Ian Douglas - Semper Mars

“She’s clean, Sarge,” Larabee said, replying to Bledsoe’s warning. “Clean enough to eat off of. Uh-oh. Heads up.”

Bledsoe turned to check the direction in which Larabee was looking. Captain Theodore Warhurst was emerging from the Residence. “Atten…hut!”

“As you were, men,” Warhurst snapped. Like Bledsoe and Larabee, he wore fatigues, vest armor, and an old-style coal-scuttle helmet with a cloth camouflage cover. A service issue M-2020 pistol was secured to his combat vest in a shoulder-holster rig. “What’s the word?”

“Natives are gettin’ restless, Captain,” Bledsoe said. He gestured toward the embassy’s front gate, less than twenty meters away. “I don’t hablo the Español, much, but it sounds to me like that guy with the microphone is getting them pretty riled up.”

“Intel IDed that guy as a local SUD preacher. He could be trouble.”

“Man,” Larabee said. “That’s all we need.”

The Solamente Uno Dios was one of the noisier and more bitter factions competing for attention in the Federal District these days. Formed as part of the backlash against the myriad new religions and groups devoted to worshiping the Ancients as gods, the SUD was a startlingly unlikely coalition of Baptists, Pentacostals, and a few Catholics who found common cause in their belief that God, not aliens, had created Mankind and that the alien artifacts discovered on Mars should be left strictly alone. There were some things, SUD spokespersons declared every time a television or netnews camera was pointed in their direction, that Man simply was not meant to know, and other things that were explained so clearly in the Bible, thank you, that no further explanation was needed. There’d been several bloody clashes during the past few days between the SUD and some of the pro-Ancients groups, the International Ancient Astronaut Network and Las Alienistas, in particular.

Now, it seemed, the local SUDs were getting ready to take on the US Embassy.

“Just wanted to let you guys know,” Warhurst said, keeping his eyes on the crowd beyond the high wall. “We’re evacuating. Closing up shop and pulling out.”

“Evacuating!” Bledsoe said, startled.

“That’s what they tell me. We’re passing the word in person, though, so our friends out there can’t listen in on our platoon freaks. We’ve got Perries inbound now from the Reagan.”

“All right,” Larabee said. “About time we got clear of this shithole.”

“What’s it mean, Captain?” Bledsoe asked. “War?”

“Shit. You’ll know when I know, Sergeant.”

“Yeah, but Peregrines. I mean, are they fighting their way through Mexican airspace, or what?”

“I guess we’ll find out when they get here, won’t we?”

“If they get here,” Larabee put in.

Warhurst chuckled. “We’re talking TR-5s, Sergeant. Probably with Valkyries on CAP. They’ll get here. I don’t think the whole Mexican Air Force has anything more modern than a couple dozen old F/A-22s.

“In any case, Major Bainbridge wants you men to be on your toes. Those Peregrines’ ETA is in another twenty minutes or so…and when they set down, the crowd could get a bit…eager.”

“We’ll be ready, sir.” Bledsoe slapped the side of his ATAR for emphasis, a sharp crack of palm on plastic.

“I know you will. Carry on, Marines.” He turned and disappeared into the Residence.

“Hey, Bled. Is it true what they say about that guy?”

“About him bein’ the commandant’s son? Sure is. I got the straight shit from Dolchik in Personnel.”

“I’ll be damned. He’s not a bad sort, for the son of God.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. I’d rather have him at my back in a firefight than some of these new-Corps pukes.”

“Roger that.” They listened for several minutes more to the speech barking from the speakers outside the embassy walls. A final pronouncement sent the crowd wild, cheering and screaming and swearing and shouting, until Bledsoe thought they must be planning to knock down the walls by sheer volume alone. Another volley of garbage hurtled over the fence, bouncing and scattering across the lawn beneath one of the compound’s spreading cypress trees but coming nowhere near the two Marines and their sandbag-barricaded post.

Bledsoe slung his rifle—with the crisis on, they were not required to remain rigidly at attention, soldiers on parade, as they would have been otherwise—and pulled his PAD out of the thigh pocket in his fatigue pants. When he touched the wake-up key, a keyboard and a display screen winked on, and he began tapping at the unyielding flat surface.

“Whatcha doin’?” Larabee asked.

“Linking in to the security net,” Bledsoe replied. Several perimeter camera views were available over the general embassy net. “Ah. Here we go.”

His PAD’s display screen flickered from the logo of the embassy’s local server to a low-res, real-time image shot from one of the small security cameras perched atop the compound wall. The scene looked out across the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City’s Great White Way, a broad and skyscraper-lined boulevard that was now smothered in a seething, shifting mass of humanity. A short distance up the road, El Angel stood gracefully on her pedestal, a towering monument to Mexican independence; a dozen men had swarmed up her base to a vantage point well above the heads of the crowd. Beyond, the elegant but aging facade of the Maria Isabel Sheraton was nearly lost behind the surging mob.

Several rocks clattered off the embassy gate.

“Get a load of this,” Bledsoe said, handing the PAD to Larabee. He pointed to the display. The security camera had clearly picked up a number of Mexican soldiers—in full battle gear—gathered in a small group in front of the Sheraton Hotel.

“Are they watching the mob?” Larabee wanted to know. “Or getting ready to join in?”

“Damfino,” Bledsoe replied. “Maybe they don’t know either. They might be there just to make sure the rocks don’t get thrown at Mexican property.”

“Yeah, but if a few gringos get dinged up, no big deal, right?”

Bledsoe set the PAD on top of the sandbag barricade and unslung his assault rifle. He didn’t like the looks of that crowd—too many tough-looking and angry young men, and no women or children visible at all. If this was really a spontaneous demonstration, like the local sources had been saying, he would have expected to see a more broadly distributed mix representing the local demographics.

Not something that looked more like an army than a mob of demonstrators….

United States Embassy

Mexico City, República de

México

1512 hours local time

“Come in.”

Captain Theodore Warhurst opened the door and entered the large room—all deep carpets and oak paneling and framed photographs and oils—that was the office of Franklin R. Tibbs, the United States ambassador to Mexico. The scene inside was one of quiet, almost deliberate confusion, as aides transferred stacks of papers from gaping filing cabinets into boxes and piled them up. As Warhurst approached the desk, three more undersecretaries came into the room, hurried past him, and collected several of the boxes; the shredding machines down the hall were working continuously now, reducing American diplomatic secrets to unrecoverable confetti.

It was a curious statement about the culture, Warhurst thought, that government bureaucracies still depended on vast quantities of hard copy to keep their records and pass their orders, despite the omnipresence of computer systems that made such wholesale deforestation unnecessary.

Ambassador Tibbs, a heavy, florid man in a neatly tailored gray suit, was packing jewel boxes into his attaché case. Each small, flat box securely held a neatly ordered array of twelve CMC microdrives. The size of a pencil eraser, each color-coded computer memory clip looked, in fact, like a small jewel and was far more precious; a single CMC carried half a gig of storage.