Semper Mars (35 page)

T
WENTY
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IVE

Friday, 22 June: 1340 Hours GMT

Warrenton, Virginia

0940 hours EDT

Kaitlin was on the floor in the den playing chess with twelve-year-old Jeff Warhurst when the call came through. “Kaitlin?” Stephanie Warhurst started speaking before she was fully in the room. She sounded concerned. “It’s a vidcall from Monty, at the Pentagon, and he says it’s on a special line. I don’t really know why he’s calling you…”

“It’s okay, Mrs. Warhurst. Can I take it in the E-room?”

“Of course, dear. I’ll transfer the call there.”

“Hey, Kaitlin?” Jeff said, looking up from the board. “Yeah?”

“Are you gonna be a Marine someday, like my grandpa… and my dad?”

The question, coming out of nowhere, shook her. She’d thought about it a lot, of course… and she’d been thinking about it again ever since her return from Japan. But…

“I don’t know, Jeff,” she said. “Why?”

“I dunno. Just wondering, I guess. I’m gonna be a Marine, you wait! And the UNers better watch out!” There seemed to be no proper answer to such an assertive statement. She rose and started to follow Mrs. Warhurst.

“Oh, and Kaitlin,” Jeff added. “Yes?”

“Just thought I’d warn you. Your queen’s a goner.”

She grinned. “Take another look, sport. If you take my queen, I’ve got mate in five.”

“Huh?” Jeff looked incredulous.

“Sometimes sacrificing a piece can give you a significant advantage. See if you can figure it out by the time I get back.”

The Warhursts’ entertainment room was large and comfortably furnished, with a circular sofa in the sunken floor, and a Hitachi wallscreen that literally covered an entire, eight-meter wall from ceiling to floor. She sat down behind the low, central table and slid open the polished top, exposing the keyboard, touchscreen, and gaming controls. She touched the accept key.

The screen came on, and Montgomery Warhurst’s craggy face looked down at her, huge and imposing. “Hello, Kaitlin,” he said.

She touched a control that stepped the screen’s active area down a bit, so she didn’t feel like she was standing in front of the Face on Mars. “Good morning, General,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

“Kaitlin, I’ve just had the damnedest call. Came through from an old friend of mine… who also used to be our ambassador to Japan. It seems a Japanese friend of his has been trying to get in touch with you, and, well, with the war and everything, he had to resort to some pretty sneaky back channels to carry it off.”

Kaitlin’s heart leaped. A Japanese friend? But, no… it couldn’t be Yukio. Yukio’s father might know the American ambassador as a friend, but not Yukio.

And in that moment, she knew who the call was from, and what it was about.

“Anyway, we’ve set up a special comm channel for him. It’s, ah, it’s the Japanese minister of International Trade and Industry, and he wants to talk to you. In private. Will you take the call?”

Kaitlin felt very cold… and detached. It was as though she were listening to someone else, a stranger, say, “I’ll take it.”

“Okay.” He turned his head, looking at another screen. “I’m putting you through, sir.”

The face that appeared on screen a moment later was not Ishiwara’s, but a younger man sitting cross-legged on a tatami behind a low table with a PAD. It was Hisho Nabuko, the man she’d spoken with the day she left Japan.

He bowed formally. “Good morning, Miss Garroway,” he said in only slightly accented English. She stood, then bowed in reply. “Konichiwa, haji-memashte, o-hisho-san.”

“I am well, thank you. The minister would like a moment of your time, if you would be so kind.”

“Of course. I would be delighted to talk to him.”

Her stomach was twisting, her eyes blurring through the tears. Slowly, she slumped back to the sofa, then let herself slide to the floor, kneeling next to the table. Oh, God, no! Not Yukio! Not Yukio!…

Ishiwara appeared, wearing a silk robe and seated on the floor behind a low table and PAD identical to his secretary’s. He was seated in one of the almost bare rooms of his home, and she wondered what he must think of the lush, cluttered, and very Western decor at her back. Well, he was used to dealing with Western gaijin. More surprising was the very fact of speaking face-to-face with a member of the Japanese government… when the United States was at war with Japan.

What, she wondered, would her father think?

With a small, jarring shock of recognition, she saw that a small niche in one wall was occupied now by her house present, the sleek and elegant little model of the Inaduma fighter, a black-and-white,

dart-shaped minnow clinging to the back of the whalelike Ikaduti booster. “Konichiwa, Kaitlin-san,” Ishiwara said. “Genki des ka?”

He was addressing her as a younger friend, asking her how she was.

“Genki des, domo, o-Daijin-sama,” she replied, giving the traditional za-rei, or seated bow, three large fingers of each hand on the floor, thumbs touching little fingers in circles. “Konichiwa, o-genki des ka?”

“I am… in good health, Kaitlin-san,” he said, switching to English. “I fear, however, that I have very bad news. Nine days ago, Toshiyuki-san… he failed to return from his mission.”

Somehow, somehow, she kept her face as impassive as his. “I am very sorry to hear that, Ishiwara-sama. The loss of your son… of Yukio…” She couldn’t stop the tears streaming down her face. She reached up and brushed them away. “I am very sorry for you, for your loss.”

Ishiwara smiled, the expression jolting Kaitlin for an instant, until she remembered that in Japan, a smile, a pleasant face, was expected to cover any emotion. When she looked into his eyes, however, she saw there the truth.

“First, Kaitlin-chan, let me tell you that Yukio loved you very deeply. We talked often about it, about you. I know this to be true.”

Kaitlin was still recovering from the shock of hearing Ishiwara use the honorific chan instead of san, an affectionate diminutive usually reserved for family members or intimate friends. She could say nothing… do nothing but try to match Ishiwara’s smile.

“I must tell you frankly,” Ishiwara continued, “that I was against your relationship. Not your friendship, perhaps, but there could be no thought of the two of you marrying. I was, frankly, most relieved when I received your message that you had to return to your country. The two of you were from worlds vastly more alien than Earth is from Mars. One or the other of you would have had to deny himself, to deny his very soul in such a union.”

Kaitlin wondered why Ishiwara was telling her this. He doesn’t need to justify himself, she thought. Not now, not to a gaijin.

“We had many long talks, my son and I,” he continued, still smiling. “He told me much about you, about your thoughts. He told me, just before he left for Tanegashima for the last time, that he felt the war between our countries, yours and mine, was a serious mistake, that we were fighting the wrong people at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. I suspect that your feelings were at least partly responsible for his belief.”

“I am… sorry if I gave offense, Ishiwara-sama.”

“Offense must be accepted as well as given. You expressed your heart, as did he. In any case,

Toshi-chan’s convictions have been… weighing heavily, these past few days. Soon, I must address my government and tell them what I feel about this war. I wished to tell you, Kaitlin-chan, that a part of you, and a part of Toshi-chan, will be there with me when I address the prime minister.”

He hesitated then, and Kaitlin wondered if he was waiting for a response. She had none to give. She could say nothing. She still didn’t know why Ishiwara was telling her these things. Her grief at knowing that Yukio was dead left her numb to thoughts of governments, prime ministers, and cabinet meetings. Oh God oh Christ I hate this war, she thought, and her fists clenched until her nails bit the palms of her hands. I hate this damned, stupid war!…

“There is something else,” Ishiwara continued. “Something… something deeply and personally embarrassing to me. I must apologize deeply, Kaitlin-san. In your farewell message, you enclosed a message for me to give to Toshiyuki-chan. I am very sorry to tell you that I never gave it to him. The fault is mine. I thought… I thought it best not to give it to him, since I feared encouraging you to continue your relationship. I feared that it might affect the performance of his mission. It was wrong of me, and I apologize.” He bowed, deeply.

“Please don’t be sorry,” she said. Pain churned within her. He never got it. He never knew. “You were right. You were right, after all. It couldn’t have worked out with us. I know that now.” It’ll never work so long as people keep acting so damned stupid, she thought fiercely. It’ll never have a chance of working until we can start all over, someplace else, away from this damned black hole of old cultures and old customs and old notions of what’s proper and what’s acceptable and what’s right. Damn, damn, damn this war!…

“I’m not so sure that I was right, Kaitlin-chan.” He sighed. “In any case, I apologize for keeping back the letter. And this, you see, brings me to another subject. After… Toshiyuki’s final mission, the base commander sent me a memclip. It had been found among his things, along with instructions to transmit it to me, if… if he failed to return. One of the items on that memclip was a vidmessage for you. I have not seen it… but I have arranged to have it transmitted over this channel, if you wish to see.”

“I would. Domo arigato gozaimasu.”

“I will leave you then. I’m very sorry for any sadness I have given you.”

“And I am sorry, Ishiwara-sama, that you have lost your son.”

“Perhaps there is yet good to come of it. Sayonara, Kaiti-chan.”

The word sayonara, in Japanese, was abrupt for the language, a word tinged with sadness that the two who were parting might never see one another again. Kaitlin bowed deeply and chose a more informal closing. “Domo arigato gozaimasu, Ishiwara-sama,” she said. “Dewa mata.”

Her good-bye meant something more like “Well, see you again sometime.”

For the briefest of instants, she thought she detected a flicker of surprise behind those dark eyes, and the rigidly controlled emotions dwelling there. He bowed, and the screen went blank.

And a moment later she was looking up at Yukio. He was wearing a black Space Defense Force uniform with the chrysanthemum pips of a chu-i on his collar. He appeared to be in a booth of some sort; at his back, blurred and out of focus, was some sort of recreation hall. She could hear laughter in the background, see the shadowy shapes of other young men gathered around a table, standing and talking, playing Ping-Pong. The enemy…

He smiled at her. “Hello, Chicako. Look, I’m not very good at this, and I don’t want to seem overly dramatic or anything, but, well, if you’re seeing this, I guess that means I’m dead.” His smile stayed in place, but the eyes were dark and terribly serious.

“When we were together here,” he went on, “I felt… strange. Divided. I guess I was having some trouble reconciling the Western part of me with the Nihonjin. And, maybe I was wrong, but I thought I was sensing the same sort of struggle going on in you. When my father told me that you had returned to America, I figured you had probably decided it had all been a terrible mistake.”

He didn’t know. He never got my message.

“You know, Chicako, it wouldn’t have been easy. I couldn’t have just turned my back on my family. And, well, you must feel the same way about your father. And your country. I don’t know how we were going to work it out.

“I just wanted you to know that we would have worked it out. You taught me that, Chicako. Anything’s possible, with enough love.

“By now, you’ll know that the UN has ordered us to join the fight against the United States. I hate that order, with every fiber of my being, but because I am who and what I am, I must obey. It’s, well… my heritage, I guess you would call it. Samurai. I will do what I have to do. And die doing it. But I want you to know that I love you with all my heart, that I’ll be thinking of you out there… and that I know we would have found a way, if fate had been just a little kinder.

“Remember me, Chicako.”

“Ah, Toshi-san!” someone called out from close by. “Isho-ni konai?”

Yukio turned his head. “Ima iku!” he called. He turned back to the screen. “I’ve got to go now. I just wanted you to know… I love you. Always. Sayonara, Chicako.”

Much later, Jeff Warhurst came to the E-room to find Kaitlin. After figuring out her queen gambit, he’d spent the next hour looking for an alternate plan that didn’t involve capturing her queen but would still give him a fighting chance. He’d thought he’d found one, and he was eager to check it out, but when he looked in the room, he saw Kaitlin, still on the floor, head down on her arms on the tabletop, sobbing quietly. He hesitated, wondering if he should go in, then changed his mind and quietly closed the door, giving Kaitlin some time alone with her grief.

After his dad had died, he’d learned about grief himself. He knew about being alone.

Wednesday, 4 July: 0343 Hours GMT

Cydonia Prime

Cydonia, Mars

Sol 5672: 1510 hours MMT

Major Mark Garroway emerged from the main hab at Cydonia Prime. It was midafternoon, and the Cydonian Plain stood golden in that astonishing clarity of the thin Martian air. It was, he was forced to admit, beautiful… in a stark and oceanless way…

Strange. Garroway was beginning to like Mars… like its solitude, its stark beauty, its magnificent vistas of sand, rock, and color. It couldn’t compare to the ocean, of course, and he was still looking forward to that marina in the Bahamas… but he thought he was going to enjoy the rest of his deployment here. Kaitlin, he thought, would be pleased.

He hoped she was all right. As soon as full communications with Earth had been restored after the battle, they’d started exchanging e-mail frequently. But then, a few days after the battle, she’d stopped answering him, and Garroway had been increasingly frantic. General Warhurst, finally, had mentioned a mysterious vidcall from the Japanese minister of International Trade and Industry—a private call for Kaitlin. Although the NSA had probably decoded and recorded the conversation as a matter of course, Warhurst didn’t know what had been said, and Kaitlin had mentioned nothing about it, either to him or to Garroway.