Semper Mars(19)
It was a curious statement about the culture, Warhurst thought, that government bureaucracies still depended on vast quantities of hard copy to keep their records and pass their orders, despite the omnipresence of computer systems that made such wholesale deforestation unnecessary.
Ambassador Tibbs, a heavy, florid man in a neatly tailored gray suit, was packing jewel boxes into his attaché case. Each small, flat box securely held a neatly ordered array of twelve CMC microdrives. The size of a pencil eraser, each color-coded computer memory clip looked, in fact, like a small jewel and was far more precious; a single CMC carried half a gig of storage.
“Hello, Captain,” Tibbs said, looking up. His normally jovial features were sagging, his face creased and heavy. “You talk to your people?”
“Sir!” Warhurst said, coming to attention before the desk. “Yes, sir!”
“Aw, knock off the kay-det crap, Ted. Whatcha got for me?’
Warhurst allowed his rigid posture to relax, but only a little. He’d been gung ho, been raised gung ho, all of his life, and the ingrained training of a lifetime could not be easily discarded.
“The transport will be here in another few minutes, Mr. Ambassador,” he said. “It’ll touch down on the roof heliport. I’d like you to be on the first aircraft out.”
Tibbs winced. “I wish we…we didn’t have to do this. But my orders…”
“I don’t see that we have any choice, sir.”
Warhurst could tell that Tibbs was hurting, that he literally didn’t know what to do next. A friend and confidant of three American presidents, the man had been assistant secretary of labor during Kerrey’s second term, and secretary of state under Wood until his retirement in ’35. Markham had appointed him ambassador to Mexico as a reward for years of service and generous campaign contributions.
He didn’t look like he felt very rewarded at the moment. “I just…don’t know how it came to this,” he said, his voice so soft that no one in the room could have heard him but Warhurst.
“I’m sure there wasn’t anything anyone could have done,” Warhurst replied. “God knows, you’ve been in there pitching. Sir.”
“I’m beginning to think those fanatics out there are right. We should leave that stuff on Mars where we found it. Of course it makes other countries nervous when it looks like we might try to grab it all for ourselves.”
“That’s not my department, sir,” Warhurst replied carefully. He thought that Tibbs wanted to talk, that he was trying to relieve himself of some hard-to-discuss burden, but Warhurst had never been a particularly social man and didn’t know how best to respond. “But it seems to me pretty senseless just to pretend there’s nothing there. And if we can develop aldetech, well, everybody’s gonna benefit.”
Aldetech. Alien-derived technology. The word had been coined nearly a decade before to describe the expected commercial and industrial spin-offs from the fragments of lost technology discovered at Cydonia.
“You’re right, of course,” Tibbs said, nodding. “And if it wasn’t us, it would be somebody else. The Japanese, maybe. Or the EU. They both have pretty aggressive space programs and could get to Mars by themselves in another few years, if they wanted to.” He waved toward the office’s windowless wall, in the general direction of the crowds outside. “It just seems to be such a fuss over, over nothing, really. It’s not like we’re threatening them, is it?”
“Well, it’s always something, isn’t it, sir? If it wasn’t the UN afraid we were gonna grab the aldetech for ourselves, it would be Aztlan and the plebiscite.” He made a face. “Or our refusal to disarm and become nice, docile members of the global family.”
Tibbs sagged, the hopelessness of his situation, the failure clear in his eyes. Warhurst felt sorry for the man. He’d never liked Tibbs personally, and he certainly didn’t share the man’s politics, which leaned toward globalism and the new Internationalism more than he cared for. When President Markham had decided to take a tough, anti-Internationalist stance last year, defying the UN and their plebiscite and sending a Marine section to Mars to protect American interests there, he’d left many of the globalist and pro-UN people in the government dangling, especially in State, where the Internationalist influence had always been strongest.
As a member of the United States Armed Forces, as a Marine, Warhurst could have his own opinions about politics but couldn’t take sides…not publicly, not officially. If Tibbs was looking for forgiveness, understanding, or even simply a sympathetic ear, he wasn’t gonna find it in the Embassy Guard detail. Still, Warhurst could sympathize with the man’s impossible position, believing one thing, forced to carry out orders derived from an entirely different philosophy, and then being caught in the resultant back-blast.