Red Mars(212)

Behind him Nadia and Yeli leaned forward instinctively on the bamboo couch, as if that might help them to hear the silent clip better. Their two weeks of being cut off from outside news had seemed like a year, and now they watched the screen helplessly, soaking in whatever information they could. Yeli even stood to turn the sound back up, but saw that Frank was asleep in his chair, his chin on his chest. When a message from the State Department came in Frank jerked awake, turned up the sound, stared at the tiny faces on the screen, snapped out a reply in a hoarse rasp. Then he closed his eyes and slept again.

At the end of the second night of the Vega link, he had gotten Secretary Wu to promise to press the U.N. in New York to restore communications, and halt all police action until the situation could be assessed. Wu was also going to try to get transnational forces ordered back to Earth, though that, Frank noted, would be impossible.

The sun had been up for a couple of hours when Frank sent a final acknowledgment to Vega, and shut down. Yeli was asleep on the floor. Nadia stood up stiffly and went for a walk around the park, taking advantage of the light to have a look around. She had to step over bodies sleeping in the grass, in groups of three or four spooned together for warmth. The Swiss had set up big kitchens, and rows of outhouses lining the city wall; it looked like a construction site, and suddenly she found tears running down her face. On she walked. It was nice to be able to walk around in the open light of day.

Eventually she returned to the city offices. Frank was standing over Maya, who was asleep on a couch. He stared down at her with a blank expression, then looked up bleary-eyed at Nadia. “She’s really out.”

“Everyone’s tired.”

“Hmph. What was it like at Hellas?”

“Under water.”

He shook his head. “Sax must be loving it.”

“That’s what I kept saying. But I think it’s too out of control for him.”

“Ah yes.” He closed his eyes, appeared to sleep for a second or two. “I’m sorry about Arkady.”

“Yes.”

Another silence. “She looks like a girl.”

“A little.” Actually Nadia had never seen Maya look older. They were all pushing eighty, they couldn’t keep the pace, treatments or not. In their minds they were old.

“The folks on Vega told me that Phyllis and the rest of the people on Clarke are going to try to get across to them in an emergency rocket.”

“Aren’t they out of the plane of the ecliptic?”

“They are now, but they’re going to try to push down to Jupiter, and use it to swing back down-system.”

“That’ll take a year or two, won’t it?”

“About a year. Hopefully they’ll miss entirely, or fall into Jupiter. Or run out of food.”

“I take it you’re not happy with Phyllis.”

“That bitch. She’s responsible for a lot of this. Pulling in all those transnats with promises of every metal ever put to use— she figured she would be queen of Mars with all those folks backing her. You should have seen her up there on Clarke, looking down at the planet like a little tin god. I could have strangled her. How I wish I could have seen her face when Clarke took off and went flying!” He laughed harshly.

Maya stirred at the sound, woke. They pulled her up and went out into the park in search of a meal. They got in a line of people huddled in their walkers, coughing, rubbing their hands together, blowing out plumes of frost like white cotton balls. Very few talked. Frank surveyed the scene with a disgusted look, and when they got their trays of röshti and tabouli he devoured his and began conversing to his wristpad in Arabic. “They say Alex and Evgenia and Samantha are coming up Noctis with some Bedouin friends of mine,” he told them when he shut down.

That was good news. Alex and Evgenia had been heard from last in Aureum Overlook, a rebel bastion that had destroyed a number of orbiting U.N. ships before being incinerated by missile fire from Phobos. And no one had heard from Samantha the whole month of the war.

So all the first hundred in town went to the north gate of Cairo that afternoon to greet them. Cairo’s north gate looked down a long natural ramp that ran into one of the southernmost canyons of Noctis. The road rose up from the canyon floor on this ramp, and they could see all the way down it to the canyon bottom. There, in the early afternoon, came a rover caravan, churning up a small dust cloud and moving slowly.

It was nearly an hour before the cars rolled up the last part of the ramp. They were no more than three kilometers away when great gouts of flame and ejecta burst into being among them, knocking some rovers into the cliff wall, some over the ramp into space. The rest twisted to a halt, shattered and burning.