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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 the middle of July, so he assumed she was staying in Pittsburgh for the whole summer. If he knew she was going to Japan, he would have gotten all fatherly and protective, assuming that she couldn’t take care of herself, and she just didn’t want to have to deal with that. She always used her global.net account whenever she was outside of Pittsburgh, so he would be able to tell from her v-mail only that she was not at CMU.

“Anyway,” she continued, “from all I’ve read on archeology, it’s a long, involved, painstaking process. Alexander told Dad it might be years before they even knew the right questions to ask.”

“So why do you think I might be able to answer those questions, when we don’t even know what they are?”

“Well, of course we can’t know. But we can guess, can’t we? We can speculate. The idea of other intelligent beings, a whole other civilization, inhabiting this solar system long before modern humans even evolved…it’s mind-boggling. I want to know who they were, why they came here, where they went.”

Yukio grinned. “Then why aren’t you studying exo-paleoarchaeology instead of AI systems design?”

Kaitlin shook her head. “I don’t have the patience for archaeology. I want to go out there and find them, wherever they are. Even if that particular species is extinct, just the fact that they were there proves we’re not alone. There must be others, thousands of other races throughout the galaxy. And I don’t think we’re going to find them by sitting here waiting for them to come to us. We’ve got to go to them.”

Yukio gazed out into the deep blue of not-quite-space. “We’re just on the edge of exploring the solar system. It will be quite some time before we are able to reach the stars.”

“I don’t know. If we can work the bugs out of antimatter propulsion, we could be sending a ship to Alpha Centauri in, oh, twenty years or so.

“And I want to be on that ship.”

0507 HOURS GMT

Kansai International Airport

Osaka Bay, Japan

1407 hours Tokyo time

Yukio held his hands casually in his lap to keep from gripping the handrests as the Star Raker came into its approach to the huge man-made island that was Kansai International Airport. He always felt a little nervous flying when he didn’t have any electronic displays in front of him to follow course and speed and range. He didn’t know the man in the cockpit, didn’t know with certainty his competence and experience, the way he did with Taii Iijima, the Space Defense Force captain he usually flew with. For a veteran of thousands of hours of flight time, such nervousness seemed embarrassing, so he always tried to hide it. Usually he was successful.

A slight sound coming from his right made him turn his head to see Kaitlin looking at him as though she was trying hard not to laugh.

“Okay, now I really know you’re a flight officer!”

“Oh? And why is that?”

“Dad says all flyers are like that, though the actual pilots are usually worse than side-seaters like you. Can’t stand to have someone else in control.”

Yukio grinned ruefully. “You found me out. And I thought I was hiding it pretty well.”

She nodded. “You were. But don’t worry, I won’t let on I know your dreadful secret. It’s just nice to know that you have at least one flaw.”

The Star Raker came in for a textbook landing, and Yukio resumed his normal breathing pattern. The slidewalk in the International Terminal was bordered with gift shops, eating parlors, and communications stations; signs in French, English, and Nihongo welcomed visitors, and holoboard advertisements bombarded them with sights and sounds as they made their way toward the baggage area. Travelers from all over the world came through Kansai, but there was a predominance of Asian faces. As he got off the end of the slidewalk, Yukio almost gave a skip. It was good to be home.

They took the Jet Foil across Osaka Wan to the mainland and then traveled by maglev to Kyoto. One flaw, she said. How little she knows me, if she thinks I have only one. He stole a glance at the woman on the seat next to him, seeing her as though with new eyes. By American standards she was beautiful, with long auburn hair curving around a thin green-eyed face. By international standards she was stylishly and appropriately dressed for travel, in a sleeveless one-piece jumpsuit with hip belt. By Japanese standards, she was neither appropriately dressed nor beautiful.

He thought about his name. Yukio was a shortened form of Toshiyuki; the nickname meant Snow Boy and implied one who goes his own way. When, Yukio wondered, had he ever gone his own way? He’d entered the Space Defense Force to please his father. He’d enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University because he was ordered to by the SDF. He’d agreed to this trip because Kaitlin wanted it, and he’d been almost relieved when he’d thought his new orders would make it impossible. Then he’d allowed himself to be persuaded again.

Yukio considered himself quite cosmopolitan, not Westernized to the extent of rejecting his heritage, of course, but enough of an Internationalist to be open-minded about Western ideas, Western culture…even Western women. In Pittsburgh Kaitlin had seemed perfect, exotic in the way that all Western women were, and yet familiar because of her love of Japan and Japan’s culture. Now she seemed jarring, out of place…or was he the one who was out of place?

They took the subway from the maglev station and then walked the few blocks to the youth hostel where Kaitlin would be staying. She made a good impression on the clerk at the desk, bowing and addressing him in fluent and respectful Nihongo. Yukio had never stayed at a place like this, but he would guess that few Americans came here who would be able to converse with their host in the host’s language…or who would wish to.

“I’m going up to change,” she said. “I shouldn’t be more than a few minutes. Unless you’d like to come wash up also?”

“No. I am fine. Thank you.”

She gave him a strange look, then turned and walked up the stairs to her room. He mentally kicked himself. Ever since they’d landed at Kansai, he’d become more and more formal with Kaitlin. He knew that she felt it and was puzzled by it. The thing was, he was puzzled, too. He was well aware of the differences between American and Japanese customs. He was well aware that behavior that would be considered reprehensible in Kyoto was perfectly acceptable in Pittsburgh. But he’d thought of himself as a new Japanese, able to transcend his upbringing, to be a citizen of the world. He was finding that he was more tightly bound to tradition than he’d imagined possible.

He walked over to the comm station against one wall of the lobby. It was an old-fashioned one—audio only, no video, no net access—but sufficient for his purposes. He called home and arranged with Isoru Nabuko, his father’s secretary, for a car to be sent to pick them up. “Is my father at home, Hisho-san?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, Ishiwara-san,” the man replied. “Daijin Ishiwara returned from Tokyo two hours ago. He is eagerly awaiting your arrival and that of your honored guest.” Nabuko chuckled. “I’ve not seen him so excited since you received your well-deserved promotion to the rank of chu-i.”

Yukio asked that Nabuko convey his respects to his father, and then he hung up, wondering if the secretary knew that the honored guest in question was in fact a gaijin. He had not hidden the fact from his parents, but he didn’t know whether the information had been passed on. Perhaps it had. Perhaps he was worrying unnecessarily. Perhaps he was the only one who—

“Is there a problem?” It was Kaitlin.

“Oh. No, certainly not. I was just thinking.”

“Ah.”

She was conservatively dressed, he was relieved to see, and holding a large, oblong box in her hands. “Did you call home?” she asked.

He nodded. “A car will be here in…” He glanced at his wrist-top. “…about a half an hour. Perhaps we can find a place nearby to sit down and have a drink.”

“I need to get this wrapped first,” she said, gesturing with the box. “The clerk here said there was a gift shop around the corner. All of those shops at the airport seemed geared for tourists, and I want to make sure this is wrapped properly.”

Her thoughtfulness stung. Both the giving and the wrapping of gifts in Japan were high arts and were as cloaked in ritual as the tea ceremony. Kaitlin had a Western face, but her heart was Nihonjin.

Now if only his father were able to see her in the same light…

0850 HOURS GMT

Ishiwara household

Outskirts of Kyoto

1750 hours Tokyo time

The limousine pulled up to the gate in front of Yukio’s house, where a uniformed guard looked inside the car, then opened the gate, waving them through. Kaitlin glanced back to see him pick up a phone in the guard shack, presumably to announce them. The security measures—necessary, Kaitlin supposed, for the household of the minister of International Trade and Industry—were so impressive, she was surprised to find that the actual house was not large and appeared quite traditional. Yukio had told her that his father was conservative in matters of custom, although he was something of a freethinker in the field of politics.

As they walked up to the front door, Kaitlin thought about the upcoming meeting. Back in Pittsburgh the idea of meeting Yukio’s parents and younger brother had excited her. When her father had been stationed in Osaka in the early twenties, she’d come to love this country and its people. As soon as they’d arrived in Japan, her mother, a natural linguist and determined not to be perceived as a typical American, had arranged for language and culture lessons. Kaitlin herself picked up the language, not through formal study but from playing with the children of her mother’s teacher.

Then her mother died, shortly after the end of her father’s stint in Japan. For Kaitlin, studying Japanese became a way of remembering and honoring her mother.

And now she was being invited into a Japanese home for the first time in almost fifteen years…and she felt totally unprepared. Speaking the language wasn’t enough—even knowing the customs wasn’t enough. She was different, and she would always be different. Yukio’s behavior proved that. At first she’d been hurt, watching him seal himself behind a wall of formality, but then she realized that it was simply that he was now home and acting accordingly. The misgivings she’d felt earlier reared up again. Was it possible for love to create a bridge between two cultures as different as theirs?

And if it was possible, was her love for Yukio strong enough?

Yukio slid the door open, and the two of them walked through into the genkan, the vestibule. “Toshi-chan!” a voice boomed down from the main level of the house. Three people were standing there, a young boy wearing a jean-suit and a T-shirt and an older couple in traditional garb.

“O-to-chan!” Yukio replied joyfully, confirming that the middle-aged man wearing Yukio’s face was the senior Ishiwara. The suffix chan was used only among close family members; o-to-san was the more formal way to address one’s father.

Yukio bowed to his father and slipped off his shoes, stepping easily onto the main level of the house and into the slippers that were waiting for him. Kaitlin followed suit, glad she’d remembered to change into slip-ons at the youth hostel. It was bad form to sit down to take off your shoes.

“Father, I have the honor to introduce Ms. Kaitlin Garroway.”

Kaitlin bowed low. “Konbanwa, Daijin-sama,” she said, using the title for a government minister. “I am honored by your invitation.”

Ishiwara returned the bow. “O-kyaku-sama, you are welcome to our house.”

Honored guest.

“Mother, Ms. Kaitlin Garroway.”

Bows and greetings were exchanged again, and the process was repeated with Yukio’s brother, Shigeru. Mrs. Ishiwara complimented Kaitlin’s command of Nihongo, and Kaitlin politely disagreed. She knew her Japanese was flawless, but it would be rude to acknowledge such praise directly.

Kaitlin then bowed again to Yukio’s parents and held out the package she had brought, resulting in still more bows and polite words. They would not open it in her presence, of course, so she would not be able to see their response, but with the Japanese simply the fact of a beautifully wrapped gift was more important than the gift itself. She wondered nervously whether she should have stayed with the gift she had originally bought for the Ishiwaras. Two weeks before, she had purchased a framed vidclip of a view of Pittsburgh from Mount Washington. During the course of the ten-second loop, the fountain at the Point sprayed into the air, birds flew past, and a tourist boat emerged from under the Fort Pitt Bridge. She and Yukio had taken a trip once on just such a boat. She knew that a gift from a foreigner that was representative of the foreigner’s hometown was usually acceptable, and this had the added benefit of depicting the city where their son had been living for the past ten months.

But as she was walking through the Kansai Terminal, she’d noticed a shop selling models, beautifully detailed miniatures of various ships, aircraft, and spaceships. While Yukio was getting their bags, she slipped back, under the pretext of visiting the O’tearai, the honorable hand-washing place, to take a closer look. As she’d hoped, the shop sold completed models as well as model kits, and one of the models on display was a beautifully painted Inaduma fighter, complete with booster—the very spacecraft that Yukio flew in. She’d bought it on the spot, and that was the gift she’d had specially wrapped that afternoon, while the framed vidclip languished in her room at the youth hostel.

What was causing her misgivings now was the fact that the twelve-inch model was very expensive.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t afford it. For all she’d teased Yukio about his being a rich kid, she was not poor herself, and she had enough money in her savings to handle a few special purchases. No, the difficulty was that giving an expensive gift created an obligation to reciprocate equally. She felt that the gift was well matched by the honor of being invited to the Ishiwara home. The question was, would the Ishiwaras feel that way? She might never know.

The four of them walked down the hall to a room with a tatami-covered floor, so everyone removed their slippers before stepping onto the reed mats. Three times she was offered the seat of honor near the beauty alcove, the toko-no-ma, and three times she declined. The fourth time she knelt on the tatami. After a similar process of offers, polite refusals, and renewed offers, she shifted to a floor cushion, a za-buton.

As they’d walked down the hall, Kaitlin had noticed a room with a carpet and Western-style furniture, indicating that the Ishiwaras were used to entertaining foreign visitors. The fact that they were treating her as a Japanese guest instead—taking her to the Japanese living room rather than the Western-style one, continuing to speak Nihongo rather than switching to English—was an honor…and a test. So far she’d been doing all right. The evening was young, though. She rarely got examination jitters, but she’d never had an exam on which so much depended.

Glancing at Yukio, she wondered what he thought of her performance. He had certainly come to life since arriving at his home. He was smiling, laughing, teasing Shigeru. This, she realized, was his world; this was where he belonged. As he glanced around, his eyes met hers and his smile faded. So. He too was wondering if she could ever belong here. Being an honored guest was one thing.

Being accepted as a member of the family was something completely different.

Slowly the evening wore on. After about an hour, they all moved to another room, which seemed identical to the first, with the addition of a low table in the middle of the tatami-covered floor. Here several hours of dinner were served by servants who were constantly refilling her bowls. The food was magnificently prepared, a feast for the eye as well as for the palate. Gradually she relaxed, telling herself to simply enjoy the experience.

“O-kyaku-sama,” Shigeru said during a pause in the eating. “Toshi has told us that your honored father was going to Mars.”

Kaitlin looked at the youngster and smiled at the eagerness in his voice. Yukio—Toshi, as his family seemed to call him—had told her that Shigeru was sixteen and just as space-happy as his brother.

“Hai, Shigeru-san,” she said. “The cycler arrived in Mars orbit last week, and the shuttle lander ferried them down to Cydonia. I’m afraid my father is not as thrilled at being on the surface of the red planet as you or I would be. He prefers his sand with an ocean nearby. One that’s not half a million years old.”

“Both my sons feel strongly,” Ishiwara said, “that our future is in space.”

“And you feel differently, Daijin-sama?” she asked.

Ishiwara put his chopsticks down carefully on the hashi-oki and took a sip of o-cha before replying. “I would be more interested, Honored Guest, in your opinion. Both because you are an American and because of your connection with Mars.”

“I do not know that my opinion would be worth anything, Respected Minister, but I must agree with your sons. And for two reasons. However long it takes to uncover what is buried under the sands of Cydonia, it could change…everything. Whether it is new technology that we are able to make use of, or simply the knowledge that we are not alone in the universe, it will transform life on this planet.”

“You are…most persuasive. And what is the second reason?”

“A corollary of the first. The fact that the Ancients were there means that we are not alone. It means that there are others out there. If we stay put, nice and safe here within our solar system, well, then they might find us. The encounter might be…quite a shock. But if we are the explorers, if we go out and seek them, then…Well, I can’t say we’ll necessarily be ready for whatever we’ll find, but surely it is better to be the seeker than the sought. In history it is the exploring nations that have grown, have developed, whether that exploration has been physical or intellectual. There are no more physical frontiers on this planet. For that…we have to reach out into space.”

“Japan has tried isolation before, Father,” Yukio said. “After the battle of Sekigahara we tried to wall ourselves off from the rest of the world, believing that if we continued to ignore them, they would politely continue to ignore us.”

“It didn’t work, did it, Father?” Shigeru asked.

“You are correct, Shi-chan, it did not. The world will not leave us alone, much as we may wish it. Many of my countrymen proclaim that everything that Japan needs can be found within Japan. That has not been true for a very long time, and it is becoming less true every day.”

“We need to expand into space,” Shigeru said. “And I plan to be a part of it. Wait and see. Ten years from now I’ll be on Mars.”

Yukio laughed. “And I’ll be there to welcome you!”

At the end of the meal, Ishiwara called for the limousine to take Kaitlin back to the youth hostel. Yukio accompanied her, but even with the glass up between them and the driver, his speech was polite and formal. He made a point of not sitting right next to her, which frustrated her even more. She was well aware that custom frowned on public displays of affection, but she hadn’t quite realized that Yukio would be unwilling even to hold hands with her.

He did bring up the subject of where they might go during the next few days. Perhaps things would be better once they got away from Kyoto and the shadow of his father. At least she hoped so.

Because otherwise, it was going to be a very long and less-than-relaxing vacation.

FRIDAY, 18 MAY: 1810 HOURS GMT

Arlington National Cemetery

Arlington, Virginia

1410 hours EDT

Tombstones stood in rank upon gleaming rank on the eastern face of the hill, a seemingly endless forest of grave markers spreading in precisely ordered formation across the tree-shaded slopes of Arlington National Cemetery. At the top of the hill, half-hidden behind ancient, spreading oaks, the white-pillared expanse of the Custis-Lee Mansion brooded over the tableau on the hill below as it had since the American Civil War. It was said that the US government had originally buried Union dead practically on the doorstep of the mansion in order to discourage the Lees from ever returning to this place. Whatever the original reason, the nearly two centuries of fallen American heroes interred here had hallowed this ground.

Opposite, across the gray waters of the Potomac, the city of Washington, DC, shimmered beneath the early-afternoon sun. In the distance, lonely thunder rolled…a SCRAMjet liner on final approach to Washington National, a few miles to the south.

General Montgomery Warhurst stood at attention at the front of a small crowd of mourners, which included as many Marines as it did civilians. Janet, Ted’s widow, stood on his left, with twelve-year-old Jeff at her side. Stephanie, the general’s wife, was on his right. Neither woman was crying, though their eyes were red. Jeff looked solemn; Warhurst wondered if he’d connected yet with what had happened.

Hell, he thought bitterly. Have you? Before him, a few feet away, the casket of his son rested above the open grave.

Chaplain Connell had completed his remarks and invocation.

“Comp’ny…ten-hut!” Warhurst and the other military personnel not in formation raised their hands in salute. A short distance up the hill, seven Marines in Class-As snapped to present arms, then in a single, smoothly oiled motion, brought rifles to shoulders, aiming out over the city.

“Ready…fire!” Volleyed gunfire barked, the noise sharp in the still spring air.

In ancient times, Warhurst thought, volleys were fired to scare off evil spirits emerging from the hearts of the dead. But there was no evil here, not in Ted’s heart, not in the dead he was resting with. There was only sorrow, and a kind of bittersweet clutching for meaning amid words that threatened to lose all meaning.

Honor. Glory. Duty….

“Ready…fire!”

A second volley exploded. Birds, startled, rose from nearby trees.

“Ready…fire!”

Warhurst’s eyes were burning.

As the echoes of the third volley died away, a lone Marine raised a bugle to his lips and began playing the mournful dirge of taps. Two more Marines—Sergeant Gary Bledsoe and Lieutenant Carmen Fuentes, both part of the honor detachment—lifted the American flag from the casket and began folding it between them, corner over corner, fly to hoist, reducing it to a thick, white-starred, blue triangle with no red showing.

Taps wavered to its lump-throated conclusion.

Warhurst dropped his salute, the sound joining the sharp crack of other arms snapping to sides. Holding the folded flag before her, Fuentes pivoted ninety degrees, took two steps, pivoted again, the double right angle bringing her squarely in front of Colonel Brad Mackley, Ted’s commanding officer. Crisp and correct, Mackley accepted the flag, did a sharp about-face, then paced off the four steps that brought him up to the crowd, directly in front of Janet.

“On behalf of a grateful nation and a proud Marine Corps,” Mackley said quietly, “I present this flag to you in recognition of your husband’s years of honorable and faithful service, and his sacrifice for this nation.”

Mackley handed Janet the flag, then saluted her. “Port…harms!” a voice rasped out. “Order…harms! Detail…dis-missed!”

The crowd began breaking up, some of them wandering back toward the shady curve of Halsey Drive, others standing in small groups, talking. Several came up, saluted him, and said…something. He never heard the words. He wanted to say something himself to Janet and Jeff…but when he turned, he saw that Stephanie had led them away, her arm around Janet’s shoulders. He felt…alone. And empty.

Warhurst closed his stinging eyes. You bring a son into the world, raise him, educate him, love him, grieve with him, rejoice with him. You watch him choose your own branch of the service, graduate from Annapolis, go on to his first command, be chosen for the honor of embassy duty. You see him get married, see him begin a family of his own.

And at the end, there was nothing to show for it all but a folded flag.

And the memories.

Warhurst drew a ragged breath. For a moment, he could have hated the tradition, the parade-ground finery, the solemn grandeur and the emotion-wringing symbolism. Ted had died in a fucking incident in a country that Warhurst didn’t give a damn for, an incident, not even a real war. According to the latest netnews downloads, Mexico was charging that American Marines had fired on civilians, precipitating the regrettable attack by Army forces on the American embassy. Pundits, politicians, and bureaucrats would be arguing over the blame for months to come, but nothing had been settled.

What was it all for? What was the use? Damn it, his son was dead….

The Marine Corps. The term “marine,” of course, had its roots in seafaring tradition…a soldier who fought at sea. Since the founding of the Corps in November of 1775, though, the term had become synonymous with a very special elite, a force-in-readiness, a unit ready and able to fight anywhere at short notice.

Everywhere. On distant coral atolls. In disease-festering swamps. Now, possibly, thanks to him, even the surface of another world.

Or the roof of an embattled embassy in Mexico City, in an incident….

He drew another breath…and another, willing the tears to recede. He would not give in to self-pity. There was too much at stake.

Ritual. Tradition. His son had died in the best traditions of the service.

The Marine Corps would continue.

He would continue.

Somehow….