Sandy let the van’s nav take him home; it was quicker that way, locking into fast-lane traffic across town to Pasadena. Zuma Beach had been a bust, with too many people, too few decent waves. And he’d been distracted: couldn’t be thinking about alien starships when your board was trying to kick your ass into the deep.
He’d left Argentina in a medevac chopper, spent the next six months at the San Francisco Army Hospital. When he got out, physically rehabbed and mentally stable, give or take a med or two, he’d started looking for a job that might engage him. He hadn’t found it. He was addicted to the rush of combat, but that was hard to find in civilian life. You could find jobs that were simply dangerous, but as dangerous as they might be, they were usually boring as well, until everything went sideways and you got killed.
He’d gotten a taste of the rush, running around L.A. with a news team and a camera, but after a while, it all seemed pointless: with nine billion people on Earth, anything that you could conceive of people doing to each other was being done. All the time. Taking pictures of it didn’t change anything.
His father, though a rich and conservative plutocrat, was a nice-enough guy. He worried that Sandy was drifting, and, when he inherited his grandfather’s money, would become another too-rich dilettante, wasting his life with sex, drugs, AR, and RhythmTech. He’d call every morning with suggestions, and finally had suggested a job that might engage Sandy’s intellect: “I think I found you something different over at Caltech.”
That hadn’t worked out, and Sandy started drifting again. He stayed away from the Alternate Reality games, as too stupid and too addictive. His VA medical monitor suggested more drugs, something that might chemically re-create the spark.
The Benz parked itself, and the phone component of Sandy’s
wrist-wrap told the front door that he’d arrived. The door unlocked itself and disarmed the alarm. One step inside, he stripped off his damp T-shirt and dropped it on the floor, as the door closed itself. Another three steps and he stopped, then backed up to the door, passed his wrist-wrap over a faux-but-good Impressionist painting. The painting swung silently away from the wall, revealing a niche.
Sandy took the HK double-stack automatic out of the niche, turned it on, and selected the hard stuff without thinking, and asked, aloud, “Who’s here?”
“Crow.”
Crow. Sandy could smell him. Nothing offensive—mostly peanut butter—but not right for an empty apartment. Sandy followed the muzzle of the pistol into the kitchen, where Crow was sitting at the breakfast bar, handling the partly disassembled RED XV vid camera that Sandy had been refurbishing. A half-eaten peanut-butter sandwich sat an arm’s length away.
“Careful with the camera,” Sandy said. He dropped the gun on the kitchen counter with a metallic clank and pulled open the refrigerator. “I’ve been realigning the sensor and it’s not tightened down yet.”
“I can see that—I’ve worked with one of these before,” Crow said. “Looks like a full hardware alignment.”
“Yeah, it is. The actuators were screwed. And for Christ’s sakes, don’t get peanut butter on anything.”
“Sorry. I haven’t had much time to eat.”
Sandy nodded. “You want a Dos Equis? And, uh, I got a couple splits of champagne if you’re feeling girlie.”
“Dos Equis is good. So: I talked to Larry McGovern last night.”
“Yeah? I heard he got his birds.” Sandy handed Crow a bottle of beer, picked up the HK and turned it off, and leaned against the refrigerator door.
“Yes, he did. He’ll get a star in a couple of years, if he doesn’t send the wrong memo to the wrong guy.”
“He’s not really a memo guy,” Sandy said. “At least, he didn’t used to be, when he was a light colonel.”
“Still not. He says ‘hello.’ He doesn’t call you ‘Sandy,’ or ‘Lieutenant Darlington,’ by the way. He calls you ‘The X.’ Not ‘X,’ but ‘The X.’”
“Army bullshit,” Sandy said. “Anyway, what’s up with you? I assume this isn’t a practice burglary. Especially with the security they’ve got in this place.”
“No. We need to talk to you, about keeping your mouth shut. About not trying to blackmail us into letting you go on the mission.”
“What mission?”
“To Saturn. Leaves in a year or two.”
Sandy took his beer around to the couch that faced the breakfast bar, dropped into it, and said, “You’re really going?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, I gotta tell you—I want to go, and bad,” Sandy said. “What do I have to do to talk you into it? Or bribe you? How about a huge fuckin’ campaign contribution to Santeros? I could . . .”
Crow shook his head: “Nothing. You want to sign up, we’ll take you.”
Sandy thought about it for a minute, then asked, “Why?”
“Well, oddly enough, you precisely fit a slot on the ship. You’re a decent videographer, bordering on good, and you’ll be better than good by the time we leave. We need to document every millimeter of this thing. We’ll want it in the highest resolution. And we want it done by somebody who has demonstrated some guts—somebody who won’t cut and run because he’s about to be flamed by a bug—and somebody who has shown that he can keep his mouth shut. That’s one thing.”
“One thing? There’s another?”
“Yeah. There’ll be a few guns on board,” Crow said. “I’ll have one. You’ll have access to another one, if need be. Some weird shit could happen on this trip. There’ll be a lot of stress, probably a lot of argument, given the kind of people who’ll be aboard. Could have some psych problems. We think it’d be a good idea to have a hard-nosed security guy to back me up, if I need it.”
“I’m really not interested in killing anybody,” Sandy said. He took a hit of Dos Equis. “Not anymore.”
“If you got to the point where you had to kill someone, you’d most likely be saving the whole crew, as well as your own ass,” Crow said.
Sandy said, “Okay. That, I could do.”
“So. You wanna go?”
“Absolutely. The only thing is . . .”
Crow: “What?”
“I’m afraid that you’re setting me up,” Sandy said. “Fletcher’s told you that I’m entirely unreliable, that I couldn’t change a fuckin’ tire, and all that. That I smoke too much dope, that I screw my way through the Group . . .”
Crow waved it off: “We know what Fletcher’s going to say, and I know what Larry McGovern told me yesterday. Larry said that if I ever needed a backup, and I didn’t choose you when I had the chance, I was a fool. I’m not a fool. You couldn’t take any dope aboard the ship, for obvious reasons, but—”
“I don’t need it,” Sandy said. “I’m still worried that you’ll just lead me along, and then, at the last minute, after word about the mission has leaked . . . you’ll kick me off the mission. Like totally fuck me.”
“We considered that,” Crow said. “But, given the fact that you rather neatly fit a slot we need, and all your money, and the potential for fucking us back . . . we decided it’d be easier to play it straight.”
Sandy grinned at him: “I would have liked to have seen that decision get made. ‘Playing it straight’? That’s gotta be a first for Santeros.”
“We’re not that bad,” Crow said.
“Of course you are,” Sandy said.
Crow asked, “Why’d you drop the HK when you saw who it was? What if I’d come here to take care of our potential publicity problem?”
“You really do that?” Sandy asked.
“I’ll ignore that question,” Crow said. Then, a half second later, “Wait—I won’t ignore it. Of course I don’t do that. We don’t go around killing innocent people.”
Sandy nodded and said, “I keep the gun in case there’s still somebody who might try to collect the blood money. When it turned out to
be you, I knew that the gun wouldn’t help. If you were here to kill me, it was a done deal. Though, when I think some more about it, you wouldn’t be here if I was going to be killed. There’d be an unfortunate surfing accident, or a semi-trailer’s nav would go crazy and cross the centerline . . .”
“Paranoid fantasy . . . science fiction.” Crow took a final pull on his beer, put down the bottle, and asked, “Would you be willing to go back under military discipline?”
“You mean reenlist?”
“You’d be reactivated. You’re still technically—very technically—in the reserve.”
“Could I be a major?”
“No, but you could be a captain,” Crow said.
“Would I have to wear a uniform?”
“Actually, we don’t want you to,” Crow said. “The only reason we want you under discipline is so that if . . . mmm . . . there were some difficult orders, the consequences would be more severe if you didn’t follow them. Orders from the President. Court-martial, instead of a bunch of surf rats on a jury from Venice Beach.”
“I could—”
“There’s a little more,” Crow interrupted. “We’d want you to stay under cover. Keep your current persona. The rich and flaky vid guy whose father probably bought him a job on the ship. In other words, we wouldn’t want people to know you’re actually Superman, until it’s time to leap over the building.”
“Let me think about that a second,” Sandy said. He thought one second, then brought out his toothy grin. “Okay. I’m in.”
“And you’ll do what we want.” A statement, not a question.
“I’ll tell you what, Crow,” Sandy said, the smile slipping away. “I’ll not only do what you want, I’ll do what you need.”
Jiang, the ambassador from the People’s Republic of China to the United States, grumbled over the morning briefings. Today’s minor crisis involved a glitch in mining and trade negotiations, and he’d probably have to smooth a few ruffled feathers. What the hell was rhenium used for, anyway?
Chen poked his head in the door without knocking: “Boss? Hate to interrupt, but I got a call from my little birdie. He says we need to watch the President’s speech. More than that: he’s sending a messenger with an advance copy. He said you should read it . . . for your own good.”
“My own good? Your little birdie is presumptuous,” Jiang said. “What else did he say? Is this going to be ugly? Everything seems smooth right now. Haven’t heard anything from home . . .”
“That’s why I stuck my head in—my contact is very, very close to Santeros. He hinted that we’re getting an advance look because they basically like us, and don’t want you to look bad, back home. You’ll be able to tip them off.”
“It’s already ten o’clock. The announcement said she’s speaking at one o’clock. What good will three hours do us?”
“Better than no hours, if she’s about to drop a bomb.” Chen looked at his watch. “And it’ll be less than three hours—I got the impression that the messenger wasn’t on his way, yet. The messenger, by the way, will arrive in a Secret Service car. I suspect his arrival will be very closely calculated to give you just enough time to tip off the minister, but not enough time to shoot down whatever balloon Santeros is planning to float.”
Jiang pulled on an ear, thinking, then said, “Tell Chong if he takes more than nine seconds to get from the street to my office, I’ll have him hanged in the basement.”
“Boss, that would be cruel. You know how serious . . .”
Jiang waved him off. “Okay. Tell him he’ll be flogged in the basement.”
A Secret Service agent, in the middle car of a three-car caravan,
delivered a sealed package to Chong at 11:45. Chong made it to the ambassador’s door in 7.5 seconds, handed it off to Chen, who stuck his head in again: “Boss, the package is here.”
“They took their time with it,” Jiang said, as Chen crossed the long Oriental carpet to his desk.
Chen handed him the package and asked, “Do you want me to . . .” He tipped his head toward the door.
“No. I prefer to have a witness,” Jiang said. “Sit down.”
He ripped off the top of the envelope, using the dangling ribbon that protruded from one end.
Chen nodded, and sat. He’d been Jiang’s right-hand man since Jiang had joined the diplomatic service. Jiang wasn’t entirely sure what the slight and shy man had done before joining the corps, but he was well-connected in Beijing and had excellent intuition. Chen seemed to possess certain kinds of information before other people even knew it existed.
Inside the package, Jiang found a thin sheaf of papers, cheap stuff available at any office supply store. There was no identification on the papers, and they’d apparently been produced on a routine office printer.
“This is serious,” Jiang said, before he started reading. “The paper . . . we could never prove where it came from . . . who leaked it.”
Chen nodded.
Jiang began skimming: Routine opening salutations, announcing a great new American initiative that would foster international cooperation, with our friends and allies the Chinese . . .
Allies?
. . . have decided to accompany them on their Mars mission . . .
“What the hell?” Jiang blurted, frowning at the papers in his hand. He looked up at Chen: “We need to get to the communications shell right now.”
“What is it, boss?”
“Santeros is sending a mission to Mars . . . with us.”
“What?”
They were both moving, Jiang a half step ahead of Chen. “You’re sure about your birdie?”
“As sure as you can get with Americans. They do seem to enjoy treachery for its own sake. On the other hand, I can think of no reason at all that they’d ever set us up, you and I, on something like this. No: it’s real.”
Jiang stopped: “I wonder if the sly boys have anything on this?” He was talking about the Chinese intelligence unit headquartered in the embassy.
Chen shook his head: “I would have heard . . . one way or another. I do know that they’re asking about the speech, but I haven’t heard that they’ve gotten much back.”
Jiang said, “Then if these papers are correct”—he shook them at Chen—“not only will we be first in Beijing, we will stick a poker up Yang’s ass, will we not?”
Yang was the head of the intelligence unit. Chen showed just a sliver of a smile: “I think, yes, we will. Now that you mention it, I suspect my little birdie knows that, too.”
“It’s a worthwhile thing, anytime, for all of us,” Jiang said.
Jiang read more of the speech as they walked to the elevator that went down to the communications unit, buried deep in the soil of Washington, D.C. Some of it he read aloud to Chen, as the smaller man hurried to keep pace:
We all agree that space is the common heritage of humanity, and it is our future and our promise. Any effort to expand the human spirit enhances us all. We also know that space is still a very dangerous place. Anytime we push the frontiers and boundaries outward we are at risk.
Accordingly, after long-term and extensive consultation with members of Congress, the USSA, and other experts in the field, I am making it our highest priority to join China in their venture to send an expedition to Mars. We commend them for the bravery
and spirit they’ve shown in initiating this magnificent undertaking, but our experts have concluded that, despite the Chinese’s brilliant planning and engineering, the risks are too great for a single ship, alone. Failure cannot be considered an acceptable option; it would be a loss for us all. So, we will accompany them, in a ship of our own. Two ships, each self-sufficient, accompanying each other on this grand undertaking greatly improve the chances of success.
The Chinese are well along on building their vessel, and we have no desire to delay their mission. Our best people have come up with a plan to meet their timetable. Accordingly, I have ordered the repurposing of U.S. Space Station Three, to convert it for travel to Mars. Its two habitat modules can handle the personnel and life support needs for a long-duration mission, and they will become the core of the new ship. The addition of tanks, engines, and a new command and instrumentation module to turn it into an interplanetary vessel can be accomplished quickly and efficiently.
In recognition of the President who first brought the Americans and Chinese into ongoing cooperation in the modern era, breaking down the barriers that had separated our people for many decades, almost a century ago, we will rename the USSS3 as the Richard M. Nixon.
A century ago, it was only Americans who set foot on the moon. They gave lip service to “for all mankind” but nothing more. We’ve moved beyond that. We’re not out to steal China’s glory nor beat them to Mars. We fully intend to give them the honor of placing the first footsteps on Martian soil. They have earned it. Then we can proceed together, as humanity expands into the solar system.
I expect, not too many months from now, to be congratulating our Chinese and American pioneers as they stand side by side under the rust-colored skies of Mars. Godspeed to them all.
Chen shook his head, said, “What is this? What can it be?”
The elevator door opened in the communications unit, where two
armed guards were waiting with submachine guns, which they promptly pointed elsewhere.
Jiang paused, and said quietly, “I can tell you what it is. It’s bullshit, Chen. The Americans are fucking with us. I don’t know why, but I want you to find out.”
“They must know that we’re sending a colony ship,” Chen said. “They’re afraid that we’re going to use that to lay claim to Mars. They’re making sure to let us know that that is not an acceptable outcome, and they’re taking steps to prevent it.”
Jiang asked, “Are we doing that?”
“Boss, that would be a complete violation of the International Space Treaty that has served both sides very well for the past thirty years. No, we are not doing that. Even if we did, everybody would just laugh us off. It’d be like . . . claiming the moon.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure, boss. There are probably a few idiots in Beijing who’ve tried to bring it up, but it’d never fly.”
“So we let the big brains figure this out,” Jiang said. “I’d give a lot of money to see the chairman’s face when this pops up on his screen.”
“A lot of money,” Chen said, “but preferably from a safe distance.”