Kim Robinson - Red Mars

That was good news. Alex and Evgenia had been heard from last in Aureum Overlook, a rebel bastion that had destroyed a number of orbiting U.N. ships before being incinerated by missile fire from Phobos. And no one had heard from Samantha the whole month of the war.

So all the first hundred in town went to the north gate of Cairo that afternoon to greet them. Cairo’s north gate looked down a long natural ramp that ran into one of the southernmost canyons of Noctis. The road rose up from the canyon floor on this ramp, and they could see all the way down it to the canyon bottom. There, in the early afternoon, came a rover caravan, churning up a small dust cloud and moving slowly.

It was nearly an hour before the cars rolled up the last part of the ramp. They were no more than three kilometers away when great gouts of flame and ejecta burst into being among them, knocking some rovers into the cliff wall, some over the ramp into space. The rest twisted to a halt, shattered and burning.

Then an explosion rocked the north gate, and they dove for the wall. Cries and shouts over the common band. Nothing more; they stood back up. The fabric of the tent still held, although the gate lock was apparently stuck fast.

Down on the road thin plumes of tan smoke lofted into the air, tattering to the east, pulled back down into Noctis on the dusk wind. Nadia sent a robot rover down to check for survivors. Wristpads crackled with static, nothing but static, and Nadia was thankful for that; what could they have hoped for? Screams? Frank was cursing into his wristpad, switching between Arabic and English. Trying vainly to find out what had happened. But Alexander, Evgenia, Samantha. . Nadia looked fearfully at the little images on her wrist, directing the robot cameras with dread. Shattered rovers. Some bodies. Nothing moved. One rover still smoked.

“Where’s Sasha?” Yeli’s voice cried. “Where’s Sasha?”

“She was in the lock,” someone said. “She was going out to greet them.”

They went to work opening the inner lock door, Nadia at the front punching all the codes and then working with tools and finally a shape charge that someone handed to her. They moved back and the lock blew out like a crossbow bolt, and then they were there, crowbarring the heavy door back. Nadia rushed in and dropped to her knees by Sasha, who was huddled head-in-jacket, in the emergency posture; but she was dead, the flesh of her face Martian red, her eyes frozen.

Feeling that she had to move or else turn to stone on the spot, Nadia broke and ran back to the town cars they had come in. She jumped in one and drove away; she had no plan, and the car seemed to choose the direction. Her friends’ voices cut through the crackle on her wristpad, sounding like crickets in a cage, Maya muttering viciously in Russian, crying— only Maya was tough enough to keep feeling in all of this—”That was Phobos again!” her little voice cried. “They’re psychotic up there!”

The others were in shock, their voices like AIs’. “They’re not psychotic,” Frank said. “It’s perfectly rational. They see a political settlement coming and they’re getting in as many shots as they can.”

“Murderous bastards!” Maya cried. “KGB fascists. . ”

The town car stopped at the city offices. Nadia ran inside, to the room where she had stashed her stuff, at this point no more than her old blue backpack. She dug in it, still unaware of what she was looking for until her claw hand, still the strong one, reached into a bag and pulled it out. Arkady’s transmitter. Of course. She ran back to the car and drove to the south gate. Sax and Frank were still talking, Sax sounding the same as always, but saying, “Every one of us whose location is known is either here, or else has been killed. I think they’re after the first hundred in particular.”

“Singling us out, you mean?” Frank said.

“I saw some Terran news that said we were the ringleaders. And twenty-one of us have died since the revolt began. Another forty missing.”

The town car arrived at the south gate. Nadia turned off her intercom, got out of the car, went into the lock and put on boots, helmet, gloves. She pumped up and checked out, then slammed the open button and waited for the lock to empty and open. As it had on Sasha. They had lived a lifetime together in just the last month alone. Then she was out onto the surface, into the glare and push of a windy hazy day, feeling the first diamond bite of the cold. She kicked through drifts of fines and red puffs blew out ahead of her. The hollow woman, kicking blood. Out the other gate were the bodies of her friends and others, their dead faces purplish and bloated, as after construction accidents. Nadia had seen several of those now, seen death several times, and each had been a horror— and yet here they were deliberately creating as many of these horrible accidents as they could! That was war; killing people by every means possible. People who might have lived a thousand years. She thought of Arkady and of a thousand years, and hissed. They had quarreled so in recent years, mostly about politics. Your plans are all anachronism, Nadia had said. You don’t understand the world. Ha! he had laughed, offended. This world I understand. With an expression as dark as any she had ever seen from him. And she remembered when he had given her the transmitter, how he had cried for John, how crazy he had been with rage and grief. Just in case, he had said to her refusals, pleading. Just in case.

And now it had happened. She couldn’t believe it. She took the box from her walker’s thigh pocket, turned it over in her hand. Phobos shot up over the western horizon like a gray potato. The sun had just set, and the alpenglow was so strong that it looked like she was standing in her own blood, as if she were a creature as small as a cell standing on the corroded wall of her heart, while around her swept the winds of her own dusty plasma. Rockets were landing at the spaceport north of the city. The dusk mirrors gleamed in the western sky like a cluster of evening stars. A busy sky. U.N. ships would soon be descending.

Phobos crossed the sky in four-and-a-quarter hours, so she didn’t have to wait long. It had risen as a half moon, but now it was gibbous, almost full, halfway to the zenith, moving at its steady clip across the coagulating sky. She could make out a faint point of light inside the gray disk: the two little domed craters, Semenov and Leveykin. She held the radio transmitter out and tapped in the ignition code, MANGALA. It was like using a TV remote.

A bright light flared on the leading edge of the little gray disk. The two faint lights went out. The bright light flared even brighter. Could she really perceive the deceleration? Probably not; but it was there.

Phobos was on its way down.

Back inside Cairo, she found that the news had already spread. The flare had been bright enough to catch people’s eyes, and after that they had clumped together around the blank TV screens, by habit, and exchanged rumors and speculation, and somehow the basic fact had gotten around, or been worked out independently. Nadia strolled past group after group, and heard people saying “Phobos has been hit! Phobos has been hit!” And someone laughed, “They brought the Roche limit up to it!”

She thought she was lost in the medina, but almost directly she came to the city offices. Maya was outside: “Hey Nadia!” she cried, “Did you see Phobos?”

“Yes.”

“Roger says when they were up there in year One, they built a system of explosives and rocketry into it! Did Arkady ever tell you about it?”

“Yes.”

They went in to the offices, Maya thinking aloud: “If they manage to slow it down very much, it’ll come down. I wonder if it’ll be possible to calculate where. We’re pretty damn close to the equator right here.”