Lloyd found a convenient stanchion and hung on, floating in an out-of-the-way attitude as the rest of the Marines filed in. Overall, the evolution was an orderly one…but he noticed one bit of confusion toward the rear of the column.
Pushing off from his anchor point, he maneuvered to the scene of the problem. An unarmored civilian had infiltrated the column and had gotten tangled with the armored troops.
It was one of the archeologists, Dr. David Alexander.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Uh…I thought I would tag along on this shuttle,” Alexander replied. “I understand you’re going straight to Cydonia, instead of to Mars Prime.”
The only thing faster than light is the damned shipboard scuttlebutt, Lloyd thought. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” he replied. “This is liable to be a rough ride, with a hot reception at the end of it.”
“Well, Captain Elliott said there was room.”
“Captain Elliott?”
“Harper Elliott. Bizarre’s skipper. Turns out she used to be a Navy aviator. Served on the Reagan, same ship as my dad.”
“I see.” That put Lloyd in an uncomfortable position. He didn’t want to have civilians kicking around on his assault boat, especially if things turned nasty when they hit ground. On the other hand, it wasn’t his assault boat, not in the formal sense. Elliott was ship’s captain, and he didn’t want to end up second-guessing the Bizarre’s CO.
Alexander seemed to sense Lloyd’s dilemma and gave him a lopsided grin. “I’ll promise to be good.”
He sighed. “Very well, Dr. Alexander,” Lloyd told the man. There ought to be room enough. “Find yourself a seat. But…if things are hot when we touch down, you get the hell out of the way, understand?”
“You expect things to be, uh, ‘hot,’ as you put it?”
“I don’t expect anything, sir. But it’s best to be prepared.”
“Don’t worry,” Alexander said. “If anybody starts shooting, I’ll be sure to keep my head down.” The man spoke with a sardonic edge to his voice that told Lloyd he was being humored.
Colonel Lloyd did not like being humored, and he did not like the archaeologist’s attitude, at once bantering and condescending. He almost—almost—wished that something would happen when they landed, just to teach the arrogant civilian some manners.
Not, he realized, a professional response at all.
1556 GMT
Mars Shuttle-Lander Harper’s
Bizarre
Sol 5621: 1210 hours MMT
David Alexander had fought to get himself a window seat.
Not that there was terribly much to see through the narrow, thick-cut piece of grit-scoured transplas set in the circular port, but he felt he deserved a chance to see the Cydonian site from the air. The Marines, after all, didn’t need to see the area they’d be guarding. It was just another deployment to them.
And besides, he wanted to see the Face.
He chuckled to himself. If Hoist or that bureaucratic idiot Bahir at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities could just see him now….
For a time, all he’d seen through the tiny port was the slowly revolving arms of the cycler as Marines continued to load their gear aboard Harper’s Bizarre. Finally, though, with a short, hard shock, the MSL had cut free from the cycler, falling tail first away from the far larger spacecraft-station until Alexander, by pressing his face hard against the transplas and shielding it from the interior light with his hands, could see the cycler in its entirety. Two more MSLs were in the process of docking with the cycler as the Bizarre cleared the sweep of Polyakov’s arms. Then, with a gut-wrenching burst of acceleration, Bizarre spun to a new attitude that swept the other spacecraft from view.
Acceleration pressed him back against his thinly padded couch…building and building far beyond the meager three-tenths G he’d gotten used to over the past few weeks. He wasn’t sure how long they were under boost; he’d forgotten to check his wrist-top when the Bizarre’s nukes cut in. He only knew that the weight pressing down on his body, on his chest and lungs, was unendurable…and that it went on and on and on, forcing him to endure, whatever he thought about the matter.
Eventually, they were in free fall again, but by that time he felt too tired to note the time…or even to look out the window.
After a while, acceleration resumed, and the sky beyond his tiny porthole began to glow.
The point of cycler spacecraft like Polyakov was that they occupied solar orbits that touched Earth’s orbit on their inward swing and Mars’s orbit on their outer. With some judicious use of gravity wells during each planetary swing-by and occasional kicks from their ion-electric drives, they could arrange to meet the planetary orbits when the planets themselves were there. It was necessary, however, to ferry the personnel and equipment brought out from Earth down to the Martian surface…and that meant a hefty delta-v burn, followed by aerobraking in the Martian atmosphere. The ride down was long, rough, and excruciatingly uncomfortable.