Further out was a kind of ring, blurred, expanding rapidly: superheated air, he supposed, driving the ubiquitous Martian dust before it. And, behind that sweeping band, no sign of humanity was left, no settlements visible, no lights, no roads. Overwhelmed already.
‘I think we may have trouble appreciating the scale of this,’ Grantt said tightly, listening to feeds of his own. ‘The apparent slowness is a clue. That central magma pool is already a hundred kilometres across. Much bigger than the crater in Hellas. A lot more energy being delivered. And that atmospheric shock wave, that looks like it’s crawling, is spreading at the speed of sound. This is big . . .’
The ground shuddered and flexed under Poole’s feet. He felt, as much as heard, a deep groan, as if the bedrock itself were being twisted and torn.
Jack Grantt reflexively grabbed his arm.
Poole, deliberately keeping calm, tried to figure the numbers. He was a thousand kilometres from the groundfall of that cherry-red beam; seismic waves propagated at a few kilometres per second . . . Only minutes since the strike, and the first effects were already here. And, in a few more minutes, they would be felt all across the planet.
Now came fear. A deep, phobic reaction. He had spent much of his life in space but he had been born and raised on planets, on Earth and Moon. Worlds weren’t meant to buck and tremble like a ship with a badly tuned GUTengine. This was real, not just some light show, a distant, theoretical spectacle. The attack had reached out already and touched him.
There was a ferocious crack, loud in the thin air.
‘The hotel,’ Grantt said. ‘Those glass walls—’
‘Go.’
Out of instinct, Poole and Grantt ran, side by side, supporting each other, away from the building, Poole clumsy in the low Martian gravity, Grantt more efficient, faster once he hit his stride. The ground shook harder, making them stumble.
After maybe fifty metres Poole, still running, looked back. He saw that the big glass bubble of the lobby’s wall had already cracked clean in two; shards were wheeling out in the Martian air. The roof of the lobby was sagging too. Poole saw bots rolling through the debris, patiently, as if preparing to begin the operation of sweeping up, despite the greater drama unfolding all around them.
Again the ground shook, still more violently. And again.
They ran on.
Poole gasped out, ‘Tell me what’s happening, Emry.’
‘I’ve got softscreens full of numbers here. Projections. I’m trying to abstract what it all means.
‘The Xeelee and its drones are just pouring energy down into Mars. From each of the vertices of the tetrahedron. Nobody knows how this is being done. Some of the police experts suggest it is something like a gravity-wave laser. Or even an antigravity laser, something that rips you apart from within.
‘But what’s important isn’t the how but the how much. The numbers . . . Even the comparisons are extraordinary. It’s as if Mars is suffering a dinosaur-killer comet strike, a Chicxulub, every hour. Or, a better comparison – those Probe strikes that did so much damage, on Mars and Earth and the Moon? Forty of those every second. And it just keeps hammering down. It’s like an asteroid fall that won’t stop.
‘At the Tharsis site, an initial crater maybe a hundred kilometres across has already been obliterated, the rim walls dissolved, by a kind of spreading magma pool. From space it looks like a skin cancer, a blight. All that energy is blasting rock to liquid, even vapour – a hundred trillion tonnes of it at each groundfall so far, most of it being sucked up into the stratosphere along the lines of the beams. What else? Earthquakes. Seismic waves from the big shocks being inflicted on the bedrock, felt all over the planet already . . .’
Poole looked up. A shadow was crossing the sky, like a very high altitude cloud bank. Could that really be rock from Tharsis – the substance of ancient volcanoes pulverised and hurled out to the edge of space? He thought he could see the crackle of lightning.
‘Why?’ Grantt asked suddenly. ‘Why? Where is this going to end? What in Lethe does the Xeelee want? I’m an evolutionary biologist. I ought to be able to understand this. Maybe it is simply impossible for two tool-wielding, technological intelligences to coexist. One must inevitably displace the other . . .’
‘Jack, come on, focus. Where’s your rover?’
Grantt seemed to make a positive effort to think. He pointed, then led the way. ‘Parked up at the city limit. Half a kilometre that way. We’ll get organised,’ he said grimly, as he walked, still distracted. ‘We Martians, I mean. We’re tough. They’ll already be designating refuges, gathering points. Evacuation stations, even.’
Poole said, ‘My father will see that your people get all the help there is. But it’s one step at a time. Jack. Stay with me. The rover—’
‘This way.’
When they got to the rover, they scrambled into its interior, slamming closed the airlock hatch.
It was a huge relief just to be in shelter. They opened their suits and gulped down water. Yet still Poole could feel the ground shake, through the vehicle’s suspension.
There was fresh data, downloaded by Nicola.
She had found images of the damage being done at the south pole strike site. There, so much energy had been injected into the ancient landscape that the ice was melting, already, the whole kilometres-thick polar cap, a grand disaster spanning a thousand kilometres, those strange wind-scoured spiral valleys softening and slumping. Poole checked the time. It was less than an hour since the planetbuster beams had first touched Mars.
Nicola broke through their appalled silence. ‘So, you two had enough of goofing off, and ready for some work?’
They looked at each other, and grinned. ‘Patch us in, Nicola.’
Grantt quickly reported their own position and the rover’s capabilities to the Kahra authorities, offering their service. In the last months, as the Xeelee had approached, preparations for an attack on the planet had been made as best they could be, including the establishment of an emergency command hierarchy with local controllers drawn from the Federal Police, and from ‘Steward’ Harry Poole’s new UN-peacekeeper army, stationed in each province. Already the Kahra commander was briskly ordering checks on outlying communities, settlements, even stranded travellers, the intention being to bring them into the more robust shelter of the city itself. It was a good start, although, Poole thought, the closeness of the planetbuster beam track to the Olympus space elevator was going to complicate the scheme.
Poole admired Grantt’s focus now. With an immediate crisis to deal with, he didn’t mention his family, or indeed the Lattice, once.
Within a few minutes the Kahra command centre gave them a destination, a young family that had got split up, half of them stuck in a low-tech habitat about twenty kilometres from the city. Emergency response required.
With Grantt navigating, they rolled that way and went to work.
Two hours after the planetbuster beams touched down, the dust storm hit.
The storm was a world-girdling wall that came from the direction of Tharsis, rushing from the planetbuster strike at the speed of sound in Martian air. The debris of a billion years, driven in supersonic winds. Such winds were being experienced across the planet now, driven by the unending storms at the four energy-injecting strike points.
It caught Poole and Grantt outside the rover, on their second call-out, as they were making for another small, isolated settlement. Dust, and bits of rock that pounded at their skinsuits like bullets. Suddenly Poole couldn’t see, couldn’t hear for the battering of the dust on his faceplate and hood; even his link to Nicola was cut off.
But Jack Grantt was still here, waving his hands in the murk. Poole grabbed his arms. Clinging together, moving by memory as much as by sight, they made their way towards the shadowed bulk of the settlement’s domes.
They got the inhabitants back to the relati
ve safety of Kahra. Then they responded to another call, and went out again. And then another. As long as the calls kept coming.
50
At the start of the second day Jack Grantt floated the idea of going to Cydonia, to do what they could to help co-ordinate the evacuation there. Though his own family had long been evacuated Grantt had grown increasingly anxious about the fate of friends, colleagues, students in the region.
So they travelled to Cydonia, by flitter, through a continuing global dust storm.
Cydonia, a glass dome over a forest of towers, was Mars’s second largest community after Kahra, with two million residents before the Xeelee came. That number included a wide hinterland of smaller settlements, with a population who more or less depended on the central city for facilities such as medical care and manufacturing – and including Jack Grantt himself, who in normal times was to be found in his laboratory-base out in the wild country.
Poole and Grantt connected with the local relief efforts, and immediately got to work. But Poole, distracted, couldn’t help but obsess about the numbers.
Two million people, then, in Cydonia. Ten million on Mars in total. Just a day after the planetbusters had come down – the Cage, as the commentators had started calling the Xeelee’s lethal tetrahedral trap – it had become horribly clear to Poole that they would all have to be evacuated, taken off the planet: all the Martians, from Kahra, Hellas, Cydonia, everywhere. Because the Xeelee wasn’t about to let up.
And Poole, consulting with Grantt and others, was getting a pretty clear idea of how much time they had left to achieve that evacuation. At the planetbuster touchdown points the surface bedrock and crust had already been melted all the way down to the molten mantle fifty kilometres below, so that, surrounding the vertical beams, lakes of magma, liquid rock, started spreading ever wider.
Given the energetics of the planetbusters, it was estimated it would take just thirty-one days after the Xeelee’s arrival from orbit to have injected, in theory, enough energy to enlarge those lakes to a thousand kilometres wide. Ultimately, after a few years of this, the crust would be melted entirely. Of course it wouldn’t be a smooth process; Poole imagined volcanism, earthquakes, islands of dissolving granite in a spreading magma ocean . . .
Whatever the detail, whatever the Xeelee’s ultimate intention for Mars, the Stewardship analysts were saying now that they couldn’t see how any part of the planet could remain habitable after a year, maybe less.
A year, then, to save the population of a world.
Already a heroic effort had begun. People, families, were lifted by flitters and commandeered cargo ships directly to orbit and then beyond. Or they were shipped by surface roads and monorails and even stately tourist airships to the foot of the Olympus space elevator, to be crammed into squalid compartments for dangerously hasty ascents to orbit.
But the elevator itself was a mere few hundred kilometres from the groundfall of a Xeelee planetbuster beam. The whole planet shook now with seismic waves, a response to the apocalyptic energies being poured into it at the groundfall locations. Passengers on the elevator said you could feel the cable sway, as you inched your way to space.
And all of this, the system working at its maximum capacity, seemed to represent only a trickle when measured against these crowds of people who needed to be saved. Poole was an engineer of interplanetary technology, and he was used to dealing with big numbers. Yet the sheer logistical, human, psychological complexity of shifting ten million baffled him. He worked, and worked. But his deeper mind churned too. How in Lethe could everybody be saved in time?
In another corner of his crowded mind, he kept obsessing over how his father’s ploy, to lure the Xeelee to Mars, had worked out. He put in more calls, demanding that Harry meet him, in person or the nearest thing to it.
And during that second day, during his breaks, in an overtired mind fizzing with ideas, an evacuation scheme started to coalesce.
He and Grantt had more immediate assignments. But when he next got a break Poole took steps to put his plan, such as it was, in motion. He made calls to the Poole Industries shipyards at Jupiter, and ordered a trial GUTship called the Carnot to be flown in to Mars, with a few modifications made on the way . . .
On the third day a report came down from Nicola that a barrage of Xeelee Probes, launched from the Cache and having crossed space with virtually no human resistance, had destroyed the moon Phobos. Three human casualties, many artificial sentiences lost. Jack Grantt’s family, though, were all long gone, to comparative safety. But the Tangle, the warship graving yard, was lost. It had just got that bit harder to fight back.
And Mars now had a ring, like Saturn.
Poole was barely distracted by this event, stupendous as it was in its own right, so immersed was he by now in the details of his own planning.
Then, on the fourth day after the arrival of the Xeelee at Mars, Poole got a personal distress call, from his own mother. She was on the scene of a collapse under Green Town Plaza, near Cydonia’s Illinois Tower – somehow he wasn’t surprised to discover Muriel had a presence here. And she’d found some trapped children. Nobody was going to die soon. But, she said, there was nobody around to help. Nobody physical.
So Poole got his gear together, and found Jack Grantt.
‘I’ll go myself. Nobody else to handle it.’
‘I’ll log it. Come back safe.’
51
In a battered rover, Poole soon found the location: a broken-open dome, already evacuated.
He released a swarm of rescue bots to find the survivors, put up a temporary airtight shelter, and do the heavy digging.
The bots found the trapped party within minutes. Poole closed up his suit, gathered his gear and walked to the site.
Soon Poole found himself looking down, through the dome’s smashed, glass-strewn plaza, into a cracked-open bunker. He saw rooms dug out of the subsurface rock, separated by narrow partition walls, cluttered with rubble from a caved-in ceiling.
In the early days of both waves of Martian colonisation in the past, this kind of subterranean habitat had been a common building strategy. Mars’s atmosphere was so thin it offered little effective protection from cosmic radiation or the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. So early pioneers, lacking the advanced materials that would later make soaring structures like the Cydonia dome possible, had erected pressurised domes that they’d covered with heaped-up Martian dirt – or, as in this case, they’d just dug down into the ground itself, through layers of compacted, loosely cemented dust, maybe all the way down to impact-shattered bedrock. Thus, a protective cavern – and you found that you’d come all the way to Mars, to a new world, to live in a hole in the ground. But then, Mars never had been as welcoming as the dreamers of the Discovery era had hoped.
So he was looking into a bit of history here: a chamber that had once been a home, then maybe a storm shelter, then a storage cellar, until it was abandoned and probably forgotten entirely. But there was no time for archaeology now – and, perhaps, on Mars at least, there never would be again.
All that mattered for Poole now was the fact that, gathered there, maybe three, four metres down on the floor of the largest room, was a little huddle of children. And a single adult, an unreal figure, hovering over them. Angelic. It was, of course, Muriel, his mother.
She smiled up at him, radiating calm.
‘Good to see you, Mother. But your projection is slipping.’
Subtle details: the shadows on her ageless face were wrong, as if she was illuminated by some invisible light source; her clothing, though a practical jumpsuit, was far too clean, unblemished. And, worst of all, she hovered maybe ten centimetres off the ground, and that was the detail at which the children kept staring.
‘Not my fault,’ Muriel said with a sigh. ‘I keep sending back diagnostics, but the capacity for Virtual projection, like everything else on this wre
tched world, is being used to the maximum, even while the technological infrastructure to sustain it is collapsing . . .’
‘You’ll do. How many do we have here?’
‘Just three. Two boys and a girl. Siblings. Family name of Thomas. They got separated from their parents, everything was in a rush.’
One of the children spoke up. ‘There was an earthquake and the floor fell in and we fell in the cave and Robert hurt his leg.’
Muriel looked up. ‘That’s Timothy. He’s the oldest. You’re in charge, aren’t you, Timothy?’
‘Until Mom gets back.’
‘Until then, yes. Doing a great job. And we have Alice down here, she’s the youngest, and then we have Robert, the middle one. He has indeed hurt his leg.’ She looked at Poole. ‘Mars-born.’
He understood the implication: Martians were tall, lightly built, strong and wiry, but often with comparatively brittle bones. Probably a leg-break, then.
‘Now, I don’t think it’s too bad and I showed Timothy how to improvise a rough splint, so it’s stabilised. Alice helped a lot.’
Brave kids, Poole thought. Muriel would be full of advice but obviously she couldn’t actually touch any of the children; Timothy and Alice must have had to set their brother’s leg themselves.
‘We know everybody’s very busy, but—’
‘But Robert needs to get to the doctor. OK. Just stay there.’
He had a good look around before he went any deeper.
The collapsed roof of the bunker had created a crumbled debris ramp – steep, but with plenty of ledges and protruding chunks. Not impossible for an adult to climb down, and back up again, Poole thought. And especially not for one with Earthborn muscles. Plus he had the right gear. Like everybody else involved in the rescue and evacuation operations going on across Mars, Poole had a basic kit in a pack attached to his skinsuit: medical stuff, a flashlight, a couple of knives, a length of fine rope. But he’d learned to take care.
Xeelee: Vengeance Page 28