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.
Ann kept walking east. “Look for Kasei or Dao or Marion or Peter,” she said to her wrist again and again. But no one replied.
She followed a narrow street just inside the southern wall of the tent. Harsh sunlight, sharp-edged black shadows. Some buildings had held, their windows in place, their lights on inside. No one to be seen in them, of course. Ahead the cable was just visible, a black vertical stroke rising into the sky out of east Sheffield, like a geometric line become visible in their reality.
The Red emergency band was a signal transmitted in a rapidly varying wavelength, synchronized for everyone who had the current encryption. This system cut through some kinds of radio jamming very well; nevertheless Ann was surprised when a crow voice cawed from her wrist, “Ann, it’s Dao. Up here.”
He was actually in sight, waving at her from a doorway into a building’s little emergency lock. He and a group of some twenty people were working with a trio of mobile rocket launchers out in the street. Ann ran over to them, ducked into the doorway beside Dao. “This has to stop!” she cried.
Dao looked surprised. “We’ve almost got the Socket.”
“But what then?”
“Talk to Kasei about that. He’s up ahead, going for Arsiaview.”
One of their rockets whooshed away, its noise faint in the thin air. Dao was back at it. Ann ran forward up the street, keeping as close as she could to the buildings siding it. It was obviously dangerous, but at that moment she didn’t care if she was killed or not, so she had no fear. Peter was somewhere in Sheffield, in command of the green revolutionaries who had been there from the beginning. These people had been efficient enough to keep the UNTA security forces trapped on the cable and up on Clarke, so they were by no means the hapless pacifistic young native street demonstrators that Kasei and Dao seemed to have assumed they were. Her spiritual children, mounting an attack on her only actual child, in complete confidence that they had her blessing. As once they had. But now—
She struggled to keep running, her breath hard and ragged, the sweat beginning to flood through all over her skin. She hurried to the south tent wall, where she came on a little fleet of Red boulder cars, Turtle Rocks from the Acheron car manufactory. But no one inside them answered her calls, and when she looked closer she saw that their rock roofs were punctured by holes at their fronts, where the windshields would have been, underneath the rock overhang. Anyone inside them was dead. She ran on eastward, staying against the tent wall, heedless of debris underfoot, feeling a rising panic. She was aware that a single shot from anyone could kill her, but she had to find Kasei. She tried again over the wrist.
While she was at it, a call came in to her. It was Sax.
“It isn’t logical to connect the fate of the elevator with terraforming goals,” he was saying, as if he was speaking to more people than just her. “The cable could be tethered to quite a cold planet.”
It was the usual Sax, the all-too-Sax: but then he must have noticed she was on, because he stared owlishly into his wrist’s little camera and said, “Listen Ann, we can take history by the arm and break it—make it. Make it new.”
Her old Sax would never have said that. Nor chattered on at her, clearly distraught, pleading, visibly nerve-racked; one of the most frightening sights she had ever seen, actually: “They love you, Ann. It’s that that can save us. Emotional histories are the true histories. Watersheds of desire and devolution—devotion. You’re the— the personification of certain values— for the natives. You can’t escape that. You have to act with that. I did it in Da Vinci, and it proved— helpful. Now it’s your turn. You must. You must— Ann— just this once you must join us all. Hang together or hang separately. Use your iconic value.”