Semper Mars: Book One of the Heritage Trilogy

by Ian Douglas

  Kaitlin wondered why Ishiwara was telling her this. He doesn’t need to justify himself, she thought. Not now, not to a gaijin.

  “We had many long talks, my son and I,” he continued, still smiling. “He told me much about you, about your thoughts. He told me, just before he left for Tanegashima for the last time, that he felt the war between our countries, yours and mine, was a serious mistake, that we were fighting the wrong people at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. I suspect that your feelings were at least partly responsible for his belief.”

  “I am…sorry if I gave offense, Ishiwara-sama.”

  “Offense must be accepted as well as given. You expressed your heart, as did he. In any case, Toshi-chan’s convictions have been…weighing heavily, these past few days. Soon, I must address my government and tell them what I feel about this war. I wished to tell you, Kaitlin-chan, that a part of you, and a part of Toshi-chan, will be there with me when I address the prime minister.”

  He hesitated then, and Kaitlin wondered if he was waiting for a response. She had none to give. She could say nothing. She still didn’t know why Ishiwara was telling her these things. Her grief at knowing that Yukio was dead left her numb to thoughts of governments, prime ministers, and cabinet meetings. Oh God oh Christ I hate this war, she thought, and her fists clenched until her nails bit the palms of her hands. I hate this damned, stupid war!…

  “There is something else,” Ishiwara continued. “Something…something deeply and personally embarrassing to me. I must apologize deeply, Kaitlin-san. In your farewell message, you enclosed a message for me to give to Toshiyuki-chan. I am very sorry to tell you that I never gave it to him. The fault is mine. I thought…I thought it best not to give it to him, since I feared encouraging you to continue your relationship. I feared that it might affect the performance of his mission. It was wrong of me, and I apologize.” He bowed, deeply.

  “Please don’t be sorry,” she said. Pain churned within her. He never got it. He never knew. “You were right. You were right, after all. It couldn’t have worked out with us. I know that now.” It’ll never work so long as people keep acting so damned stupid, she thought fiercely. It’ll never have a chance of working until we can start all over, someplace else, away from this damned black hole of old cultures and old customs and old notions of what’s proper and what’s acceptable and what’s right. Damn, damn, damn this war!…

  “I’m not so sure that I was right, Kaitlin-chan.” He sighed. “In any case, I apologize for keeping back the letter. And this, you see, brings me to another subject. After…Toshiyuki’s final mission, the base commander sent me a memclip. It had been found among his things, along with instructions to transmit it to me, if…if he failed to return. One of the items on that memclip was a vidmessage for you. I have not seen it…but I have arranged to have it transmitted over this channel, if you wish to see.”

  “I would. Domo arigato gozaimasu.”

  “I will leave you then. I’m very sorry for any sadness I have given you.”

  “And I am sorry, Ishiwara-sama, that you have lost your son.”

  “Perhaps there is yet good to come of it. Sayonara, Kaiti-chan.”

  The word sayonara, in Japanese, was abrupt for the language, a word tinged with sadness that the two who were parting might never see one another again. Kaitlin bowed deeply and chose a more informal closing. “Domo arigato gozaimasu, Ishiwara-sama,” she said. “Dewa mata.”

  Her good-bye meant something more like “Well, see you again sometime.”

  For the briefest of instants, she thought she detected a flicker of surprise behind those dark eyes, and the rigidly controlled emotions dwelling there. He bowed, and the screen went blank.

  And a moment later she was looking up at Yukio. He was wearing a black Space Defense Force uniform with the chrysanthemum pips of a chu-i on his collar. He appeared to be in a booth of some sort; at his back, blurred and out of focus, was some sort of recreation hall. She could hear laughter in the background, see the shadowy shapes of other young men gathered around a table, standing and talking, playing Ping-Pong. The enemy….

  He smiled at her. “Hello, Chicako. Look, I’m not very good at this, and I don’t want to seem overly dramatic or anything, but, well, if you’re seeing this, I guess that means I’m dead.” His smile stayed in place, but the eyes were dark and terribly serious.

  “When we were together here,” he went on, “I felt…strange. Divided. I guess I was having some trouble reconciling the Western part of me with the Nihonjin. And, maybe I was wrong, but I thought I was sensing the same sort of struggle going on in you. When my father told me that you had returned to America, I figured you had probably decided it had all been a terrible mistake.”

  He didn’t know. He never got my message.

  “You know, Chicako, it wouldn’t have been easy. I couldn’t have just turned my back on my family. And, well, you must feel the same way about your father. And your country. I don’t know how we were going to work it out.

  “I just wanted you to know that we would have worked it out. You taught me that, Chicako. Anything’s possible, with enough love.

  “By now, you’ll know that the UN has ordered us to join the fight against the United States. I hate that order, with every fiber of my being, but because I am who and what I am, I must obey. It’s, well…my heritage, I guess you would call it. Samurai. I will do what I have to do. And die doing it. But I want you to know that I love you with all my heart, that I’ll be thinking of you out there…and that I know we would have found a way, if fate had been just a little kinder.

  “Remember me, Chicako.”

  “Ah, Toshi-san!” someone called out from close by. “Isho-ni konai?”

  Yukio turned his head. “Ima iku!” he called. He turned back to the screen. “I’ve got to go now. I just wanted you to know…I love you. Always. Sayonara, Chicako.”

  Much later, Jeff Warhurst came to the E-room to find Kaitlin. After figuring out her queen gambit, he’d spent the next hour looking for an alternate plan that didn’t involve capturing her queen but would still give him a fighting chance. He’d thought he’d found one, and he was eager to check it out, but when he looked in the room, he saw Kaitlin, still on the floor, head down on her arms on the tabletop, sobbing quietly. He hesitated, wondering if he should go in, then changed his mind and quietly closed the door, giving Kaitlin some time alone with her grief.

  After his dad had died, he’d learned about grief himself. He knew about being alone.

  WEDNESDAY, 4 JULY: 0343 HOURS GMT

  Cydonia Prime

  Cydonia Mars

  Sol 5672: 1510 hours MMT

  Major Mark Garroway emerged from the main hab at Cydonia Prime. It was midafternoon, and the Cydonian Plain stood golden in that astonishing clarity of the thin Martian air.

  It was, he was forced to admit, beautiful…in a stark and oceanless way….

  Strange. Garroway was beginning to like Mars…like its solitude, its stark beauty, its magnificent vistas of sand, rock, and color. It couldn’t compare to the ocean, of course, and he was still looking forward to that marina in the Bahamas…but he thought he was going to enjoy the rest of his deployment here. Kaitlin, he thought, would be pleased.

  He hoped she was all right. As soon as full communications with Earth had been restored after the battle, they’d started exchanging e-mail frequently. But then, a few days after the battle, she’d stopped answering him, and Garroway had been increasingly frantic. General Warhurst, finally, had mentioned a mysterious vidcall from the Japanese minister of International Trade and Industry—a private call for Kaitlin. Although the NSA had probably decoded and recorded the conversation as a matter of course, Warhurst didn’t know what had been said, and Kaitlin had mentioned nothing about it, either to him or to Garroway.

  “Damned if I know what it was all about,” Warhurst had told him. “I do know that she was in Japan in May, just before the war started…and I also know that four days aft
er the ITI Minister called, we got the first overtures from Tokyo that they might be willing to come over to our side if we guaranteed them a piece of what we find at Cydonia. You’ve got one hell of a special girl there, Mark.”

  A special girl? Yeah, she was all of that. He still wanted to talk to her, though, about what the hell she’d been doing in Japan of all places. Why was it that fathers were always the last to know?…

  Thirteen more months on Mars…and seven more after that for the cycler ride home. He missed Kaitlin so badly he could taste it. Twenty more months before he could be with his little girl…who’d somehow and disconcertingly been transformed into a not-so-little young woman.

  He thought he could wait that long.

  The fighting on Mars was over, and for that, Garroway was grateful. While civilians might bemoan the idiocy of war, only someone in the military, someone who’d actually faced that vilest of the Four Horsemen, could truly appreciate war’s ugliness, its terror, its sheer, blind stupidity, its colossal waste.

  The war, he knew from Triple-N and regular comm reports, was continuing on Earth…but with the abrupt defection of Japan from the UN, it appeared that the balance of power had subtly shifted in favor of the US-Russian Alliance. The cruise missile assault had dropped to nearly nothing with the sinking of three UN arsenal ships—two of them by the Shepard Station HEL, newly repaired and recrewed. Fierce fighting continued in the northern Mexican desert, and Monterey had fallen to troops of the 2nd Armored Division on the twenty-fifth. In the north, Army forces had entered Longneuil, just across the St. Lawrence from the québecois capital of Montreal, and there were fairly substantial rumors that secret negotiations were under way that would result in Quebec’s withdrawal from the UN and the war. With Japan out of the war, US forces had been able to transit the La Perouse Strait, cross the Sea of Japan, and land reinforcements for the beleaguered Russians near Vladivostok. Only hours ago, according to the last Triple-N download, US Marines of the 2nd Marine Division had landed at Matanzas, Cuba.

  After that grim initial period of the UN bombardment, it was turning out to be one hell of a glorious Fourth.

  The war showed no signs of ending yet, but the tide had definitely turned. That, at least, was the assessment of the Marines at Cydonia. They appeared confident and had greeted the word that French troops were on the way aboard the Faucon spacecraft with wry and optimistic good humor. The Marines now controlled every Mars shuttle on the planet; when the Faucon swept past the orbit of Mars a few months from now, how were the UN troops supposed to disembark? They would do so on the Marines’ terms…or not at all.

  Even so, Garroway was making preparations, just in case the UN had allowed for that contingency by including a shuttle in the Faucon’s payload—unlikely, given the high fuel-to-mass ratio of a Mars Direct flight.

  A century before, when Japanese forces had invaded tiny Wake Island shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the story had circulated that the Marine commander on the doomed island had been asked if he needed anything else. “You can send us more Japs” was his apocryphal rejoinder. The incident almost certainly had never happened, but the Marines at Cydonia had dusted it off and begun circulating it among themselves. “The major e-mailed the Pentagon for recreational supplies,” the current story ran. “They’re sending us more French.”

  Outside the main hab, between the living facilities and the landing pad, the American flag still flew from a length of microwave tower support tubing driven deep into the sand. As on the Moon, a piece of wire kept the flag extended, though often there was wind enough here to unfurl the lightweight fabric.

  As it turned out, the photograph David Alexander had taken of the flag’s raising during the closing moments of the battle at Cydonia Prime had been uploaded to Spacenet. The shot of five Marines in their Class-One armor erecting the five-meter pole in the Martian sand had been so spectacularly reminiscent of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima that, at last report, the Marine Public Affairs Office back home was being swamped with requests for the picture, even though it was freely available on the net.

  Garroway grinned. Not long ago, the very continued existence of the US Marines, perceived as an anachronism in this modern age of spacecraft, orbital lasers, and electronic warfare, was in serious doubt. He, himself, had been questioning his own contented service in a military arm with little real future.

  When the flag had been raised on Mount Suribachi, on the embattled island of Iwo Jima in 1945, then-Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had been watching from the deck of an amphibious command ship offshore. He was reported to have turned to Marine Major General Holland “Howlin Mad” Smith and said, “Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”

  It had only been ninety-six years since Suribachi. Maybe they needed a flag-raising like this one every century or so, just so that people would remember….

  0343 HOURS GMT

  The Face

  Cydonia, Mars

  1510 hours MMT

  David Alexander stood at last on the top of the mesa, the broad, red and brown expanse of the Cydonian plain spreading out beneath his feet like a map. West lay the pyramids of the City, the Fortress, the enigmatic strangeness of the Ship, and the tiny cluster of life and light that was Cydonia Prime. Southwest, the D&M Pyramid bulked huge against the pink sky, as protective of its mysteries as ever.

  He was standing atop the Face, symbol of all that was still unknown about Mars, about the beings who’d lived here half a million years ago, about Man himself, and how he’d come to be….

  It seemed odd, but the features of the Face, so obviously artificial, so obviously artistic, so obviously the product of conscious and intelligent design when seen from high overhead, flattened into an expanse of ordinary sand-smoothed rock from this vantage point, from the surface of the Face itself. After an hour’s climb, he’d reached this highest part of the mesa, the center of the chin just south of the enormous crevasse that formed the image’s mouth.

  Below, at his feet, were the quadrangular plates that so resembled teeth; farther off, just visible half a mile to the north, were the vast, bare, flattened mounds of windswept rock that, from the sky, at any rate, looked like eyes.

  From where he stood now, it didn’t look as though the landform could possibly be artificial. Only from the air did the overall cumulative effect of thousands of separate aspects, the convex smoothness of the eyeballs, the planes of cheeks and jaw and ridged brow, even the striations in the carving’s headdress or helmet that gave it such an eerie resemblance to the nemes of some pharaoh out of ancient Egypt, all come together, directly challenging any assertion that this was the mindless accidental product of eons of wind, ice, and water.

  Fifty-one sols on Mars, and he still felt no closer to the answers he was looking for than he’d been back on Earth. It was going to take years…no, decades, just to learn where to begin. The archeological teams continued to uncover mountains of weather-eroded equipment, enigmatic artifacts, and the ungraspable products of alien design philosophies. It was already clear that human manufacturing and materials-processing techniques were about to be revolutionized, and the teams hadn’t yet gotten properly started. No one was willing to even guess what new surprises might still be in store.

  And with all of this, the biggest questions were still stark and unyielding mysteries. Who’d built the Cydonian monuments, and why? Who were the humans whose remains were now being found everywhere throughout the region? What was their relationship with their cousins left back on Earth at the very dawn of the human spirit?

  He sat down on a smooth-sculpted ridge, feeling the thin wind rattle against his lightweight EVA suit.

  He liked it here on Mars, liked the freedom to pursue his studies without hindrance, liked the fact that the government, even though it was sponsoring his work, was far, far away. He’d come to terms with the Marine presence here; Garroway and his MMEF were what was making all of this possible, and he
was grateful for that, as well.

  Alexander was being hailed as a hero of the scientific community, the scientist who’d refused to acquiesce to the UN World Cultural Bureau’s attempts at censorship. Well, he couldn’t have managed that without the Marines. This war, he thought, more and more, was a struggle between those who would disseminate the truth, and those who would try to control it.

  Control was the key, so far as the governments of Earth were concerned. No wonder, he thought, the UN had been so desperate to hide the secrets uncovered beneath the Cydonian plain. In the past weeks, according to the Net News vidcasts, dozens of new religions, new alien cults, new cosmic awareness groups had blossomed around the news that mummified humans half a million years old had been discovered on Mars. There were rumors that widespread riots in France, Germany, and Mexico were threatening to undermine those nations’ war efforts. If their governments fell in the chaos of religious rioting and fanaticism, the war might well sputter to an end.

  Alexander’s published papers, both on the net and in Archeology International, were being hailed in the States as one man’s bid for academic freedom, an end to scientific censorship, and a victory for truth.

  Maybe. He’d gotten credit for the discovery, at any rate. And most of Mireille Joubert’s team was working for him now, part of a genuinely international research project that had as its goal the discovery of the truth about the Martian ruins. Joubert herself was still sulking, but he thought she would come around.

  He looked around at the bleak and rocky landscape of the Face and laughed. This Martian Sphinx was good at keeping its secrets…better, perhaps, than its far smaller cousin on Earth. The ancient humans discovered here remained the biggest mystery of all.

  His original guess that the bodies he’d found were representatives of Homo erectus had been mistaken, it turned out. Several papers had already emerged in various journals and net professional posts discussing the images of the bodies uncovered so far, pointing out that their facial features almost certainly placed them in the group generally referred to as “archaic Homo sapiens.” These were essentially modern humans with hang-on traits of their Homo erectus ancestors, like brow ridges and heavy musculature. Their brains were as large and as complex as those of fully modern humans; perhaps even more telling, the structure and placement of their larynxes were the same as modern humans, riding lower in their throats, and with larger pharyngeal cavities than the earlier erectus.