Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [301]
“We’ll have to do something about Burroughs,” Sax said.
“I know.”
• • •
They flew southward again, past the bump of Hecates Tholus on the northern end of the Elysium massif, to the South Fossa spaceport. Their flight had taken twelve hours, but they had gone west through nine time zones, and crossed the date line at 180° longitude, so it was midday Sunday when their airport bus drove to the rim of South Fossa, and through the roof lock.
South Fossa and the other Elysium towns, Hephaestus and Elysium Fossa, had all come out for Free Mars in a big way. They made a kind of geographical unit; a southern arm of the Vastitas ice now ran between the Elysium massif and the Great Escarpment, and though the ice had already been spanned by pistes on pontoon bridges, Elysium was in the process of becoming an island continent. In all three of its big towns crowds had poured into the streets, and occupied the city offices and the physical plants. Without the threat of attacks from orbit to back them up, the few Transitional Authority police in the towns had either changed into civilian clothes and melted into the crowds, or else gotten on the train to Burroughs. Elysium was uncontestedly part of Free Mars.
Down at the Mangalavid offices Nadia and Sax found that a large armed group of rebels had taken over the station, and were now busy churning out twenty-four and a half hours a day of video reports on all four channels, all sympathetic to the revolt, with long interviews from people in all the independent towns and stations. The timeslip was going to be devoted to a montage of the previous day’s events.
Some outlying mining stations in Elysium’s radial cracks, and in the Phlegra Montes, were purely metanat operations, mostly Amexx and Subarashii. These were staffed largely by new emigrants who had holed up in their camps, and either gone silent or else started to threaten anyone who tried to bother them; some even declared their intention to retake the planet, or hold out until reinforcements from Earth arrived. “Ignore them,” Nadia advised. “Avoid them and ignore them. Jam their communications systems if you can, and leave them alone.”
Reports from elsewhere on Mars were more promising. Senzeni Na was in the hands of people who called themselves Booneans, though they were not associated with Jackie— they were issei, nisei, sansei, and yonsei, who had immediately named their mohole John Boone, and declared Thaumasia a “Dorsa Brevia Peaceful Neutral Place.” Korolyov, now a small mining town only, had revolted almost as violently as in ‘61, and its citizens, many of them descendants of the old prison population, had renamed the town Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov, and declared it an undocumented anarchist free zone; the old prison compounds were to be converted into a giant bazaar and communal living space, with a particular welcome made to refugees from Earth. Nicosia was likewise a free city. Cairo was under the control of Amexx security. Odessa and the rest of the Hellas Basin towns were still holding firm for independence, although the circumHellas piste had been cut in some places. The maglev train system was bad that way; the magnetic systems had to be operating for the pistes to function and the trains to move, and these systems were easy to break. For that reason many trains were running empty or were canceled, as people took to rovers or planes to make sure they didn’t get stranded in the outback somewhere, in vehicles that didn’t even have wheels.
Nadia and Sax spent the rest of Sunday monitoring developments and making suggestions, if asked, about problem situations. In general it seemed to Nadia that things were going well. But on Monday, bad news came in from Sabishii. The UNTA expeditionary force had arrived there from the southern highlands, and retaken the surface portion of the city after a bitter all-night fight with the Red guerrillas in control of the city. The Reds and the original