“Look,” Sax said, “it’s breaking up.”
The satellite telescopic camera gave them an excellent view. The dome over Stickney burst outward in great shards and the crater pit lines that had always marked Phobos suddenly puffed with dust, yawning open. Then the little potato-shaped world blossomed, fell apart into a scattering of irregular chunks. A half a dozen large ones slowly spread out, the largest one leading the way. One chunk flew off to the side, apparently powered still by one of the rockets that had lain buried in the moon’s interior. The rest of the rocks began to spread out in an irregular line, tumbling each at a different speed.
“Well, we’re kind of in the line of fire,” Sax remarked, looking up at the rest of them. “The biggest chunks will hit the upper atmosphere soon, and then it’ll happen pretty quickly.”
“Can you determine where?”
“No, there’s too many unknowns. Along the equator, that’s all. We’re probably far enough south to miss most of it, but there may be quite a scatter effect.”
“People on the equator ought to head north or south,” Maya said.
“They probably know that. Anyway the fall of the cable probably cleared the area pretty effectively already.”
There was little to do but wait. None of them wanted to leave the city and head south, it seemed they were past that kind of effort, too hardened or too tired to worry about longshot risks. Frank paced the room, his swarthy face working with anger; finally he couldn’t stand it, and got back on his screen to send off a sequence of short pungent messages. One came back in, and he snorted. “We’ve got a grace period, because the U.N. police are afraid to come down here until after the shit falls. After that they’ll be on us like hawks. They’re claiming that the command initiating the Phobos explosions originated here, and they’re tired of a neutral city being used as a command center for the insurrection.”
“So we’ve got until the fall is over,” Sax said.
He clicked into the UNOMA network, and got a radar composite of the fragments. After that there was nothing to do. They sat; they stood and walked around; they looked at the screens; they ate cold pizza; they napped. Nadia did none of these things. She could only manage to sit, hunched over her stomach, which felt like an iron walnut in her. She waited.
Near midnight and the timeslip, something on the screens caught Sax’s attention, and with some furious typing on Frank’s channels he got through to the Olympus Mons observatory. It was just before dawn there, still dark, and one of the observatory cameras gave them its low space view southward, the black curve of the planet blocking the stars. Shooting stars were blazing down at an angle out of the western sky, as fast and bright as if they were perfectly straight lightning bolts, or titanic tracer bullets, spraying in a sequence eastward, breaking apart in the last moments before impact, causing phosphor blobs to burst into existence at every impact point, like the first moments of a whole string of nuclear explosions. In less than ten seconds the strike was over, leaving the black field dotted with a line of glowing yellow smoke-obscured patches.
Nadia closed her eyes, saw swimming afterimages of the strike. She opened them again, looked at the screen. Clouds of smoke were surging up into the predawn sky over west Tharsis, pouring so high that they got up out of the shadow of the planet and were lit by the rising sun; they were mushroom clouds, their heads a bright pale pink, their dark gray stalks illuminated by reflection from above. Slowly the sunlight moved down the tumultuous stalks, until they were all burnished by the new morning sun. Then the lofty line of yellow and pink mushroom clouds drifted across a sky that was a delicate shade of indigo pastel: it looked like a Maxfield Parrish nightmare, too strange and beautiful a sight to believe. Nadia thought of the cable’s last moment, that image of the incandescent double helix of diamonds. How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension? She stared and stared at the image, focused all her will on it; but she could not make it make sense.
“That may be enough particulate matter to trigger another global dust storm,” Sax observed. “Although the net heat addition to the system will surely be considerable.”
“Shut up, Sax,” Maya said.
Frank said, “It’s about our turn to get hit, right?”
Sax nodded.
They left the city offices and went out into the park. Everyone stood facing northwest. It was silent, as if they were performing some religious ritual. It felt completely different from waiting for bombardment by the police. By now it was mid-morning, the sky a dull dusty pink.