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 after 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.