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SUNDAY, 27 MAY: 1220 HOURS GMT

Marine Barracks

Cydonia Base, Mars

Sol 5636: soltime +34 minutes

MMT

Most of the Marines in the barracks area were asleep. The sole exception was Sergeant Randolph Gardner, First Squad, Second Section, who had the ten-to-two fire and security watch that night. He heard footsteps in the passageway, heard the hiss and thump of the pressure door opening, and centered himself on the hatch to give the challenge. He assumed, of course, that it would be Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky making the late rounds…or even Colonel Lloyd, checking to make certain that all of the watch standers were on their toes. He was not prepared for what he saw when the hatch swung open—the business end of an H&K pointed straight at his face.

“Do not give the alarm,” the man at the far end of the rifle told him in thick, German-accented English. “Do not speak. Give me your weapon.”

Gardner complied. His ATAR wouldn’t have done him any good in any case; it was unloaded, as specified by regulations. The platoon’s alert status was still green, which meant full weapons-safety protocols were in effect. He wasn’t even wearing armor, save for the kinevlar vest he had on over his greens.

“Down on the floor!” the man said, speaking quietly but with a deadly will behind the words. “Hands behind your head!”

Gardner hit the deck, fingers interlaced behind his head as one of the intruders stood above him, well clear of any attempted heroics, a leg-sweep or a scissors. Other UN troops filed quietly into the barracks, moving almost silently, with only the occasional click of plastic on armor to warn of their coming. They fanned out through the barracks, taking key positions. Then, when all were in position, the man who’d first addressed him hit the light control panel.

The barracks lights came on, harsh and uncompromising. “Hey, what is this?” a male voice called.

“What the freakin’—”

A tall, severe-looking man in UN blues entered the barracks. “Fall in!” the man snapped. “All of you! At attention!”

Habit dragged a half dozen Marines out of their racks and up to the red tape line marked out on the deck…but others, realizing that what was happening was way outside of standard procedures, protested. “Who the fuck are you?” Sergeant Jacob demanded, standing in green T-shirt and white boxer shorts, hands on his hips. “And what the fuck are you doing in here?”

“Shut up and move!” the German barked. One of the UN soldiers rammed the muzzle of his short-barreled bullpup rifle against Jacob’s side, propelling him toward Gardner’s position. More soldiers emerged from the hab section partitioned off for the women Marines, grinning as they led them to join the other Marines. Ostrowsky, barefoot and wearing only a T-shirt and panties, was furious. “What the fucking hell is this all about?”

“I am Sergeant Ernst Stenke, of the Second Demibrigade, First Regiment of the Legion Étranger,” he announced, “currently in the service of the United Nations Enforcement Arm. And for the moment, at least, you are all my prisoners.”

A crash sounded from the far end of the barracks. It was taking three UN soldiers to subdue Colonel Lloyd, who’d been sleeping in the partitioned cubicle reserved for the Marine officers. No, four. Lloyd had left another one on the deck, clutching his left knee in what Gardner sincerely hoped was excruciating pain. Two of the UN troops had just slammed Lloyd facedown against a garbage can—the cause of all of the racket—while the third came up behind him, rifle raised above his head.

Gardner winced as the rifle descended sharply, butt down, connecting with a sickening crack against the back of Lloyd’s skull.

“Anyone who resists,” the sergeant continued, as they dragged Lloyd up the center aisle of the barracks, “or who does not carry out my orders precisely, will be subdued, then dragged. We do not wish to harm any of you, but you will do as we say!”

Gardner was finally allowed to sit up as the Marines were carefully counted and checked for weapons. There were twenty-three Marines in the barracks in all, counting Gardner and the unconscious Lloyd. Swiftly, efficiently, they were allowed to dress in twos or threes, with a guard standing by to check their greens and boots for hidden weapons, and then herded through the airtight hatches to the recreation area. There, they were deposited in the middle of the floor, seated with their hands up and their fingers locked behind their heads, all save Doc Casey, who was allowed to look after Lloyd.

Within a few minutes more, Bergerac, the UN commanding officer, led three more men into the room from the comm shack—Hayes and the major, along with one of the scientists who’d been at Cydonia when the Marines had arrived. During the next ten minutes, more UN troops brought in the rest of the American and Russian personnel from the station, most looking groggy and sleep-disheveled as they continued to pull on their clothing. There was confusion enough in their noisy entrance that several of the Marines took the chance to talk among themselves in quiet murmurs.

“What’dya think, Randy?” Corporal Theodore Miller, a young kid from Ohio in Gardner’s squad sitting to his left, whispered. “Looks like some kinda military coup.”

“Shut your trap,” Sergeant Ostrowsky growled, her voice just loud enough to reach the two Marines. She was sitting to Gardner’s right, and she was still furious. “We’ve got a war on our hands, here.”

“Shit, Sarge. What makes you say that?”

“Stands to reason, doesn’t it? You don’t think they’d pull a dumb-ass stunt like this unless they had the full backing of the UN, do you? Oh, shit! They got Kaminski.”

A pair of armored Foreign Legion troops were bringing Frank Kaminski into the room at gunpoint. That wasn’t good. If the guys on duty outside had escaped the UN net, maybe they could’ve helped somehow. Groller’s absence was worrying and a little hopeful. Was the other EVA security watch dead, or had he managed to get away?

And if he’d escaped, what could he do?

“Be quiet, all of you, if you please,” Bergerac said, addressing the entire room. “By order of the United Nations Military Command and the UN World Cultural Bureau, I am assuming direct military control of this facility—”

There was an explosion of noise from the Marines, and from the scientists as well, people shouting, people starting to rise to their feet despite the threatening guards stationed close by.

“Quiet! Quiet!” He turned and rasped something to the troops near him, and a dozen rifle muzzles raised in unison, pointed at the Marines. For a panic-ragged moment, Gardner thought that one or another of the other troops was going to fire warning shots into the overhead…not a good idea with the next best thing to hard vacuum outside.

“You UNdies don’t have any jurisdiction here!” Donatelli shouted above the commotion, using the popular Corps slang for UN troops or bureaucrats.

“I beg to differ. Now, all of you, sit down, and I will explain your position!”

“I’ll show you some positions,” Sergeant Jacob growled nearby, but, slowly, order was restored in the room.

“Now then,” Bergerac continued, speaking as though nothing had happened, and despite the UN troops who still held their rifles aimed at the Marines like a firing squad. “As I said, we are assuming military control of this facility. The politics of this decision do not really concern any of you…except insofar as this obviously changes the nature of your mission here. We do not have enough personnel to watch over you all the time, and so we are taking you to another…place, where—”

He had to stop again as shouts, curses, and questions broke once more from the Americans before him.

“We will take you to a place where it will be easier to guard you. You will be our guests at this place for another three months, when the cycler Champlain arrives to take you all back to Earth.”

Gardner let out the breath he’d been holding then. For a moment, he’d thought the Americans were all to be killed. Then he decided that it was premature to relax. The SS guards had told their prisoners in the death camps that they were being taken to the showers.

“We sincerely regret the necessity of this action, but be assured that we will carry out our program here, and you will not be allowed to stand in our way.

“You will be led in groups of three back to the common room,” Bergerac continued, “where you will find your EVA armor already laid out. I assure you, all suits will have been carefully checked for weapons or other contraband. You will find your suits and you will put them on. There will be no talking. Any attempt at escape will be dealt with severely. Am I understood?”

This time, there were no protests, and Bergerac seemed to accept this as assent. “Very good,” he said. He pointed. “You three! Let’s go!”

Soldiers led Donatelli, Marchewka, and Hauser from the room, and at that moment, Gardner wondered if he would ever see any of them again.

1828 HOURS GMT

Mars Transport Shuttle

Cydonia Base, Mars

0605 hours MMT

The flight out of Cydonia was brutal, but mercifully short. The transport was so crowded with Marines—all of them encumbered in their Class-One armor—that there was no room to move or even shift to get into a more comfortable position. “Y’know,” somebody said over the general comm channel, “if they wanted to get rid of all of us in a convenient accident—”

“Ruhe!” another voice barked. “Be quiet, all of you! No talking!”

The pilot—Garroway didn’t know if it was one of the UN troops or a NASA pilot working at gunpoint—piled on the Gs for the liftoff from Cydonia…and the acceleration continued for a long time, long enough to convince Garroway that they were making a high-speed run to someplace rather than the usual slower, fuel-conserving suborbital hop.

He was sitting close enough to one of the shuttle’s small observation ports that he could see a blur of ocher landscape below as they hurtled past. It had taken most of the rest of the night to secure the American prisoners, get them suited up, and to lead them three at a time out to the shuttle on its launchpad. The sun was just coming up, the light casting long fingers of black shadow from each rock or boulder or irregular fold of the chaotic terrain, but they were moving too quickly, and at too low an altitude, for him to tell where they were. At a guess, judging from the direction the shadows were pointing, they were heading more or less southwest, which made a certain amount of sense. There were only two major bases on Mars, Cydonia and Candor Chasma at the equator; they must be heading back for Candor Station.

The question, of course, was what was going to happen to them when they arrived.

He felt a growing discomfort in the small of his back, where the wrist-top he’d hidden there was trapped, pinched between him and the inside of his armor. They’d searched him again before he’d suited up, but he’d palmed the microcomputer when they frisked him, hiding it under hands clasped behind his head as they patted him down. By pretending to adjust his trousers before climbing into his armor, he’d managed to hide it again in his waistband. He wondered just how much stress the device could take, though, as several Gs slammed him back into the thinly padded seat.

Acceleration cut off, and for a long time after that they were in free fall, save for occasional violent thumps and kicks when the pilot fired steering jets to maintain attitude or to adjust their course. Their captors had made certain that all of the Marines were strapped down, and two of them sat now at the forward end of the compartment, as uncomfortable as any of the Americans as they kept an eye on their prisoners.

Garroway was wedged in between two Marines, with a third sitting half on top of him and half on the Marine to his right. In their armor, they were anonymous…but he could still recognize voices occasionally over the comm channel…mingled occasionally with the harsh, retching sounds of people being sick in their helmets.

The shuttle’s cargo hold was designed to hold thirty passengers in something like relative comfort, and it could manage another ten, perhaps, with some crowding. That, however, assumed that the passengers weren’t wearing bulky Class-Ones…or EVA suits. Most of the scientists, Garroway noticed, had been kept at Cydonia, but five had been packed into Mars surface suits and loaded aboard the shuttle with the Marines…the ones who’d discovered those Homo erectus corpses two days before. They’d nearly had to drag Alexander physically from the hab and chuck him into the lobber.

There were twenty-five Marines on board—Colonel Lloyd and Private Groller, both wounded, had been left at Cydonia under the care of Dr. Penkov, the Russian doctor at the base. That put a total of thirty prisoners aboard the shuttle, and the crowding was nightmarish with them all wearing armor or surface EVA suits.

After a small eternity of free fall, they were jarred by a sharp, dizzying swoop as the shuttle flipped end for end, and then acceleration hammered at them again when the main drive fired. The world tilted sickeningly, and then was obscured by swirling ocher dust as the craft settled in for a cushioned landing on its four hydraulic jacks.

They were down.

“Gentlemen, and ladies, we have arrived at your new home,” Bergerac told them, climbing down the narrow ladder from the pilot’s compartment. Had he flown the ship himself, Garroway wondered? No, he could see a NASA pilot behind him, seated at the console. The UN colonel must have been riding strapped to the bridge jumpseat.

With two UN guards urging them to move, the Marines and scientists clambered awkwardly down the center passageway ladder and into the shuttle’s airlock bay. Since everyone had been suited up for the flight, the shuttle was already open to the Martian atmosphere. The loading ramp was down; in moments, Garroway stood with the others on the cold, still, and nearly airless desert.

This was not Candor Chasma.

That fact was beginning to register with the others as well. He heard several low-murmured comments, and several Marines exchanged words by touching their helmets together for a quick, sound-inducted comment or two.

Garroway had not been to Mars Prime, of course, but he’d read about the place often enough during the cycler flight out, and he’d seen plenty of video transmissions downloaded off the Spacenet. Mars Prime, the first permanent settlement on the red planet, lay close to the site of the first manned landing on the floor of Candor Chasma, one of the larger canyons in the vast and labyrinthine complex of canyons known as Valles Marineris, the Valley of the Mariner Spacecraft. It consisted of some fifteen hab modules, a large, permanent landing strip, and water-drilling, fuel-production, and storage facilities even larger and more extensive than those at Cydonia. Compared to Mars Prime, the base at Cydonia was a small and somewhat primitive frontier outpost.

This base was smaller still. Located on a valley floor—Garroway could see the distant red cliffs, mostly still lost in shadow but capped by gleaming gold, the reflected light of the rising sun—it was a small outstation of some kind, consisting of a single hab partly covered over by sand and piles of bulldozed regolith. A Mars cat was parked nearby, but Garroway could see no drilling or fuel-production facilities, no storage structures, nothing, in fact, other than the hab, the cat, and the grounded shuttle.

Lieutenant Russel King, standing nearby, turned to him. “So what do we do now, Major?”

Garroway blinked at the platoon leader, unable for a moment to reply. Until that moment, he’d not thought about the command structure at all. But with Colonel Lloyd wounded and left at Cydonia, he was the senior officer of a section of twenty-four US Marines, plus five scientists.

It was not a responsibility that Garroway had ever imagined having to assume.

The other Marines were talking among themselves, and with growing agitation. “What the fuck?” one man said over the talk channel. “The bastards are just leaving us here?”

Bergerac stood at the top of the ramp. “We are not monsters,” he told them, “or barbarians. We must have full control of the Cydonian base, however, and for that we need all of you out of the way. I’m sure you all realize that we could have killed you…but instead we are leaving you here, with plenty of food, water, and a portable drilling unit for more water.”

“I think we need some things clarified, Bergerac,” Garroway said. “Are we prisoners of war?”

“Technically, of course, no state of war exists between your country and the United Nations, at least for the moment. Let us simply say that we are temporarily reassigning you to this outpost.”

“Yeah, but for how long?” a woman’s voice—Garroway thought it was Ostrowsky—called out. “You can’t just abandon us here!”

“Silence in the ranks, Marine,” Garroway rasped out. If he was in command, he would have to maintain order, starting now.

“How long,” Bergerac said, “depends entirely on how long it takes to, eh, assess Dr. Alexander’s finds at Cydonia.”

“To hide them, you mean,” Alexander called out, “or destroy them.”

“Please, Dr. Alexander,” Garroway said. He could see Alexander about twenty feet away, out of place among the armored Marines in his blue EVA suit. “Let’s hear what he has to say.”

“We are not vandals, Doctor,” Bergerac added. “But we do intend to secure what technological assets we can from the Cydonia site. For the benefit of all Mankind.”

“What the hell are you babbling about, Bergerac?” Alexander snapped back. “We haven’t been holding out on anybody!”

“Yes, we could tell,” Bergerac replied dryly. “So many papers published on the alien Ship. On the surveys. On the Builders’ technology you’ve uncovered so far. What have we learned from you since you began studying these ruins? Nothing! Some of us believe that you are deceiving the rest of the world.”

“The rest of the world, Colonel,” Garroway said quietly, hoping to forestall another riposte from Alexander, “is deceiving itself. We’ve gone out of our way to accommodate you people here.”

“Damn straight,” Alexander added. “And if you wanted better access, you could build your own Mars cyclers.”

“That is coming, Dr. Alexander, believe me. It is dangerous to leave you Americans, and your Russian friends, in sole possession of such a find, such a treasure trove as Cydonia. We will administer these treasures for the good of all, in accordance with the provisions of the RMT.”

The Revised Moon Treaty had been voted on and ratified by the UN in 2025, the same year that the Geneva UN Charter had been published, and five years after the United States had formally withdrawn from the UN. Like its predecessor, the Moon Treaty of 1979, the RMT discouraged private enterprise in space by forbidding private ownership or exploitation of any world or other body in space. Individual governments were forbidden to stake out claims—even of the fast-dwindling available satellite slots in geosynchronous orbit. The issue was one of many that had led to the American withdrawal from the UN, and the organization’s relocation to Geneva.

The United States had never been signatory to the RMT, but it looked as though the UN was determined to enforce the treaty anyway.

“As for how long you will be kept here,” Bergerac went on, “that depends on several factors outside my control. At worst, we will be forced to leave you until the next cycler flyby, which is scheduled for three months from now. With luck, however, we will have the situation…clarified sooner than that. At that time, we will arrange for your transport to Mars Prime, where you will remain until the cycler arrives.”

“He can’t do that!” someone said over the open channel.

“My God, what are we gonna do?…” That sounded like one of the scientists.

“Shoot the fuckers….” That sounded like Ostrowsky.

Garroway was painfully aware that the discipline holding the men and women of his section was dangerously close to cracking; if they lost it, they would be at the mercy of their captors…and of the utter inhospitality of the Martian desert.

“You should find the outpost hab adequate,” Bergerac continued, “if not exactly comfortable. The still is inside, and you have fuel cells enough to provide you with what power you’ll need.” He pointed. “That Mars cat has several of my men on board, never mind how many. It arrived here several hours ago to prepare the station for you, and to make certain there were no communications equipment or computers here. We cannot permit you to communicate at all with Earth, or even with other bases on the planet.

“They’re here to keep an eye on you, at least for the time being. They will stay long enough to be certain that you are settled in and need nothing. If you do find you are lacking in anything, you may ask them, and they will communicate with me. I warn you, however, to approach the Mars cat one at a time only, and with a white cloth in your hand. You will not be permitted to approach the cat closer than about twenty meters…for reasons that should be obvious to you.

“And now, I must say adieu. We will see one another again, quite soon. Be assured of that.”

Bergerac turned then and strode back into the shuttle, followed by the two guards, who backed up the ramp, their rifles still trained on the Marines.

“We can take ’em…” one voice said.

“Belay that, Marine,” Garroway growled. If those UN troops started shooting now, half of his people would be dead or swiftly dying in the cold Martian air in the space of a second or two.

Then the moment was past, the hatch slowly closing. “Come on, people,” Garroway said. “There’ll be another time. Move back before they light that torch!”

The Marines and civilians turned and jogged toward the hab, putting as much distance between themselves and the shuttle as they could. A moment later, the landscape turned brighter, and Garroway’s external mikes picked up a high-pitched, metallic shriek as the shuttle’s main drive kicked in. He turned in time to see the shuttle climbing into the black, early-morning sky on a wavering pillar of superheated methane.

And the Marines were left alone in the desert.