course,” he said contemptuously. “Terran news
Behind him Nadia and Yeli leaned forward instinctively on the bamboo couch, as if that might help them to hear the silent clip better. Their two weeks of being cut off from outside news had seemed like a year, and now they watched the screen helplessly, soaking in whatever information they could. Yeli even stood to turn the sound back up, but saw that Frank was asleep in his chair, his chin on his chest. When a message from the State Department came in Frank jerked awake, turned up the sound, stared at the tiny faces on the screen, snapped out a reply in a hoarse rasp. Then he closed his eyes and slept again.
At the end of the second night of the Vega link, he had gotten Secretary Wu to promise to press the U.N. in New York to restore communications, and halt all police action until the situation could be assessed. Wu was also going to try to get transnational forces ordered back to Earth, though that, Frank noted, would be impossible.
The sun had been up for a couple of hours when Frank sent a final acknowledgment to Vega, and shut down. Yeli was asleep on the floor. Nadia stood up stiffly and went for a walk around the park, taking advantage of the light to have a look around. She had to step over bodies sleeping in the grass, in groups of three or four spooned together for warmth. The Swiss had set up big kitchens, and rows of outhouses lining the city wall; it looked like a construction site, and suddenly she found tears running down her face. On she walked. It was nice to be able to walk around in the open light of day.
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
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
