Kim Robinson - Red Mars

The man they were following appeared to be humming a tune over their band, an absorbed little bum, bum, badum-dum dum — Peter’s theme from “Peter and the Wolf,” perhaps. He knew the streets of Cairo well, making turns in the medina’s tight warren without a moment’s pause for thought, and leading them to the city wall in less than ten minutes.

At the wall they peered through the warped tenting; outside in the murk, anonymous suited figures were running off alone or in groups of two or three, in a kind of Brownian dispersion onto the south Noctis rim. “Where’s Yeli?” Maya exclaimed suddenly.

No one knew.

Then Frank pointed. “Look!”

Down the road to the east, a number of rovers had appeared out of Noctis Labyrinthus. They were very fast cars of an unfamiliar shape, coming up out of the dusk without headlights.

“Who now?” Sax said. He turned to look at their guide for an answer, but the man was gone, disappeared back into the alleyways.

“Is this still the first hundred’s frequency?” a new voice said.

“Yes!” Frank replied. “Who is this?”

Maya cried, “Isn’t that Michel?”

“Good ear, Maya. Yes, it’s Michel. Look, we’re here to take you away if you want to go. It appears they are systematically eliminating any of the first hundred they can get their hands on. So we thought you would be willing to join us.”

“I think we are all ready to join you,” Frank said. “But how?”

“Well, that’s the tricky part. Did a guide show up and lead you to the wall?”

“Yes!”

“Good. That was Coyote, he’s good at things like that. So, wait there. We will create some diversions elsewhere, and then come right to your section of the wall.”

In only a matter of minutes, though it seemed like an hour, explosions rocked the city. They saw flashes of light to the north, toward the spaceport. Michel came back on. “Shine a headlamp east for just a second.”

Sax put his face to the tent wall and turned on his headlamp, briefly illuminating a cone of smoke-choked air. Visibility had dropped to a hundred meters or less, and seemed to be still diminishing. But Michel’s voice said, “Contact. Now, cut through the wall and step outside. We’re almost there. We’ll take off again when you’re all in our rover locks, so be prepared. How many are you?”

“Six,” Frank said after a pause.

“Wonderful. We have two cars, so it won’t be too bad. Three of you in each, okay? Get ready, let’s do this fast.”

Sax and Ann cut at the tent fabric with little knives from their wristpad tool kits; they looked like kittens clawing at drapes, but quickly made holes big enough to crawl through, and they all clambered over the waist-high coping, and out onto the smoothed regolith of the wall skirt. Behind them explosions were blowing the physical plant into the sky, illuminating the wrecked city in flashes that cut through the haze like photographic strobes, freezing individual moments before they disappeared in the murk.

Suddenly the strange rovers they had seen appeared out of the dust and skidded to a halt before them. They yanked open the outer lock doors and piled in, Sax and Ann and Simon in one, Nadia with Maya and Frank in the other, and they were tumbled head over heels when the rover jerked into motion and accelerated away. “Ow!” Maya cried.

“All aboard?” Michel asked.

They called out their names.

“Good. I’m glad we have you!” Michel said. “It’s getting pretty hard. Dmitri and Elena are dead, I just heard. Killed at Echus Overlook.”

In the silence that ensued they could hear the tires, grinding over the gravel of the road.

“These rovers are really fast,” Sax remarked.

“Yes. And great shock absorbers. Made for just this kind of situation, I’m afraid. We’ll have to abandon them once we get down into Noctis; they’re much too visible.”

“You have invisible cars?” Frank asked.

“In a manner of speaking.”

After half an hour of bouncing in the lock they stopped briefly, and transferred into the rovers’ main rooms. And there in one was Michel Duval, white-haired, wrinkled— an old man, gazing at Maya and Nadia and Frank with tears in his eyes. He embraced them one by one, laughing an odd, choked laugh.

“You’re taking us to Hiroko?” Maya said.

“Yes, we will try. But it’s a long way, and conditions are not good. But I think we can do it. Oh, I am so glad we have found you! You don’t know how horrible it has been to look and look, and find only bodies.”

“We know,” Maya said. “We found Arkady, and Sasha was just killed today, and Alex and Edvard and Samantha, and I guess Yeli too, just now. . ”

“Yes. Well. We will try to make sure there aren’t any more.”

The rover’s TV showed the interior of the following car, where Ann and Simon and Sax were greeted stiffly by a young stranger. Michel turned to look over his shoulder out the windshield, and hissed. They were at the head of one of the many box canyons leading down into Noctis, a rounded canyon end that dropped rapidly away. The road that descended this headwall had followed an artificial ramp that had been built to support it, but now the ramp was gone, blasted away, and the road with it.

“We will have to walk,” Michel said after a while. “We would have had to abandon these cars at the bottom anyway. It’s only about five kilometers. Are your suits fully supplied?”

They refilled their tanks from the rover, and put their helmets back on. Then it was back out through the locks.

When they were all out, they stood staring at each other: the six refugees, Michel and the younger driver. The eight of them set off on foot, in darkness, using headlamps only during the tricky climb down the broken-off section of the road ramp. Once back on the road, they turned their headlamps off and strode down the steeply sloping gravel path, falling naturally into the long lope that was the most comfortable pace in this angle of descent. The night was starless, and the wind whistled down-canyon around them, sometimes in gusts so strong that it felt like they were being shoved in the back. It felt like another dust storm was indeed beginning; Sax muttered about equatorial versus global, but it was impossible to tell what it would be. “Let’s hope it goes global,” Michel said. “We could use the cover.”

“I doubt it will,” Sax said.

“What’s our destination?” Nadia asked.

“Well, there is an emergency station in Aureum Chaos.”

So they had to thread the entire length of Valles Marineris—5,000 kilometers! “How will we do it!” Maya cried.

“We have canyon cars,” Michel said briefly. “You’ll see.”

The road was a steep one, and they kept up the fast pace, punishing their joints. Nadia’s right knee began to throb, and her ghost finger itched for the first time in years. She was thirsty, and cold in the old diamond pattern. It got so dusty and dark that they turned on their headlamps. Each bobbing cone of yellow light barely reached to the road surface, and glancing back up Nadia thought they looked like a string of deep-sea fish, their luminous spots glowing on a great ocean floor. Or like miners in some fluid smoky tunnel. Some part of her began to enjoy the situation— it was a tiny stirring, a sensation mostly physical, but still, the first positive feeling she could remember since finding Arkady. Pleasure like the ghost itching of her lost finger, faint and slightly irritating.

It was still the middle of the night when they came to the bottom of the canyon, a broad U, very common to all the Noctis Labyrinthus canyons. Michel approached a boulder, pushed its side with a finger, then lifted a hatch in the boulder’s side. “Get in,” he said.