUIS HANDS OFF MARS! one read. ALIEN TREASURES ARE FOR ALL! read another. Some of the demonstrators evidently were voicing their support for Aztlan, an Hispanic homeland to be carved out of Mexico’s northernmost states—and the US Southwest. Tensions with Mexico had been at the boiling point since 2038, ever since the UN declared a plebiscite to be held in August of this year; the United States had already announced that it was not signatory to the agreement that had called for a vote on independence within its own territorial boundaries.

Occasionally, a rock or bit of garbage sailed over the high stone wall that fenced off the embassy compound. Someone, Bledsoe could hear, was haranguing the crowd in Spanish over a shrill and feedback-prone PA. He couldn’t tell what was being said, but the crowd evidently approved, judging from the full-throated roar that followed each emphatic statement.

“Man, what’s bitin’ them?” Corporal Frank Larabee, standing at Bledsoe’s side, said nervously.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you download the netnews?” Bledsoe said, his tone bantering. “They’re afraid we’re out to loot the Ancients’ ruins on Mars and get all the good stuff for ourselves.”

“Yeah? So what’s that got to do with us?”

“The Ugly American, guy. Haven’t you heard? We’re getting uglier every day.”

“Ugly?” Larabee patted his M-29 assault rifle. “I’ll show ’em ugly.”

“Easy there, Bee,” Gary said. “I haven’t heard a weapons-free, yet. You just be damn certain your toy’s clean.”

Both Marines were wearing their Class-Threes, low-tech, camouflaged helmets and kinevlar torso armor. Normally, of course, they’d have been in their Class-As, the full-dress blues with red-and-white trim that had been the uniform of Marines on embassy guard duty for well over a century now, but as the Mexican crisis had exploded into this ongoing riot, the orders had come down to go to battle dress.

The orders had also allowed them to carry loaded weapons, though they still had to wait for a release order to lock and load or open fire, even if they were fired on first. For a while there, a couple of weeks ago, the embassy Marines had been going around with unloaded rifles. The joke going the rounds at the time had been that the boxy, plastic M-29s weren’t properly shaped to serve as decent clubs, so if a Marine was attacked, his best bet was to give his rifle to his attacker, then kick the bastard in the kneecap while he was still trying to figure out how the adtech weapon worked.

The M-29 ATAR, or advanced-technology assault rifle, was a direct-line descendent of the German-made G-11s of the last century, firing a 4.5mm ablative sabot caseless round with a muzzle velocity of over a kilometer and a half per second. With each bullet embedded in a solid, rectangular block of propellant, there was no spent brass with each shot, and no open ejection port to foul with dirt, sand, or mud. The weapon was loaded by snapping a plastic box containing one hundred rounds into the loading port in the butt, a “bullpup” design that resulted in a rifle only seventy centimeters long and weighing just four kilos. The ’29 looked like a blocky, squared-off plastic toy with a cheap telescope affixed to the top and a pistol grip on the bottom…which was why the men and women who carried them referred to the weapons as their toys.

The caseless ammo was both the M-29’s greatest strength and its biggest weakness. The lack of shell casings to feed through an ejection port gave the rifle an incredibly high cyclic rate of twenty-five hundred rounds per minute, so fast that a three- or five-round burst could have the bullets on their way and dead on-target before the recoil had affected the shooter’s aim. On the downside, though, the firing chamber was easily fouled by chemical residues from the propellant blocks. The weapon used a clean-burning propellant, but there was always some gunk left over when it burned, and without an ejection port or shell casings, that gunk built up fast…fast enough to degrade the rifle’s performance after only a couple of mags.

The Corps, which lived by the rule that the rifle was the whole reason there was a Marine in the first place, met this weakness with typical directness. Every Marine took a perfectionist’s care of his weapon, learning to field-strip and clean it under the most extreme and dangerous of conditions, to do it fast, and to do it right. “Aw, he’s got shit up his chamber” was by now well-established Marine slang for someone who didn’t know what was what, who hadn’t gotten the word, or who didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

“She’s clean, Sarge,” Larabee said, replying to Bledsoe’s warning. “Clean enough to eat off of. Uh-oh. Heads up.”

Bledsoe turned to check the direction in which Larabee was looking. Captain Theodore Warhurst was emerging from the Residence. “Atten…hut!”

“As you were, men,” Warhurst snapped. Like Bledsoe and Larabee, he wore fatigues, vest armor, and an old-style coal-scuttle helmet with a cloth camouflage cover. A service issue M-2020 pistol was secured to his combat vest in a shoulder-holster rig. “What’s the word?”

“Natives are gettin’ restless, Captain,” Bledsoe said. He gestured toward the embassy’s front gate, less than twenty meters away. “I don’t hablo the Español, much, but it sounds to me like that guy with the microphone is getting them pretty riled up.”

“Intel IDed that guy as a local SUD preacher. He could be trouble.”

“Man,” Larabee said. “That’s all we need.”

The Solamente Uno Dios was one of the noisier and more bitter factions competing for attention in the Federal District these days. Formed as part of the backlash against the myriad new religions and groups devoted to worshiping the Ancients as gods, the SUD was a startlingly unlikely coalition of Baptists, Pentacostals, and a few Catholics who found common cause in their belief that God, not aliens, had created Mankind and that the alien artifacts discovered on Mars should be left strictly alone. There were some things, SUD spokespersons declared every time a television or netnews camera was pointed in their direction, that Man simply was not meant to know, and other things that were explained so clearly in the Bible, thank you, that no further explanation was needed. There’d been several bloody clashes during the past few days between the SUD and some of the pro-Ancients groups, the International Ancient Astronaut Network and Las Alienistas, in particular.

Now, it seemed, the local SUDs were getting ready to take on the US Embassy.

“Just wanted to let you guys know,” Warhurst said, keeping his eyes on the crowd beyond the high wall. “We’re evacuating. Closing up shop and pulling out.”

“Evacuating!” Bledsoe said, startled.

“That’s what they tell me. We’re passing the word in person, though, so our friends out there can’t listen in on our platoon freaks. We’ve got Perries inbound now from the Reagan.”

“All right,” Larabee said. “About time we got clear of this shithole.”

“What’s it mean, Captain?” Bledsoe asked. “War?”

“Shit. You’ll know when I know, Sergeant.”

“Yeah, but Peregrines. I mean, are they fighting their way through Mexican airspace, or what?”

“I guess we’ll find out when they get here, won’t we?”

“If they get here,” Larabee put in.

Warhurst chuckled. “We’re talking TR-5s, Sergeant. Probably with Valkyries on CAP. They’ll get here. I don’t think the whole Mexican Air Force has anything more modern than a couple dozen old F/A-22s.

“In any case, Major Bainbridge wants you men to be on your toes. Those Peregrines’ ETA is in another twenty minutes or so…and when they set down, the crowd could get a bit…eager.”

“We’ll be ready, sir.” Bledsoe slapped the side of his ATAR for emphasis, a sharp crack of palm on plastic.

“I know you will. Carry on, Marines.” He turned and disappeared into the Residence.

“Hey, Bled. Is it true what they say about that guy?”

“About him bein’ the commandant’s son? Sure is. I got the straight shit from Dolchik in Personnel.”

“I’ll be damned. He’s not a bad sort, for the son of God.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. I’d rather have him at my back in a firefight than some of these new-Corps pukes.”

“Roger that.” They listened for several minutes more to the speech barking from the speakers outside the embassy walls. A final pronouncement sent the crowd wild, cheering and screaming and swearing and shouting, until Bledsoe thought they must be planning to knock down the walls by sheer volume alone. Another volley of garbage hurtled over the fence, bouncing and scattering across the lawn beneath one of the compound’s spreading cypress trees but coming nowhere near the two Marines and their sandbag-barricaded post.

Bledsoe slung his rifle—with the crisis on, they were not required to remain rigidly at attention, soldiers on parade, as they would have been otherwise—and pulled his PAD out of the thigh pocket in his fatigue pants. When he touched the wake-up key, a keyboard and a display screen winked on, and he began tapping at the unyielding flat surface.

“Whatcha doin’?” Larabee asked.

“Linking in to the security net,” Bledsoe replied. Several perimeter camera views were available over the general embassy net. “Ah. Here we go.”

His PAD’s display screen flickered from the logo of the embassy’s local server to a low-res, real-time image shot from one of the small security cameras perched atop the compound wall. The scene looked out across the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City’s Great White Way, a broad and skyscraper-lined boulevard that was now smothered in a seething, shifting mass of humanity. A short distance up the road, El Angel stood gracefully on her pedestal, a towering monument to Mexican independence; a dozen men had swarmed up her base to a vantage point well above the heads of the crowd. Beyond, the elegant but aging facade of the Maria Isabel Sheraton was nearly lost behind the surging mob.

Several rocks clattered off the embassy gate.

“Get a load of this,” Bledsoe said, handing the PAD to Larabee. He pointed to the display. The security camera had clearly picked up a number of Mexican soldiers—in full battle gear—gathered in a small group in front of the Sheraton Hotel.

“Are they watching the mob?” Larabee wanted to know. “Or getting ready to join in?”

“Damfino,” Bledsoe replied. “Maybe they don’t know either. They might be there just to make sure the rocks don’t get thrown at Mexican property.”

“Yeah, but if a few gringos get dinged up, no big deal, right?”

Bledsoe set the PAD on top of the sandbag barricade and unslung his assault rifle. He didn’t like the looks of that crowd—too many tough-looking and angry young men, and no women or children visible at all. If this was really a spontaneous demonstration, like the local sources had been saying, he would have expected to see a more broadly distributed mix representing the local demographics.

Not something that looked more like an army than a mob of demonstrators….

United States Embassy

Mexico City, República de

México

1512 hours local time

“Come in.”

Captain Theodore Warhurst opened the door and entered the large room—all deep carpets and oak paneling and framed photographs and oils—that was the office of Franklin R. Tibbs, the United States ambassador to Mexico. The scene inside was one of quiet, almost deliberate confusion, as aides transferred stacks of papers from gaping filing cabinets into boxes and piled them up. As Warhurst approached the desk, three more undersecretaries came into the room, hurried past him, and collected several of the boxes; the shredding machines down the hall were working continuously now, reducing American diplomatic secrets to unrecoverable confetti.

It was a curious statement about the culture, Warhurst thought, that government bureaucracies still depended on vast quantities of hard copy to keep their records and pass their orders, despite the omnipresence of computer systems that made such wholesale deforestation unnecessary.

Ambassador Tibbs, a heavy, florid man in a neatly tailored gray suit, was packing jewel boxes into his attaché case. Each small, flat box securely held a neatly ordered array of twelve CMC microdrives. The size of a pencil eraser, each color-coded computer memory clip looked, in fact, like a small jewel and was far more precious; a single CMC carried half a gig of storage.

“Hello, Captain,” Tibbs said, looking up. His normally jovial features were sagging, his face creased and heavy. “You talk to your people?”

“Sir!” Warhurst said, coming to attention before the desk. “Yes, sir!”

“Aw, knock off the kay-det crap, Ted. Whatcha got for me?’

Warhurst allowed his rigid posture to relax, but only a little. He’d been gung ho, been raised gung ho, all of his life, and the ingrained training of a lifetime could not be easily discarded.

“The transport will be here in another few minutes, Mr. Ambassador,” he said. “It’ll touch down on the roof heliport. I’d like you to be on the first aircraft out.”

Tibbs winced. “I wish we…we didn’t have to do this. But my orders…”

“I don’t see that we have any choice, sir.”

Warhurst could tell that Tibbs was hurting, that he literally didn’t know what to do next. A friend and confidant of three American presidents, the man had been assistant secretary of labor during Kerrey’s second term, and secretary of state under Wood until his retirement in ’35. Markham had appointed him ambassador to Mexico as a reward for years of service and generous campaign contributions.

He didn’t look like he felt very rewarded at the moment. “I just…don’t know how it came to this,” he said, his voice so soft that no one in the room could have heard him but Warhurst.

“I’m sure there wasn’t anything anyone could have done,” Warhurst replied. “God knows, you’ve been in there pitching. Sir.”

“I’m beginning to think those fanatics out there are right. We should leave that stuff on Mars where we found it. Of course it makes other countries nervous when it looks like we might try to grab it all for ourselves.”

“That’s not my department, sir,” Warhurst replied carefully. He thought that Tibbs wanted to talk, that he was trying to relieve himself of some hard-to-discuss burden, but Warhurst had never been a particularly social man and didn’t know how best to respond. “But it seems to me pretty senseless just to pretend there’s nothing there. And if we can develop aldetech, well, everybody’s gonna benefit.”

Aldetech. Alien-derived technology. The word had been coined nearly a decade before to describe the expected commercial and industrial spin-offs from the fragments of lost technology discovered at Cydonia.

“You’re right, of course,” Tibbs said, nodding. “And if it wasn’t us, it would be somebody else. The Japanese, maybe. Or the EU. They both have pretty aggressive space programs and could get to Mars by themselves in another few years, if they wanted to.” He waved toward the office’s windowless wall, in the general direction of the crowds outside. “It just seems to be such a fuss over, over nothing, really. It’s not like we’re threatening them, is it?”

“Well, it’s always something, isn’t it, sir? If it wasn’t the UN afraid we were gonna grab the aldetech for ourselves, it would be Aztlan and the plebiscite.” He made a face. “Or our refusal to disarm and become nice, docile members of the global family.”

Tibbs sagged, the hopelessness of his situation, the failure clear in his eyes. Warhurst felt sorry for the man. He’d never liked Tibbs personally, and he certainly didn’t share the man’s politics, which leaned toward globalism and the new Internationalism more than he cared for. When President Markham had decided to take a tough, anti-Internationalist stance last year, defying the UN and their plebiscite and sending a Marine section to Mars to protect American interests there, he’d left many of the globalist and pro-UN people in the government dangling, especially in State, where the Internationalist influence had always been strongest.

As a member of the United States Armed Forces, as a Marine, Warhurst could have his own opinions about politics but couldn’t take sides…not publicly, not officially. If Tibbs was looking for forgiveness, understanding, or even simply a sympathetic ear, he wasn’t gonna find it in the Embassy Guard detail. Still, Warhurst could sympathize with the man’s impossible position, believing one thing, forced to carry out orders derived from an entirely different philosophy, and then being caught in the resultant back-blast.

“Anyway,” Warhurst added, “you did all you could do. All anyone could expect.”

Tibbs nodded, though Warhurst wasn’t sure how much he’d heard. Don’t fold on me now, Ambassador, he thought. We’re not out of this yet. Not by a long shot!

“Do you need any more help here, sir? I can send up a couple of men.”

“No, Captain,” Tibbs said, straightening. “No. We’re almost done.”

Warhurst heard a sound, a distant, hollow thud, followed by something that might have been the popping of firecrackers muffled by walls and distance. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll send for you when we have the transports in sight. Meanwhile, sir, stay away from the windows. Stay away from any of the outer walls.”

He turned and hurried from the room.

United States Embassy

Mexico City, Repúublica de

México

1518 hours local time

“Shit!” Larabee said. “Here they come!”

Bledsoe didn’t need the warning. He was already on one knee, his M-29 braced atop the sandbag barricade as he covered the embassy compound’s wall. A number of Mexicans, mostly young men, teenagers, in fact, were swarming up the wall and clambering across the top.

Some of them had guns.

“Outfield, this is Homeplate” crackled from Bledsoe’s in-ear speaker. He keyed the transceiver attached to his combat rig. “Homeplate, Outfield. Go!” he replied.

“Weapons free. Repeat, weapons free!”

“Uh…copy ‘weapons free.’ Damn it, some of these guys are just kids!”

One of the attackers, straddling the wall, raised an old Armalite rifle to his shoulder and fired, the round shrieking off the bricks of the Residence a few feet behind Bledsoe’s head. He shifted aim slightly and squeezed the trigger on his M-29, a light touch only that loosed a quick, three-round burst, exploding the gunman’s chest before the recoil had time to kick the weapon up and back in his hands. The man pinwheeled back off the wall in a spray of scarlet. More gunshots, from the upper floors of buildings across the street, probed the Residence.

“Kids my ass!” Larabee growled. He fired his ATAR in short, precisely controlled bursts, knocking several more attackers off the wall. The yells and imprecations and shrieks from the crowd outside—shrieks of pain and of white-hot fury—grew louder and more shrill. He sprayed a long burst across the top of the wall, the sound like the riffling of a deck of plastic cards, but far louder. The high-velocity stream of rounds sent fragments of stone and bullet into the arms and faces of the attackers still clinging to the top.

Then they heard the growling of heavy armor, the rumble and clank of tanks moving down the street toward the embassy.

FIVE

FRIDAY, 11 MAY

Rattlesnake One

TR-5 Peregrine transport/gunship

Inbound, east of Mexico City,

República de México

1519 hours local time

“Snakebite, this is Basket. Excalibur. I say again, Excalibur.”

Lieutenant Carmen Fuentes, US Marine Corps, pressed her hand against her Mark III helmet, pressing its left speaker harder against her ear, trying to hear above the shrill whine of the TR-5 Peregrine’s jets. “Basket, Snakebite,” she replied over her helmet com. “Authenticate force release.”

“Snakebite, Basket,” the voice in her ear said again. “Authenticate Bravo-delta-delta-one-seven. Excalibur. I say again, Excalibur.”

The release code and the word “Excalibur” were also glowing in green letters, winking on and off against the message display in the lower right corner of her helmet’s HUD, the confirmation she’d been waiting for. Things had just turned nasty in Mexico City, and First Platoon, Alfa Company, was headed for a hot LZ.

Fuentes turned in her seat and caught the eyes of the rest of her platoon. They were all suited up in Class-Two armor, which made them look a bit like astronauts in EVA hardsuits…except that these suits used an active camo surface layer that mimicked the colors and shadows and light sources around them in an eerie shifting of ill-shaped reflections. The only thing Class-One had that Class-Two didn’t, in fact, was the bulky full-support backpack that turned it into a space suit in fact as well as in appearance. She couldn’t read the faces behind the dark helmet visors on either side of the Peregrine’s troops compartment, but she knew every man and woman in the section was watching her intently.

“It’s a go, Marines,” she told them over her helmet’s com system. “Mexican forces have opened fire on our people at the embassy. Basket has just relayed the codeword Excalibur. We go in, and we go in hot.”

She’d been pretty sure that they would get the go-ahead this time. Fifteen minutes earlier, the Peregrine’s pilot had alerted her that Mexican Air Force F/A-22s had tried to intercept them over the coast, and only the Marine AV-32s flying CAP on Operation Rattlesnake had stopped them from pulling an intercept. Maybe those F/A-22s had been ordered to simply escort the intruders out of Mexican airspace…but Fuentes didn’t think so. The Mexicans had been getting cocky of late, certain that the entire United Nations was behind them in their dispute with the US, and they must have known that the only way to stop the relief flight was to shoot it down.

But that shooting would take some doing. Rattlesnake Flight consisted of four Peregrines and an escort of four Marine AV-32s, superb VSTOL fighters derived from the Harrier jump jets of the last century. All of the aircraft had stealth technology, and all had sophisticated antimissile defenses. There was a good chance that they would be into the Mexican capital and out again before the Mexican air-defense net could even get them pinpointed.

“So what do you think, Lieutenant?” Corporal Steve Bellamy asked over the section’s chat channel. “Is it gonna be war?”

“That,” Fuentes replied with a singular lack of interest, “is up to the politicians.”

Fuentes herself was about as apolitical as it was possible to be…but she hated the fact that some people had questioned her allegiance, and for no better reason than the ethnic origins of her name. She happened to be the daughter of legal Mexican immigrants, born in San Diego, California, and as far as she was concerned—at least until and unless the UN Aztlan plebiscite went through—that made her an American.

Hell, if the Southwestern US was suddenly torn away to become a new country, she wasn’t gonna go with it. She’d already made up her mind to stay in the Corps and resettle wherever they sent her. She didn’t like thinking about the rumor—an ugly possibility—that all Hispanics would be forced out of the US Armed Forces if that happened, or that they might even lose their citizenship. She was pretty sure that the other Hispanics in her platoon—Garcia, Ortega, and Carle—all felt the same.

In a way, she welcomed this current crisis with Mexico. It gave her an opportunity to show everyone just where her loyalties truly lay. She’d found it interesting as she thought about the problem over these past few days, however, that her primary loyalties weren’t to the United States of America, though she considered herself a patriot and was willing to put her life on the line for her country.

Her main loyalties were to her brother and sister Marines.

She used the utility wrist-top jacked into her armor’s dataport to open a window on her HUD’s data display. Channel four showed a computer-generated map of the region northeast of the Mexico DF. The aerial relief flotilla had already cleared the Sierra Madre Oriental, flying nap-of-the-Earth up the Nautla Valley, then hurtling low across the plains of Tlaxcala. They were over Texcoco Lake now, hurtling toward downtown Mexico City at better than four hundred knots. Eighteen kilometers to go—at this speed, less than two minutes more.

“Everybody check your gear!” she called. “Ninety seconds!” She wished the Peregrine had a window so that she could see out…but, of course, every square centimeter possible of the aircraft’s hull was coated in radar-absorbing polymers. She watched as each Marine in the platoon checked the armor and ordnance of the Marine at his or her left, then repeated the inspection to the right. Gunnery Sergeant Christopher Walsh checked her over, making certain that external armor snaps were locked, that grenades were secure, that she didn’t have any “Irish pennants”—loose straps or cords dangling where they could hang up and trap her. Then she returned the favor.

“Nervous, Lieutenant?” Walsh asked her on the private channel.

“Hell, yes,” she replied. It was her first time in combat, and Walsh knew that.

“Good,” he replied, and she could just make out his grin through his dark helmet visor. “If you were sure of yourself, I’d request a transfer out of this outfit, effective yesterday. Don’t worry, L-T. You’ll show ’em!”

She was grateful that he hadn’t patronized her with a “you’ll do fine,” and more grateful still that he recognized the spot she was in. Hell, in another couple of minutes, she might find herself shooting at her relatives.

But that was because they were shooting at her family….

United States Embassy

Mexico City, República de

México

1520 hours local time

The Mexican civilians had stopped coming over the wall now; in fact, as far as Bledsoe could tell, all of the civilians had scattered and fled after those first few volleys. Bledsoe was still on his knees next to Larabee, bracing his ATAR on the sandbag wall, drawing a bead on a scrawny guy wearing officer’s epaulets who seemed to be waving the attackers on from the far side of the barred front gate. He squeezed off another burst and watched the man tumble backward onto bloody pavement.

The initial rush had been beaten back, but the attack was far from over. Something large was growling unseen on the street beyond the gate, ominous and implacable. Moments later, an old Bradley AFV lumbered around the corner, striking the closed gate in a piercing clash and rattle of metal bars. A second M-2 Bradley followed the first…and a third.

“Christ!” Larabee yelled above the din. “They’re sending in the whole frigging Mex army!”

A rotary cannon on the lead Bradley howled, its muzzle flash a flickering beacon on the turret. Both Marines hit the deck as brick and sandbag alike were pulverized by the stream of heavy metal. To the right of the main gate, a portion of the wall burst inward in a crashing shower of brick. The squat, hulking shape grinding through the breach was no Bradley, however, but an M1A2, one of the old Abrams tanks sold to the Mexicans twenty years before.

Abrams and Bradleys might be laughably obsolete by modern standards, but they were still deadly. Neither of the Marines was packing weapons that could challenge that kind of armor.

Reaching up, Bledsoe touched the transmit key on the Motorola strapped to his vest. “Homeplate, this is Outfield!” he called. “We’ve got heavy armor here, and they’re knockin’ on the goddamn front door!”

“Copy that, Outfield,” a calm voice replied. It sounded like Captain Warhurst. “We see them. You can’t do anything more out there. Come on inside.”

“Rog—”

The world exploded. The Abrams had just fired its main gun, and the round had crashed into the front of the Residence and detonated somewhere inside, behind the front door. Bledsoe and Larabee, both already flat on the front porch, were lifted several feet and slammed against their crumbling sandbag barricade.

Groping through the swirling smoke, Bledsoe looked around for Larabee. The sandbags had been scattered as though kicked by a playful giant; Larabee lay on his back where the blast had flung him, off the porch, down the steps, and several yards out into the Residence front lawn. The front of the Residence itself, never designed to take such punishment, had partially collapsed, a jagged tangle of brick and beam and splintered wood, licked about with flame. The upper stories and the rear of the large mansion were intact, but a few more direct hits by that tank and the whole structure was gonna come tumbling down.

Mexican troops were spilling from the three Bradleys now, troops better equipped than the civilians in the first wave had been, with modern assault rifles and kinevlar vests similar to what Bledsoe and Larabee were wearing. Gunfire popped and chattered; Bledsoe groped for his ATAR, dropped when the Abrams had fired, and knocked down three or four running figures. The smoke was getting thicker now, and it was difficult to acquire and hold a target. The full-auto fire from the wrecked front of the building seemed to be making the attackers cautious.

But they would be charging across the lawn and up the steps of the Residence any second now.

Bledsoe knew he didn’t have much time.

Rattlesnake One

TR-5 Peregrine transport/gunship

Mexico City, República de

México

1521 hours local time

“Landing alert, Lieutenant!” sounded in Fuentes’s headset. “Thirty seconds!” She could feel the transport’s nose coming up, could feel the change in pitch of the engines as they rotated to their straight-up, hover position.

“Roger that,” she replied.

“We can see the embassy now,” the Peregrine’s pilot added. “Looks like there’s a lot of shooting going on down there.”

Her pulse raced. Had war broken out officially, or was this just another “incident,” the kind that left widows and cripples in its wake? Had the Mexicans really been stupid enough to try a toe-to-toe slugfest with the United States?

Maybe they thought that with UN backing, they could win.

She punched in a combination on her wrist-top, then studied the low-res vid-feed from the TR-5’s nose camera as it flickered in pale black and white on her helmet display. The embassy’s broad, rooftop helipad was visible at the center of the picture; one of the AV-32s swept past her view from right to left, circling low, dropping smoke canisters that erupted in a dense, boiling gray-white fog around the embassy perimeter. There might be snipers nearby packing firepower heavy enough to bring down a Peregrine, and the smoke would hamper them when they tried to find a target. It would also screw up the enemy’s laser range finders. There was already a hell of a lot of smoke in the area; it looked like the front of the Residence might be on fire.

Two of the Peregrines, moving according to plan, were making for the helipad, where they would start taking off the embassy’s civilian staff. While a third circled the compound providing gunship support, the one carrying Fuentes’s platoon would deposit them in the compound between the Residence and the front gate. They would hold the embassy until all of the civilians were away, then hightail it back for their transports and haul-tail for the Gulf of Campeche.

“Snakebite, Basket. Be advised that we have hostile MBTs and AFVs in the AO.” A side window opened on the display, showing a freeze-frame image from a military satellite, looking down onto the embassy compound. Several vehicles were highlighted by winking red dots.

“Roger that.” Tanks and troop carriers. Things were a bit more complicated than they’d expected. Just frigging great!

But then, she thought, main battle tanks were why God had invented Marine air close-ground support.

United States Embassy

Mexico City, República de

México

1521 hours local time

Bledsoe looked up as jet engines howled low out of the sky. The sheer relief, the release when he saw two Valkyrie AV-32 hoverjets sweeping low across the rooftops, sunlight glinting from their canopies, was enough to leave him weak and shaking. “Yeah!” he screamed at the sky. “Go! Go!”

The turrets of the Bradleys were pivoting to meet this new threat, but they were having trouble connecting with the targets. Vals were hard to see, even in broad daylight. Their active-camo hull coatings mimicked the surrounding colors of the sky almost as well as they absorbed radar, and with no vertical stabilizers on the flat upper surface, there was very little to catch the eye. When they dropped down low and started a head-on pass, they all but vanished, even if you knew exactly where to look.

The attack had at least distracted the Mexican troops for a few, precious moments. Bledsoe snatched at the chance, rising from his hiding place, sprinting across the scattering of sandbags, and throwing himself down across Larabee’s still form.

Larabee was still alive and breathing, though he had a nasty gash down the side of his head, and blood was pumping from a neat, round hole in his thigh, just above his left knee. Bledsoe grabbed an Ml first-aid kit and fumbled it open, extracting a sterile gauze pad and stuffing it onto the wound, trying to stop the bleeding.

Then the Bradley AFVs opened fire with their rotary cannons, hosing the sky with streams of red tracers, trying to drag down the oncoming Vals. Bledsoe never even saw the Valkyries return fire; the armored fighting vehicles simply began exploding in a quick one-two-three succession, flame and jagged black chunks of metal whirling into the air. Another blast rocked the Mexican tank. The concussions were deafening; Bledsoe covered Larabee with his own body, sheltering him as the explosions thundered and the Marine Valkyries streaked overhead.

He looked up, blinking into swirling smoke. Two more Vals were circling in the distance, as a quartet of TR-5 Peregrines angled in toward the Residence.

Time to get the hell out of Dodge. Rolling off his buddy, he gathered the unconscious Larabee into a fireman’s carry and started crawling back toward the embassy’s shattered front porch.

Rattlesnake Flight

TR-5 Peregrine transport/gunship

Mexico City, República de

México

1521 hours local time

In a swirling blast of deflected exhaust, two of the Peregrine gunships brought their noses up, tilt-jets howling as they swung to the upright, hover position, the aircraft barely moving as they drifted above the city streets in front of the embassy. A shoulder-launched rocket streaked skyward from the roof of the Sheraton; the aircraft’s active antimissile defense system, reacting with a computer’s superhuman speed, replied before the missile had traveled half the distance to the target, snapping back with a burst of radar-guided rotary cannon fire that detonated the SAM in an orange-black blossom of flame and smoke. The gunship’s main battery cut loose then, its Zeus high-speed cannon buzz-sawing into the roof of the structure with a cyclic rate of six thousand rounds per minute. Under that firestorm of depleted uranium penetrators mingled with 6.2mm high-explosive rounds and green tracers in a 7:2:1 ratio, the roof of the hotel literally disintegrated in a black cloud of whirling chips and fragments. Windows exploded, walls buckled, and much of the upper two stories of the structure crumbled into an avalanche of shattered masonry, glass, and stucco. The line of green tracers, so thick and solid-seeming it appeared to be a bright streak of dazzling green light, played briefly across the target zone, then winked out.

The tilt-jet Peregrines pivoted slowly, like hovering, airborne dragons searching for prey. Most of the mob had dispersed by now, though a number of bodies sprawled motionless in the streets or crawled slowly for imagined places of safety. Three AFVs and a heavy tank were burning in front of the embassy. A second aging M1A2 grumbled from a side street, seeking shelter from the air attacks, perhaps, but the green bolt of solid-looking flame flared once more, touching the Abrams’s turret at the engine cover. The fireball as the fuel tanks detonated roiled into the crystalline blue mountain air above the city like a black death’s-head.

The Peregrines continued to take small-arms fire from the surrounding buildings. It looked as though most of the buildings had, in fact, been occupied by Mexican troops, though the Peregrine gunners were under orders not to initiate a slaughter of Mexico City’s general population. They responded to the most serious threats, blocking incoming missiles and sending bursts of high-velocity cannon fire back at the shooters.

Enemy fire slacked off noticeably as the Mexican troops decided to stop calling attention to themselves.

Rattlesnake One

Mexico City, República de

México

1521 hours local time

Aboard the Peregrine, a red light winked on overhead. “On target,” the pilot’s voice said in Fuentes’s headset. “Opening up!” With a growling whine, the Peregrine’s aft ramp cracked open, then lowered, admitting a blaze of blue-white light from the outside.

There wasn’t room to land a Peregrine on the Residence’s front lawn. Instead, as the rear door eased open, the aircraft’s crew tossed four nylon ropes out the back; almost immediately, the first four armored Marines were fast-roping down the lines, hitting the ground hard and moving fast, clearing the area before the next man down the line hit the same spot. Fuentes followed Private Peterson, stepping off the ramp and sliding down the rope with practiced ease. The ride down was dizzying, with the Peregrine hanging like a vast, black whale just above their heads, the tilt-jets shrieking to left and right like demented banshees.

Fuentes landed with pile-driver force, nearly sinking to her knees, but then she was diving ahead, getting clear before Gunny Walsh landed on her shoulders. She didn’t remember slapping the release on her M-29, but her rifle was in her gloved hands and the liquid-crystal readout on the stock showed a full load of one hundred rounds, ready to rock and roll. She didn’t see any immediate targets; a Mex tank was burning cheerfully in a smashed-out gap in the compound wall to her right; the smoking, flame-blackened shells of a trio of Bradley AFVs were scattered along the embassy’s front drive farther on.

Near the front door of the embassy, she saw one Marine crawling with another man slung across his back. “Bellamy! Kelly! Sanderson!” she snapped off. “Deploy right! Hold the wall! Gunny! Take the others! Form a perimeter covering the main drive and the front of the building!” Fuentes double-timed it across the lawn, reaching down to help the Marine with his wounded buddy. Both men were hurt, one unconscious with head and leg wounds, the other with blood smearing his face and the dazed look of someone caught too near an exploding round.

Another Marine appeared beside her, tall, lean-faced, with a captain’s bars in dull black metal showing on his fatigue collar. WARHURST, T. was stenciled on his black combat vest. He helped her lift the wounded men and drag them toward the Residence. “Good to see you, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Sir, Lieutenant Fuentes reporting,” she told him. “First Platoon, Alfa Company. What’s your situation?”

“We’re okay now,” he said, as more embassy Marines spilled out of the building and took charge of the two wounded Marines. He turned then to face her. “Now that you and some Marine air are here. They came over the wall three or four minutes ago…civilians, at first, or at least men in civilian clothing.”

“A setup, you think?”

Warhurst nodded. “Definitely.” He held up his hand as though spreading out a newspaper headline. “‘US Marines Slaughter Helpless Civilians at Demonstration outside Embassy.’ It’ll look great on Triple-N. Especially in Geneva.”

She gestured toward a burned-out Bradley with her ATAR. “Civilians don’t usually attack embassies with tanks or AFVs.”

“Mmm, no…but they’ll say they sent in the army to restore order. I doubt that anyone will question why the army just happened to have an armored division parked across the street when the trouble started.”

Fuentes felt herself go ice-cold inside. She’d been responding to a provocation, following orders, even fighting the first battle of a war…but she’d not thought her actions could have possibly been construed as starting that war.

Gunfire continued to pop and crackle in the distance, but the area around the embassy was eerily calm at the moment. God knows what they’re shooting at, she thought. Or why. Alien cultists, possibly, exchanging pleasantries with anti-alien religious fanatics. The whole world had been coming unglued lately. Maybe all that had been needed to smash it apart was this one, last, tiny nudge.

A roar from the roof of the embassy signaled the first of the TR-5 transports lifting clear, hovering a moment, then dipping its nose and banking toward the east. An AV-32 followed, flying shotgun.

Warhurst touched the radio plug in his right ear, listening. “Okay,” he said. “Roger that.” He looked at Fuentes. “The ambassador and his family are away. Most of the civilians, too, and our wounded. Now we just have to get ourselves the hell out of here.”

The evacuation proceeded smoothly, with a choreographed precision that seemed to have been carefully rehearsed. The remaining civilians, the embassy’s CIA staff, and the rest of the embassy Marines made it off in the second TR-5. Warhurst helped get them all on the tilt-jet before it lifted off and followed the first toward the east and safety, but he remained behind on the roof to see to the evacuation of the First Platoon Marines.

At Fuentes’s signal, the last of her Marines outside the Residence fell back from the walls, filing inside the shattered building and making their way up the steps. Fuentes found Warhurst standing on the embassy roof. “Come on, sir!” she yelled. “Last plane out of this burg!”

Something had caught his attention on the grounds below, and he unslung his M-29. “Get the rest of your people on board,” he said. “We have company.”

She joined him at the parapet, staring down into the front of the compound. Under cover of the dense smoke, more vehicles had moved close to the embassy walls, and dark-uniformed troops were scrambling out and spilling into the embassy grounds through a dozen different breaches.

“Now I know how Davy Crockett felt at the Alamo,” he told her.

“Let’s get out of here, sir!”

“You go. I’ll—”

“Come on, Captain! Now!”

He nodded. “Okay! Go! Go!”

First Platoon’s Peregrine was loading on the embassy roof now, with Sergeant Walsh hurrying the last few men across the helipad pavement to the waiting tilt-jet. Together, Fuentes and Warhurst sprinted for the aircraft. The engine whine was spooling up, the air above the pavement dancing and shimmering in the jetwash.

Fuentes had reached the TR-5, pounding up the lowered rear ramp before she realized that she was alone. “Where is he?”

Walsh looked about, then pointed. Twenty meters across the helipad, a small shed rose from the embassy roof, a shelter for the stairwell leading down into the building. Warhurst had positioned himself next to the open door and was leaning over the stairwell, firing his M-29 down the steps at unseen attackers.

Fuentes saw what must have happened. While the last of the Marines had been loading onto the transport, Mexican troops had raced into the embassy and come swarming up the stairs. Warhurst had known they were there already, or guessed it. He stood now on the landing, exchanging fire with the Mexican troops, keeping them from emerging onto the helipad.

“Captain!” Fuentes yelled. Her voice was lost in the roar of the engines. Biting off a curse, she touched her Motorola’s transmit switch, choosing the command channel. “Captain!” she yelled again. “Come on! We’ll cover you!”

“Roger that!”

Loosing a final long burst of gunfire down the stairwell, Warhurst turned and started running toward the Peregrine. He’d only come about three steps, however, when an explosion ripped the red metal door from the stairwell shed and knocked the Marine captain flat.

Fuentes started back down the ramp. Warhurst saw her and waved her back. “Get away!” She heard his voice over her transceiver. “Get the hell away!”

A machine gun opened fire from the roof of one of the neighboring buildings, striking sparks from the pavement between Fuentes and the downed Marine, smacking into the Peregrine with a chilling, metallic thunk-thunk-thunk. Instinctively, she dropped, searching for a target. The machine gun kept firing, aiming for the transport.

“We’re taking hits!” the Peregrine’s pilot called over her earpiece. “We’re taking hits! We’ve got to go!”

“Go! Go!” Warhurst shouted. “That’s a goddamn order!”

Mexican troops burst from the smoking stairwell shed, firing wildly. She saw Warhurst rolling over, saw him fire into the charge, saw him go under. Sergeant Walsh dragged her up the ramp as the pavement dropped away beneath her. The TR-5 was airborne, boosting itself into the sky as gunfire probed and chattered after it.

“You couldn’t have gotten to him,” Walsh told her.

“Damn them!” she yelled, battle lust and horror and frustration and rage all boiling from her in a nightmare of raw emotion. “Damn them!…”

One hundred feet above the embassy, the Peregrine’s pilot banked the aircraft slightly, giving the Zeus gunner a clear field of fire. For three or four seconds, a solid line of tracers, like straight, hard, green lightning, licked at the embassy roof, smashing into and through the structure in a cataclysm of detonating HE rounds and depleted uranium penetrators. Fuentes, still watching from the half-opened ramp of the aircraft, saw dozens of troops trapped in that deadly beam, transfixed, then torn apart and scattered by that searing whirlwind of death and utter destruction.

The embassy roof, what was left of it, collapsed in flame and boiling smoke.

We never leave our own behind….

But she had. Damn it, she had….

SIX

SATURDAY, 12 MAY

Earth-Mars Cycler Polyakov

1417 hours GMT

“All right, people!” Colonel Lloyd bellowed. “Listen up! We got us a major change of plans, here.”

Lloyd waited as the buzz of speculation and grumbling died away. Most of the MMEF’s Marines had been gathered in Polyakov’s storm cellar, in full Class-One armor, with weapons and HUD helmets. Those not mustered in were watching through the unwinking eye of the television camera mounted on the bulkhead.

“What kind of change, Colonel?” Sergeant Ken Jacob called out.

“Yeah,” Corporal John Donatelli added. “We gonna get to go kick ugly space-alien butt or not?”

The others chuckled, and several gave one another gloved high-fives.

“No, but I’m gonna kick some ugly Marine butt if you assholes don’t simmer down.”

James Andrew Lloyd knew he had a reputation for being hard on the men and women under his command. In fact, he gloried in that rep, cultivating the image of a hard-as-nails badass the way other men cultivated wealth or success. It had been that way for as long as he could remember. The United States, nearly a century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, guaranteed equality for all…but there was still that unspoken assumption, strongest in the black, middle-class families like the one James—never “Jim”—had grown up in, that blacks and women had to work extra hard, had to go that extra kilometer, just to prove that they really had what it took.

James Lloyd had been taking that extra kilometer for a long time, now. Hard work and a no-nonsense attitude had led to his graduation cum laude from the University of Michigan, followed by both OCS and Marine Aviation Flight School. He’d flown a Harrier IV in Cuba in ’24, led a platoon by airdrop into Colombia in ’27, and seen combat since in Panama, Greece, and Andhra Pradesh.

While the fact that he was black had helped define his career, he rarely thought about it now. The Marine DI who’d run his OCS class had been black; an oft-quoted motivational expression of his was an old Corps theme: “There are no black Marines. There are no white Marines. There are only amphibious green Marines…and right now I want to see nothing but amphibious green blurs!…”

Colonel Lloyd thought of himself as amphibious green.

“Our original mission profile,” he told them as the noise died away, “called for off-loading to a Mars Shuttle-Lander, followed by a descent to the primary base at Candor Chasma. Those of you who’ve read your mission profiles—maybe I should say those of you who can read—know that Candor Chasma is on the Martian equator…about five thousand kilometers from Cydonia, which is where we’re ultimately supposed to be deployed.

“A new set of orders has come through from Earth, however. The MSL pilot has been ordered to take us directly to Cydonia. The bulk of our supplies and matériel will be sent to Candor Base, as originally planned. We will take with us what we can ferry along in the one MSL.”

“Aw, shit, Colonel!”

Lloyd turned a hard gaze on the Marine who’d spoken. “You have a problem with that, Corporal Slidell?”

“Sorry, sir…but damn it, what about all our supplies and shit?”

“There is no effective difference in the new deployment,” Lloyd said patiently, “at least insofar as our equipment is concerned. We would have had to off-load our gear at Candor, then repack what we needed to carry along aboard another MSL and redeploy by suborbital hop to Cydonia. As we needed spares or whatever, they would have been sent to us on the regular supply runs. We’re just cutting out one extra hop for us.” He studied Slidell’s stricken face, wondering what was going through the man’s head. “Be happy, Slider. The lot of you would’ve spent a day or two unloading shipping containers at Candor. Instead, you all get to sit on your fat, happy asses, guarding sand dunes at Cydonia.”

“Yeah, but it ain’t fair, jerkin’ us around like that,” Slidell said.

“Easy, man,” Lance Corporal Ben Fulbert told Slidell. “Ice down.”

“The Corps never promised you fair, Slider.” Lloyd decided that he would have to keep an eye on the man. He seemed just a little too upset by the change in plans.

“Why the change, Colonel?” Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky wanted to know. “I thought everything had to channel through Mars Prime.”

“When they tell me, Ostrowsky, I’ll tell you. In the meantime, we follow orders.” He hesitated before adding, “Let’s just say that HQ is concerned about the friendliness of our reception. So we go in sharp, and we go in with Class-Ones. Questions?”

There were plenty of questions—there had to be with this crowd—but no one spoke up. Hell, he had questions, and none of them could be answered yet.

The change had come through only a few hours before, coded, and marked Secret and Eyes Only. INTEL BELIEVES UNFMC TROOPS SHIFTED TO MARS PRIME REGION LAST 72 HOURS, the report had stated. The United Nations Force, Mars Contingent, numbered fifty men, almost twice the number in Lloyd’s Marine platoon. If they’d shifted south from Cydonia to the Mars Prime base at Candor Chasma, it could be because they planned to confront the Marines when they landed.

Or possibly not. Bergerac, the UNF’s new CO, was aboard the Polyakov. Maybe they were just getting ready to throw him a welcome-to-Mars party.

But Lloyd firmly believed that a little healthy paranoia was good for a man…and especially for Marines who planned to die in bed. That was why he’d ordered the platoon to assemble here in full armor, complete with weapons, HUD helmets, and full field gear. It made the storm cellar a bit crowded, and the deorbit was gonna be hell, but at least they would be ready, no matter what was waiting for them on the ground.

“Okay, people,” he said at last. “We got thirty mikes before the shuttle docks. Time for weapons drill.” He looked at his wrist-top, which had been attached to the outer sleeve of his gauntlet. “Ready…begin!”

Half an hour later, on schedule as dictated by the dead hand of Sir Isaac Newton, the first of a small fleet of approaching Mars Shuttle-Landers docked with Polyakov’s nonrotating hub. Though there were no windows in the storm cellar, there was a small television monitor with a feed from the control deck, and Lloyd was able to open a channel from one of Polyakov’s docking-bay approach cameras.

Harper’s Bizarre—painted in grit-scoured red letters on the stubby craft’s bare-metal prow—was the unofficial name of the first of the MSLs that slowly eased in to a capture and hard dock. The upper half of the forty-meter craft was a biconic hull, an off-center cone designed for atmospheric reentries, while the lower half consisted of two, stacked doughnut-clusters of spherical methane tanks and the close-folded complexity of a trio of spidery landing legs. The Bizarre, like the other MSLs on Mars, was a nuke, using a Westinghouse-Lockheed NTR, a Nuclear Thermal Rocket similar to the old Nerva designs, to heat the tanked reaction mass. The propellant of choice was methane, a liquid produced in quantity on Mars from atmospheric CO₂ and permafrost-melted water; the concept was known as NIMF, an unlikely acronym standing for Nuclear rocket using Indigenous Martian Fuel.

Once the green light showed for docking lock one, pressures were equalized and the MSL opened to Polyakov’s interior. As befitted one of the burgeoning Martian colony’s workhorses, the Bizarre had a large and utilitarian cargo section, which for this trip had been fitted with a plug-in deck-chair module. Nothing fancy, but it had padding and straps enough to get human cargo from the cycler’s orbit to the Martian surface in, if not comfort, then at least relative safety.

Lloyd’s path through the docking collar and forward pressure lock brought him to a point where he passed beneath the feet of the MSL’s pilot. “Marine Mars Expeditionary Force,” he rasped out. “Request permission to come aboard.”

“Granted, Colonel,” the pilot called back. She was a slender redhead in a trim, lightweight pressure suit. “Find yourselves seats and get strapped in.”

The rest of the Marines were already clambering in after him, muttering curses or sharp imprecations as their clumsy Class-Ones scraped or bumped against equipment, bulkheads, or the armor of other Marines. Class-One armor was almost as bulky as a full-fledged space suit, and with good reason. It was self-contained, pressurized, and—with a full-charged life-support pack and rebreather assembly—could keep a man alive in hard vacuum almost indefinitely…or at least until his food ran out.

All of the MMEF’s armor had active chameleonic surfaces—coatings of a specially formulated plastic that “remembered” incident light and was able to adapt its color and texture within minutes to match the surroundings. The only parts of the suits that did not sport this constantly shifting surface were the helmet visors—normally dark to block ultraviolet radiation—and the traditionally camouflaged helmet covers. Those last were something of an old Marine tradition, a holdover from the second half of the twentieth century. Marine aviators, though they’d worn flight suits and standard helmets when they’d gone aloft in their old Harrier IIs or F/A-18s or, later, in their F/A-22s and AV-32s—always wore the US Marines’ standard tan, brown, and green fabric helmet cover…not for camouflage, but to show solidarity with their fellow Marines on the ground. It was a tradition that went back at least as far as Vietnam, and probably farther; Marines took extraordinary pride in the close relationship between Marines in the mud and the Marine aviators flying close support.

Lloyd found a convenient stanchion and hung on, floating in an out-of-the-way attitude as the rest of the Marines filed in. Overall, the evolution was an orderly one…but he noticed one bit of confusion toward the rear of the column.

Pushing off from his anchor point, he maneuvered to the scene of the problem. An unarmored civilian had infiltrated the column and had gotten tangled with the armored troops.

It was one of the archeologists, Dr. David Alexander.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Uh…I thought I would tag along on this shuttle,” Alexander replied. “I understand you’re going straight to Cydonia, instead of to Mars Prime.”

The only thing faster than light is the damned shipboard scuttlebutt, Lloyd thought. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” he replied. “This is liable to be a rough ride, with a hot reception at the end of it.”

“Well, Captain Elliott said there was room.”

“Captain Elliott?”

“Harper Elliott. Bizarre’s skipper. Turns out she used to be a Navy aviator. Served on the Reagan, same ship as my dad.”

“I see.” That put Lloyd in an uncomfortable position. He didn’t want to have civilians kicking around on his assault boat, especially if things turned nasty when they hit ground. On the other hand, it wasn’t his assault boat, not in the formal sense. Elliott was ship’s captain, and he didn’t want to end up second-guessing the Bizarre’s CO.

Alexander seemed to sense Lloyd’s dilemma and gave him a lopsided grin. “I’ll promise to be good.”

He sighed. “Very well, Dr. Alexander,” Lloyd told the man. There ought to be room enough. “Find yourself a seat. But…if things are hot when we touch down, you get the hell out of the way, understand?”

“You expect things to be, uh, ‘hot,’ as you put it?”

“I don’t expect anything, sir. But it’s best to be prepared.”

“Don’t worry,” Alexander said. “If anybody starts shooting, I’ll be sure to keep my head down.” The man spoke with a sardonic edge to his voice that told Lloyd he was being humored.

Colonel Lloyd did not like being humored, and he did not like the archaeologist’s attitude, at once bantering and condescending. He almost—almost—wished that something would happen when they landed, just to teach the arrogant civilian some manners.

Not, he realized, a professional response at all.

1556 GMT

Mars Shuttle-Lander Harper’s

Bizarre

Sol 5621: 1210 hours MMT

David Alexander had fought to get himself a window seat.

Not that there was terribly much to see through the narrow, thick-cut piece of grit-scoured transplas set in the circular port, but he felt he deserved a chance to see the Cydonian site from the air. The Marines, after all, didn’t need to see the area they’d be guarding. It was just another deployment to them.

And besides, he wanted to see the Face.

He chuckled to himself. If Hoist or that bureaucratic idiot Bahir at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities could just see him now….

For a time, all he’d seen through the tiny port was the slowly revolving arms of the cycler as Marines continued to load their gear aboard Harper’s Bizarre. Finally, though, with a short, hard shock, the MSL had cut free from the cycler, falling tail first away from the far larger spacecraft-station until Alexander, by pressing his face hard against the transplas and shielding it from the interior light with his hands, could see the cycler in its entirety. Two more MSLs were in the process of docking with the cycler as the Bizarre cleared the sweep of Polyakov’s arms. Then, with a gut-wrenching burst of acceleration, Bizarre spun to a new attitude that swept the other spacecraft from view.

Acceleration pressed him back against his thinly padded couch…building and building far beyond the meager three-tenths G he’d gotten used to over the past few weeks. He wasn’t sure how long they were under boost; he’d forgotten to check his wrist-top when the Bizarre’s nukes cut in. He only knew that the weight pressing down on his body, on his chest and lungs, was unendurable…and that it went on and on and on, forcing him to endure, whatever he thought about the matter.

Eventually, they were in free fall again, but by that time he felt too tired to note the time…or even to look out the window.

After a while, acceleration resumed, and the sky beyond his tiny porthole began to glow.

The point of cycler spacecraft like Polyakov was that they occupied solar orbits that touched Earth’s orbit on their inward swing and Mars’s orbit on their outer. With some judicious use of gravity wells during each planetary swing-by and occasional kicks from their ion-electric drives, they could arrange to meet the planetary orbits when the planets themselves were there. It was necessary, however, to ferry the personnel and equipment brought out from Earth down to the Martian surface…and that meant a hefty delta-v burn, followed by aerobraking in the Martian atmosphere. The ride down was long, rough, and excruciatingly uncomfortable.

Alexander spent much of reentry trying hard not to be sick.

“Hey, uh…sir?” the Marine seated next to him said after a long time. “You see anything out there?”

Vaguely, Alexander realized that the man talking to him was the Marine he’d shouldered aside earlier in order to get the spot by the window. The name FULBERT was stenciled in black on the gray-and-white mottling of his chest armor. “Not a lot,” he said.

Several more jolts slammed him in the back as Bizarre’s nuclear engines came up to full thrust. The shuttle was balancing down on its tail now. “Down” was aft, toward the rear of the ship, and Alexander was lying flat on his back with his knees braced above his chest.

“You’re the new head archeologist gonna see the Face, right?” Fulbert said.

Alexander shook his head. He’d not associated much with the Marines for the past months, understandably enough, and his official mission had not been widely advertised, but it was impossible to live that long inside a couple of large, sealed tin cans without everyone learning something about everyone else.

“I’m just going with some new sonic imaging gear,” he said, correcting the Marine. “Dr. Graves is head of the American team, and he’s already at Cydonia. Dr. Joubert is going as head of the UN team, though.”

Fulbert’s face split into a broad and knowing grin inside the confines of his open helmet. “Man, there’s a high-voltage outlet! I guess you two don’t let the international shit get in the way of your workin’ together, huh?”

Clearly, Fulbert was more interested in the salacious details of his relationship with Joubert than in the international situation. “She’s a good archeologist,” he replied, keeping his voice noncommittal. “She did some fine fieldwork in the Yucatán.”

“Ha! I wouldn’t mind doin’ some fieldwork with her. Is that where you met her? Down in Yucatán?”

Alexander shook his head. “My specialty is…my specialty was Egypt.” He found that the unfairness still hurt, even after three years. “In a way, I guess, we’re enemies.” He gave a wan smile. “Some folks with the UN don’t care much for me or my ideas.”

The Marine’s eyes widened. “Egypt? You mean like, the pyramids and the Sphinx and all that?”

“That’s right.”

“So…you think there’s some kind of connection? Between the Sphinx and the Face? Is that why you’re on the UN’s shit list?”

Alexander grimaced. The question always came up with the uninitiated. “The Sphinx at Giza and the Face at Cydonia have nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with one another.” He’d long since lost count of how many times he’d gone through this. “The Face, as near as we can tell, is something like five hundred thousand years old. That’s half a million years, okay? The Sphinx, I am convinced, is much, much older than the date traditionally assigned to it, but it is nowhere near that old. The idea that the same culture who made the Face also made the pyramids and the Sphinx is garbage…worse than trying to link the pyramids of Egypt with the pyramids of Mexico. Can’t be done.”

“Yeah? But I read that the UN was havin’ to call out troops to break up demonstrations…and lots of those demonstrations were over the idea of aliens colonizing the Earth thousands of years ago. Things like the Sphinx are supposed to be proof the aliens were here, but the UN government doesn’t like that.”

Alexander sighed. As was often the case, the layman’s view mingled a little fact with a great deal of fancy. “There were definitely aliens in the solar system half a million years ago,” he explained. “They left traces at Cydonia…though you might be surprised to hear that there are still quite a few scientists who argue that the Face and the so-called pyramids on Mars are natural features.”

“No shit?”

“Most of us think the Face, at least, was carved by someone…something, and the Fortress-Ship complex is obviously artificial, though after half a million years of dust storms and weathering, there’s not much left of it. But there is room for debate. That’s what science is all about, after all, testing hypotheses.”

“How come some scientists still think that Face-thing is natural? I’ve seen three-vids of that thing, and it gives me the crawlies.”

“Well, we still can’t find a decent reason for a sculpture of an essentially human face to be carved into a mesa on Mars at a time when Homo sapiens was just appearing on Earth. The aliens, whoever or whatever they were, were not human. I guess it’s easier to believe that the Face is a wind-carved freak of nature than it is to believe it could be a deliberately sculpted likeness of us.”

“Well, that’s what all the nutcase new religions and shit are all about, ain’t it? That the aliens tinkered with apes and turned ’em into people? Like in that old movie that everybody’s talkin’ about now, 2000.”

“2001: A Space Odyssey,” he said, correcting the Marine again. “And it wouldn’t have been apes, not unless you count humans as a kind of ape. Homo erectus was the dominant hominid line on Earth half a million years ago.”

“Sure, whatever. But, like I was sayin’, everybody on Earth, it seems like, either thinks the aliens were gods or thinks that we’re tryin’ to slip one over on ’em to take away their religion, or whatever, and the UN johnnies all seem dead sure that all the stuff about aliens visiting Earth back then is crap. Like it couldn’t possibly happen, y’know?”

Alexander smiled. “I know.” He’d been in the eye of that particular storm for a long time. In fact, he had his own opinions about some of the more improbable sites on Earth…not that aliens had built them, necessarily, but the possibility of alien inspiration and technical help was not unthinkable.

Still, it was dangerous territory to tread upon. The discoveries of the past few decades had transformed traditional science…but they’d also caused an explosion in the pseudosciences. The old “ancient astronaut” theories had come back with a vengeance, spawning volume upon volume of crackpot ramblings, pop-science gibberish, and even a horde of new religions.

Hoping to end the conversation, he deliberately checked his wrist-top, calling up the time. Before the MSL rendezvous, everyone’s personal computers had been updated to Mars time. The planet’s rotation was slightly longer than Earth’s and, therefore, could not be brought into synch with the GMT used aboard all spacecraft. A Martian day was called a sol; it was divided into traditional hours and minutes, as on Earth, but had an extra thirty-seven-minute catch-up period, called soltime, added after local midnight. The young Mars colony counted sols instead of days, beginning with the official establishment of the first permanently manned settlement—the base at Candor Chasma, now known as Mars Prime. Sol 1 was July 20, 2024, fifty-five years to the day after Armstrong had set foot on the moon. The current sol was 5621.

All of which meant that Mars Mean Time, or MMT, had nothing whatsoever in common with GMT. It was now, he saw, 1740 hours at Cydonia—late afternoon—and 2126 hours in Greenwich. Of course, for the next fifteen months or so, his only interest in what time…or day…it was on Earth would be when he had to calculate the arrival or departure time of another report.

“So,” Fulbert said, still clinging to the conversation thread, “you don’t think aliens did stuff on Earth? You know, the pyramids? Easter Island? All that shit?”

He decided not to mention his own reservations about the Giza pyramids, at least. “Easter Island? Certainly not! We know how the local population built and raised those great stone heads, because they showed us. No mystery there at all.”

Turning away in another attempt to end the conversation, he pressed his face against the tiny port. He could see sky above—still a dark, purplish color at the horizon turning to jet-black overhead. Below, the Martian surface spread out beneath a curved horizon, a dusty, dusky ocher color tinted with streaks of rust and gray-brown. They were still too high up for the smaller details of the surface to be visible, but he could see scattered, shadow-edged shapes that must be mountains or the jumble of chaotic terrain. He tried to orient himself. If it was late afternoon here, then north would be that way…but he didn’t know if they were even descending in an attitude that would let him see the Face or the attendant structures. It was frustratingly like trying to recognize buildings or landmarks from the air while approaching a city’s airport on Earth. For all he knew, the Cydonian ruins were on the other side of the—

He saw it.

My God! It’s just like they all said…but so…so unexpected….

It was smaller than he’d thought it would be, which was why he’d overlooked it at first. Bizarre must still be twenty or thirty kilometers up. He looked down on the Cydonian Face, and it returned his wondering stare with the same enigmatic and Sphinx-like skyward gaze it had worn for half a million years.

First captured by chance on two frames shot by the Viking 1 orbiter spacecraft in 1976, the Face hadn’t even been noticed until the early 1980s…and then the image had been dismissed as a trick of the light and of the remarkable persistence of the human mind in imposing order and facial features on random shapes, be they ink-blots on a paper, or a mile-long landform in the desert. By the turn of the century, space probes had returned better images, and NASA had—with some reluctance—acknowledged at last that there might be something there worth investigating after all. That revelation, that intelligence had carved a mile-long face into a mesa in the Cydonian region of Mars, was the last in a rapid-fire barrage of discoveries that had completed at last the long-fought Copernican Revolution. Since the 1990s, it had been known that planet-bearing stars were common, and evidence of fossilized bacteria had been discovered on a meteorite gouged from the Martian surface eons before.

Humankind was not alone in the universe.

Those discoveries had spurred a long-awaited renaissance in space exploration. The first manned landing on Mars, a joint US-Russian venture, had taken place in 2019 at Candor Chasma; it wasn’t until the second landing five years later that Geoffrey Cox, Anatol Kryukov, and Roberta Anders had stood at last in the shadow of that alien-carved enigma and wondered….

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