Red Mars (75 page)

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 down-system.”

“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
röshti
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 U.N. 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 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 she 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. U.N. 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.

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 people’s 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 Fabergé 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 sitting 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 dotcode 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 burst outward in great shards and the crater pit lines that had always marked Phobos suddenly puffed with dust, yawning open. 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 U.N. 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.”