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“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.”
