same way we got it, not without risking tipping the bad guys off, but Garroway’s daughter may have a back door for us.”
“That’s a negative.”
“But—”
“I said negative. Harrel was specific on that point, and he made sure to tell me to pass it on to you, loud and clear. If the president needs negotiating room on this, he can’t have us undercutting his position by sending messages to Garroway.”
“What?”
“If the UN intercepts our messages to Garroway, they could claim that Markham was negotiating with one hand and managing some kind of guerrilla operation on Mars with the other. We can’t take that chance, Monty. We can’t even acknowledge that we got his message in the first place. The fact that we know the UN pulled an offensive move against us up there when they don’t know that we know what they did, well, that might provide us with some leverage in Geneva. As far as you and I and everybody else on Earth is concerned, we have no idea where Garroway is or what he is up to.”
“You’re abandoning him, then.” The words were hard and bitter.
“Call it plausible deniability. Anyway, it’s not as though we could do anything to help. The next cycler’s due for Earth return next week, but we don’t have time to put together a reinforcement mission. Even if we did, it’d be another eight months before they could reach him.”
“Just knowing that you’ve got people pulling for you can help sometimes, Admiral. Right now, I’d guess that Garroway and his people are about as lonely as any US military detachment has ever been in history.”
“Well, God help them,” Gray said. “Because we can’t.” He stopped and held Warhurst with his gaze. “I mean that, Monty. That’s a direct order. No communications with Garroway until this matter is resolved.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
In thirty-six years of military service, Montgomery Warhurst had never disobeyed an order…but damn, he was tempted to now.
SIXTEEN
TUESDAY, 29 MAY: 0230 HOURS GMT
Tithonium Chasma, Mars
Sol 5637: 1330 hours MMT
It was, Garroway thought, one of the oddest-looking marches in the annals of military history…the Mars cat, a bug-faced, tracked monstrosity piled high with stores and armored Marines, grinding along at the pace of a man’s walk and dragging behind it in a swirling cloud of dust a flat sled similarly loaded down with men and supplies.
The sled was the brainchild of Gunnery Sergeant Knox and Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky, who’d suggested the idea as a way of beating some unpleasant facts of life. The Mars cat was designed to carry six to eight people comfortably, but experiment demonstrated that sixteen could be jammed in with considerable crowding, a crowding made worse by the fact that none of the people aboard would remove their armor during the trek. Six or eight more at a time could ride on top of the crawler, clinging to plastic straps rigged from cargo-handling grips.
That left at least four more who would have to walk…and anyone moving on foot would drastically slow the cat from its usual fifteen to thirty kilometers per hour down to the two to three kph that could be expected of a human in full armor trudging along through the sand. At one point, during the planning before they’d left Heinlein Station, Garroway had been convinced that he was going to have to leave at least four of the Marines behind, simply because they couldn’t afford to crawl all the way to Candor at the speed a man could walk.
His two senior NCOs had suggested an alternative, however. A number of carbaluminum pipes—sections for the microwave relay mast that was to have been built at Heinlein Station in the near future—were stored outside the hab. The interior walls of the hab were made of foamboard, a lightweight composite-material used extensively in the cyclers and other MST-derived habs and spacecraft for interior fittings. By wiring sheets of foamboard cut from the hab partitions to an X-framed rectangle of carbaluminum piping, a team of Marines had managed to jury-rig a sled four meters long and three wide and attach it to the Mars cat by its rear tow cable.
“Now, in the old Marine Corps,” Knox had wisecracked, “we could go weeks at a time without food. Just thinking about those old MREs was enough to keep us going on spit and cusswords. But a tow-sled’ll let us carry enough food and water to see us through a couple of weeks, anyway, and it means the people outside can ride instead of walk.” The sled would also carry some of their bulkier equipment—fuel-cell-powered heaters, a rolled-up plastic pressure tent, and spare tanks of liquid oxygen and nitrogen.
The whole assembly looked bizarrely improbable once it was loaded and yoked to the cat’s winch. It was a compromise and, like all such, was not perfect. The drag sled slowed the cat considerably. Both because of the strain put on the Mars cat’s electric drive and for safety reasons, the cat would not be able to make much better than eight kilometers per hour, at the very best…and in rough terrain, the Marines outside would have to actually carry the sled like a huge canoe, portaging their way across the steepest or roughest stretches.
Nor could they travel a full twenty-four and a half hours a day. The period of the Martian night between midnight and dawn was far too cold for Marines to remain outside for more than two or three hours at a time, nor could the cat’s engines take the sustained punishment of round-the-clock travel with that kind of load. They were going to have to stop and camp for at least six hours each night while the cat’s fuel-cells recharged, and the people riding outside would all have to be cycled through the cat’s interior every couple of hours in order to get warm and to recharge their suits’ batteries.
They’d made only fifteen kilometers that first day, traveling southeast to pick up the opening in the encircling chasma walls that would give entrance to an extremely narrow and steep-sided canyon. According to maps found aboard the Mars cat, this was where the wider portion of Tithonium was squeezed down to a slender rille—actually a chain of deep fault-collapse craters puncturing the surface in a straight line all the way to the broad expanses of Candor Chasma, some 450 kilometers to the east.
They’d not set off, however, until a scant two hours before sunset, and moving at a slow and painful crawl, they’d managed about ten kilometers before the sun set. The Martian night swept down the valley with astonishing swiftness, the sky fading from pink to orange to deepest, star-strewn black within the space of a couple of minutes. The outside temperature began plummeting as well, from minus five centigrade to minus forty-five in the first three hours after sunset.
With nightfall, they kept going…but their speed was reduced even further. Garroway didn’t want the cat to show lights, not with the very real possibility of a UN air search by lobber, and the two tiny moons shed almost no illumination on the dark desert floor. Marines took turns walking ahead of the Mars cat, scouting out obstacles like craters or boulders and slowly guiding the vehicle through the night practically step by step.
And they were still on the flat and sandy floor of the chasma; their progress would be slower still once they entered the rougher terrain of the canyon proper.
At some point around local midnight, Garroway had called a halt, set the watches, and let the party hunker down for a restless night. At the very best, at this rate of travel, Garroway estimated that they could make the passage from Heinlein Station to Mars Prime in four to five days…if they could average ninety miles per day—almost 150 kilometers—across almost four hundred miles.
He knew better than to expect that kind
