Free Semper Mars by Ian Douglas

an army than a mob of demonstrators…

United States Embassy
Mexico City, República de México
1512 hours local time

    “Come in.”
    Captain Theodore Warhurst opened the door and entered the large room—all deep carpets and oak paneling and framed photographs and oils—that was the office of Franklin R. Tibbs, the United States ambassador to Mexico. The scene inside was one of quiet, almost deliberate confusion, as aides transferred stacks of papers from gaping filing cabinets into boxes and piled them up. As Warhurst approached the desk, three more undersecretaries came into the room, hurried past him, and collected several of the boxes; the shredding machines down the hall were working continuously now, reducing American diplomatic secrets to unrecoverable confetti.
    It was a curious statement about the culture, Warhurst thought, that government bureaucracies still depended on vast quantities of hard copy to keep their records and pass their orders, despite the omnipresence of computer systems that made such wholesale deforestation unnecessary.
    Ambassador Tibbs, a heavy, florid man in a neatly tailored gray suit, was packing jewel boxes into his attaché case. Each small, flat box securely held a neatly ordered array of twelve CMC microdrives. The size of a pencil eraser, each color-coded computer memory clip looked, in fact, like a small jewel and was far more precious; a single CMC carried half a gig of storage.
    “Hello, Captain,” Tibbs said, looking up. His normally jovial features were sagging, his face creased and heavy. “You talk to your people?”
    “Sir!” Warhurst said, coming to attention before the desk. “Yes, sir!”
    “Aw, knock off the kay-det crap, Ted. Whatcha got for me?”
    Warhurst allowed his rigid posture to relax, but only a little. He’d been gung ho, been raised gung ho, all of his life, and the ingrained training of a lifetime could not be easily discarded.
    “The transport will be here in another few minutes, Mr. Ambassador,” he said. “It’ll touch down on the roof heliport. I’d like you to be on the first aircraft out.”
    Tibbs winced. “I wish we… we didn’t have to do this. But my orders…”
    “I don’t see that we have any choice, sir.”
    Warhurst could tell that Tibbs was hurting, that he literally didn’t know what to do next. A friend and confidant of three American presidents, the man had been assistant secretary of labor during Kerrey’s second term, and secretary of state under Wood until his retirement in ’35. Markham had appointed him ambassador to Mexico as a reward for years of service and generous campaign contributions.
    He didn’t look like he felt very rewarded at the moment. “I just… don’t know how it came to this,” he said, his voice so soft that no one in the room could have heard him but Warhurst.
    “I’m sure there wasn’t anything anyone could have done,” Warhurst replied. “God knows, you’ve been in there pitching. Sir.”
    “I’m beginning to think those fanatics out there are right. We should leave that stuff on Mars where we found it. Of course it makes other countries nervous when it looks like we might try to grab it all for ourselves.”
    “That’s not my department, sir,” Warhurst replied carefully. He thought that Tibbs wanted to talk, that he was trying to relieve himself of some hard-to-discuss burden, but Warhurst had never been a particularly social man and didn’t know how best to respond. “But it seems to me pretty senseless just to pretend there’s nothing there. And if we can develop aldetech, well, everybody’s gonna benefit.”
    Aldetech. Alien-derived technology. The word had been coined nearly a decade before to describe the expected commercial and industrial spin-offs from the fragments of lost technology discovered at Cydonia.
    “You’re right, of course,” Tibbs said, nodding. “And if it wasn’t us, it would be somebody else. The Japanese, maybe. Or the EU. They both have pretty