Chapter 0
Looking Back,
Mars 2176 AD
They say that every man goes through phases in his life. As a child, he plays with his toys, ignorant of the complexities around him. As a youth, he studies and trains, preparing to conquer—or at least to reshape—the world. In adulthood, he gets to practice what he once longed for, and finds that conquering is impossible, reshaping is almost as hard, and—if he’s lucky—he can just stake out one small patch, call it his, fill it with a loving wife, a family, and a small garden to tend . . . and in old age, he looks back, distills his experiences, and tries to pass along some of what he saw, some of what he did, and some of what he learned, to the youth.
Who will, of course, ignore all of his hard-won wisdom and insist on making their own mistakes.
Benjamin Franklin had something to say about fools who only learn from experience, but I never learned the whole quote . . . because I refused to listen to him when he told me.
No, that was a joke. I’m old, but I’m not quite old enough to have known Ben himself.
Anyway, all of that is to say that I reckon now that I’m in my old age, perhaps it’s time to set down some of what I saw. The story of how we Martians got here, and how this great red state came to be.
I’ve started this project a few times, and it never seemed to hang together, but I finally realized the problem. The story—our story—didn’t start with the destruction of The Peddler’s Walk, or Lieutenant Colonel He Xue’s “Intolerable Demand,” or even “the shot heard round Mars” at Fánróng.
No.
It started seventy-five years before all of that, with World War III—the Chinese plague first strike, the US nuclear counterstrike, and the ragged Chinese “wet firecracker” nuclear counter-counterstrike, then the stuttering, hesitant missile launches as both sides worked their way to a ceasefire agreement.
If you approach history as a study of great men, you could say it started with Bob and Jenna Newcastle, preparing for the catastrophe that they smelled coming, and with their kids and grandkids who holed up with them on the ranch during the Five Day War.
Or if you think that technology drives events, you could say that it began a bit after that—after Chinese plague balloons and the US nuclear second strike, and the Chinese third strike, and the US fourth strike, with the Mackenzie road convoys salvaging solar panels from abandoned homes, servers from dark and powerless data centers, and weapons from old National Guard armories.
Or if you prefer military history, you could say that it started with the Atkinses and Hyltons, clawing their way out of the rubble, rebuilding, then defending the little they’d scraped together against the Chinese-backed cartels raiding up from Mexico during the Thirty Years that followed the Three Days.
Or if you like to analyze things through the lens of diplomacy and politics, maybe it all starts with the Hollins family, just before the war, and just after, and how they had their fingers in everything.
But whichever point you pick, in a thirty-year and seven-
hundred-mile-wide window, one thing is certain: It all started in Texas.
—Will Newcastle,
Houston, Valles Marineris, Mars
2176 AD
Chapter 1
A Tense Delivery to Fánróng, Mars 2126 AD
Will Newcastle put down the grease gun on the running board of the combine, next to the collection of wrenches and impact drivers already littering it.
“It’s not fair you won’t let me go visit the Chinese.”
Jim looked at his son. The boy was big for his age—you could almost mistake him for a high schooler—but it was a boy’s face—a fourteen-year-old’s face—that looked back at him under the mop of sandy hair. Jim wanted to keep Will safe—at least for another few years. And fourteen was definitely too young for a trip to the Huoxingren city. “Life isn’t fair, champ. You’re old enough to know that.”
Will scowled. “This isn’t ‘life.’ This is your decision. You can make a different decision.”
Jim was checking that the dump gates on the bottom of the grain-hopper trailer were dogged tight, and didn’t immediately answer, so Will kept arguing his case. “You trust me to maintain the combines—fix ’em, even, when they’re broken. You trust me to fertilize, to harvest, to run the thresher. I even fixed the auger in silo 3! Did everything from printing the bearings to welding the steel.” Will paused, casting about for any additional ammunition, and landed on “And I haven’t missed church or youth group in months—you can ask Pastor Dan!”
Jim sighed. “We can talk about this next year.”
“It’s not fair, you still won’t—”
“Your dad still won’t what?” Will’s Grandpa Benji wandered into the barn. Whisps of unruly gray hair swirled around the pink bald center of his scalp, and a hint of good-hearted mischief radiated from his blue eyes.
Will turned to his grandfather, hoping to leverage him as intercession. “Still won’t let me go on the run to Fánróng.”
Will’s dog Ox ran up to Grandpa Benji, held up a paw, then rolled on his back, exposing his stomach and begging for belly rubs. Grandpa Benji squatted down and obliged him. Ox whimpered in delight and rolled a bit further to one side, sliding a fresh patch of stomach under Benji’s wrinkled hands.
“Dad, I don’t need you weighing in on this,” Jim said.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Grandpa Benji said. “I’d never wade into a debate between a father and a son. Stick my nose in there, where it’s not wanted. No, sir.”
Jim turned from his task with the grain hopper, faced his dad head on, raised an eyebrow, and said, “That’s exactly what you’d do.”
Grandpa Benji stood and held his hands up, warding off the accusation. Ox immediately whined for attention, and Benji fixed him with a stare. “No more. Go bother Will.” Ox cocked his head at an angle, deciding whether Benji was serious and, concluding he was, got to his feet and wandered over to Will.
Benji hooked his thumbs into the suspenders of his overalls and leaned back against the combine. “I’m just an interested observer.”
Jim gave his father a dubious—but not entirely hostile—look.
Will sensed an opening and pressed his case. He held up a hand and counted off his arguments on his fingers. “I do all the work on the combines, and I help with the genetic screening, and I run the matter printers, and Uncle Dan says I should get out and see more of the quadrangle, and . . .” Will suddenly stumbled to a halt, but having left a hanging “and” at the end of his sentence, he needed one more talking point. After a moment, inspiration—albeit a weak form of it—hit him, and he added, hopefully, “And uncle Brian says that the Chinese always give you tea and snacks and stuff, and they’re not like what we eat here.”
Grandpa Benji said, almost as a narrative aside, aimed at no one in particular, “It’s not the boy’s first rodeo.”
Jim pursed his lips and shook his head slightly, but it was more in resignation than anger. His son had solid points; he had to give him that. The boy had really been stepping up recently, not just keeping up with ongoing maintenance on the machinery, but even getting ahead of the curve, tackling some long-standing planned upgrades.
Jim looked at his father and shot him a faux warning. “If I say yes, don’t you—”
Grandpa Benji smiled, then quickly hid it. “I’m not doing anything except petting a dog.” He looked around. “Where’d that dog get to?”
Jim looked back at his son. “Fine. You can come.”
Will smiled, and he thought he saw a quick matching smile sneak across Grandpa Benji’s face before it slipped away again.
Jim said, “Since we’re discussing the trade run, word on the grapevine is that Waylon and John Atkins said that they were thinking of coming along.”
Grandpa Benji looked up from his position over Ox and said, “Oh hell, no! The Atkinses are all loose cannons. Last time I saw Waylon Atkins, he was three sheets to the wind—and it wasn’t even noon!”
“You’re preachin’ to the choir.”
At that moment Brian and Dan, two of Will’s uncles, wandered into the barn. The men were both around thirty and came from the same Newcastle mold: average height, average size, and fair . . . but their personalities made them a study in contrasts.
Brian, though a Newcastle, was dressed like a Mackenzie—baggy shorts with cargo pockets, an active-fabric shirt displaying slowly evolving mathematical patterns, and some sort of hypercomplex, freshly printed footwear more suited to zero-g than a farm. Dan looked like his opposite: While he was also wearing an active-fabric shirt, the pattern it displayed leaned less toward Menger sponges and Art Deco fractals and more toward barbed wire and stylized machetes. To complete the “Atkins” look, he was holding a Shiner Bock beer.
Dan took a sip of his beverage and nodded to Granpa Benji. “Mr. Newcastle.” Then to Jim and Will, “Guys.” He looked around the group. “Who’s preaching what?”
“Waylon and John Atkins want to come along on the run to Fánróng,” Jim said. “Which is something I assume you already know about.” The pointed delivery of the last line was matched by the look Jim gave his brother-in-law.
But if Dan even noticed the look or the barbed comment, it ran off his back like water off a duck. Dan just took another sip of his beer. “Those boys don’t mean no harm—”
Brian glanced at Dan dryly, looked like he was about to say something, then decided to hold his tongue. Jim didn’t. “I know they’re your drinking buddies, but that doesn’t change the fact that—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold your horses—let me finish my damned sentence.”
Jim tipped his head a fraction. Dan continued: “I was gonna say, ‘They don’t mean no harm . . . but that doesn’t mean that they’re not bulls in a china shop.’ So if you were going to say that they shouldn’t come, then calm down, ’cause I agree with you.”
Benji said, “Looks like we all agree that we don’t need those hotheads messing things up.”
Dan said, “There’s one complication . . .”
“What’s that?”
“Waylon said that if I didn’t take him along on one of these trade runs to introduce him, he’d do one on his own, and make his own introductions.”
All four men looked at each other, silently weighing the alternatives of having some ability to rein in the Atkins cousins—but also being perceived by the Chinese as vouching for them—versus having no control over what they’d do and say.
Grandpa Benji spoke first. “Well, that’s a conundrum.”
Dan took another sip.“But not one we have to figure out right now.” He turned to his brother-in-law. “When are we doing the run?”
“I was thinking of heading out just before sunrise tomorrow,” Jim answered. “That way—”
Dan knew the route, the average speed, and all the rest, and cut him short. “Makes sense.” Dan clapped Will on the shoulder. “See you in the morning, chief.”
Will looked at him. “Hey, wait a second. How’d you know I was coming?”
Dan winked once, then held a finger to the side of his nose for a moment before turning away.
“What’s that mean?”
Will turned to his dad and grandfather and asked again, “What’s that mean?” But he got no answer.
Will and Ox padded into the barn long before the Sun was up. His dad and his Uncles Dan and Brian were already there—as was his Uncle Liam.
“Uncle Liam’s coming?” Will asked, wiping sleep from his eyes
“We couldn’t do this without Half-Asian Liam!” Dan said. “Ain’t rightly a trade mission if there’s not a Mackenzie, is it?”
Liam rolled his eyes at the nickname, but otherwise took it in good grace.
In a moment they were in the Freightliner—already connected to its trailers—and moving through the pre-dawn darkness of First City’s agricultural domes. Wheat fields, equipment sheds, and cattle feed lots slid past, interspersed with the occasional single-story, butterfly-roof, half-stone/half-vatwood house in Newcastle “Brazos ranch” style.
Will started the trip curled up with Ox in the back of the Freightliner and was still back there when the Freightliner and its trailers passed through North Air Lock. He’d intended to move up to the front as soon as the Sun rose, but exhausted as he was by the week’s work, and lulled by the easy back-and-forth motion of the heavy puller, he soon fell asleep. After the last week of getting the harvest in from dome 9, he needed it.
He jerked awake and glanced around, disoriented. He wasn’t in his bed. The Sun was up, but the sky was caramel, not blue. Right—he was in the Freightliner. On the trading trip to Fánróng. He rubbed his eyes, clearing the crust. The light wasn’t coming into the cabin at a low-raking angle. He’d been asleep for quite some time.
“Assistant, what time is it?” he said.
“10:05 a.m.”
“Where are we?”
“About an hour out of Fánróng,” Dan answered him, at the same time that the AI said, “Thirty-five point two miles from the Chinese dome known as Fánróng, which is a Chinese word that has a literal translation into English—”
Will interrupted it. “Cancel.”
Will pulled himself up to an upright position. “I missed Karl’s Ramp?”
“You’ll see it on the way home.”
“It’ll be dark by then.”
“If we’re lucky, it’ll be twilight,” his dad said. “It’s still impressive at that hour—maybe more so, because of the shadows.”
His Uncle Brian—either wearing a different shirt, or the same one with a new fractal loaded into it—said, “You should see it from space someday. Even better.”
Will sighed. He’d actually seen the whole Oxia from space, but everything was so small, it wasn’t really the same. He’d really wanted to see the view from the cliff, down to the floor of the Brazos, and maybe—if the air was clear—all the way back to First City.
Well, he’d have to make the best of it. He picked up his tablet, poked at it, realized he wasn’t in the mood to read or play games, and put it back down. Uncle Brian seemed deep in some textbook, but up front Uncle Dan was talking to Uncle Liam, so Will picked himself up from the bench seat and wandered up there. Ox raised his head, watched him go, decided that the warm bench was where he belonged, and tucked his nose back under one haunch.
“What’re you guys talking about?”
“Your Uncle Dan was telling me about ‘pumpkin launching,’” Liam said.
Dan laughed and shook his head. “There you go, trying to make it all formal and Mackenzie. It’s ‘pumpkin chuckin’.’”
“Right. And the projectiles—they’re actual pumpkins?” The disbelief in his voice was clear.
“What else would you use?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
Dan nodded, as if the two men had finally reached common ground and were talking sense again. “Exactly.”
“And the goal is to shoot your pumpkin further than the other guy shoots his pumpkin?”
Dan cocked a finger at him. “You’ve got it.”
“Now, you used compressed air to shoot the pumpkin—”
“Yep.”
“Why not use a linear accelerator, or a chemical deflagrant—like gunpowder, or something?”
Dan shook his head. “Might as well ask why not cook pizza for Easter dinner, or put presents under a plum tree for Christmas. Tradition!”
Liam nodded and said, “I understand,” even as the expression on his face made it clear that he didn’t—not at all.
“Uncle Dan,” Will asked, “when are you going up against Larry Prince for the record again?”
Dan said, “Larry’s torn apart his trebuchet and is working on a bigger one.“
Liam saw an opportunity to escape a conversation he had no interest in being in any longer. “Since we’re an hour out, I’m going to call ahead,” he said. No one objected. “TradeNet. Place a call to Richard at Fánróng.”
“Connecting.”
“Liam, good to hear from you,” Richard answered.
“You too. Just wanted to let you know we’re about an hour out.”
“Wonderful. Looking forward to seeing you. Will Wei and Ling be there?”
Richard paused. “Wei may be there. Ling is having morning sickness, so she will be at home.” The two men chatted for a few moments, switching effortlessly between English and Chinese a few times, then ended the call. Afterward Liam sat silently.
Jim noticed and asked, “What?”
Liam shook his head. “Something seemed off.”
“Off how?”
“I’m not sure . . . but Richard was tense.”
Quizzical looks flew around the cabin, and the atmosphere, which had been convivial and almost festival-like, grew cooler and somber.
“You stay here,” Jim told his son. “And the dog stays in the truck too.”
“It’s been four hours,” Will protested. “He’s gotta pee.”
“Put down a towel or a drop cloth or something, and have him pee in the cabin then.”
“He’s been house-trained since he was a pup. If I do that, his training’ll take a hit.”
“This isn’t the time,” Liam said. “There are cultural norms at play. And there’s something going on with Richard.”
Jim put a hand on Will’s shoulder. “Look, I know it sucks, but sometimes stuff happens. Okay?”
Will looked at Brian. Brian was his favorite uncle, and would often take his side in debates . . . but apparently not this time. He shook his head. “This isn’t the time.”
Will grumbled under his breath, then nodded. “Fine. Sure.”
Jim said, “Good,” and headed for the air lock.
Brian followed Jim Newcastle into the lock. He turned to look at Will over his shoulder. “I get that for your first trip to Fánróng, this has been kind of a dud. But I promise you, there’ll be others.”
“Maybe. We’ll see what my dad—”
“I’ll talk to your dad,” Liam said. “Chin up. Show me some gumption.”
“Yes, sir.”
Liam Mackenzie put on his helmet, twisted it, and stepped into the air lock, and the door slid shut behind him, leaving Will and Ox alone in the cabin. Will turned to Ox, shook his head. “This sucks.”
Ox didn’t understand the words, but he understood the tone and hung his head in sympathy.
“Let’s find something for you to pee on.”
Ox raised his head and arched one eyebrow—were there treats involved?
Will opened the hatch to the tech room on the Freightliner, walked past the spare parts, winches, rolled-up traction mats, printer, and tools, and then through the door at the far end of that room, into the cargo hold. This run there was no internal cargo, just the unpressurized grain hoppers towed behind, but there was always some leftover farm stuff kicking around back there. Will wouldn’t be surprised to find some polyethylene sheeting, or shop rags, or even some old clothing.
He let himself in, looked around . . . and saw that, for maybe the first time in his life, the cargo hold was empty. It looked swept clean, actually. He slapped his forehead at the unfairness of it. What was he going to do with Ox?
He turned and walked back into the tech room. “Assistant. Are there any towels in inventory? Maybe in a storage bench or—”
“There are no towels on the Freightliner.”
Will dropped silent as his eyes landed on the matter printer. An idea occurred to him.
“Assistant, do you have plans for space suits?”
“Yes, several varieties, in a range of functional and aesthetic patterns. In addition to Newcastle Standard Pattern, I have plans for three Atkins types, plus a generative grammar for over one hundred thousand Mackenzie—”
“Does this matter printer have sufficient feedstock to print a space suit?”
“Yes.”
“Can you customize a space suit?” He thought for a moment, picturing gaudy Atkins suits and the weird retro-futurist-cum-math-nerd Mackenzie suits, and added, quickly, “I mean a Newcastle suit.”
“The Newcastle Standard Pattern has a wide degree of configurability.”
Dan, Brian, Jim Newcastle, and Liam Mackenzie waited in the Huoxingren air lock. Air whooshed in and blew dust off the floor of the large chamber. A moment later a light went green over the inner door and the portal slid open. The men took off their helmets as they stepped into the interior of Fánróng.
The dome was smaller than most of the modern Martian ones—in fact, it was barely bigger than First Dome. The Huoxingren also didn’t have the same skill with biogel printers that the Texans did—the film overhead was clear, so the sky was beige and muddy, not blue like it was in the Martian domes.
But it wasn’t just the color of the sky that let them know that they were strangers in a strange dome. There were little things too. The sounds of birds—presumably Asian species—with their own calls, the slightly warmer temperature, the way that the shrubs and flowers here just smelled different.
Liam was first through the door, and was intercepted by someone he apparently hadn’t met before.
“Hi,” Liam said. “I’m here to meet—”
The Chinese man said something in Mandarin, and Liam responded—then there was another back and forth, this time more tense. Jim, Dan, and Brian looked at each other.
The three men each whispered to their earpieces, “Assis-tant, translate.”
Something about the functionary was off, and it wasn’t just his tone. His features were odd—his face was more rectangular than the usual round Han structure, and there was something he couldn’t quite pinpoint about the eyes. After a moment Brian realized what was off about the eyes—they were amber, not the dark brown that was almost universal among the Huoxingren—and then he pieced it together: This man was from Earth—one of the genetically modified “caste” Chinese that they’d heard about.
Brian looked at Jim and Dan and tried to convey his insight with darting eyes and raised eyebrows, but from the looks on the other men’s faces he wasn’t convinced he’d gotten anything across.
Liam turned to the three Newcastles, beckoned. “Follow us.” They set off with the Chinese functionary down one of the gravel-covered paths that cut between the one- and two-story buildings that filled the dome. Around them other Chinese sitting on their porches, working in their gardens, and shepherding children looked at them curiously, then saw their escort and found reasons to hurry away.
The functionary—the guard?—gestured at one building that seemed to be a restaurant, and waved his arm while shouting at them. Their earpieces translated his words: “Go. Go!”
They stepped inside.
Most of the tables had been pushed to the sides of the room, leaving a single table in the center of the room. There were two chairs on one side of the table, none on the other. Xuan “Richard” Liang was sitting in one of the two chairs on the far side of the table. He met the eyes of the Newcastle delegation, but said nothing. He was clearly uncomfortable. In the chair next to him was a Chinese military officer, in full uniform. Like the man who’d guided them in, there was something off about him—another “caste” genemod. Unlike the functionary, with his amber eyes, this officer had hazel eyes. The combination of their color and the intelligence that shone from them would be striking, in other circumstances—but in this circumstance, they just created a sense of unease. Who—what—were they dealing with here?
Brian looked at Jim and Dan and tried to communicate his realization with a flick of his eyes, and he thought he saw understanding dawn on both of their faces—but none of them said anything.
Instead the men looked at the tableau in front of them—and it didn’t escape them that there were no chairs on their side of the table.
Jim Newcastle looked at Liam Mackenzie, silently asking who the new Chinese officer was. Liam shook his head minutely. He didn’t know either.
The question was answered quickly enough. “Wo shi Zhong Jiang He Xue,” which their earbuds translated as “I am Lieutenant Colonel He Xue.”
Liam said, “Normally we meet with Richard and Senior Colonel Deng Hua. If I may ask, why—”
“Today you meet with me.”
Liam waited a moment. “Wonderful.” He looked back and forth from Richard to the lieutenant colonel, and it was clear from the looks on both of their faces that Lieutenant Colonel He would be running this meeting. “So, Colonel, we’ve arrived with the grain—” He paused, then decided to back up and review the background, just in case the colonel wasn’t fully up to speed. “That is, the grain that we’re to deliver, as per the contract we signed with Richard—”
The colonel interrupted. “You will not use informal names. Proper names only.”
“Of course.” Liam took a breath. “We have the grain and pork sides, as per the contract that we signed with Xuan Liang. It’s parked outside—delivered as promised. Normally at this stage we just come into the dome to visit with Rich—with Xuan Liang. He’s kind enough to share tea, and—but I see there’s a different plan today. So, I suppose that if you’re ready to accept delivery, we’ll just take the fish, the clothing, and the matter printer feedstock, and—”
The colonel interrupted. “The fish and clothing, yes, but not the feedstock.”
Liam blinked, then said, “Ah—” He paused and then switched to Mandarin, perhaps hoping for a personal touch, or at least a guarantee that his tone of voice would come through. Jim and Dan’s earbuds translated for them. “I’m sorry, I think the translation software may have mistranslated something. Could you repeat that, please?”
“You can have the fish and clothing,” the colonel said, “but not the feedstock.”
Liam managed to keep a polite smile on his face. “Oh?”
“The feedstock is not Xuan’s property,” Lieutenant Colonel He explained. “He is not free to trade it.”
Liam blinked. “I see. I guess there’s a misunderstanding. We’ve been trading—” He started over. “For several years—a decade or more, I believe, a member of Xuan Liang’s family has, as I
understand it, been importing matter printer feedstock. And Liang has traded excess material to us, in what we’ve all found to be a
mutually beneficial trade, where he gets pork and soybeans,
and we—”
The colonel interrupted. “The details of who traded what in the past are irrelevant, and I have no interest in it. I have explained the law: The sheng domes are not to trade computationally capable feedstock.” He paused. “Now, the rest of the deal stands. You will drop off the meat and grains at air lock—?”
The colonel turned to Richard, who spoke for the first time during the entire ordeal. “Three.”
Lieutenant Colonel He Xue didn’t pause to thank Richard, or even nod his head to acknowledge the answer, but bowled on with his demands to Liam. “You will drop off the cargo at air lock 3. There you can pick up the fish and the clothing.”
Liam objected: “The grains and pork are in exchange for a specific bill of goods. The deal is geotagged, time-stamped, and signed. If Rich—if the full list of goods is not available, then the deal we have—”
Lieutenant Colonel He interrupted Liam again. “You don’t dictate terms. But . . .” He thought for a moment. “As a gesture of goodwill, we will replace the feedstock with—” He looked at one of the aides who was standing nearby. The aide leaned in and whispered something that the translating earbuds didn’t catch. “With an equal weight of refined copper wire.”
Liam’s carefully constructed smile faltered. “Copper?”
The Chinese colonel nodded once, quickly, as if the matter was already settled.
Liam looked at the three Newcastle men, gauged their reaction, then turned back to the colonel. “May we step outside to confer for a moment?”
The colonel scowled but waved his hand dismissively. Liam chose to take that as permission. The three men stepped outside.
“You heard all of that?”
Jim, Dan, and Brian nodded.
“The feedstock was the bulk of the payment,” Liam said. “The clothes, the fish—that’s nice, but it’s a rounding error. Copper’s worth about 5 percent as much as the feedstock. So this deal, as presented, sucks. We can do some quick math to figure out how much to reduce the amount of grain and pork, or—”
“Nuke the deal,” Dan said, “Walk away.”
Both men turned to Jim, who hadn’t spoken yet. “You guys notice that those two looked like—”
Liam gave Jim a warning look. Best to assume they were being listened in on at all times. Jim took the warning and stopped, then thought for a long moment. Finally he said, “I’ve got an itchy feeling.”
Liam nodded. “Me too.”
“I think we should take the deal.”
“The deal is a shit sandwich,” Dan said.
“Absolutely,” Brian agreed.
Jim nodded. “We should take the deal, even though it’s a shit sandwich.”
Dan shook his head. “What? Bullshit. If this colonel fuck—”
Liam said, “Careful.”
Dan shrugged. “They can suck my whole dick. If he sees us bend over once, he’ll expect it again.”
Jim grimaced. “I hear what you’re saying—but we’ve got my kid along.”
Brian looked at him. “What, you think there’s any actual danger? Danger danger?”
Jim shrugged. “Maybe, yes. I’m not sure, but—”
He looked to Liam for confirmation, and Liam nodded. “I think so too. We’re a long way from home, outnumbered, outgunned, and with no backup.” He bit his lip. “We take the hit, we write it off as shrinkage, and we get home—”
Dan raised his eyebrows, outraged. “‘Shrinkage’?!”
“My grandfather, Don—you all know of him,” Liam said. “He always said that better than winning a fight is not getting in one in the first place.”
“Huh? I thought you guys—”
“Thought we what? Tried to get into firefights?”
“Well, no . . . but the stories about the Mackenzie battles with the cartels were legendary—”
Liam nodded. “And who do you think told those stories? Who shot and edited the videos—curated those stories in particular from all the footage available?”
Dan’s brow furrowed. “Wh—”
“Punched them up with special effects. We even commissioned narcocorrido songs to go with them—did you know that? Made sure that they got wide distribution south of the border—even paid for placement in Central and South America. It was good marketing for our services . . . and good deterrence against hijackers.”
Brian raised his eyebrows. “That’s some deep Mackenzie shit. I’d never heard that.”
“Not exactly family secret, but—”
Dan shook his head, confused. “What’s the point of that story?”
“The point is, I was saying that Grandpa Don always told us to avoid firefights and live to trade another day. That’s my guidance.” He turned to Jim. “What do you think?”
Jim nodded to acknowledge the question but spoke to his earbud. “Assistant, give me sentiment analysis of the colonel and gauge his seriousness. Also, search anything you can find about him and cross-reference—”
One of the colonel’s aides exited the building and said something in Mandarin. Their earbuds translated. “He wants you three back inside. Now.”
The four men all looked at each other, then followed the aide in.
They reached the table and stood, three abreast.
On the far side, Richard and the colonel sat and looked at them. Richard looked apologetic, but said nothing. The colonel looked at Liam. “Well?”
Liam licked his lips.