“Don’t forget the Martians,” Meryl said. “If anybody here is going to drive me fucking insane, it will be Fly-in-Amber.” The other three laughed, perhaps nervously.

“Walking through that air lock did trap you,” Paul said. “There’s no going back.”

“Not to Earth, granted. But one could stay here, or go on to Mars,” I said, looking at my wife. “You’ve never said anything about this.”

“It just came into my head,” she said, with an innocent look that I knew. Happy to have surprised me.

“It’s a good point,” Paul said. “A couple of days out, we’re past the point of no return. Let’s all have our nervous breakdowns before then.”

It did cause me to reflect. Am I being too much of a soldier? Orders are orders?

Thirty-five years ago, in the basic training kibbutz, a sergeant would wake me up, his face inches from mine, screaming, What is the first general rule?

“I will not quit my post until properly relieved,” I would mumble. Much more powerful than I will obey orders.

“What is the first general rule?” I asked her softly.

A furrow creased her brow. “What is the first what?”

Dustin cleared his throat. “I will not quit my post until properly relieved.”

She smiled. “My soldier boys. We need a better first rule.” She looked at Carmen and raised her eyebrows.

“How about ‘Don’t piss off the aliens’?”

“Except Fly-in-Amber?” I said to Meryl.

She gave a good- natured grimace. “He’s no worse than the other ones in the yellow tribe. They’re all kind of stuck-up and . . . distant? Even to the other Martians.”

I’d seen that in our briefings. The yellow ones were the smallest group, about one in twenty, and with their eidetic memory they served as historians and record-keepers. They also had been a pipeline to the one Other we’d had contact with—a sort of prerecorded message that all the yellow ones had carried around for millennia, supposedly, hidden waiting for a triggering signal.

When the signal came, nine eventful years ago, Fly-in-Amber had been here, in Little Mars. He went into a coma and started spouting gibberish that was decoded pretty easily. The Other was announcing its existence and location and the fact that it had a silicon- nitrogen metabolism, and little else. It didn’t mention the fact that it was about to try to destroy the world.

“I’m sort of like the soldier boys,” Paul said. “I hadn’t thought about there being an option.”

Carmen laughed. “For you, forget it. You have to fly the boat.” Actually, it was so automated and autonomous that it didn’t need a pilot. Paul would oversee it and take over if something went wrong. But that was beyond problematic. Nobody’d ever flown an iceberg close to the speed of light before.

I could sense people sorting one another out socially. The three of us and Paul all had military service, and, in most mixed populations, that is a primary difference. A pseudospeciation—you have killed, at least theoretically, or been given permission to, and so you are irrevocably different.