All this was as expected, as it should be.
Susannah steadied herself with a hand against the high back of the couch as she finally considered the orange splash of color that was the intruding vehicle. “Alix, distance to the Red Oasis homestead?”
The same androgynous voice that inhabited her ear loop spoke now through the room’s sound system. “Twelve kilometers.”
The homestead had advanced five kilometers in the twenty minutes she’d taken to return to the cottage—though in truth it was really much closer. Earth and Mars were approaching a solar conjunction, when they would be at their greatest separation, on opposite sides of the Sun. With the lightspeed delay, even this new image was nineteen minutes old. So she had only minutes left to act.
Reaching down to brace herself against the armrest of the couch, she sat with slow grace. “Alix, give me a screen.”
A sleeve opened in the armrest and an interface emerged, swinging into an angled display in front of her.
The fires that had destroyed the Holliday Towers might have been part of the general inferno sparked by the Hollywood earthquake, but Susannah suspected otherwise. The towers had stood as a symbol of defiance amid the destruction—which might explain why they were brought low. The Martian Obelisk was a symbol too, and it had long been a target both for the media and for some of Destiny’s original backers who had wanted the landing left undisturbed, for the use of a future colonization mission that no one could afford to send.
“Start up our homestead,” Nate urged her. “It’s the only equipment we can afford to risk. If you drive it at an angle into the Red Oasis homestead, you might be able to push it off its tracks.”
Susannah frowned, her fingers moving across the screen as she assembled an instruction set. “That’s a last resort option, Nate, and I’m not even sure it’s possible. There are safety protocols in the AIs’ core training modules that might prevent it.”
She tapped send, launching the new instruction set on its nineteen-minute journey. Then she looked at Nate. “I’ve ordered the AIs that handle the construction equipment to retreat and evade. We cannot risk damage or loss of control.”
He nodded somberly. “Agreed—but the synth and the beetle cart are in the tower.”
“They’re safe in there, for now. But I’m going to move the homestead—assuming it starts. After seventeen years, it might not.”
“Understood.”
“The easiest way for someone to shut down our operation is to simply park the Red Oasis homestead at the foot of the obelisk, so that it blocks access to the stairway. If the beetle cart can’t get in and out, we’re done. So I’m going to park our homestead there first.”
He nodded thoughtfully, eyeing the image of the obelisk. “Okay. I understand.”
“Our best hope is that you can find out who’s instructing the Red Oasis homestead and get them to back off. But if that fails, I’ll bring the synth out, and use it to try to take manual control.”
“The Red Oasis group could have a synth too.”
“Yes.”
They might also have explosives—destruction was so much easier than creation—but Susannah did not say this aloud. She did not want Nate to inquire about the explosives that belonged to Destiny. Instead she told him, “There’s no way we can know what they’re planning. All we can do is wait and see.”
He smacked a frustrated fist into his palm. “Nineteen minutes! Nineteen minutes times two before we know what’s happened!”
“Maybe the AIs will work it out on their own,” she said dryly. And then it was her turn to be overtaken by frustration. “Look at us! Look what we’ve come to! Invested in a monument no one will ever see. Squabbling over the possession of ruins while the world dies. This is where our hubris has brought us.” But that was wrong, so she corrected herself. “My hubris.”
Nate was an old man with a lifetime of emotions mapped on his well-worn face. In that complex terrain it wasn’t always easy to read his current feelings, but she thought she saw hurt there. He looked away, before she could decide. A furtive movement.
“Nate?” she asked in confusion.
“This project matters,” he insisted, gazing at the obelisk. “It’s art, and it’s memory, and it does matter.”
Of course. But only because it was all they had left.
“Come into the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll make coffee.”
Nate’s tablet chimed while they were still sitting at the kitchen table. He took the call, listened to a brief explanation from someone on his staff, and then objected. “That can’t be right. No. There’s something else going on. Keep at it.”
He scowled at the table until Susannah reminded him she was there. “Well?”
“That was Davidson, my chief investigator. He tracked down a Red Oasis shareholder who told him that the rights to the colony’s equipment had not been traded or sold, that they couldn’t be, because they had no value. Not with a failed communications system.” His scowl deepened. “They want us to believe they can’t even talk to the AIs.”
Susannah stared at him. “But if that’s true—”
“It’s not.”
“Meaning you don’t want it to be.” She got up from the table.
“Susannah—”
“I’m not going to pretend, Nate. If it’s not an AI driving that homestead, then it’s a colonist, a survivor—and that changes everything.”
She returned to the Mars room, where she sat watching the interloper’s approach. The wall screen refreshed every four minutes as a new image arrived from the other side of the sun. Each time it did, the bright orange homestead jumped a bit closer. It jumped right past the outermost ring of survey sticks, putting it less than two kilometers from the obelisk—close enough that she could see a faint wake of drifting dust trailing behind it, giving it a sense of motion.
Then, thirty-eight minutes after she’d sent the new instruction set, the Destiny AI returned an acknowledgement.
Her heart beat faster, knowing that whatever was to happen on Mars had already happened. Destiny’s construction equipment had retreated and its homestead had started up or had failed to start, had moved into place at the foot of the tower or not. No way to know until time on Earth caught up with time on Mars.
The door opened.
Nate shuffled into the room.
Susannah didn’t bother to ask if Davidson had turned up anything. She could see from his grim expression that he expected the worst.
And what was the worst?
A slight smile stole onto her lips as Nate sat beside her on the couch.
The worst case is that someone has lived.
Was it any wonder they were doomed?
Four more minutes.
The image updated.
The 360-degree camera, mounted on a steel pole sunk deep into the rock, showed Destiny profoundly changed. For the first time in seventeen years, Destiny’s homestead had moved. It was parked by the tower, just as Susannah had requested. She twisted around, looking for the bright green corner of the factory beyond the distant ridge—but she couldn’t see it.
“Everything is as ordered,” Susannah said.
The Red Oasis homestead had reached the green survey sticks.
“An AI has to be driving,” Nate insisted.
“Time will tell.”