“No,” she screamed, and then she screamed again without words.
It was not a spectacular death.Where the laser cut through a living module there was a tiny burst of flame, barely visible from where Molly lay; before the fire could spread, the carbon dioxide smothered it.The beam moved steadily down the length of the dome, then crossed it from side to side.
Molly saw the Center explode, a brighter flare that sent glowing chunks of concrete into the dust and darkness.And finally, just before it disappeared, the creeping line of red touched the reserve oxygen tanks in the north wall and melted them in a hot, blue sphere of fire.
She hardly noticed when the airlock opened and a single, suited figure came out, wearing an infrared helmet and carrying a gun in its hand.“Kane?” she said, but the helmet only paused for a second as its gaze swept past her, and no one answered.The figure bounded down the slope and disappeared into the swirling sand.
Molly leaned against the rock and closed her eyes. She was still there when the first of the survivors began to climb past her toward the cave.
Twenty miles from the Salyut, when it had just become a point light-source on her screens, Mayakenska fired her retros.
She wanted to keep the thrust at maximum, to ram them out of the sky, but her common sense held her back.And then she saw the hair-thin line of red wink into existence and she knew that it would not have made any difference, that nothing she could have done would have mattered.
They had been ignoring her signals but now she tried again.“This is Mayakenska.You must stop this attack.You must—” She broke off in rage and frustration, trying to slam her fist into the control panel.With no weight behind it the gesture was feeble and meaningless, serving only to wrench her shoulders off to the right and nearly spin her out of her chair.
She forced herself to lean back into the sling, tighten her straps against the negligible thrust of the retros, and concentrate on the upcoming rendezvous.
She’d swept across the daylight side of Mars, over the western edge of the Elysium Planitia and the Syrtis Major Planitia in twenty minutes, watching the digital propellant gauge counting backwards toward empty tanks and the various forms that disaster could take. One by one she watched the gruesome possibilities put to rest: not enough fuel to reach escape velocity, not enough height to reach the Salyut, not enough thrust for the retros.
Now she only had the docking to worry about, and that no longer mattered.
She had defied her superiors, gambled against time, and lost. In the old days she would have become a non-person, pensioned out or even sent to a gulag as an example. She wondered what the current equivalent would be; a desk job in Yakutsk, or perhaps an auto accident on an empty stretch of road?
Gently she nosed the ship into a higher, slower orbit as she closed on the green, tapering cylinder of the Salyut. Once her greatest pleasure had been the hours she’d bought on the simulators with her position, her blat. Now she flew the actual ship with less feeling than she’d had on the dullest hour in training, as far beyond emotion as she was beyond fatigue.
With cautious puffs of hydrazine from her attitude jets, she brought the nose of the lander into the Salyut berth, feeling the latches click solidly into place.
She reached for the toggle switches that would pump air into the tunnel between the lander and the Salyut, and then stopped her hand halfway there.
What you’re thinking, she told herself, is murder.Worse than murder, it’s treason.
And what do you call the cold-blooded destruction of the dome? she asked. Russians died down there, not just Americans and Japanese.
She moved her arm back to her side. She felt the feverish chill of sweat drying on her forehead and cheeks. It’s not something, she thought, that you talk yourself into. It’s an emotional decision, and you know you’re not going to do it now; you’ve lost the impulse. So go ahead and turn those switches, pump in the air, finish all the seals. Don’t think about the other possibilities.
Her radio crackled.“Mademoiselle Mayakenska, please complete your seal on the tunnel.You are hereby ordered to place yourself under arrest and surrender the landing vehicle—”
In a rush of anger and despair, her hands shot to the console and typed in a series of numbers. Numbers Chaadayev would never have heard of, numbers known only to the most senior ground personnel. The computer asked her to verify the order and she did it.
The explosive bolts that held the air lock hatch in place blew off in silence, shaking the lander like a rabbit in the jaws of a dog. But the latches held her firmly to the Salyut, and in a few seconds everything was still again.
Three men had died, the air sucked from their lungs, the moisture leached from their skin, their eyes nearly blown from their sockets.
Murdered.
She closed her eyes.
Go on, she thought.You can’t stop here. It’s too late to bring them back, to undo any of this. So take it one step at a time.
But finish it.
She removed the hatch from the nose of the lander and crawled through into the long, narrow hallway of the Salyut.The air of the ship seemed to be filled with stars, winking between the orbiting bodies of the three dead cosmonauts; after a second or two Mayakenska realized the lights were tiny, frozen crystals of blood.
She brushed past Chaadayev’s corpse and patched her helmet radio into the transmitter.“Dawn, this is Zenith. Zenith calling Dawn. Mayakenska here.The American base is destroyed. I regret to report that our information was inaccurate, they—” She stopped, took her finger off the transmit button to get her breath, then started again.
“The transporter did not—does not exist. I...examined the rock which was supposedly destroyed by the antimatter. I found traces of plastic explosive and indications that others of the rocks had been similarly wired. It was...only a hoax.”
She released the button again.And now what? The lander was out of fuel, but even if she could get back to the surface, what kind of life could she have there? Curtis would still be alive, sheltered by the rock walls of his cave, and he would hold her accountable.
For that matter, without the dome, what kind of life would any of them have?
Her eyes came to rest on the propellant gauge, reminding her that the outboard tanks had been filled at the Phobos station. She had more than enough fuel to get back to Earth, but that, she thought, watching the frozen corpses in their grisly pas de trois, was no longer an alternative.
She tried to remember. How big a crater would it take? Deep enough to hold in two or three hundred millibars of pressure, at least three or four kilometers deep.Would the fuel tanks, pushed by the mass of the Salyut, protected by the carbon-carbon heat shield of the lander, make that big an explosion?
She didn’t know.
If not, she thought, then let it be a gesture.A first, halting step.
“Zenith to Dawn.We are preparing to leave orbit.”She flicked the power switch on and off to create static in the transmission. “Dawn, there is a problem with our attitude control. Repeat, we are experiencing—”
She switched the radio off, then smashed it with a wrench. No backing out, she told herself. She would display no lack of moral certainty.
A little hardship would now be required.
She programmed the computer for a course that would take her into the Solis Planum, the frozen wasteland they used to call Solis Lacus, the Lake of the Sun.The buried ice there would melt and add to the explosion, releasing precious gasses into the air. For an instant its name would become the literal truth, and it would burn with the brightness and heat of a star.
If Blok had sounded the alarm, then there would be survivors.That cave was the original settlement; it had supported the colony before the dome was built, and it could support them again until they moved to their new home.