Red Mars

“You know we had nothing to do with Nemesis,” he said. “It is irrelevant.”

“How can you be such a fool!” she cried.

“It is not foolishness. Listen, you tell your masters this— if they try to subdue the free cities here, we will destroy everything on Mars.” That was the Swiss defense.

“Do you think that matters?” She was white-lipped, her tiny image like a primitive fury mask.

“It matters. Look, Phyllis, I’m only the polar cap of this, there’s a massive underground lens that you can’t see. It’s really vast, and they’ve got the means to strike back at you if they want.”

She must have let her arm fall, because the image on his little screen swung wildly, then showed a floor. “You were always a fool,” her disembodied voice said. “Even back on the Ares.”

The connection went dead.

Arkady walked on, the city’s bustle no longer as exhilarating as it had been. If Phyllis were frightened. .

At the physical plant they were busy running a malfunction search. A couple of hours before, oxygen levels in the city had begun to rise, and no warning lights had gone off. A tech had discovered it accidentally.

Half an hour’s work and they found it. A program had been substituted. They replaced it, but Tati Anokhin was not happy. “Look, that had to be sabotage, and there’s still more oxygen than even this accounts for. Look, it’s nearly forty percent out there right now.”

“No wonder everyone is in such a good mood this morning.”

“I’m not. Besides that mood thing is a myth.”

“Are you sure? Go through the programming again, and look at the encryption IDs, and see if there are any other substitutions hidden under this one.”

He headed back to the city offices. He was halfway there when there was a loud pop overhead. He looked up and saw a small hole in the dome. The air suddenly took on an iridescent shimmer, as if they were inside a great soap bubble. A bright flash and a loud boom knocked him to his feet. Struggling back up, he saw everything ignite simultaneously; people were burning like torches; and right before his eyes his arm caught fire.

It was not hard to destroy Martian towns. No harder than breaking a window, or popping a balloon.

Nadia Cherneshevsky discovered this while holed up in the city offices of Lasswitz, a tent town which had been punctured one night just after sunset. All the surviving occupants were now huddled in the city offices or the physical plant. For three days they had spent their time going out to try to repair the tent, and watching TV to try and figure out what was going on. But the Terran news packages were concerned with its own wars, which seemed to be coalescing into one. Only infrequently was there a brief report on the wrecked Martian towns. One said that many domed craters had been hit by missiles from over the horizon, usually in a sequence where oxygen or aerated fuels were introduced and then quickly followed by an ignitor that caused explosions of varying severity— from antipersonnel fires, to blasts that blew the domes off, to really big explosions that in effect re- excavated the crater. Antipersonnel oxygen fires appeared to be the most common; these left the infrastructure intact, for the most part.

Tent towns were simpler still. Most of them had been punctured by Phobos-based lasers; some had had their physical plants targeted by guided cruise missiles; others had been invaded by troops of one kind or another, their spaceports seized, armored rovers crashing through city walls, and in rare cases rocketpack paratroopers descending from above.

Nadia watched the jiggling video images that so clearly revealed the fear of the camera operators, her stomach collapsing to a tight walnut inside her. “What are they doing, testing methods?” she cried.

“I doubt it,” said Yeli Zudov. “It’s probably just a matter of different groups using different methods. Some look like they’re trying to do as little damage as possible, others seem to want to kill as many of us as they can. Make more room for emigration.”

Nadia turned away, sickened. She got up and took off for the kitchen, bent slightly over her collapsed stomach, desperate to do something. In the kitchen they had turned on a generator and were microwaving frozen dinners. She helped hand them out, moving up and down a line of people sitting in the hall outside. Unwashed faces, splashed with black frostnip blisters: some people talked animatedly, others sat like statues, or slept leaning against each other. Most of them had been residents of Lasswitz, but a good number had driven in from tents or hideouts that had been destroyed from space, or attacked by ground forces. “Is stupid,” an old Arab woman was saying to a gnarled little man. “My parents were Red Crescent in Baghdad when the Americans bombed it, if they have the sky is nothing you can do, nothing! We have to surrender. Surrender as soon as possible!”

“But to whom?” the little man asked wearily. “And for whom? And how?”

“To anyone, from everybody, and by radio, of course!” The woman glared at Nadia, who shrugged.

Then her wristpad beeped, and Sasha Yefremov babbled in a tinny wristphone voice. The water station north of town had gone up in an explosion, and the well it had capped was now fountaining in an artesian eruption of water and ice.

“I’ll be right there,” Nadia said, shocked. The town’s water station tapped the lower end of the Lasswitz aquifer, which was a big one. If any significant part of the aquifer broached the surface, the water station and the town and the entire canyon they lay in would disappear in a catastrophic flood— and worse, Burroughs was located only 200 kilometers down the slope of Syrtis and Isidis, and the flood could very conceivably run that far. Burroughs! Its population was far too large to evacuate, especially now that it had become a refuge for people escaping the war; there was simply no other place to go.

“Surrender!” the Arab woman insisted from the hall. “All surrender!”

“I don’t think that will work anymore,” Nadia said, and ran for the building’s lock.

• • •

A part of her was immensely relieved to be able to do something, to stop huddling in a building watching disasters on TV, and do something. And Nadia had platted and overseen the construction of Lasswitz, only six years before, so now she had an idea what to do. The town was a Nicosia-class tent, with the farm and physical plant in separate structures, and the water station well off to the north. All the structures were down on the floor of a big east-west rift called Arena Canyon, the walls of which were nearly vertical and half a kilometer high. The water station was located only a couple hundred meters from the canyon’s north wall, which in that area had an impressive overhang at the top. As Nadia drove with Sasha and Yeli to the water station, she quickly outlined her plan: “I think we can bring down the cliff onto the station, and if we can, the landslide ought to be enough to cap the leak.”

“Won’t the flood just carry the landslide’s rock away?” Sasha asked.

“It will if it’s a full aquifer outbreak, sure. But if we cover it when it’s still just an uncapped well, then the escaping water will freeze in the landslide, and hopefully form a dam heavy enough to hold it. Hydrostatic pressure in this aquifer is only a bit greater than the lithostatic pressure of the rock over it, so the artesian flow isn’t all that high. If it were we’d be dead already.”

She braked the rover. Out the windshield they could see the remains of the water station, under a cloud of thin frost steam. A rover came bouncing full speed toward them, and Nadia flashed their headlights and turned the radio to the common band. It was the water-station crew, a couple named Angela and Sam, rabid with the adventures of the last hour. When they had driven alongside and finished their story, Nadia explained to them what she had in mind. “It could work,” Angela said. “Certainly nothing else will stop it now, it’s really pumping.”

“We’ll have to hurry,” Sam said. “It’s eating the rock at an unbelievable rate.”

“If we don’t cap it,” Angela said with a certain morbid enthusiasm, “it’ll look like when the Atlantic first broke through the Straits of Gibraltar and flooded the Mediterranean basin. That was a waterfall that lasted ten thousand years.”

“I never heard of that one,” Nadia said. “Come on with us to the cliff and help us get the robots going.”

During the ride over she had directed all the town’s construction robots from their hangar to the foot of the north wall, next to the water station; when the two rovers got there, they found a few of the faster robots had