Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [245]
“Sax must be loving this revolution,” Nadia said again. “He’s getting stuff they never would have approved.”
“But a lot of his projects must be getting wrecked too,” Yeli pointed out.
“I bet it’s still a net gain, in Sax’s terms. All this water on the surface . . .”
“We’ll have to ask him.”
“If we ever see him again.”
Yeli was silent. Then he said, “Is it that much water, really?”
“It’s not just Lasswitz,” Sam said. “I saw a news bit a while ago— they’ve broken the Lowell aquifer, a big breakout like the ones that cut the outflow channels. It’ll rip billions of kilos of regolith downslope, and I don’t know how much water. It’s unbelievable.”
“But why?” Nadia said.
“It’s the best weapon they have, I guess.”
“Not much of a weapon! They can’t aim it or stop it!”
“No. But neither can anyone else. And think about it— all the towns downslope from Lowell are gone— Franklin, Drexler, Osaka, Galileo, I imagine even Silverton. And all those were transnational towns. A lot of channel mining towns are vulnerable, I should think.”
“So both sides are attacking the infrastructure,” Nadia said dully.
“That’s right.”
She had to work, there was no other choice. She got them going again on robot programming, and they spent the rest of that day and the next getting the robot teams out to the drilling site, and making sure the start-up went right. The drilling was straightforward; it was only a matter of making sure that pressures in the aquifer didn’t cause a blowout. And the pipeline to transfer the water north was even simpler, an operation that had been fully automated for years; but they doubled up on all the equipment, just to make sure. Up the north canyon roadbed, and on northward from there. No need to include pumps; artesian pressure would regulate the flow quite nicely, because when the pressure dropped low enough to stop pushing water out of the canyon, the danger of a breakout at the lower end would presumably be past. So when the mobile magnesium mills were grinding along, scooping up fines and making pipe, and when the forklifts and frontloaders were taking these pipe segments to the assembler, and when that great moving building was taking in the segments and extruding pipe behind it as it rolled slowly along up the road, and when another mobile behemoth was going over the completed pipe, and wrapping it in aerolattice insulation made from tailings from the refinery; and when the first segment of the pipeline was heated and running— then they declared the system operational, and hoped it would make it 300 kilometers farther. The pipeline would be built at about a kilometer an hour, for twenty-four-and-a-half hours a day; so if all went well, about twelve days to Nili Fossae. At that rate the pipeline would be done very soon after the well was drilled and ready. And if the landslide dam held that long, then they would have their pressure valve.
So Burroughs was safe, or as safe as they could make it by their efforts. They could go. But it was a question what their destination should be. Nadia sat slumped over a microwaved dinner, watching a Terran news show, listening to her companions debate the issue. Horrible how the revolution was being portrayed on Earth: extremists, communists, vandals, saboteurs, reds, terrorists. Never the words rebel or revolutionary, words of which half the Earth (at least) might approve. No, they were isolated groups of insane, destructive terrorists. And it didn’t help Nadia’s mood that there was, she felt, some truth to the description; it only made her angrier.
“We should join whoever we can, and help fight!” Angela said.
“I’m not fighting anyone,” Nadia said mulishly. “It’s stupid. I won’t do it. I’ll fix things where I can, but I won’t fight.”
A message came over the radio. Fournier Crater, about 860 kilometers away, had a cracked dome. The populace was trapped in sealed buildings, and running out of air.
“I want to go there,” Nadia said. “There’s a big central warehouse of construction robots there. They could fix the dome, and then be set to other repairs