Moving Mars

Part Five

In the darkened debating chamber, Ti Sandra and her closest opponent, Rafe Olson of Copernicus, stood behind podi-ums, bathed in golden spots. Ti Sandra looked over the audience warmly, smiling and nodding. The debates were all being held at UMS and broadcast live around Mars. Three million adult Martians watched loyally, an audience one-tenth of one percent that of the most popular freeband LitVid on Earth.

The affairs of Mars were trivial in numbers, yet significant in emotional impact. LitVid signals were already spreading over the ex net, with attached text commentary from across the Triple. The Martian election campaign was big news everywhere, the first test of a world-nation, all else being birth and rehearsal.

I had suffered through debates with my opponents, and done well enough, but Ti Sandra had no equal on Mars. She had grown into her role with such style and grace that I wondered how anyone could replace her. She accepted the pressures flexibly, and blew them away to become even stronger.

Olson was smooth and efficient and knew his stuff; I’ve often thought he would have made a good President. He might have been smarter than Ti Sandra. But leadership has never been carried out by brains alone. Olson had at least three enhancements that we knew of, two social and one technical, yet still couldn’t match her for instinct and style.

I sat in the front row, Dandy Breaker on my left, the Chancellor of UMS and his wife to my right, one thousand students in ranked tiers behind us. The scene might have been centuries old; very democratic, very human, a contest between the best Mars could offer.

The chancellor, Helmut Frankel, patted my hand and whispered in my ear, “Makes a red rabbit very proud, doesn’t it?”

I agreed with a smile. I knew Ilya was watching; I felt that communality and closeness with him. I knew Charles would be watching. Let the games begin.

The UMS thinker, Marshall, installed two years before, projected an image of a proper Martian university professor, male, melanic, perhaps twenty-five years old, distinguished by peppery spots in his hair. The image bowed to the audience, which applauded politely, then to the stage. “President Erzul, Candidate Olson,” the thinker began, “I have taken questions posed by citizens of our young Republic, humans and thinkers, and analyzed them carefully to extract those issues which seem of most concern. First, I would like to ask Candidate Olson, how would you shape the policy of the Republic with regard to imports of high application goods such as nano designs?”

Olson did not appear to pause to think. ‘The Triple must treat Mars as an economic full partner, with no restrictions on any high app goods. While our economic leverage with regard to the major exporter of nano designs, Earth, is not particularly strong, I believe we have moral leverage, as child to the parent world. Why would Earth not treat us as a full partner, with the aim of eventually uniting all the Solar System under a common alliance, sovereign states and worlds recognizing a common goal?“

“Would that common goal be the so-called Push, the move to expand to the stars?”

“In the long run, certainly; I do share with the governments of Earth the belief that frontiers are necessary for growth. But other goals are much more immediate, among them open gateways for all scientific and technological discoveries, to remove the friction of uneven technological advancement.”

Olson did not know much if anything about the Olympians, and was almost certainly referring to Mars’s complaints against limited access to Earth technology, but for me, the statement carried extra weight.

“President Erzul, your comment on Candidate Olson’s answer?”

Ti Sandra placed her hands on the podium, pausing. The silence of several seconds was significant. Politics is showmanship; Ti Sandra would not appear to give predigested answers, or take the question and response quickly and lightly.

“No nation or political body operates out of altruism in the long run, and there is no reason to expect Earth to behave as mother to child. We have our own planetary pride, our own qualities, our own goods and inventions to offer, and these will in time be very significant. We must grow as friendly competitors, and we must earn our place in the Triple, without gifts, without favors. Others may need new frontiers, but Mars is still a frontier in itself. Mars is young but strong. We can grow, and will grow, to our own maturity in our own time.”

“But should not the Triple treat us as an equal partner, for the sake of historical ties?” Marshall asked.

Ti Sandra acknowledged that this would be a good thing, but added, “We intend never to impede the growth of Earth or any other sovereign power within the Triple. All we ask, in the long run, is that the Triple not stand in our way. We welcome economic ties, we welcome all forms of open trade, but we must not rely on inappropriate expectations or emotions.”

She had thirty seconds more for her answer, and took the time to elaborate. “Mars is a rich desert, scattered with settlements filled with a tough and loving people. We have grown as independent families, cooperating to keep each other alive, trading and sharing to prosper. I believe this is the natural order of things: good will among tough-minded but loving equals, never handicapping competitors, sharing the common resources through a strong and fair central authority. Good government keeps balances and corrects those flaws that will not correct themselves. The success of a Martian government lies in not stifling our greatest strengths to fit into some grand intellectual scheme with no precedent in history as actually lived.”

Chancellor Frankel leaned over to speak to me. “Brilliantly stated and reprised,” he said, nodding vigorously. “I hope she doesn’t really believe all that.”

Marshall ’s image turned to face Olson. “The interim government of President Erzul has already shown itself to be an effect effect an iv eck — ”

The image abruptly froze, then winked out. LitVid displays around the auditorium spun through confined gyrations and went dark. A low hum filled the room, empty digits on the auditorium’s sounder, and then that, too, fell silent. Beside me, Dandy jumped to his feet, took my shoulder, and practically lifted me out of my seat. Two guards and an arbeiter leaped on stage to surround Ti Sandra, and another guard stationed himself by Olson. The auditorium’s lights went out.

“Get down,” Dandy whispered harshly. I fell to my knees beside him. The auditorium filled with concerned voices and a few shouts and screams. I could feel my body becoming frightened before my mind had time to react.

Dandy pushed my butt and urged me across the floor, still on hands and knees. He covered me like a rude lover until we were in the protection of a stairwell. Ti Sandra huffed beside me. “You there, Cassie?” she asked.

“I’m here,” I said.

“Quiet!” Dandy ordered.

A torch flicked on, half-hidden by a guard’s hand as he read a small map on a metal plate secured to a handrail at the base of the stairs. Ti Sandra’s chief guard, Patsy Di Vorno, a sharp-faced young woman with incredible arms and shoulders, slapped a thick white slab like modeling clay on my arm. I gave a little shriek as it quickly spread and covered my torso, neck, and head, bunching my hair and tugging it painfully. It left me holes to see and breath through. Di Vorno wrapped a slab around each of Ti Sandra’s arms. We were now covered with reactive nano armor. The armor was intelligent and mobile; it could sense approaching projectiles and curl us into a tight ball with muscle-snapping speed. Any high-speed projectile hitting the armor would be blown to a stop. That made us dangerous to everybody around us.

With a few grunted words, the President and I were dragged, walked, and shoved up the stairs like cargo. In a small storage room, cool and dark, the guards pushed us low against a wall adjacent to the entrance. They turned their torches high and flicked them down the hall outside. Coded com links penetrated the walls like secret half-heard whispers among frightened children.

Nobody followed. Four guards and two arbeiters set up a secure station in that room, slapping quick-spread sensors onto the walls and drawing their guns. The arbeiters were much more heavily armed than I had guessed, sporting both projectile rapid-fires, short-range electron beams, and selective bio knockers that could put an army of live assailants — human or animal — into shock.

I hugged Ti Sandra and she hugged me, the armor squeaking like rubber between us. Only then did we realize that Olson was in the room with us. Ti Sandra gave him a shocked look, and we hugged him as well.

“What in the hell is this?” Olson asked, voice shaky. His dignity seemed ruffled and he pushed us back.

“Power failure,” Ti Sandra ventured. The closest guard, whom I knew only as Jack, shook his head in the torch glare, a shadow above him echoing larger denial.

“No, ma’am,” Patsy Di Vorno said, coming back into the room. “Power doesn’t go down in buildings like this. The dedicated thinker blanked. All backup control dunked with it. That doesn’t happen. We have a planned failure of support.”

“Oh,” Olson said, leaving his jaw open.

Patsy’s mind — triggering a speed enhancement — went into high gear and she started clipping. “Now get your shuttle to unknown. Risk if unfriendly air team tracking — ”

“Or sabotage,” Dandy Breaker said. “We should separate prez and veep now. Candidate can serve as decoy.”

Olson’s jaw dropped farther.

“Sorry, sir,” Dandy went on, face stony and eyes narrowed in the glare. I could hardly see except in blocks of harsh white and starry black.

“You have an obligation,” Olson said, but his own guard interrupted.

“Sir, we mean to get you out of here as well. Breaker means that each team will vector separately. Three arrows out of here, each acting as diversion for the other.” He raised his hand, and again we were grabbed and pushed into the hall. From the auditorium came more screams and concerned voices.

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” Breaker told me. “No weapons fire and no assault signals.”

“Watch for peeling walls,” another guard said. Nano poisons, rapid-assembly weapons and machines, anything might be possible.

“Who?” Ti Sandra asked, face flushed, large body suddenly very vulnerable and weak, a big slow target. “We don’t care right now, Madam President,” another guard said.

I told Dandy, “If you grab my ass again, you better mean it.” He shot me a look of surprise, grinned, and said, “Sorry, Ma’am.”

We took back tunnels to the shuttle port, walking briskly with guards and arbeiters front and back. “Christ, I don’t want this!” Olson said before we split, his lone guard hustling him to the train tubes.

“Madam Veep, you have another shuttle,” Di Vorno said. “Prez goes incom. Luck, Dandy.”

Dandy, Jack, and an arbeiter guided me to the proper gate for the second shuttle. I knew the team always traveled with two shuttles, but I had not seen the second before. It did not look luxurious; spare, cut down, armored and fast.

Then Dandy did something that shocked me badly. He took a tiny package from his pocket, approached a decorative fountain in the terminal and broke the package over the main nozzle. The package quickly swelled in the water like a lump of rising dough. A tiny mechanical observer poked out of the mass and painted me quickly with a gridwork of red lines of light. The lump flopped in the pool around the fountain, popping arms and legs. The legs neglected to sprout toes, growing shoes instead.

It began to look like me, clothes and all, right down to the lumpy white armor. In a few seconds, it stood, squeaked, and with a convincing if inelegant gait, followed the arbeiter into the shuttle. The shuttle sealed the terminal bridge and its hatches, rolled away, and rose into the pink afternoon sky on flame-rooted feathers of white steam.

I shivered away the prickling hairs on my neck.

“My call, ma’am,” Dandy said. He and Jack each took an arm and guided me down the corridor. “Maintenance trains go to old station tunnels from here. We’ll take one of those.”

So I was back where it all began for me, the birthplace of my political consciousness. The pioneer tunnels behind the UMS train depot were still dark and narrow and filled with forgotten debris eventually awaiting the recyclers. The air was downright cold and smelled bad. My head swam as Dandy and Jack paused to consult their slates.

“All com’s out except for secure channels, and they’re not active,” Jack said. He shook his head. “Satcom’s out. We might hook into a port and try internal optic.”

“No ports here,” Dandy said. “Why no com on the secure channels?”

Jack thought for a moment. “I doubt anybody’s sending. President’s crew is going to stay quiet and in the air until they hear from Point One.”

“Point One doesn’t rely on thinker coordination…” Dandy mused. “But they have links with thinkers, and computers route the com like anywhere else.”

“Evolvons?” I asked.

Dandy waggled his head, not committing himself to any theories. Jack, however, reached up to the roof of the tunnel with long arms, scraped his fingers there, and said, “We’ve put Terrie thinkers back in authority after sweeps. UMS was running its day-to-day with thinkers.”

“Not life support,” I said.

“No, but everything’s coordinated… Computers talk with thinkers, thinkers give computers high-level instructions, even backup systems refer to the system boss… and that’s a thinker. We swept for them and we missed, that’s all.”

“Earth evolvons,” Dandy said. “Why?”

Jack dropped his hand to his side, wiping ice crystals on his pants, and said, “Madam Vice President, where are the Olympians now?”

“Some of your people are protecting them,” I said.

“Of course, but do you know where they are?”

“I assume most of them are at Melas Dorsa. Franklin ’s core group. Some may be at Tharsis Research University with Leander.”

“I need to know some things,” Jack said. “Will you brief me?”

“I’ll try,” I said.

“Let’s find a hidey hole with some insulation. We’ll settle in until Point One tells us what to do… assuming they can. If we don’t hear in several hours, we’ll commandeer a train and move out of here.”

In the dark, the three of us sat in a old branch still lined with foamed rock, marginally warmer than the long tunnels.

I wondered if I could still find my way to the trench dome where I’d first spoken with Charles, where the students had gathered before going Up.

“I have a theory,” Jack began. “But you should tell me some things first.”

“All right,” I said.

“Don’t be hasty, Ma’am,” Dandy said, half-joking. “Check out his clearance.”

Jack nodded sincerely. “That should be first, he’s right,” he said.

I held my slate to his and checked his security clearance by comparison of coded signals. The signals found a locus of agreement. Jack and Dandy were both cleared for top secret, but only on a strict need-to-know basis.

“I think Earth is fapping with our dataflow,” Jack began. “That isn’t good. We’re vulnerable as hell. Our contingency plans call for getting you to a safe location of our choosing. We’ll put together the government at that point by popping up a shielded satcom. Assuming they still have evolvons in most of our thinkers, and the evolvons have polluted the computers as well, Mars is going to be in bad shape. Stations will be cut off except for direct optic links and they’ll be down for a while. Governors won’t be able to report to Many Hills for several days. Techs will have to go in with certified Martian computers and start rearranging dataflow.”

“There will be more fapping,” Dandy said. “You can bet our certified computers will be polluted.”

“Comes from too much reliance on Earth,” Jack said sourly, “Ma’am, what I need to know is, why would Earth do this? Just to screw up our government?”

“No,” I said. “They’d want to deal with a stable government.”

“Have we got something going that would scare them that bad?” Jack asked.

“Yes,” I said, cutting through all my instinctive equivocation. My life probably depended on these two men.

“The Olympians?” Jack asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m just asking because they were put under top security protection a month ago, and I planned the pattern,” Jack said. “Unusual for industrial stuff.”

“Is there any chance this is just a local failure?” I asked, the strain in my voice obvious. My last ray of hope was about to be extinguished.

“No, Ma’am,” Dandy said. “We’d get Point One immediately.”

“Then I’d like to be with the Olympians, and as soon as possible,” I said.

Dandy and Jack considered this in silence. “Ma’am, you undoubtedly have your reasons. But we have to make you available for talks with negotiators representing the aggressor. You will be exposed before the President, in case the aggressors are trying to decapitate Mars. Security for the Olympians assumes they will be killed if the aggressor knows their whereabouts. They’ll be removed from Melas Dorsa as soon as possible, and we don’t know where they’ll be.”

“I need to communicate with them, then.”

“Nobody’s talking with anybody for the next few hours, perhaps longer, if we guess correctly.”

“If it’s that bad, then people are dying,” I said.

Jack nodded. “Yes, Ma’am. Power blackouts, tunnel collapses in the fancier stations, oxydep, recycler failures…”

My neck stiffened with rage beneath the armor. “When will Ti Sandra and I be able to talk?”

Dandy was about to answer when his slate chimed. Coded signals flashed onto the screen.

‘That’s Point One,“ he said. ”Someone’s popped up a mini satcom. Things are happening fast. We’re to get you to a shuttle and take you to Many Hills immediately. You’re to meet with someone who has a message from Earth.“

“I hope you like adventure, Madam Vice President,” Jack said.

“Not this kind,” I said.

“Nor I, Ma’am.”

“What’s your last name, Jack?”

“Name’s Ivan Ivanovitch Vasilkovsky, Ma’am, from Yamaguchi BM in Australe.”

Terror can only last so long before it subsides into numbness and a sour stomach.

A sleek black and red maintenance train engine had been sidelined in the depot roundhouse. We boarded through the engineer’s lock. Dandy checked the computer and found it had been completely deactivated. Together, Dandy and Jack pulled the computer offline so it would not start with powerup, switched the engine to emergency manual override, turned on safety sensors but left lights and beacons off, and took us out of the roundhouse. Dandy took the first watch in the driver’s seat.

I did not want to go to Many Hills, but their arguments were irrefutable. Running unloaded, on a straight trace the engine could push up to four hundred kiphs. The trip would take at least fifteen hours.

Saddled with authority, away from Ti Sandra and out of touch possibly for days, I felt like a lost child. Mostly I stayed quiet in the tiny compartment, lying on a hard cot that belied the colloquial name from centuries past — “featherbedding.”

Jack Vasilkovsky sat on a pulldown stool, face unreadable. He would give up his life for me if called upon. And he would kill.

I had thought these matters through before, but never with such intensity and urgency. I was no longer simply myself or even the Vice President. I was the face of the Republic until Ti Sandra could safely emerge.

In a few hours, I would examine all the contingency plans made by our defense and security staffs. And shortly after that, whether or not I had spoken with Ti Sandra, I would be facing someone representing Earth — who? And with what demands?

The compartment’s tiny port allowed small glimpses of pink sky darkening into dusk. The pink shaded into deep brown filled with stars. Came a quick flash of pale blue along the horizon, something I had never seen live before, and night black and cold.

The compartment smelled of stale nano and dust. The engine flew at speed, silent on straight trace. There might be other trains stranded on the tracks, their computers dithering from Earth’s merciless evolvons. Jack looked as if he was prepared to blast them out of our way — but then I thought more as he and Dandy were thinking, and realized they would simply commandeer the next engine, leaving the stranded passengers to fend for themselves.

Oddly, only now did I speck that these events were going to be historic. Whether we won or lost, the scattering of Mars’s leaders — President, Vice President, and presumably the district governors — would become a Martian legend. Intrigue, decoys, shuttle flights and trains in the night.

Jack’s slate chimed and another coded message came in. “Another pop-up,” he said dryly. “Point One is still operating, but our satellites are brought down as soon as we put them up. They must want us really scared.”

“What’s the message?” I asked, rising from the cot.

“I have something from the President, your eyes only, and status on who we’re talking to at Many Hills. Cailetet seems to be functioning, and maybe a few small renegade BMs. Nothing else.”

He transferred Ti Sandra’s message to my slate, simple text and one picture.

The text was followed by a small picture of Ti Sandra, face smiling but haggard. I signaled the wiping of the message and the picture faded.

Locusts.

Jack leaned forward, touching my hand in concern. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“What do you know about locusts?” I asked.

Jack sat upright and rubbed his hands on his knees. “Jesus,” he said. “Contravened by treaty throughout the Triple. What in God’s name could we do to Earth… Have they?”

“The President says they have.”

He looked as if he might cry, caught between anger and horror and helpless to act. “Jesus,” he repeated, and could say no more for a few seconds.

“Locusts,” I said, trying to bring him back.

He folded his arms and looked away, eyebrows drawn together. “How do you control an entire planet from across the Solar System? Seed it with nano factories that can build a variety of automatic weapons, self-directing warbeiters. Mars’s soil is ideal. High silicate and aluminum, high ferrous content. Choose old mines or seemingly depleted sites, still rich with the basic minerals, open to deep exploration and concealment without triggering alarm. Sprinkle nano factory seeds from orbit. A single small ship could do it. We have no defense against such an atrocity.”

I thought of Cailetet’s attempt to expand mining claims. As if Crown Niger had tried to warn us, one last signal flag of honor before handing himself to Earth on a platter, sole political survivor of conquered Mars.

I wondered now if Stan and Jane were even alive. “We could fight the locusts,” I offered.

“We don’t have anywhere near the means to destroy all the factories,” he said. “The locust concept is specifically forbidden by treaty signed by all nations and alliances.”

“And we’re too young and naive to have thought of a defense.”

‘Theoretically,“ Jack said, ”in a year or two, all of our scientists could design a response. A nano-level disease. But if the locusts are Earth-designed, we…” He did not finish.

But we did have defenses, and they were in themselves so frightening as to have provoked the Earth… Extremes bringing on extremes. The future seemed not just dangerous, not just bleak; it seemed incomprehensible.

Dandy left the controls briefly to tell us the track ahead was clear for five hundred klicks. Jack and I told him about the locust warning. His face went gray.

I told neither of them about Ti Sandra’s impending death.

Jack switched places with Dandy, and the engine pushed on across Mars, skirting the rugged regions a hundred klicks south of Mariner Valley and Eos Chasma.

I had never felt so isolated, so wrapped in silence. The train’s faint vibration on a curved trace rose through my feet. Dandy slept fitfully, leaning against the cabin bulkhead behind the stool, feet splayed like a boy’s, boots turned out.

In the next few hours, I studied the contingency plans available on my VP slate. They were none of them useful or even suggestive. None of them took into account either locusts or Olympians. Those preparing the plans would not have been in the know about the Olympians, and Martians were too trusting to assume the worst of Mother Earth.

How many Martians would die now, brave and artless?

How many deaths could Ti Sandra and I absorb the blame for?

I stared out the port again. The stars in the sky over nightbound Mars had their echo in the sands — piezoelectric flashes as the sizzle contracted from the day’s mild warmth, sparkling like thousands of tiny fireflies. I turned off the cabin light to see them better and pressed my armor-wrapped face against the glass like a little girl. For a moment, the vision seduced me into forgetting my worries, and I felt suspended like a wraith, a child’s ghost flying over the sands. I specked through my enhancement pressures building in sizzle baked by ultraviolet across the years, wind removing layers of flopsand and powder, sudden cold night air flowing from nearby scarps, pressure within the desert varnish squeezing tiny crystals of quartz…

Then I imagined the flashes were locusts signaling to each other, and pulled away from the port with a small cry. Dandy came awake instantly, straightened his legs, blinked at me. He drew his gun so quickly I only noticed the result, not the action.

“Dreaming?” he asked, pocketing the weapon without apology.

“No,” I said. “Thinking the worst, though.”

“No good that,” he said.

Jack came into the cabin and told us the tracks seemed to be clear through Schiaparelli and into Many Hills. “We’ve passed two trains that coasted automatically onto spurs,” he said. “At least the computers did that much before they locked up.”

“People still in the trains?” I asked.

“I assume,” he said, face stony.

The engine ascended a graceful, fairy-light series of sloping trestles. We topped the inward-facing scarps of Schiaparelli basin and descended into the great flat plain twenty-five hours after departing UMS. Many Hills stood at the center, in the worn hummocks of ancient central rings. The engine coasted into the new, dazzling white depot.

The white walls and pressure arches stood out against the ochre and red all around, a beacon for assault. The entire town was a target. But that kind of warfare had long since ceased. Now, soldiers could be invisible, and destruction carried out by machines like termites from within, not bombs from without. Warbeiters, Jack had called them. A horribly awkward and unpleasant name.

All seemed deserted, which was expected. During an emergency, red rabbits clustered close to water and oxygen sources. A Martian station seldom looks inhabited from the outside, anyway. And the Republic’s new capital had not yet received its full population of bureaucrats, cabinet members, jurists, governors and representatives.

Point One had established its command at Many Hills some weeks before. Overseeing guards for the President and Vice President, assembling the early stages of Martian intelligence and internal security, Point One had taken on a carefully observed life of its own with surprising speed. Now I was grateful to see men and women I recognized at the depot, carrying weapons, wearing pressure suits, waiting for the train with somber but professional faces.

We disembarked in an underground area, away from possible bombardment, and I was immediately taken by armored truck to fresh tunnels east of the capitol construction.

Dandy and Jack met with their superior, Tarekh Firkazzie, in the rear of the truck. A slim blond man from Boreum, Firkazzie had been appointed head of overall security the month before.

Two women stripped my reactive armor and carefully packaged it for disposal. “You’re brave, traveling for a day with this stuff, Madam Vice President,” one said.

Jack came forward, grinding his teeth audibly, thrusting his lower jaw as it mocking a heroic male. Then I saw that his expression, however absurd, was genuine; he was grieving.

“Madam Vice President, I’ve been appointed… we chose by lots… to bring you bad news. You have a much heavier burden now. Ti Sandra Erzul and her crew have been involved in a shuttle mishap. It may have been an accident, but we’re not sure. We haven’t confirmed the location of the crash, and we won’t be able to for some time. Emergency beacon reports rescue arbeiters have not located anybody alive in the wreckage. We’re bringing in a magistrate from the court tunnels. We’ll have you sworn in as President as soon as possible, perhaps in the next few minutes. I’m sorry.”

For a moment, I did not know whether this was the faked death Ti Sandra had warned me about, or a real accident. I had to assume it was the former. I would become acting President.

I felt nothing then. I had become an arbeiter working for a political machine with its own rules, inevitable and soulless.

Point One had played its role as protector of the chain of command during my flight by train engine from Sinai. The interim Speaker of the House of Governors had been flown in from Amazonis by shuttle; the speaker for the House of the People had been at Many Hills to begin with. The interim congress had been caught campaigning, scattered across Mars, except for three governors and two candidate representatives. They were in a deep tunnel guarded by what defense arbeiters and personnel the Point One folks could assemble.

Point One had assumed control of all the available links. The ex net was down, but some private nets strung through local optics were up on manual and portable narrowband, keeping us informed about conditions at stations around Schiaparelli Basin . In effect, there were communications, but at less than one-tenth of one percent normal.

We still could not talk with the Olympians. I did not expect any further messages from Ti Sandra for days, perhaps longer.

All rules were being ignored, all bets were off.

Led by Dandy Breaker, five guards and two arbeiters escorted me into the narrow emergency tunnel two hundred meters below the congress, just above the new and expanded wellhead for Many Hills. There, I faced the dismayed band of seven legislators. For a moment, nobody spoke, and then all gathered in a circle around me, shaking my hands, asking questions.

I held up my arms, sidestepped a governor who seemed about to hug me, and called out, as clearly as possible without shouting, “We are the only ones who can act as a lawful government for the Republic! We must have order!”

The Speaker of the House of Governors, Henry Smith of Amazonis, a stocky man with a close-trimmed beard and piggish discerning eyes, used his stentorian voice to call the meeting to order. “Obviously,” he added, in an aside to me, “we do not have a quorum, but this is an emergency session.”

I agreed. “All of our intelligence, assembled by the Point One people — thanks to all of them for their extraordinary work — ”

“They did not avert this catastrophe!” shouted the representative from Argyre.

“They are not intended for military defense!” responded Henry Smith, raising a tight-fisted hand, his chin lowered as if he were a bull about to charge. Argyre clapped his mouth shut, eyes wide. They were all very frightened men and women.

“Please let me say what needs to be said,” I continued.

“Without interruptions,” Henry Smith insisted.

“The President may be dead.”

Some of the legislators and even a few of the guards who had not heard seemed to wilt, their faces as blank as those of shocked children. “My God,” Henry Smith said.

“I will take the oath of office soon, unless we can establish that Ti Sandra Erzul is still alive. We have heard that her shuttle crashed. I assume it was destroyed by some sort of aggressive action.”

“Who? Who, in God’s name, has done this to us?” cried Representative Rudia Ely from Icaria .

“I’ve been told that we will be negotiating with people from Cailetet, representing Earth. Earth seems to have decreed that all our thinkers and computers be shut down by activated evolvons.”

“We swept them!” someone shouted. “There were guarantees!”

“Quiet!” Henry Smith yelled.

I asked Lieh Walker, the head of the Point One Com and Surveillance team, to give us a status report. Her words provided no comfort. We knew conditions around most of Schiaparelli, and there were bursts of information from places as far away as Milankovic and Promethei Terra, but no complete picture. “Communications with other parts of Mars are severely restricted,” she said. “Even if we had the data, we could not assemble it into anything coherent. Our interpreters are down. Everything’s badly polluted except our slates and a few personal computers with CPUs made on Mars.”

When she finished, I spoke again. “Our position may be untenable for the time being. Not only is Mars paralyzed, but it seems the Terries have laced parts of the planet with locusts.”

Not all the legislators understood the term. Martians have always been known for a tight domestic focus. I explained briefly. “Is that possible?” one asked.

Henry Smith glanced at me as if for moral support. “I’ve had some briefings on it,” he said. “It’s a little buried cesspool of tech. Nobody much admits to that sort of thing.”

“Then we’re dead,” said Argyre.

“Don’t settle for anything so final,” I said sharply. “Some options are still open.”

Dandy Breaker entered the chamber and told me that the negotiators from Cailetet had arrived by shuttle at the depot. “They’re clean and well-dressed,” he said contemptuously. “Their stuff seems to work.”

I glanced at Lieh Walker for an explanation. She dropped the edges of her lips, eyes flashing anger. “Cailetet has been removed from our net links,” she said. “They may not be affected, but they are lying low. There is nothing from their regions coming through Point One com.”

I studied the legislators. I would need a witness and some support for my negotiations. I had to pick wisely from a group I knew only in passing; the interim government had never quite integrated. Ti Sandra had conducted a lot of business personally with these people, but I had met only a few, very briefly.

“Governor Smith, Representative Ely, if you’ll come with me…”

Smith seemed eager to please, but he was smart and tough — Ti Sandra had told me so, and I trusted her judgment implicitly. Candidate Representative Rudia Ely of Eastern Hellas — unopposed — had served with me on a capital architecture committee, several months ago. She was generally quiet and observant and I had felt comfortable around her.

I did not want to think too long about the importance of every decision I made now, of the roles these people would play, of what I would discuss with the traitors from Cailetet.

Someone has said that nobody pays politicians to have emotions. Yet when the magistrate administered the Oath of the Presidency, in a tiny anteroom to the Hall of the Judiciary, surrounded by gray racks of dormant, polluted law library thinkers, I wept quietly.

No one gave it the slightest notice.

Sean Dickinson had changed little in appearance since the days in the trench dome. He stood very straight, knees limber, with hands folded behind him, parade rest. He clenched and unclenched his jaw muscles, regarded me steadily, and blinked only once in the long seconds I examined him.

We were meeting in the half-finished chamber of the governors, scaffolding and architectural slurry above our heads, the air yeasty with active nano. So long as the nutrient vats held out, the capitol would continue building itself. Dickinson stood before the hand-carved pink marble podium where Henry Smith — if he were elected — would gavel the House of Governors to order.

“I have been sworn in as President of the Federal Republic of Mars,” I said. “I understand you represent Cailetet?”

“I recognize you,” Dickinson said, words clipped but soft. “Casseia Majumdar. Do you remember us?”

His lip twitched as if he might smile, but he turned away and gave a languid look at Gretyl Laughton. She stood at the front of their aides, four men and women from Cailetet. They appeared uneasy, well aware of possible charges of treason even though they belonged to a nonaligned BM. Gretyl had become leaner, like a greyhound or whippet; she wore deliberately dull clothes, her hair had grayed, and she seemed uninterested in appearances.

“I remember,” I answered.

“We did some brave things together not that many years ago. You once claimed to despise the Statists.”

“And now I am one.”

“Worse. You are the state.”

Neither of us cared to break through the iciness and unpleasant formality. “Where are your documents? I won’t talk with you until I’m convinced you have the powers you claim.”

Dickinson said, “We have the proper documents. We represent factions on Earth who have control over much of Mars now. They do not wish to reveal themselves, but they have given us coded identifiers for verification. Our documents have been hand-vetted, since your security thinkers and other machines are not functioning.”

“Is this so?” I asked Lieh Walker, who stood beside Henry Smith. Tarekh Firkazzie entered the chamber and sat inconspicuously in one of the gallery seats.

“Their codes match Earth codes shipped to all governments in the Triple,” Lieh said.

“Utter cowardice,” I said, shaking my head. “Are they afraid of their own plebiscites? This is an atrocity, an illegal act.”

Dickinson smiled. “Can we become serious?” he asked.

I glared at him. At that moment, it was all I could do to keep myself from reaching out and striking him.

We chose a table in the witness square and sat.

“I’ve been authorized to present you with an offer.”

I made a gesture to Lieh. The chamber recorders were switched on. “Mars has been attacked without reason,” I said. “Is Cailetet cooperating with the aggressors?”

Sean leaned forward slightly. “The Republic, the state to which Mars has decided to give itself, is developing very dangerous weapons. Considering the political situation in the Triple — completely peaceful for nearly sixty years — that seems out of character and very damned stupid.“

“No weapons are being developed,” I said.

“I’ve been told that these weapons could be more destructive than any yet made.”

I saw no reason to argue the point further. “Present your proposals and let’s get this over with.”

“The parties involved in this preemptive action will deactivate all blocks on Martian dataflow, if the people listed on this slate…” He pushed his own slate forward and I spun it around to view the screen. “Are delivered into my hands within seventy-two hours. I will receive them here in Many Hills and transport them elsewhere. Eventually they will go to Earth.”

I read the list: all of the Olympians, Zenger, Casares, and nineteen others — among them, the finest scientists on Mars.

“What will this accomplish?” I asked.

“Peace,” Dickinson said. “Return to normal dataflow. Lives saved.”

“No locusts?” I asked.

“Locusts?”

“Warbeiters. Nano armies,” I said.

He seemed puzzled.

“Your puppet masters don’t tell you everything. Either that or you’re willfully ignorant.”

Dickinson shrugged.

“What Earth is doing to Mars right now will alter the balance of the Triple,” I said, voice cracking. “Nobody will feel safe.”

“Please don’t lecture me,” Dickinson said.

Gretyl stepped forward. “We understand the delicate balances better than you.”

“Yes, and your youthful ideals — my God, Sean, you’re working with Crown Niger !” I shut myself up, but my body trembled with suppressed rage. Three days. “The Republic has no authority to kidnap citizens.”

“What it comes down to, I think, is Earth considers its own safety paramount, and does not trust Martian intentions,” Dickinson concluded. “Ninety-eight percent of all humanity still lives on Earth. Knowing what I know about this government, I wouldn’t trust you, either.”

“We’ve never shown Earth any hostility. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“Mars should have kept its innocence,” Dickinson said. “No world state, stay out of the big leagues, peace and comparative prosperity. I’ve fought against this all my life. All states resort to force in the end.”

“I assume there are other conditions?”

Dickinson referred to his slate. “Return to BM economic structure for a minimum of twenty years. Earth monitors to be installed at all research centers, and regular visits of inspection teams at any facility of any kind on Mars.”

They had given up on us. They wanted us weak, locked in our own past, stripped of our new powers. Someone had calculated that the technological situation would get out of hand before any peaceful negotiations could be concluded. “Occupation by Earth,” I said. “Absolutely incredible. How can anyone believe that will be workable?”

“Not my problem,” Dickinson said.

“And what do you get, personally?”

“Exile, I suppose,” Dickinson said. “No Martian will tolerate Gretyl and me now. No doubt we’ll be dead in a few months if we stay here. We’ll go to Earth.”

“You’re happy with that?”

“For the end of a Martian state, I’d gladly accept my own death, and Gretyl’s,” Dickinson said. “I am true to my ideals. I haven’t changed, Casseia.”

“Every history has its traitors,” I said.

Dickinson dismissed that with a subtle toss of his head and flicker of his eyelids. “I’ll need your answer soon.”

“How soon?”

“Within one hour.”

“We don’t have a quorum. If you could bring the rest of the government together — ”

“Please don’t try to stall. We’re all here to avert an even greater catastrophe. If we fail, stronger measures will be taken.”

“Locusts.”

“I truly don’t know. As President, you are allowed, by your constitution, to negotiate foreign treaties.”

“But not to negotiate surrender during wartime,” I said.

“This is not war,” Dickinson said.

“What is it, for God’s sake?”

“Clever, devastating disruption imposed by a vastly superior power,” Dickinson said. “Why mince words? I don’t think you’re stupid. We have one hour. I understand that if Earth does not receive a reply by then, the knot will tighten.”

These were not negotiations; they were ultimatums. Mars would strangle if I did not agree to everything. I felt lightheaded, almost giddy with suppressed rage.

“Have you any human heart whatsoever?” I asked Dickinson . “Have you any feelings for what your planet is suffering?”

“I was not the one who made this situation,” he answered briskly.

“We are honorable Martians,” Gretyl said.

No choice. No way out. Selling out the Republic’s future, all we had worked for; I would be branded the traitor. A kind of delirium smoothed itself around me with seductive insistence. Die, but do not do this. I could not listen.

Lieh had been monitoring her slate closely for several minutes. Now, she stood up from the gallery and approached me like a delicate crab, eyes full of hatred turned on Dickinson . She bent over and whispered in my ear, “Madam President, we’ve established contact with the Olympians. I’m told that you are not to sell the farm, and that you are to leave this meeting and come with me to the surface. Charles says he has to go see a man about a scary dog.”

I looked at her, baffled. Lieh straightened and backed away.

“I’d like to discuss this with the people I’ve assembled here,“ I said to Dickinson. He nodded, appearing faintly bored. ”You’ll have your answer,“ I said.

I left the table and gestured for Smith and Ely to follow me out of the chamber. We met Firkazzie in the governors’ cloakroom. “What’s going on?” I asked Lieh and Firkazzie, my nerves shot, all confidence fled.

Lieh deferred to Firkazzie.

“We’re to take you Up in the next ten minutes. There’s an observation deck on the top of the main capitol building, but it isn’t pressurized yet.”

“By whose orders?”

“It was not an order, Ma’am,” Firkazzie said. “Charles Franklin requested your presence, and said it was very important.”

I started to laugh and caught myself before it turned into a hysterical bray. “What in hell is more important than negotiating with Earth?”

“I only carry the message,” Lieh said, stiffening and looking me firmly in the eye. I felt adequately chastened.

“Let’s go, then,” I said.

“We don’t have much time,” Firkazzie said. “We have to suit up and climb past the construction barriers.”

Dandy, Firkazzie, and Lieh accompanied me; all the others, senators and aides, were left behind, not essential to this task.

We took an elevator to the upper levels, two stories above the surface. I was too numb and confused to be concerned with politics and protocol. I felt the bleak threat of Mars devastated by Terrie power, by armies in the sands; I could not get over the thought that this pollution, this disruption had caused deaths already, and must end soon, or else. Dickinson had given me an unacceptable ultimatum — and I had no choice but to accept. What could anyone do or say that would change that?

I stood in a dim cold room while Dandy and Lieh dragged out suits, tested them and found them secure. We put them on and attached cyclers. The seals activated. My suit adjusted to my body automatically.

Lieh, Dandy, and an architect whose name I did not catch took me through a short maze of nutritional vats and construction slurry tanks. Beyond the safety barriers, the dark, silent hall opened onto a short, curved corridor, an open hatch with a blinking red low-pressure light, a glimpse of dark brown sky and scattered clouds reddening in the dawn.

We stood on a parapet overlooking Many Hills, surrounded by Schiaparelli Basin , twenty meters above the reddish-brown surface. Smooth scrubbed lava streaked with pockets of smear stretched for kilometers all around. The air was cold and still, the quiet profound. We had not turned on our suit radios for fear of attracting attention from assassins. Terrie ships could spot us from thousands of klicks and do whatever they wished to us.

I lifted my arms in bafflement, wondering what I was supposed to be witnessing. I was almost by accident that I fixed my gaze west and saw Phobos, one hour into its ascent, four hours from setting in the east. I glanced past it, then felt my neck stiffen and my eyes begin to water. Scary dog.

Charles said he was going to see a man about a scary dog. I did not know what Charles was going to do. But a hopeless wish, a wildest guess within me, pushed forward, fantasy turning to conviction. It fit. The Mercury could take them there, the equipment and the thinkers, and Charles was just the quiet sort of megalomaniac to think of such a thing and secretly offer it to Ti Sandra.

I started to speak but realized nobody would hear me. I pointed to the moon. I pulled Lieh toward me, touching helmets, and practically screamed the phrase from Shakespeare. “ ‘Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!’ Fear! Fear and panic, the dogs of war! Look at Phobos! My God, Lieh! He’s going to do it! He’s going to do it!”

She pulled away, her almond eyes squinting in concern, as if I might be insane. I laughed and wept, convinced I knew, convinced that somehow this horrible burden was about to be lifted from my shoulders. Dandy touched his helmet to mine and said, solicitously, “Something wrong, Ma’am?”

I grabbed his shoulders and spun him to look west, to face that familiar moon we had seen so often since our births, that dread canine Fear that accompanies the God of War, so innocuous and innocent for such a dreadful name, small and nicked away by meteoroids and early settlement mining, circling Mars every seven hours forty minutes at six thousand kilometers, low and fast, accompanied by its fellow dog Panic.

Lieh, Dandy and I all faced west. The architect stayed in shadow, not caring to expose himself to whatever had made us mad.

Bright and full against the dark star-strewn sky, Phobos climbed behind a low wisp of ice cloud. It turned ghostly in the cloud, shimmered, and then emerged crystalline, as real and sharp as anything I had ever seen. I focused my will on it, as if helping Charles, as if a psychic link had risen between us all in this extremity and we could each of us know what the other was thinking and doing. My will went out and touched the moon and I was half insane with a terrified desire.

Phobos disappeared. There were no clouds between, no obscuring dust. The clarity of deep gray orbiting stone simply vanished.

My desire became epiphany. Dandy and Lieh scanned the sky, not understanding; they did not know what I knew.

Then Lieh turned to me and her eyes widened with fear. She and Dandy touched helmets with me simultaneously. “Have they blown it up?” Dandy asked.

“No,” I said, weeping. “No! They’ve shown Earth what we can do!”

They still did not comprehend. I didn’t care. In my relief and ecstasy — in my absolute terror for Charles — I loved them as if they had been my own children. I grabbed their arms and shouted, helmets pressed together firmly, “They’ve gone to Phobos and they’ve moved it. Never forget this! Never! Never forget!”

On the parapet of the future observation deck, I did a mad little pirouette, then fetched up against a pillar and stared out over the red and orange vastness of the basin. Phobos had left the skies of Mars, and I did not know when or if it would return.

But I knew, as surely as if Charles and Ti Sandra had told me themselves, where they had sent it. And I knew Charles was riding it… Across the Solar System, to Earth, a dreadful warning from her oppressed child.

Phobos now rose in the skies of the Mother of us all.

Don’t tread on me.

Dickinson sat where I had left him, Gretyl nearby. They seemed at peace, content to play their roles in this grand comeuppance. It would be almost an hour before a message could be sent from Earth. Until then, he was mine to toy with, and I felt more than wicked.

As ignorant as Dickinson , the legislators resumed their seats after standing at my entrance.

“Mr. Dickinson,” I said, “I refuse your ultimatum. I’m placing you under arrest. Under the laws of the Federal Republic of Mars…” I consulted my slate, leaned over the table, and pointed my finger at him, “you are accused of high crimes against the Republic, including treason, espionage, not registering as a foreign agent, and threatening the security of the Republic.” I turned to Gretyl. “You, too, honey,” I said.

Dickinson glanced at the four Cailetet aides. He turned back to rne, blinking. His equanimity impressed me no end. “That’s your answer?” he said.

“No. My answer to you and the groups you represent is that at the duly appointed time and under the proper circumstances, when order has been restored to this Republic and all threats have been rescinded, we will discuss issues of substance with properly identified Earth governments like civilized peoples. There will be a quorum of elected and appointed officials in this chamber, and duly recognized diplomats and negotiators from Earth. We’ll do it legally and openly.”

Gretyl lost some of her bearing; she flicked her eyes around the chamber like a deer in a cage. I remembered intense Gretyl ripping away her mask, willing to martyr herself on the Up. And I remembered, with sad clarity, how I had once thought Sean Dickinson the most noble male figure I had ever seen — brave, quiet and forthright. Had he offered, I would have bedded him instantly. And in bed he would have been quiet and reserved, a little chilly. I would have fallen into destructive love with him. He would have torn me up and discarded me.

I felt blessed for never having had that opportunity.

“Are you certain that’s what you want me to say?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. ‘Tell Crown Niger and Earth that your credentials are not acceptable.” I turned to Dandy. “After he’s done,” I said, “arrange for their arrest. All of them.”

Governor Henry Smith of Amazonis seemed close to fainting.

Dickinson stood, face suddenly ashen. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.

For a moment, we stared at each other. Sean blinked, turned away slowly, and said, “I never trusted you. Not from the beginning.”

“I would have given my life for you,” I said. “But I was young and stupid.”

I’d like to pull back now and take a moment to rest and rethink my telling. I remember the emotions of that moment so vividly that I am back in that chamber. I wrote the above lines weeping like a young girl. It was the high moment of my life, perhaps because what came after was too sad and immense to be real.

From this time on, events fall in my memory like dead creatures across an old sea floor, flat and compressed, unreal.

I do not say I was not responsible. I was more involved, and therefore more responsible, than most; the blame has fallen squarely on me, and I accept it.

Phobos appeared in the skies over Earth in a broad elliptical orbit inclined at thirty degrees to the equator with a perigee of one thousand kilometers and apogee of seven thousand.

Phobos’s bright face, quickly waxing and waning, changed the entire equation as nothing else could. Mars could drop moons on Earth. In the strategic balance, we now tipped the scales.

Earth did not know that on Phobos rode the equipment and the individuals essential to the wielding of this power. What they did not know, weakened them.

And what Earth would soon know or guess could ultimately weaken us.

The evolvons withdrew within six hours, on command from Earth’s satellites around Mars. Those satellites then self-destructed, leaving tiny streaks of red against the dark sky. We received assurances that locusts had not been planted; confusion and weakness, for the moment, forced us to accept that. Mars began to come alive again; its dataflow blood coursed.

The networks of communication set up by amateurs in the preceding days were charted, formalized, organized, made ready for further duties. We would not be caught so vulnerable again. In stations across Mars, engineers rigged simpler, more secure dataflow systems, setting us back fifty years or more, but guaranteeing that we would breathe, drink clean water, see no more the vivid horror of vacuum rose in blown-out tunnels.

Mars began counting its dead, and every horror was broadcast around the Triple. Earth’s tactics had backfired — for the time being.

Alice One and Two were among the casualties. Half of the high-level thinkers could not be reactivated. Their memory stores were salvaged, and portions of personality could be recorded for use in other thinkers, but the essence — the soul of the thinker — was gone. I could not mourn her; there was too much to mourn. If I began to mourn, it would never stop; and I still waited for word of Ilya and Ti Sandra.

For two days, shuttles and trains coursed into the new capital, bringing legislators, jurists, eager to re-confirm the Republic’s independence, its very existence; bringing fresh equipment, experts determined to sweep again and clean out the pollution of Earth.

For two days, I coordinated as President, knowing my position was temporary — believing but not knowing for sure that Ti Sandra was alive somewhere. I worried that she did not present herself now. It wasn’t like her not to take the slight risk. Politics demanded that she return, if only to reassure the citizens of Mars.

I did not sleep, barely had time to eat, and I moved from station to station around Arabia Terra by train and shuttle, spending no more than a few hours in one place at any time. We did not trust Earth’s statements. Once betrayed, a hundred times shy.

Five days after the Phobos transfer, I was invited to observe its return from an observation dome in Paschel Station near Cassini Basin . The governor of Arabia Terra, Lexis Caer Cameron, three of her top aides, Dandy Breaker, and Lieh Walker stood beside me under a broad plastic dome. We lifted glasses of champagne, looking east this time.

“I wish to hell I knew what this all means,” Governor Cameron said.

“So do I,” I said.

Lieh ventured a rare opinion. “It means we never have to knuckle under again.”

I smiled but could not share her optimism. Our triumph would be short-lived.

“Thirty seconds,” Lieh said.

We waited. I could barely think through my accumulated exhaustion. I needed a full body cleanse; hell, I felt as if I could use a whole new body.

Phobos winked into existence, a crescent rising nine or ten degrees above the horizon. After a few measurements by Lieh, we confirmed that Phobos was back in its proper orbit.

The scary dog was home, apparently none the worse for its journey.

I did not drink my champagne. Thanking the governor, I handed her my glass, and Dandy escorted me quickly from the center. No time to linger…

Lieh made connections with new satcoms and showed me LitVid reaction throughout the Triple. I watched and listened silently, beyond numbness and into frozen isolation.

I hadn’t heard of Ilya since the Freeze — the name assigned by Martian LitVids to the brief war.

Around the Triple, the sense of outrage against Earth had flared, subsided, and flared anew, into a call for general boycotts by all space resource providers. That wasn’t practical — Earth had stockpiled resources for several years, as a hedge against market fluctuations. But the political repercussions would be serious.

Engineers in asteroid cities descended in close floating ranks on Terrie consulates, demanding explanations for the aggression.

The Moon, predictably, tried to keep a low profile. But even on the Moon, independent nets bristled with fearful, angry calls for resignations, investigations, recall plebiscites. A few independent Lunar BMs expressed solidarity with the beleaguered Federal Republic of Mars. I could feel the fear echoing across the Solar System, especially in the vulnerable Belts. Nobody in the Triple could trust the old Mother now.

Finally, the President of the United States of the Western Hemisphere asked for an investigation into the causes of the conflict. “We must understand what happened here, and discover who took it upon themselves to give these orders, and do these things,” he concluded, “in order to avoid even worse disasters in the future.”

“Look to your own house,” I murmured. I trusted nothing spoken by Terrie politicians.

“This is very interesting,” Lieh said, placing her slate before me. She had worked her way through several layers to a small and exclusive Terrie advisement net called Lumen. She didn’t tell me how she’d accessed such a subscription — Mars had its penetrators and seekers after forbidden knowledge, and no doubt Point One had recruited many of the best. “This went out to subscribers about six hours ago.”

A handsome elderly woman with weary, wrinkled features and an immaculately tailored green suit sat stiffly in flat image, talking and calling up text reports from around Earth. At first glance, the program seemed dull and old-fashioned even by Martian standards. But I forced myself to listen to what was being said.

“No nation or alliance has taken responsibility for starting the action against Mars, and no pundit has given an adequate explanation for why any authority would do so. The calls for plebiscite judgment, absent any clear perpetrators, worries this observer a great deal… I think we are dealing, yet again, with gray eminences who have sealed themselves away from plebiscites, above even the alliances, and I look for them in the merged minds who ride the greatest and most secure Thinkers, those which oversee Earth’s estate and financial situation. Arising from the old system of national surveillance established in the United States over a century and a half ago, once limited to oversight alone, these merged minds — rumored but never confirmed — have become the greatest processors of data in human history.

“With the transfer of space defense to the alliances, they may not be limited to advisement now; they may have decided to wield power. If so, then our subscribers may wish to withdraw from all dataflux markets for the next few months or even years. Something is moving bigger than mere individuals can withstand.”

Even in the exhaustion, I shivered. “Have you heard of them?” I asked Lieh.

“Only as silly rumors,” Lieh said. “But this is an expensive advisement net. Maybe thirty thousand legal subscribers. Supposedly, rash or silly statements are never made here.“

“A small group mind,” I said softly. “Above the common herd. Sending orders down through alliances, through nations. Who, most likely?”

“Heads of GEWA,” Lieh suggested. “They have control of Solar System defense.”

Dandy shifted in his seat. “I’ve seen and heard enough scary stuff for one lifetime,” he said.

Unofficially, Mars was on wartime footing, and by the rules of the constitution, acting as President until Ti Sandra’s return, I had extraordinary powers…

But even my extraordinary powers could not extend to Cailetet. We had to treat it as a sovereign foreign nation; we could declare war, of sorts, and we would, but it would be a war of finance. I worried about Stan and hoped that he was using all of his considerable intelligence to keep himself and his family safe.

Damage reports came rapidly now. Station by station, region by region, lists of dead, missing, accounts of damages, requests for emergency aid, all crowded the restored channels. Point One transferred the calls to the government net, and Lieh drew them from the legislative and presidential channel, condensing and editing.

So little was known about some regions, still. Dataflow had not been re-established everywhere; some thinkers in key positions had apparently “died” and could not be brought up again.

Mars was screaming in pain; I suddenly specked hearing the collected information as one voice. I shied from that quickly. I could not afford such grim inspiration now.

On the shuttle flight to Many Hills, I tried to rest, but couldn’t close my eyes for more than minutes at a time. Unexpectedly, I started feeling my enhancement again, and began calculating the adjustments necessary to move a mass the size of Phobos. I visualized in multiple layers of equations the functions which described transfer of co-responsibility for conservation of these quantities to a larger system… The entire galaxy. Nobody would miss it. We had become thieves in a vast treasure house.

I murmured aloud some of the enhancement’s activities.

Dandy came into the darkened cabin with my dinner. “Excuse me?” he asked.

“My muse,” I said. “I’m possessed by physics.”

“Oh,” he said. “What does ‘physics’ tell you?”

I just shook my head. “I’m not hungry,” I said.

“Tarekh says if you don’t eat he’s bound by duty to force-feed you.” He smiled thinly and set the tray down before me. I picked at the food for a while, ate a few bites, and returned to my efforts to sleep.

I must have succeeded for a short while, for Dandy and Lieh stood before me suddenly. Lieh shook my arm gently. “Madame Vice President,” she said, “it’s official. She’s alive.”

I stared up at her, muzzy and confused.

“Ti Sandra is alive. We’ve had it confirmed.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I have a message from the President,” Lieh continued.

“She’s been injured,” Dandy said. “They have her in recovery at a secret location.”

I took my slate, touched it to Lieh’s, and they left me alone while I listened to Ti Sandra. My eyes filled with tears when I saw her face; I could barely discern the support equipment around her. She did not seem in pain, but her eyes lacked focus and that clued me. Her nervous system was under nano control.

“Little sister Cassie,” she began. Her lips stuck together for a moment, muffling her words. Someone gave her a sip from a cup of water. Drops glistened on her lips. “I am so grateful that you carried this horrible burden the past week. Our little trick nearly turned true. We had a real shuttle crash on the slopes of Pavonis Mons. Special targeting for me. Paul is dead.“

My tears spilled over then, and my entire chest gave a sharp lurch. I felt as if my body might suddenly fail, my heart give out. I moaned.

Dandy looked in briefly, then closed the door again.

“I’ve lost half my body, they say. My big, lovely body. I’ll recover. We’re growing new stuff right now. But no thinker controls, no computer controls — just twenty human doctors round the clock. I feel so greedy, taking so much when so many others are injured… But they won’t let me near anything that could do any more harm. I don’t feel any grief right now, my dear. I won’t for a long time, they say.

“Cassie, I told Charles and Stephen to do it, right after my accident, before I was put completely under. I hope I was in my right mind. It does accelerate things, doesn’t it? I asked, and they assured me they were ready. There was danger, but it could be done. Now it’s done, and you must let them know how grateful we all are. There’s so much more to do, though.

“You must act for me a while longer. You’re more than my crutch now, Cassie, You must be me as well as yourself. I can’t think as well as I should.”

I wanted so much to collapse into being a little girl, irresponsible and protected by others. Worse, a feeling of absolute dread had rooted itself. I turned off the slate, halting Ti Sandra in mid-statement, and almost screamed for Lieh to come in. She came through the door, face white, and kneeled beside my seat.

“Find Ilya,” I demanded, grabbing the back of her neck.

“We’re trying,” Lieh said. “We’ve been searching since dataflow started coming back.”

“Please just find him and tell me!”

She nodded, squeezed my arm, and left the cabin again.

Ti Sandra resumed at my touch. “ — think we have very little time now to put together a consensus. Elections are impossible. The Republic is still under threat, perhaps a greater threat than ever before. This Solar System is fatal. It’s fatal for Mars. Ask Charles to explain. Everything is out of balance. We have used fear to fight the effects of terror. Listen: we’re lambs, you and I. We’re expendable for the greater good.

“I don’t mean our lives, honey. I mean our souls.”

The research center at Melas Dorsa had been abandoned at the beginning of the Freeze. Charles and Stephen Leander had departed in the Mercury; the others had been brought out by tractor, with as much equipment as could be salvaged. Pictures of the site confirmed the wisdom of keeping the Olympians on the move: the remains of all tunnels, the grounds of the station itself, had been uprooted as if by thousands of burrowing insects or moles.

Locusts. Earth denied planting them, so we broadcast evidence of their use across the Triple, another part of the war of nerves. Tarekh Firkazzie and Lieh suggested we consider Mars as forever “bugged,” that all future planning allow for the emergence of hidden warbeiters. We would never be able to sweep the planet completely.

Firkazzie had grimly surveyed the remains of the Melas Dorsa laboratory and decided that it could never be occupied again. We had to locate a new site for an even bigger laboratory, to house an even bigger research effort.

From orbit, Charles suggested the site for a new laboratory. He remembered his father’s search ten years past for ice lenses not quite sufficient to support large stations. Such a lens existed beneath Kaibab in Ophir Planum, the remains of a shallow dusted lake from a quarter of a billion Martian years past. It was unlikely, it was in a desolate and difficult land, it was far from any other station, and there was little chance of encountering locusts.

In just twenty-four hours, architectural nano delivered and activated by a squadron of shuttles made a solid, moderately comfortable preliminary structure, a hideaway near the edge of the plateau. For the time being, a few dozen people could stay there in seclusion. Later, the site could be expanded for the larger effort.

Charles and Stephen Leander returned from Phobos, bringing the Mercury down under cover of a thin dust storm from Sinai. A few hectares of crushed and flattened lava served as a rough landing pad.

My shuttle landed at Kaibab hours after the Mercury’s arrival. The terrain was hellish — sharp-edged rills and ancient pocked high-silica lava flows, every edge a knife, all depressions filled with purple vitreous oxidizing rouge. These were badlands indeed, worse than anything I had ever seen humans inhabit on Mars.

Following Lieh and Dandy, I stepped out of the shuttle lock and squeezed under the low tube seal. I saw Leander and Nehemiah Royce first. Then I turned and saw Charles. He stood at the end of the ramp. Gray surgical nano marked parts of his head and neck. He smiled and extended his hand. I shook it firmly and enfolded it with my other hand.

“It’s good to see you, Madam President,” he said.

“I’m not President any more, thank God,” I said.

Charles shrugged. “You have the power,” he said. “That’s what counts.” He gestured for me to lead the way.

As I passed Lieh, I grabbed her arm again and stared at her. Ilya was still missing.

“We’ll find him,” she said. “He’s all right, I’m sure of it.”

I ignored the reassurance. Tough as nails, I thought. Winston Churchill in the Blitz. Remember. Tough as nails.

The “tweaker” had been removed from the Mercury and sat on a bench in one corner of a cramped tunnel. I quickly looked over the zero-temp chamber with its gray, squat force disorder pumps, the Martian-made QL thinker and interpreter, cables, power supply.

Leander had arranged for tea and cakes to be served on a low table nearby. We sat on thick pillow cushions from the Republic shuttle. Besides Charles and Leander, only two other Olympians were present: Nehemiah Royce and Amy Vico-Persoff. Point One had dictated that for the duration of the emergency, no more than four Olympians be in one place at one time. The others were being housed at Tharsis Research University , under tight security.

“How much does it all weigh?” I asked Leander as Charles poured the tea.

“About four hundred kilograms,” Leander said. “We pared it down considerably in the last version. Most of the weight is in the pumps.”

“So tell me,” I said, crossing my legs and warming my hands on the cup.

Charles poured his cup last and kneeled on his pillow. He glanced at me, I smiled, and his eyes darted away as if in shyness. He focused on the table and cakes. “We guessed what was happening right away. So did Ti Sandra.” The words seemed to come with difficulty. I stared at Charles as if feeding a new hunger, feeling a mix of awe and intense affection.

“Ti Sandra instructed us to get to Phobos any way we could, with the tweaker, and take a trip.”

“She knew you were ready to do this?” I asked. “I didn’t.”

“She guessed, or she just made a wild request… We certainly weren’t ready for so much, so soon. We fueled the Mercury, moved everything we could on board. The most difficult part was guaranteeing a clean power supply for the pumps. We managed that. We were ready for take-off twelve hours after the Freeze began.”

“What about coordinates, navigation?” I asked.

“We worked it out while waiting for further orders from Ti Sandra. Stephen and I made up a working hypothesis on the relative position tweaks, worked out the momentum and energy descriptor co-responses and scaling, specified final position and state, stimulated the tweaker to access descriptors for every particle in Phobos, considered as a complete system…”

“Charles had to hook himself into the QL,” Leander said.

“Are you all right?” I asked Charles.

“I’m fine,” he said. “They all did good work. Nobody knew everything except Stephen and myself, but everybody felt the urgency. They all knew it was important.”

“A lot of medals should be awarded,” Leander said.

“Not least to Charles. He guided the QL,” Royce said.

Charles shook his head. “I don’t remember most of that. It’ll come back in time. We had a pilot with us — ”

“One more medal,” Leander said.

“He had no idea what was going to happen. We told him without checking his security clearance.”

“He’s fine,” Lieh said, seated outside the circle around the low table. “We debriefed him separately.”

“Why did you link with the QL?”

“The interpreter wasn’t getting across everything we needed. The QL began returning trivial results, nonsense strings. I think it was exploring the possibility of an alternate descriptor system. It found that more amusing than the real one. I steered it back to giving relevant results. The whole apparatus became coordinated then.”

“It hummed,” Amy said, shivering suddenly. “My God, it really hummed. I was afraid for them. I left the Mercury and they launched.”

They all seemed a little in shock even now.

“What did it feel like?” I asked Charles.

“As I said, I don’t remember exactly. We — the QL and I — were communicating and I made my requests and it pulled answers out of its non-trivial syncline searches.”

“Answers?”

“Instructions, actually. To pass on to the tweaker. Without the QL, we might have been able to do the same thing — with about six months of high-level thinker programming. The QL cut the time down to a few hours. Within eight hours, we were secured to an old mining base in Stickney Crater on Phobos. We’d measured what we needed to measure, everything was still connected and coordinated. Ti Sandra told us to go. She’d been in an accident, and it took us days to establish communications with her again.”

I had been left completely out of the loop, despite being in charge of the entire project. I didn’t know whether I felt resentment, or relief, that Ti Sandra had shouldered all of this particular burden.

“She was in pain,” Charles said, as if reading my thoughts. “I don’t think she had time to tell you what was planned. When she first gave us the instructions, we didn’t know we could do it. It was all very confused.”

“I understand. You went to Earth. What was it like?”

“The stars changed,” Charles said. “We felt something shift inside of us — very minor. We’re still not sure what it was — gravitation, psychological response, we don’t know.”

“Everything combined, probably,” Leander said.

“We looked through the shuttle ports, saw a sunrise limb, the sun much brighter and larger… Earth. We scrambled to check our distance and orbital path. We were right on the money, effectively, but about a hundred kilometers behind the projected orbital insertion point.”

“We’re still working on that,” Leander said,

“We listened but broadcast nothing. About fifteen minutes passed before someone sent us a signal. It was from a private analog radio operator in Mexico . He spoke to us in Spanish. He said, ‘Hello, new moon. Where are you from?’ ”

We laughed. Charles smiled. “Our pilot said, ‘Don’t ask. You won’t believe us.’ ”

“We started getting official signals a few minutes after that,” Leander said. “We had instructions from Ti Sandra what to say. We broadcast the same words — over and over again.”

“We were waiting to be annihilated,” Charles said. “But that was pretty silly, I suppose. Some of the officials sounded terrified. Some behaved as if nothing at all had happened, the most routine diplomatic communications. We spoke to government negotiators and diplomats from the Eurocon, GEWA, GSHA, and half a dozen others. We told them all the same thing.”

“What was that?”

“ ‘Mars is under attack by unknown governments on the Earth. You have ten hours to pull back and remove the threat, or there will be a retaliatory response.’ ” Charles’s voice sounded hollow as he repeated the statement, burned into memory.

“What response? What retaliation?”

“Ti Sandra told us to remotely convert the White House in Washington into mirror matter,” Charles said. “A symbolic gesture.”

Silence around the room.

“Could you have done that?” I asked.

Charles nodded. “Without very much precision. She did not tell us to have it evacuated first, but I was going to give some warning. A half hour or so.”

I covered my mouth with my hand, suddenly nauseated. The sensation passed. I closed my eyes and dropped my hand slowly. “You have all been exceptionally courageous,” I said.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Charles said, with a flippant salute that jarred me. I looked up at him, shocked and puzzled. Charles leaned forward, eyes narrowed as if in pain.

“We have followed our instructions. We’ve done everything we’ve been told, at the expense… almost… of our souls. We’ve understood the strategic necessity, and we believe enough to give ourselves to this cause, but, Casseia, I could not give a flying fuck about medals or patriotism now. I am scared to death of what is going to happen next. We’ve had our fun, we’ve made a flying circus run with Phobos and given nightmares to children and adults all over Earth. Do you think it’s going to end there? Do you think we have any time left at all?”

“No,” I said.

“Good,” Charles said, biting the word off and leaning back, his face red with emotion. “God damned good. Because I’m half convinced this is going to be the end of the human race. Impart some of your thinking to us, oh master of politics. We are children lost in the woods.”

“So am I, Charles,” I said quietly. “We all know what’s going to happen now. Ti Sandra knows. They saw you move Phobos. They have the resources, in people and machines and laboratories, to duplicate your discoveries, given this clue. And as soon as they can do what we can do, it’s just a matter of time before somebody strikes somebody else.“

“It’s too damned convenient,” Leander said.

Charles agreed. “They may discover things we don’t know yet.”

“A strike can be fast, it can be total,” I said, “and it can guarantee survival in an otherwise dicey situation.”

“Survival for how long?” Amy Vico-Persoff asked. “How long until we divide right down to region against region, or us against Cailetet? GEWA against GSHA?”

“Let’s not be so pessimistic,” Charles said, holding up a hand. “This is never going to be household kitchen-sink type science. There might be four or five places on Earth that have the resources and the theoreticians necessary to duplicate our work. Don’t be fooled by the tweaker’s small size. It’s as sophisticated a piece of equipment as any human being has ever made. Bit-player warfare isn’t our real problem right now, and may never be.

“But you’re right — they’ll do it, and soon — two weeks, a month, two months. We have to find a political solution very soon.”

“Politics, hell,” Leander said. “Look what politics has accomplished this far. We have to leave.” He looked around the room guiltily, a child who’d spoken a naughty word.

“Evacuate Mars?” Royce asked, face wreathed in puzzlement.

None of them had given this a lot of thought, I could tell — except Charles and Leander. Brooding in their little ship, fastened to a peregrinating moon…

“No,” I said. “Move it.”

“Jesus!” Lieh cried, jumping from her chair. She left the room, shaking her head and swearing.

Nobody spoke for long seconds. Charles stared at me, then folded his hands together. “We have no right to make these decisions ourselves, alone. Scientists and politicians have no such right.“

“There isn’t the time or the means for a plebiscite. Earth has guaranteed that,” I said. “Our choices are very limited. Ti Sandra said the Solar System would become too dangerous. It would kill us.”

The equipment in the chamber seemed innocent and even crude. “How far have we come, Casseia?” Charles asked.

‘Too far. A long time ago, I remember cursing you for the troubles you caused. We’ve come a long way since.“

“I have never felt in control,” Charles said. Royce and Vico-Persoff seemed content to let us talk for the moment. Dandy stood a few paces behind me, stiff as a statue. Charles and I were being given a wide space in which to make decisions, as much out of fear as respect.

“Nobody has died yet,” I said. “I mean, we haven’t killed anybody. Earth has. We’re still getting reports — but there are entire stations cut off.”

“I know,” Charles said.

“We did not strike the first blow. We will not use this as a weapon.”

“Bullshit,” Charles said, stinging me again. “I had orders to cause damage if necessary. When you and Ti Sandra are worn out and thrown away, someone else will step in and desperation and fear will…” He swallowed and pulled his hands apart, rubbing them on his knees. “Believe it. What we’ve made will kill people, lots of people.”

“We keep coming back to it, then,” I said.

“You’ll talk with Ti Sandra, soon?” Charles asked.

“Yes. I don’t think any of this will surprise her.”

Lieh had returned, face flushed, expression sheepish, and stood beside Dandy. I got up, nodded to Charles, to Leander, to Royce and Vico-Persoff, thanked them for the tea, and left with my bodyguard and communications advisor.

I looked forward to a Spartan bunk and few amenities. Lieh used an electronic key to unlock the door to my room.

It was as Spartan as I could have wished, clean and new and empty. It smelled of starch and fresh bread.

“If the President is awake and well enough, I need to talk with her now,” I said.

Lieh seemed troubled. She looked away and shook her head. Dandy stepped into the room, arms hanging loose. ‘There’s no good time for this, ma’am. Word just came a few minutes ago. We’ve found your husband.“

“He’s at Cyane Sulci?” I asked.

“He was evacuated and taken to a small station at Jovis Tholus. He got there safely, I understand, but the station was a new one. Its architecture was dynamic, thinker controlled.”

“Why not just leave him at the lab in Cyane?” I sat on the bed, expecting to hear of Ilya’s adventures with security, with a troubled station, a technical comedy to relieve my sense of oppression.-

“It wasn’t a good move,” Dandy admitted. He had difficulty keeping his composure. “There were main quarters blowouts at Jovis. They’ve been digging and identifying the last few days. Five hundred dead, three hundred injured.”

“He’s dead, Casseia,” Lieh said. “He’s been found and he’s dead. We weren’t going to tell you until we knew for sure.”

There was no appropriate response, and I had no energy for melodrama. I seemed to be a hole into which things would fall; not a positive force, but a negative.

“Would you like me to stay?” Lieh asked. I lay back on the bed, staring up at the flat ceiling, the utilitarian blue cabinets.

“Yes, please,” I said.

Lieh touched Dandy on the arm and he left, closing the door behind. She sat on the bed and rested her back against the rear wall. “My sister and her kids died at Newton ,” she said. “Ninety casualties.”

“I’m very sorry,” I said.

“I used to talk with her a lot before joining Point One,” she said. “Time gets away. This all seemed so important.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“I liked Ilya,” she said. “He seemed very kind and straight.”

“He was,” I said. The dreamlike nature of the conversation told me how many layers of insulation Lhad wrapped around my emotions, expecting just this news, but refusing to acknowledge the possibility — with the growing number of days, the certainty. “Tell me about your sister.”

“I don’t think I’m ready to talk about them yet, Cassie.”

“I understand,” I said.

“The Sulci lab came through fine,” she said. “Dandy thinks we killed him.”

“That’s stupid,” I said.

“He’s taking it hard.”

“I have to talk with Ti Sandra.”

“I think you should wait a few minutes,” Lieh said. “Really.”

“If I do anything but work, I’m going to go right over the edge,” I said. “There’s too much to do.”

Lieh pressed down the placket of her gray suit and held her hand over mine. “Please rest a while,” she said.

“No,” I said.

She stood up from the bed, reached out with her long arm and long, beautiful fingers, and opened the room’s optical port. I handed her my slate and she attached it. A few strokes and verbal instructions, a series of code and security checks, and she was through to Point One at Many Hills. They completed the connection.

I spoke to Ti Sandra ten minutes later. I did not tell her about Ilya.

We talked about the situation, about my discussion with Charles. Still wrapped in surgical nano, eyes heavy-lidded, her lips twitched as she spoke in a harsh whisper: “We agree, Stephen and you and I. But we’re not enough. There have to be consequences and we can’t just go anywhere. So what kind of an idea is this? We need more experts. We need to think seriously.”

“The Olympians can get us started,” I suggested. “We should gather everybody in the next week or so; take the risk.“

“The Point One people can give them everything they need. You’re still acting President, Casseia. How are you, honey?” Ti Sandra asked.

“Not very well,” I answered.

“We’re a mess, all of us. We need a change of scenery. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

“You bring the experts from around Mars. Everyone who can help. Keep in touch. I’ll try to stay awake, Casseia.”

I touched her face on the slate and said good-bye. Lieh waited expectantly, standing in the corner of the small room.

“Why are we going to do this?” she asked.

I lay back on the bed. “You tell me,” I said.

“Because if we don’t, a lot of people are going to get killed,” she said. “But how many people will be killed if we move?”

“We need to find out,” I said. Through the insulation, through the fog of growing reaction, my enhancement began working the problem of removing a mass the size of Mars abruptly from the vicinity of the sun, putting it elsewhere.

No distance. Thieves stealing from the galactic treasure house.

“Areologists, I think,” Lieh said.

“Right. Structural engineers for the stations. People we can trust, but we’ll have to lower our standards a little. People are going to know soon enough.”

“The meeting will have to be held in the flesh, incommunicado,” Lieh said. “Everybody involved will have to stay sequestered until we’ve moved.”

“Oh?” I asked, still listening to my enhancement.

“The greatest danger is a leak to Earth. They may take action at any hint we’re working on something so drastic.”

“Yes,” I said, letting her think for me, for the time being, letting her stretch to envelop the concept.

“This will take a lot of planning,” she said.

“Twenty experts, no more,” I said. “We’ll need a safe meeting place.”

“This is as safe a place as any,” Lieh said.

“All right.” I suddenly dreaded the thought of staying in this room where I had learned of Ilya’s death. “Ask the Olympians what they’ll need to build several large tweakers. Ask them how soon they can have them ready.”

“I’ll wake you in eight hours,” she said, and she left.

I closed my eyes.

When the grief came, I screwed up my eyes until they hurt, trying to keep back the tears, trying not to lose control. I could not accept I could not believe. Adult sophistication meant nothing against that need spread through to my child-self. I kept seeing my mother’s face, gone before this all began; lost to me, lost to my father. I would not wear my father’s grief, not lose my inner self. I could not recall Ilya’s face with much clarity, not as a picture. I picked up my slate and searched for a good picture and yes, there he was, smiling over a mother cyst at Cyane Sulci, and here on the day of our ceremony, uncomfortable in a formal suit.

It seemed to me that I had never told him enough about my love and need. I cursed myself, so spare with words and revealed emotions to those I loved.

I rubbed my eyes. My insides felt like shredded rubber. For a moment, I considered calling in a medical arbeiter and plucking out this overwhelming pain. I told myself I could not let my emotions get in the way of duty. But I had not done that for my mother, and I would not do it now.

I forced my body to relax. Then, without warning, I fell asleep, as if a small circuit breaker had tripped inside my head, and the eight hours passed instantly.