Semper Mars. Ian Douglas

get here. I don’t think the whole Mexican Air Force has anything more modern than a couple dozen old F/A-22s.

      “In any case, Major Bainbridge wants you men to be on your toes. Those Peregrines’ ETA is in another twenty minutes or so…and when they set down, the crowd could get a bit…eager.”

      “We’ll be ready, sir.” Bledsoe slapped the side of his ATAR for emphasis, a sharp crack of palm on plastic.

      “I know you will. Carry on, Marines.” He turned and disappeared into the Residence.

      “Hey, Bled. Is it true what they say about that guy?”

      “About him bein’ the commandant’s son? Sure is. I got the straight shit from Dolchik in Personnel.”

      “I’ll be damned. He’s not a bad sort, for the son of God.”

      “Well, I’ll tell you. I’d rather have him at my back in a firefight than some of these new-Corps pukes.”

      “Roger that.” They listened for several minutes more to the speech barking from the speakers outside the embassy walls. A final pronouncement sent the crowd wild, cheering and screaming and swearing and shouting, until Bledsoe thought they must be planning to knock down the walls by sheer volume alone. Another volley of garbage hurtled over the fence, bouncing and scattering across the lawn beneath one of the compound’s spreading cypress trees but coming nowhere near the two Marines and their sandbag-barricaded post.

      Bledsoe slung his rifle—with the crisis on, they were not required to remain rigidly at attention, soldiers on parade, as they would have been otherwise—and pulled his PAD out of the thigh pocket in his fatigue pants. When he touched the wake-up key, a keyboard and a display screen winked on, and he began tapping at the unyielding flat surface.

      “Whatcha doin’?” Larabee asked.

      “Linking in to the security net,” Bledsoe replied. Several perimeter camera views were available over the general embassy net. “Ah. Here we go.”

      His PAD’s display screen flickered from the logo of the embassy’s local server to a low-res, real-time image shot from one of the small security cameras perched atop the compound wall. The scene looked out across the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City’s Great White Way, a broad and skyscraper-lined boulevard that was now smothered in a seething, shifting mass of humanity. A short distance up the road, El Angel stood gracefully on her pedestal, a towering monument to Mexican independence; a dozen men had swarmed up her base to a vantage point well above the heads of the crowd. Beyond, the elegant but aging facade of the Maria Isabel Sheraton was nearly lost behind the surging mob.

      Several rocks clattered off the embassy gate.

      “Get a load of this,” Bledsoe said, handing the PAD to Larabee. He pointed to the display. The security camera had clearly picked up a number of Mexican soldiers—in full battle gear—gathered in a small group in front of the Sheraton Hotel.

      “Are they watching the mob?” Larabee wanted to know. “Or getting ready to join in?”

      “Damfino,” Bledsoe replied. “Maybe they don’t know either. They might be there just to make sure the rocks don’t get thrown at Mexican property.”

      “Yeah, but if a few gringos get dinged up, no big deal, right?”

      Bledsoe set the PAD on top of the sandbag barricade and unslung his assault rifle. He didn’t like the looks of that crowd—too many tough-looking and angry young men, and no women or children visible at all. If this was really a spontaneous demonstration, like the local sources had been saying, he would have expected to see a more broadly distributed mix representing the local demographics.

      Not something that looked more like an army than a mob of demonstrators….

      United States Embassy

       Mexico City, República de

       México

       1512 hours local time

      “Come in.”

      Captain Theodore Warhurst opened the door and entered the large room—all deep carpets and oak paneling and framed photographs and oils—that was the office of Franklin R. Tibbs, the United States ambassador to Mexico. The scene inside was one of quiet, almost deliberate confusion, as aides transferred stacks of papers from gaping filing cabinets into boxes and piled them up. As Warhurst approached the desk, three more undersecretaries came into the room, hurried past him, and collected several of the boxes; the shredding machines down the hall were working continuously now, reducing American diplomatic secrets to unrecoverable confetti.

      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