very little to do with the Corps.
More than one of the people he’d worked with over the past few years, people including Colonel Lloyd, had accused him of going ROAD—Retired On Active Duty—marking time, in other words, until he was a civilian once more.
Well, maybe that was true, in a way. It was a bit ironic, actually, that he should find himself a member of the MMEF, occupying a billet that a few thousand other Marines would have given their teeth for, and he didn’t really want to be here. Two more years—a planned fifteen-month deployment on Mars, followed by a seven-month transit home aboard the cycler Columbus—and he’d be out of the Corps. With all the military cutbacks lately, he shouldn’t have any trouble resigning his commission, and a month or two after that he’d be on the beach at Nassau, alternately soaking up the sun and soaking the rich tourists.
“Well,” he said at last, after a long silence had passed, “all the routine traffic is up-to-date. I guess I’ll head back to the hab.” He stretched. “I still have five minutes’ shower credit left over from last month, and I think I’m gonna luxuriate.”
“Enjoy,” Reiner replied. “And thanks for your help. I don’t know what we’ll do if the cameras go out in the shelter again on the Earth-bound leg.”
“Oh, you’ll manage, I’m sure.” He jerked a thumb at the monitor. “You won’t have so many passengers on board. Maybe the romantic ones can use their cubicles, like normal folks.”
“Nah,” Reiner said, shaking his head. “Zero G is too much fun.”
“Oh? How would you know?”
“Classified information, Major. I’ll never tell.”
Garroway caught a transport pod and took it down to the hab-mod level, where the spin gravity now measured .38 Gs, the same as on the surface of Mars. There were two hab modules attached to the outermost rack of the cycler’s A-arm. His quarters were in Hab One, which was reserved for officers, female Marines, and civilian passengers. The twenty-two enlisted male Marines were quartered together in Hab Two’s tiny open dorm. Crowding was bad in both habs—worse in Two than in One. At least the Marine officers were quartered two to a compartment. He shared his semiprivate, closet-sized quarters with the MMEF’s supply officer, Captain Gregory Barnes.
As he stepped through the lock module into Hab One’s small rec lounge, he nearly collided with Mireille Joubert. “Major! Hallo. I wanted to thank you for your, ah, timely warning.”
“It was nothing.” He’d not meant for his voice to sound cold, but it did anyway.
“It would have been most embarrassing….”
“Excuse me, Miss Joubert—”
“It is Doctor Joubert, but I wish you would call me Mireille.” She cocked her head to the left. “We have made this voyage all the way from Earth, seven months, now, and we have not had much opportunity to get to know one another. Perhaps it is time we did so.”
Garroway raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think that would be such a good idea, ma’am,” he said, a little stiffly.
“Why? Because I work for the UN?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“I am not one of Colonel Bergerac’s thugs,” she said, lifting her chin. “I am a scientist, an archeologist. Whatever differences your nation might have with the UN, they should not affect you and me.”
“Mmm. To tell you the truth, Dr. Joubert, I feel more kinship with Bergerac’s ‘thugs,’ as you call them, than I do with you and your UN observers. In my opinion, it’s misguided UN policy and the demands being made by your bureau that have created this crisis. Not my government. And not the MMEF.”
“Did I say that it was?”
“The opinion the UN has about Marines on this expedition is well enough known, I think. As are the UN’s opinions about American sovereignty.” He gave her a wintry smile. “Funny. I always thought you French would fight to the death to keep your national sovereignty.”
“And who says we do not, monsieur?” she flared back. “France is still free. Still sovereign…within very broad and liberal boundaries.”
“If that’s your story, you stick to it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, they warned us back at Vandenberg that we shouldn’t discuss politics with you people.”
Pushing past her, he entered his cubicle and pulled the accordion-pleated door shut.
What he didn’t need right now was to be reminded about politics. The political situation on Earth seemed to be worsening almost week by week, with the increasing pressure to cave in to UN demands. Russia and the United States of America were the last two major powers on the planet that had not signed the UN Reorganization Charter of 2025. That document called for the establishment of a United Nations government that would have jurisdiction over the national governments of the world, the gradual abolition of all national militaries, and new international laws and regulations governing the exploitation, shipment, and sale of the world’s resources.
The reasons for the growing concern—no, the growing world panic—were easy enough to see. The problems had been around for a long time, growing steadily, growing as quickly, in fact, as the world’s population, which currently stood at something just over nine billion people. Global warming, the subject of speculation as far back as the 1980s, had proved to be not speculation but hard fact for forty years or more. Sea levels had risen by half a meter the world over, and they were expected to rise by another meter or so before the century’s end. Rising sea levels—and disastrous storms—had killed millions, and driven tens of millions more into refugee status. Precious agricultural land in Bangladesh and coastal China and the US Gulf Coast had been swallowed up by the advancing tides. As nations like the United States and Russia finally ended their dependencies on fossil fuels and polluting industries, the poorer nations of the world had finally reached the point where they could become rich…but only by embracing the air-, land-, and sea-destroying industries that the US and others were now abandoning. Acid rain generated by China was destroying forests in western Canada, and the Amazon rain forest was all but gone now, replaced by ranches and acid-pissing factories. The last of the oil was swiftly vanishing; other raw materials vital to civilization—copper, silver, titanium, cobalt, uranium, a dozen others—were nearly gone as well. Things were bad enough that the Geneva Report of 2030 had declared unequivocally that all of the world’s nations had to be under direct UN control by 2060 if certain key controls on population and industry were to be successfully put into place.
No wonder the whole world was casting the US and Russia as villains, holdouts selfishly clinging to outmoded sovereignty simply because they feared a little thing like dictatorship….
Garroway wasn’t sure what the answer was, wasn’t even sure if there was an answer. The US, though, had been arguing for years that two new factors were about to break the deadly cycle of poverty and scarcity on Earth once and for all, if the industrialized nations of the planet would just cooperate long enough to make use of them.
The first was the wholesale industrialization of space, where power from the sun could be collected on a never-before-imagined scale and applied to industries that should not be allowed to pollute or endanger the planet. In another few years, perhaps, orbital industries could start making a real difference in the mess on Earth. The question was whether or not they would be in time….
The
