Luna Marine(59)
“But a damn sight more romantic. You ever try necking while sealed up inside one of those tin suits? Not my idea of a good time.”
“Well, I guess you’ll have to show me what your idea of a good time is. Nineteen hundred it is. Where do you want to eat?”
“I was kind of thinking of the Menkoi.”
Her eyebrows went up. “‘Love noodles’?”
“Is that what it means?” The scalp beneath his short-cropped Marine haircut flushed darker, and he looked uncomfortable.
“More or less.”
“It’s the name of a new Japanese restaurant in Las Cruces.”
“I know. It sounds great. I’m looking forward to it.”
It wouldn’t be their first date since their return from the Moon. In fact, they’d been seeing rather a lot of one another lately. She hadn’t known Rob all that well before the mission, but since then, she’d discovered that they had a lot in common besides a passionate love of the Corps. Both loved long discussions and longer walks; both were outspoken and not afraid to express an opinion. Both were well-read, enjoyed programming, and loved science fiction. Both were taking cram courses in French, in the spirit of know-your-enemy. And they both loved Japanese food.
Dinner was, for Kaitlin, a blissful escape from the stress she’d been under for the past week, during the official inquiry. The chefs all knew her—she’d been to the Menkoi more than once and startled the Japanese manager by bowing and greeting him in fluent Nihongo—and they made a fuss over the two Marines, so much so that Rob was embarrassed. “I keep forgetting you’re half-Japanese yourself,” he said with a wry grin.
“Only in the heart,” she replied. “Living there as long as I did will do that to you.”
“And that’s why you’re so good at French, right? Because you speak Japanese?”
“Any second language makes the third easier,” she told him.
While the Menkoi had a Western section in the front, there were rooms in the back reserved for traditional dining, where shoes were left outside the door, and the rice was served after the various side dishes that made up the meal, to fill the belly and cleanse the palate. They ate seated on the floor, using o-hashi; Kaitlin had to help Rob get his fingers properly positioned for the exercise and to reassure him that it was okay to lift the soup bowl to his chin in order to get at the solid bits of meat and vegetable afloat inside. Their conversation ranged from the alien images and information discovered on Mars to the future of humankind in space.
By tacit consent, they both steered well clear of anything about the inquiry, or the friendly-fire incident at Picard.
“Mark my words, Kate,” Rob told her as they ate. “The military is taking us back into space. And it’s the Marines who are leading the way.”
“’Sfunny,” she said around a mouthful of bamboo and mushroom. “I thought it was all the alien stuff we’ve been finding out there. That was what revitalized the space program, back when we’d all but given up on space.”
“Sure. I guess that got things rolling.” He chewed for a moment, thoughtful. “But if you think about it, it was the need to get lots of people out to Mars, and provide ’em with air and power, that got us on track with the cycler spacecraft and the big bases at Mars Prime and Cydonia. And most of the people we ended up sending were Marines. To protect our national interests…meaning the ET technology and stuff we were finding out there. And now, the same is happening on the Moon.”
The conversation had veered perilously close to a dangerous area. She decided to try steering the subject clear of the Marine missions to Fra Mauro and Picard. “It’s the technology we need,” she told him. “The things we can learn from the ancient ETs. Everyone knows that!”
“Think about history,” he told her. “Think about what happened in the American West. Sure, settlers started heading west looking for gold or farmland or whatever, and they built covered wagons and, later, transcontinental railroad lines to get ’em there. But it was the soldiers who went along who spread civilization to that whole empty stretch of the continent, from Missouri to California. It was the soldiers who built the forts at Laramie and Fort Collins and Leavenworth and Dodge and Lincoln and how many other lonely outposts across the West that later became towns and cities.”
“Well, the Native Americans might quibble with your use of the word civilization,” she replied, “but I guess I see your point.”
“The Army opened the West in a way the mountain men and the gold rushers never could,” he insisted. “Without those forts stretched clear across the continent, we would have ended up with two countries, the US and California, with nothing but wilderness and mountains between the two.”