“Jesus, Nadia!”
“Four hours.” She typed in the last command and started up their rover. Angela and Sam followed with a cheer.
“You don’t seem very sorry to leave,” Yeli said to them.
“Hell, it was boring!” Angela said.
“I don’t think that’s going to be much of a problem anymore.”
The evacuation was difficult. A lot of the town’s occupants didn’t want to leave, and there was barely room for them in the rovers at hand. Finally they were all stuffed into one vehicle or another, and off on the transponder road to Burroughs. Lasswitz was empty. Nadia spent an hour trying to contact Phyllis by satellite phone, but the comm channels were disrupted by what sounded like a number of different jamming efforts. Nadia left a message on the satellite itself: “We’re noncombatants in Syrtis Major, trying to stop the Lasswitz aquifer from flooding Burroughs. So leave us alone!” A surrender of sorts.
Nadia and Sasha and Yeli were joined in their rover by Angela and Sam, and they drove up the steep switchbacks of the cliff road, onto the south rim of Arena Canyon. Across from them was the imposing north wall; below to the left lay the town, looking almost normal; but to the right it was clear something was wrong. The water station was broken in the middle by a thick white geyser, which plumed like a broken fire hydrant, and then fell into a jumble of dirty red-white ice blocks. This weird mass shifted even as they watched, briefly exposing black flowing water which frost-steamed madly, white mists pouring out of the black cracks and then whipping down-canyon on the wind. The rock and fines of the Martian surface were so dehydrated that when water splashed onto them they seemed to explode in violent chemical reactions, so when the water ran over dry ground, great clouds of dust fired off into the air and joined the frost steam swirling off the water.
“Sax will be pleased,” Nadia said grimly.
At the appointed hour, four plumes of smoke shot out of the base of the northern wall. For several seconds nothing else happened, and the observers groaned. Then the cliff face jerked, and the rock of the overhang slipped down, slowly and majestically. Thick clouds of smoke shot up from the bottom of the cliff, and then sheets of ejecta shot out, like water from under a calving iceberg. A low roar shook their rover, and Nadia cautiously backed it away from the south rim. Just before a massive cloud of dust cut off their view, they saw the water station covered by the swift tumbling edge of the landslide.
Angela and Sam had been cheering. “How will we tell if it’s worked?” Sasha asked.
“Wait till we can see it again,” Nadia said. “Hopefully the flood downstream will have gone white. No more open water, no more movement.”
Sasha nodded. They sat looking down into the ancient canyon, waiting. Nadia’s mind was mostly blank; the thoughts that did occur to her were bleak. She needed more action like the last few hours’, the kind of intense activity that gave her no time to think; even a moment’s pause and the whole miserable situation crashed back in on her, the wrecked cities, the dead everywhere, Arkady’s disappearance. And no one in control, apparently. No plan to any of it. Police troops were wrecking towns to stop the rebellion, and rebels were wrecking towns to keep the rebellion alive. It would end with everything destroyed, her whole life’s work blown up before her eyes; and for no reason! No reason at all.
She couldn’t afford to think. Down there a landslide had overrun a water station, hopefully, and the water rushing up the well had been blocked and frozen, making a composite dam. After that it was hard to say. If the hydrostatic pressure in the aquifer was high enough, a new breakout might be forced. But if the dam were thick enough. . . Well, nothing to be done about it. Although if they could create some kind of escape valve, to take the pressure off the landslide dam . . .
Slowly the wind tattered the dust away. Her companions cheered; the water station was gone, covered by a fresh black landslide that spilled out from the northern wall, which now had a big new arc in its rim. But it had been a close thing, not anywhere near as big a landslide as she would have hoped. Lasswitz itself was still there, and it appeared that the layer of rock over the water station was not all that thick. The flood seemed to have stopped, it was true; it was motionless, a chunky, dirty white swath, like a glacier running down the middle of the canyon. And there was very little frost steam rising from it. Still . . .
“Let’s go back down to Lasswitz and look at the aquifer monitors,” Nadia said.
They drove back down the canyon-wall road and into Lasswitz’s garage. They walked down the empty streets in walkers and helmets. The aquifer study center was located next to the city offices. It was odd to see their refuge of the last few days empty.
Inside the aquifer center they studied the readouts from the array of underground sensors. A lot of them were no longer functioning, but those that were showed that hydrostatic pressure inside the aquifer was higher than ever before, and increasing. As if to emphasize the point a small temblor shook the ground, vibrating the soles of their boots. None of them had ever felt such a thing on Mars before. “Shit!” Yeli said, “it’s going to blow again for sure!”
“We have to drill a runoff well,” Nadia said. “A kind of pressure valve.”
“But what if it breaks out like the main one?” Sasha asked.
“If we put it at the upper end of the aquifer, or midway so that it takes some flow, it should be fine. Just as good as the old water station, which someone probably blew up, or else it would still be working fine.” She shook her head bitterly. “We have to risk it. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, then maybe we cause an outbreak. But if we don’t do something, it looks like there’ll be an outbreak anyway.”
She led the little group down the main street to the robot warehouse in the garage, and sat down in the command center to begin programming again. A standard drilling operation, with maximum blowout baffling. The water would come to the surface under artesian pressure, and then they would direct it into a pipeline, which they would instruct a robot crew to lay in some direction that would take it out of the Arena Canyon region. She and the others studied topographic maps, and ran simulated floods down several canyons paralleling Arena to north and south. They found that the watershed was huge, everything on Syrtis drained down toward Burroughs, the land was a big bowl here. They would have to pipe the water north for nearly 300 kilometers to get it into the next watershed. “Look,” Yeli said, “released into the Nili Fossae, it will run straight north onto Utopia Planitia, and freeze on the northern dunes.”
“Sax must be loving this revolution,” Nadia said again. “He’s getting stuff they never would have approved.”
“But a lot of his projects must be getting wrecked too,” Yeli pointed out.
“I bet it’s still a net gain, in Sax’s terms. All this water on the surface . . .”
“We’ll have to ask him.”
“If we ever see him again.”
Yeli was silent. Then he said, “Is it that much water, really?”
“It’s not just Lasswitz,” Sam said. “I saw a news bit a while ago— they’ve broken the Lowell aquifer, a big breakout like the ones that cut the outflow channels. It’ll rip billions of kilos of regolith downslope, and I don’t know how much water. It’s unbelievable.”
“But why?” Nadia said.
“It’s the best weapon they have, I guess.”
“Not much of a weapon! They can’t aim it or stop it!”
“No. But neither can anyone else. And think about it— all the towns downslope from Lowell are gone— Franklin, Drexler, Osaka, Galileo, I imagine even Silverton. And all those were transnational towns. A lot of channel mining towns are vulnerable, I should think.”
“So both sides are attacking the infrastructure,” Nadia said dully.
“That’s right.”
She had to work, there was no other choice. She got them going again on robot programming, and they spent the rest of that day and the next getting the robot teams out to the drilling site, and
making sure the start-up went right. The drilling was straightforward; it was only a matter of making sure that pressures in the aquifer didn’t cause a blowout. And the pipeline to transfer the water north was even simpler, an operation that had been fully automated for years; but they doubled up on all the equipment, just to make sure. Up the north canyon roadbed, and on northward from there. No need to include pumps; artesian pressure would regulate the flow quite nicely, because when the pressure dropped low enough to stop pushing water out of the canyon, the danger of a breakout at the lower end would presumably be past. So when the mobile magnesium mills were grinding along, scooping up fines and making pipe, and when the forklifts and frontloaders were taking these pipe segments to the assembler, and when that great moving building was taking in the segments and extruding pipe behind it as it rolled slowly along up the road, and when another mobile behemoth was going over the completed pipe, and wrapping it in aerolattice insulation made from tailings from the refinery; and when the first segment of the pipeline was heated and running— then they declared the system operational, and hoped it would make it 300 kilometers farther. The pipeline would be built at about a kilometer an hour, for twenty-four-and-a-half hours a day; so if all went well, about twelve days to Nili Fossae. At that rate the pipeline would be done very soon after the well was drilled and ready. And if the landslide dam held that long, then they would have their pressure valve.
So Burroughs was safe, or as safe as they could make it by their efforts. They could go. But it was a question what their destination should be. Nadia sat slumped over a microwaved dinner, watching a Terran news show, listening to her companions debate the issue. Horrible how the revolution was being portrayed on Earth: extremists, communists, vandals, saboteurs, reds, terrorists. Never the words rebel or revolutionary, words of which half the Earth (at least) might approve. No, they were isolated groups of insane, destructive terrorists. And it didn’t help Nadia’s mood that there was, she felt, some truth to the description; it only made her angrier.
“We should join whoever we can, and help fight!” Angela said.
“I’m not fighting anyone,” Nadia said mulishly. “It’s stupid. I won’t do it. I’ll fix things where I can, but I won’t fight.”
A message came over the radio. Fournier Crater, about 860 kilometers away, had a cracked dome. The populace was trapped in sealed buildings, and running out of air.
“I want to go there,” Nadia said. “There’s a big central warehouse of construction robots there. They could fix the dome, and then be set to other repairs down on Isidis.”
“How will you get there?” Sam asked.
Nadia thought it over, took a deep breath. “Ultralite, I guess. There’s some of those new 16Ds up on the south-rim airstrip. That would be the fastest way for sure, and maybe even the safest, who knows.” She looked at Yeli and Sasha. “Will you fly with me?”
“Yes,” Yeli said. Sasha nodded.
“We want to come with you,” Angela said. “It’ll be safer with two planes anyway.”
They took two planes that had been built by Spencer’s aeronautic factory in Elysium, the latest things, called simply 16Ds, ultralite delta-winged four-seat turbojets, made mostly of areogel and plastics, dangerous to fly because they were so light. But Yeli was an expert flier and Angela said she was too, so they climbed into two of them the next morning, after spending the night in the empty little airport, and taxied out to the packed dirt runway and took off directly into the sun. It took them a long time to rise to a thousand meters.
The planet below looked deceptively normal, its old harsh face only a bit whiter on the north faces, as if aged by its parasite infestation. But then they flew out over Arena Canyon, and saw running down it a dirty glacier, a river of broken ice blocks. The glacier widened frequently where the flood had pooled for a time. The ice blocks were sometimes pure white, but more often stained one Martian shade or other, then broken and tumbled into a mix, so that the glacier was a shattered mosaic of frozen brick, sulfur, cinnamon, coal, cream, blood. . . spilling down the flat bed of the canyon all the way to the horizon, some seventy-five kilometers away.
Nadia asked Yeli if they could fly north and inspect the land that the robots were going to build the pipeline over. Soon after they turned they received a weak radio message on the first hundred band, from Ann Clayborne and Simon Frazier. They were trapped in Peridier Crater, which had lost its dome. It was to the north also, so they were already on the right course.
The land they crossed that morning appeared negotiable to the robot team; it was flat, and though littered with ejecta, there were no little stopper escarpments. Farther on in this region the Nili Fossae began, very gradually at first, just four very shallow depressions, curving down to the northeast like the fingertips of a faint handprint. A hundred kilometers farther north, however, and they were parallel chasms each 500 meters deep, separated by dark land that had been heavily bashed by craters— a kind of lunar configuration, reminding Nadia of a messy construction site. Farther north still, they got a surprise: where the easternmost canyon debouched onto Utopia, there was another aquifer outbreak. At its upper end it was simply a new slump, a big bowl of land shattered like a broken plate of glass; lower down, patches of frosting black-and-white water surged right out of the broken land, ripping at the new blocks and carrying them away even as they watched, in a steaming flood that caused the land it touched to explode. This shocking wound was at least thirty kilometers across, and ran right over the horizon to the north, with no sign of dissipating.
Nadia stared at the sight and asked Yeli to fly nearer. “I want to avoid the steam,” Yeli said, absorbed in the sight himself. Most of the white frost cloud was blowing east and falling down onto the landscape, but the wind was fitful, and sometimes the thin white veil would rise straight up, obscuring the swath of black water and white ice. The outflow was as big as one of the big Antarctic glaciers, or even bigger. Cutting the red landscape in two.
“That is a hell of a lot of water,” Angela said.
Nadia switched to the first hundred band, and called Ann down in Peridier. “Ann, do you know about this?” She described what they were flying over. “And it’s still running, the ice is moving, and we can see patches of open water, it looks black or sometimes red, you know.”
“Can you hear it?”
“Just sort of like a ventilator hum, and some cracks and pops from the ice, yeah. But we’re pretty loud up here ourselves. Hell of a lot of water!”
“Well,” Ann said, “that aquifer isn’t very big compared to some.”
“How are they breaking them open? Can people really break those open?”
“Some of them,” Ann said. “The ones with hydrostatic pressure greater than lithostatic pressure are in essence lifting the rock up, and it’s the permafrost layer that is forming a kind of dam, an ice dam. If you drilled a well and blew it up, or if you melted it . . .”
“But how?”
“Reactor meltdown.”
Angela whistled.
“But the radiation!” Nadia cried.
“Sure. But have you looked at your counter lately? I figure three or four of them must have gone.”
“Wow!” Angela cried.
“And that’s just so far.” Ann’s voice had that distant, dead tone it took on when she was angry. She answered their questions about the flood very briefly. A flood that big caused extreme pressure fluctuations; bedrock was smashed, then plucked away, and it was all swept downstream in a pulverizing rush, a ripping, gaseous, boulder-filled slurry. “Are you going to come over to Peridier?” she asked when their questions trailed off.
“We’re just turning east now,” Yeli replied. “I wanted to get a visual fix on Crater Fv first.”
“Good idea.”
They flew on. The astounding roil of the flood dropped beneath the horizon, and they flew over the familiar old stone and sand again. Soon Peridier appeared over the horizon ahead, a low, much-eroded crater wall. Its dome
was gone, tattered sheets of the fabric thrown aside, still rolling this way and that over the crater rampart, as if a seed pod had burst. The piste running south reflected the sun like a silver thread. They flew over the arc of the crater wall, and Nadia peered down at the dark buildings through binoculars, cursing in a low Slavic chant. How? Who? Why? There was no way to tell. They flew on to the airstrip out on the far crater rampart. None of the hangars was working, and they had to suit up and drive some little cars over the rim into town.
All the surviving occupants of Peridier were holed up in the physical plant. Nadia and Yeli went through its lock and gave Ann and Simon a hug, and then they were introduced to the others. There were about forty of them, living off emergency supplies, struggling to balance the gas exchange in the sealed buildings. “What happened?” Angela asked them, and they told the story in a kind of Greek chorus, interrupting each other frequently: a single explosion had burst the dome like a balloon, causing an instantaneous decompression that had also blown up many of the town’s buildings. Luckily the physical plant was reinforced, and had withstood the internal pressures of its own air supply; and those inside had survived. Those out on the streets, or in the other buildings, had not.
“Where’s Peter?” Yeli asked, startled and fearful.
“He’s on Clarke,” Simon said quickly. “He called us right after this all began. He’s been trying to get a spot on one of the elevators down, but it’s all police at this point, I guess there were a lot of them in orbit. He’ll get down when he can. It’s safer up there right now anyway, so I’m not in that much of a hurry to see him.”
This made Nadia think of Arkady again. But there was nothing to be done, and quickly she set herself to the task of rebuilding Peridier. She first asked the survivors what their plans were, and when they shrugged, she suggested that they start by setting up a much smaller tent than the dome had been, using tenting material stored in the construction warehouses out at the airport. There were a lot of older robots mothballed out there, and so reconstruction would be possible without too much preliminary tooling. The occupants were enthusiastic; they had not known about the contents of the airport warehouses. Nadia shook her head at this. “It’s in all the records,” she said to Yeli later, “they only had to ask. They just weren’t thinking. They were just watching the TV, watching and waiting.”
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