Semper Mars(133)

He thought he could wait that long.

The fighting on Mars was over, and for that, Garroway was grateful. While civilians might bemoan the idiocy of war, only someone in the military, someone who’d actually faced that vilest of the Four Horsemen, could truly appreciate war’s ugliness, its terror, its sheer, blind stupidity, its colossal waste.

The war, he knew from Triple-N and regular comm reports, was continuing on Earth…but with the abrupt defection of Japan from the UN, it appeared that the balance of power had subtly shifted in favor of the US-Russian Alliance. The cruise missile assault had dropped to nearly nothing with the sinking of three UN arsenal ships—two of them by the Shepard Station HEL, newly repaired and recrewed. Fierce fighting continued in the northern Mexican desert, and Monterey had fallen to troops of the 2nd Armored Division on the twenty-fifth. In the north, Army forces had entered Longneuil, just across the St. Lawrence from the québecois capital of Montreal, and there were fairly substantial rumors that secret negotiations were under way that would result in Quebec’s withdrawal from the UN and the war. With Japan out of the war, US forces had been able to transit the La Perouse Strait, cross the Sea of Japan, and land reinforcements for the beleaguered Russians near Vladivostok. Only hours ago, according to the last Triple-N download, US Marines of the 2nd Marine Division had landed at Matanzas, Cuba.

After that grim initial period of the UN bombardment, it was turning out to be one hell of a glorious Fourth.

The war showed no signs of ending yet, but the tide had definitely turned. That, at least, was the assessment of the Marines at Cydonia. They appeared confident and had greeted the word that French troops were on the way aboard the Faucon spacecraft with wry and optimistic good humor. The Marines now controlled every Mars shuttle on the planet; when the Faucon swept past the orbit of Mars a few months from now, how were the UN troops supposed to disembark? They would do so on the Marines’ terms…or not at all.

Even so, Garroway was making preparations, just in case the UN had allowed for that contingency by including a shuttle in the Faucon’s payload—unlikely, given the high fuel-to-mass ratio of a Mars Direct flight.

A century before, when Japanese forces had invaded tiny Wake Island shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the story had circulated that the Marine commander on the doomed island had been asked if he needed anything else. “You can send us more Japs” was his apocryphal rejoinder. The incident almost certainly had never happened, but the Marines at Cydonia had dusted it off and begun circulating it among themselves. “The major e-mailed the Pentagon for recreational supplies,” the current story ran. “They’re sending us more French.”

Outside the main hab, between the living facilities and the landing pad, the American flag still flew from a length of microwave tower support tubing driven deep into the sand. As on the Moon, a piece of wire kept the flag extended, though often there was wind enough here to unfurl the lightweight fabric.

As it turned out, the photograph David Alexander had taken of the flag’s raising during the closing moments of the battle at Cydonia Prime had been uploaded to Spacenet. The shot of five Marines in their Class-One armor erecting the five-meter pole in the Martian sand had been so spectacularly reminiscent of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima that, at last report, the Marine Public Affairs Office back home was being swamped with requests for the picture, even though it was freely available on the net.

Garroway grinned. Not long ago, the very continued existence of the US Marines, perceived as an anachronism in this modern age of spacecraft, orbital lasers, and electronic warfare, was in serious doubt. He, himself, had been questioning his own contented service in a military arm with little real future.

When the flag had been raised on Mount Suribachi, on the embattled island of Iwo Jima in 1945, then-Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had been watching from the deck of an amphibious command ship offshore. He was reported to have turned to Marine Major General Holland “Howlin Mad” Smith and said, “Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”

It had only been ninety-six years since Suribachi. Maybe they needed a flag-raising like this one every century or so, just so that people would remember….

0343 HOURS GMT

The Face

Cydonia, Mars

1510 hours MMT

David Alexander stood at last on the top of the mesa, the broad, red and brown expanse of the Cydonian plain spreading out beneath his feet like a map. West lay the pyramids of the City, the Fortress, the enigmatic strangeness of the Ship, and the tiny cluster of life and light that was Cydonia Prime. Southwest, the D&M Pyramid bulked huge against the pink sky, as protective of its mysteries as ever.