Red Mars

Part Seven Senzeni Na

On the fourteenth day of the revolution Arkady Bogdanov dreamed he and his father sat on a wooden box, before a small fire at the edge of the clearing; a kind of campfire, except that the long low tin-roofed buildings of Ugoly were just a hundred meters behind their backs. They had their bare hands extended to the radiant heat, and his father was once again telling the story of his encounter with the snow leopard. It was windy and the flames gusted. Then a fire alarm rang out behind them.

It was Arkady’s alarm, set for 4 AM. He got up and took a hot sponge bath. An image from the dream re-occurred to him. He had not slept much since the revolt’s beginning, just a few hours snatched here or there, and his alarm had awakened him from several deep sleep dreams, the kind one normally did not remember. Almost all had been undistorted memories of his childhood, memories never once recalled before. It made him wonder just how much the memory held, and if its storage might not be immensely more powerful than its retrieval mechanism. Might one be able to remember every second of one’s life, but only in dreams that were always lost on waking? Might this be necessary, somehow? And if so, what would happen if people started living for two or three hundred years?

Janet Blyleven came by, looking worried. “They’ve blown up Nemesis. Roald has analyzed the video, and guesses they hit it with a bunch of hydrogen bombs.”

They went next door to Carr’s big city offices, where Arkady had spent most of the previous two weeks. Alex and Roald were inside watching the TV. Roald said, “Screen, replay tape one for Arkady.”

An image flickered and held: black space, the thick net of stars, and midscreen a dark irregular asteroid, visible mostly as a patch of occluded stars. For a few moments the image held, and then a white light appeared on the side of the asteroid. The expansion and dispersal of the asteroid was immediate. “Fast work,” Arkady remarked.

“There’s another angle from a camera farther away.”

This clip showed the asteroid as oblong, and it was possible to make out the silver blisters of its mass driver. Then there was a white flash, and when the black sky returned the asteroid was gone; a shimmering of stars to the right of the screen indicated the passage of fragments, then they steadied and it was over. No fiery white cloud, no roar on the soundtrack; just a reporter’s tinny voice, chattering about the end of the Martian rioters’ doomsday threat, and the vindication of the concept of strategic defense. Although apparently the missiles had come from the Amex lunar base, launched by rail gun.

“I never did like the idea,” Arkady said. “It was mutual assured destruction all over again.”

Roald said, “But if there’s mutual assured destruction, and one side loses the capability…”

“We haven’t lost the capability here, though. And they value what’s here as much as we do. So now we’re back to the Swiss defense.” Destroy what they wanted and take to the hills, for resistance forever. It was more to his liking.

“It’s weaker,” Roald said bluntly. He had voted with the majority, in favor of sending Nemesis on its course toward the Earth.

Arkady nodded. It couldn’t be denied that one term had been erased from the equation. But it wasn’t clear if the balance of power had changed or not. Nemesis had not been his idea; Mikhail Yangel had proposed it, and the group in the asteroids had carried it out on the their own. Now a lot of them were dead, killed by the big explosion or by smaller ones out in the belt; while Nemesis itself had created the impression that the rebels would countenance mass destruction on Earth. A bad idea, as Arkady had pointed out.

But that was life in a revolution. No one was in control, no matter what people said. And for the most part it was better that way, especially here on Mars. Fighting had been severe in the first week,UNOMA and the transnationals had beefed up their security forces in the previous year. A lot of the big cities had been instantly seized by them, and it might have happened everywhere except that there turned out to be so many more rebel groups than they or anyone else had known about. Over sixty towns and stations had gotten on the net and declared independence, they had popped out of the labs and the hills and simply taken over. And now with Earth on the far side of the sun, and the nearest continuous shuttle destroyed, it was the security forces who were looking under siege, big cities or not.

A call came from the physical plant. They were having some trouble with the computers, and wanted Arkady to come have a look.

He left the city offices and walked across Menlo Park to the plant. It was just after sunrise, and most of Carr Crater was still in shadow; only the west wall and the tall concrete buildings of the physical plant were in sunlight at this hour, their walls all yellow in the raw morning light, the pistes running up the crater wall like gold ribbons. In the shadowed streets the city was just waking. A lot of rebels had come in from other towns or the cratered highlands, and they slept on the park grass. People sat up, sleeping bags still draped over their legs, eyes puffy, hair wild. Night temperatures were being kept up, but it was still cool at dawn, and those out of their bags crouched around stoves, blowing into their hands and puttering with coffee pots and samovars, and checking to the west to see how close the line of sunlight had crept. When they saw Arkady they waved, and more than once he was stopped by people who wanted to get his opinion of the news, or give him advice. Arkady answered them all cheerfully. Again he felt that difference in the air, the sense that they were all in a new space together, everyone facing the same problems, everyone equal, everyone (seeing a heating coil, glowing under a coffee pot) incandescent with the electricity of freedom.

He walked feeling lighter, chattering into his wristpad’s diary file as he went. “The park reminds me of what Orwell said about Barcelona in the hands of the anarchists; it is the euphoria of a new social contract, of a return to that child’s dream of fairness we all began with-”

His wristpad beeped and Phyllis’s face appeared on the tiny screen, which was annoying. “What do you want?” he asked.

“Nemesis is gone. We want you to surrender before any more damage is done. It’s simple now, Arkady. Surrender or die.”

He almost laughed. She was like the wicked witch in the Oz movie, appearing unexpectedly in his crystal ball.

“It’s no laughing matter!” she exclaimed. Suddenly he saw that she was scared.

“You know we had nothing to do with Nemesis,” he said. “It is irrelevant.”

“How can you be such a fool!” she cried.

“It is not foolishness. Listen, you tell your masters this; if they try to subdue the free cities here, we will destroy everything on Mars.” That was the Swiss defense.

“Do you think that matters?” She was white-lipped, her tiny image like a primitive fury mask.

“It matters. Look, Phyllis, I’m only the polar cap of this, there’s a massive underground lens that you can’t see; it’s really vast, and they’ve got the means to strike back at you if they want.”

She must have let her arm fall, because the image on his little screen swung wildly, then showed a floor. “You were always a fool,” her disembodied voice said. “Even back on the Ares.”

The connection went dead.

Arkady walked on, the city’s bustle no longer as exhilarating as it had been. If Phyllis were frightened…

At the physical plant they were busy running a malfunction search. A couple of hours before, oxygen levels in the city had begun to rise, and no warning lights had gone off; a tech had discovered it accidentally.

Half an hour’s work and they found it. A program had been substituted. They replaced it, but Tati Anokhin was not happy. “Look, that had to be sabotage, and there’s still more oxygen than even this accounts for. Look, it’s nearly forty percent out there right now.”

“No wonder everyone is in such a good mood this morning.”

“I’m not. Besides that mood thing is a myth.”

“Are you sure? Go through the programming again, and look at the encryption IDs, and see if there are any other substitutions hidden under this one.”

He headed back to the city offices. He was halfway there when there was a loud pop overhead. He looked up and saw a small hole in the dome. The air suddenly took on an irridescent shimmer, as if they were inside a great soap bubble. A bright flash and a loud boom knocked him to his feet. Struggling back up, he saw everything ignite simultaneously; people were burning like torches; and right before his eyes his arm caught fire.

It wasnot hard to destroy Martian towns. No harder than breaking a window, or popping a balloon.

Nadia Chernevsky discovered this while holed up in the city offices of Lasswitz, a tent town which had been punctured one night just after sunset. All the surviving occupants were now huddled in the city offices or the physical plant. For three days they had spent their time going out to try to repair the tent, and watching TV to try and figure out what was going on. But the Terran news packages were concerned with its own wars, which seemed to be coalescing into one. Only infrequently were there a brief report on the wrecked Martian towns. One said that many domed craters had been hit by missiles from over the horizon, usually in a sequence where oxygen or aerated fuels were introduced and then quickly followed by an ignitor that caused explosions of varying severity-from anti-personnel fires, to blasts that blew the domes off, to really big explosions that in effect re-excavated the crater. Anti-personnel oxygen fires appeared to be the most common; these left the infrastructure intact, for the most part.

Tent towns were simpler still. Most of them had been punctured by Phobob-based lasers; some had had their physical plants targeted by guided cruise missiles; others had been invaded by troops of one kind or another, their spaceports seized, armored rovers crashing through city walls, and in rare cases rocketpack paratroopers descending from above.

Nadia watched the jiggling video images that so clearly revealed the fear of the camera operators, her stomach collasping to a tight walnut inside her. “What are they doing, testing methods?” she cried.

“I doubt it,” said Yeli Zudov. “It’s probably just a matter of different groups using different methods. Some look like they’re trying to do as little damage as possible, others seem to want to kill as many of us as they can. Make more room for emigration.”

Nadia turned away, sickened. She got up and took off for the kitchen, bent slightly over her collapsed stomach, desperate to do something. In the kitchen they had turned on a generator and were microwaving frozen dinners. She helped hand them out, moving up and down a line of people sitting in the hall outside. Unwashed faces, splashed with black frostnip blisters: some people talked animatedly, others sat like statues, or slept leaning against each other. Most of them had been residents of Lasswitz, but a good number had driven in from tents or hideouts that had been destroyed from space, or attacked by ground forces. “Is stupid,” an old Arab woman was saying to a gnarled little man, “My parents were Red Crescent in Bagdad when the Americans bombed it, if they have the sky is nothing you can do, nothing! We have to surrender. Surrender as soon as possible!”

“But to whom?” the little man asked wearily. “And for whom? And how?”

“To anyone, from everybody, and by radio, of course!” The woman glared at Nadia, who shrugged.

Then her wristpad beeped, and Sasha Yefremov babbled in a tinny wristphone voice; the water station north of town had gone up in an explosion, and the well it had capped was now fountaining in an artesian eruption of water and ice.

“I’ll be right there,” Nadia said, shocked. The town’s water station tapped the lower end of the Lasswitz aquifer, which was a big one; if any significant part of the aquifer broached the surface, the water station and the town and the entire canyon they lay in would disappear in a catastrophic flood-and worse, Burroughs was located only two hundred kilometers down the slope of Syrtis and Isidis, and the flood could very conceivably run that far. Burroughs! Its population was far too large to evacuate, especially now that it had become a refuge for people escaping the war; there was simply no other place to go.

“Surrender!” the Arab woman insisted from the hall. “All surrender!”

“I don’t think that will work anymore,” Nadia said, and ran for the building’s lock.

A part of her was immensely relieved to be able to do something, to stop huddling in a building watching disasters on TV, and do something. And Nadia had platted and overseen the construction of Lasswitz, only six years before, so now she had an idea what to do. The town was a Nicosia-class tent, with the farm and physical plant in separate structures, and the water station well off to the north. All the structures were down on the floor of a big east-west rift called Arena Canyon, the walls of which were nearly vertical and half a kilometer high. The water station was located only a couple hundred meters from the canyon’s north wall, which in that area had an impressive overhang at the top. As Nadia drove with Sasha and Yeli to the water station, she quickly outlined her plan: “I think we can bring down the cliff onto the station, and if we can, the landslide ought to be enough to cap the leak.”

“Won’t the flood just carry the landslide’s rock away?” Sasha asked.

“It will if it’s a full aquifer outbreak, sure. But if we cover it when it’s still just an uncapped well, then the escaping water will freeze in the landslide, and hopefully form a dam heavy enough to hold it. Hydrostatic pressure in this aquifer is only a bit greater than the lithostatic pressure of the rock over it, so the artesian flow isn’t all that high. If it were we’d be dead already.”

She braked the rover. Out the windshield they could see the remains of the water station, under a cloud of thin frost steam. A rover came bouncing full speed toward them, and Nadia flashed their headlights and turned the radio to the common band. It was the water station crew, a couple named Angela and Sam, rabid with the adventures of the last hour. When they had driven alongside and finished their story, Nadia explained to them what she had in mind. “It could work,” Angela said. “Certainly nothing else will stop it now, it’s really pumping.”

“We’ll have to hurry,” Sam said. “It’s eating the rock at an unbelievable rate.”

“If we don’t cap it,” Angela said with a certain morbid enthusiasm, “it’ll look like when the Atlantic first broke through the Straits of Gibraltar and flooded the Mediterranean basin. That was a waterfall that lasted ten thousand years.”

“I never heard of that one,” Nadia said. “Come on with us to the cliff and help us get the robots going.”

During the ride over she had directed all the town’s construction robots from their hangar to the foot of the north wall, next to the water station; when the two rovers got there, they found a few of the faster robots had already arrived, and the rest were grinding over the canyon floor toward them. There was a small talus slope at the foot of the cliff, which towered over them like an enormous frozen wave, gleaming in the noon light. Nadia linked into the earthmovers and bulldozers and gave them instructions to clear paths through the talus; when that was done, tunnelers would bore straight into the cliff. “See,” Nadia said, pointing at an areological map of the canyon that she had called onto the rover’s screen, “there’s a big fault there behind that whole overhanging piece. It’s causing the lip of the wall to slump a bit, see that slightly lower shelf at the top? If we set off all the explosives we’ve got at the bottom of that fault, it’s sure to bring down the overhang, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” Yeli said. “It’s worth a try.”

The slower robots arrived, bringing an array of explosives left over from the excavation of the town’s foundation. Nadia went to work programming the vehicles to tunnel into the bottom of the cliff, and for most of an hour she was lost to the world. When she was finished she said, “Let’s get back to town and get everyone evacuated. I can’t be sure how much of the cliff might come down, and we don’t want to bury everyone. We’ve got four hours.”

“Jesus, Nadia!”

“Four hours.” She typed in the last command and started up their rover. Angela and Sam followed with a cheer.

“You don’t seem very sorry to leave,” Yeli said to them.

“Hell, it was boring!” Angela said.

“I don’t think that’s going to be much of a problem anymore.”

“Good.”

The evacuation was difficult; a lot of the town’s occupants didn’t want to leave, and there was barely room for them in the rovers at hand. Finally they were all stuffed into one vehicle or another, and off on the transponder road to Burroughs. Lasswitz was empty. Nadia spent an hour trying to contact Phyllis by satellite phone, but the comm channels were disrupted by what sounded like a number of different jamming efforts. Nadia left a message on the satellite itself: “We’re non-combatants in Syrtis Major, trying to stop the Lasswitz aquifer from flooding Burroughs. So leave us alone!” A surrender of sorts.

Nadia and Sasha and Yeli were joined in their rover by Angela and Sam, and they drove up the steep switchbacks of the cliff road, onto the south rim of Arena Canyon. Across from them was the imposing north wall; below to the left lay the town, looking almost normal; but to the right it was clear something was wrong: the water station was broken in the middle by a thick white geyser, which plumed like a broken fire hydrant, and then fell into a jumble of dirty red-white ice blocks. This weird mass shifted even as they watched, briefly exposing black flowing water which frost-steamed madly, white mists pouring out of the black cracks and then whipping downcanyon on the wind. The rock and fines of the martian surface were so dehydrated that when water splashed onto them they seemed to explode in violent chemical reactions, so when the water ran over dry ground, great clouds of dust fired off into the air and joined the frost steam swirling off the water.

“Sax will be pleased,” Nadia said grimly.

At the appointed hour, four plumes of smoke shot out of the base of the northern wall. For several seconds nothing else happened, and the observers groaned. Then the cliff face jerked, and the rock of the overhang slipped down, slowly and majestically. Thick clouds of smoke shot up from the bottom of the cliff, and then sheets of ejecta shot out, like water from under a calving iceberg. A low roar shook their rover, and Nadia cautiously backed it away from the south rim. Just before a massive cloud of dust cut off their view, they saw the water station covered by the swift tumbling edge of the landslide.

Angela and Sam had been cheering. “How will we tell if it’s worked?” Sasha asked.

“Wait till we can see it again,” Nadia said. “Hopefully the flood downstream will have gone white. No more open water, no more movement.”

Sasha nodded. They sat looking down into the ancient canyon, waiting. Nadia’s mind was mostly blank; the thoughts that did occur to her were bleak. She needed more action like the last few hours’, the kind of intense activity that gave her no time to think; even a moment’s pause and the whole miserable situation crashed back in on her, the wrecked cities, the dead everywhere, Arkady’s disappearance. And no one in control, apparently. No plan to any of it. Police troops were wrecking towns to stop the rebellion, and rebels were wrecking towns to keep the rebellion alive. It would end with everything destroyed, her whole life’s work blown up before her eyes; and for no reason! No reason at all.

She couldn’t afford to think. Down there a landslide had overrun a water station, hopefully, and the water rushing up the well had been blocked and frozen, making a composite dam. After that it was hard to say. If the hydrostatic pressure in the aquifer was high enough, a new breakout might be forced. But if the dam were thick enough… well, nothing to be done about it. Although if they could create some kind of escape valve, to take the pressure off the landslide dam…

Slowly the wind tattered the dust away. Her companions cheered; the water station was gone, covered by a fresh black landslide that spilled out from the northern wall, which now had a big new arc in its rim. But it had been a close thing, not anywhere near as big a landslide as she would have hoped; Lasswitz itself was still there, and it appeared that the layer of rock over the water station was not all that thick. The flood seemed to have stopped, it was true; it was motionless, a chunky, dirty white swath, like a glacier running down the middle of the canyon. And there was very little frost steam rising from it. Still…

“Let’s go back down to Lasswitz and look at the aquifer monitors,” Nadia said.

They drove back down the canyon wall road and into Lasswitz’s garage. They walked down the empty streets in walkers and helmets. The aquifer study center was located next to the city offices. It was odd to see their refuge of the last few days empty.

Inside the aquifer center they studied the readouts from the array of underground sensors. A lot of them were no longer functioning, but those that were showed that hydrostatic pressure inside the aquifer was higher than ever before, and increasing. As if to emphasize the point a small tremblor shook the ground, vibrating the soles of their boots. None of them had ever felt such a thing on Mars before. “Shit!” Yeli said, “it’s going to blow again for sure!”

“We have to drill a runoff well,” Nadia said. “A kind of pressure valve.”

“But what if it breaks out like the main one?” Sasha asked.

“If we put it at the upper end of the aquifer, or midway so that it takes some flow, it should be fine. Just as good as the old water station, which someone probably blew up, or else it would still be working fine.” She shook her head bitterly. “We have to risk it. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, then maybe we cause an outbreak. But if we don’t do something, it looks like there’ll be an outbreak anyway.”

She led the little group down the main streeet to the robot warehouse in the garage, and sat down in the command center to begin programming again. A standard drilling operation, with maximum blowout baffling. The water would come to the surface under artesian pressure, and then they would direct it into a pipeline, which they would instruct a robot crew to lay in some direction that would take it out of the Arena canyon region. She and the others studied topographic maps, and ran simulated floods down several canyons paralleling Arena to north and south. They found that the watershed was huge, everything on Syrtis drained down toward Burroughs, the land was a big bowl here. They would have to pipe the water north for nearly three hundred kilometers to get it into the next watershed. “Look,” Yeli said, “released into the Nili Fossae, it will run straight north onto Utopia Planitia, and freeze on the northern dunes.”

“Sax must be loving this revolution,” Nadia said again. “He’s getting stuff they never would have approved.”

“But a lot of his projects must be getting wrecked too,” Yeli pointed out.

“I bet it’s still a net gain, in Sax’s terms. All this water on the surface…”

“We’ll have to ask him.”

“If we ever see him again.”

Yeli was silent. Then he said: “Is it that much water, really?”

“It’s not just Lasswitz,” Sam said. “I saw a news bit a while ago-they’ve broken the Lowell aquifer, a big breakout like the ones that cut the outflow channels. It’ll rip billions of kilos of regolith downslope, and I don’t know how much water. It’s unbelievable.”

“But why? ” Nadia said.

“It’s the best weapon they have, I guess.”

“Not much of a weapon! They can’t aim it or stop it!”

“No. But neither can anyone else. And think about it-all the towns downslope from Lowell are gone-Franklin, Drexler, Osaka, Galileo, I imagine even Silverton. And all those were transnational towns. A lot of channel mining towns are vulnerable, I should think.”

“So both sides are attacking the infrastructure,” Nadia said dully.

“That’s right.”

She had to work, there was no other choice. She got them going again on robot programming, and they spent the rest of that day and the next getting the robot teams out to the drilling site, and making sure the start-up went right. The drilling was straightforward; it was only a matter of making sure that pressures in the aquifer didn’t cause a blowout. And the pipeline to transfer the water north was even simpler, an operation that had been fully automated for years; but they doubled up on all the equipment, just to make sure. Up the north canyon road bed, and on northward from there. No need to include pumps; artesian pressure would regulate the flow quite nicely, because when the pressure dropped low enough to stop pushing water out of the canyon, the danger of a breakout at the lower end would presumably be past. So when the mobile magnesium mills were grinding along, scooping up fines and making pipe, and when the forklifts and frontloaders were taking these pipe segments to the assembler, and when that great moving building was taking in the segments and extruding pipe behind it as it rolled slowly along up the road, and when another mobile behemoth was going over the completed pipe, and wrapping it in aerolattice insulation made from tailings from the refinery; and when the first segment of the pipline was heated and running-then they declared the system operational, and hoped it would make it three hundred kilometers farther. The pipeline would be built at about a kilometer an hour, for twenty-four and a half hours a day; so if all went well, about twelve days to Nili Fossae. At that rate the pipeline would be done very soon after the well was drilled and ready. And if the landslide dam held that long, then they would have their pressure valve.

So Burroughs was safe, or as safe as they could make it by their efforts. They could go. But it was a question what their destination should be. Nadia sat slumped over a microwaved dinner, watching a terran news show, listening to her companions debate the issue. Horrible how the revolution was being portrayed on Earth: extremists, communists, vandals, saboteurs, reds, terrorists. Never the words rebel or revolutionary, words of which half the Earth (at least) might approve. No, they were isolated groups of insane, destructive terrorists. And it didn’t help Nadia’s mood that there was, she felt, some truth to the description; it only made her angrier.

“We should join whoever we can, and help fight!” Angela said.

“I’m not fighting anyone,” Nadia said mulishly. “It’s stupid. I won’t do it. I’ll fix things where I can, but I won’t fight.”

A message came over the radio. Fournier Crater, about eight hundred and sixty kilometers away, had a cracked dome. The populace was trapped in sealed buildings, and running out of air.

“I want to go there,” Nadia said. “There’s a big central warehouse of construction robots there. They could fix the dome, and then be set to other repairs down on Isidis.”

“How will you get there?” Sam asked.

Nadia thought it over, took a deep breath. “Ultralite, I guess. There’s some of those new 17Ds up on the south rim airstrip. That would be the fastest way for sure, and maybe even the safest, who knows.” She looked at Yeli and Sasha. “Will you fly with me?”

“Yes,” Yeli said. Sasha nodded.

“We want to come with you,” Angela said. “It’ll be safer with two planes anyway.”

They tooktwo planes that had been built by Spencer’s aeronautic factory in Elysium, the latest things, called simply 17Ds, ultralite delta-winged four-seat turbojets, made mostly of aerogel and plastics, dangerous to fly because they were so light. But Yeli was an expert flier and Angela said she was too, so they climbed into two of them the next morning, after spending the night in the empty little airport, and taxied out to the packed dirt runway and took off directly into the sun. It took them a long time to rise to a thousand meters.

The planet below looked deceptively normal, its old harsh face only a bit whiter on the north faces, as if aged by its parasite infestation. But then they flew out over Arena Canyon, and saw running down it a dirty glacier, a river of broken ice blocks. The glacier widened frequently where the flood had pooled for a time. The ice blocks were sometimes pure white, but more often stained one martian shade or other, then broken and tumbled into a mix, so that the glacier was a shattered mosaic of frozen brick, sulfur, cinnamon, coal, fertilizer, cream, blood… spilling down the flat bed of the canyon all the way to the horizon, some seventy-five kilometers away.

Nadia asked Yeli if they could fly north and inspect the land that the robots were going to build the pipeline over. Soon after they turned they received a weak radio message on the first hundred band, from Ann Clayborne and Simon Frazier. They were trapped in Peridier Crater, which had lost its dome; it was to the north also, so they were already on the right course.

The land they crossed that morning appeared negotiable to the robot team; it was flat, and though littered with ejecta, there were no little stopper escarpments. Farther on in this region the Nili Fossae began, very gradually at first, just four very shallow depressions, curving down to the northeast like the fingertips of a faint handprint. A hundred kilometers farther north, however, and they were parallel chasms each five hundred meters deep, separated by dark land that had been heavily bashed by craters-a kind of lunar configuration, reminding Nadia of a messy construction site. Farther north still, they got a surprise: where the easternmost canyon debouched onto Utopia, there was another aquifer outbreak. At its upper end it was simply a new slump, a big bowl of land shattered like a broken plate of glass; lower down, patches of frosting black and white water surged right out of the broken land, ripping at the new blocks and carrying them away even as they watched, in a steaming flood that caused the land it touched to explode. This shocking wound was at least thirty kilometers across, and ran right over the horizon to the north, with no sign of dissipating.

Nadia stared at the sight and asked Yeli to fly nearer. “I want to avoid the steam,” Yeli said, absorbed in the sight himself. Most of the white frost cloud was blowing east and falling down onto the landscape, but the wind was fitful, and sometimes the thin white veil would rise straight up, obscuring the swath of black water and white ice. The outflow was as big as one of the big Antarctic glaciers, or even bigger. Cutting the red landscape in two.

“That is a hell of a lot of water,” Angela said.

Nadia switched to the first hundred band, and called Ann down in Peridier. “Ann, do you know about this?” She described what they were flying over. “And it’s still running, the ice is moving, and we can see patches of open water, it looks black or sometimes red, you know.”

“Can you hear it?”

“Just sort of like a ventilator hum, and some cracks and pops from the ice, yeah. But we’re pretty loud up here ourselves.”

“Hell of a lot of water!”

“Well,” Ann said, “That aquifer isn’t very big compared to some.”

“How are they breaking them open? Can people really break those open?”

“Some of them,” Ann said. “The ones with hydrostatic pressure greater than lithostatic pressure are in essence lifting the rock up, and it’s the permafrost layer that is forming a kind of dam, an ice dam. If you drilled a well and blew it up, or if you melted it…”

“But how?”

“Reactor meltdown.”

Angela whistled.

“But the radiation!” Nadia cried.

“Sure. But have you looked at your counter lately? I figure three or four of them must have gone.”

“Wow!” Angela cried.

“And that’s just so far.” Ann’s voice had that distant, dead tone it took on when she was angry. She answered their questions about the flood very briefly. A flood that big caused extreme pressure fluctuations; bedrock was smashed then plucked away, and it was all swept downstream in a pulverizing rush, a ripping, gaseous, boulder-filled slurry. “Are you going to come over to Peridier?” she asked when their questions trailed off.

“We’re just turning east now,” Yeli replied. “I wanted to get a visual fix on Crater Fv first.”

“Good idea.”

They flew on. The astounding roil of the flood dropped beneath the horizon, and they flew over the familiar old stone and sand again. Soon Peridier appeared over the horizon ahead, a low, much-eroded crater wall. Its dome was gone, tattered sheets of the fabric thrown aside, still rolling this way and that over the crater rampart, as if a seed pod had burst. The piste running south reflected the sun like a silver thread. They flew over the arc of the crater wall, and Nadia peered down at the dark buildings through binoculars, cursing in a low Slavic chant. How? Who? Why? There was no way to tell. They flew on to the airstrip out on the far crater rampart. None of the hangars were working, and they had to suit up and drive some little cars over the rim into town.

All the survivng occupants of Peridier were holed up in the physical plant. Nadia and Yeli went through its lock and gave Ann and Simon a hug, and then they were introduced to the others. There were about forty of them, living off emergency supplies, struggling to balance the gas exchange in the sealed buildings. “What happened?” Angela asked them, and they told the story in a kind of Greek chorus, interrupting each other frequently: a single explosion had burst the dome like a balloon, causing an instantaneous decompression that had also blown up many of the town’s buildings. Luckily the physical plant was reinforced, and had withstood the internal pressures of its own air supply; and those inside had survived. Those out on the streets, or in the other buildings, had not.

“Where’s Peter?” Yeli asked, startled and fearful.

“He’s on Clarke,” Simon said quickly. “He called us right after this all began. He’s been trying to get a spot on one of the elevators down, but it’s all police at this point, I guess there were a lot of them in orbit. He’ll get down when he can. It’s safer up there right now anyway, so I’m not in that much of a hurry to see him.”

This made Nadia think of Arkady again. But there was nothing to be done; and quickly she set herself to the task of rebuilding Peridier. She first asked the survivors what their plans were, and when they shrugged, she suggested that they start by setting up a much smaller tent than the dome had been, using tenting material stored in the construction warehouses out at the airport. There were a lot of older robots mothballed out there, and so reconstruction would be possible without too much preliminary tooling. The occupants were enthusiastic; they had not known about the contents of the airport warehouses. Nadia shook her head at this. “It’s in all the records,” she said to Yeli later, “they only had to ask. They just weren’t thinking. They were just watching the TV, watching and waiting.”

“Well, it’s a shock to have a dome go like that, Nadia. They had to make sure the building was secure first.”

“I guess.”

But there were very few engineers or construction specialists among them. They were mostly escarpment areologists, or miners. Basic construction was something that robots did, or so they seemed to think. It was hard to say how long they would have gone before they would have started in on the reconstruction themselves, but with Nadia there to point out what could be done, and drive them with a brief burst of withering scorn at their inactivity, they were soon under way. Nadia worked eighteen and twenty hours a day for a few days, and got a foundation wall laid, and tenting cranes into action over the rooftops; after that it was mostly a matter of supervision. Restlessly Nadia asked her companions from Lasswitz if they would join her in the planes again, and move on. They agreed; and so about a week after their arrival they took off again, with Ann and Simon joining them in Angela and Sam’s plane.

As they flew south, down the slope of Isidis toward Burroughs, a coded message clittered abruptly over their radio speakers. Nadia dug through her pack and found a bag of stuff Arkady had given her, including a bunch of files; she found the one she wanted and plugged it into the plane’s AI, and they ran the message through Arkady’s decryption program. After a few seconds the AI spoke the message in its even tones:

“UNOMA is in possession of Burroughs, and detaining everyone who comes here.”

There was silence in the two planes, winging south through the empty pink sky. Below them the plain of Isidis sloped down to the left.

Ann said, “Let’s go there anyway. We can tell them in person to stop the assaults.”

“No,” Nadia replied. “I want to be able to work. And if they lock us up… Besides, why do you think they’d listen to what we tell them about the assaults?”

No answer from Ann.

“Can we make it to Elysium?” Nadia asked Yeli.

“Yes.”

So they turned east, and ignored radio queries from Burroughs air traffic control. “They won’t come after us,” Yeli said with assurance. “Look, the satellite radar shows there’s a lot of planes up and around, too many to go after all of them. And it would be a waste of time anyway, because I suspect most of them are decoys. Someone’s sent up a whole lot of drones, which confuses the issue nicely as far as we’re concerned.”

“Someone really put a lot of effort into this,” Nadia muttered as she looked at the radar image. Five or six objects were glowing in the southern quadrant. “Was it you, Arkady? Did you hide that much from me?”

She thought of that radio transmitter of his, which she had just run across in her bag. “Or maybe it wasn’t hid. Maybe I just didn’t want to see it.”

They flew to Elysium, and landed next to South Fossa, the largest roofed canyon of them all. They found that the roof was still there; but only, it turned out, because the city had been depressurized before it had been punctured. So the inhabitants were trapped in any number of intact buildings, and trying to keep the farm alive. There had been an explosion at the physical plant, and several others in the town itself. So there was a lot of work to be done, but there was a good base for a quick recovery, and a more enterprising population than the group in Peridier. So Nadia threw herself into it as before, determined to fill every waking moment with work. She could not stand to be idle; she worked every moment she was awake, her old jazz tunes running through her mind-nothing appropriate, there was no jazz or blues appropriate to this-it was all completely incongruous, “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “Pennies From Heaven,” “A Kiss To Build a Dream On”…

And in those hectic days on Elysium she began to realize just how much power the robots had. In all her years of construction she had never really tried to exert that power to the full; there simply had been no need. But now there were hundreds of jobs to be done, more than could be accomplished even with a total effort, and so she took the system right out to the bleeding edge as programmers would say, and saw just how much that effort could do, even as she tried to figure out how to do more. She had always considered teleoperation to be a basically local procedure, for instance, but it wasn’t necessarily so; using relay satellites she could drive a bulldozer in the other hemisphere, and now, whenever she could establish a good link, she did so. She did not stop working for even a single waking second; she worked as she ate, she read reports and programs in the bathroom, and she never slept except when exhaustion knocked her out. While in this timeless state she told anyone and everyone she worked with what to do, without regard for their opinion or comfort; and in the face of her monomaniacal concentration, and the authority of her grasp of the situation, people obeyed her.

Despite all this effort, they could not do enough; so that it always came back to Nadia, and she alone through the sleepless hours gave the system a full stretch, out on the bleeding edge all the time. And Elysium had a huge fleet of construction robots already built, so that it was possible to attack most of the pressing problems simultaneously. Most of those were located among the canyons on Elysium’s western slope. All the roofed canyons had been broken open to one degree or another, but most of their physical plants were untouched, and there were a great number of survivors hunkered down in individual buildings running on emergency generators, as in South Fossa. When South Fossa was covered and heated and pumped up, she directed teams to go out and find all the survivors on the western slope, and they were pulled out of the other canyons and brought to South, and then sent back out with jobs to do. The roofing crews moved from canyon to canyon, and their ex-occupants went to work underneath, readying for the pump-ups. At that point Nadia turned her attention to other matters, programming toolmakers, starting robot linemen along the broken pipelines from Chasma Borealis. “Who did all this?” she said with disgust, staring one night at the TV’s image of burst water pipes.

The question was torn out of her; in reality she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to think about the bigger picture, about anything but that pipeline there, broken on the dunes. But Yeli took her at her word, and said, “It’s hard to tell. The Terran news programs are all about Earth now, there’s only an occasional clip from here, and they don’t know what to make of it either. Apparently the next few shuttles are bringing UN troops, who are supposed to restore order. But most of the news is about Earth-the Middle East war, the Black Sea, Africa, you name it. A lot of the Southern Club is bombing flag of convenience countries, and the Group of Seven has declared they’re going to defend them. And there’s a biological agent loose in Canada and Scandinavia-”

“And maybe here too,” Sasha interrupted. “Did you see that clip of Acheron? Something happened there, the windows of the habitat are all blown out, and the land underneath the fin is covered with these growths of God knows what, no one wants to get near enough to find out…”

Nadia closed her mind to their talk, and concentrated on the problem of the pipeline. When she returned to real time, she found that every single robot she could find was in action reconstituting the towns, and the factories were busily pumping out more bulldozers, earthmovers, dump trucks, backhoes, frontloaders, steamrollers, framers, foundation diggers, welders, cement makers, plastic makers, roofers, everything. The system was at full pump, and there wasn’t enough to occupy her anymore. And so she told the others she wanted to take off again, and Ann and Simon and Yeli and Sasha decided to accompany her; Angela and Sam had met friends in South Fossa, and were going to stay.

So the five climbed into their two planes, and took off again. This was the way it would happen everywhere, Yeli asserted; whenever members of the first hundred encountered each other, they would not separate.

They headed in the two planes south, toward Hellas. Passing over Tyrrhena Mohole, next to Hadriaca Patera, they landed briefly; the mohole town was punctured, and needed help to start the rebuilding. There were no robots on hand, but Nadia had found she could start an operation with as small a seed as her programs, a computer, and an air miner. That kind of spontaneous generation of machinery was another aspect of their power. It was slower, no doubt of that; still, within a month these three components together would have conjured obedient beasts out of the sand: first the factories, then the assembly plants, then the construction robots themselves, vehicles as big and articulated as a city block, doing their work in their absence. It really was confounding, their new power.

And yet all of it was as nothing in the face of human destructiveness. The five travelers flew from ruin to ruin, becoming numb to the damage and to the dead. Not that they were insensible to their own danger; after passing over a number of wrecked planes in the Hellas-Elysium flight corridor, they switched to night flights. These flights were more dangerous than day flights in many ways, but Yeli was more comfortable with their level of stealth. The 17Ds were nearly invisible to radar, and would leave only the faintest traces on the most powerful tight-focus IR detectors. All of them were willing to take the risk of that minute exposure. Nadia didn’t care at all, she would have been happy to fly by day. She lived in the moment as much as she could, her thoughts ran in circles as she kept trying to drag them back to the moment; stunned by the waste of all that had been destroyed, she was becoming far distanced from her emotions. She only wanted to work.

And Ann, some part of Nadia noticed, was worse. Of course she must have been worried about Peter. And then all the destruction as well; for her it was not the structures but the land itself, the floods, the mass wasting, the snow, the radiation. And she had no work to distract her. Her work would have been the study of the damage. And so she did nothing, or tried to help Nadia when she could, moving around like an automaton. Day after day they worked at initiating the repair of one ruined structure or another, a bridge, a pipeline, a well, a power station, a piste, a town. They lived in what Yeli called Waldo World, ordering robots about as if they were slavemasters or magicians, or gods; and the machines went to work, trying to reverse the film of time and make broken things fly back together. With the luxury of haste they could be sloppy, and it was incredible how fast they could initiate construction, and then fly on. “In the beginning was the word,” Simon said wearily one evening, punching at his wristpad. A bridge crane swung across the setting sun. And then they were off again.

They started up containment and burial programs for three blown reactors, staying safely over the horizon and working by teleoperation. While watching the operations, Yeli sometimes switched channels and had a look at the news. Once the shot was from orbit: a full disk shot of the Tharsis hemisphere, in daytime for all but the western limb. From that height they could see no sign of the outflows. But the voiceover claimed they had occurred in all the old outflow channels that ran north from Marineris into Chryse; and the image jumped to a telescopic shot, which showed whitish pink bands in that region. Canals at last, of a sort.

Nadia snapped the TV back to their work. So much destroyed, so many people killed, people who might have lived a thousand years-and, of course, no word of Arkady. It had been twenty days now. People were saying he might have been forced into complete hiding, to avoid being killed by a strike from orbit. But Nadia no longer believed this, except in moments of extreme desire and pain, the two emotions surging up through the obsessive work mode in a brand-new mixture, a new feeling that she hated and feared: desire causing pain, pain causing desire-a hot fierce desire, that things not be as they were. How painful such a desire was! But if she worked hard enough, there was no time for it. No time to think or feel.

They flew over the bridge spanning Harmakhis Vallis, on the eastern border of Hellas; it was down. Repair robots were cached in endhouses on all major bridges, and these could be adapted to total reconstruction of the spans, although they would be slow at it. The travelers got them going, and that evening, after finishing the last programs, they sat down to microwaved spagetti in the plane’s cabins, and Yeli turned on the Terran TV channel again. There was nothing but static and a snaking, destroyed image. He tried switching channels, but all the channels were the same. Dense, buzzing static.

“Have they blown up Earth too?” Ann said.

“No no,” Yeli said. “Someone’s jamming it. The sun is between us and it, these days, and you would only have to interfere with a few relay stations to cut contact.”

They stared glumly at the fizzing screen. In recent days the local areosynchronous communications satellites had been going down left and right; shut down or sabotaged, it was impossible to say. Now, without the Terran news, they would really be in the dark. Surface-to-surface radio was limited indeed, given the tight horizons and the lack of an ionosphere; not much more range than walker intercoms, really. Yeli tried a variety of stochastic resonance patterns, to see if he could cut through the jamming. The signals were scrambled beyond repair. He gave up with a grunt, punched out a search program. The radio oscillated up and down through the hertz, gathering static and stopping at the occasional faint punctuation: coded clicking, irretrievable snatches of music. Ghost voices gabbling in unrecognizable languages, as if Yeli had succeeded where SETI had failed, and finally, now that it was pointless, gotten messages from the stars. Probably just stuff from the asteroid miners. In any case incomprehensible, useless. They were alone on the face of Mars, five people in two small airplanes.

It was a new and very peculiar sensation, which only became more acute in the days that followed, when it didn’t go away, and they understood that they were going to have to proceed with all their TVs and radios blanked by white noise. It was an experience unique not only in their martian experience, but in their whole lives. And they quickly found that losing the electronic information net was like losing one of their senses; Nadia kept glancing down at her wristpad, on which, until this breakdown, Arkady could have appeared any second; on which any of the first hundred might have showed up, and declared themselves safe; and then she would look up from the little blank square at the land around her, suddenly so much bigger and wilder and emptier than it had ever been before. It was frightening, truly. Nothing but jagged rust hills for as far as the eye could see, even when flying in the airplanes at dawn and looking for one of the little landing strips marked on the map, which when spotted would resemble little tan pencils. Such a big world! And they were alone in it. Even navigation could no longer be taken for granted, no longer be left to the computers; they had to use road transponders, and dead reckoning, and visual fixes, peering down anxiously in the dawn twilight to spot the next airstrip in the wilderness. Once it took them well into the morning to find a strip near Dao Vallis; after that Yeli began to follow pistes, flying low through the night and watching the silvery ribbon snake below them through the starlight, checking transponder signals against the maps.

And so they managed to fly down in the broad lowland of Hellas basin, following the piste to Low Point Lakefront. Then in the horizontal red light and long shadows of sunrise, a sea of shattered ice came over the horizon into view. It filled the whole western part of Hellas. A sea.

The piste they had been following ran right into ice. The frozen shoreline was a jagged tangle of ice plates that were black or red or white or even blue, or a rich jade green-all piled together, as if a tidal wave had crushed Big Man’s butterfly collection, and left it strewn over a barren beach. Beyond it the frozen sea stretched right over the horizon.

After many second’s silence, Ann said, “They must have broken the Hellespontus aquifer. That was a really big one, and it would drain down to Low Point.”

“So the Hellas mohole must be flooded!” Yeli said.

“That’s right. And the water at the bottom of it will heat up. Probably hot enough to keep the surface of the lake from freezing. Hard to say. The air is cold, but with the turbulence there might be a clear spot. If not, then right under the surface it will be liquid for sure. Must be some strong currents in fact. But the surface…”

Yeli said, “We’ll see pretty soon, we’re going to fly over it.”

“We should be landing,” Nadia observed.

“Well, we will when we can. Besides, things seem to be calming down a bit.”

“That’s just a function of being cut off from news.”

“Hmm.”

As it turned out they had to fly all the way across the lake, and land on the other side. It was an eerie morning, flying low across a shattered surface reminiscent of the Arctic Sea, except here the ice flows were frosting like an open freezer door, and they were colored across the whole spectrum, heavy on the reds of course, but this only made the occasional blues and greens and yellows stand out more vividly, the focus points of an immense, chaotic mosaic.

And there at its center-where, even flying as high as they were, the ice sea still extended to the horizon in every direction-there was an enormous steam cloud, rising thousands of meters into the air. Circling this cloud cautiously, they saw that the ice underneath it was broken into bergs and floes, floating tight-packed in roiling, steaming black water. The dirty bergs rotated, collided, turned turtle and caused thick walls of red-black water to splash upward; when these walls fell back down, waves expanded out in concentric circles, bobbing all the bergs up and down as they passed.

There was silence in the two planes as they stared down at this most unmartian spectacle. Finally, after two mute circumnavigations of the steam column, they flew on westward over the shattered waste. “Sax must be loving this revolution,” Nadia said as she had before, breaking the silence. “Do you think he’s part of it?”

“I doubt it,” Ann said. “He probably wouldn’t risk his Terran investment. Nor an orderly progression to the project, or some kind of control. But I’m sure he’s evaluating it in terms of how it affects the terraforming. Not who’s dying, or what’s getting wrecked, or who’s taking over here. Just how it affects the project.”

“An interesting experiment,” Nadia said.

“But hard to model,” Ann said. They both had to laugh.

Speak of the devil-they landed west of the new sea (Lakefront was drowned), and spent the day resting; and the next night as they followed the piste northwest toward Marineris, they flew over a transponder that was blinking S.O.S. in Morse code. They circled the transponder until dawn, and landed on the piste itself, just beyond a disabled rover. And next to it was Sax, in a walker, fiddling with the transponder to send his manual S.O.S.

Sax climbed into their plane and slowly took off his helmet, blinking and purse-mouthed, his usual bland self. Tired, but looking like the rat that ate the canary, as Ann said to Nadia later. He said little. He had been stuck on the piste in the rover for three days, unable to move; the piste was dead, and the rover had no emergency fuel. Lakefront had indeed drowned: “I was leaving for Cairo,” he said, “to meet with Frank and Maya, because they think it would help to have the whole first hundred together, to form some kind of authority to negotiate with the UNOMA police, and get them to stop.” He had taken off, and was in the Hellspontus foothills when the Low Point mohole’s thermal cloud had suddenly turned yellow, and plumed twenty thousand meters into the sky. “It turned into a mushroom cloud like a nuclear explosion, but with a smaller cap,” he noted. “The temperature gradient isn’t so steep in our atmosphere.”

After that he had turned back, and gone to the edge of the basin to see some of the flooding. The water running down the basin from the north had been black but kept going white, icing over in big segments almost instantaneously, except around Lakefront, where it had bubbled “like water on the stove. Thermodynamics were pretty complex there for a while, but the water cooled the mohole pretty fast, and-”

“Shut up, Sax,” Ann said.

Sax lifted his eyebrows, and went to work improving the plane’s radio receiver.

They flew on, six of them now, Sasha and Yeli, Ann and Simon, Nadia and Sax: six of the first hundred, gathered together as if by magnetism. There was a lot to talk about that night, and they exchanged stories, information, rumors, speculations. But Sax could add little concrete to the overall picture. He had been cut off from the news just like they had. Again Nadia shuddered as if at a lost sense, realizing that this was a problem that wasn’t going to go away.

The next morning at sunrise they landed at Bakhuysen’s airstrip, and were met by a dozen people carrying police stun guns. This little crowd kept their gun barrels down, but escorted the six with very little ceremony into the hangar inside the crater wall.

There were more people in the hangar, and the crowd grew all the time. Eventually there were about fifty of them, about thirty of them women. They were perfectly polite, and, when they discovered the travelers’ identities, even friendly. “We just have to make sure who we’re dealing with,” one of them said, a big woman with a strong Yorkshire accent.

“And who are you?” Maya asked boldly.

“We’re from Korolyov Prime,” she said. “We escaped.”

They took the travelers into their dining hall, and treated them to a big breakfast. When they were all seated, people took up magnesium jugs and reached across the table to pour their neighbor’s apple juice, and their neighbors did likewise, until everyone was served. Then over pancakes the two groups exchanged stories. The Bakhuysen crowd had escaped from Korolyov Prime in the first day of the revolt, and had made their way this far south, with plans to go all the way down to the southern polar region. “That’s a big rebel location,” the Yorkshire woman (whom it turned out was really Finnish) told them. “There are these stupendous bench terraces with overhangs, you see, so in effect they’re these long open-sided caves, a couple klicks long most of the time, and quite wide really. Perfect for staying out of satellite view but having a bit of air. A kind of a Cro-Magnon cliff-dweller life they’re setting up down there. Lovely, really.” Apparently these long caves had been famous in Korolyov, and a lot of the prisoners had agreed to rendezvous there if a breakout ever occurred.

“So are you with Arkady?” Maya asked.

“Who?”

It turned out they were followers of the biologist Schnelling, who from the sound of it had been a kind of red mystic, held in Korolyov with them, where he had died a few years before. He had given wrist lectures that had been very popular on Tharsis, and after his incarceration many of the prisoners in Korolyov had become his students. Apparently he taught them a kind of martian communalism based on principles of the local biochemistry; the group at Bakhuysen wasn’t very clear about it, but now they were out, and hoping to contact other rebel forces. They had succeeded in establishing contact with a stealthed satellite, programmed to operate in directed microbursts; they had also managed briefly to monitor a channel being used by security forces on Phobos. So they had a little news. Phobos, they said, was being used as a surveillance and attack station by transnational and UNOMA police forces, recently arrived on the latest continuous shuttle. These same forces had control of the elevator, of Pavonis Mons, and of most of the rest of Tharsis; the Olympus Mons observatory had rebelled, but been firestormed from orbit; and transnational security forces had occupied most of the great escarpment, effectively cutting the planet in two. And the war on Earth appeared to be continuing, although they had the impression it was hottest in Africa, Spain, and the US-Mexican border.

They thought it was useless to try going to Pavonis; “they’ll either lock you up or kill you,” as Sonja put it. But when the six travelers decided to try anyway, they were given precise directions to a refuge a night’s flight to the west; it was the Southern Margaritifer weather station, the Bakhuysen people told them. Occupied by Bogdanovists.

Nadia’s heart leaped when she heard that word, she couldn’t help it. But Arkady had a lot of friends and followers, and none of them seemed to know where he was. Still, she found herself unable to sleep that day, her stomach again tied in a knot. That night at sunset she was happy to return the planes and take off. The rebels in Bakhuysen sent them on their way so laden with hydrazine and gases and freeze-dried food that their planes had a hard time getting off the ground.

Their night flights had taken on a strangely ritual aspect, as if they were in the process of inventing a new and exhausting pilgrimage. The two planes were so light that they were buffeted hard by the prevailing western winds, sometimes bouncing wildly ten meters up or down, so that it was impossible to sleep for long even when one was not flying; a sudden drop or lift and one was awake again, in the dark little cabin, staring out the window at the black sky and stars above, or the starless black world below. They spoke hardly at all. The pilots hunched forward, expending their energy on keeping a visual fix on the other plane. The planes hummed along, winds keening over their long flexible wings. It was sixty degrees below zero outside, the air only 150 millibars and poisonous; and there was no shelter on the black planet below, for many kilometers in every direction. Nadia would pilot for a while, then move to the back, and twist and turn, and try to sleep. Often the click of a transponder over the radio, combined with the general aspect of their situation, would remind her of the time she and Arkady had ridden the storm in the Arrowhead. She would see him then, striding red-bearded and naked through the broken interior of the dirigible, tearing away paneling to throw overboard, laughing, fines floating in a nimbus around him-then the 17D would jerk her awake, and she would twist with the discomfort of her fear. It would have helped to pilot again, but Yeli wanted to as much as she, at least for the first couple of hours of his watch. There was nothing for it but to help him watch for the other plane, always a kilometer to the right if all was well. They had occasional radio contact with the other plane, but microbursted the calls, and kept them to a minimum; hourly checks, or inquiries if one fell behind. Everything had taken on ritualistic qualities, and in the dead of night it sometimes seemed this was all any of them had ever done, it was hard to recall what life had been like before the revolt. And what had it been, twenty-four days? Three weeks, though it felt like five years.

And then the sky would begin to bleed behind them, high cirrus clouds turning purple, rust, crimson, lavender, and then swiftly to metal shavings, in a rosy sky; and the incredible fountain of the sun would pour over some rocky rim or scarp, and they would search anxiously as they ghosted over the pocked and shadowed landscape, looking for some sign of an airstrip by the piste. After the eternal night it seemed impossible that they would have navigated successfully to anything at all, but there lay the gleaming piste below, which they could land on directly in an emergency. And the transponders being all individually identifiable, and pegged to the map, their navigation was always more sure than it seemed; so every dawn they would spot a strip down in the shadows ahead, a welcome blond pencil strip of perfect flatness. Down they would glide, thump against the ground, slow down, taxi to whatever facilities they could find; stop the engines, slump back in the seats. Feel the strange lack of vibration, the stillness of another day.

That morning they landed at the strip by the Margaritifer station, and were met at their planes by a dozen men and women who were extravagantly enthusiastic in their welcome, hugging and kissing the six travelers countless times, and laughing as they did so. The six clumped together, more alarmed by this than by the wary greeting of the day before. Their welcomers did not neglect to run laser readers over their wrists to identify them, which was reassuring; but when the AI confirmed that they were indeed receiving six of the first hundred, they burst into cheers, and carried on in the very highest of spirits. In fact when the six were lead through a lock into a commons, several their hosts went over immediately to some small tanks, and breathed in hits of what proved to be nitrous oxygen and an pandorphin aerosol, after which they laughed themselves silly.

One of them, a slender fresh-faced American, introduced himself. “I’m Steve, I trained with Arkady on Phobos in 12, and worked with him on Clarke. Most of us here worked with him on Clarke. We were in Schiaparelli when the revolution began.”

“Do you know where Arkady is?” Nadia asked.

“Last we heard he was in Carr, but now he’s out of the net, which is the way it should be.”

A tall skinny American shambled up to Nadia, and put his hand on her shoulder and said, “We’re not always like this!” and laughed.

“We’re not!” Steve agreed. “But it’s a holiday today! You haven’t heard?

A giggling woman scraped her face off the table and cried, “Independence Day! Fourteen the Fourteenth!”

“Watch, watch this,” Steve said, and pointed at their TV.

An image of space flickered onto the screen, and suddenly the whole group was yelling and cheering. They had locked onto a coded channel from Clarke, Steve explained, and though they could not decode its messages, they had used it as a beacon to aim their station’s optical telescope. The image from the telescope had been transferred onto the commons TV, and there it was, the black sky and the stars blocked at the center by the shape they had all learned to recognize, the squared-off metallic asteroid with the cable extending out of it. “Now watch!” they yelled at the puzzled travelers. “Watch!”

They howled again, and some of them began a ragged countdown, starting at one hundred. Some of them were inhaling helium as well as nitrous oxide, and these stood below the big screen singing, “We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz! Because, because, because, because, because of the wonderful things she does! We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz! We’re… off to see the wizard!…”

Nadia found herself shivering. The shouted countdown got louder and louder, reached a shrieked “ Zero.”

A gap appeared between the asteroid and the cable. Clarke disappeared from the screen instantly. The cable, gossamer among the stars, dropped out of view almost as fast.

Wild cheers filled the room, for a moment at least. But it caught, as if on a hitch, as some of the celebrants were distracted by Ann leaping to her feet, both fists at her mouth.

“He’s sure to be down by now!” Simon cried to Ann over their din. “He’s sure to be down! It’s been weeks since he called!”

Slowly it got quiet. Nadia found herself at Ann’s side, across from Simon and Sasha. She didn’t know what to say. Ann was rigid, her eyes bugged out horribly.

“How did you break the cable?” Sax asked.

“Well, the cable’s pretty much unbreakable,” Steve replied.

“You broke the cable?” Yeli exclaimed.

“Well, no, we separated the cable from Clarke, is what we did. But the effect is the same. That cable is on its way down.”

The group cheered again, somewhat more weakly. Steve explained to the travelers over the noise: “The cable itself was pretty much impervious, it’s graphite whisker with a diamond sponge-mesh gel double-helixed into it, and they’ve got smart pebble defense stations every hundred kilometers, and security on the cars that was intense. So Arkady suggested we work on Clarke itself. See, the cable goes right through the rock to the factories in the interior, and the actual end of it was physically as well as magnetically bonded to the rock of the asteroid. But we landed with a bunch of our robots in a shipment of stuff from orbit, and dug into the interior and placed thermal bombs outside the cable casing, and around the magnetic generator. Then today we set them all off at once, and the rock went liquid at the same time the magnets were interrupted, and you know Clarke is going like a bullet, so it slipped right off the cable end just like that! And we timed it so that it’s going directly away from the sun, and twenty-four degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic as well! So it’ll be damned hard to track it down. At least we hope so!”

“And the cable itself?” Sasha said.

It got loud with cheers again, and it was Sax who answered her, in the next quiet moment: “Falling,” he said. He was at a computer console, typing as fast as he could, but Steve called out to him, “We have the figures on the descent if you want them. It’s pretty complex, a lot of partial differential equations.”

“I know,” Sax said.

“I can’t believe it,” said Simon. He still had his hands on Ann’s arm, and he looked around at the revelers, his face grim. “The impact’s going to kill a lot of people!”

“Probably not,” one of them replied. “And those it does kill will mostly be UN police, who have been using the elevator to get down and kill people here on the ground.”

“He’s probably been down a week or two,” Simon repeated emphatically to Ann, who was now white-faced.

“Maybe,” she said.

Some people heard this, and quieted down; others did not want to hear, and continued to celebrate.

“We didn’t know,” Steve said to Ann and Simon. His expression of triumph was gone, he was frowning with concern. “If we had known, I guess we could have tried to contact him. But we didn’t know. I’m sorry. Hopefully-” he swallowed. “Hopefully he wasn’t up there.”

Ann walked back to their table, sat down. Simon hovered anxiously at her side. Neither of them appeared to have heard anything Steve had said.

Radio traffic increased somewhat, as those in control of the remaining communcations satellites got the news about the cable. Some of the celebrating rebels got busy monitoring and recording these messages; other continued to party.

Sax was still absorbed by the equations on the screen. “Going east,” he remarked.

“That’s right,” Steve said. “It’ll make a big bow in the middle at first, as the lower part pulls down, and then the rest will follow.”

“How fast?”

“That’s hard to say, but we think about four hours for the first time around, and then an hour for the second time around.”

“Second time around!” Sax said.

“Well, you know, the cable is 37,000 kilometers long, and the circumference at the equator is twenty-one thousand. So it’ll go around almost twice.”

“The people on the equator had better move fast,” Sax said.

“Not exactly the equator,” Sam said. “The Phobos oscillation will cause it to swerve away from the equator to a certain extent. That’s actually the hardest part to calculate, because it depends where the cable was in its oscillation when it began to fall.”

“North or south?”

“We should know in the next couple of hours.”

The six travelers stared helplessly at the screen. It was quiet for the first time since their arrival. The screen showed nothing but stars. No vantage point existed from which to view the elevator’s fall; the cable, never visible for more than a fraction of its length to any single observer, would stay invisible to the end. Or visible only as a falling line of fire.

“So much for Phyllis’s bridge,” Nadia said.

“So much for Phyllis,” said Sax.

The Margarifiter group re-established contact with the satellite transmissions they had located, and they found they were also able to poach a number of security satellites. From all these channels they were able to piece together a partial account of the cable’s fall. From Nicosia, a UNOMA team reported that the cable had fallen north of them, crumpling down vertically while yet still rapidly covering ground, as if it were cutting through the turning planet. Though north of them, they thought it was south of the equator. A staticky, panicky voice from Sheffield asked them for confirmation of this; the cable had already fallen across half the city and a line of tents east of it, all the way down the slope of Pavonis Mons and across east Tharsis, flattening a zone ten kilometers wide with its sonic boom; it would have been worse, but the air was so thin at that elevation that it did not carry much force. Now the survivors in Sheffield wanted to know whether to run south to escape the next wrapping, or try to get around the caldera to the north.

They got no reply. But more escapees from Korolyov, on the south rim of Melas Chasma in Marineris, reported over one of the rebel channels: the cable was now falling so hard it was shattering on impact. Half an hour later an Aureum drilling operation called in; they had gone out after the sonic booms, and found a mound of glowing brecciated debris, stretching from horizon to horizon.

There was an hour’s absence of any new hard information, nothing but questions and speculation and rumor. Then one of the headphoned listeners leaned back and showed thumbs up to the rest of them, and clicked on the intercom, and an excited voice came on yelling through the static: “It’s exploding! It came down in about four seconds, it was burning top to bottom and when it hit the ground everything jumped right under our feet! We’re having trouble with a leak here. We figure we’re about eighteen kilometers south of where it hit, and we’re twenty-five south of the equator, so you should be able to calculate the rest of the wrap from that, I hope. It was burning from top to bottom! Like this white line cutting the sky in half! I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve still got afterimages in my vision, they’re bright green. It was like a shooting star had stretched… Wait, Jorge is on the intercom, he’s out there and saying it’s only about three meters high where he is. It’s soft regolith here, so the cable’s in a trench it smashed for itself. He says it’s so deep in places you could bury it and have a level surface. Those’ll be like fords, he says, because in other places it stands five or six meters high. I guess it’ll do that for hundreds of kilometers at a stretch! It’ll be like the Great Wall of China.”

Then a call came in from Escalante Crater; it was right on the equator, and they had evacuated immediately on news of the break with Clarke, but had gone south, so that the arrival of the cable had turned out to be a close thing. The cable was now exploding on impact, they reported, and sending sheets of molten ejecta into the sky, lava-esque fireworks that arced up into their dawn twilight, and were dim and black by the time they fell back to the surface.

During all this time Sax never left his screen, and now he was muttering through pursed lips as he typed and read the screen. The second time around the speed of the fall would accelerate to 21,000 kilometers an hour, he said, almost six kilometers a second; so that for anyone within sight of it-a dangerous place to be, deadly if you were not up on a prominence and many kilometers away-it would look like a kind of meteor strike, and cross from horizon to horizon in less than a second. Sonic booms to follow.

“Let’s go out and have a look,” Steve suggested with a guilty glance at Ann and Simon. A lot of them suited up and went outside. The travelers contented themselves with a video image piped in from the exterior camera, alternating that with video clips gleaned from the satellites. Clips shot from the night side surface were spectacular; they showed a blazing curved line, cutting down like the edge of a white scythe that was trying to chop the planet in two.

Even so they found it hard to concentrate, hard to focus on what they were seeing and understand it, much less feel anything about it. They had been exhausted when they had landed, and now they were even more exhausted, and yet it was impossible to sleep; more and more video clips were being passed along, some from robot cameras flying in drones on the day side, showing a blackened steaming swath of desolation-the regolith blasted to the side in two long parallel ejecta dikes, banking a canal full of blackness, black all studded with a brecciated mix of stuff which got more exotic as the impact became more severe, until finally a drone camera sent along a clip of a horizon-to-horizon trench of what Sax said must be rough black diamonds.

The impact in the last half hour of the fall was so strong that everything far to north and south was flattened; people were saying that no one close enough to actually see the cable hit survived it, and most of the drone cameras had been smashed as well. For the final thousands of kilometers of the fall, there were no witnesses.

A late clip came in from the west side of Tharsis, from the second pass up that great slope. It was brief but powerful: a white blaze in the sky, and a explosion running up the west side of the volcano. Another shot, from a robot in West Sheffield, showed the cable blasting by just to the south; then an earthquake or sonic blast struck, and the whole rim district of Sheffield fell off the rim in a mass, dropping slowly to the caldera floor four kilometers below.

After that there were any number of video clips bouncing around the fragmented system, but they proved to be only repeats, or late arrivals, or film of the aftermath. And then the satellites began to shut down again.

It had been five hours since the fall began. The six travelers slumped in their chairs, watching or not watching the TV, too tired to feel anything, too tired to think.

“Well,” Sax said, “now we’ve got an equator just like the one I thought the Earth had when I was four years old. A big black line running right around the planet.”

Ann glared at Sax so bitterly that Nadia worried she would get up and hit him. But none of them moved. The images on the TV flickered, and the speakers hissed and crackled.

They saw the new equator line in person, the southernmost one anyway, on the second night of their flight toward Shalbatana Vallis. In the dark it was a broad straight black swath, leading them west. As they flew over it Nadia stared down somberly. It hadn’t been her project, but it was work, and work destroyed. A bridge brought down; and bringing down a bridge was always a dubious proposition.

And that black line was also a grave. Not many people on the surface had been killed, except on the east side of Pavonis, but most if not all of those on the elevator must have been, and that in itself meant several thousand people. Most of whom had probably been all right until their part of the cable hit the atmosphere and burned up.

As they flew over the wreckage Sax intercepted a new video of the fall. Someone had already stitched up a chronological montage from all the images that had been sent onto the net live or in the hours immediately afterward. In this montage, a very effective bit of work, the final clip was of the last section of the cable, exploding into the landscape. The impact zone was never anything but a moving white blob, like a flaw in the tape; no video was capable of registering such illumination. But as the montage continued the images had been slowed down and processed in every way possible, and one of these processed images was the final clip, an ultra-slow motion shot in which one could see details that would have been impossible to spot live. And so they could see that as the line had crossed the sky, the burning graphite had stripped away first, leaving an incandescent double helix of diamond, flowing majestically out of a sunset sky.

All a gravestone, of course, the people on it already dead at that point, burned away; but it was hard to think of them when the image was so utterly strange and beautiful, a vision of some kind of fantasy DNA, DNA from a macroworld made of pure light, plowing into our universe to germinate a barren planet…

Nadia stopped watching the TV, moved into the copilot’s seat to help spot the other plane. All that long night she stared out the window, unable to sleep, unable to get the image of that diamond descent out of her mind’s eye. It was the longest night of their trip so far, for her. It seemed a kind of eternity before dawn came.

But time passed, another night of their lives, and at last dawn came. Soon after sunrise they landed at a pipeline service airstrip above Shalbatana, and stayed with a group of refugees who had been working on the pipeline, and were now caught there. This group had no political stance in common, and wanted only to survive until things got back to normal. Nadia found their attitude only partly refreshing, and tried to get them to go out and repair pipelines; but she did not think they were convinced.

That evening they took off once more, again laden with supplies given to them by their hosts. And the following dawn they landed on the abandoned airstrip of Carr Crater. Before eight, Nadia and Sax and Ann and Simon and Sasha and Yeli were out in walkers, and up to the crater rim.

The dome was gone. There had been a fire below. All the buildings were intact but scorched, and almost all their windows had been broken or melted. Plastic walls were bent or deformed; concrete was blackened. There were splashes of soot scattered everywhere, and piles of soot scattered here and there on the ground, little heaps of blackened carbon. Sometimes they looked like Hiroshima shadows. Yes, they were bodies. The outlines of people trying to claw down through the sidewalks. “The city’s air was hyperoxygenated,” Sax ventured. In such an atmosphere human skin and flesh were combustible and flammable. That was what had happened to those early Apollo astronauts, stuck in a test capsule filled with an atmosphere of pure oxygen; when the fire started they had burnt like parrafin.

And so here. Everyone on the streets had caught fire and rushed around like torches, one could see that by the placement of the soot piles.

The six old friends walked down together into the shadow of the eastern crater wall. Under a circular dark pink sky they stopped at the first clutch of blackened bodies, and then walked quickly on. They opened doors in buildings when it was possible, and knocked on all the jammed doors, and listened at the walls with a stethoscope device Sax had brought along. No sound but their own heartbeats, loud and fast at the backs of their coppery throats.

Nadia stumbled around, her breath harsh and ragged. She forced herself to look at the bodies she passed, trying to estimate heights from the black piles of carbon. Like Hiroshima, or Pompeii. People were taller now. They still burnt to the bone, though, and even the bones were thin black sticks.

When she came to a likely-sized pile, she stood staring at it. After a while she approached, and found the right arm, and scraped with her three-fingered glove at the back of the charred wristbones, looking for the dotcode tag. She found it, cleaned it. Ran her laser over it like a grocery clerk pricing goods. Emily Hargrove.

She moved on, did it again with another likely-sized pile. Thabo Moeti. It was better than checking teeth against dental records; but she wouldn’t have done that.

She was light-headed and numb when she came to a soot pile near the city offices, alone, its right hand splayed out so that she only had to check. She cleaned the tag and checked. Arkady Nikoleyevich Bogdanov.

They flewwest for eleven more days, hiding through the daylight hours under stealth blankets, or taking shelter with people they encountered en route. During the nights they followed transponders, or the directions of the last group with which they had stayed. Though these groups often knew of each others’ existence and location, they were definitely not parts of a single resistance, or coordinated in any way: some hoped to make it to the south polar cap like the prisoners from Korolyov, others had never heard of this refuge; some were Bogdanovists, others were revolutionaries following different leaders; some were religious communes or utopian experiments, or nationalist groups trying to contact their governments back home; and some were merely collections of survivors without a program, orphaned by the violence. The six travelers even stopped at Korolyov itself, but they did not attempt to enter when they saw the naked frozen bodies of guards outside the locks, some of them propped in standing positions like statues.

After Korolyov, they encountered no one. The radios and TVs went dead as satellites were shot out; the pistes were empty; the Earth was on the other side of the sun. The landscape seemed as barren as before their arrival, except for the spreading patches of frost. They flew on as if they were the only people in the world, the sole survivors.

White noise buzzed in Nadia’s ear, something to do with the plane’s ventilators no doubt. She checked the ventilators, but they were okay. The others gave her chores to do, let her go on walks by herself before take-off, and after landing. They were stunned themselves by what they had found at Carr and Korolyov, and unable to bring much to the effort of cheering her up, which she found a relief. Ann and Simon were still worried about Peter. Yeli and Sax were worried about their food supplies, dropping all the time; the plane’s cabinets were nearly bare.

But Arkady was dead, and so none of that mattered. The revolt seemed to Nadia more a waste than ever, an unfocused spasm of rage, the ultimate cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. The whole world, wrecked! She told the others to send out a radio message on one of the general channels, announcing that Arkady was dead. Sasha agreed, and helped convince the others to do it. “It will help stop things more quickly,” Sasha said.

Sax shook his head. “Insurrections don’t have leaders,” he said. “Besides, no one is likely hear it.”

But a couple days later, it was clear some people had heard it. They received a microburst in response from Alex Zhalin. “Look, Sax, this isn’t the American Revolution, or the French or the Russian or the English. It’s all the revolutions at once, and everywhere! A whole world in revolt, with a land area equal to Earth’s, and only a few thousand people trying to stop it, and most of those still in space, where they have a good view but are very vulnerable. So if they manage to subdue a force in Syrtis, there is another in the Hellespontus. Imagine space-based forces trying to stop a revolution in Cambodia, but also in Alaska, Japan, Spain, Madagascar. How do you do it? You can’t. I only wish that Arkady Nikolayevich had lived to see it, he would have-”

The microburst ended abruptly. Perhaps a bad sign, perhaps not. But even Alex hadn’t been able to keep a note of discouragement out of his voice, when he talked about Arkady. It was impossible; Arkady had been so much more than a political leader-everybody’s brother, a natural force, the voice of one’s conscience. One’s innate sense of what was fair and just. One’s best friend.

Nadia stumped through her grief, helping to navigate their flights by night, sleeping as much as she could through the days. She lost weight. Her hair turned pure white, all the remaining gray and black hairs coming out in her brush. She found it hard to speak. It felt like her throat and guts had petrified. She was a stone, it was impossible to weep. She went about her business instead. No one they met had any food to spare, and they were running out themselves. They set a strict rationing schedule, dividing meals in half.

And on the thirty-second day of their journey from Lasswitz, after a journey of some ten thousand kilometers, they came to Cairo, up on the southern rim of Noctis Labyrinthus, just to the south of the southernmost strand of the fallen cable.

Cairo was under the de facto control of UNOMA, in that no one in the city had ever claimed otherwise, and like all the rest of the big tent cities it lay helpless under the orbiting lasers of UNOMA police ships, which had burned into orbit sometime in the last month. Also most of the inhabitants of Cairo at the beginning of the war had been Arab and Swiss, and in Cairo, at least, people of both nationalities seemed only to be trying to stay out of harm’s way.

Now, however, the six travelers were not the only refugees arriving; a flood of them had just come down Tharsis from the devastation in Sheffield and the rest of Pavonis; others were driving up from Marineris, through the maze of Noctis. The city was at quadruple capacity, with crowds living and sleeping in the streets and parks, the physical plant strained to the breaking point, and food and gases running out.

The six travelers were told this by an airstrip worker who was still stubbornly doing her job, although none of the strip shuttles were running any more. After guiding them into parking places among a great fleet of planes at one end of the strip, she told them to suit up and walk the kilometer to the city wall. It made Nadia unreasonably nervous to leave the two 17Ds behind and walk into a city; and she was not reassured once through the lock, when she saw that most people inside were wearing their walkers and carrying their helmets with them, ready for depressurization if it came.

They went to the city offices, and there found Frank and Maya, as well as Mary Dunkel and Spencer Jackson. They all greeted each other with relief, but there was no time for catching up on their various adventures; Frank was busy before a screen, talking to someone in orbit by the sound of it, and he shrugged off their hugs and kept talking, waving once later to acknowledge their appearance. Apparently he was hooked into a functioning communications system, or even more than one, because he stayed in front of the screen talking to one face or another for the next six hours straight, pausing only to sip water or make another call, not sparing another glance for his old compatriots. He seemed to be in a permanent fury, his jaw muscles bunching and unbunching rhythmically; other than that he was in his element, explaining and lecturing, wheedling and threatening, inquiring and then commenting impatiently on the answers he got. Wheeling and dealing in his old style, in other words, but with an angry, bitter, even frightened edge, as if he had walked off a cliff and was trying to argue his way back to ground.

When he finally clicked off, he leaned back in his seat and sighed histrionically, then rose stiffly from his seat and came over to greet them, putting a hand briefly on Nadia’s shoulder. Aside from that he was brusque with all of them, and completely uninterested in how they had managed to make it to Cairo. He only wanted to know whom they had met, and where, and how well these scattered parties were doing, and what they intended. Once or twice he went back to his screen and contacted these groups immediately upon being informed of their location, an ability that stunned the travelers, who had assumed that everyone was as cut off as they had been. “UNOMA links,” Frank explained, running a hand over his swarthy jaw. “They’re keeping some channels open for me.”

“Why?” Sax said.

“Because I’m trying to stop this. I’m trying for a cease-fire, then a general amnesty, then a reconstruction joined by all.”

“But under whose direction?”

“UNOMA’s, of course. And the national offices.”

“But UNOMA agrees only to the cease-fire?” Sax ventured. “While the rebels only agree to the general amnesty?”

Frank nodded curtly. “And neither like the reconstruction joined by all. But the current situation is so bad they may go for it. Four more aquifers have blown since the cable came down. They’re all equatorial, and some people are saying it’s cause and effect.”

Ann shook her head at this, and Frank looked pleased to see it. “They were broken open, I was pretty sure. They broke one at the mouth of Chasma Borealis, it’s pouring out onto the Borealis dunes.”

“The weight of the polar cap probably puts that one under a good bit of pressure,” Ann said.

“Do you know what happened to the Acheron group?” Sax asked Frank.

“No. They’ve disappeared. It might be like with Arkady, I’m afraid.” He glanced at Nadia, pursed his lips unhappily. “I should get back to work.”

“But what’s happening on Earth?” Ann demanded. “What does the UN have to say about all this?”

“ ‘Mars is not a nation but a world resource,’ “ Frank quoted heavily. “They’re saying that the tiny fraction of humanity that lives here can’t be allowed to control the resources, when the human material base as a whole is so deeply stressed.”

“That’s probably true,” Nadia heard herself say. Her voice was harsh, a croak. It felt like she hadn’t spoken in days.

Frank shrugged.

Sax said, “I suppose that’s why they’ve given the transnationals such a free hand. It seems to me there’s more of their security here than UN police.”

“That’s right,” Frank said. “It took the UN a while to agree to deploy their peacekeepers.”

“They don’t mind having the dirty work done by someone else.”

“Of course not.”

“And Earth itself?” Ann asked again.

Frank shrugged. “The group of seven seems to be getting things under control.” He shook his head. “It’s hard to say from here, it really is.”

He went to his screen to make more calls. The others went off to eat, to clean up, to sleep, to catch up on friends and acquaintances, on the rest of the first hundred, on what news there was from Earth. The flags of convenience had been destroyed by attacks from the have-nots in the south, but apparently the transnationals had fled to the group of seven, and had been taken in and defended by the seven’s giant militaries. The twelfth attempt at a cease fire had held for several days now.

So, a bit of time to try and recover. But when they went through the comm room, Frank would still be there, shifting ever more surely into a bitter black fury, snapping his way through what seemed an endless nightmare of screen diplomacy, talking on and on in an urgent, scornful, biting tone. He was past cajoling anyone into anything, now; it was purely an exertion of will. Trying to move the world without a fulcrum, or with the weakest of fulcrums, his leverage consisting mainly of his old American connections and his current personal standing with a variety of insurrection leaders, both nearly severed by events and the TV blackouts. And both becoming less important daily on Mars itself, as UNOMA and the transnational forces took over town after town. It seemed to Nadia that Frank was now trying to muscle the process along by the sheer force of his anger at his lack of influence. She found she could not stand to be around him; things were bad enough without his black bile.

But with Sax’s help, he got an independent signal to Earth, by contacting Vega and getting the technicians there to transmit messages back and forth. That meant a few hours between transmission and reception, but in a long couple of days after that, he got in five coded exchanges with Secretary of State Wu, and while waiting through the night for return messages, the people on Vega filled the gaps with tapes of Terran news programs that they had not seen. All these reports, when they referred to the Martian situation at all, portrayed the insurrection as a minor disruption caused by criminal elements, prinicipally by escaped prisoners from Korolyov, who had gone on a rampage of senseless property damage, in the process killing great numbers of innocent civilians. Clips of the frozen naked guards outside Korolyov were featured prominently in these reports, as were satellite telephotos of the aquifer outbursts. The most skeptical programs mentioned that these and all other clips from Mars were provided by UNOMA; and some stations in China and the Netherlands even questioned the accuracy of the UNOMA accounts. But they provided no alternative explanation of events, and for the most part, the Terran media disseminated the transnationals’ version of things. When Nadia pointed this out, Frank snorted. “Of course,” he said contemptuously. “Terran news is a transnational.” He turned off the sound.

Behind him Nadia and Yeli leaned forward instinctively on the bamboo couch, as if that might help them to hear the silent clip better. Their two weeks of being cut off from outside news had seemed like a year, and now they watched the screen helplessly, soaking in whatever information they could. Yeli even stood to turn the sound back up, but a view of Frank from the side stopped him; Frank was asleep in his chair, his chin on his chest. When a message from the State Department came in he jerked awake, turned up the sound, stared at the tiny faces on the screen, snapped out a reply in a hoarse rasp. Then he closed his eyes and slept again.

At the end of the second night of the Vega link, he had gotten Secretary Wu to promise to press the UN in New York to restore communications, and halt all police action until the situation could be assessed. Wu was also going to try to get transnational forces ordered back to Earth, though that, Frank noted, would be impossible.

The sun had been up for a couple of hours when Frank sent a final acknowledgment to Vega, and shut down. Yeli was asleep on the floor. Nadia stood up stiffly and went for a walk around the park, taking advantage of the light to have a look around. She had to step over bodies sleeping in the grass, in groups of three or four spooned together for warmth. The Swiss had set up big kitchens, and rows of outhouses lining the city wall; it looked like a construction site, and suddenly she found tears running down her face. On she walked. It was nice to be able to walk around in the open light of day.

Eventually she returned to the city offices. Frank was standing over Maya, who was asleep on a couch. He stared down at her with a blank expression, then looked up bleary-eyed at Nadia. “She’s really out.”

“Everyone’s tired.”

“Hmph. What was it like at Hellas?”

“Under water.”

He shook his head. “Sax must be loving it.”

“That’s what I kept saying. But I think it’s too out of control for him.”

“Ah yes.” He closed his eyes, appeared to sleep for a second or two. “I’m sorry about Arkady.”

“Yes.”

Another silence. “She looks like a girl.”

“A little.” Actually Nadia had never seen Maya look older. They were all pushing eighty, they couldn’t keep the pace, treatments or not. In their minds they were old.

“The folks on Vega told me that Phyllis and the rest of the people on Clarke are going to try to get across to them in an emergency rocket.”

“Aren’t they out of the plane of the ecliptic?”

“They are now, but they’re going to try to push down to Jupiter, and use it to swing back downsystem.”

“That’ll take a year or two, won’t it?”

“About a year. Hopefully they’ll miss entirely, or fall into Jupiter. Or run out of food.”

“I take it you’re not happy with Phyllis.”

“That bitch. She’s responsible for a lot of this. Pulling in all those transnats with promises of every metal ever put to use-she figured she would be queen of Mars with all those folks backing her, you should have seen her up there on Clarke, looking down at the planet like a little tin god. I could have strangled her. How I wish I could have seen her face when Clarke took off and went flying!” He laughed harshly.

Maya stirred at the sound, woke. They pulled her up and went out into the park in search of a meal. They got in a line of people huddled in their walkers, coughing, rubbing their hands together, blowing out plumes of frost like white cotton balls. Very few talked. Frank surveyed the scene with a disgusted look, and when they got their trays of roshti and tabouli he devoured his and began conversing to his wristpad in Arabic. “They say Alex and Evgenia and Samantha are coming up Noctis with some Bedouin friends of mine,” he told them when he shut down.

That was good news; Alex and Evgenia had been heard from last in Aureum Overlook, a rebel bastion that had destroyed a number of orbiting UN ships before being incinerated by missile fire from Phobos. And no one had heard from Samantha the whole month of the war.

So all the first hundred in town went to the north gate of Cairo that afternoon to greet them. Cairo’s north gate looked down a long natural ramp that ran into one of the southernmost canyons of Noctis; the road rose up from the canyon floor on this ramp, and they could see all the way down it to the canyon bottom. There, in the early afternoon, came a rover caravan, churning up a small dust cloud and moving slowly.

It was nearly an hour before the cars rolled up the last part of the ramp. They were no more than three kilometers away when great gouts of flame and ejecta burst into being among them, knocking some rovers into the cliff wall, some over the ramp into space. The rest twisted to a halt, shattered and burning.

Then an explosion rocked the north gate, and they dove for the wall. Cries and shouts over the common band. Nothing more; they stood back up. The fabric of the tent still held, although the gate lock was apparently stuck fast.

Down on the road thin plumes of tan smoke lofted into the air, tattering to the east, pulled back down into Noctis on the dusk wind. Nadia sent a robot rover down to check for survivors. Wristpads crackled with static, nothing but static, and Nadia was thankful for that; what could they have hoped for? Screams? Frank was cursing into his wristpad, switching between Arabic and English. Trying vainly to find out what had happened. But Alexander, Evgenia, Samantha… Nadia looked fearfully at the little images on her wrist, directing the robot cameras with dread. Shattered rovers. Some bodies. Nothing moved. One rover still smoked.

“Where’s Sasha?” Yeli’s voice cried. “Where’s Sasha?”

“She was in the lock,” someone said. “She was going out to greet them.”

They went to work opening the inner lock door, Nadia at the front punching all the codes and then working with tools and finally a shape charge that someone handed to her. They moved back and the lock lock blew out like a crossbow bolt, and then they were there, crowbarring the heavy door back. Nadia rushed in and dropped to her knees by Sasha, who was huddled head-in-jacket, in the emergency posture; but she was dead, the flesh of her face martian red, her eyes frozen.

Feeling that she had to move or else turn to stone on the spot, Nadia broke and ran back to the town cars they had come in. She jumped in one and drove away; she had no plan, and the car seemed to choose the direction. Her friends’ voices cut through the crackle on her wristpad, sounding like crickets in a cage, Maya muttering viciously in Russian, crying, only Maya was tough enough to keep feeling in all of this: “That was Phobos again!” her little voice cried. “They’re psychotic up there!”

The others were in shock, their voices like AIs’. “They’re not psychotic,” Frank said. “It’s perfectly rational. They see a political settlement coming and they’re getting in as many shots as they can.”

“Murderous bastards!” Maya cried. “KGB fascists…”

The town car stopped at the city offices. Nadia ran inside, to the room where she had stashed her stuff, at this point no more than her old blue backpack. She dug in it, still unaware of what she was looking for until her claw hand, still the strong one, reached into a bag and pulled it out. Arkady’s transmitter. Of course. She ran back to the car and drove to the south gate. Sax and Frank were still talking, Sax sounding the same as always, but saying, “Every one of us whose location is known is either here, or else has been killed. I think they’re after the first hundred in particular.”

“Singling us out, you mean?” Frank said.

“I saw some Terran news that said we were the ringleaders. And twenty-one of us have died since the revolt began. Another forty missing.”

The town car arrived at the south gate. Nadia turned off her intercom, got out of the car, went into the lock and put on boots, helmet, gloves. She pumped up and checked out, then slammed the open button and waited for the lock to empty and open. As it had on Sasha. They had lived a lifetime together in just the last month alone. Then it was out onto the surface, into the glare and push of a windy hazy day, feeling the first diamond bite of the cold. She kicked through drifts of fines and red puffs blew out ahead of her. The hollow woman, kicking blood. Out the other gate were the bodies of her friends and others, their dead faces purplish and bloated, as after construction accidents; Nadia had seen several of those now, seen death several times, and each had been a horror-and yet here they were deliberately creating as many of these horrible accidents as they could! That was war; killing people by every means possible. People who might have lived a thousand years. She thought of Arkady and of a thousand years, and hissed. They had quarreled so in recent years, mostly about politics. Your plans are all anachronism, Nadia had said. You don’t understand the world. Ha! he had laughed, offended. This world I understand. With an expression as dark as any she had ever seen from him. And she remembered when he had given her the transmitter, how he had cried for John, how crazy he had been with rage and grief. Just in case, he had said to her refusals, pleading. Just in case.

And now it had happened. She couldn’t believe it. She took the box from her walker’s thigh pocket, turned it over in her hand. Phobos shot up over the western horizon like a gray potato. The sun had just set, and the alpenglow was so strong that it looked like she was standing in her own blood, as if she were a creature as small as a cell standing on the corroded wall of her heart, while around her swept the winds of her own dusty plasma. Rockets were landing at the spaceport north of the city. The dusk mirrors gleamed in the western sky like a cluster of evening stars. A busy sky. UN ships would soon be descending.

Phobos crossed the sky in four and a quarter hours, so she didn’t have to wait long. It had risen as a half moon, but now it was gibbous, almost full, halfway to the zenith, moving at its steady clip across the coagulating sky. She could make out a faint point of light inside the gray disk: the two little domed craters, Semenov and Leveykin. She held the radio transmitter out and tapped in the ignition code, MANGALA. It was like using a TV remote.

And then a bright light flared on the leading edge of the little gray disk. The two faint lights went out. The bright light flared even brighter. Could she really perceive the deceleration? Probably not; but it was there.

Phobos was on its way down.

Back inside Cairo, she found that the news had already spread. The flare had been bright enough to catch peoples’ eyes, and after that they had clumped together around the blank TV screens, by habit, and exchanged rumors and speculation, and somehow the basic fact had gotten around, or been worked out independently. Nadia strolled past group after group, and heard people saying “Phobos has been hit! Phobos has been hit!” And someone laughed, “They brought the Roche limit up to it!”

She thought she was lost in the medina, but almost directly she came to the city offices. Maya was outside: “Hey Nadia!” she cried, “Did you see Phobos?”

“Yes.”

“Roger says when they were up there in year One, they built a system of explosives and rocketry into it! Did Arkady ever tell you about it?”

“Yes.”

They went in to the offices, Maya thinking aloud: “If they manage to slow it down very much, it’ll come down. I wonder if it’ll be possible to calculate where. We’re pretty damn close to the equator right here.”

“It’ll break up, surely, and come down in a lot of places.”

“True. I wonder what Sax thinks.”

They found Sax and Frank bunched before one screen, Yeli and Ann and Simon before another. A UNOMA satellite was tracking Phobos with a telescope, and Sax was measuring the moon’s speed of passage across the martian landscape to get a fix on its velocity. In the image on the screen Stickney’s dome shone like a Faberge egg, but the eye was drawn away from that to the moon’s leading edge, which was blurry and streaked with white flashes of ejecta and gases. “Look how well balanced the thrust is,” Sax said to no one in particular. “Too sudden a thrust and the whole thing would have shattered. And an unbalanced thrust would have set it spinning, and then the thrust would have pushed it all over the place.”

“I see signs of stabilizing lateral thrusts,” his AI said.

“Attitude jets,” Sax said. “They turned Phobos into a big rocket.”

“They did it in the first year,” Nadia said. She wasn’t sure why she was speaking, she still seemed out of control, observing her actions from several seconds behind. “A lot of the Phobos crew was from rocketry and guidance. They processed the ice veins into liquid oxygen and deuterium, and stored it in lined columns buried in the chondrite. The engines and the control complex were buried centrally.”

“So it is a big rocket.” Sax was nodding as he typed. “Period of Phobos, 27, 547 seconds. So it’s going… 2.146 kilometers per second, approximately, and to bring it down it needs to decelerate to… to 1.561 kilometers per second. So,.585 kilometers per second slower. For a mass like Phobos… wow. That’s a lot of fuel.”

“What’s it down to now?” Frank asked. He was black-faced, his jaw muscles pulsing under the skin like little biceps-furious, Nadia saw, at his inability to predict what would happen next.

“About one point seven. And those big thrusters still burning. It’ll come down. But not in one piece. The descent will break it up, I’m sure.”

“The Roche limit?”

“No, just stress from aerobraking, and with all these empty fuel chambers…”

“What happened to the people on it?” Nadia heard herself ask.

“Someone came on and said it sounded like the whole population had bailed out. No one stuck around to try and stop the firing.”

“Good,” Nadia said, sitting down heavily on the couch.

“So when will it come down?” Frank demanded.

Sax blinked. “Impossible to say. Depends on when it breaks up, and how. But pretty soon, I’d guess. Within a day. And then there’ll be a stretch somewhere along the equator, probably a big stretch of it, in big trouble. It’s going to make a fairly large meteor shower.”

“That will clear away some of the elevator cable,” Simon said weakly. He was stitting beside Ann, watching her with concern. She stared at Simon’s screen bleakly, showed no sign of hearing any of them. There never had been word of their son Peter. Was that better or worse than a soot pile, a dot code name coming up on your wristpad? Better, Nadia decided. But still hard.

“Look,” Sax said, “it’s breaking up.”

The satellite telescopic camera gave them an excellent view: the dome over Stickney bursting outward in great shards, the crater pit lines that had always marked Phobos suddely puffing with dust, yawning open; and then the little potato-shaped world blossomed, fell apart into a scattering of irregular chunks. A half a dozen large ones slowly spread out, the largest one leading the way. One chunk flew off to the side, apparently powered still by one of the rockets that had lain buried in the moon’s interior. The rest of the rocks began to spread out in an irregular line, tumbling each at a different speed.

“Well, we’re kind of in the line of fire,” Sax remarked, looking up at the rest of them. “The biggest chunks will hit the upper atmosphere soon, and then it’ll happen pretty quickly.”

“Can you determine where?”

“No, there’s too many unknowns. Along the equator, that’s all. We’re probably far enough south to miss most of it, but there may be quite a scatter effect.”

“People on the equator ought to head north or south,” Maya said.

“They probably know that. Anyway the fall of the cable probably cleared the area pretty effectively already.”

There was little to do but wait. None of them wanted to leave the city and head south, it seemed they were past that kind of effort, too hardened or too tired to worry about longshot risks. Frank paced the room, his swarthy face working with anger; finally he couldn’t stand it, and got back on his screen to send off a sequence of short pungent messages. One came back in, and he snorted. “We’ve got a grace period, because the UN police are afraid to come down here until after the shit falls. After that they’ll be on us like hawks. They’re claiming that the command initiating the Phobos explosions originated here, and they’re tired of a neutral city being used as a command center for the insurrection.”

“So we’ve got until the fall is over,” Sax said.

He clicked into the UNOMA network, and got a radar composite of the fragments. After that there was nothing to do. They sat; they stood and walked around; they looked at the screens; they ate cold pizza; they napped. Nadia did none of these things. She could only manage to sit, hunched over her stomach, which felt like an iron walnut in her. She waited.

Near midnight and the timeslip, something on the screens caught Sax’s attention, and with some furious typing on Frank’s channels he got through to the Olympus Mons observatory. It was just before dawn there, still dark, and one of the observatory cameras gave them its low space view southward, the black curve of the planet blocking the stars. And then there were shooting stars blazing down at an angle out of the western sky, as fast and bright as if they were perfectly straight lightning bolts, or titanic tracer bullets, spraying in a sequence eastward, breaking apart in the last moments before impact, causing phosphor blobs to burst into existence at every impact point, like the first moments of a whole string of nuclear explosions. In less than ten seconds the strike was over, leaving the black field dotted with a line of glowing yellow smoke-obscured patches.

Nadia closed her eyes, saw swimming afterimages of the strike. She opened them again, looked at the screen. Clouds of smoke were surging up into the pre-dawn sky over west Tharsis, pouring so high that they got up out of the shadow of the planet and were lit by the rising sun; they were mushroom clouds, their heads a bright pale pink, their dark gray stalks illuminated by reflection from above. Slowly the sunlight moved down the tumultuous stalks, until they were all burnished by the new morning sun. Then the lofty line of yellow and pink mushroom clouds drifted across a sky that was a delicate shade of indigo pastel: it looked like a Maxfield Parrish nightmare, too strange and beautiful a sight to believe. Nadia thought of the cable’s last moment, that image of the incandescent double helix of diamonds. How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty had no moral dimension? She stared and stared at the image, focused all her will on it; but she could not make it make sense.

“That may be enough particulate matter to trigger another global dust storm,” Sax observed. “Although the net heat addition to the system will surely be considerable.”

“Shut up, Sax,” Maya said.

Frank said, “It’s about our turn to get hit, right?”

Sax nodded.

They left the city offices and went out into the park. Everyone stood facing northwest. It was silent, as if they were performing some religious ritual. It felt completely different than waiting for bombardment by the police. By now it was mid-morning, the sky a dull dusty pink.

Then over the horizon lanced a painfully bright comet; there was a collective indrawn gasp, punctuated by scattered cries. The brilliant white line curved down toward them, then shot over their heads in an instant, disappearing over the eastern horizon. There hadn’t even been time to catch one’s breath as it passed. A moment later the ground trembled slightly under their feet, and the silence was broken by exclamations. To the east a cloud shot up, redefining the height of the sky’s pink dome; it must have plumed twenty thousand meters.

Then another brilliant white blaze crossed the sky overhead, trailing comet tails of fire. Then another, and another, and a whole blazing cluster of them, all crossing the sky and dropping over the eastern horizon, down into great Marineris. Finally the shower stopped, leaving the witnesses in Cairo half-blinded, staggering, afterimages bouncing in their sight. They had been passed over.

“Now comes the UN,” Frank said. “At best.”

“Do you think we ought to…” Maya said. “Do you think we’re…”

“Safe in their hands?” Frank said acidly.

“Maybe we should take to the planes again.”

“In daylight?”

“Well, it might be better than staying here!” she retorted. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to just get lined up against a wall and shot!”

“If they’re UNOMA they won’t do that,” Sax said.

“You can’t be sure,” Maya said. “Everyone on Earth thinks we’re the ringleaders.”

“There aren’t any ringleaders!” Frank said.

“But they want there to be ringleaders,” Nadia said.

This stilled them.

Sax said mildly, “Someone may have decided things will be easier to control without us around.”

More news of impacts in the other hemisphere came in, and Sax settled down before the screens to follow it. Helplessly Ann stood over his right shoulder to observe it as well; these kinds of strikes had happened all the time back in the Noachian, and the chance to see one live was too much for her to pass up, even if it was the result of human agency.

While they watched, Maya continued to urge them to do something-to leave, to hide, whatever, just something. She swore at Sax and Ann both when they didn’t respond. Frank left to see what was happening at the spaceport. Nadia accompanied him to the door of the city offices, afraid that Maya was right, but unwilling to listen anymore. She said good-bye to Frank and stood before the city building, looking at the sky. It was afternoon, and the prevailing westerlies were beginning to sweep down the slope of Tharsis, bringing with them dust from the impacts; it looked like smoke in the sky, as if there were a forest fire on the other side of Tharsis. The light inside Cairo dimmed as the dust clouds obscured the sun, and the tent’s polarization created short rainbows and sundogs, as if the very fabric of the world were unravelling into kaleidscopic parts. Huddled masses, under a burning sky. Nadia shivered. A thicker cloud covered the sun like an eclipse. She went indoors, out of its shadow, back into the offices. Sax was saying, “Very likely to begin another global.”

“I hope it does,” Maya said. She was pacing back and forth like a great cat in a cage. “It will help us escape.”

“Escape where?” Sax asked.

Maya sucked air in through her teeth. “The planes are stocked. We could go back to the Hellespontus Montes, to the habitats there.”

“They’d see us.”

Frank came onto Sax’s screen; he was staring into his wristpad, and the image quivered. “I’m at the west gate with the mayor. There’s a bunch of rovers outside. We’ve locked all the gates because they won’t identify themselves. Apparently they’ve surrounded the city, and are trying to broach the physical plant from the outside. So everyone should get their walkers on, and be ready to go.”

“I told you we should have left!” Maya cried.

“We couldn’t have,” Sax said. “Anyway, our chances may be just as good in some sort of melee. If everyone makes a break for it at once, they might be overwhelmed by numbers. Now look, if anything happens, let’s all meet at the east gate, okay? You go ahead and go. Frank,” he said to the screen, “you should get over there too when you can. I’m going to try some things with the physical plant robots that should keep those people out until dark at least.”

It was now three PM, although it seemed like twilight, as the sky was thick with high, rapidly-moving dust clouds. The forces outside identified themselves as UNOMA police, and demanded to be let in. Frank and Cairo’s mayor asked them for authorization from UN Geneva, and declared a ban on all arms in the city. The forces outside made no reply.

At 4:30 alarms went off all over the city. The tent had been broached, apparently catstrophically, because a sudden wind whipped west through the streets, and pressure sirens went off in every building. The electricity went off; and just that quick it went from a town to a broken shell, full of running figures in walkers and helmets, all of them rushing about, crowding toward the gates, knocked down by gusts of wind or by each other. Windows popped out everywhere, the air was full of clear plastic shrapnel. Nadia, Maya, Ann and Simon and Yeli left the city building, and fought their way through crowds toward the east gate. There was a great crush of people around it because the lock was open, and some people were squeezing through; a deadly situation for anyone who fell underfoot, and if the lock were blocked in any way, it could turn deadly for everyone. And yet it all happened in silence, except for helmet intercoms and some background impacts. The first hundred were tuned to their old band, and over the static and exterior noises Frank’s voice came on. “I’m at the east gate now. Get out of the crush so I can find you.” His voice was low, businesslike. “Hurry up, there’s something happening outside the lock.”

They worked their way out of the crowd, and saw Frank just inside the wall, waving a hand overhead. “Come on,” the distant figure said in their ears. “Don’t be such sheep, there’s no reason to join the toothpaste when the tent’s lost its integrity, we can cut through anywhere we want. Let’s go straight for the planes.”

“I told you,” Maya began, but Frank cut her off: “Shut up, Maya, we couldn’t leave like this until something like this happened, remember?”

It was near sunset now, the sun pouring through a gap between Pavonis and the dust cloud, illuminating the clouds from below in a garish display of violent martian tones, casting a hellish light over the milling scene. And now figures in camoflaged uniforms were pouring in through rents in the tent. There were big spaceport shuttle buses parked outside, with more troops emerging from them.

Sax appeared out of an alley. “I don’t think we’ll be able to get to the planes,” he said.

A figure in walker and helmet appeared out of the murk. “Come on,” it said on their band. “Follow me.”

They stared at this stranger. “Who are you?” Frank demanded.

“Follow me!” The stranger was a small man, and behind his face place they could see a bright ferocious grin. Brown thin face. The man took off into an alley leading to the medina, and Maya was the first to follow. Helmeted people ran everywhere; those without helmets were sprawled on the ground, dead or dying. They could hear sirens through their helmets, very faint and attenuated, and there were soundlike vibrations underfoot, seismic booms of some kind; but other than that all the hectic activity occurred in silence, broken only by the sounds of their own breathing, and their voices in each other’s ears, “Where to?” “Sax are you there?” “He went down that one,” and so forth, a strangely intimate conversation, given the dusky chaos they ran through. Looking around Nadia almost kicked the body of a dead cat, lying in the streetgrass as if asleep.

The man they were following appeared to be humming a tune over their band, an absorbed little bum, bum, ba-dum-dum dum -Peter’s theme from Peter and the Wolf, perhaps. He knew the streets of Cairo well, making turns in medina’s tight warren without a moment’s pause for thought, and leading them to the city wall in less than ten minutes.

At the wall they peered through the warped tenting; outside in the murk, anonymous suited figures were running off alone or in groups of two or three, in a kind of Brownian dispersion onto the south Noctis rim. “Where’s Yeli?” Maya exclaimed suddenly.

No one knew.

Then Frank pointed. “Look!”

Down the road to the east, a number of rovers had appeared out of Noctis Labyrinthus. They were very fast cars of an unfamiliar shape, coming up out of the dusk without headlights.

“Who now?” Sax said. He turned to look at their guide for an answer; but the man was gone, disappeared back into the alleyways.

“Is this still the first hundred’s frequency?” a new voice said.

“Yes!” Frank replied. “Who is this?”

Maya cried, “Isn’t that Michel?”

“Good ear, Maya. Yes, it’s Michel. Look, we’re here to take you away if you want to go. It appears they are systematically eliminating any of the first hundred they can get their hands on. So we thought you would be willing to join us.”

“I think we are all ready to join you,” Frank said. “But how?”

“Well, that’s the tricky part. Did a guide show up and lead you to the wall?”

“Yes!”

“Good. That was Coyote, he’s good at things like that. So, wait there; we will create some diversions elsewhere, and then come right to your section of the wall.”

In only a matter of minutes, though it seemed like an hour, explosions rocked the city. They saw flashes of light to the north, toward the spaceport. Michel came back on: “Shine a headlamp east for just a second.”

Sax put his face to the tent wall and turned on his headlamp, briefly illuminating a cone of smoke-choked air. Visibility had dropped to a hundred meters or less, and seemed to still be diminishing. But Michel’s voice said,

“Contact. Now, cut through the wall and step outside, we’re almost there. We’ll take off again when you’re all in our rover locks, so be prepared. How many are you?”

“Six,” Frank said after a pause.

“Wonderful. We have two cars, so it won’t be too bad. Three of you in each, okay? Get ready, let’s do this fast.”

Sax and Ann cut at the tent fabric with little knives from their wristpad tool kits; they looked like kittens clawing at drapes, but quickly made holes big enough to crawl through, and they all clambered over the waist-high coping, and out onto the smoothed regolith of the wall skirt. Behind them explosions were blowing the physical plant into the sky, illuminating the wrecked city in flashes that cut through the haze like photographic strobes, freezing moments before they disappeared in the murk.

Suddenly the strange rovers they had seen appeared out of the dust and skidded to a halt before them. They yanked open the outer lock doors and piled in, Sax and Ann and Simon in one, Nadia with Maya and Frank in the other, and they were tumbled head over heels when the rover jerked into motion and accelerated away. “Ow!” Maya cried.

“All aboard?” Michel asked.

They called out their names.

“Good. I’m glad we have you!” Michel said. “It’s getting pretty hard. Dmitri and Elena are dead, I just heard. Killed at Echus Overlook.”

In the silence that ensued they could hear the tires, grinding over the gravel of the road.

“These rovers are really fast,” Sax remarked.

“Yes. And great shock absorbers. Made for just this kind of situation, I’m afraid. We’ll have to abandon them once we get down into Noctis; they’re much too visible.”

“You have invisible cars?” Frank asked.

“In a manner of speaking.”

After half of hour of bouncing in the lock they stopped briefly, and transferred into the rovers’ main rooms. And there in one was Michel Duval, white-haired, wrinkled-an old man, gazing at Maya and Nadia and Frank with tears in his eyes. He embraced them one by one, laughing an odd, choked laugh.

“You’re taking us to Hiroko?” Maya said.

“Yes, we will try. But it’s a long way, and conditions are not good. But I think we can do it. Oh, I am so glad we have found you! You don’t know how horrible it has been to look and look, and find only bodies.”

“We know,” Maya said. “We found Arkady, and Sasha was just killed today, and Alex and Edvard and Samantha, and I guess Yeli too, just now…”

“Yes. Well. We will try to make sure there aren’t any more.”

The rover’s TV showed the interior of the following car, where Ann and Simon and Sax were having a similar reunion with Iwao. Their own car’s driver exclaimed at something, and Michel turned to look over his shoulder, out the windshield. They were at the head of one of the many box canyons leading down into Noctis, a rounded canyon end that dropped rapidly away. The road that descended this headwall had followed a artificial ramp which had been built to support it; but now the ramp was gone, blasted away, and the road with it.

“We will have to walk,” Michel said after a while. “We would have had to abandon these cars at the bottom anyway. It’s only about five kilometers. Are your suits fully supplied?”

They refilled their tanks from the rover, and put their helmets back on. Then it was back out through the locks.

When they were all out, they stood staring at each other: the six refugees, Michel and Iwao, and two younger drivers, one man and one woman. The ten of them set off on foot, in darkness, using headlamps only during the tricky climb down the broken-off section of the road ramp. Once back on the road, they turned their headlamps off and strode down the steeply sloping gravel path, falling naturally into the long lope that was the most comfortable pace in this angle of descent. The night was starless, and the wind whistled downcanyon around them, sometimes in gusts so strong that it felt like they were being shoved in the back. It felt like another dust storm was indeed beginning; Sax muttered about equatorial versus global, but it was impossible to tell what it would be. “Let’s hope it goes global,” Michel said. “We can use the cover.”

“I doubt it will,” Sax said.

“What’s our destination?” Nadia asked.

“Well, there is an emergency station in Aureum Chaos.”

So they had to thread the entire length of Valles Marineris-five thousand kilometers! “How will we do it!” Maya cried.

“We have canyon cars,” Michel said briefly. “You’ll see.”

The road was a steep one, and they kept up the fast pace, punishing their joints. Nadia’s right knee began to throb, and her ghost finger itched for the first time in years. She was thirsty, and cold in the old diamond pattern. It got so dusty and dark that they turned on their headlamps; each bobbing cone of yellow light barely reached to the road surface, and glancing back up Nadia thought they looked like a string of deep sea fish, their luminous spots glowing on a great ocean floor. Or like miners in some fluid smoky tunnel. Some part of her began to enjoy the situation; it was a tiny stirring, a sensation mostly physical, but still, the first positive feeling she could remember since finding Arkady. Pleasure like the ghost itching of her lost finger, faint and slightly irritating.

It was still the middle of the night when they came to the bottom of the canyon, a broad U, very common to all the Noctis Labyrinth canyons. Michel approached a boulder, pushed its side with a finger; then lifted a hatch in the boulder’s side. “Get in,” he said.

There were two of these boulder cars, it turned out; big rovers, shelled by a thin layer of actual basalt. “What about their thermal signals?” Sax asked as he ducked into one.

“We direct all the heat into coils, and bury the coils. So there’s no signal to speak of.”

“Good idea.”

The young man who had driven Michel’s fast rover helped them into the new cars. “Let’s get out of here,” he said brusquely, almost shoving them through the outer lock doors. Light from the lock illuminated his face, framed by his helmet: Asian, perhaps twenty-five, he aided the refugees without meeting their eye, appearing disgruntled, disgusted, perhaps frightened. He said to them scornfully, “Next time you have a revolution you’d better try some other way.”