LITMIR.BIZ

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several lightweight air and water bottles, and a heater, the latter implements being located in a backpack.

      They weren’t particularly heavy, but they were awkward; if you fell over while walking, it was the devil to get up again without the help of your comrades. Also, you had to be careful about accidentally ripping the fabric, which, depending on the circumstances and where the suit tore, could prove fatal. You could spend about three and one-half hours in the Martian environment without changing the air bottle, depending on your exertion level.

      The major officers were given individually contoured suits, but all the others were generic, without markings of any kind—and since the masks were reflective, once you’d put the damned thing on and joined a group of others of a similar height, you became, in essence, the invisible man. You couldn’t normally tell a bunch of excursionists apart. You could radio one of them, but unless he or she raised an arm in acknowledgment, you’d never know precisely who it was.

      So how do you lose someone? You join a crowd—and that was Mindon’s plan. What I did with it after that was my problem.

      After debarking at the ruined guard station, we examined it very carefully inside and out—the Seabees hadn’t had a chance yet to reconstruct the site—and then began taking soundings outside the station to see if the aliens had tunneled close enough to delude the poor bugger who’d gone crazy with his AK-47 or laser gun or whatever it was he used (they’d all wound up dead just the same).

      I walked towards an outcrop of rocks a quarter-mile distant, and Mindon said over the com: “Hey, look here! I’m getting some interesting readings.”

      I waved the end of my sensor wand at the ground. Naturally, my shadow-meister thought that it was Mindon leading the charge, and that I was still part of the pack that followed.

      “Nah, never mind,” he said. “Looks like a false reading. I’ll keep checking the area, though, just to make sure.”

      I kept taking my non-existent surveys of the terrain while Min wandered around with the rest of the slobs back near the guard post.

      “Another fluctuation,” Mindon said. “Nope, it’s gone. Anyone else having any luck?”

      “Yeah,” said Markus, “I’ve got a real prospect off to the east a bit.”

      So everyone focused their attention on him, while I walked just a bit further, until I reached a ten-foot-high jumble of stones and sand. Then I ducked behind them.

      “All right, Big Guy,” I said to myself. “If you’re going to do anything, now would be a very good time!”

      And, lo and behold, the ground opened up before me, and there was a Martian digging-machine. It popped its hatch, and I squeezed in next to the operator, a small alien with dark gray skin mottled in white.

      “You took your own sweet siesta,” I mumbled.

      It swiveled its head and looked at me with its big eyes. Then it turned to its business again, and soon we were backing down into the small tunnel, and the machine was pushing up soil to cover the entrance. It swiveled around and headed down a sharply declining spiral hole. Perhaps a hundred yards further on we reached a cross-tunnel, and there I boarded one of the traveling-machines.

      I looked over at Spotty.

      “Thanks,” I said.

      “Mah-goo,” I think it replied. I don’t know if that was an answer of sorts, or its name, or…whatever.

      Then we went our separate ways, and I never met this fellow, attended or alone, again.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      IT STARTED LIKE A GUILTY THING

      Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

      —William Shakespeare

      Stephen Smith, 17 Bi-October, Mars Year viii

      Inland Empire, California, Planet Earth

      My brother Alex has asked me to jot down my memories of what happened here during the recent unrest, and although I’m not much of a writer, he can be persuasive when he wants to be.

      If you’ve read his book about the War of Two Worlds, you’ll have seen me mentioned there. I think he overdramatized my role then, but that’s Alex for you. After the war, I married Cassie and adopted Erie, and we had two more daughters, Anna and Sarah. I finished my residency and became a cardiologist at a major hospital in Southern California. Erie grew up, found someone of her own, and we now have a grandchild, with another on the way.

      During the Second Martian War, when the aliens were bombarding Earth with their meteors, we were fortunate to escape any trauma ourselves, other than what we saw reflected on the tube. I did spend six months after the war as a volunteer medic in South America a decade ago, helping to rebuild the devastated regions. But we were really fortunate not to have been directly affected by that second clash between the races.

      When my older sibling volunteered for Expedition III, I flew up to Grass Valley, where he was living at the time, and spent a week saying goodbye—because I knew we’d never meet again in this lifetime.

      And then when the Third War began, two years after the end of the second, well, we watched and waited from afar—but we received no communication from Alex for months. It wasn’t until later that I learned the reasons for this.

      The news of the U.S.S. Indefatigable’s destruction hit everyone here hard. Things had started out well enough with the bombardment of the Martian home pits, and then we got the news of one disaster after another, seemingly caused by the insane actions of our own troops. Soon, though, it became evident that the aliens were manipulating our guys into attacking each other.

      Every day, it seemed, there was something new, something really awful. The world appeared to turn upside down. And yet—all of this was still a distant shadow to us, something that had happened and continued to happen over there, not here. That made it all bearable somehow. There was nothing any of us could do about the situation, except support Madame President and buy more bonds, as our ex-Governor said.

      Of more immediate concern was the potential loss of the U.S.S. Warren G. Harding, a missile submarine that was missing in the Pacific somewhere—they wouldn’t say exactly where. And then the Russian nuclear sub Boris Yeltsin vanished two days later off Vladivostok—again, no debris, no distress calls, no nothing. The freighter Fukuoka Maru broadcast an SOS shortly thereafter, saying it was…but the message was cut off in midstream. Rescue vessels sent to an area near Midway Island where the boat was located found nothing to indicate what’d happened to the ship—not even an oil slick.

      BERMUDA TRIANGLE—WEST?

      one of the headlines blared. The losses continued to mount day by day, just as they were simultaneously increasing on Mars. Gradually we all came to believe—without any hard evidence—that the two events were somehow connected.

      One of the televangelists, Romey Carnick, reported a vision in which he saw the Rapture approaching, and urged his listeners to send him all their money, because they wouldn’t need it much longer. Several of the UFO people went to the mountain in western Nevada where Kirk’s “death” had been filmed, and began a vigil to await the arrival of the critters from the deeps—ours or theirs, they weren’t too specific. PBS reran Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series decades after the fact. His rumbling mantra, “billions and billions,” wasn’t exactly reassuring in our present context.

      I didn’t like the way the tea leaves were reading, so I quietly began gathering together some survival gear and stowing it in our SUV. Like I told Cassie, “better safe than dead.” She agreed with me, remembering all too well our experiences in the War of Two Worlds. The two girls just thought it was a lark. Anna, the ten-year-old thoughtful one, was at that stage where she was always asking questions, and I’d had to scramble to find some reasonable answers. Her younger sister was more practical about such things.

      Then Tijuana was attacked in the middle of the night by something or some things coming up out of the ocean. The few survivors described

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