Maya said, “But these metanationals are squabbling all the time yes?”
“That’s right.”
“The thing to do would be to start a big fight between some of them.”
Art’s eyebrows shot up. “A dangerous plan!”
“For who?”
“For Earth.”
“I don’t give a damn about Earth,” Maya said, tasting the words on her tongue.
“Join the crowd,” Art said ruefully, and she laughed again.
Happily, Jackie’s troop soon left for Sabishii. Maya decided to travel out to the site of the newly discovered aquifer. She took a train counterclockwise around the basin, over Niesten Glacier and south down the great western slope, past the hill town of Montepulciano to a tiny station called Yaonisplatz. From there she drove a little car along a road that followed a mountain valley through the violent ridges of the Hellespontus.The road was no more than a rough cut in the regolith, secured by a fixative, marked by transponders, and obstructed in shadowed places by drifts of dirty hard summer snow. It ran through strange country. From space the Hellespontus had a certain visual and areomorphological coherence, as the ejecta had been thrown back from the basin in concentric rings. But on the surface these rough rings were almost impossible to make out, and what was left was random pilings of rock, stone dropped from the sky chaotically. And the fantastic pressures engendered by the impact had resulted in all manner of bizarre metamorphoses, the most common being giant shattercones, which were conical boulders fractured on every scale by the impact, so that some had faults you could drive into, while others were simply conical rocks on the ground, with microscopic flaws that covered every centimeter of their surfaces, like old china.
Maya drove through this fractured landscape feeling somewhat spooked by the frequent kami stones: shattercones that had landed on their points and stood balanced; others that had had the softer material underneath them eroded away, until they became immense dolmens; giant rows of fangs; tall capped lingam columns, such as the one known as Big Man’s Hardon; crazily stacked strata piles, the most prominent of them called Dishes In the Sink; great walls of columnar basalt, patterned in hexagons; other walls as smooth and gleaming as immense chunks of jasper.
The outermost concentric ring of ejecta was the one that most resembled a conventional mountain range, appearing on this afternoon like something out of the Hindu Kush, bare and huge under galloping clouds. The road crossed this range by means of a high pass between two lumpy peaks. In the windy pass Maya stopped her car and looked back, and saw nothing but ragged mountains, a whole world of them— peaks and ridges all piebald with clouds’ shadows and snow, and here and there the occasional crater ring to give things a truly unearthly look.
Ahead the land dropped to the crater-pocked Noachis Planum, and down there was a camp of mining rovers, drawn up in a circle like a wagon train. Maya drove hard down the rough road to this camp, reaching it in the late afternoon. There she was welcomed by a small contingent of old Bedouin friends, plus Nadia, who was visiting to consult on the drilling rig for the newly discovered aquifer. They all were impressed with this one. “It extends past Proctor Crater, and probably out to Kaiser,” Nadia said. “And it looks like it goes way far south, so far it might be coextensive with the Australis Tholus aquifer. Did you ever establish a northern boundary for that one?”
“I think so,” Maya said, and started tapping at her wristpad to find out. They talked about water through an early dinner, only occasionally pausing to exchange other news. After dinner they sat in Zeyk and Nazik’s rover, and relaxed eating sherbet that Zeyk passed around, while staring into the coals of a little brazier fire on which Zeyk had earlier cooked shish kebab. The talk turned inevitably to the current situation, and Maya said again what she had said to Art— that they should foment trouble between the metanationals back on Earth, if they could.
“That means world war,” Nadia said sharply. “And if the pattern holds, it would be the worst one yet.” She shook her head. “There has to be a better way.”
“It will not take our meddling for it to start,” Zeyk said. “They’re on the spiral down into it now.”
“Do you think so?” Nadia said. “Well, if it happens . . . then we’ll have our chance for a coup here, I guess.”
Zeyk shook his head. “This is their escape hatch. It will take a lot of coercion to make the powerful give up a place like this.”
“There are different kinds of coercion,” Nadia said. “On a planet where the surface is still deadly, we should be able to find some kinds that don’t involve shooting people. There should be a whole new technology for waging war. I’ve talked with Sax about this, and he agrees.”