Red Mars(204)
After that he had turned back, and gone to the edge of the basin to see some of the flooding. The water running down the basin from the north had been black but kept going white, icing over in big segments almost instantaneously, except around Lakefront, where it had bubbled “like water on the stove. Thermodynamics were pretty complex there for a while, but the water cooled the mohole pretty fast, and—”
“Shut up, Sax,” Ann said.
Sax lifted his eyebrows, and went to work improving the plane’s radio receiver.
• • •
They flew on, six of them now, Sasha and Yeli, Ann and Simon, Nadia and Sax: six of the first hundred, gathered together as if by magnetism. There was a lot to talk about that night, and they exchanged stories, information, rumors, speculations. But Sax could add little concrete to the overall picture. He had been cut off from the news just as they had been. Again Nadia shuddered as if at a lost sense, realizing that this was a problem that wasn’t going to go away.
The next morning at sunrise they landed at Bakhuysen’s airstrip, and were met by a dozen people carrying police stun guns. This little crowd kept their gun barrels down, but escorted the six with very little ceremony into the hangar inside the crater wall.
There were more people in the hangar, and the crowd grew all the time. Eventually there were about fifty of them, about thirty of them women. They were perfectly polite, and, when they discovered the travelers’ identities, even friendly. “We just have to make sure who we’re dealing with,” one of them said, a big woman with a strong Yorkshire accent.
“And who are you?” Nadia asked boldly.
“We’re from Korolyov Prime,” she said. “We escaped.”
They took the travelers into their dining hall, and treated them to a big breakfast. When they were all seated, people took up magnesium jugs and reached across the table to pour their neighbors’ apple juice, and their neighbors did likewise, until everyone was served. Then over pancakes the two groups exchanged stories. The Bakhuysen crowd had escaped from Korolyov Prime in the first day of the revolt, and had made their way this far south, with plans to go all the way down to the southern polar region. “That’s a big rebel location,” the Yorkshire woman (who it turned out was really Finnish) told them. “There are these stupendous bench terraces with overhangs, you see, so in effect they’re these long open-sided caves, a couple klicks long most of the time, and quite wide really. Perfect for staying out of satellite view but having a bit of air. A kind of a Cro-Magnon cliff-dweller life they’re setting up down there. Lovely, really.” Apparently these long caves had been famous in Korolyov, and a lot of the prisoners had agreed to rendezvous there if a breakout ever occurred.
“So are you with Arkady?” Nadia asked.
“Who?”
It turned out they were followers of the biologist Schnelling, who from the sound of it had been a kind of red mystic, held in Korolyov with them, where he had died a few years before. He had given wrist lectures that had been very popular on Tharsis, and after his incarceration many of the prisoners in Korolyov had become his students. Apparently he taught them a kind of Martian communalism based on principles of the local biochemistry. The group at Bakhuysen wasn’t very clear about it, but now they were out, and hoping to contact other rebel forces. They had succeeded in establishing contact with a stealthed satellite, programmed to operate in directed microbursts; they had also managed briefly to monitor a channel being used by security forces on Phobos. So they had a little news. Phobos, they said, was being used as a surveillance and attack station by transnational and UNOMA police forces, recently arrived on the latest continuous shuttle. These same forces had control of the elevator, of Pavonis Mons, and of most of the rest of Tharsis; the Olympus Mons observatory had rebelled, but been firestormed from orbit; and transnational security forces had occupied most of the great escarpment, effectively cutting the planet in two. And the war on Earth appeared to be continuing, although they had the impression it was hottest in Africa, Spain, and the U.S.-Mexican border.
They thought it was useless to try going to Pavonis; “They’ll either lock you up or kill you,” as Sonja put it. But when the six travelers decided to try anyway, they were given precise directions to a refuge a night’s flight to the west; it was the Southern Margaritifer weather station, the Bakhuysen people told them. Occupied by Bogdanovists.
Nadia’s heart leaped when she heard that word, she couldn’t help it. But Arkady had a lot of friends and followers, and none of them seemed to know where he was. Still, she found herself unable to sleep that day, her stomach again tied in a knot. That night at sunset she was happy to return to the planes and take off. The rebels in Bakhuysen sent them on their way so laden with hydrazine and gases and freeze-dried food that their planes had a hard time getting off the ground.