Blue Mars

“Pavonis, A

The present rolled over her like the landslide in her dream. She jerked out of Nadia’s grasp, groped for her shirt. “Wasn’t my rover locked?”

“I broke in.”

“Ah.” A

“They launched missiles at the cable.”

“They did!” Another jolt, further clearing away the fog. “And?”

“It didn’t work. The cable’s defense systems shot them down. They’ve got a lot of hardware up there now, and they’re happy to be able to use it at last. But now the Reds are moving into Sheffield from the west, firing more rockets, and the UN forces on Clarke are bombing the first launch sites, over on Ascraeus, and they’re threatening to bomb every armed force down here. This is just what they wanted. And the Reds think it’s going to be like Burroughs, obviously, they’re trying to force the action. So I came to you. Look, A

“Where are they?” A

“Yes yes.”

“So will you talk to the Reds, will you stop them?”

A sudden fury swept through A

“Maybe so,” Nadia said mulishly. Clearly she didn’t care about that, it was the past and didn’t matter; she waved it aside and would not be swerved from her point: “But will you try?”

A

“I’ll do what I can,” A

It was indeed too late. The rover camp A

“…had to do it,” he was telling her. A

This echoed A

“We’re a minority, A

“I’m not so sure. That’s what we have to work on. And even if we do decide on active resistance, it doesn’t have to be here and now. It doesn’t have to be Martians killing Martians.”

“They’re not Martian.” There was a glint in his eye, his expression was Hiroko-like in its distance from the ordinary world. In that sense he was not like John at all. The worst of both parents; and so they had another prophet, speaking a new language.

“Where are you now?”

“West Sheffield.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Take the Socket, and then bring down the cable. We’re the ones with the weapons and the experience. I don’t think we’ll have much trouble.”

“You didn’t bring it down first try.”

“Too fancy. We’ll just chop it down this time.”

“I thought that wasn’t the way to do it.”

“It’ll work.”

“Kasei, I think we need to negotiate with the greens.”

He shook his head, impatient with her, disgusted that she had lost her nerve when push came to shove. “After the cable is down we’ll negotiate. Look A

“Kasei!”

But he was gone. No one listened to her — not her enemies, not her friends, not her family — though she would have to call Peter. She would have to try Kasei again. She needed to be there in person, to get his attention as she had Nadia’s — yes, it had come to that: to get their attention she had to shout right in their faces.

The possibility of getting blocked around east Pavonis kept her going west from Lastflow, circling counterclockwise as she had the day before, to come on the Red force from its rear, no doubt the best approach anyway. It was about a 150-kilometer drive from Lastflow to the western edge of Sheffield, and as she sped around the summit, just outside the piste, she spent the time trying to call the various forces on the mountain, with no success. Explosive static marked the fight for Sheffield, and memories of ‘61 erupted with these brutal bursts of white noise, frightening her; she drove the rover as fast as it would go, keeping it on the piste’s narrow outside apron to make the ride smoother and faster — a hundred kilometers per hour, then faster — racing, really, to try to stave off the disaster of a civil war — there was a terrible dreamlike quality to it. And especially in that it was too late, too late. In moments like these she was always too late. In the sky over the caldera, starred clouds appeared instantaneously — explosions, without a doubt missiles fired at the cable and shot down in midflight, in white puffs like incompetent fireworks, clustered over Sheffield and peaking in the region of the cable, but puffing into existence all over the vast summit, then drifting off east on the.jet stream. Some of those rockets were getting nailed a long way from their target.

Looking up at the battle overhead she almost drove into the first tent of west Sheffield, which was already punctured. As the town had grown westward new tents had attached to the previous ones like lobes of pillow lava; now the construction moraines outside the latest tent were littered with bits of framework, like shards of glass, and the tent fabric was missing in the remaining soccer-ball shapes. Her rover bounced wildly over a mound of basalt rubble; she braked, drove slowly up to the wall. The vehicle lock doors were stuck shut. She put on her suit and helmet, ducked into the rover’s own lock, left the car. Heart pounding hard, she walked up to the city wall and climbed over it into Sheffield.

The streets were deserted. Glass and bricks and bamboo shards and twisted magnesium beams lay scattered on the streetgrass. At this elevation, tent failure caused flawed buildings to pop like balloons; windows gaped empty and dark, and here and there complete rectangles of unbroken windows lay scattered, like great clear shields. And there was a body, face frosted or dusted. There would be a lot of dead, people weren’t used to thinking about decompression anymore, it was an old settlers’ worry. But not today.