“Soltime tomorrow,” she said. “That will give our people at Candor time to get ready.”
Bergerac nodded. “It will be good to have these American Marines out from underfoot,” he said.
TEN
Mars Expedition/Communications: Reliable communications are vital for the safety, efficiency and productivity of the mission, and Spacenet has been adapted to the purpose. Established in 2024 as an extension of the existing Internet, Spacenet provides both broad- and narrow-band data transmission, including graphical and video interfacing through the World Wide Web. Primary Earthside nodes include the AI systems at Kennedy and Vandenberg Spaceports, as well as the Marshal, Johnson, and Greenbelt Space Centers. Spaceside nodes include the AI systems of each of the manned space stations, with the primary node in the ISS, as well as the Fra Mauro Node on Luna. All Mars communications are currently relayed through a PV-10K communications satellite in areosynchronous orbit. A secondary relay is located in the old MSC-1 system on the inner Martian moon, Phobos—currently inoperative.
—Download from Networld Encyclopedia vrtp://earthnet.public.dataccess
SUNDAY, 27 MAY: 1159 HOURS GMT
Cydonia Base, Mars
Sol 5636: soltime +13 minutes MMT
It was just past midnight, the time of the day reserved for the so-called soltime, the extra forty-one minutes and some odd seconds that brought the human reckoning of time by hours, minutes, and seconds into line with Mars’s longer rotational period. Garroway had been planning on hitting his rack early, but he was on edge and sleep eluded him. It had been a long day—most of it spent in a long series of diagnostics with the EVA suits used by Alexander, Kettering, Pohl, Druzhininova, and Vandemeer when they’d made their discovery at the Fortress the day before. All five suits had flagged red in pre-EVA checkout. With the chance—admittedly remote—that something about the site had somehow affected the suits, no one was being allowed to return to the site until it could be checked out remotely, and that was going to take time. There’d been nothing wrong with the suits that he could determine.
Alexander had been furious, convinced that Joubert or one of the UN people had sabotaged the readouts to keep them from going back to the Fortress site.
The possibility that the expedition could be torn apart by internal dissension or even UN sabotage was a serious one; building psychological pressures within any small group of mismatched people cooped up together far from other humans had more than once led to disaster.
Unable to sleep, Garroway walked over to the comm center, where he commed a long vidmessage to Kaitlin. After uploading it onto Spacenet, he went back to the command center, poured himself a cup of coffee at the mess, and sat down at a spare console seat with Dr. Graves and Corporal Phil Hayes, who had the communications mid-watch. Hayes stood as Garroway came closer.
“At ease, at ease,” he said. “What’s the good word?”
“Hello, Major,” Graves said. “The corporal was just telling me about the problems you Marines are having on Mars.”
“You having problems, Corporal?” Garroway asked.
“No, sir!” the Marine snapped back, resuming his seat but managing to remain at attention.
“It’s okay, son,” he said. “I’m not your CO, and I don’t bite. What’s the trouble?”
“Well, sir…the sand is hell on the rifles. It’s more like a real fine dust or windblown grit, y’know? Gets into everything. Coats everything, worse’n mud.”
“Which is why all of the weapons-cleaning drills on the way out, right?”
“Roger that, sir. Then, on top of that, some REMF back on Earth recalibrated all of ATARs, so we couldn’t hit shit when we started range practice last week. We had ’em set for Mars gravity, y’know? Then when we started workin’ with ’em here, we kept hitting above the bull’s-eye. I thought old Lloyd and Master—uh, I mean—”
“That’s okay. Go ahead, Marine.”
“Uh, I thought the colonel was gonna shit, sir. We were all selected for this mission, y’know, on the strength of our quals Earthside, and it was looking like we were the worst damned shots in the Corps.”
“You get that straightened out?”
“Oh, sure. It was pretty obvious what had happened. You know, no one in the Marines, no one in the ranks, anyway, likes these new electronic rifles. Too much gadgetry screws things up, y’know? Give me a rifle you could sight in with a sandbag and a screwdriver, like in the old days.”
Garroway chuckled. Hayes looked too young to reminisce about “the old days.”
“I was telling him,” Graves added, “that it sounded like someone on Earth got his sums wrong.”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Garroway said. The M-29 ATAR was designed to accept PAD entries feeding it data such as air pressure, altitude, cartridge size, and gravity in order to precisely sight the rifle—supposedly a big improvement over the old-fashioned chore of taking it out to the range and sighting it in manually. “The gravitational acceleration on Earth is 980 centimeters per second squared. On Mars it’s, what?”
“Three seventy-one and a bit,” Graves said. “About a third.”
“I can see how that would throw your aim off. Some supply officer probably looked at that 371 centimeters per second squared, said, ‘Hey! This can’t be right!’ and changed it.”
“Every rifleman ought to be responsible for sighting in his own weapon,” Hayes said in the matter-of-fact way that professionals have when they discuss their tools. “Leave it to some supply officer back on Earth, and, see what happens? If there’s a way to fuck it up, you know they’ll find a way to do it.” He didn’t specify who they might be, but Garroway understood the feelings every soldier of every time and nationality had for the bureaucrats and bean counters behind the lines.
“You know,” Graves added, “I’m reminded of something I read about the early space-station designs. The US Skylab, put up way back in the 1970s…apparently the crews had some real problems because the engineers back on Earth kept forgetting that there was no up or down in space. And these people were designing a space station, for chrissakes!”
“It’s hard to shake our Earthbound prejudices,” Garroway agreed.
“Tell me about it, sir!” Hayes said, laughing. “Didja hear about the boots?”
“Nooo….”
“Some idiot, probably the same ROAD-SOB who fucked up the rifles, must’ve seen we were headed for a desert environment, ’cause he also saw to it we had thirty pairs of Boots, Mark I Desert, Marine Issue, Standard.”
Garroway’s eyes widened. “Desert boots? On Mars?”
“Swear to God! Like we could wear ’em with our Class-One armor! The colonel was fit to be tied when he heard. Anyway, I guess that’s why Slider and Fulbert volunteered to go to Candor Chasma and give Captain Barnes a hand straightening the mess out.”
“I’m sure Captain Barnes appreciates their help,” Garroway said, grinning. “In fact, I—”
He broke off the sentence as the hatchway from the base common area clanked open. The first person in was one of the UN troops, wearing full combat armor and carrying a Sturmgewehr SG-32 assault rifle. The bullpup magazine was locked in place behind the pistol grip—in direct violation of standing station operational orders.
“What the hell—” Garroway started,