The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds by Michael Rizzo Page A

appreciate your discretion up to this point. Know also that it
is unnecessary. What we have done here is not for you to
defend.”
    I nod my understanding heavily, and he vanishes.
    Then I tell Anton to send the requested files.
    “Everything?” he has to ask.
    “Everything. Including Halley’s examinations of Paul,
our skirmishes with the Nomads, the Shinkyo attacks, the PK and
Zodanga incidents…”
    “Our training of the ETE ‘Guardians’?” Matthew asks
uncomfortably.
    “All of it.”
     
     

 
    3 February, 2116:
     
    As if we’re being punished for our (my) sins, we
don’t get another message (other than pings to reassure us the
channel’s still open) for two days.
    In the interim, we’ve been pouring through the files
sent with the last message:
    There are a lot of personnel-specific records, most
detailing the fates of the families left behind. I decide not to
censor any of it. It’s in many cases more difficult than we could
have anticipated. Halley and Ryder have grown grandchildren and
great-grandchildren, their children dead years ago. Anton’s parents
are also long-deceased, and his “younger” sister has aged
poorly—the report from a UNMAC page says she doesn’t seem to
remember him at all, much less their conversations about him. He
has an adult nephew with children physically older than him.
    Morales had a “baby daddy” back home taking care of
their young son. The child is now fifty-seven, a new grandparent
himself, with half-siblings from his father’s subsequent
relationships.
    Kastl’s wife remarried in 2069, had the children he
never had with her, and accepted “voluntary euthanasia” after being
diagnosed with a Stage 4 brain tumor three years ago, surrounded by
her children and grandchildren.
    Smith’s ex died of a completely curable cancer,
having become a post-Apocalypse convert to one of many
newly-popular fundamentalist sects that passionately encouraged the
rejection of the nano-medicine that could have saved her.
(Apparently pumping adaptive self-replicating machines into your
body was now an unthinkable taboo.) His two sons were raised by her
family. His oldest was killed bringing aid to the starving in East
Africa—not by violence; just a senseless convoy accident. His
youngest had a family of his own and is still alive—a
grandfather—but hasn’t responded to UNMAC attempts to contact
him.
    As for Rios, only the grandchildren of cousins could
be found.
    Tru has a similar file: the descendants of a sister
and a few cousins, all her age and older, who only knew her in
stories and old family picture and video files.
    In all, nine-hundred and seventeen of us got mixed
news from home, but in only a few cases were there any actual video
correspondences from those relatives, and all of those are very
brief and awkward. Depressing in a different way are files sent to
personnel we’ve lost, including a message from Colonel Copeland’s
granddaughter and one from Lieutenant Carver’s nephew.
    There is also a very sparse history of the last fifty
years. Richards and Satrapi were good to their words in sending us
reasonably detailed accounts of the Earthside response to the
bombardment and orbital attack, as well as the Disc “Trojan” attack
on Earth’s orbital facilities. It isn’t as hard to understand their
reluctance to come back for us, especially after reviewing the
video files of the Discs using the surviving ships to kill even
more of us. Otherwise, what we get feels carefully sanitized (made
more suspect by their “securing” of our channels—anything we get
comes from a single “official” source).
    The global and political map shifted almost as much
as the economic one in the wake of the horror. There were
demonstrations, riots, revolutions. It looked like the Eco War had
come to Earth with a vengeance, as nanotech producers and vendors
were attacked globally, labs and plants destroyed, products dumped
and burned in raging ceremonies. All space