Semper Mars (27 page)

That gave Fuentes her bearings, and she started moving toward the station keel.

Other Marines around her were doing the same, their active camo armor showing odd, almost abstract designs of black and white. The camo, she thought, worked well in space; it was hard to recognize anything human in those shapes, though the MMUs, which were not camouflaged, provided anchor points for the eye that helped her pick out individual features like helmets, gloves, or ATARs.

Several Marines, she saw, had reached the station dead, their armor torn open, a frosting of frozen water or atmosphere forming around gaping entry or exit holes. Others had missed the station and were receding into the black void beyond. She called up a visual on her platoon life-support readouts. It looked like five dead out of twenty-two… not good, but not as bad as it could have been, and there was always the tiny but defiant hope that some of those listed as dead were alive, but with damaged transmitters.

“Eagle, this is Marine One,” she called. “We’re down to eighteen effectives, but we’re on the station. Can you clarify the tacsit, over?”

“Ah, copy that, One. Sorry, it looks like a real furball from here. Can’t see much of anything.”

“Rog.” It was up to the Marines, then. Up to her.

As she rounded the curve of the station module, she spotted a blue-helmet clinging to the rigging in the distance. It was impossible, she found, to estimate ranges. Things seemed closer in vacuum, without the slight haze of an atmosphere to give subconscious clues to distance. No matter. She didn’t even need to check the range on her HUD. Combat here was strictly point and shoot.

A patch of the station hull a few meters away suddenly and silently acquired a bright silver smudge; a bullet had just grazed the structure’s outer skin. She dragged her ATAR around until the crosshairs were centered on the enemy, then squeezed the trigger. Recoil bumped her back, setting her adrift from the station as the UN soldier flung his arms out and lost his rifle as he drifted clear of the station rigging.

She used her MMU to stop her backward drift, then accelerate forward again. She skimmed past the station hull, her boots centimeters above the white-painted surface. She saw several more UN bodies, some drifting equipment, but no more active targets.

“Marine One, this is Eagle,” crackled in her headset. “It looks like you’ve got ’em on the run. We can see five… no, six blue-tops making for an airlock at the Alfa end. Looks like you’ve got ’em bottled up.”

“Copy that, Eagle.”

She was panting, breathing hard, though whether from exertion or excitement she wasn’t sure. She used her suit controls to adjust her air mix, upping the O
₂
content a bit, then set to work rallying her people. At her command, four Marines jetted over to the connector joints, where the solar panel arrays were mounted to the station’s keel by large, rotating joints, and began placing their cutting charges at key points.

The first stage of the battle, at least, was over. Now the game became one of cat-at-the-mousehole, and they would have to see who broke first.

T
WENTY

Tuesday, 12 June: 1606 Hours GMT

Candor Chasma

Sol 5651: 1830 hours MMT

“So,” Mark Garroway said in what he’d intended to be a conversational way, but which came out more like a grunt. “What’s so damned important about this shit you found at Cydonia?”

He was sitting in the Mars cat’s lounge, tightly wedged in between Sergeant Knox on his left and Lieutenant King on his right, with David Alexander squeezed in with Pohl and Druzhininova on the other side of the vehicle.

His lips were dry and cracked, making conversation difficult. The entire force had gone on short rations of water four days ago, when two of the cat’s fuel-cell recycler condensers had gone bad. Water was more important for power now than even for drinking. Without power, the cat would die, their armor life support would fail a few hours later, and they would be stranded, dead unless a UN patrol happened to find them.

“That’s rather a difficult question to answer, Major,” Alexander said. His voice cracked. “Obviously, it has a bearing on what Man is, where he came from, how he evolved. I’d say the question touches on just about every aspect of human history, physiology, psychology, and evolution.”

“Isn’t that what science is all about?” Druzhininova said. She shrugged inside her suit. “To find out who we are, where we are going, and why.”

“Not necessarily why,” Pohl said. “I’ve always thought that was a question for the theologians and the philosophers.”

“There is no question that can be excluded by science,” Alexander replied. “Not if there is hard evidence that allows us to look at the question in the first place.”

The walls of the Mars cat shuddered, and all of them looked up. A full-blown dust storm was howling outside. Technically, it was daytime, but the black pall of dust thrown up by the winds screeching across the Martian surface had blotted out the sun as effectively as nightfall, forcing them—yet again—to halt their journey. The Marines on watch outside were all gathered, at Garroway’s orders, in the narrow space beneath the Mars cat, taking advantage of a new technique they’d developed almost a week ago. By digging into the sand beneath the vehicle, the Marines forced to stay outside could huddle together in a narrow space that quickly warmed with the heat radiated from their armor and from the bottom of the crawler. It still wasn’t comfortable, exactly, but they wouldn’t freeze.

And in a howling Martian dust storm, it meant the others would know where to dig when the thing was over.

Dr. Druzhininova had pointed out that some Martian dust storms during the early summer could cover the whole northern hemisphere of the planet and last for months. If that happened, the MMEF and their civilian charges would die here, and their mummified bodies would remain for some far-future archeologist to wonder at.

Garroway reached up and scratched the bristle at his chin. The last tube of nobeard had given out five days ago, and all of the men were showing the effects now. There wasn’t water to spare for shaving, and the male members of the MMEF were beginning to take on a distinctly piratical air as their beards started growing out.

Alexander’s beard was fuller, almost neat-looking. He and Dr. Pohl had stopped using facial depilatories from the start and now looked like something halfway approaching distinguished.

Garroway was thoughtful for a time. “How long would it take you, Doctor,” he said finally, “to write up a paper on the subject? Something you could transmit over the Spacenet?”

Alexander’s face worked for a moment behind his sandy beard. “You mean… publish? It’s what I’ve been dreaming of. You know that. But, well, I don’t have much to say, yet. It’d be premature.”

“You discovered those bodies back at Cydonia. That seems to be what the UN scientists want to keep under wraps. Can’t you just publish that?”

“Well, yes. Certainly. But, well, we don’t know anything about who those… those people were, or why they’re on Mars. How they got here. I’d want to do a lot of excavating first, just to see if we could come up with any preliminary hypothesis.”

“We find dead humans, or… what did you call them?”

“Archaic Homo sapiens,” Druzhininova said. “Or possibly very modern Homo erectus.”

“That’s part of what we need to do more research on,” Alexander added, “to nail down just what it is we’re dealing with here.”

“It strikes me, Doctor,” Garroway said carefully, “that just the fact that ancestors of ours were brought here to Mars, that they seem to have been living here when the climate was, hell, a shirt-sleeve environment… wouldn’t that warrant some kind of initial wake-up call? ‘Hey, Earth! Mankind’s prehistory is a lot different than you thought it was!’”

The others chuckled.

“You could write it up there,” he said, nodding at the cat’s comm center. “I can encode it, slip it in with some housekeeping traffic using the Phobos relay, and drop it in my daughter’s e-mail box back on Earth. If you include instructions for where you’d like to see it published, she can take care of that.”

“It might work,” Alexander said, nodding. “Lots of scientific papers are published over the net these days. Most of ’em, in fact. Used to be you needed to present it in a scholarly journal for peer review.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Garroway said. “Us shaggy-headed electronics types publish on the net all the time.”

“So, what’s your take on this, Major?” Alexander wanted to know. “Why are you in such a hurry to see us publish?”

Garroway pursed his lips. “I don’t know. The fact that the UN wanted to suppress your discovery, for whatever reason, seems good enough reason to me to see it shouted from the housetops. Don’t you think?”

Alexander nodded slowly. “You know, I think you’re right.”

2130 Hours GMT

Tanegashima Space Center, Osaki Launch Site

0630 hours Tokyo time

“… roku… go… yon… san… ni… ichi… ima!”

Acceleration crushed down on Yukio’s chest, pressing him hard against his couch as the powerful Ikaduti booster ignited, hauling the sleek Inaduma space fighter aloft from Pad Nine. His heart was pounding, and only partly from the building Gs of lift off. He was on his way to space. On his way to space at last…

Ikaduti and Inaduma. Thunder and lightning. Booster and spaceplane were well matched, the pinnacle of a long line of Japanese successes in spacecraft design and engineering. The thunder built steadily, though the actual sound seemed to be dropping away behind as the spacecraft climbed into the clear azure sky.

The Inaduma space fighter could carry a crew of four, though on this run there were only three aboard. Sho-sa Kurosawa was mission commander, Tai-i Iijima was pilot, and Chu-i Yukio Ishiwara was aboard as computer technician and radar operator, a position roughly analogous to the Radar Intercept Officers used aboard some American dual-seat military aircraft. Conditions in the Inaduma’s cockpit were cramped; Yukio’s acceleration couch was jammed in immediately behind and slightly below the tandem couches of commander and pilot, while the fourth seat had been removed to accommodate an additional bank of electronic sensory equipment.

The roar of the main engines continued to fade, but the crushing sensation of weight on his chest and stomach actually increased. As the mighty Ikaduti booster burned up more and more of its fuel, the rocket’s mass dwindled, increasing acceleration.

Yukio studied the radar intercept console beside his couch, struggling to focus on the main screen. Yes… the second fighter was there, rising from Pad Twelve thirty seconds behind them. Taka Flight—the word was Nihongo for Hawk—consisted of two spaceplanes, Yukio’s Taka One, and Sho-sa Ozawa’s Taka Two.

The Inaduma was small as manned spacecraft went, barely twelve meters long and shaped like a blunt, round-nosed arrowhead. The tips of the delta wings were set in a gentle curve, like a smile when seen from head-on, and the cockpit clung to the ship’s back like a dark, glassy droplet of oil. Launched vertically, strapped to the side of the Thunder booster, it could easily reach LEO in a single-stage-to-orbit launch, carry out a variety of missions, and reenter like the old shuttle orbiters, bellying down on a meteoric blaze of incandescent reentry gases.

The sky ahead, just visible from Yukio’s aft position between the heads of the commander and pilot, was swiftly deepening from cloudless, early-morning blue to deepest ultramarine. The spaceplane was angling over now, hurtling downrange across the Pacific into the sunrise, speed still building as it hurtled toward the tiny window of opportunity that would give them one shot, and one only, at the target.

Major Kurosawa was giving the countdown to booster separation now, his voice straining a bit beneath the pressure of almost five Gs of acceleration. “Go… yon… san… ni… ichi… ima!”

With a savage thump, the Ikaduti booster separated, dropping away from the Inaduma’s belly like an oversize bomb. For a blissful moment, all was silence and falling, and then the spaceplane’s twin Mitsubishi engines cut in, hammering the stubby craft into space.

Yukio found himself unexpectedly amused by one aspect of the countdown. Japan took an exceptional pride in her space program, adopting all of the trappings of the Russian and Western programs with relish… right down to the countdown which, as he understood it, had first been added for dramatic impact to a 1929 German science-fiction film, Die Frau im Mond. Japan’s national love affair with space stemmed at least partially from her justifiable pride in her technological accomplishments. Rising from the utter devastation at the end of the War almost a century ago to a spacefaring Great Power, this was Japan’s destiny and her heritage, and she’d been pursuing it relentlessly into the twenty-first century, through her participation in the ISS, through her first manned shuttle in 2010, to her position now as one of the two major spacefaring powers in the United Nations.

The Western part of Yukio’s mind, however, couldn’t help but notice Kurosawa’s routine substitution during the countdown of the word yon for shi, the numeral four. As a language, Japanese lent itself well to puns, for there were numerous words and syllables that sounded exactly alike and yet meant vastly different things. Shi not only meant “four.” It was also the Japanese word for death, and in a lingering swirl of ancient superstition no hospital room or ward in Japan was numbered four, one never purchased gift sets with four items, the numeral itself was thought to be unlucky, and the safe word yon was almost always substituted for shi… especially in something as critical and as auspicious as the countdown for the launch of a spacecraft!

Well, superstition was a part of being human and was scarcely restricted to the Japanese. The Americans hadn’t numbered a spacecraft “13” since the explosion aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft in 1970—launched at 1313 hours Houston time, on April 11, 1970… an interesting date in itself since the individual numerals in 4/11/70 added up to 13, while the actual explosion occurred on Monday, April 13…

Yukio laughed, partly at the superstition, partly at the sheer, heady joy of being in space at last, leaving his mind in a racing, leapfrogging whirl.

“You said something, Radar Officer?” Kurosawa asked over his headset phone. “Ah, no, sir. Excuse me, please. I laughed…”

Iijima chuckled. “His first time.”

“I don’t mind if you enjoy the flight, Chu-i-san,” Kurosawa said. “But perhaps you should also see about acquiring the target, neh?”

Yukio glanced again at the panel beside him. Except for Taka Two, the sky around them was clear. “They are not yet in range, Commander,” he replied.

It was harder to speak now, as acceleration continued to increase. The Ikaduti booster was patterned on the monster Energiyas of the Russians and was fully capable of hurling the spaceplane into orbit on a single stage. Taka Flight was gambling on the extra velocity to put them into a short, direct, interception course with the target, one that would take them past the target in minimum time, then swing wide into a long, highly elliptical orbit.

And then, the last of the thunder and the bone-rattling vibration was gone. “Orbital velocity,” Kurosawa announced. “We have attained orbit.”

Yukio almost laughed aloud again at the slightly queasy, swift-dropping sensation of weightlessness, a delightful sensation that he knew he would come to enjoy quickly, if he had the chance. He just wished the fighter had a roomier cockpit, with space enough to unbuckle his harness and float around. Experimentally, he plucked a pen from his flight-suit pocket and let it hang, gleaming and silver, in midair before his face.

He had to snatch it back again, as Captain Iijima made some adjustments to his controls and the fighter gracefully rolled to port, bringing the vast and awe-inspiring blue majesty of the Earth “above” the spaceplane’s cockpit. Yukio’s view of the planet, stretched like a blue and cloud-mottled sky overhead, was partly blocked by the opaque hood over the afterpart of the fighter’s cockpit, but he could see enough that it caught the breath in his throat and transfixed him with its impossible beauty.

The launch from Tanegashima had hurled the Inaduma far out over the Pacific, and he could see no land at all… nothing save the spirals of the great, cloud-folded weather patterns. Yukio was surprised to see how three-dimensional the clouds appeared, even from this height. He’d thought they would look flatter, like white brushstrokes against a blue backdrop. Instead, he could easily see their three-dimensional character, could make out the ripples in their upper surfaces, like wavelets in a pond, and see the shadows cast by the highest of the cloud tops, like shadows thrown by mountains in the early-morning sun.

If only Kaitlin could see…

As though a switch had been thrown, his joy evaporated. It wasn’t just the thought of Kaitlin. The view of Earth, that magnificent blue Earth, seemed so completely antithetical to their mission. The thought that they were here to try to kill people…

Don’t think about that! You have your duty. Concentrate on your duty…