“In five more days, ladies and gentlemen, the Marine Corps will have its birthday, celebrating eleven hundred and three years of service, first to the United States of America, then to the Commonwealth of Terra. Eleven hundred years.
“It’s true, you know, that the Marines have their own culture. I admit that. In fact, I’m damned proud of that. We call a floor a deck, a door a hatch, a hat a cover, our living spaces quarters, a bed a rack. We have our own brand of humor, jokes only Marines can appreciate or even understand. Marines have had their own culture ever since they lived crowded together on the stinking lower decks of wind-driven wet-navy sailing ships, ever since seven of them led an army of revolutionaries across the Sahara Desert to Derna, ever since they charged time after time after bloody time the German machine-gun nests in Belleau Wood. It’s a part of being a member of this fraternity, this brotherhood of heroes.
“Is that such a bad thing? We still have God knows how many distinct cultures on Earth, and we call it diversity and say it’s an important part of being human. And the people living in Earth Ring have their own distinct way of looking at things … as do people in Mars Ring, or in Luna, or out in the Belts or the Jovians or Chiron or Ishtar or anywhere else where humans have gone and made homes for themselves. We Marines are no different. We’ve made a home for ourselves within the family we call the Corps. If we’re proud of that, it’s no worse than being proud of being American, or Japanese, or Lunan.
“How does having a unique culture make us a threat?
“Yes, we have our ‘pretty uniforms,’ as Madam Devereaux said, where each part carries its own tradition, each color its own meaning. Black for space, blue for the ancient oceans of Earth. And red. Let’s not forget the red in that thin red stripe down the trouser legs of our full-dress uniforms. Red for the blood of Marines shed at places like Chapultepec and Belleau Wood, Suribachi and the Chosin Reservoir, Cydonia and Ishtar.
“Blood, I might add, shed for your ancestors, so that they, and you, might be free to hold these deliberations in this chamber today!”
Alexander was startled by a sudden burst of applause from the chamber. He hesitated, looking across the pit, wondering what it was that had inspired this display. He didn’t think of himself as a demagogue, and certainly not as a politician or a speechmaker. He’d been speaking from the heart, from a very angry heart, not so much trying to sway the audience as to simply get them to hear, to understand.
He took a deep breath, calming himself. He did have their attention now, so if he was going to make his point, now was the time to do it.
“You have a choice before you, Senators. You can do nothing, and wait for the Xul to arrive … and they will arrive, I promise you that. Sooner or later, they will be here, just as they were here in 2314, but this time it will be an armada flinging rocks or worse at Mars, not a solitary, arrogant, and cocksure huntership.
“And if that happens, I promise you that the Marines will stand and fight. We will fight, as we have always fought in desperate actions, and we will die protecting you, and your children, and our children, and our worlds. We will stand and we will fight and we will die … because there will be no place else to which we can withdraw if the enemy comes to us with his full, vast, and overwhelmingly advanced technological might.
“Do you understand that? We will die. Earth will die. And on every one of 512 planets scattered across eight hundred light-years, Humanity will die! We know something similar happened half a million years ago, with the destruction of the Builders. It happened to the An. It will happen to us.
“Or … you can adopt the proposal I have placed before you, a plan drawn up by my staff on Skybase and incorporating the best intelligence on Xul basing and deployments that we have. We can go on the offensive, take the war to them in a dozen different star systems. We can hit them and keep hitting them and never be there when they muster a retaliatory force, and we can hurt them enough that they will send their full strength after us, rather than to Sol and Earth. We will lead them deeper and deeper into the sea of stars that is our Galaxy, far away from Earth, and we will continue to fight them while you, here, decide how best to preserve that ‘precious way of life’ invoked by Madam Devereaux.
“That, Senators, is the choice I give you. Stand and fight and die here … within Earth’s own solar system. Or send the Marines, dangerous and extremist as we are, to fight this war out there, in their backyard, not ours.
“And because we are loyal to the Commonwealth and to the rule of civilian law, we will wait and do what you command.
“I only ask that you make up your minds swiftly … because we, all of Humankind, do not have much time left.”
Again, thunderous applause filled the chamber. As Alexander took his seat, he turned his gaze on Devereaux, in her box on the far side of the pit. His link with the local Net allowed him to zoom in on her face from almost 80 meters away. She was watching him, he saw, with a cold look of absolute contempt.
“I don’t think she likes you, General,” Cara whispered in his thoughts.
“No, I don’t think she does.” He shrugged. “Does make me wonder, though.”
“Wonder what, General?”
“Why it always seems that our most vicious enemies aren’t the aliens who want to wipe us off the face of the universe … but our own friends and neighbors.”
“Truthfully, General, I’ve never understood that about humans. If you don’t have enemies, you seem peculiarly adept at creating them. If you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Mind? No. Why would I mind the truth?” He checked his internal time sense. “Looks like they’re going to be debating for a long time to come, Cara. I need food.”
He electronically logged out, then stepped through the doorway at the back of his visitor’s box. He could already tell that it was going to be a long afternoon, one that would probably extend well into the evening.
And the die was cast, as another general had commented three thousand years earlier.
There was nothing else he could do to influence events, however much he might wish it.
1011.1102
USMC Recruit Training Center Command
Ares Ring, Mars
1020 hrs GMT
Like Earth, Mars possessed a ring.
Like its counterpart encircling the Motherworld of Humankind, the Ares Ring was not solid, but was composed of some tens of thousands of separate orbital facilities, colony habs, nanufactories and power stations, dockyards and spaceports, research stations and living quarters. Each structure pursued its own orbit about the planet, though many were magnetically locked with the neighbors, creating the illusion of a solid structure. They were positioned at about 20,000 kilometers above the planet’s surface, locking them in to an arestationary orbit—the equivalent of geostationary for Earth. From this height, Mars appeared some eleven times larger than did the full moon from Earth, and four times brighter.
Unlike Earth, Mars possessed only a single ground to synchronous-orbit elevator, the Pavonis Mons Tower. Pavonis Mons, the middle of the striking set of three volcanoes in a row southeast of the vast swelling of Mons Olympus, reached seven miles into the sky and by chance exactly straddled the Martian equator—the perfect ground-end anchor