Blue Mars(14)

So strange to hear such stuff from Saxifrage Russell. But then he shifted again, he seemed to pull himself together. “. . . logical procedure is to establish some kind of equation for conflicting interests.” Just like his old self.

Then there was a beep from her wrist and she cut Sax off, and answered the incoming call. It was Peter, there on the Red coded frequency, a black expression on his face that she had never seen before.

“Ann!” He stared intently at his own wristpad. “Listen, Mother— I want you to stop these people!”

“Don’t you Mother me,” she snapped. “I’m trying. Can you tell me where they are?”

“I sure as hell can. They’ve just broken into the Arsiaview tent. Moving through— it looks like they’re trying to come up on the Socket from the south.” Grimly he took a message from someone off-camera. “Right.” He looked back at her. “Ann, can I patch you into Hastings up on Clarke? If you tell him you’re trying to stop the Red attack, then he may believe that it’s only a few extremists, and stay out of it. He’s going to do what he has to to keep the cable up, and I’m afraid he’s about to kill us all.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

And there he was, a face from the deep past, a time lost to Ann she would have said; and yet he was instantly familiar, a thin-faced man, harried, angry, on the edge of snapping. Could anyone have sustained such enormous pressures for the past hundred years? No. It was just that kind of time, come back again.

“I’m Ann Clayborne,” she said, and as his face twisted even further, she added, “I want you to know that the fighting going on down here does not represent Red party policy.”

Her stomach clamped as she said this, and she tasted chyme at the back of her throat. But she went on: “It’s the work of a splinter group, called the Kakaze. They’re the ones who broke the Burroughs dike. We’re trying to shut them down, and expect to succeed by the end of the day.”

It was the most awful string of lies she had ever said. She felt like Frank Chalmers had come down and taken over her mouth, she couldn’t stand the sensation of such words on her tongue. She cut the connection before her face betrayed what falsehoods she was vomiting. Hastings disappeared without having said a word, and his face was replaced by Peter’s, who did not know she was back on-line; she could hear him but his wristpad was facing a wall, “If they don’t stop on their own we’ll have to do it ourselves, or else UNTA will and it’ll all go to hell. Get everything ready for a counterattack, I’ll give the word.”

“Peter!” she said without thinking.

The picture on the little screen swung around, came onto his face.

“You deal with Hastings,” she choked out, barely able to look at him, traitor that he was. “I’m going for Kasei.”

• • •



Arsiaview was the southernmost tent, filled now with smoke, which snaked overhead in long amorphous lines that revealed the tent’s ventilation patterns. Alarms were ringing everywhere, loud in the still-thick air, and shards of clear framework plastic were scattered on the green grass of the street. Ann stumbled past a body curled just like the figures modeled in ash in Pompeii. Arsiaview was narrow but long, and it was not obvious where she should go. The whoosh of rocket launchers led her eastward toward the Socket, the magnet of the madness— like a monopole, discharging Earth’s insanity onto them.

There might be a plan revealed here; the cable’s defenses seemed to be capable of handling the Reds’ lightweight missiles, but if the attackers thoroughly destroyed Sheffield and the Socket, then there would be nothing for UNTA to come down to, and so it would not matter if the cable remained swinging overhead. It was a plan that mirrored the one used to deal with Burroughs.

But it was a bad plan. Burroughs was down in the lowlands, where there was an atmosphere, where people could live outside, at least for a while. Sheffield was high, and so they were back in the past, back in ‘61 when a broken tent meant the end for everyone in it exposed to the elements. At the same time most of Sheffield was underground, in many stacked floors against the wall of the caldera. Undoubtedly most of the population had retreated down there, and if the fighting tried to follow them it would be impossible, a nightmare. But up on the surface where fighting was possible, people were exposed to fire from the cable above. No, it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t even possible to see what was happening. There were more explosions near the Socket, static over the intercom, isolated words as the receiver caught bits of other coded frequencies cycling through: “— taken Arsiaview pkkkkkk—” “We need the AI back but I’d say x-axis three two two, y-axis eightpkkkkk—”