Mars Discovery's twin ship, Mars Discovery II, was ready to leave for Mars; the need for a rescue mission had speeded up the construction and tuning of Discovery II.
Times had shrunk to the point that in just six months everything was ready for departure: within a few hours the rescue mission would be gone.
This time there were only four people on board, all officers of the US military, no civilians, no Europeans, no Chinese, no scientists, no scientific equipment. The space and weight reserved for men and instruments, this time, was completely crammed with weapons and war systems.
There was someone on Mars to save, but there was also someone to fight with to bring home the two survivors of the Mars Discovery: the mission deputy commander Frank Seratomo and Dr. Tina Kasei.
Six months had passed since the last message received from Mars, many on Earth thought that the rescue mission was, after all, more an attempt to recover the bodies than a real rescue mission.
It was known with certainty that the rest of the Discovery crew would not return, for Frank and Tina, however, there was some faint hope.
In any case, it was necessary to go and check what exactly had happened, who had killed the first men who had set foot on Mars and also had to teach these warlike and unfriendly Martians a lesson.
Even among the four crew members there were not many doubts that the two survivors, after six months without any message, would have been found, at best, as corpses, or no trace of them would have been found, what everyone considered the most likely.
In the meantime, space was constantly monitored in the fear that a ship, an armed missile, had already left from Mars, that the real war with the Martians had already somehow begun.
For six months on Earth there has been no talk of anything but the tragic end of the first human expedition to Mars and the evident presence of sentient and warlike living beings on the red planet.
The mission of Discovery II was also fundamental to appease the river of illusions, theories, apocalyptic predictions, to go there, to understand what really happened and why, what were the real intentions of the Martians, how they were made, how it was possible to deal with them .. the questions to be answered at least were many and certainly not trivial.
Over the months the fear of a Martian attack, instead of waning, obviously had increased; at first the date feared by all was that of the fateful forty-five days, the time that Discovery had taken to reach Mars.
After that date, all the experts indicated in at least 6 months the time needed to travel the distance between the two planets, having exclaimed that even the Martians were able to use a technology similar to that of the Earth.
The departure of the rescue mission therefore also corresponded with an increasing fear of an attack in style by the Martians.
Every day without any kind of sighting seemed to everyone a confirmation that an attack would come soon, rather than a sign of narrow escape.
There were, of course, also those who believed a new mission to be a hostile signal that would have been better avoided, given the very low probability that Seratomo and Kasei were still alive.
Six months earlier they had sent a last message, in which they had confusedly told what had happened in the few hours since the arrival of the first Discovery on Martian soil.
In their last message they were alive and well and healthy.
They had food and water for many years, since their mission companions were all dead.
But were they still alive?
Impossible to say with certainty, certainly the fact that the Martians had killed all the other human beings and the fact that from that communication every attempt to get in touch with them had been absolutely vain, did not tip the balance in favor of the their survival.

From a "Martian" point of view, the Earthlings had been the first to prove hostile, landing on Mars, following this thesis, sending other Earthlings, armed and warlike, was not the right step to take.
The main governments, however, had had no doubts, immediately the Discovery II mission was born as a military mission, paid almost entirely with military funds and with only four men, all military and all American, the country that most of all aimed to teach the Martians a lesson to get things straight from the start.
The protests against this decision were of no use, showing muscles was the only choice, the only option taken into consideration by the main governments and their political and military leaders.

After a few days spent on the international space base, where Discovery II had been assembled, the four crew members, George Wynne, Michael Rostow, Francis Moseley and Michael Warren got on the spaceship and took their seats pending the countdown.
Discovery II, as it had happened to Discovery, would not have made a spectacular start as it happens for rockets that have to detach themselves from Earth and overcome the gravitational attraction on Earth.
Quite simply, she would have detached herself from the space station, slowly moving away, until she reached a safe distance before starting her own americium 242 nuclear engine.
Thus the flight to Mars would begin, a flight of forty-five, endless, days.
Waiting six months before we could leave had been difficult, but waiting another month and a half would have been even harder, both for the crew, more used to action than waiting, and for all the inhabitants of the Earth, waiting of an infinite number of answers to the questions crowded over the past months after that last message.

As a veteran of space missions, George Wynne listened to the monotonous litany almost without feeling:
9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ... knock off!

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