“We’re trying,” Lieh said. “We’ve been searching since dataflow started coming back.”
“Please just find him and tell me!”
She nodded, squeezed my arm, and left the cabin again.
Ti Sandra resumed at my touch. “ — think we have very little time now to put together a consensus. Elections are impossible. The Republic is still under threat, perhaps a greater threat than ever before. This Solar System is fatal. It’s fatal for Mars. Ask Charles to explain. Everything is out of balance. We have used fear to fight the effects of terror. Listen: we’re lambs, you and I. We’re expendable for the greater good.
“I don’t mean our lives, honey. I mean our souls.”
The research center at Melas Dorsa had been abandoned at the beginning of the Freeze. Charles and Stephen Leander had departed in the Mercury; the others had been brought out by tractor, with as much equipment as could be salvaged. Pictures of the site confirmed the wisdom of keeping the Olympians on the move: the remains of all tunnels, the grounds of the station itself, had been uprooted as if by thousands of burrowing insects or moles.
Locusts. Earth denied planting them, so we broadcast evidence of their use across the Triple, another part of the war of nerves. Tarekh Firkazzie and Lieh suggested we consider Mars as forever “bugged,” that all future planning allow for the emergence of hidden warbeiters. We would never be able to sweep the planet completely.
Firkazzie had grimly surveyed the remains of the Melas Dorsa laboratory and decided that it could never be occupied again. We had to locate a new site for an even bigger laboratory, to house an even bigger research effort.
From orbit, Charles suggested the site for a new laboratory. He remembered his father’s search ten years past for ice lenses not quite sufficient to support large stations. Such a lens existed beneath Kaibab in Ophir Planum, the remains of a shallow dusted lake from a quarter of a billion Martian years past. It was unlikely, it was in a desolate and difficult land, it was far from any other station, and there was little chance of encountering locusts.
In just twenty-four hours, architectural nano delivered and activated by a squadron of shuttles made a solid, moderately comfortable preliminary structure, a hideaway near the edge of the plateau. For the time being, a few dozen people could stay there in seclusion. Later, the site could be expanded for the larger effort.
Charles and Stephen Leander returned from Phobos, bringing the Mercury down under cover of a thin dust storm from Sinai. A few hectares of crushed and flattened lava served as a rough landing pad.
My shuttle landed at Kaibab hours after the Mercury’s arrival. The terrain was hellish — sharp-edged rills and ancient pocked high-silica lava flows, every edge a knife, all depressions filled with purple vitreous oxidizing rouge. These were badlands indeed, worse than anything I had ever seen humans inhabit on Mars.
Following Lieh and Dandy, I stepped out of the shuttle lock and squeezed under the low tube seal. I saw Leander and Nehemiah Royce first. Then I turned and saw Charles. He stood at the end of the ramp. Gray surgical nano marked parts of his head and neck. He smiled and extended his hand. I shook it firmly and enfolded it with my other hand.
“It’s good to see you, Madam President,” he said.
“I’m not President any more, thank God,” I said.
Charles shrugged. “You have the power,” he said. “That’s what counts.” He gestured for me to lead the way.
As I passed Lieh, I grabbed her arm again and stared at her. Ilya was still missing.
“We’ll find him,” she said. “He’s all right, I’m sure of it.”
I ignored the reassurance. Tough as nails, I thought. Winston Churchill in the Blitz. Remember. Tough as nails.
The “tweaker” had been removed from the Mercury and sat on a bench in one corner of a cramped tunnel. I quickly looked over the zero-temp chamber with its gray, squat force disorder pumps, the Martian-made QL thinker and interpreter, cables, power supply.
Leander had arranged for tea and cakes to be served on a low table nearby. We sat on thick pillow cushions from the Republic shuttle. Besides Charles and Leander, only two other Olympians were present: Nehemiah Royce and Amy Vico-Persoff. Point One had dictated that for the duration of the emergency, no more than four Olympians be in one place at one time. The others were being housed at Tharsis Research University , under tight security.
“How much does it all weigh?” I asked Leander as Charles poured the tea.
“About four hundred kilograms,” Leander said. “We pared it down considerably in the last version. Most of the weight is in the pumps.”
“So tell me,” I said, crossing my legs and warming my hands on the cup.
Charles poured his cup last and kneeled on his pillow. He glanced at me, I smiled, and his eyes darted away as if in shyness. He focused on the table and cakes. “We guessed what was happening right away. So did Ti Sandra.” The words seemed to come with difficulty. I stared at Charles as if feeding a new hunger, feeling a mix of awe and intense affection.
“Ti Sandra instructed us to get to Phobos any way we could, with the tweaker, and take a trip.”
“She knew you were ready to do this?” I asked. “I didn’t.”
“She guessed, or she just made a wild request… We certainly weren’t ready for so much, so soon. We fueled the Mercury, moved everything we could on board. The most difficult part was guaranteeing a clean power supply for the pumps. We managed that. We were ready for take-off twelve hours after the Freeze began.”
“What about coordinates, navigation?” I asked.
“We worked it out while waiting for further orders from Ti Sandra. Stephen and I made up a working hypothesis on the relative position tweaks, worked out the momentum and energy descriptor co-responses and scaling, specified final position and state, stimulated the tweaker to access descriptors for every particle in Phobos, considered as a complete system…”
“Charles had to hook himself into the QL,” Leander said.
“Are you all right?” I asked Charles.
“I’m fine,” he said. “They all did good work. Nobody knew everything except Stephen and myself, but everybody felt the urgency. They all knew it was important.”
“A lot of medals should be awarded,” Leander said.
“Not least to Charles. He guided the QL,” Royce said.
Charles shook his head. “I don’t remember most of that. It’ll come back in time. We had a pilot with us — ”
“One more medal,” Leander said.
“He had no idea what was going to happen. We told him without checking his security clearance.”
“He’s fine,” Lieh said, seated outside the circle around the low table. “We debriefed him separately.”
“Why did you link with the QL?”
“The interpreter wasn’t getting across everything we needed. The QL began returning trivial results, nonsense strings. I think it was exploring the possibility of an alternate descriptor system. It found that more amusing than the real one. I steered it back to giving relevant results. The whole apparatus became coordinated then.”
“It hummed,” Amy said, shivering suddenly. “My God, it really hummed. I was afraid for them. I left the Mercury and they launched.”
They all seemed a little in shock even now.
“What did it feel like?” I asked Charles.
“As I said, I don’t remember exactly. We — the QL and I — were communicating and I made my requests and it pulled answers out of its non-trivial syncline searches.”
“Answers?”
“Instructions, actually. To pass on to the tweaker. Without the QL, we might have been able to do the same thing — with about six months of high-level thinker programming. The QL cut the time down to a few hours. Within eight hours, we were secured to an old mining base in Stickney Crater on Phobos. We’d measured what we needed to measure, everything was still connected and coordinated. Ti Sandra told us to go. She’d been in an accident, and it took us days to establish communications with her again.”