MONDAY, 21 APRIL 2042

Parris Island Recruit Training
Center
0725 hours EDT

Jack Ramsey—Private Jack Ramsey, US Marine Corps—stood at a rigid, fair approximation of attention on the recruit battalion grinder, gaze focused on the tops of the palmetto palms in the distance. Parris Island, they said, was slowly sinking as the world’s sea levels continued to rise. Scuttlebutt had it that the whole island was already beneath sea level, like Holland, and the only thing holding the Atlantic at bay were the rings of seawalls, dikes, and tide barriers erected by the Army Corps of Engineers and a few thousand Marines.

Jack was less interested at the moment in the possibility of a storm’s fury sweeping over the low-lying island than he was in the fury of another force of nature. Moments before, Recruit Platoon 4239 had met their drill instructors, and, in an old and venerable tradition of the Corps, they were enduring their first inspection and their welcoming speech, delivered by the platoon’s senior DI, Gunnery Sergeant Harold Knox.

“Never, never in my entire military career,” Knox was saying as he stalked along the solitary line of recruits, “have I seen such sorry specimens!” The expression on his leathery face gave every appearance of a man appalled by what he had just had the misfortune of witnessing. His voice, crackling with the authority known throughout the Marine Corps as the Command Voice, bore the punch and edge necessary to carry above a howling storm…or a pitched battle. The stress he laid on certain words gave his oration an almost singsong, mesmerizing quality, holding the recruits spellbound. “It makes me sick to think that my beloved Corps could someday be in your pale, flabby hands!”

The Voice went on, and Jack swayed slightly on his feet. He was exhausted…running about ten hours minus on sleep at the moment. It felt like he’d been here for days already, and yet he’d only arrived at Parris Island that morning. Somehow, confusion and sleep deprivation had conspired to keep him from clicking in with the routine.

Every waking moment for the past month had been geared toward this moment, from his last on-line discussion with the recruiter, Staff Sergeant Henson, to his physical in Pittsburgh, to his swearing in at the recruiter’s office. The maglev bringing him down from Pittsburgh had arrived in Charleston late on the previous afternoon, but the bus to take them the final short leg to the Parris Island Marine Recruit Depot—a clattering wreck with a gasoline engine, no less—had been mysteriously delayed. They’d not arrived at the base until 2:00 A.M.—0200 hours, in Marine parlance—a bit of disorganization that Jack was convinced had been done on purpose. Arriving in the middle of the night, told to “hit the beach” by screaming Marine NCOs and made to line up on yellow-painted footprints on the pavement, bullied, harassed, and screamed at some more, had resulted in the forty-three men and women aboard the bus feeling as cut off from their former lives as they might have been on the farside of the Moon.

After an initial orientation lecture, the female recruits had been called off and marched away into the night; the Marines alone of the four major services continued to maintain separate training battalions for its male and female recruits. There’d followed a nightmare, sleep-deprived blur of standing in line, of running, of standing in more lines, and of listening to bellowed lectures that extended throughout the rest of the night hours and well into the dawn of the morning. After breakfast, they’d been officially mustered into Recruit Platoon 4239 with a number of men already there in a holding company, bringing their numbers up to an even eighty. After that, they’d been checked into a recruit barracks, issued uniforms, and herded through a thirty-second haircut that left each recruit “high and tight.”

And then there’d been more lectures, where they learned to start and finish every sentence with the word “sir,” where they learned to come to attention at a shouted “attention on deck,” where they learned not to speak in ranks unless spoken to, and where they learned that an order was to be answered by a shouted “aye, aye, sir,” a hoary phrase meaning “I understand, and I will obey.” High-running tension, shock, and lack of sleep had them all stumbling by the time they were marched to supper; the midday meal was never referred to as “lunch,” a term strictly for civilians.

They’d mustered here on the grinder this afternoon to meet their company DIs.

Gunnery Sergeant Harold Knox was their senior drill instructor; Jack had felt in awe of the man from the moment he strode into their presence, crisp, immaculate, his traditional “Smoky Bear” hat precisely straight. Most of the other recruits, Jack knew, couldn’t read the colorful splash of ribbons that started high on the left breast of the man’s creaseless khaki shirt and extended halfway down to the black web belt that marked him as a senior DI. Silver Star. Bronze Star with cluster. Purple Heart. Presidential Unit Citation. Andhra Pradesh Intervention Ribbon. Colombian Civil War Ribbon.

And, for Jack, the most stunning campaign ribbon of them all, the gold-and-ocher rectangle of the Mars Marine Expeditionary Force. Gunny Knox had been out there, on the same mission as his uncle!

They stood in their long line, sweating in the steamy, April heat, stiffly at attention as Gunny Knox paced down the line, giving each recruit a look razor-edged enough to count their individual vertebrae and spot-check the contents of their stomachs.

He stopped, finally, in front of one Marine six down the line from where Jack was standing. “What in the hell do you think you are?”

“Sir! I’m a Marine! Sir!”

Knox’s control was masterful. “I beg your pardon,” he replied, his voice dropping in volume without losing any of its command, “but you are not. You are a recruit, and in future, when you are referring to your sorry-assed selves, you will not say ‘I’ or ‘me,’ but you will speak in the third person, saying ‘this recruit.’ There are no ‘I’s’ here, except for the eyes in your head! Do you understand me?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“Furthermore, you do not have the right to refer to yourself in the first person! And you do not have the right to call yourself Marines! I have been making Marines out of sorry, slime-bucket maggots like you for twenty years, now, and I promise you that I do know what a Marine is! Trust me! You ain’t it!”

Knox moved to the next man in line. “Good God in heaven! What, may I ask, is that thing on your face?”

Jack couldn’t see from his current vantage point, staring across the grinder at the distant palmettos, but he knew who the DI must be talking to. Lonnie Costantino had been on the bus with Jack out from Charleston. He had a subdural implant under the skin of his forehead, a glow-tattoo powered by his body heat. It cast an illuminated, inner tattoo of an eight-pointed star centered by an alien-looking symbol, glowing in eerie yellow-and-red light clearly visible right through his skin. Jack had seen that symbol before, he was pretty sure—something from one of the alien scenes discovered in the Cave of Wonders on Mars.

“Uh…I mean, sir, that’s my mark, sir. I’m, uh, like, a member of the Alien Astronauts Church, y’know? Freedom of religion! Uh, sir.”

There was a long silence, and Jack wondered if Knox was about to explode. His eyes grew large, and a vein in his temple popped out, throbbing. Jack had the feeling that it was an act…but if it was, it was masterful, an Academy-Award performance.

Jack’s breath caught in his throat. Lonnie had seemed like a nice enough guy, in a Pittsburgh tough-kid kind of way, but he wasn’t, well, Marine material.

“The Corps will not interfere with the practice of your religion, son,” Knox said, and he sounded almost fatherly. Then the edge came back, sharp and hard. “However, I will not stand by and watch some dink sniper drill you a new puckered asshole smack between your eyes—or between the eyes of one of the young men or women who end up in your squad—because you’re wearing that damned glow-in-the-dark tattoo. You, therefore, have two options. I’ll write you out a chit and you can go see the regimental chaplain. He’ll arrange for your immediate discharge on the grounds of religious conscience. Or you can report to sick bay and have them remove your…mark. There is no place in the Corps for a man with his own luminous head-shot target. What’ll it be?”

“Uh…I’ll stay, sir.”

“Report to sick bay. You know where it is?”

“Uh…”

“Bryce!”

“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!” One of the junior DIs following Knox down the line rasped out.

“Escort our religious friend to sick bay.”

“Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant!”

“But first, recruit, drop down and give me fifty! That’s for being stupid enough to show up here with a headlight!”

“Uh, aye, aye, sir!”

“And then give me twenty-five more after that for not using the third person, as you were instructed! You are not an ‘I’! You are not a ‘me’! You are a recruit, and by God you will act like one and you will talk like one, because you do not have the faintest idea of how a Marine should act and talk! Hit it!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

As Lonnie began counting off his push-ups, Knox continued his walk. “You, you civilians are disgusting! You are not Marines. At this moment I have grave doubts that any of you can ever become Marines, and you will not sully the name of my beloved Corps by claiming that you are! Right now, each and every one of you is too low to ever even think about becoming a United States Marine. You are so low that whale shit looks like shootin’ stars to you! You! Are you smiling at me?”

The object of Knox’s sudden attention, three to Jack’s left, paled.

“S-sir! No, sir!”

“Do you find me amusing?”

“Sir! No, sir!”

“Hit the deck! Gimme twenty-five!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“And sing out!”

“One!…Two!…”

“You!” Knox said, stopping in front of the recruit to Jack’s left, his voice strong above the first recruit’s cadence. “Why the hell are you here in my squad bay pretending you’re good enough to join my Corps?”

“Sir! This recruit will fight and die for my—uh—his country, sir!” The words came out with a crack and a squeak.

“Then you are no good to me, or to my Corps,” Knox said, with overtones that were almost sorrowful. “General Patton said it best, and he knew what he was talking about, even if he was a doggie. The idea, ladies, is to get some other poor dumb bastard to die for his country. When we are done with you, you will be Marines, you will be killers, you will be America’s fighting elite, fully capable of making that poor dumb bastard die for his country. To accomplish this, you will use the ATAR, you will use the Wyvern shoulder-fired missile system, you will use your Marine-issue K-Bar knife, you will use rocks, you will use your bare hands, you will use your teeth if you have to, because you will be Marines, and you will be trained to kill! Do you understand me?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“But you are not Marines yet. You do not look like Marines. You do not sound like Marines. The battle cry of the US Marine is ooh-rah! Let me hear you ladies wrap your throats around that!”

“Ooh-rah!”

Knox surveyed the line of recruits, fists on hips. “Pathetic! Again!”

“Ooh-rah!”

“Again!”

“OOH-RAH!”

“You!” Knox bellowed into Jack’s face, as suddenly, as unexpected as an explosion. “Why are you here? What do you plan to make of yourself in this man’s Marine Corps?”

Jack thought he knew what would impress the man. “Sir! This recruit intends to become a Space Marine, sir!”

Knox stared for a half a heartbeat, then startled Jack with an explosion of laughter. “A Space Marine! Well, what do you know about that? We’ve got Flash Gordon, here, ladies! Or is it Buck Rogers?” He laughed again, with a contortion of muscles about his eyes and mouth that threatened to crack his lean face. “I’ve got some hot intel for you, Flash. There are, as of this moment, three hundred ninety-five thousand men and women in the US Marine Corps. Of those, approximately twelve hundred are currently serving in the Space Assault Group, on space deployment, or in various support units.

“Now, since I know that you could not count to twenty-one even if you were barefoot and you removed your pants, I’ll make it simple for you. The odds are something like three hundred thirty to one against you, son. Six months from now, you are far more likely to be serving in Siberia or some dink country you’ve never heard of and couldn’t spell if you had, than you are to be playing space he-ro!”

Jack flushed, suddenly angry. “But my recruiter said—”

“WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?”

Cold fear clawed up the back of Jack’s neck. “Sir! I’m sorry, I mean, this recruit is sorry, sir!”

“I know what you are, recruit! What I don’t know is what you were just doing with that constipated, sorry-assed turd you call a brain! While in ranks, you will not speak unless I demand a response from you! Do I make myself clear, Flash?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“Hit the deck! Gimme one hundred! Move!”

“Aye, aye, sir!” He dropped to a push-up position and began doing push-ups.

“And you will sound off with each one!”

“Sir, yes, sir! Three!…four!…”

“I did not hear one and two, recruit! I must have missed them! Start over!”

“One!…Two!…”

Knox dropped into a crouch next to Jack, speaking softly now, but still with that whipcrack of command in his voice. “And as for what your recruiter may or may not have promised you, maggot, perhaps you would like to take that up with the regimental chaplain. Or maybe you’d like to run home to your momma! She might feel sorry for you. But I do not!” Straightening suddenly, he walked on down the line of men.

“And while Recruit Flash is demonstrating the proper technique for push-ups, the rest of your sorry-assed wannabes might consider this! Every Marine, and I don’t care if he’s a fighter jock joystickin’ a Valkyrie, a space Marine on the Moon, a guard at an embassy or a goddamned cook, he is, first and foremost, forever and always, a Marine rifleman! You people will learn that lesson, and you will learn it well, because if you don’t, some goddamn dink is gonna pop you a new asshole right between your eyes!”

He walked on down the line, and Jack kept pumping, calling off the numbers. “Eighteen!…Nineteen!…”

He had to concentrate, because the other recruits were calling off the numbers of their push-ups and were a bit ahead. By the time Knox had reached the end of the line and started making his way back, half a dozen other recruits were pumping and counting as well. And yet, over the cacophony, Gunny Knox’s Voice of Command cracked and badgered, pushed, snapped, and berated. “I don’t think any of you will ever have what it takes to be a United States Marine, but by God in heaven I am going to try! I am going to personally break every last one of you miserable lowlife worms, and in the process I guarantee each and every one of you that you will wish that you have never been born! And then we will take what’s left and begin molding it into something that might, perhaps, begin to resemble a Marine!”

Jack’s arms gave out at sixty-four. He kept trying, struggling to raise himself, but by that time the DI had decided that the entire platoon needed to report to their racks inside the barracks to learn something about how to properly stow gear. And after that…perhaps a little run to warm them all up for the afternoon’s activities….

“Give it up, Ramsey!” he bellowed. “That is pathetic! On your feet! And you have the unspeakable gall to think you can become a Marine? Move out! All of you, move out! I want to see nothing on this grinder but amphibious green blurs! On the double, move-it-move-it-move-it!”

The most humiliating part of the whole sorry affair was the sudden realization that his mother might have been right about his chances to get to space by joining the Corps.

Alexander Residence
Arlington Heights, Illinois
0810 hours CDT

Liana Alexander slammed the door behind her as she stalked into the house. Damn the man! Damn, damn the man! How he could be so insufferably arrogant, so cold, so…so heartless!…

Such a simple request, and he’d refused her, point-blank!

She walked into the E-room and dropped onto the sunken couch facing the wall screen. Picking up the remote, she thumbed through several menu selections, calling up her Earthnet access. David must have some files in here, things he was working on now, preliminary reports, something that would be useful!

David didn’t know that she knew his private file-access code: Sphinx. Not that he’d ever tried very hard to hide it from her. In fact, he seemed to assume that she simply didn’t have the brains to work any electronic equipment. Well, it was true that she had trouble recording more than one program at a time off the entertainment feeds without getting hopelessly lost in all of the menu selections and information trees. And she had trouble with some of the interactive Net services. So many choices!

But she could handle files and recorded messages just fine, thank you, and she knew how to use access codes. She’d been looking over his shoulder once when he’d keyed in the word “Sphinx” to get a locked file. He’d known she was there at the time, but in his usual arrogant way, he’d probably thought that she had no idea what he was doing.

She’d done this a number of times in the past, and it always gave her a small, guilty flush of excitement, the feeling she imagined a spy must have breaking into the enemy’s computer database.

Well, she was a spy, in a sense. It was the only way she had to get at the truth, the only way she knew of finding the ammunition the Church needed. Reverend Blaine had told her last Sunday that what she was doing…what was it he’d said? It “transcends mere human law, in the eternal service of the Ancient Divine Masters of the Cosmos!”

So there, David!

Anyway, whatever it was she was doing, David had it coming!

She’d first started taking sneak peeks at David’s files and correspondence several weeks after his return from Mars. He’d been gone one day, she couldn’t get him on his PAD because he was busy in a meeting and refused the call, and she’d needed to find his government disbursal number for the tax forms she was filling out. Armed with the password she’d seen him type in once—Sphinx—she opened his private files and almost by accident discovered a saved vidcast.

It was one of the people at his new office—what was her name? Teri, she thought. Teri something-or-other. “Hiya, good-lookin’,” the woman had said, leaning forward and smiling into her E-room’s vid pickup. She was naked.

Well, the old taboo against public nudity was one of those aspects of modern society that was changing fast, had been changing since the turn of the century. Lots of people went nude these days, at home or when gathered with a few friends. It didn’t mean anything, she knew. Even in public, on hot days lots of people wore shoes and UV block and nothing else but a wallet strap; with global warming and all it was just more comfortable that way.

But the way that Teri person had smiled and moved and said “Hiya, good-lookin’” had rankled. Damn it, it was inappropriate, it just wasn’t proper for her to act and talk that way to a married man, especially when that man was her boss!

“Hey, Teri!” David’s voice had answered. “What’s up?”

“Oh, lots of things, I’m sure. What I’m calling for, though, is to find out about the trip to LA.”

Liana had watched the whole sordid recording, wondering all the while if David was sleeping with that woman. The rest of the message was innocuous enough—her asking about details on the speech he was scheduled to give in LA, and his voice replying matter-of-factly, without any leering or flirting or innuendo. But the way, at the end, she’d stood up and slinked closer to the pickup, closing out with the words, “Okay, honey. See you…later…” had shocked her. At that moment, she was certain that David had had sex with Teri, was having sex with her on a regular basis. The fact that David had saved that damned message instead of deleting it was proof enough.

She wondered how often he played it back, with HER up there two times larger than life on that damned big wall screen. Yuck.

Liana sighed. Nudity taboos weren’t the only aspects of society that had been changing lately. Marriage, for instance. Nowadays, the institution was pretty much whatever people said that it was. There were so many new kinds of marriage and social groupings now that simply hadn’t been around when she was younger…or at least, no one had talked about them, things like line marriages with several men and women all married to one another.

That sort of thing had never been for her, not the way she’d been raised!

And…and divorce was so easy, now! All you needed was for both parties to agree that it was over, and that was it, unless the initial contract specified something more enduring.

The thought made her uncomfortable. She knew that David wanted a divorce; they’d talked about it several times, but she’d simply not been brought up that way. Stacy might be able to shake off the way they’d been raised…but not her. “What God has brought together, let no man put asunder” her mother had always said, and while Liana had lost much of her once fiery Baptist faith during the past few years, especially since she’d started going to Reverend Blaine’s church, she hadn’t lost the upbringing that had come with it. If marriage vows meant anything, they were holy vows to be kept, and kept forever!

Even if she now believed that Jesus had been the genetically manipulated child of a woman artificially inseminated by extraterrestrial visitors. Her mother, dead now for six years, would have thrown a fit if she’d known.

Every time David had brought the subject of divorce up, she’d managed to change the subject…or else throw a crying fit emotional enough to make him back off. The law, at least, was on her side. If he walked out on her, she would get the house and half of their joint bank account, and that seemed to be holding him back.

As for her divorcing him, well, she wasn’t about to let him off the hook easily. She was certain that he was cheating on her—probably had been for a long time—and that was grounds for a divorce if she wanted one. The point was that she didn’t.

She sighed. The very word “cheating,” she knew, was a holdover from an earlier age of more formal and binding marriage contracts, but she simply couldn’t help that. For her, as for her mother, marriage was forever.

Besides, if she and David separated, she wouldn’t find things like…this!

A folder marked “Picard/Sumeria” opened to a scrolling page of notes, including some PAD-scanned images of what looked like gold or silver statues. She squinted at the pictures, trying to make sense of them, but there was little sense to be made. The figures were so stiff and cartoonish, somehow…and did not resemble her notion of the ancient astronaut-gods very closely.

Nonetheless, she made a copy of everything, transferring the duplicates to her own private files. Later she would uplink them to Pastor Blaine’s Net address, and the Church elders could make of them what they could.

Guilt nagged at her, but she angrily pushed the feeling aside. She’d given David his chance, just a short while ago when she’d driven him to the maglev station. Every morning she drove him to the Arlington Heights station so he could take the commuter maglev into town; every evening she picked him up again…at least on those days when he wasn’t gallivanting off around the country somewhere, giving talks, giving lectures. Did he have time for her and her church and her friends? No!

He could sleep with his goddamned secretary or assistant or whatever she was, but he couldn’t tell his own wife about what he’d discovered on the Moon, even if he knew how important the subject was to her.

This morning had been the worst. She’d asked him, yet again, if he could tell her about what he’d found on the Moon that obviously had him so concerned, asked him if there was anything there that she could share with the people at her church. “What, that bunch of idiots?” was what he’d said.

And, by implication, that was what he thought of her. There’d been more. A lot more, none of it pleasant. The part about “a bunch of losers who think God was a space-man, and that he’s going to come down and rescue them all from the evils of the world,” that had hurt, a lot.

Maybe because there was some truth in it. The First Church of the Divine Masters of the Cosmos did hold that there would be a final reckoning, when the Divine Masters returned—any day now!—and demanded an accounting for Man’s stewardship of the planet. And on that day, the faithful would board the great mother ships, to be carried in rapture into heaven, abandoning a world corrupted by greed and sin and Adam’s fallen nature, a wicked world already under judgment by global warming, a world about to face the nuclear destruction levied by the Masters on Sodom and Gomorrah….

And David simply couldn’t see….

She’d been skimming the material on the screen, looking for key words or phrases that might pop out at her, and finding nothing. Some of the sub files were cryptically named: Gab-Kur-Ra, Shu-Ha-Da-Ku, Shar-Tar-Bak. What in the Name of the Divine Masters were those?

She copied them faithfully, nonetheless.

Then, however, her eyes landed on a pair of concluding paragraphs, and she read them carefully.

“It seems obvious that the aliens, tentatively identified as ‘An’ or ‘Anu,’ and which from admittedly preliminary and scanty evidence quite possibly can be identified with Species Eighty-four, from the Cydonian visual data, did indeed have considerable direct contact with humans living at the head of the Persian Gulf, the peoples we know today as Sumerians. That contact, however, does not appear to have been a friendly one from the human perspective. The accounts translated so far speak of enslaving the ‘lu,’ a term used in ancient Sumerian to mean “human,” but which includes the connotation of ‘something herded,’ ‘something taken care of.’ Humans appear to have been useful to the An primarily in working mines, raising crops, forming military units for further conquests, and for attending the masters as personal servants.

“It remains to be seen whether human civilization was something bestowed on human slaves by the masters, or whether it was developed independently by primitive cultures attempting to emulate the godlike visitors in their midst.”

She read the paragraphs again, her eyes tearing, her head making little, involuntary no-no motions. He had it all wrong! The Divine Masters hadn’t been like that, couldn’t have been like that at all! He was misinterpreting the data; he had to be!

No matter. Pastor Blaine would know what to do. He always did. He never admitted it, but she was certain he was somehow inspired by the Masters themselves, as they orbited the Earth in their invisible mother ships, watching over their people below.

She completed her final copy and uploaded it to the pastor’s address. Then she checked through David’s files once more, this time—with a painful curiosity that burned like the picking of an old scab—looking for any more of those saved vid recordings or other files that might have been sent by that woman.

She was almost disappointed when she failed to find any more.