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

Garroway nodded. “Which is why you say we have a one-in-four chance of finding dextro-sugars and levo-amino acids on a new planet.”

“Right. And that’s just for starters. There’s also the problem of long-chain proteins that—”

“Whoa!” Garroway said, holding up both hands. “I never got beyond high-school chemistry. Organics leave me whimpering and sucking my thumb. But I get the idea. Humans may have picked up some hints and tips from aliens, but we ain’t the aliens.”

“Eloquently stated, Major. I just wish we could find what the true extraterrestrial connection was.”

“Maybe we’re about to find out,” Garroway said.

“I know we are, Major. We’ve just scratched the surface.” He pointed at the floor. “The answers are here, under our feet. And I’m going to find them.”

Garroway was impressed by the man’s determination, the sheer will in his voice. “Yes, Dr. Alexander. I think you are.”

“And Mireille Joubert and her World Cultural Bureau and the whole damned UN can go to hell.”

They left the rec area together.

1039 HOURS GMT

Communications Center

Cydonia Base, Mars

2253 hours MMT

Cydonia Prime’s communications room was located in a partitioned-off portion of the command center. There wasn’t much to see there—the computers used to maintain communications between people on surface EVA or in the Mars cats, the main workstation with a direct uplink to the areosynchronous comsat, and another unit that maintained a constant open channel with Mars Prime, again through the comsat. During the day, when teams were working out on the surface, the comm center was a busy, even a crowded place, but no one ventured out onto the surface during the night, when the outside temperature plunged to minus one hundred twenty Celsius or lower. A communications watch was maintained through the night, of course, with personnel rotating down the watch list from both the NASA crew and the US Marines.

A Marine was on watch this night, but that didn’t bother Dr. Joubert. She smiled as the young man handed her a hardcopy printout. “Here ya go, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Corporal.” Turning, she walked through the partition door into the main command center. There were three or four people there, either on duty or chatting. Colonel Bergerac was waiting for her by the door.

“Colonel?” Joubert handed him the hardcopy. “It seems we have our reply.”

Bergerac’s bushy eyebrows raised as he accepted the sheet and glanced at it. ALPHA APPROVED IMMEDIATE was all it said.

“That was fast,” he said. “Scarcely time for the light lag.”

Earth and Mars were currently five light-minutes apart. The query, coded and inserted in the normal outbound comm traffic, had uploaded at 2136 hours. It would have reached Earth at 2141. Valle and the others must have been waiting right there at the Geneva command center to have made their decision and relayed it back in less than an hour.

“Soltime tomorrow,” she said. “That will give our people at Candor time to get ready.”

Bergerac nodded. “It will be good to have these American Marines out from underfoot,” he said.

Mars Expedition/Communications: Reliable communications are vital for the safety, efficiency and productivity of the mission, and Spacenet has been adapted to the purpose. Established in 2024 as an extension of the existing Internet, Spacenet provides both broad- and narrow-band data transmission, including graphical and video interfacing through the World Wide Web. Primary Earthside nodes include the AI systems at Kennedy and Vandenberg Spaceports, as well as the Marshal, Johnson, and Greenbelt Space Centers. Spaceside nodes include the AI systems of each of the manned space stations, with the primary node in the ISS, as well as the Fra Mauro Node on Luna. All Mars communications are currently relayed through a PV-10K communications satellite in areosynchronous orbit. A secondary relay is located in the old MSC-1 system on the inner Martian moon, Phobos—currently inoperative.

—Download from Networld Encyclopedia vrtp://earthnet.public.dataccess

SUNDAY, 27 MAY: 1159 HOURS GMT

Cydonia Base, Mars

Sol 5636: soltime +13 minutes

MMT

It was just past midnight, the time of the day reserved for the so-called soltime, the extra forty-one minutes and some odd seconds that brought the human reckoning of time by hours, minutes, and seconds into line with Mars’s longer rotational period. Garroway had been planning on hitting his rack early, but he was on edge and sleep eluded him. It had been a long day—most of it spent in a long series of diagnostics with the EVA suits used by Alexander, Kettering, Pohl, Druzhininova, and Vandemeer when they’d made their discovery at the Fortress the day before. All five suits had flagged red in pre-EVA checkout. With the chance—admittedly remote—that something about the site had somehow affected the suits, no one was being allowed to return to the site until it could be checked out remotely, and that was going to take time. There’d been nothing wrong with the suits that he could determine.

Alexander had been furious, convinced that Joubert or one of the UN people had sabotaged the readouts to keep them from going back to the Fortress site.

The possibility that the expedition could be torn apart by internal dissension or even UN sabotage was a serious one; building psychological pressures within any small group of mismatched people cooped up together far from other humans had more than once led to disaster.

Unable to sleep, Garroway walked over to the comm center, where he commed a long vidmessage to Kaitlin. After uploading it onto Spacenet, he went back to the command center, poured himself a cup of coffee at the mess, and sat down at a spare console seat with Dr. Graves and Corporal Phil Hayes, who had the communications mid-watch. Hayes stood as Garroway came closer.

“At ease, at ease,” he said. “What’s the good word?”

“Hello, Major,” Graves said. “The corporal was just telling me about the problems you Marines are having on Mars.”

“You having problems, Corporal?” Garroway asked.

“No, sir!” the Marine snapped back, resuming his seat but managing to remain at attention.

“It’s okay, son,” he said. “I’m not your CO, and I don’t bite. What’s the trouble?”

“Well, sir…the sand is hell on the rifles. It’s more like a real fine dust or windblown grit, y’know? Gets into everything. Coats everything, worse’n mud.”

“Which is why all of the weapons-cleaning drills on the way out, right?”

“Roger that, sir. Then, on top of that, some REMF back on Earth recalibrated all of ATARs, so we couldn’t hit shit when we started range practice last week. We had ’em set for Mars gravity, y’know? Then when we started workin’ with ’em here, we kept hitting above the bull’s-eye. I thought old Lloyd and Master—uh, I mean—”

“That’s okay. Go ahead, Marine.”

“Uh, I thought the colonel was gonna shit, sir. We were all selected for this mission, y’know, on the strength of our quals Earthside, and it was looking like we were the worst damned shots in the Corps.”

“You get that straightened out?”

“Oh, sure. It was pretty obvious what had happened. You know, no one in the Marines, no one in the ranks, anyway, likes these new electronic rifles. Too much gadgetry screws things up, y’know? Give me a rifle you could sight in with a sandbag and a screwdriver, like in the old days.”

Garroway chuckled. Hayes looked too young to reminisce about “the old days.”

“I was telling him,” Graves added, “that it sounded like someone on Earth got his sums wrong.”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Garroway said. The M-29 ATAR was designed to accept PAD entries feeding it data such as air pressure, altitude, cartridge size, and gravity in order to precisely sight the rifle—supposedly a big improvement over the old-fashioned chore of taking it out to the range and sighting it in manually. “The gravitational acceleration on Earth is 980 centimeters per second squared. On Mars it’s, what?”