by Ian Douglas
All of her security clearances had been handled the week before. An Army lieutenant met her at the maglev station in the basement of the “five-sided squirrel cage,” as her father liked to call the place, and escorted her to the office of the commandant. A Marine major received them in Warhurst’s outer office.
“Kaitlin Garroway for the commandant,” the lieutenant said, saluting.
“Very good, Lieutenant,” the major replied—not saluting because Marines did not salute uncovered indoors. “Good afternoon, Ms. Garroway. Please be seated for a moment. The commandant is anxious to see you.”
She ignored the hard seats he indicated and remained standing, while he touched a PAD screen on his desk. In less than twenty seconds, a door opened and General Warhurst strode out. Automatically, she stood at attention, sternly suppressing an urge to salute this man who commanded respect not because of what he did, but just because of who he was.
“Kaitlin,” he said warmly, grasping her hand. “I’m glad you managed to slip past those bastards downstairs this time.”
He was referring to the Intel people who’d grilled her last week. His irreverence drew a reluctant grin from her. “It hasn’t been too bad, sir,” she admitted.
“Good, good.” He led her into his office before saying any more. “Well, the worst of it should be over now,” he said as he waved her toward one of two comfortable-looking chairs in front of his desk. “I just heard from Brentlow. Intel’s finally decided that you’re not a spy for the Japanese after all.”
She took a deep breath and expelled it forcibly. “I was wondering, sir. Some of them were getting, well, pretty intense.”
“Hmm.” He sounded distracted.
“Is something the matter, sir?”
“Well, it’s not good. You know about the ISS, of course.”
She nodded. Even if she hadn’t been a newshound, she couldn’t have avoided learning about the UN’s takeover of the ISS. Jeff had been talking about little else since Saturday, that and what was happening on Mars.
“In a way, the UN action was good,” he said. “It verified that what your dad told us was true, which might get some of the fence-sitters around here off their asses and off to work. Anyway, at 0225 hours this morning, our time, there was a launch from Guiana Space Center. Thirty-one minutes later, there was a SCRAMjet launch from San Marco Equatorial. Both of them rendezvoused with the ISS a few hours later.”
“Two SCRAMjets? What…oh!” Her eyes widened. “They’re getting ready to meet the next incoming cycler!”
“No.” He shook his head. “We thought so too, at first. But now we believe that the first launch was a Mars Direct.”
Kaitlin knew a little about Mars Direct flights. The first three manned Mars missions had used the technique, in the years before the first cycler had been deployed.
“We’re fairly certain that the new ship is a modified Faucon 1B, with a Proton booster second stage. It appears to be refueling at the ISS now. When fueling is complete, it will be able to launch for Mars on a trajectory that will get it there in about five months.”
“And the SCRAMjet was carrying more troops?”
He nodded. “Almost certainly. Intelligence guesses another thirty UN troops, probably Foreign Legion from the Second Demibrigade. The same unit that already has a detachment on Mars.”
“Shit!” She looked up, then blushed at her unguarded expletive. “Ah…excuse me, sir.”
“S’all right. I feel the same way. And, of course, with the ISS in UN hands, even if your dad’s people win through on Mars, we’re not going to be able to bring them back.”
The realization struck Kaitlin like a punch to the stomach. She’d forgotten. All outbound interplanetary insertions used the fuel stored at the ISS spaceport to top off tanks drained dry by their struggle up the side of the planet’s fearsome gravity well. That must have been the reason the UN had captured the space station in the first place…so that they could be sure of launching their Faucon. For the same reason, the ISS maintained the fleet of tugs and high-delta-v transports that could rendezvous with incoming cyclers and transfer their passengers to a shuttle bound for Earth.
If the ISS was controlled by the UN, any cycler returning from Mars would depend on the UN’s good graces to rendezvous with them and effect the transfer to Earth orbit.
A cold anger blazed in Kaitlin. “So we’re just…abandoning them? Sir?”
The hint of a smile touched the corners of Warhurst’s mouth. “Allow me to rephrase that. As long as the UN forces retain control of the ISS, we won’t be able to bring our boys home from Mars.”
“Ah.” She wondered what unit would have the honor of recapturing the station. It was almost enough to make her want to be a Marine herself. She sat up a little straighter in her chair.
Warhurst appeared to be thinking something over. His brow was furrowed, and there was a hard set to his mouth. “We have a Marine unit going into training tomorrow at Vandenberg, for a possible strike against the ISS.” He gave her a sharp look. “That is classified, you know. In fact, I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Uh…sure.” She was confused. So why had he told her? She knew that Warhurst had an iron control when it came to revealing or concealing anything. His self-control in regard to his dead son was proof enough of that. She could not believe that it had just been a slip….
“In any case,” he continued, as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, “I’m afraid that there’s not a damned thing we can do to help your dad on Mars. Especially with the space station in UN hands. But there may be something we can do here. To make sure he can get back. And, possibly even more important, to make sure he knows the score.”
“Have you been able to establish contact with him yet?” Kaitlin asked. She’d been requested—ordered might have been the better word—not to use her backdoor communications route until the political situation was clearer. She didn’t like it; her question was a polite way of reminding Warhurst that she wanted to talk to her father…while at the same time she wanted to be careful not to get in the Pentagon’s way.
He shook his head. “No. And that brings me, going around Robin Hood’s barn, to what I really wanted to see you about. You told me that your father was assuming that regular e-mail would not be a secure method of reaching him, and I’m inclined to agree with his assumption. The bad guys would be stupid not to safeguard those channels. But you also told me that the two of you had an alternate means of communication to fall back on.”
“Yes, through a newsgroup that we both like a lot. I can post a message there, and Dad could just search for messages from me. They can’t shut down Usenet, and they wouldn’t be able to check all the postings.”
“From your study at CMU, Kaitlin, I assume you would know about these things. Is there any way they could search for your user name in the Usenet postings?”
She grinned. “Even if they knew which of something like eighty thousand newsgroups to search, they wouldn’t find me. I’d use my global-dot-net account, not my CMU one. That user ID is ‘chicako,’ not ‘garroway.’”
Warhurst didn’t look as pleased to hear that there was a secure way to communicate with the Marines on Mars as she’d expected. Instead he frowned, tapping his fingers rhythmically on a lone sheet of paper on the top of his desk. “I would like to be able to use that channel, Kaitlin. I would like to tell your father that we’re pulling for him, even if we can’t do anything substantial right now. I even have the letter written.” He stopped his drumming and laid his index finger on the paper. “Right here.”
“No problem, sir. I can—”
“I’m afraid there is a problem. I’ve been forbidden to communicate with your father.”
That statement hit Kaitlin even harder than the earlier one about the ISS, but she remained calm. By now she knew that Warhurst said nothing without a purpose…and that sometimes he intended to convey something different from the literal meaning of his words. “May I ask why, sir?”
The general sighed. “The feeling is that the president may need negotiating room. How the hell we’re supposed to negotiate with the bastards, I don’t know, but that’s the idea. And the upshot of it is I can’t use that channel of yours to communicate with your father. Even though I’ve got the message all written, ready and waiting to go.”
He stood up and started to walk around his desk. “Well, I guess that’s it then. So. How about lunch?” Without waiting for an answer, he added, “I’ll tell Major Garth to make reservations for us at the Szechuan Garden.” And with that he walked out of the office, closing the door behind him.
Kaitlin grinned. He didn’t need to talk to the major in person to tell him to comm a restaurant. He just wanted to leave the room for a minute. To leave her alone…with the letter.
As she reached over to the desk and picked up the letter, she felt a peculiar twinge, as though she were cheating on an exam back in grade school. She almost laughed out loud.
This time the teacher was ordering her to cheat…because the Marines take care of their own.
SEVENTEEN
WEDNESDAY, 6 JUNE: 2026 HOURS GMT
Tithonium Chasma
Sol 5646: 0155 hours MMT
Mark Garroway watched his daughter’s face on the Mars cat’s computer display with a sense of homesickness and longing sharper than anything he’d felt in his life. In that moment, he felt every one of the hundred million-plus miles between himself and his daughter and wondered if he would ever see her again.
He hated Mars. He hated the Marines.
No…not that. He couldn’t hate the Corps, not really, even though the Corps was what had separated him from Kaitlin.
Outside the cat was the blackness of the Martian night, with a dazzle of stars directly overhead but cut off on all sides by the sheer cliffs rising above the crawler. A thin, hard wind was blowing down the chasm; the outside temperature was down to ninety-five below and dropping. His watch outside was coming up in another hour, and he could barely stand the thought of having to go stomp around in the bitterly frigid sands again, constantly moving to avoid freezing to death.
Ten sols had passed since they’d left Heinlein Station…and it felt as though their journey had scarcely begun. The terrain they’d been following through the narrow chasm was impossibly rugged, a tortured badlands of sand pits and boulders, an endless succession of craters drilled rim to rim into the crumbling regolith. Scouting teams now walked ahead of the crawler searching for safe paths; as often as not, Marines on foot ended up carrying the sled, hauling it by brute force up and down the crater rims. More than once they’d had to use the cat’s winch and tow cable to drag the whole vehicle up a slippery, yielding slope that the sturdy machine could not otherwise have traversed.
This rift in the planet’s surface, Garroway kept reminding himself, was one of the little ones, and yet Arizona’s Grand Canyon could have comfortably fit inside. Its only advantage was that it lay on a nearly straight line with the Candor Chasma base, as straight as one of the mythical canals of pre-Viking, pre-Mariner Mars.
He shook away thoughts of the bleak, cold night surrounding the Mars cat and tried to concentrate on his daughter’s face. He’d been using the cat’s electronics to tap into Mars Prime’s Spacenet server every few Phobos orbits, looking in on the Usenet postings that were regularly mirrored from Earth.
Usenet had grown enormously since its beginnings in the old Internet of the late twentieth century. Some newsgroups were still little more than written postings on static electronic bulletin boards, but most had benefited from new communications hardware and protocols and expanded to allow vidpostings, downloaded segments where you could actually see the person who was talking, along with maps, graphics, vidclips, or whatever else might help the presentation. He and Kaitlin both were partial to rec.humanities.culture.japan, a newsgroup for Japanophiles from all over the world. That was why he’d suggested that newsgroup as a posting place for any return messages in reply to his first message to Earth.
If the Pentagon wanted to reply, he couldn’t expect them to drop an e-mail in his box in Candor’s server. If the UN forces on Mars were serious about cutting off all communication between Mars and Earth, they would certainly cut off the e-mail conduit; at the very least, they would set a watch program over the mailboxes set to retrieve and delete any message from Earth for any of the Marines.
He doubted that they would cut off the Usenet postings, though. There would be no particular reason to do so; at the same time, they wouldn’t be able to watch every one of the newsgroups posted onto the Spacenet. And, so far, he’d seen no indication that they were even aware of the unauthorized waking of the Phobos com relay.
Kaitlin’s posting was there, as he’d hoped, as he’d almost feared, her image frozen with a familiar, wrinkle-browed expression that mingled worry with excitement. The date, time, and post lines at the bottom left of the screen indicated that the message had been uploaded about twenty-six hours ago.
He touched the hotspot on the console that brought life to the vidimage.
“Ah…okay. This is to the guy that said he’d meet me in Japan,” she said. She seemed a bit nervous, as though she was being extra careful of what she was saying.
“I hope you’re keeping up with the Cu-Ja postings, ’cause it looks like this is the only way I’ll get to talk to you. There are a lot of folks here who want to get together with you, only there’s, ah, no way they can see their way clear to do it right now. The situation is pretty confused, as you can imagine. There’s talk about the Japanese joining the UN against the United States, and, well, the last I saw, it looked like that was going to happen. I know personally that some military bases there are on full alert. Like the one at Tanegashima.”
Tanegashima? That’s Japan’s main launch center, on a tiny island fifty miles south of the southern tip of Kyushu. An alert there meant the Japanese may be preparing to do something with their Space Defense Force, and that was not good, not good at all.
“I’ve got a picture for you here. Translate it the usual way. And, well, until we can get together again, in Japan or, or wherever…you take care of yourself, okay?” There were tears glistening in her eyes. She said the final words so quickly he almost missed them. “I love you.”
Kaitlin’s face vanished, replaced by columns of numbers. Anyone casually glancing at the page would assume it was an encoded picture or illustration of some kind, one using a private algorithm to keep the content private. In a sense, that was exactly what it was. Those columns of three were almost certainly a Beale code sequence. Garroway checked to make sure the memory clip containing Shogun was plugged in on his wrist-top, then touched a key, feeding a copy through the Beale encoder/decoder program, and sending it back to the screen as text. It took only a few seconds for the whole message to appear.
Date: 5 June 2040
Mark:
Your daughter got your message through. Smart thinking. She’s a sharp kid and obviously has a lot in common with her dad.
I wish to hell I had better news. The official word is, no communication with you at all, just in case the president needs some maneuvering room with the UN. Though we still have some optimists in Washington, we are almost certainly going to be at war with the UN within a very few days. UN armies are reported massing in both Quebec and Mexico. We’re tracking a number of French, German, and Manchurian arsenal ships off our coasts.
Mark, I also have to tell you that three days ago—2 June—UN forces seized the International Space Station. Just this morning, a UN spacecraft lifted from Kourou. We think that it’s a Mars Direct flight and that it’s carrying at least thirty more UN troops. Could be you’ll be getting company in another five months. Whatever you do, you’ll have to do it before those reinforcements reach Mars.
In any case, don’t worry about Kaitlin. I’ve asked her to stay at my place in VA. She’ll be safe there, if anywhere.
What you do on Mars is, I’m afraid, up to you and what you
think you can get away with. At this point, anything you could do to put a wrench in the UN’s plans would be desirable. Future communications can be via the same method you used with Kaitlin. We need to know why the UN is so interested in Mars.
Consider this a personal weapons-free order. By the time you get to where you’re going, we very likely are going to be at war. Sorry to leave you on your own, but, then, anything more than one platoon of US Marines against the UN forces now on Mars simply wouldn’t be fair. Good luck! We’re all pulling for you.
Semper fi.
—Warhurst, Gen. USMC
Garroway blinked at the signature line. Warhurst? He’d sent his original message to Colonel Fox; he’d had no idea that it would get bumped clear up to the commandant of the Corps!
“Hey, Major?” Sergeant Ostrowsky called as she squeezed into the Marine-crowded lounge area of the cat. “You wanted me to let you know. Your watch outside.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” he said. Carefully, he made sure the decoded message was saved on his wrist-top, then began shutting down the com center.
Warhurst was right. The news wasn’t good…especially the bit about UN reinforcements. It was funny, though, that just hearing from someone back on Earth helped. He found he could face going out into the bitter cold and loneliness once again.
Or was that the result of getting to hear his daughter’s voice again? He wasn’t sure. It didn’t really matter.
He reached for his gloves and helmet and began the laborious process of sealing up his armor.
FRIDAY, 8 JUNE: 2230 HOURS GMT
Net News Network
1830 hours EDT
VOICE-OVER, WITH SPECIAL LOGO: This is a Net News Special Presentation…Collision Course, the UN Crisis. And now, from the Net News Center in Washington, DC, special reporter Carlotta Braun….
