Blue Mars (5 page)

“Ann!” He stared intently at his own wristpad. “Listen, Mother—I
want you to stop these people!”

“Don’t you Mother me,” she snapped. “I’m trying. Can you tell me
where they are?”

“I sure as hell can. They’ve just broken into the Arsiaview tent.
Moving through—it looks like they’re trying to come up on the Socket from the
south.” Grimly he took a message from someone off-camera. “Right.” He looked
back at her. “Ann, can I patch you into Hastings up on Clarke? If you tell him
you’re trying to stop the Red attack, then he may believe that it’s only a few
extremists, and stay out of it. He’s going to do what he has to to keep the
cable up, and I’m afraid he’s about to kill us all.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

And there he was, a face from the deep past, a time lost to Ann
she would have said; and yet he was instantly familiar, a thin-faced man,
harried, angry, on the edge of snapping. Could anyone have sustained such
enormous pressures for the past hundred years? No. It was just that kind of
time, come back again.

“I’m Ann Clayborne,” she said, and as his face twisted even
further, she added, “I want you to know that the fighting going on down here
does not represent Red party policy.”

Her stomach clamped as she said this, and she tasted chyme at the
back of her throat. But she went on: “It’s the work of a splinter group, called
the Kakaze. They’re the ones who broke the Burroughs dike. We’re trying to shut
them down, and expect to succeed by the end of the day.”

It was the most awful string of lies she had ever said. She felt
like Frank Chalmers had come down and taken over her mouth, she couldn’t stand
the sensation of such words on her tongue. She cut the connection before her
face betrayed what falsehoods she was vomiting. Hastings disappeared without
having said a word, and his face was replaced by Peter’s, who did not know she
was back on-line; she could hear him but his wristpad was facing a wall, “If
they don’t stop on their own we’ll have to do it ourselves, or else UNTA will
and it’ll all go to hell. Get everything ready for a counterattack, I’ll give
the word.”

“Peter!” she said without thinking.

The picture on the little screen swung around, came onto his face.

“You deal with Hastings,” she choked out, barely able to look at
him, traitor that he was. “I’m going for Kasei.”

Arsiaview was the southernmost tent, filled now with smoke, which
snaked overhead in long amorphous lines that revealed the tent’s ventilation
patterns. Alarms were ringing everywhere, loud in the still-thick air, and
shards of clear framework plastic were scattered on the green grass of the
street. Ann stumbled past a body curled just like the figures modeled in ash in
Pompeii. Arsiaview was narrow but long, and it was not obvious where she should
go. The whoosh of rocket launchers led her eastward toward the Socket, the
magnet of the madness—like a monopole, discharging Earth’s insanity onto them.

There might be a plan revealed here; the cable’s defenses seemed
to be capable of handling the Reds’ lightweight missiles, but if the attackers
thoroughly destroyed Sheffield and the Socket, then there would be nothing for
UNTA to come down to, and so it would not matter if the cable remained swinging
overhead. It was a plan that mirrored the one used to deal with Burroughs.

But it was a bad plan. Burroughs was down in the lowlands, where
there was an atmosphere, where people could live outside, at least for a while.
Sheffield was high, and so they were back in the past, back in ‘61 when a
broken tent meant the end for everyone in it exposed to thfe elements. At the
same time most of Sheffield was underground, in many stacked floors against the
wall of the caldera. Undoubtedly most of the population had retreated down
there, and if the fighting tried to follow them it would be impossible, a
nightmare. But up on the surface where fighting was possible, people were
exposed to fire from the cable above. No, it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t even
possible to see what was happening. There were more explosions near the Socket,
static over the intercom, isolated words as the receiver caught bits of other
coded frequencies cycling through: “—taken Arsiaviewpkkkkkk—” “We need the AI
back but I’d say x-axis three two two, y-axis eightpkkkkk—”

Then another barrage of missiles must have been launched at the
cable, for overhead Ann caught sight of an ascending line of brilliant
explosions of light, no sound to them at all; but after that, big black
fragments rained down on the tents around her, crashing through the invisible fabrics
or smashing onto the invisible framework, then falling the last distance onto
the buildings like the dropped masses of wrecked vehicles, loud despite the
thin air and the intervening tents, the ground vibrating and jerking under her
feet. It went on for minutes, with the fragments falling farther outward all
the time, and any second in all those minutes could have brought death down on
her. She stood looking up at the dark sky, and waited it out.

Things stopped falling. She had been holding her breath, and she
breathed. Peter had the Red code, and so she called his number and tapped in a
patch attempt, heard only static. But as she was turning down the volume in her
earphones, she caught some garbled half phrases—Peter, describing Red movements
to green forces, or perhaps even to UNTA. Who could then fire rockets from the
cable defense systems down onto them. Yes, that was Peter’s voice, bits of it
all cut with static. Calling the shots. Then it was only static.

At the base of the elevator brief flashes of explosive light
transformed the lower part of the cable from black to silver, then back to
black again. Every alarm inside Arsiaview began ringing or howling. All the
smoke whipped away toward the east end of the tent. Ann got into a north-south
alley and leaned back against the east wall of a building, flat against
concrete. No windows on the alley. Booms, crashes, wind. Then the silence of
near airlessness.

She got up and wandered through the tent. Where did one go when
people were being killed? Find your friends if you can. If you can tell who
they are.

She collected herself and continued looking for Kasei’s group,
going to where Dao had said they would be, and then trying to think where they
would go next. Outside the city was a possibility; but having come inside they
might try for the next tent to the east, try to take them one by one,
decompress them, force everyone below and then move on. She stayed on the
street paralleling the tent wall, jogging along as fast as she could. She was
in good shape but this was ridiculous, she couldn’t catch her breath, and she
was soaking the inside of her suit with sweat. The street was deserted, eerily
silent and still, so that it was hard to believe she was in the middle of a
battle, and impossible to believe she would ever find the group for which she
was looking.

But there they were. Up ahead, in the streets around one of the
triangular parks—figures in helmets and suits, carrying automatic weapons and
mobile missile launchers, firing at unseen opponents in a building fronted with
chert. The red circles on their arms, Reds—

A blinding flash and she was knocked down. Her ears roared. She
was at the foot of a building, pressed against its polished stone side.
Jaspilite: red jasper and iron oxide, in alternating bands. Pretty. Her back
and bottom and shoulder hurt, and her elbow. But nothing was agonizing. She
could move. She crawled around, looked back to the triangle park. Things were
burning in the wind, the flames little oxygen-starved orange spurts, going out
already. The figures there were cast about like broken dolls, limbs akimbo, in
positions no bones could hold. She got up and ran to the nearest knot of them,
drawn by a familiar gray-haired head that had come free of its helmet. That was
Kasei, only son of John Boone and Hiroko Ai, one side of his jaw bloody, his
eyes open and sightless. He had taken her too seriously. And his opponents not
seriously enough. His pink stone eyetooth lay there exposed by his wound, and
seeing it Ann choked and turned away. The waste. All three of them dead now.

She turned back and crouched, undipped Kasei’s wrist-pad. It was
likely that he had a direct access band to the Kakaze, and when she was back in
the shelter of an obsidian building marred by great white shatterstars, she
tapped in the general call code, and said, “This is Ann Clayborne, calling all
Reds. All Reds. Listen, this is Ann Clayborne. The attack on Sheffield has
failed. Kasei is dead, along with a lot of others. More attacks here won’t
work. They’ll cause the full UNTA security force to come back down onto the
planet again.” She wanted to say how stupid the plan had been in the first
place, but she choked back the words. “Those of you who can, get off the
mountain. Everyone in Sheffield, get back to the west and get out of the city,
and off the mountain. This is Ann Clayborne.”

Several acknowledgments came in, and she half listened to them as
she walked west, back throtfgh Arsiaview toward her rover. She made no attempt
to hide; if she was killed she was killed, but now she didn’t believe it would
happen; she walked under the wings of some dark covering angel, who kept her
from death no matter what happened, forcing her to witness the deaths of all
the people she knew and all the planet she loved. Her fate. Yes; there was Dao
and his crew, all dead right where she had left them, lying in pools of their
own blood. She must have just missed it.

And there, down a broad boulevard with a line of linden trees in
its center, was another knot of bodies—not Reds— they wore green headbands, and
one of them looked like Peter, it was his back—she walked over weak-kneed,
under a compulsion, as in a nightmare, and stood over the body and finally
circled it. But it was not Peter. Some tall young native with shoulders like
Peter’s, poor thing. A man who would have lived a thousand years.

She moved on carelessly. She came to her little rover without
incident, got in and drove to the train terminal at the west end of Sheffield.
There a piste ran down the south slope of Pavonis, into the saddle between
Pavonis and Arsia. Seeing it she conceived a plan, very simple and basic, but
workable because of that. She got on the Kakaze band and made her
recommendations as though they were orders. Run away, disappear. Go down into
South Saddle, then around Arsia on the western slope above the snowline, there
to slip into the upper end of Aganippe Fossa, a long straight canyon that
contained a hidden Red refuge, a cliff dwelling in the northern wall. There
they could hide and hide and start another long underground campaign, against
the new masters of the planet. UNOMA, UNTA, metanat, Dorsa Brevia— they were
all green.

She tried calling Coyote, and was somewhat surprised when he
answered. He was somewhere in Sheffield as well, she could tell; lucky to be
alive no doubt, a bitter furious expression on his cracked face.

Ann told him her plan; he nodded.

“After a time they’ll need to get farther away,” he said.

Ann couldn’t help it: “It was stupid to attack the cable!”

“I know,” Coyote said wearily.

“Didn’t you try to talk them out of it?”

“I did.” His expression grew blacker. “Kasei’s dead?”

“Yes.”

Coyote’s face twisted with grief. “Ah, God. Those bastards.”

Ann had nothing to say. She had not known Kasei well, or liked him
much. Coyote on the other hand had known him from birth, back in Hiroko’s
hidden colony, and from boyhood had taken him along on his furtive expeditions
all over Mars. Now tears coursed down the deep wrinkles on Coyote’s cheeks, and
Ann clenched her teeth.

“Can you get them down to Aganippe?” she asked. “I’ll stay and
deal with the people in east Pavonis.”

Coyote nodded. “I’ll get them down as fast as I can. Meet at west
station.”

“I’ll tell them that.”

“The greens will be mad at you.”

“Fuck the greens.”

Some part of the Kakaze snuck into the west terminal of Sheffield,
in the light of a smoky dull sunset: small groups wearing blackened dirty
walkers, their faces white and frightened, angry, disoriented, in shock.
Wasted. Eventually there were three or four hundred of them, sharing the day’s
bad news. When Coyote slipped in the back, Ann rose and spoke in a voice just
loud enough to carry to all of them, aware as she never had been in her life of
her position as the first Red; of what that meant, now. These people had taken
her seriously and here they were, beaten and lucky to be alive, with dead
friends everywhere in the town east of them.

“A direct assault was a bad idea,” she said, unable to help
herself. “It worked in Burroughs, but that was a different kind of situation.
Here it failed. People who might have lived a thousand years are dead. The
cable wasn’t worth that. We’re going to go into hiding and wait for our next
chance, our next real chance.”

There were hoarse objections to this, angry shouts: “No! No!
Never! Bring down the cable!”

Ann waited them out. Finally she raised a hand, and slowly they
went silent again.

“It could backfire all too easily if we fight the greens now. It
could give the metanats an excuse to come in again. That would be far worse
than dealing with a native government. With Martians we can at least talk. The
environmental part of the Dorsa Brevia agreement gives us some leverage. We’ll
just have to keep working as best we can. Start somewhere else. Do you
understand?”