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