Ian Douglas - The Complete Heritage Trilogy - Semper Mars, Luna Marine, Europa Strike

Yukio wanted to introduce her to his family, and she knew enough about Japanese protocol to know what that meant. She and Yukio both considered themselves to be Internationalists, not in the sense of wanting the UN to take over everything, but in the sense of being citizens of the world. Would Yukio still feel that way if it came to a choice between her…and his family? If his family wouldn’t accept her, would he be willing to live in the States permanently? Come to think of it, suppose they did accept her. Would she be willing to leave her country behind, to make a permanent home in Japan?

She shook her head. Too much serious thinking with nothing in your stomach is a no-good way to make decisions. She really wished she could talk to her dad about this, but somehow she hadn’t been able to tell him about Yukio, and she wasn’t entirely sure why. She hadn’t even told him about the trip to Japan. Not that she needed to, of course. She was of age, she had her own passport, and she was paying for the trip out of money she’d earned. But it had been a long time since she’d kept a secret from her father. She grinned. Usually the two of them kept secrets from others.

She reached her favorite tree, a sprawling black walnut, and sat down, first unhooking her PAD case from her hip belt. Taking her PAD out of its case, she carefully unfolded it and propped it up on her knees, keying it to download her v-mail. The usual departmental garbage—she’d have to check through it later to make sure she wasn’t missing anything important. She still hadn’t been able to write a filter good enough to catch everything she needed to see. She’d once accused Namir, the department head, of deliberately writing department memos so obscurely that a programmed filter wouldn’t be able to extract the substance. “Well, if your filter isn’t good enough, Kaitlin,” he’d said with an irritating twinkle, “perhaps you’d better write one that is.” Naturally, she’d risen to the challenge, but just as naturally, Namir had increased the obfuscatory nature of his memos. She grinned. She’d learned more about self-enhancing systems writing and rewriting those damned filters than she had in three years of classes. Namir’s method was brutal, but it worked.

Hmm, what else? A few vids from friends, nothing critical. Nothing from Yukio, but that wasn’t surprising. They’d planned to meet here after his exam, so the only reason for him to comm her would be to tell her that he couldn’t make it. Notice of the Zugswang meeting tonight. She keyed in a reply, saying that she was planning on being there. A few games of chess would be the best preparation she could think of for her physics exam the next day. More study at this point would only fry her brain.

Ooh, great, a message from Dad. Kaitlin checked her wrist-top for the current time and then tapped a key to give her GMT, the Greenwich Mean Time that all spaceships and all space expeditions ran on. Only four hours difference now that Daylight Savings had kicked in, so it was late afternoon on the Polyakov. He mostly wrote her at night. When he wrote at other times, it was usually because he had something special to say, something beyond the trivia of day-to-day life aboard a cycler bound for Mars. She snorted. As if he didn’t know full well that anything that happened on board the Polyakov was fascinating to her. She’d been space-happy since…since she didn’t know how long. At least since she saw her first Vandenberg launch, but the genesis of her space fever was a lot earlier than that.

She remembered her mother reading to her a lot when she was little. Her dad had told her that a lot of the books her mother read to her were stories about spaceships and other planets and alien beings, books she later devoured for herself. Books by Heinlein and Asimov, Longyear and Brin, Zettel and Ecklar. It was infuriating. Here her dad was going off on a trip she’d give her eyeteeth for, not to mention certain other less mentionable parts, and he didn’t care! He’d rather be on a beach in the Bahamas than on the sands of Mars! She was gonna have to comm that man a lecture. If he didn’t learn to enjoy walking where no human had walked before…well, she wasn’t sure what she’d do to him, but it wouldn’t be pleasant, she could assure him of that.

She tapped on the vid icon on her PAD. It swelled and morphed into a waist-up view of a Marine major, with the stark gray wall of his hab behind him.

“The top o’ the morning to you, Chicako,” he said with a grin, “or whatever time it is when you see this.” She grinned in return. The pet name her dad had given her when she was six and in love with everything Japanese meant “near and dear,” and only he and Yukio were allowed to use it. “Well, it’s been another exciting day in the old Poly, dodging asteroids and space pirates again. To keep from dying of boredom, I’ve actually resorted to some of those science-fiction books you gave me. The problem is, of course, that the realistic ones are boring and the unrealistic ones keep reminding me of how boring the real planet is likely to be. Take this one I’ve been reading lately, for instance.” He held his PAD up in front of him. “Red Planet by that buddy of yours, Robert Heinlein.”

Buddy of mine! Come on, Dad. He’s been dead for fifty years.

“What I’m thinking is, if there were any aliens down there where we’re going, like there are in that book, well, then this trip just might be worth something. But you know, Chicako, I just can’t see that investigating rocks is worth the investment of thirty Marines. I can’t help but feel that we’re being used somehow.” He shook his head and chuckled. “What am I talking about; of course, we’re being used. We’re supposed to be used. I guess what I mean is that we’re not being used properly. We’re not being used as a tool, we’re being used as a pawn in some vast political game that I don’t understand. But I can tell you, I don’t like it.”

He looked away for a long moment. “Something else I don’t like,” he said finally, turning back to face her. “This…uneasy dance we’re doing with the UN. I know we have to let them use our cyclers by treaty, but why we’re letting them horn in on our explorations on Mars is beyond me. Do they really think we’d hog all the goodies? I don’t know.”

“There’s something that happened today I want to tell you about. It…it disturbed me, and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe you can help me make some sense out of it. So long, Chicako. When next you see me, I’ll be on the beach.” His mouth twisted in a wry grin. “No ocean, unfortunately, but it’ll be nice to have ground underfoot again. Till then.” His face stayed on the screen for a full second and then dissolved into a string of numbers—the rest of his message was in code.

They’d started writing in code right after her mother died. A big, grown-up seven-year-old girl didn’t really want to put down in writing that she was scared, that she missed her mommy, that she wished her daddy could be home with her instead of being stationed overseas. So her dad had taught her a simple substitution code so she could say all those things without anyone else knowing what she was saying.

Over the years their codes became more and more sophisticated, until now they were using a Beale code, guaranteed unbreakable without the book the code is based on. And that was the beauty of it. It could be any book; it was simply necessary that the two parties agree on the book and, specifically, on the edition of that book. For the Mars trip, the Garroways had agreed on a 2038 reprinting of Shogun, a twentieth-century novel about sixteenth-century Japan. Kaitlin had downloaded both the book and her own Beale code translation program to her dad’s wrist-top before he’d left for Vandenberg.