Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [131]
The news about Sax had come from Spencer, by way of Nadia. Spencer was working in Kasei Vallis, which was a kind of new Korolyov, a security town, very sophisticated and at the same time very low-profile. Sax had been taken to one of the compounds there, and Spencer had found out about it and made the call out to Nadia.
“We have to get him out,” Maya said, “and fast. They’ve only had him a couple days.”
“The Sax Russell?” Randolph was saying. “Wow. I can’t believe it. Who are you all, anyway? Hey, are you Maya Toitovna?”
Maya cursed him in livid Russian. Coyote ignored them all; he hadn’t said anything since the message had arrived, and was busy at his AI screen, looking at what appeared to be weather satellite photos.
“You might as well let me go,” Randolph said into the silence. “I couldn’t tell them anything they won’t get out of Russell.”
“He won’t tell them anything!” Kasei said hotly.
Randolph waggled a hand. “Scare him, maybe hurt him a little, put him under, plug him in, dope him up and zap his brain in the right places— they’ll get answers to whatever they ask. They’ve got it down to a science, as I understand it.” He was staring at Kasei. “You look familiar too. Never mind! Anyway, if they can’t tweak it out, they can usually do it more crudely.”
“How do you know all this?” Maya demanded.
“Common knowledge,” Randolph said. “So maybe it’s all wrong, but . . .”
“I want to go get him,” Coyote said.
“But they’ll know we’re out here,” Kasei said.
“They know that anyway. What they don’t know is where we are.”
“Besides,” Michel said, “it’s our Sax.”
Coyote said, “Hiroko won’t object.”
“If she does, tell her to fuck off!” Maya exclaimed. “Tell her shikata ga nai!”
“It would be my pleasure,” Coyote said.
• • •
The western and northern slopes of the Tharsis bulge were unpopulated relative to the eastern drop to Noctis Labyrinthus; there were a few areothermal stations and aquifer wells, but much of the region was covered in a year-round blanket of snow and firn and young glaciers. Winds out of the south collided with the strong northwest winds coming around Olympus Mons, and the blizzards could be fierce. The protoglacial zone extended up from the six- or seven-kilometer contour nearly to the base of the great volcanoes; it was not a good place to build, nor was it a good place for stealth cars to hide. They drove hard over the sastrugi and along ropy lava mounds that served as roads, north past the bulk of Tharsis Tholus, a volcano that was about the size of Mauna Loa, though under the rise of Ascraeus it looked like a cinder cone. The next night they made it off the snow and northeast across Echus Chasma, and hid for the day under the stupendous eastern wall of Echus, just a few kilometers north of Sax’s old headquarters at the top of the cliff.
The east wall of Echus Chasma was the Great Escarpment at its absolute greatest— a cliff three kilometers tall, running in a straight line north and south for a thousand kilometers. The areologists were still arguing over its origin, as no ordinary force of landscape formation seemed adequate to have created it. It was simply a break in the fabric of things, separating the floor of Echus Chasma from the high plateau of Lunae Planum. Michel had visited Yosemite Valley in his youth, and he still recalled those towering granite cliffs; but this wall standing before them was as long as the whole state of California, and three kilometers high for most of that length: a vertical world, its massive planes of redrock staring out blankly to the west, glowing in each empty sunset like the side of a continent.
At its northern end this incredible cliff finally became less tall, and