from below as the Bizarre’s main engines switched on. For several minutes more, he was aware only of the pounding of those nuclear thermal rockets as the MSL lowered itself toward the Martian surface. Dust, brick red except where the touch of low-slanting sunlight kissed it golden, swirled up past the window. There was the slightest of jars…
…and then the engine thunder was dwindling away.
“Okay, jarheads,” Captain Elliott, the MSL’s skipper, announced happily, “welcome to Mars!”
Throughout the compartment, armored Marines unbuckled harnesses and struggled to their feet. A ladder set into what on an airliner would have been the floor was now a series of steps going down the wall to the cargo lock below, and the Marines were swinging out of their seats and clambering down the ladder in surprisingly good order. Alexander stayed where he was, safely out of the way. He imagined that Lloyd must be shouting orders at them or counting them off by the numbers, but the Marines were all sealed up and their conversations restricted to their suit radios.
In seconds, the last of them had vanished down the ladder into the cargo hold and the hatch sealed shut with a bang. Alexander turned to try to see out the port, but little was visible except for dust, sand, and rock beneath an eerie pink sky. He could hear the throb of compressors as the cargo hold’s atmosphere was tanked for later use and the compartment brought down to the near vacuum of the Martian surface. If somebody wanted to attack them, this would be a hell of a good time….
“Looks like they have the welcome mat out for us, Dr. Alexander,” Captain Elliott called down. “The natives are friendly. A little bent out of shape, maybe, but friendly.”
Alexander hadn’t realized how nervous he’d been. With a sigh of relief he began unbuckling, eager to get outside and see this place for himself, a place he’d been dreaming of for years.
Outside, as it had for millennia, the Face stared skyward with quiet and enigmatic aplomb.
SEVEN
THURSDAY, 17 MAY: 0315 HOURS GMT
United Orient Flight 372
95,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean 1215 hours Tokyo time
Kaitlin Garroway peered out the cabin window at a sky so blue it was almost black. A smattering of stars was visible above a curved horizon. Each time she traveled on an HST she felt the same sense of mingled awe and longing. Hypersonic transports didn’t reach into space, but it looked as though they were on the edge. “Have you ever flown at this altitude?” she asked her companion.
Yukio leaned over her shoulder to share the view. “Yes, and a little higher. But still not into space. The Inaduma fighter can reach orbit only with a very large booster. So far I have only flown above thirty-five thousand meters in a simulator. Now if we’d taken the suborbital as I’d suggested…”
“My internal clock is gonna be no less scrambled from this flight than from a forty-five-minute hop, thank you very much, so what’s the advantage? Besides, you know I couldn’t afford it. Those suborbs are for businessmen on expense accounts, not for college students.”
“And you wouldn’t let me pay your way.”
“Certainly not. It’s my vacation, and I’m going to enjoy knowing that my money paid for it.”
“Independent-minded gaijin.”
She turned quickly to see if he was serious. Gaijin was the word used to refer to a foreigner, but the connotation was more that of barbarian. Nihonjin, more than any other people she knew of, divided the world into two categories: people…and outsiders. Yukio’s face was somber, but his eyes were twinkling, so she knew he was teasing her again. Still she wondered…
“Is it going to be a problem, Yukio?” she asked. “That I am my own person, that I have my own ideas and express them?”
“In other words, that you are not…a proper Japanese woman?”
She nodded.
Yukio leaned back in his seat and stared at the overhead light. “We have spoken of this before, and you know how I feel. We are part of a new generation, you and I, citizens of Earth.”
“And yet there is gimu.” The word meant duty, obligation.
“Yes. I have obligations, to my family, to my country. My military duty is just one part of this. I…I am having difficulty reconciling these duties with our vision of the world, of what the world is becoming, what it must become if the human race is to survive.”
Kaitlin was silent for a while, considering her own duties. She had grown up assuming that she would enter the Marine Corps after college. After all, what better way to emulate her adored father? But during the last few years, and especially since she’d come to CMU, she’d begun seeing things in a different light. Exposed for the first time to the ideas of the Internationalist Party, she’d started to see her country as an obstacle to world peace and nationalism as an outmoded concept, notions that, understandably, horrified her father. It hurt her to realize that she was hurting him, but she couldn’t not-think just to please his old-fashioned patriotism.
Things got further complicated when she realized that her father no longer had the same devotion to duty and to the Corps that he’d had when she was young. It worried her that he seemed to be just marking time until he could retire. She’d prefer a good, loud argument to the apathy she saw in him now. Occasionally things still ticked him off, like that incident with the two archaeologists last week, but most of the time he seemed content simply to put in his time. She wondered what he thought of the Mexico business.
That news had shaken her, not so much because of what happened as because of her reaction to it. She wasn’t naive enough to believe everything she saw on Triple-N, so it hadn’t surprised her when she found that the military newsgroups had a very different slant on the embassy takeover, claiming that the Mexicans were the aggressors and that what was supposedly a spontaneous demonstration had really been orchestrated by the Mexican Army. What had surprised her was her reaction to the Internationalist newsgroups. All of a sudden the talk of American imperialist aggressors sounded raucous and hollow to her, and she found herself vigorously defending the Marines…and getting flamed for it.
Not that getting flamed was unusual for her—she seldom held back on expressing her own opinions, regardless of how unpopular they might be—but that the attacks seemed so unreasoned bothered her. She’d thought of the Internationalists as a group of rational intellectuals; now she was seeing just as much unthinking prejudice in them as in, say, those who claimed the Martian Ancients were demons.
The Ancients.
“Yukio, who do you think the Ancients really were?”
“The Ancients?” He laughed. “How can I even take a guess? We know so little about them. What does your father say? Have they turned up anything new?”
Kaitlin shrugged. “They’ve only been there five days. He seems to be getting friendly with one of the archeologists, a guy named Alexander, and he’s been filling him in on what the previous team had uncovered and where they’re starting from now, but I don’t think there’s anything new and startling.”
The thought of her latest vid from her father made her grimace. She had a job lined up for later in the summer, and she’d told him all about it without specifically saying that it didn’t start until
