“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.”
“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. Shooting stars were 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 predawn 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 has 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 from 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 20,000 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 U.N.,” 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 t
he 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 unraveling into kaleidoscopic 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 p.m., 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 U.N. 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 catastrophically, 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, 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 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 camouflaged 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-plate 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, badum-dum dum— Peter’s theme from “Peter and the Wolf,” perhaps. He knew the streets of Cairo well, making turns in the 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 be still 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 individual 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 an 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.