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By Root 475 0

bar against the door and wall of the trailer. The trailer was made of a magnesium-based alloy, and the polymer fixative would make what was in effect a ceramic bond between the locking bar and the trailer, so that the door would be stuck. He ran around the trailer and did the same to the other door, then dashed back toward the gate, feeling his blood fly through him as if it were pure adrenaline. It was so much like a prank that he had to consciously remember the explosive charges that Coyote and Art were distributing through the settlement, in warehouses, against the tent fabric, and in the parking lot for the mining behemoths. Nirgal joined them in running from vehicle to vehicle, climbing the stairs on their sides, opening doors manually or electronically, tossing small boxes Coyote had provided into the cabs or cabins.

But there were also hundreds of tons of processed uranium that Coyote wanted to haul away. This was impossible, unfortunately. They did run over to a warehouse, however, where they filled a number of the mine’s own robot trucks with loads, and programmed them with instructions to head off into the canyonlands to the north, burying loads in regions where the apatite concentrations might be high enough to disguise the boxed uranium’s radioactivity, and make the loads hard to relocate. Spencer had doubted this strategy would work, but Coyote said it beat leaving the uranium at the mine, and all of them were happy to help in any plan that would keep him from putting tons of uranium in the storage hold of their boulder car, radproof containers or not.

When that was done they ran back to the gate, and got back outside, and ran hard. Halfway to the escarpment they heard a series of pops and booms from the tent, and Nirgal glanced over his shoulder, but saw nothing different— the tent was still mostly dark, the trailer windows lit.

He turned and ran on, feeling as if he were flying, and was astonished to see Art racing over the canyon floor ahead of him, every stride a huge wild leap, bounding like some cheetah-bear all the way to the escarpment, where he had to wait for Coyote to catch up and lead them back through the crevasse maze. Once out of it he took off again, so fast that Nirgal decided to try to catch him, just to feel how fast it was. He got into the rhythm of the sprint, pressing harder and harder, and as he passed Art he saw that his own springbok strides were almost twice as long as Art’s even in sprint mode, where both their legs were pumping as fast as possible.

They got to the boulder car long before Coyote, and waited for him in the lock, catching their breath, grinning through their faceplates at each other. A few minutes later Coyote was there and in with them, and Spencer had the rover moving, with the timeslip just past, and six more hours of night to drive in.

Inside they laughed hard at Art’s mad run, but he only grinned and waved them off. “I wasn’t scared, it’s this Martian gravity I tell you, I was just running the way I usually would but my legs were leaping along like a tiger! Amazing.”

• • •

They rested through the day, and after dark they were off again. They passed the mouth of a long canyon that ran from Ceraunius to Jovis Tholus; it was an oddity in that it was neither straight nor sinuous, and was called Crooked Canyon. When the sun rose they were hidden on the apron of Crater Qr, just north of Jovis Tholus. Jovis Tholus was a bigger volcano than Tharsis Tholus, bigger in fact than any volcano on Earth, but it was located on the high saddle between Ascraeus Mons and Olympus Mons, and both were visible on skysills to east and west, bulking like vast plateau continents, and making Jovis seem compact, friendly, comprehensible— a hill you could walk up if you wanted to.

That day Sax sat and stared silently at his screen, tapping at it tentatively and getting a random assortment of texts, maps, diagrams, pictures, equations. He tilted his head at each, with no sign of recognition. Nirgal sat down beside him. “Sax, can you hear what I’m saying?”

Sax looked at him.

“Can you