Читать книгу The Complete Heritage Trilogy: Semper Mars, Luna Marine, Europa Strike - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 23

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 of average, however. Given the fact that they faced unpredictably rough terrain and the likelihood of things breaking down or simply taking longer than expected, he figured they would be lucky if they managed something on the order of ten to twelve days instead, and a much longer time was distinctly possible. Water was going to be a headache, with food and air nearly as bad. They were carrying as much extra water as could be held in a pair of large, pressurized drums, plus enough readymeal packets to last twenty-eight people for twenty days. The air re-circulators both in the cat’s cabin and in their suit PLSS backpacks would extend their breathing time, but they would need occasional recharges of liquid oxygen and nitrogen to make up for the unavoidable loss each time an airlock was opened or a helmet was removed. Garroway’s best back-of-the-envelope calculation said…twenty to twenty-five days, depending on their exertion. If they didn’t make it in that time…well, he could always call for help. That meant surrender, however, an option he was not willing to consider.

Not yet.

During the drive out from Heinlein Station, Garroway, King, and Knox had worked out a rotation schedule for the twelve people outside. Each night after they stopped, every person in the party would spend a two-hour security watch outside, the ones outside exchanging with the ones inside. It looked like no one was going to be getting much sleep on this trek, not with everyone taking a turn freezing in the desert each night.

Garroway had insisted that both he and King take their turns outside with the rest, and he volunteered for the first watch. Alexander had volunteered himself and the other two scientists too, but Garroway had turned him down. Marine Corps armor was designed to stand up to the horrors of the NBC battlefield and, with adequate power, could handle life support for literally days on end. The three scientists were wearing lightweight EVA suits with much weaker heaters and power units, and he didn’t want to risk losing the civilians in his charge.

The Marine armor should be able to take the cold, though he had plenty of reason to question that the first night, as he stomped around outside, trying to stay warm in the pitch-black of the frigid Martian night. Class-One armor was rated at sixty below for four hours, but as far as he knew, no one had tested it yet at lower temperatures. He would have his people stick with two-hour watches, at least for now.

Garroway had a lot of time to think, he found, walking around on the desert with the other outside Marines, trying to keep his feet warm as his suit’s heaters battled the frigid cold. No one spoke. They were officially on radio silence, though everyone had cables and jacks that would let them hard-wire into one another’s intercoms if they wanted to chat. There didn’t seem to be much to talk about, however.

When his watch had ended at last, he’d limped inside, found a place to wedge in between two other Marines, and fallen into an exhausted and fitful sleep. All too soon, King had used the suit intercom to wake him, alerting him to the fact that it was an estimated one hour before daybreak and time to get moving once again.

Soon they’d gotten under way, seeking to put as much distance between themselves and Heinlein Station as they could. Garroway was certain that the UN guards must have some sort of call-in routine, and that call-in was long overdue by now.

The first rays of a golden sunrise were just beginning to touch the floor of Tithonium Chasma as the Mars cat started to climb up a sandy ridge, snaking its way higher and higher up the eastern escarpment of the chasma. During the night, Kaminski had attached his flag to the cat’s whip antenna, and it made a brave sight as it fluttered in the thin wind above the vehicle’s cab. Progress was slow, however, and at times the Marines riding outside had to dismount and carry the sled over rough spots, while the Mars cat ground forward with painful deliberation along the steepening, narrowing path.

By 0900, Mars time, they’d crested a saddle between the two cliff walls. The path cut sharply left and on up to the top of the cliff, where it emerged on flat and open terrain. That, Garroway knew, was the regular crawler route; radar beacons had been set along the path to mark it, and he could see the tracks the cat had left when it’d come this way a few days before. Directly ahead, though, the terrain turned ominous, plunging into a broken and tortured landscape of cliffs, craters, and boulders. According to the maps on board, that was the continuation of the Tithonium Chasma, a narrow and rough-bottomed canyon that ran arrow straight toward Candor.

Garroway tapped the shoulder of the crawler driver—it was Sergeant Caswell this watch—and pointed ahead. She nodded inside her helmet and, without hesitation, gunned the vehicle’s electric motors with the foot pedal and sent them lurching forward.

Bergerac would expect them to take the fast and easy route to Mars Prime, the one over smooth terrain that would get them there in a day or two. By staying in the chaotic badlands of the canyon, Garroway was taking a fearful risk of breakdown or outright catastrophe if the cat slid off a cliff or got mired in soft sand. But the canyon also gave them their best chance of evading the patrols—both on land and in the air—that Bergerac was certain to employ. Marines always avoided the regular paths and trails when they could.

Garroway thought it worth the risk, especially since his comments to Kettering and Vandemeer about staying on the main track might well reach Bergerac’s ears.

He just hoped he’d guessed right, because they were less than a full sol into the march, and it was already beginning to take on some of the overtones of hell.

SATURDAY, 2 JUNE

International Space Station

344 kilometers over the North

Pacific Ocean

0915 hours GMT

It was called the International Space Station, and the fiction of global cooperation had been maintained over the years, despite the realities of world politics. The design once planned as Space Station Freedom, and later as the International Friendship Station, had eventually become Earth’s lone orbital spaceport, a spindly, Tinkertoy collection of struts, modules, solar panels, and trusses circling the globe in low Earth orbit.

When construction had begun during the last couple of years of the previous century, the facility had been planned with a twenty-year life expectancy. By 2041, the station was definitely showing its age; it had always been easiest and cheapest simply to add new components to one end of the aging structure, rather than starting fresh with something new. The original station main module, called the Alfa Complex—leaking now through a dozen badly deteriorated pressure seals and valves—was relegated to storage of non-vacuum-sensitive supplies, while the docking facility was located at the far end, eighty meters distant. To either side, four sets of solar panels stretched like vast and glisteningly black damselfly wings spread from the slim and segmented white body.

Despite its age, the ISS remained the premier human facility in orbit, and a true spaceport. When the joint US-UN Return to the Moon mission was launched in 2012, the landers had departed from the ISS. Mars One was assembled there in sections by NASA workers berthed in a temporary hab adjoining the station, and Columbus, the first cycler, was also assembled and launched from the ISS.

There were other stations in LEO as well, Japan and the ESA both had small, independent facilities in the same orbit, some fifty kilometers ahead of the ISS, while the United States maintained a half dozen free-flying stations either in LEO or in higher, polar orbits. The International Space Station, however, was by far the largest, eighty meters long, with solar panels spanning over two hundred meters, with a permanent crew of fifteen to twenty people, and room for as many as fifteen short-term visitors.

In keeping with its designation as a spaceport, its facilities included twelve Shuttle II fuel tanks now filled with water and cryogenic oxygen and hydrogen, fuel for the cyclers, the UN moonships, and the small fleet of tugs that serviced the other space stations in the vicinity and even made weekly treks out to the L-5 facilities. Most of the other LEO stations, in fact, were positioned within a few tens of kilometers of the spaceport, partly for convenience, partly for safety. The fleet of Mark IV space tugs stationed at the ISS were valuable both for routine repair and maintenance of all the orbital structures and for evacuations, if such became necessary.

What no one seemed to have considered so far, though, was what would happen if something went wrong with the ISS.

Colonel Paul Gresham was not particularly worried about structure failure at the moment…though the ISS carried an uncomfortably long list of things on its maintenance log that needed to be checked, replaced, or repaired. He was concerned, however, about the human components under his command. The political situation was getting damned dicey.

Gresham carried the rank of colonel in the US Aerospace Force, but he was currently assigned to NASA, had been, in fact, ever since he’d been accepted for the astronaut program eight years before. He was the commander of the ISS, a position that, by international agreement, was rotated among the senior members of the current station staff on a monthly basis. It was a cumbersome system, and one that never worked entirely to perfection. Last month, the CO had been LeClerc, with the ESA contingent. Next month, the position was due to rotate to Zhang Shu, of Manchuria…unless the scuttlebutt he’d heard was accurate and Zhang got recalled early. If that happened, chances were that his Russian counterpart, Kulagin, would get the job.

It was annoying having necessary work, tight schedules, convenience, and even safety all twisted out of shape by politics, but that seemed to be the price for running a truly international space station in the uncertain political situation of the day. The irony was that most of the people on ISS duty couldn’t care less about politics. There was something about being able to float over to a nearby port and see the entire expanse of the glorious, blue-white Earth that tended to bring the people inside this little string of pressurized tin cans closer together, in a way that just wasn’t possible on the ground.

Sometimes, he thought, it would be nice to just sever all ties with Earth. “Come talk to us when you have your problems worked out….”

“ISS, I did not copy that.”

Gresham blinked. Damn, he’d been up too long—almost three months now on this tour. He was starting to talk to himself and not even realize it.

“Ah…Hermes One-zero-one, you are clear for final approach and docking, over.”

He was floating in the ISS command center, a somewhat larger than normal tin can mounted behind the station’s primary docking module. With his feet slipped into the deck restraints, his head was positioned behind the two main windows that looked out across the DM and beyond, to the Hermes shuttle silhouetted against the spectacular, cloud-brushed turquoise glory of Earth.

Hermes was a European design, a smaller version of the old US shuttle orbiter. Launched from any of several spaceports, from Guiana to Zanzibar to the South Pacific on an Energiya-III booster—the Russians still made the biggest, most powerful, and most reliable heavy-lift boosters anywhere—the Hermes was the workhorse of the European space program, shuttling personnel and cargo to and from LEO with near clockwork regularity.

“Copy, ISS,” the voice in his headset told him. “On final approach. Range four-five meters, approach one mps.”

Gresham checked his own readouts. They matched those of the Hermes pilot.

“Roger, I copy that four-five meters at one mps.”

In fact, rather more Hermes flights were made to the ISS each month than were American Shuttle II or Star Raker flights. For a time, US involvement in space had been on the decline.

Of course, the discoveries on Mars had changed all that. Hell, in another few years, if things kept going the way they were now and the international situation didn’t turn into a war, the ISS would be a true city in space, and Gresham would be thinking about retiring to the Moon or Mars.

Hermes 101 was slated to bring up a load of fresh water, half a ton of other consumables—food, mostly—and a set of replacement solar panels for main arrays worn out by the constant sandblasting that years of circling the Earth brought it.

There were also four people on board, replacements for four of the six ESA scientists currently on the station. The ISS complement currently numbered six Europeans, two Japanese, two Manchurians, three Russians, and five Americans.

“ISS, Hermes One-zero-one. Range two-one meters, closing at point four mps.”

“Copy, Hermes. Two-one meters at point four mps. Suggest you yaw one degree starboard and slow to point two mps.”

“Roger, ISS. I comply. Yaw, one degree starboard. Range now one-seven meters, closing at point two mps.”

Slowly, the blunt face of the Hermes grew larger in the window, its gently sloped hull white above and black below, a white acquisition strobe pulsing brilliantly above and behind its cockpit. Beyond, the blue Pacific was growing masked by clouds…the ocean vanishing beneath the vast, counterclockwise spiral of Hurricane Julio.

“Ten meters. Point two mps in approach.”

“You’re looking very good, Hermes. Bring her on in.”

The shuttle’s nose vanished behind the blunt projection of the station’s docking module. The shuttle’s airlock and docking tunnel were mounted vertically behind the cabin, in the cargo bay. Gresham now directed his full attention to one of the television monitors on his console, the one showing a camera angle looking straight down the docking collar, a view already blocked by the immense bulk of the Hermes orbiter. Slowly, slowly, the shuttle’s docking collar slid into view, slowed…steadied…then grew larger as the Hermes began snuggling up closer to the far larger ISS. Gresham gave the final countdown. “Three meters…two…one point five…one meter. Point five meter…contact light! I have contact. I have five green lights on the capture latches. Hermes One-zero-one, you are hard-docked. Welcome to the International Space Station!”

“Merci beaucoup, ISS. It is very good to be here.”

“I’m reading equalized pressures on both sides of the lock. You may come aboard when ready.”

“We come.”

Gresham shut down the console, removed his headset, and prepared to go and greet the newcomers. Visitors were always a high point at the station. “Hey, Colonel? Smitty.” It was Wesley Smith, one of the NASA engineers on board, calling over his coverall’s electronics. “I’m at the docking module. I, ah, think you’d—”

The transmission cut off. Puzzled, Gresham began pulling himself hand over hand across the control center. Nakamura and Taylor, the other two on duty in the control center, looked up.

“Probably a com failure. I’ll be right back.” Head-first, he dove through the deck hatch and entered the spine passageway, the main highway that extended from one end of the station to the other. Twisting left, he pulled himself with three months’ practice toward the docking module….

…grabbed a handhold and yanked himself to an abrupt and bobbing halt. Four men in black armor with light blue helmets spilled into the corridor in front of him, moving clumsily in microgravity and with the burden of the assault rifles they carried strapped to their sides. A fifth armored man appeared, propelling Smitty—who looked terribly vulnerable and scrawny in his NASA blue coveralls—ahead of him.

“Colonel Gresham?” a voice said, slightly distorted through a suit’s external speaker.

“I’m Gresham. What is the meaning of this?” Later he would realize how terribly trite that sounded, but at the time he could think of nothing more inventive.

“I am Colonel Cuvier, of the European Space Command. This facility is now under my control, and you and your people are my prisoners.”

“What the fuck do you think—”

“Please, Colonel,” the figure said, gesturing with an assault rifle. “It is war, and we have just…how is it you American military people put it? We have just taken the high ground.”

More UN troops were clambering through the hatch from the Hermes shuttle now, and Gresham’s mind leaped to the absurd image of boarders in a ship-to-ship action in the days of sail.

And there was not a damned thing he could do about it. No one on the ISS was armed, except for these armored troopers pouring through from what was supposed to have been a routine supply shuttle.

“Playing pirate, Cuvier?”

“No, Colonel. We are winning a war before it starts.”

The way he said it sent a chill down Gresham’s spine.

TUESDAY, 5 JUNE: 1615 HOURS GMT

The Pentagon

1215 hours EDT

Kaitlin Garroway was beginning at last to recover from her jet lag. It had been a week since she’d returned to the US to be greeted by a whirlwind of meetings and conferences, first with Commandant Warhurst himself, then with various military officers and civilians who’d debriefed her on what she’d seen in Japan, whom she’d talked to, and what the more cryptic portions of her father’s message might mean. She’d been as helpful as she could…and thank God that she hadn’t seen much in the way of military preparations. She didn’t want to be in the position of an American spy when the information she provided might be used against Yukio.

Fortunately, all she could tell them was that the base at Tanegashima had been closed to all outside communications, which they would have been able to verify other ways…and that the mood of the people, in particular, the people of the Ishiwara household, had not been notably belligerent or anti-American. She still found it hard to believe that Japan would join the UN crusade against the United States.

For the past week, she’d been staying at the Warhurst house out in Warrenton, Virginia, a twenty-five-minute maglev commute from the Pentagon. She’d protested that he didn’t need to do that, that she could take a hotel or even return to Pittsburgh, but Warhurst had insisted.

She liked the Warhursts. She had the feeling that they were struggling to pull their lives together after the tragedy that had just overwhelmed them. Stephanie, Warhurst’s wife, went out of her way to make Kaitlin feel at home. Over the course of the week, she found herself growing closer both to Stephanie and to Janet, their daughter-in-law, who was also staying in Warrenton, and even young Jeff was glad to have found a new chess partner. The Warhursts’ sincere welcome warmed her, all the more once she became aware of the grief they all suffered. She’d known that an American had been killed during the embassy takeover in Mexico City…but not that he’d been the son of the commandant of the Marine Corps.

Montgomery Warhurst seemed to be carrying the loss well, though he did wear an air of quiet sorrow. Maybe that was why she’d finally agreed to stay in Warrenton for a while; she found it hard to refuse anyone who was hurting so. In any case, the commandant seemed to feel that she could yet be useful in communicating with her father, and if there was any chance at all of finding out what was going on on Mars, she was determined to grab it.

After a week, though, she’d begun wondering when she could get back to Pittsburgh. Not that it was urgent—her job didn’t start for another month—but she was beginning to feel like a fifth wheel at the Warrenton place. She was surprised, then, when Warhurst called her early one morning and asked her to meet him at the Pentagon…for lunch.

All of her security clearances had been handled the week before. An Army lieutenant met her at the maglev station in the basement of the “five-sided squirrel cage,” as her father liked to call the place, and escorted her to the office of the commandant. A Marine major received them in Warhurst’s outer office.

“Kaitlin Garroway for the commandant,” the lieutenant said, saluting.

“Very good, Lieutenant,” the major replied—not saluting because Marines did not salute uncovered indoors. “Good afternoon, Ms. Garroway. Please be seated for a moment. The commandant is anxious to see you.”

She ignored the hard seats he indicated and remained standing, while he touched a PAD screen on his desk. In less than twenty seconds, a door opened and General Warhurst strode out. Automatically, she stood at attention, sternly suppressing an urge to salute this man who commanded respect not because of what he did, but just because of who he was.

“Kaitlin,” he said warmly, grasping her hand. “I’m glad you managed to slip past those bastards downstairs this time.”

He was referring to the Intel people who’d grilled her last week. His irreverence drew a reluctant grin from her. “It hasn’t been too bad, sir,” she admitted.

“Good, good.” He led her into his office before saying any more. “Well, the worst of it should be over now,” he said as he waved her toward one of two comfortable-looking chairs in front of his desk. “I just heard from Brentlow. Intel’s finally decided that you’re not a spy for the Japanese after all.”

She took a deep breath and expelled it forcibly. “I was wondering, sir. Some of them were getting, well, pretty intense.”

“Hmm.” He sounded distracted.

“Is something the matter, sir?”

“Well, it’s not good. You know about the ISS, of course.”

She nodded. Even if she hadn’t been a newshound, she couldn’t have avoided learning about the UN’s takeover of the ISS. Jeff had been talking about little else since Saturday, that and what was happening on Mars.

“In a way, the UN action was good,” he said. “It verified that what your dad told us was true, which might get some of the fence-sitters around here off their asses and off to work. Anyway, at 0225 hours this morning, our time, there was a launch from Guiana Space Center. Thirty-one minutes later, there was a SCRAMjet launch from San Marco Equatorial. Both of them rendezvoused with the ISS a few hours later.”

“Two SCRAMjets? What…oh!” Her eyes widened. “They’re getting ready to meet the next incoming cycler!”

“No.” He shook his head. “We thought so too, at first. But now we believe that the first launch was a Mars Direct.”

Kaitlin knew a little about Mars Direct flights. The first three manned Mars missions had used the technique, in the years before the first cycler had been deployed.

“We’re fairly certain that the new ship is a modified Faucon 1B, with a Proton booster second stage. It appears to be refueling at the ISS now. When fueling is complete, it will be able to launch for Mars on a trajectory that will get it there in about five months.”

“And the SCRAMjet was carrying more troops?”

He nodded. “Almost certainly. Intelligence guesses another thirty UN troops, probably Foreign Legion from the Second Demibrigade. The same unit that already has a detachment on Mars.”

“Shit!” She looked up, then blushed at her unguarded expletive. “Ah…excuse me, sir.”

“S’all right. I feel the same way. And, of course, with the ISS in UN hands, even if your dad’s people win through on Mars, we’re not going to be able to bring them back.”

The realization struck Kaitlin like a punch to the stomach. She’d forgotten. All outbound interplanetary insertions used the fuel stored at the ISS spaceport to top off tanks drained dry by their struggle up the side of the planet’s fearsome gravity well. That must have been the reason the UN had captured the space station in the first place…so that they could be sure of launching their Faucon. For the same reason, the ISS maintained the fleet of tugs and high-delta-v transports that could rendezvous with incoming cyclers and transfer their passengers to a shuttle bound for Earth.

If the ISS was controlled by the UN, any cycler returning from Mars would depend on the UN’s good graces to rendezvous with them and effect the transfer to Earth orbit.

A cold anger blazed in Kaitlin. “So we’re just…abandoning them? Sir?”

The hint of a smile touched the corners of Warhurst’s mouth. “Allow me to rephrase that. As long as the UN forces retain control of the ISS, we won’t be able to bring our boys home from Mars.”

“Ah.” She wondered what unit would have the honor of recapturing the station. It was almost enough to make her want to be a Marine herself. She sat up a little straighter in her chair.

Warhurst appeared to be thinking something over. His brow was furrowed, and there was a hard set to his mouth. “We have a Marine unit going into training tomorrow at Vandenberg, for a possible strike against the ISS.” He gave her a sharp look. “That is classified, you know. In fact, I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Uh…sure.” She was confused. So why had he told her? She knew that Warhurst had an iron control when it came to revealing or concealing anything. His self-control in regard to his dead son was proof enough of that. She could not believe that it had just been a slip….

“In any case,” he continued, as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, “I’m afraid that there’s not a damned thing we can do to help your dad on Mars. Especially with the space station in UN hands. But there may be something we can do here. To make sure he can get back. And, possibly even more important, to make sure he knows the score.”

“Have you been able to establish contact with him yet?” Kaitlin asked. She’d been requested—ordered might have been the better word—not to use her backdoor communications route until the political situation was clearer. She didn’t like it; her question was a polite way of reminding Warhurst that she wanted to talk to her father…while at the same time she wanted to be careful not to get in the Pentagon’s way.

He shook his head. “No. And that brings me, going around Robin Hood’s barn, to what I really wanted to see you about. You told me that your father was assuming that regular e-mail would not be a secure method of reaching him, and I’m inclined to agree with his assumption. The bad guys would be stupid not to safeguard those channels. But you also told me that the two of you had an alternate means of communication to fall back on.”

“Yes, through a newsgroup that we both like a lot. I can post a message there, and Dad could just search for messages from me. They can’t shut down Usenet, and they wouldn’t be able to check all the postings.”

“From your study at CMU, Kaitlin, I assume you would know about these things. Is there any way they could search for your user name in the Usenet postings?”

She grinned. “Even if they knew which of something like eighty thousand newsgroups to search, they wouldn’t find me. I’d use my global-dot-net account, not my CMU one. That user ID is ‘chicako,’ not ‘garroway.’”

Warhurst didn’t look as pleased to hear that there was a secure way to communicate with the Marines on Mars as she’d expected. Instead he frowned, tapping his fingers rhythmically on a lone sheet of paper on the top of his desk. “I would like to be able to use that channel, Kaitlin. I would like to tell your father that we’re pulling for him, even if we can’t do anything substantial right now. I even have the letter written.” He stopped his drumming and laid his index finger on the paper. “Right here.”

“No problem, sir. I can—”

“I’m afraid there is a problem. I’ve been forbidden to communicate with your father.”

That statement hit Kaitlin even harder than the earlier one about the ISS, but she remained calm. By now she knew that Warhurst said nothing without a purpose…and that sometimes he intended to convey something different from the literal meaning of his words. “May I ask why, sir?”

The general sighed. “The feeling is that the president may need negotiating room. How the hell we’re supposed to negotiate with the bastards, I don’t know, but that’s the idea. And the upshot of it is I can’t use that channel of yours to communicate with your father. Even though I’ve got the message all written, ready and waiting to go.”

He stood up and started to walk around his desk. “Well, I guess that’s it then. So. How about lunch?” Without waiting for an answer, he added, “I’ll tell Major Garth to make reservations for us at the Szechuan Garden.” And with that he walked out of the office, closing the door behind him.

Kaitlin grinned. He didn’t need to talk to the major in person to tell him to comm a restaurant. He just wanted to leave the room for a minute. To leave her alone…with the letter.

As she reached over to the desk and picked up the letter, she felt a peculiar twinge, as though she were cheating on an exam back in grade school. She almost laughed out loud.

This time the teacher was ordering her to cheat…because the Marines take care of their own.