Green Mars(183)
Maya pursed her lips and looked at Vlad.
“Subarashii and Amexx are increasing the number of Transitional Authority troops,” he said. “We got a message from Hiroko. They’ve bulked up the unit that attacked Zygote into a kind of expeditionary force, and it’s now moving south, between Argyre and Hellas. They don’t seem to know where most of the hidden sanctuaries are, but they’re checking hot spots one by one, and they entered Christianopolis, and took it over as a base of operations. There’s about five hundred of them, heavily armed and protected from orbit. Hiroko says she’s only just barely keeping Coyote and Kasei and Dao from leading the Marsfirst guerrillas in an attack on them. If they find many more sanctuaries the radicals are bound to call for an attack.”
Meaning the wild youngsters of Zygote, Maya thought bitterly. They had brought them up poorly, the ectogenes and that whole sansei generation— almost forty now, and itching for a fight. And Peter and Kasei and the rest of the nisei generation were nearing seventy, and in the ordinary course of things should have long since become the leaders of their world; and yet here they were always in the shadow of their undying parents, and how did that make them feel? How might they act on those feelings? Perhaps some of them were figuring that another revolution would be just the thing to give them their chance. Perhaps the only thing. Revolution was the empire of the young, after all.
The old ones sat around watching the ducks in silence. A somber, dispirited group. “What happened to the Christians?” Maya asked.
“Some went to Hiranyagarbha. The rest stayed.”
If the Transitional Authority forces took over the southern highlands, then the underground might have infiltrated the cities, but to what purpose? Scattered so thinly they couldn’t budge the two world order, based as it was on Earth. Suddenly Maya had the ugly feeling that the whole independence project was no more than a dream, a compensatory fantasy for the decrepit survivors of a losing cause.
“You know why this step-up in security has happened,” she said, glaring at Sax. “Those big sabotages were what did it.”
Sax showed no sign of hearing her.
Vlad said, “It’s too bad we couldn’t have fixed on some sort of plan of action at Dorsa Brevia.”
“Dorsa Brevia,” Maya said scornfully.
“It was a good idea,” Marina said.
“Maybe it was. But without a plan of action, agreed on by all, the constitutional stuff was just—” Maya waved a hand. “Building sandcastles. A game.”
“The notion was that each group would do what it thought best,” Vlad said.
“That was the notion in sixty-one,” Maya pointed out. “And now, if Coyote and the radicals start a guerrilla war and it touches things off, then we’re right back in sixty-one all over again.”
“What do you think we should do?” Ursula asked her curiously.
“We should take over ourselves! We make the plan, we decide what to do. We disseminate it through the underground. If we don’t take responsibility for this, then whatever happens will be our fault.”
“That’s what Arkady tried to do,” Vlad pointed out.
“At least Arkady tried! We should build on what was good in his work!” She laughed shortly. “I never thought I would hear myself say that. But we should work with the Bogdanovists, and then everyone else who will join. We have to take charge! We are the First Hundred, we are the only ones with the authority to pull it off. The Sabishiians will help us, and the Bogdanovists will come along.”
“We need Praxis too,” Vlad said. “Praxis, and the Swiss. It has to be a coup rather than a general war.”
“Praxis wants to help,” Marina said. “But what about the radicals?”
“We have to coerce them,” Maya said. “Cut off their supplies, take away their members—”
“That way leads to civil war,” Ursula objected.
“Well, they must be stopped! If they start a revolt too soon and the metanationals come down on us before we’re ready, then we’re doomed. All these uncoordinated strikes at them ought to stop. They accomplish nothing, they only increase the levels of security and make things more difficult for us. Things like knocking Deimos out of its orbit only make them more aware of our presence, without doing anything else.”
Sax, still observing the ducks, spoke in his odd lilting way: “There are a hundred and fourteen Earth-to-Mars transit ships. Forty-seven objects in Mars obit— Mars orbit. The new Clarke is a fully defended space station. Deimos was available to become the same. A military base. A weapons platform.”