Semper Mars. Ian Douglas

“Definitely.” He held up his hand as though spreading out a newspaper headline. “‘US Marines Slaughter Helpless Civilians at Demonstration outside Embassy.’ It’ll look great on Triple-N. Especially in Geneva.”

      She gestured toward a burned-out Bradley with her ATAR. “Civilians don’t usually attack embassies with tanks or AFVs.”

      “Mmm, no…but they’ll say they sent in the army to restore order. I doubt that anyone will question why the army just happened to have an armored division parked across the street when the trouble started.”

      Fuentes felt herself go ice-cold inside. She’d been responding to a provocation, following orders, even fighting the first battle of a war…but she’d not thought her actions could have possibly been construed as starting that war.

      Gunfire continued to pop and crackle in the distance, but the area around the embassy was eerily calm at the moment. God knows what they’re shooting at, she thought. Or why. Alien cultists, possibly, exchanging pleasantries with anti-alien religious fanatics. The whole world had been coming unglued lately. Maybe all that had been needed to smash it apart was this one, last, tiny nudge.

      A roar from the roof of the embassy signaled the first of the TR-5 transports lifting clear, hovering a moment, then dipping its nose and banking toward the east. An AV-32 followed, flying shotgun.

      Warhurst touched the radio plug in his right ear, listening. “Okay,” he said. “Roger that.” He looked at Fuentes. “The ambassador and his family are away. Most of the civilians, too, and our wounded. Now we just have to get ourselves the hell out of here.”

      The evacuation proceeded smoothly, with a choreographed precision that seemed to have been carefully rehearsed. The remaining civilians, the embassy’s CIA staff, and the rest of the embassy Marines made it off in the second TR-5. Warhurst helped get them all on the tilt-jet before it lifted off and followed the first toward the east and safety, but he remained behind on the roof to see to the evacuation of the First Platoon Marines.

      At Fuentes’s signal, the last of her Marines outside the Residence fell back from the walls, filing inside the shattered building and making their way up the steps. Fuentes found Warhurst standing on the embassy roof. “Come on, sir!” she yelled. “Last plane out of this burg!”

      Something had caught his attention on the grounds below, and he unslung his M-29. “Get the rest of your people on board,” he said. “We have company.”

      She joined him at the parapet, staring down into the front of the compound. Under cover of the dense smoke, more vehicles had moved close to the embassy walls, and dark-uniformed troops were scrambling out and spilling into the embassy grounds through a dozen different breaches.

      “Now I know how Davy Crockett felt at the Alamo,” he told her.

      “Let’s get out of here, sir!”

      “You go. I’ll—”

      “Come on, Captain! Now!”

      He nodded. “Okay! Go! Go!”

      First Platoon’s Peregrine was loading on the embassy roof now, with Sergeant Walsh hurrying the last few men across the helipad pavement to the waiting tilt-jet. Together, Fuentes and Warhurst sprinted for the aircraft. The engine whine was spooling up, the air above the pavement dancing and shimmering in the jetwash.

      Fuentes had reached the TR-5, pounding up the lowered rear ramp before she realized that she was alone. “Where is he?”

      Walsh looked about, then pointed. Twenty meters across the helipad, a small shed rose from the embassy roof, a shelter for the stairwell leading down into the building. Warhurst had positioned himself next to the open door and was leaning over the stairwell, firing his M-29 down the steps at unseen attackers.

      Fuentes saw what must have happened. While the last of the Marines had been loading onto the transport, Mexican troops had raced into the embassy and come swarming up the stairs. Warhurst had known they were there already, or guessed it. He stood now on the landing, exchanging fire with the Mexican troops, keeping them from emerging onto the helipad.

      “Captain!” Fuentes yelled. Her voice was lost in the roar of the engines. Biting off a curse, she touched her Motorola’s transmit switch, choosing the command channel. “Captain!” she yelled again. “Come on! We’ll cover you!”

      “Roger that!”

      Loosing a final long burst of gunfire down the stairwell, Warhurst turned and started running toward the Peregrine. He’d only come about three steps, however, when an explosion ripped the red metal door from the stairwell shed and knocked the Marine captain flat.

      Fuentes started back down the ramp. Warhurst saw her and waved her back. “Get away!” She heard his voice over her transceiver. “Get the hell away!”

      A machine gun opened fire from the roof of one of the neighboring buildings, striking sparks from the pavement between Fuentes and the downed Marine, smacking into the Peregrine with a chilling, metallic thunk-thunk-thunk. Instinctively, she dropped, searching for a target. The machine gun kept firing, aiming for the transport.

      “We’re taking hits!” the Peregrine’s pilot called over her earpiece. “We’re taking hits! We’ve got to go!”

      “Go! Go!” Warhurst shouted. “That’s a goddamn order!”

      Mexican troops burst from the smoking stairwell shed, firing wildly. She saw Warhurst rolling over, saw him fire into the charge, saw him go under. Sergeant Walsh dragged her up the ramp as the pavement dropped away beneath her. The TR-5 was airborne, boosting itself into the sky as gunfire probed and chattered after it.

      “You couldn’t have gotten to him,” Walsh told her.

      “Damn them!” she yelled, battle lust and horror and frustration and rage all boiling from her in a nightmare of raw emotion. “Damn them!…”

      One hundred feet above the embassy, the Peregrine’s pilot banked the aircraft slightly, giving the Zeus gunner a clear field of fire. For three or four seconds, a solid line of tracers, like straight, hard, green lightning, licked at the embassy roof, smashing into and through the structure in a cataclysm of detonating HE rounds and depleted uranium penetrators. Fuentes, still watching from the half-opened ramp of the aircraft, saw dozens of troops trapped in that deadly beam, transfixed, then torn apart and scattered by that searing whirlwind of death and utter destruction.

      The embassy roof, what was left of it, collapsed in flame and boiling smoke.

      We never leave our own behind….

      But she had. Damn it, she had….

      SIX

      SATURDAY, 12 MAY

      Earth-Mars Cycler Polyakov

       1417 hours GMT

      “All right, people!” Colonel Lloyd bellowed. “Listen up! We got us a major change of plans, here.”

      Lloyd waited as the buzz of speculation and grumbling died away. Most of the MMEF’s Marines had been gathered in Polyakov’s storm cellar, in full Class-One armor, with weapons and HUD helmets. Those not mustered in were watching through the unwinking eye of the television camera mounted on the bulkhead.

      “What kind of change, Colonel?” Sergeant Ken Jacob called out.

      “Yeah,” Corporal John Donatelli added. “We gonna get to go kick ugly space-alien butt or not?”

      The others chuckled, and several gave one another gloved high-fives.

      “No, but I’m gonna kick some ugly Marine butt if you assholes don’t simmer down.”

      James Andrew Lloyd knew he had a reputation for being hard on the men and women under his command. In fact, he gloried in that rep, cultivating the image of a hard-as-nails badass the way other men cultivated wealth or success. It had been that way for as long as he could remember. The United States,