Red Mars (70 page)

“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 roadbed, 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 pipeline was heated and running— then they declared the system operational, and hoped it would make it 300 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 860 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 16Ds 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.”

T
hey took two planes that had been built by Spencer’s aeronautic factory in Elysium, the latest things, called simply 16Ds, ultralite delta-winged four-seat turbojets, made mostly of areogel 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, 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 500 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 was working, and they had to suit up and drive some little cars over the rim into town.

All the surviving 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. 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 hidden. 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”….