by Ian Douglas
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, hand
ing 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.”
