Kim Robinson - Red Mars

And so they managed to fly down in the broad lowland of Hellas Basin, following the piste to Low Point Lakefront. Then in the horizontal red light and long shadows of sunrise, a sea of shattered ice came over the horizon into view. It filled the whole western part of Hellas. A sea!

The piste they had been following ran right into ice. The frozen shoreline was a jagged tangle of ice plates that were black or red or white or even blue, or a rich jade green— all piled together, as if a tidal wave had crushed Big Man’s butterfly collection, and left it strewn over a barren beach. Beyond it the frozen sea stretched right over the horizon.

After many seconds’ silence, Ann said, “They must have broken the Hellespontus aquifer. That was a really big one, and it would drain down to Low Point.”

“So the Hellas mohole must be flooded!” Yeli said.

“That’s right. And the water at the bottom of it will heat up. Probably hot enough to keep the surface of the lake from freezing. Hard to say. The air is cold, but with the turbulence there might be a clear spot. If not, then right under the surface it will be liquid for sure. Must be some strong convection currents in fact. But the surface. .”

Yeli said, “We’ll see pretty soon, we’re going to fly over it.”

“We should be landing,” Nadia observed.

“Well, we will when we can. Besides, things seem to be calming down a bit.”

“That’s just a function of being cut off from news.”

“Hmm.”

As it turned out they had to fly all the way across the lake, and land on the other side. It was an eerie morning, flying low across a shattered surface reminiscent of the Arctic Sea, except here the ice flows were frosting like an open freezer door, and they were colored across the whole spectrum, heavy on the reds of course, but this only made the occasional blues and greens and yellows stand out more vividly, the focal points of an immense, chaotic mosaic.

And there at its center— where, even flying as high as they were, the ice sea still extended to the horizon in every direction— there was an enormous steam cloud, rising thousands of meters into the air. Circling this cloud cautiously, they saw that the ice underneath it was broken into bergs and floes, floating tight-packed in roiling, steaming black water. The dirty bergs rotated, collided, turned turtle and caused thick walls of red-black water to splash upward; when these walls fell back down, waves expanded out in concentric circles, bobbing all the bergs up and down as they passed.

There was silence in the two planes as they stared down at this most un-Martian spectacle. Finally, after two mute circumnavigations of the steam column, they flew on westward over the shattered waste. “Sax must be loving this revolution,” Nadia said as she had before, breaking the silence. “Do you think he’s part of it?”

“I doubt it,” Ann said. “He probably wouldn’t risk his Terran investment. Nor an orderly progression to the project, or some kind of control. But I’m sure he’s evaluating it in terms of how it affects the terraforming. Not who’s dying, or what’s getting wrecked, or who’s taking over here. Just how it affects the project.”

“An interesting experiment,” Nadia said.

“But hard to model,” Ann said. They both had to laugh.

Speak of the devil— they landed west of the new sea (Lakefront was drowned), and spent the day resting, and the next night as they followed the piste northwest toward Marineris, they flew over a transponder that was blinking SOS in Morse code. They circled the transponder until dawn, and landed on the piste itself, just beyond a disabled rover. And next to it was Sax, in a walker, fiddling with the transponder to send his manual SOS.

Sax climbed into their plane and slowly took off his helmet, blinking and purse-mouthed, his usual bland self. Tired, but looking like the rat that ate the canary, as Ann said to Nadia later. He said little. He had been stuck on the piste in the rover for three days, unable to move; the piste was dead, and his rover had no emergency fuel. Lakefront had indeed drowned: “I was leaving for Cairo,” he said, “to meet with Frank and Maya, because they think it would help to have the whole first hundred together, to form some kind of authority to negotiate with the UNOMA police, and get them to stop.” He had taken off, and was in the Hellespontus foothills when the Low Point mohole’s thermal cloud had suddenly turned yellow, and plumed 20,000 meters into the sky. “It turned into a mushroom cloud like a nuclear explosion on Earth; but with a smaller cap,” he noted. “The temperature gradient isn’t so steep in our atmosphere.”

After that he had turned back, and gone to the edge of the basin to see some of the flooding. The water running down the basin from the north had been black but kept going white, icing over in big segments almost instantaneously, except around Lakefront, where it had bubbled “like water on the stove. Thermodynamics were pretty complex there for a while, but the water cooled the mohole pretty fast, and—”

“Shut up, Sax,” Ann said.

Sax lifted his eyebrows, and went to work improving the plane’s radio receiver.

They flew on, six of them now, Sasha and Yeli, Ann and Simon, Nadia and Sax: six of the first hundred, gathered together as if by magnetism. There was a lot to talk about that night, and they exchanged stories, information, rumors, speculations. But Sax could add little concrete to the overall picture. He had been cut off from the news just as they had been. Again Nadia shuddered as if at a lost sense, realizing that this was a problem that wasn’t going to go away.

The next morning at sunrise they landed at Bakhuysen’s airstrip, and were met by a dozen people carrying police stun guns. This little crowd kept their gun barrels down, but escorted the six with very little ceremony into the hangar inside the crater wall.

There were more people in the hangar, and the crowd grew all the time. Eventually there were about fifty of them, about thirty of them women. They were perfectly polite, and, when they discovered the travelers’ identities, even friendly. “We just have to make sure who we’re dealing with,” one of them said, a big woman with a strong Yorkshire accent.

“And who are you?” Nadia asked boldly.

“We’re from Korolyov Prime,” she said. “We escaped.”

They took the travelers into their dining hall, and treated them to a big breakfast. When they were all seated, people took up magnesium jugs and reached across the table to pour their neighbors’ apple juice, and their neighbors did likewise, until everyone was served. Then over pancakes the two groups exchanged stories. The Bakhuysen crowd had escaped from Korolyov Prime in the first day of the revolt, and had made their way this far south, with plans to go all the way down to the southern polar region. “That’s a big rebel location,” the Yorkshire woman (who it turned out was really Finnish) told them. “There are these stupendous bench terraces with overhangs, you see, so in effect they’re these long open-sided caves, a couple klicks long most of the time, and quite wide really. Perfect for staying out of satellite view but having a bit of air. A kind of a Cro-Magnon cliff-dweller life they’re setting up down there. Lovely, really.” Apparently these long caves had been famous in Korolyov, and a lot of the prisoners had agreed to rendezvous there if a breakout ever occurred.

“So are you with Arkady?” Nadia asked.

“Who?”

It turned out they were followers of the biologist Schnelling, who from the sound of it had been a kind of red mystic, held in Korolyov with them, where he had died a few years before. He had given wrist lectures that had been very popular on Tharsis, and after his incarceration many of the prisoners in Korolyov had become his students. Apparently he taught them a kind of Martian communalism based on principles of the local biochemistry. The group at Bakhuysen wasn’t very clear about it, but now they were out, and hoping to contact other rebel forces. They had succeeded in establishing contact with a stealthed satellite, programmed to operate in directed microbursts; they had also managed briefly to monitor a channel being used by security forces on Phobos. So they had a little news. Phobos, they said, was being used as a surveillance and attack station by transnational and UNOMA police forces, recently arrived on the latest continuous shuttle. These same forces had control of the elevator, of Pavonis Mons, and of most of the rest of Tharsis; the Olympus Mons observatory had rebelled, but been firestormed from orbit; and transnational security forces had occupied most of the great escarpment, effectively cutting the planet in two. And the war on Earth appeared to be continuing, although they had the impression it was hottest in Africa, Spain, and the U.S.-Mexican border.