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WEDNESDAY, 6 JUNE: 2026 HOURS GMT

Tithonium Chasma

Sol 5646: 0155 hours MMT

Mark Garroway watched his daughter’s face on the Mars cat’s computer display with a sense of homesickness and longing sharper than anything he’d felt in his life. In that moment, he felt every one of the hundred million-plus miles between himself and his daughter and wondered if he would ever see her again.

He hated Mars. He hated the Marines.

No…not that. He couldn’t hate the Corps, not really, even though the Corps was what had separated him from Kaitlin.

Outside the cat was the blackness of the Martian night, with a dazzle of stars directly overhead but cut off on all sides by the sheer cliffs rising above the crawler. A thin, hard wind was blowing down the chasm; the outside temperature was down to ninety-five below and dropping. His watch outside was coming up in another hour, and he could barely stand the thought of having to go stomp around in the bitterly frigid sands again, constantly moving to avoid freezing to death.

Ten sols had passed since they’d left Heinlein Station…and it felt as though their journey had scarcely begun. The terrain they’d been following through the narrow chasm was impossibly rugged, a tortured badlands of sand pits and boulders, an endless succession of craters drilled rim to rim into the crumbling regolith. Scouting teams now walked ahead of the crawler searching for safe paths; as often as not, Marines on foot ended up carrying the sled, hauling it by brute force up and down the crater rims. More than once they’d had to use the cat’s winch and tow cable to drag the whole vehicle up a slippery, yielding slope that the sturdy machine could not otherwise have traversed.

This rift in the planet’s surface, Garroway kept reminding himself, was one of the little ones, and yet Arizona’s Grand Canyon could have comfortably fit inside. Its only advantage was that it lay on a nearly straight line with the Candor Chasma base, as straight as one of the mythical canals of pre-Viking, pre-Mariner Mars.

He shook away thoughts of the bleak, cold night surrounding the Mars cat and tried to concentrate on his daughter’s face. He’d been using the cat’s electronics to tap into Mars Prime’s Spacenet server every few Phobos orbits, looking in on the Usenet postings that were regularly mirrored from Earth.

Usenet had grown enormously since its beginnings in the old Internet of the late twentieth century. Some newsgroups were still little more than written postings on static electronic bulletin boards, but most had benefited from new communications hardware and protocols and expanded to allow vidpostings, downloaded segments where you could actually see the person who was talking, along with maps, graphics, vidclips, or whatever else might help the presentation. He and Kaitlin both were partial to rec.humanities.culture.japan, a newsgroup for Japanophiles from all over the world. That was why he’d suggested that newsgroup as a posting place for any return messages in reply to his first message to Earth.

If the Pentagon wanted to reply, he couldn’t expect them to drop an e-mail in his box in Candor’s server. If the UN forces on Mars were serious about cutting off all communication between Mars and Earth, they would certainly cut off the e-mail conduit; at the very least, they would set a watch program over the mailboxes set to retrieve and delete any message from Earth for any of the Marines.

He doubted that they would cut off the Usenet postings, though. There would be no particular reason to do so; at the same time, they wouldn’t be able to watch every one of the newsgroups posted onto the Spacenet. And, so far, he’d seen no indication that they were even aware of the unauthorized waking of the Phobos com relay.

Kaitlin’s posting was there, as he’d hoped, as he’d almost feared, her image frozen with a familiar, wrinkle-browed expression that mingled worry with excitement. The date, time, and post lines at the bottom left of the screen indicated that the message had been uploaded about twenty-six hours ago.

He touched the hotspot on the console that brought life to the vidimage.

“Ah…okay. This is to the guy that said he’d meet me in Japan,” she said. She seemed a bit nervous, as though she was being extra careful of what she was saying.

“I hope you’re keeping up with the Cu-Ja postings, ’cause it looks like this is the only way I’ll get to talk to you. There are a lot of folks here who want to get together with you, only there’s, ah, no way they can see their way clear to do it right now. The situation is pretty confused, as you can imagine. There’s talk about the Japanese joining the UN against the United States, and, well, the last I saw, it looked like that was going to happen. I know personally that some military bases there are on full alert. Like the one at Tanegashima.”

Tanegashima? That’s Japan’s main launch center, on a tiny island fifty miles south of the southern tip of Kyushu. An alert there meant the Japanese may be preparing to do something with their Space Defense Force, and that was not good, not good at all.

“I’ve got a picture for you here. Translate it the usual way. And, well, until we can get together again, in Japan or, or wherever…you take care of yourself, okay?” There were tears glistening in her eyes. She said the final words so quickly he almost missed them. “I love you.”

Kaitlin’s face vanished, replaced by columns of numbers. Anyone casually glancing at the page would assume it was an encoded picture or illustration of some kind, one using a private algorithm to keep the content private. In a sense, that was exactly what it was. Those columns of three were almost certainly a Beale code sequence. Garroway checked to make sure the memory clip containing Shogun was plugged in on his wrist-top, then touched a key, feeding a copy through the Beale encoder/decoder program, and sending it back to the screen as text. It took only a few seconds for the whole message to appear.

Date: 5 June 2040

Mark:

Your daughter got your message through. Smart thinking. She’s a sharp kid and obviously has a lot in common with her dad.

I wish to hell I had better news. The official word is, no communication with you at all, just in case the president needs some maneuvering room with the UN. Though we still have some optimists in Washington, we are almost certainly going to be at war with the UN within a very few days. UN armies are reported massing in both Quebec and Mexico. We’re tracking a number of French, German, and Manchurian arsenal ships off our coasts.

Mark, I also have to tell you that three days ago—2 June—UN forces seized the International Space Station. Just this morning, a UN spacecraft lifted from Kourou. We think that it’s a Mars Direct flight and that it’s carrying at least thirty more UN troops. Could be you’ll be getting company in another five months. Whatever you do, you’ll have to do it before those reinforcements reach Mars.

In any case, don’t worry about Kaitlin. I’ve asked her to stay at my place in VA. She’ll be safe there, if anywhere.

What you do on Mars is, I’m afraid, up to you and what you think you can get away with. At this point, anything you could do to put a wrench in the UN’s plans would be desirable. Future communications can be via the same method you used with Kaitlin. We need to know why the UN is so interested in Mars.

Consider this a personal weapons-free order. By the time you get to where you’re going, we very likely are going to be at war. Sorry to leave you on your own, but, then, anything more than one platoon of US Marines against the UN forces now on Mars simply wouldn’t be fair. Good luck! We’re all pulling for you.

Semper fi.

—Warhurst, Gen. USMC

Garroway blinked at the signature line. Warhurst? He’d sent his original message to Colonel Fox; he’d had no idea that it would get bumped clear up to the commandant of the Corps!

“Hey, Major?” Sergeant Ostrowsky called as she squeezed into the Marine-crowded lounge area of the cat. “You wanted me to let you know. Your watch outside.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” he said. Carefully, he made sure the decoded message was saved on his wrist-top, then began shutting down the com center.

Warhurst was right. The news wasn’t good…especially the bit about UN reinforcements. It was funny, though, that just hearing from someone back on Earth helped. He found he could face going out into the bitter cold and loneliness once again.

Or was that the result of getting to hear his daughter’s voice again? He wasn’t sure. It didn’t really matter.

He reached for his gloves and helmet and began the laborious process of sealing up his armor.

FRIDAY, 8 JUNE: 2230 HOURS GMT

Net News Network

1830 hours EDT

VOICE-OVER, WITH SPECIAL LOGO: This is a Net News Special Presentation…Collision Course, the UN Crisis. And now, from the Net News Center in Washington, DC, special reporter Carlotta Braun….

CARLOTTA BRAUN: Good evening. President Markham today responded forcefully to what he called ‘a blunt ultimatum’ by the UN General Assembly, denouncing that body for its ‘unwarranted intrusion into the internal affairs of the United States’ and its ‘high-handed and hostile actions against American assets in space.’

VIDIMAGE—PRESIDENT MARKHAM SPEAKING FROM THE WHITE HOUSE BASEMENT OFFICE:

“At 10:45 Eastern Daylight Time this morning, I asked the Congress of these United States to recognize that a state of war now exists between the United States of America and the governing body of the United Nations.

“I wish to stress that we have no quarrel with any member nation of that body. This war was forced upon us by the hostile and unreasonable demands made by the UN, by their violations of American sovereignty, and by their takeover of the International Space Station. We call upon men of courage, vision, bravery, and goodwill in all nations to help us now as we face together this corrupt tyranny that claims to be a world government but so far has proven only that it is a world disgrace….”

VIDIMAGE—A CITY SCENE SHOWING SEVERAL BUILDINGS IN RUINS, THEIR FACADES BLASTED AWAY, A GAPING CRATER IN THE STREET, AN OVERTURNED GROUND CAR. CIVILIANS AND NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS ARE DIGGING THROUGH THE RUBBLE, SEARCHING FOR SURVIVORS. THE SUBTITLE READS “ATLANTA.”

CARLOTTA BRAUN: “The UN response was immediate and dramatic. By 11:30 Eastern Time, UN cruise missiles launched from Quebec, Cuba, and Mexico were striking deep into the American heartland. An estimated two hundred missiles were fired from various launch points, and while fighters from Aerospace Force, Navy, and Marine units succeeded in downing many of them, an as yet unknown number managed to get through.”

VIDIMAGE—SEVERAL MORE CITY SHOTS IN RAPID SUCCESSION SHOW THE RESULTS OF MISSILE STRIKES IN OTHER CITIES, CROWDS OF CIVILIANS FLEEING IN THE STREETS, A PALL OF DENSE, BLACK SMOKE ABOVE DOWNTOWN CHICAGO, AND ONE QUICK VIEW OF A WINGED CRUISE MISSILE SWEEPING LOW ABOVE A CITY PARK, CAPTURED IN SHAKY FOOTAGE BY AN AMATEUR VIDCORDER OPERATOR.

CARLOTTA BRAUN: “Twenty-two major population centers have been hit so far, including Dallas, Chicago, Washington, Boston, Atlanta, and New York City. In addition, there are reports of heavy fighting at the US border, both along the Rio Grande River, in Texas, and north of Plattsburgh, New York, where elements of the Armored Armée québecois are reported to have crossed into the United States in a quick thrust south from Montreal. There are no official reports as yet, but casualties are said to be heavy.

“Government authorities stress that civilians should remain inside and off the streets. The bombardment thus far has been limited to high-explosive warheads, and authorities insist that, despite rumors to the contrary, there have been no nuclear, chemical, or biological strikes by UN forces. Damage, though widespread, is not considered serious, and there has been no reported disruption of critical services. Civilians are requested—”

NET NEWS IS EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES.

PLEASE STAND BY.

SATURDAY, 9 JUNE

Shepard Military Orbital

Platform (MOP)

1417 hours GMT

Colonel Peter Dahlgren had been a member of the US Astronaut Corps for nearly fourteen years. Before that, he’d been Aerospace Force, starting off driving F-22s and ending up as an ace test pilot working on some of the most advanced and highly secret flight development programs in the US government’s arsenal. Most of his work in the last five years had been more or less routine—if that word could ever be successfully applied to working in space. He’d served on the ISS three times, once as station commander, and he’d been slated for a US lunar mission until budgetary and political problems had canceled that program.

Six months earlier, his high security clearance had gotten him a shot at another orbital mission—a tour aboard Shepard MOP, one of the handful of independent US LEO facilities. The tour had lasted six weeks, and upon his return to Vandenberg, he’d thought he was grounded for good.

Then war clouds had begun gathering, and he found himself assigned once again to Shepard…running the station’s highly classified military payload.

Shepard Station was little more than a Shuttle II external tank fitted out with living quarters, a lab, and a docking module. It also possessed a 500 KW nuclear reactor, though this was a closely guarded secret. The real secret of Shepard, though, was the Hecate laser that filled most of the main lab compartment.

Hecate—named for the Greek deity who, among other things, was goddess of the night—was a new weapons system with a software AI developed within the past few years at the Moravec Institute in Pittsburgh. Dahlgren had needed his astronomical security classification just to learn about the new device, a High-Energy Laser, or HEL, which had been put into orbit the previous year. The idea was to deploy a laser powerful enough to knock down missiles or aircraft from orbit, and so far it had worked well in tests against both static and moving targets in the Nevada desert.

Now, however, the Hecate HEL was about to be used for the first time in combat. According to the coded message beamed to Shepard that morning, cruise missiles were still striking targets across most of the continental US and causing heavy damage. It would be impossible to use one laser in a single fast-moving station in LEO to knock down more than a scant handful of the incoming cruise missiles, but the attempt would demonstrate once and for all the system’s practicality…and the value of an idea that had been argued vehemently over for the past fifty-five years. As Shepard Station drifted southeast across the Gulf of Mexico west of Florida, Dahlgren was floating in the lab, his face pressed against the rubber-hooded repeater screen for the station’s Earth-watch telescope system. The telescope, slaved to Shepard’s powerful look-down radar, was being operated by his companion aboard the station, Major Fred Lance, USAF.

“I’ve got a target, Colonel,” Lance reported. “Matanzas launch, two minutes, twelve seconds ago. Heading three-five-eight, altitude approximately five meters.”

“Lock us on, Fred,” Dahlgren replied. The lighted display showed a dizzying sweep of water and cloud as the telescope, a relatively small device mounted on the station’s outer hull, pivoted slightly. Green crosshairs centered a moment later on a white sliver in the center of the display. He pressed a touch screen point, and the image enlarged, giving him a detailed look at the target, which the telescope was now following automatically. The craft was apparently unmarked and painted off-white, a cigar shape with squared-off ends, a tail section like a miniature jet aircraft, and short, skinny wings amidships.

“You should be centered, Colonel.”

“I’ve got him. Do we have a shot?”

“Looks clear to me. On your command….”

“Fire.”

A point on the cruise missile, hurtling along at just below the speed of sound two hundred miles below, grew suddenly and intolerably brilliant, a dazzling star so bright that Dahlgren blinked and looked away. When he looked back, the dazzle was still there, but dimmer as the telescope-camera CCD adjusted for the intensity of the light.

Lance was counting off the seconds. “Two…three…”

And then the cruise missile was gone, replaced in a literal flash by a tumbling cloud of broken debris that streaked ahead for several seconds more before impacting the surface of the water in a ragged burst of white spray.

“I have lost target, Colonel,” Lance said. “Hecate at power off.”

“Target destroyed,” Dahlgren replied. He looked up and met Lance’s eyes across the lab. “Nice shooting!”

Lance shrugged. “Hell, Colonel. Hecate did it. All I did was push the damned button….”

And that, of course, was the beauty of the thing. Dahlgren looked up at the porthole in the hull a few meters away, at the drifting glory of sea and cloud. What Hecate had just done was truly remarkable. With little direction from the two human operators aboard Shepard, the sophisticated AI software had run a down-looking radar and, from an altitude of 320 kilometers, separated a speeding cruise missile three meters long and with a wingspan of less than a meter from the return of the water less than five meters below it. It had slaved an optical CCD telescope to the radar image for use as a visual target system and kept the target locked on despite both the target’s flight north at five hundred miles per hour and the space station’s drift southeast at its orbital velocity of nearly 18,000 mph.

And finally and perhaps most remarkably, it had fired the station’s laser and held the beam dead on its tiny target for the seconds necessary to burn through the missile’s hull and destroy it. Hecate was only a half-megawatt laser, and much of that energy was lost in the turbulence of the Earth’s atmosphere below; the Hecate AI had used backscatter from the laser beam on the target to continually correct the beam’s output and aim, keeping it locked on until the target was destroyed.

“Looks like we’ve got a winner, Fred,” he said. “Find me another target before we complete this pass.”

“You got it, sir. I’ve got another launch, same site, at one minute five seconds ago, bearing three-five-two…”

Dahlgren peered again into the hooded screen, watching as the AI software lined up the next shot. Like shooting fish in a goddamn barrel.

“Shepard, Shepard, this is Cheyenne Mountain,” a voice called over his jumpsuit’s com speaker.

“This is Shepard, Colorado,” he replied. “Go.”

“Shepard, we have an orbit change for you, execution in…seven minutes. Drop what you’re doing and get set for a burn.”

“Ah…Colorado,” Dahlgren said. “We have a target ready for lock-on—”

“We copy that, Shepard, but this can’t wait. Secure your gear and stand by to copy the burn parameters. Over.”

“Roger that.” Damn! What could be so all-fired important? That cruise missile streaking north out of Cuba was going to come down someplace, and people were going to die. Shepard couldn’t intercept all of the missiles, but it could stop a bunch, each time it passed overhead. The idea was to force the bad guys to stagger their launches to times when Shepard was below the horizon, and give the air-defense boys time to regroup.

But evidently, Cheyenne Mountain had other things in mind.

Shepard MOP was not exactly a spaceship. It had all of the maneuverability of an elephant in free fall. Still, a rack of strap-on B-30 maneuvering thrusters attached to the external tank’s framework gave them the ability to change orbit within certain fairly narrow parameters, enough to pass over a particular target on the ground at a specified time. If Colorado wanted them to engage in a burn within the next few minutes, it was because they had a particular destination in mind, one with a fairly narrow access window. That argued that they were trying to manage an orbital rendezvous.

Seven minutes wasn’t much time. The Hecate laser was a delicate piece of equipment, and parts had to be strapped down before any delta-v maneuver.

“Let’s hump it, Fred,” Dahlgren called. Together, they began securing the laser. Two hundred miles below them, the cruise missile continued streaking north, just a few feet above the Gulf of Mexico.