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Why it always seems that our most vicious enemies aren t the aliens who want
to wipe us off the face of the universe& but our own friends and neighbors.
Truthfully, General, I ve never understood that about humans. If you don t
have enemies, you seem peculiarly adept at creating them. If you don t mind my
saying so.
Mind? No. Why would I mind the truth? He checked his internal time sense.
Looks like they re going to be debating for a long time to come, Cara. I need
food.
He electronically logged out, then stepped through the doorway at the back of
his visitor s box. He could already tell that it was going to be a long
afternoon, one that would probably extend well into the evening.
And the die was cast, as another general had commented three thousand years
earlier.
There was nothing else he could do to influence events, however much he might
wish it.
10
1011.1102
USMC Recruit Training Center Command
Ares Ring, Mars
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1020 hrs GMT
Like Earth, Mars possessed a ring.
Like its counterpart encircling the Motherworld of Humankind, the Ares Ring
was not solid, but was composed of some tens of thousands of separate orbital
facilities, colony habs, nanufactories and power stations, dockyards and
spaceports, research stations and living quarters. Each structure pursued its
own orbit about the planet, though many were magnetically locked with the
neighbors, creating the illusion of a solid structure. They were positioned at
about 20,000 kilometers above the planet s surface, locking them in to an
arestationary orbit the equivalent of geostationary for Earth. From this
height, Mars appeared some eleven times larger than did the full moon from
Earth, and four times brighter.
Unlike Earth, Mars possessed only a single ground to synchronous-orbit
elevator, the Pavonis Mons
Tower. Pavonis Mons, the middle of the striking set of three volcanoes in a
row southeast of the vast swelling of Mons Olympus, reached seven miles into
the sky and by chance exactly straddled the Martian equator the perfect
ground-end anchor for a space elevator. The habitat housing the Marine Recruit
Training Center Command was positioned close by the nexus with the P.M. Tower,
which looked like a taut, white thread vanishing down into the mottled ocher
and green face of Mars.
PFC Aiden Garroway stood at attention on the Grand Arean Promenade, together
with the thirty-nine other Marines of Recruit Company 4102 who d completed
boot training, and tried not to look down.
The deck they were standing on was either transparent or a projection of an
exterior view from a camera angled down toward Mars the resolution was good
enough that it was impossible to tell which and it was easy to imagine that
the company was standing on empty space, with a twenty-thousand-kilometer fall
to the rusty surface of the planet far beneath his feet.
The effect of standing on empty space, the gibbous disk of Mars far beneath
his feet, could be unnerving.
He could just glimpse the planet when he turned his eyes down, while keeping
his head rigidly immobile.
Garroway and his fellow newly hatched Marines had spent a lot of time looking
at that sight since they d made the ascent from Noctis three days before. The
world was achingly beautiful red-ocher and green, the pristine sparkle and
optical snap of icecaps, the softer white swirls and daubs and speckles of
clouds, the purple-blue of the Borealis Sea.
For many of them, those from Earth s Rings, Garroway included, it brought with
it a pang of homesickness. Not that Mars resembled Earth all that closely,
even with its reborn seas and banks of clouds& but the oceanic blues and stormy
swirls of white echoed the world they d watched from
Terrestrial synchorbit; for the handful of recruits from Earth herself, it was
the colors the blues and greens, especially that reminded them of home.
All things considered, perhaps it was best that he was standing at attention
and looking straight ahead, not gawking at the deck. Somewhere behind him were
the ranks of seats filled with friends and families of graduating Marines. No
less a luminary than General McCulloch, Commandant of the U.S. Marine
Corps, was delivering a speech, his head and shoulders huge on the wallscreen
ahead and slightly to
Garroway s right.
The Marines, McCulloch was saying, have been criticized for being
different, for being out of step with the society that they are sworn to
protect. And it s true. Marines look at the world around them differently than
most people. Marines are dedicated to the ideal of service.
I don t mean to say that joining the Marines constitutes the only valid form
of service. Certainly not. Nor do I mean that military service is the only way
to serve one s country.
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But military service is one of the very few, unambiguous ways by which a
young man or woman can declare themselves in support of the common good. It s
one of the few means remaining today by which young people can make a deep and
lasting difference, both in their own lives, and in support of their homeland,
even their home world.
And Marines these Marines have selflessly chosen service to country at
considerable personal risk, have chosen service to others above comfort, above
profit, above every other mundane consideration popular with young civilians
these days& .
Garroway listened to the words, but somehow they didn t connect for him. The
seats above and behind him, he knew, were filled almost to capacity, but not
one of the Giangreco line had come out to watch his graduation. Not one.
Estelle, he knew, had wanted to come, but an e-transmit from her last week had
told him the money for a flight out to Mars just wasn t there. He wondered if
that was the reason& or if Delano Giangreco had put his pacifist foot down.
Delano, he knew, held the purse strings for the entire Giangreco line family.
He wished that, at least, his birth mother could have been there.
McCulloch was still talking.
& and it is within the Corps that these young people learn the heart and soul
of altruism. They learn to value the person standing next to them more than
they value themselves, learn to regard sacrifice as the sacred gift they give
to their comrades, and to their home.
There was a time, a thousand years or more ago, when service in the military
was a prerequisite for public service as a leader of the community or of the
larger state. It was the military that taught a young person character, and
half or more of the people attending the institutions of higher learning first
served in the military.
Eventually, however, and unfortunately, such service, such altruism, became
unfashionable. Today, I
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