“We can if we have to.”
“But I don’t think we do. Just stay low, and be ready to go down.”
“Okay.”
They stood again, bent double, and shuffled cautiously forward. Black dust flew past them with amazing rapidity. Michel’s navigation display lit his faceplate, down in front of his mouth: the first bubble tent was still a kilometer away, and to his astonishment the green numbers of the clock showed 11:15:16—they had been out an hour. The howl of the wind made it hard to hear Maya, even with his intercom right against his ear. Over on the inner bank Coyote and the others, and the Red groups as well, were presumably making their raid on the living quarters—but there was no way of telling. They had to take it on faith that the shocking wind had not halted that part of the action, or slowed it down too much.
It was hard work to shuffle forward doubled over, connected by the telephone cord. On and on it went, until Michel’s thighs burned and his lower back hurt. Finally his navigation display indicated they were very close to the southernmost tent. They could see nothing of it. The wind became stronger than ever, and they crawled the final few hundred meters, over painfully hard bedrock. The clock numerals froze at 12:00:00. Sometime soon thereafter they banged into the concrete coping of the tent’s foundation. “Swiss timing,” Michel whispered. Spencer was expecting them in the timeslip, and they had thought they would have to wait at the wall until it came. He reached up and put a hand gently on the tent’s outermost layer. It was very taut, pulsing in time with the onslaught of air. “Ready?”
“Yes,” Maya said, her voice tight.
Michel took a small air gun from his thigh pocket. He could feel Maya doing the same. The guns were used with a variety of attachments, for everything from driving nails to giving inoculations; now they hoped to use them to break the tough and elastic fabrics of the tent.
They disconnected the phone cord between them, and put their two guns against the taut vibrating invisible wall. With a tap of the elbows they shot together.
Nothing happened. Maya plugged the phone cord back into her wrist. “Maybe well have to slash it.”
“Maybe. Let’s put the two guns together, and try again. This material is strong, but still, with the wind . . .”
They disconnected, got set, tried it again—their arms were jerked over the coping, and they slammed into the concrete wall. A loud boom was followed by a lesser one, then a cascading roar, and a series of explosions. All four layers of the tent were peeling away, between two of the buttresses and maybe all across the south side, which would surely explode the whole thing. Dust was flying among the dimly lit buildings ahead of them. Windows were going dark as buildings lost lights; some appeared to be losing their windows to the sudden depressurization, although this was nowhere near as severe as it once would have been.
“You okay?” Michel said over the intercom. He could heard Maya’s breath sucking through her teeth. “Hurt my arm,” she said. Over the roar of the wind they could hear the high ringing of alarms. “Let’s find Spencer,” she said harshly. She pushed up and was blown violently over the coping, and Michel quickly followed, falling hard inside and rolling into her. “Come on,” she said. They stumbled into the prison city of Mars.
Inside the tent it was chaos. Dust made the air into a kind of black gel, pouring through the street in a fantastically fast torrent, shrieking so that Michel and Maya could just barely hear each other, even when they reconnected their phone line. Decompression had blown out some windows and even a wall, so that the streets were littered with shards of glass and chunks of concrete. They moved side by side, kicking ahead cautiously with every step, hands often touching to confirm positions. “Try your IR heads-up display,” Maya recommended.
Michel turned his on. The infrared display was nightmarish, the blown buildings glowing like green fires.
They came to the large central building that Spencer had said would contain Sax, and found it too was bright green all along one wall. Hopefully there were bulkheads protecting the underground clinic where Spencer had said Sax was being taken; if not their rescue attempt might already have killed their friend. All too possible, Michel judged; the surface floors of the building were wrecked.
And getting down onto the lower floors was going to be a problem. There was presumably a stairwell that functioned as an emergency lock, but it wasn’t going to be easy to locate it. Michel switched to the common band, and eavesdropped on a frantic discussion of trouble across the valley; the tent over the smaller of the two craters on the inner bank had blown away, and there were calls for help. Over the phone Maya-said, “Let’s hide and see if someone comes out.”
They lay down behind a wall and waited, protected somewhat from the wind. Then before them a door banged open, and suited figures rushed down the street and disappeared. When they were gone Maya and Michel went to the door, and entered.
It was a hallway, still depressurized; but its lights were on, and a panel in one wall was lit up with red lights. It was an emergency lock, and quickly they closed the outer door and got the little space repressurized. They stood before the inner door, looking at each other through dusty faceplates. Michel wiped his clear with a glove and shrugged. Back in the rover they had discussed this moment, the crux of the operation; but there hadn’t been all that much they could foresee or plan, and now the moment was here, and the blood was flying in Michel’s veins as if impelled by the wind outside.
They disconnected the phone cord between them, took taser pistols that Coyote had given them from their thigh pockets. Michel hit the door pad, and it opened with a hiss. They were met by three men in suits but without helmets, looking scared. Michel and Maya shot them and they went down, twitching. Thunderbolts from the fingertips indeed.
They dragged the three men into a side room, and shut them in. Michel wondered if they had shot them too many times; cardiac arrhythmias were common when that happened. His body seemed to have expanded until it was constricted by his walker, and he was very hot, and breathing hard, and ferociously jumpy. Maya apparently felt the same, and she led the way down a hall, almost running. The hallway suddenly went dark. Maya turned on her headlamp, and they followed its dusty cone of light to the third door on the right, where Spencer had said Sax would be. It was locked.
Maya took a small explosive charge from her thigh pocket and placed it over the handle and lock, and they went back down the hall several meters. When she blew the charge the door slammed outward, propelled by air bursting out from inside. They ran in and found two men struggling to latch helmets onto their suits; when they saw Michel and Maya one reached for a waist holster while the other went for a desk console, but hampered by the necessity of getting their helmets secured, they accomplished neither of these tasks before the two intruders shot them. The men went down.
Maya went back and closed the door they had come through. They walked down another hall, the final one. They came to the door of another room, and Michel pointed. Maya held out her pistol in both hands, nodded her readiness. Michel kicked the door in and Maya rushed through with Michel close after her. There was a figure in suit and helmet standing by what looked like a surgical gumey, working over the head of a recumbent body. Maya shot the standing figure several times and it crashed down as if struck by fists, then rolled over the floor, contorted by muscular spasms.
They rushed to the man on the gurney. It was Sax, although Michel recognized him by his body rather than his face, which was a deathmask apparition, with two blackened eyes, and a mashed nose between them. He appeared unconscious at best. They worked to detach him from body restraints. There were electrodes stuck to several places on his shaved head, and Michel winced as Maya simply tore them all away. Michel pulled a thin emergency suit from his thigh pocket, and set about pulling it up over Sax’s inert legs and torso, manhandling him in his haste; but Sax didn’t even groan. Maya came back and took an emergency fabric headpiece and small tank out of Michel’s backpack, and they hooked them to Sax?
??s suit, and turned the suit on.
Maya’s hand was clutching Michel’s wrist so hard that he feared the bones would crack. She plugged her phone line back into his wrist. “Is he alive?”
“I think so. Let’s get him out of here, we can find out later.”
“Look what they’ve done to his face, those fascist murderers.”
The person on the floor, a woman, was stirring, and Maya stalked over and kicked her hard in the gut. She leaned over and looked in the faceplate, cursed in a surprised voice. “It’s Phyllis.”
Michel pulled Sax out of the room and down the hall. Maya caught up with them. Someone appeared before them and Maya aimed her gun, but Michel knocked her hand aside—it was Spencer Jackson, he recognized him by the eyes. Spencer spoke, but with their helmets on they couldn’t hear him. He saw that, and shouted: “Thank God you came! They were done with him—they were going to kill him!”
Maya said something in Russian and ran back to the room and threw something inside, then ran back toward them. An explosion shot smoke and debris out of the room, peppering the wall opposite the door.
“No!” Spencer cried. “That was Phyllis!”
“I know,” Maya shouted viciously; but Spencer couldn’t hear her.
“Come on,” Michel insisted, picking up Sax in his arms. He gestured at Spencer to get helmeted. “Let’s go while we can.” No one seemed to hear him, but Spencer got on a helmet, and then helped Michel carry Sax along the hall and up the stairs to the ground floor.
Outside it was louder than ever, and just as black. Objects were rolling along the ground, even flying through the air. Michel took a shot to the faceplate that knocked him down.
After that he was two steps behind everything that happened. Maya plugged a phone jack into Spencer’s wristpad arid hissed orders at both of them, her voice hard and precise. They hauled Sax bodily to the tent wall and over it, and crawled back and forth until they found the iron spool anchoring their Ariadne thread.
It was immediately clear that they could not walk into the wind. They had to crawl on hands and knees, the middle person with Sax draped over his or her back, the other two supporting on each side. They crawled on, following the thread; without it they wouldn’t have had a hope of relocating the rover. With it they could crawl on, straight toward their goal, their hands and knees going numb with the cold. Michel stared down at a black flow of dust and sand under his faceplate. At some point he realized that the faceplate was badly scarred.
They stopped to rest when shifting Sax to the next carrier. When his turn was done Michel knelt, panting and resting his faceplate right on the ground, so that the dust flew over him. He could taste red grit on his tongue, bitter and salty and sulphuric—the taste of Martian fear, of Martian death—or just of his own blood; he couldn’t say. It was too loud to think,’ his neck hurt, there was a ringing in his ears, and red worms in his eyes, the little red people finally coming out of his peripheral vision to dance right in front of him. He felt he was on the verge of blacking out. Once he thought he was going to vomit, which was dangerous in a helmet, and his whole body clenched in the effort to hold it down, a sweaty gross pain in every muscle, every cell of him. After a long struggle the urge passed.
They crawled on. An hour of violent and wordless exertion passed, and then another. Michel’s knees were losing their numbness to sharp stabbing pains, going raw. Sometimes they just lay on the ground, waiting for a particularly maniacal gust to pass. It was striking how even at hurricane speeds the wind came in individual buffets; the wind was not a steady pressure, but a series of shocking blows. They had to lie prone for so long waiting out these hammerstrokes that there was time to get bored, to have one’s mind wander, to doze. It seemed they might be caught out by dawn. But then he saw the shattered numerals of his faceplate clock—it was actually only 3:30 A.M. They crawled on.
And then the thread lifted, and they nosed right into the lock door of the rover, where the Ariadne thread was tied. They cut it free and blindly hauled Sax into the lock, then climbed in wearily after him. They got the outer door closed, and pumped the chamber. The floor of the lock was deep in sand, and fines swirled away from the pump ventilator, staining the overbright air. Blinking, Michel stared into the small faceplate of Sax’s emergency headpiece; it was like looking into a diving mask, and he saw no sign of life.
When the inner door opened, they stripped off helmets and boots and suits, and limped into the rover and closed the door quickly on the dust. Michel’s face was wet, and when he wiped it he discovered it was blood, bright red in the overlit compartment. He had had a bloody nose. Though the lights were bright it was dim in his peripheral vision, and the room was strangely still and silent. Maya had a bad cut across one thigh, and the skin around it was white with frostnip. Spencer seemed exhausted, unhurt but obviously very shaken. He pulled off Sax’s headpiece, gabbling at them as he did. “You can’t just yank people out of those probes, you’re very likely to damage them! You should have waited until I got there, you didn’t know what you were doing!”
“We didn’t know whether you would come,” Maya said. “You were late.”
“Not by much! You didn’t have to panic like that!”
“We didn’t panic!”
“Then why did you just tear him out of there? And why did you kill Phyllis?”
“She was a torturer, a murderer!”
Spencer shook his head violently. “She was just as much a prisoner as Sax.”
“She was not!”
“You don’t know. You killed her just because of how it looked! You’re no better than they are.”
“Fuck that! They’re the ones torturing us! You didn’t stop them and so we had to!”
Cursing in Russian, Maya stalked to one of the drivers’ seats and started the rover. “Send the message to Coyote,” she snapped at Michel.
Michel struggled to recall how to operate the radio. His hand tapped out the release for the bursted message that they had Sax. Then he went back to Sax, who was lying on the couch breathing shallowly. In shock. Patches of his scalp had been shaved. He too had had a bloody nose. Spencer gently wiped it, shaking his head. “They use MRI, and focused ultrasound,” he said dully. “Taking him out like that could have . . .” He shook his head.
Sax’s pulse was weak and irregular. Michel went to work getting the suit off him, watching his own hands move like floating starfish; they were disconnected from his own volition, it was as if he were trying to work a damaged teleoperator. I’ve been stunned, he thought. I’m concussed. He felt nauseated. Spencer and Maya were shouting at each other angrily, really getting furious, and he couldn’t follow why.
“She was a bitch!”
“If people were killed for being bitches you never would have made it off the Ares!”
“Stop it,” he said to them weakly “Both of you.” He did not quite understand what they were saying, but it was clearly a fight, and he knew had to mediate. Maya was incandescent with rage and pain, crying and shouting. Spencer was shouting back, his whole body trembling. Sax was still comatose. I’m going to have to start doing psychotherapy again, Michel thought, and giggled. He navigated his way to a driver’s seat and tried to comprehend the driver’s controls, which pulsed blurrily under the flying black dust outside the windshield. “Drive,” he said desperately to Maya. She was in the seat next to him weeping furiously, both hands clenching the steering wheel. Michel put a hand to her shoulder and she knocked it aside; it flew away as if on a string rather than the end of his arm, and he almost fell out of his chair. “Talk later,” he said. “What’s done is done. Now we have to get home.”
“We have no home,” Maya snarled.
PART 6
—— Tariqat
Big Man came from a big planet He was just as much a visitor to Mars as Paul Bunyan, only passing by when he spotted it and stopped to look around, and he was still there when Paul Bunyan dropped in, and that’s why they had the fight Big Man won that fight, a
s you know. But after Paul Bunyan and his big blue ox Babe were dead, there was no one else around to talk to, and Mars for Big Man was like trying to live on a basketball. So he wandered around for a while tearing things apart, trying to make them fit, and then he gave up and left.
After that, all the bacteria inside Paul Bunyan and his ox Babe left their bodies, and circulated in the warm water lying on the bedrock, deep underground. They ate methane and hydrogen sulfide, and withstood the weight of billions of tons of rock, as if they were living on some neutron planet. Their chromosomes began to break, mutation after mutation, and at the reproduction rate of ten generations per day, it didn’t take long for good old survival of the fittest to make its natural selections. And billions of years passed. And before long there was an entire sub-martian evolutionary history, moving up through the cracks in the regolith and the spaces between sand grains, right up into the cold desert sunshine. All kinds of creatures, the whole spread—but everything was tiny. That’s all there was room for underground, see, and by the time they hit the surface certain patterns were set. And there wasn’t much to encourage growth up there anyway. So a whole chasmoendolithic biosphere developed, in which everything was small. Their whales were the size of first-day tadpoles, their sequoias were like antler lichen, and so on down the line. It was as if the two-magnitude ratio, which always has things on Mars a hundred times bigger than their counterparts on Earth, had finally gone the other way, and piled it on.
And so their evolution produced the little red people. They’re like us—or they look kind of like us when we see them. But that’s because we only ever see them out of the corner of our eyes. If you get a clear look at one you will see that it looks like a very tiny standing salamander, dark red, although the skin apparently does have some chameleon abilities, and they are usually the same color as the rocks they are standing among. If you see one really clearly you’ll notice that its skin resembles plate lichen mixed with sand grains, and its eyes are rubies. It’s fascinating, but don’t get too excited because the truth is you’re not ever going to see one of them that clearly. It’s just too hard. When they hold still we flat can’t see them. We would never see them at all, except that some of them when they get in a mood are so confident that they can freeze and disappear that they will jump around when they’re in your peripheral vision, just to blow your mind. So you see that, but then they stop moving when you turn your eye to look, and you never can spot them again.