“I think there’s something else you’re worried about,” Garroway told her. He kept his hands shielded from the UN people, his right hand cupped over his wrist-top. “You see a chance here to get sole access to the alien technology.”
“That is a factor,” she said. “Mostly, we cannot allow you Americans, or the Russians, to gain all of the benefits of what you learn here for yourselves.”
“And you’re not grabbing it for yourselves?” He pressed the strap release on his wrist-top and let the device drop into the palm of his right hand. Carefully, betraying nothing with facial expression or movements of his arms, he tucked it into the waistband of his greens at the small of his back. He had a feeling these people were going to be nervous about their captives having access to computers…and maybe this way he could keep his.
It was the only plan going at the moment, the only thing he could think of.
“What we do,” Bergerac said, “we do for all of Humanity. Not just for selfish and corrupt Americans.”
The man sounded angry, and Garroway decided not to push the issue. The UN propaganda machine had been working overtime lately on the “greedy and corrupt Americans” idea, while mobilizing the rest of the world against them. The thought worried him. Once you reduce a person to a label—“greedy and corrupt” was as good as any—you’re liable to have fewer qualms about arranging for that person’s disappearance. If the UN troops were moving against all Americans on Mars…hell, what were they going to do with them? There were too many to guard easily.
At the moment, things did not look good….
1211 HOURS GMT
Post 1, outside the hab
facilities
Cydonia Base, Mars
Soltime +25 minutes MMT
Lance Corporal Frank Kaminski’s feet were getting cold, and he knew it was time to move on. Of all the duties assigned to the Marines at Cydonia, this was the worst. Why, he thought miserably, am I freezing my ass off up here while Ben and Slider are taking it easy down at Candor? The answer came immediately. Because you were a pussy and didn’t volunteer to go. The truth was, he’d been afraid that Slider was going to do something stupid and get them all caught. Man, I don’t think I’m ever going to speak to either of those assholes again.
After months cooped up inside the cycler, he’d thought he’d be glad to set foot on a planet again, with a real sky and the room to get out and move around some. Unfortunately, it hadn’t worked out quite the way he’d expected. The habs at Cydonia were roomier than the cycler, of course, but they were all the same drab, stark, utilitarian design, obviously worked up by an architect who thought people liked living inside fuel tanks.
And outside was worse. You couldn’t go out without wearing Class-One armor—the full rig, complete with fifty-kilo backpack and power unit. Even if that rig only weighed something like fifteen kilos on Mars, it still moved like fifty…and once you were walking, you had to be ready to dig in your heels to stop, or that backpack would keep on going and take you with it. He was used to wearing Class-Ones, of course, after long hours of practice, but it wasn’t like really being outside. The information downloading over the HUD projected across his visor was comforting, but it still felt like he was playing video games inside a tin can.
At night it was really bad. The sky was so dark. Kaminski had grown up in a suburb of Chicago, and the nights there—between the city sprawl and the monster ultraplex at Woodfield—pretty much washed everything out of the sky except the Moon. Here, the blacknesses below and above the horizon were the same; you could tell the difference only by knowing that the horizon was where the dusting of diamond-hard, blue-white stars stopped. He’d never even seen the Milky Way before, but it arched across the sky like a long, fuzzy cloud. It made him feel…lonely.
Worse though, was the cold. Marine Class-One armor was designed to serve as a space suit, but it wasn’t as well insulated as an EVA or Marsuit; it couldn’t be, not and stay as relatively light and manageable as it was. The arsenic-gallenide batteries and the micro fuel cells provided power enough to keep him warm in the day—as well as processing the air he breathed and the water he drank—but at night, when the temperature plunged to 150 below, the ground got so cold it seemed to suck the heat right out through the soles of the boots. All of the Marines wore thermal socks inside their suits, but it wasn’t enough, not on a long, four-hour watch in the icy darkness. Marines on outside watch kept warm by moving…and by spelling one another every twenty minutes or so inside the main hab’s airlock.