Kim Robinson - Red Mars

“And the cable itself?” Sasha said.

It got loud with cheers again, and it was Sax who answered her, in the next quiet moment. “Falling,” he said. He was at a computer console, typing as fast as he could, but Steve called out to him, “We have the figures on the descent if you want them. It’s pretty complex, a lot of partial differential equations.”

“I know,” Sax said.

“I can’t believe it,” said Simon. He still had his hands on Ann’s arm, and he looked around at the revelers, his face grim. “The impact’s going to kill a lot of people!”

“Probably not,” one of them replied. “And those it does kill will mostly be U.N. police, who have been using the elevator to get down and kill people here on the ground.”

“He’s probably been down a week or two,” Simon repeated emphatically to Ann, who was now white-faced.

“Maybe,” she said.

Some people heard this and quieted down. Others did not want to hear, and continued to celebrate.

“We didn’t know,” Steve said to Ann and Simon. His expression of triumph was gone, he was frowning with concern. “If we had known, I guess we could have tried to contact him. But we didn’t know. I’m sorry. Hopefully—” he swallowed—”Hopefully he wasn’t up there.”

Ann walked back to their table, sat down. Simon hovered anxiously at her side. Neither of them appeared to have heard anything Steve had said.

Radio traffic increased somewhat, as those in control of the remaining communications satellites got the news about the cable. Some of the celebrating rebels got busy monitoring and recording these messages; others continued to party.

Sax was still absorbed by the equations on the screen. “Going east,” he remarked.

“That’s right,” Steve said. “It’ll make a big bow in the middle at first, as the lower part pulls down, and then the rest will follow.”

“How fast?”

“That’s hard to say, but we think about four hours for the first time around, and then an hour for the second time around.”

“Second time around!” Sax said.

“Well, you know, the cable is thirty-seven thousand kilometers long, and the circumference at the equator is twenty-one thousand. So it’ll go around almost twice.”

“The people on the equator had better move fast,” Sax said.

“Not exactly the equator,” Steve said. “The Phobos oscillation will cause it to swerve away from the equator to a certain extent. That’s actually the hardest part to calculate, because it depends where the cable was in its oscillation when it began to fall.”

“North or south?”

“We should know in the next couple of hours.”

The six travelers stared helplessly at the screen. It was quiet for the first time since their arrival. The screen showed nothing but stars. No vantage point existed from which to view the elevator’s fall; the cable, never visible for more than a fraction of its length to any single observer, would stay invisible to the end. Or visible only as a falling line of fire.

“So much for Phyllis’s bridge,” Nadia said.

“So much for Phyllis,” said Sax.

The Margaritifer group reestablished contact with the satellite transmissions they had located, and they found they were also able to poach a number of security satellites. From all these channels they were able to piece together a partial account of the cable’s fall. From Nicosia, a UNOMA team reported that the cable had fallen north of them, crumpling down vertically while yet still rapidly covering ground, as if it were cutting through the turning planet. Though north of them, they thought it was south of the equator. A staticky, panicky voice from Sheffield asked them for confirmation of this; the cable had already fallen across half the city and a line of tents east of it, all the way down the slope of Pavonis Mons and across east Tharsis, flattening a zone ten kilometers wide with its sonic boom; it would have been worse, but the air was so thin at that elevation that it did not carry much force. Now the survivors in Sheffield wanted to know whether to run south to escape the next wrapping, or try to get around the caldera to the north.

They got no reply. But more escapees from Korolyov, on the south rim of Melas Chasma in Marineris, reported over one of the rebel channels that the cable was now falling so hard it was shattering on impact. Half an hour later an Aureum drilling operation called in; they had gone out after the sonic booms, and found a mound of glowing brecciated debris, stretching from horizon to horizon.

There was an hour’s absence of any new hard information, nothing but questions and speculation and rumor. Then one of the headphoned listeners leaned back and showed thumbs up to the rest of them, and clicked on the intercom, and an excited voice came on yelling through the static: “It’s exploding! It came down in about four seconds, it was burning top to bottom and when it hit the ground everything jumped right under our feet! We’re having trouble with a leak here. We figure we’re about eighteen kilometers south of where it hit, and we’re twenty-five south of the equator, so you should be able to calculate the rest of the wrap from that, I hope. It was burning from top to bottom! Like this white line cutting the sky in half! I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve still got afterimages in my vision, they’re bright green. It was like a shooting star had stretched. . Wait, Jorge is on the intercom, he’s out there and saying it’s only about three meters high where he is. It’s soft regolith here, so the cable’s in a trench it smashed for itself. He says it’s so deep in places you could bury it and have a level surface. Those’ll be like fords, he says, because in other places it stands five or six meters high. I guess it’ll do that for hundreds of kilometers at a stretch! It’ll be like the Great Wall of China.”

Then a call came in from Escalante Crater, which was right on the equator. They had evacuated immediately on news of the break with Clarke, but had gone south, so that the arrival of the cable had turned out to be a close thing. The cable was now exploding on impact, they reported, and sending sheets of molten ejecta into the sky, lava-esque fireworks that arced up into their dawn twilight, and were dim and black by the time they fell back to the surface.

During all this time Sax never left his screen, and now he was muttering through pursed lips as he typed and read. The second time around the speed of the fall would accelerate to 21,000 kilometers an hour, he said, almost six kilometers a second; so that for anyone within sight of it— a dangerous place to be, deadly if you were not up on a prominence and many kilometers away— it would look like a kind of meteor strike, and cross from horizon to horizon in less than a second. Sonic booms to follow.

“Let’s go out and have a look,” Steve suggested with a guilty glance at Ann and Simon. A lot of them suited up and went outside. The travelers contented themselves with a video image piped in from the exterior camera, alternating that with video clips gleaned from the satellites. Clips shot from the night-side surface were spectacular; they showed a blazing curved line, cutting down like the edge of a white scythe that was trying to chop the planet in two.

Even so they found it hard to concentrate, hard to focus on what they were seeing and understand it, much less feel anything about it. They had been exhausted when they had landed, and now they were even more exhausted, and yet it was impossible to sleep; more and more video clips were being passed along, some from robot cameras flying in drones on the day side, showing a blackened steaming swath of desolation— the regolith blasted to the side in two long parallel ejecta dikes, banking a canal full of blackness, black all studded with a brecciated mix of stuff which got more exotic as the impact became more severe, until finally a drone camera sent along a clip of a horizon-to-horizon trench of what Sax said must be rough black diamonds.