Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [249]
Despite all this effort, they could not do enough. It always came back to Nadia, and she alone through the sleepless hours gave the system a full stretch, out on the bleeding edge all the time. And Elysium had a huge fleet of construction robots already built, so that it was possible to attack most of the pressing problems simultaneously. Most of those were located among the canyons on Elysium’s western slope. All the roofed canyons had been broken open to one degree or another, but most of their physical plants were untouched, and there were a great number of survivors hunkered down in individual buildings running on emergency generators, as in South Fossa. When South Fossa was covered and heated and pumped up, she directed teams to go out and find all the survivors on the western slope, and they were pulled out of the other canyons and brought to South, and then sent back out with jobs to do. The roofing crews moved from canyon to canyon, and their ex-occupants went to work underneath, readying for the pump-ups. At that point Nadia turned her attention to other matters, programming toolmakers, starting robot linemen along the broken pipelines from Chasma Borealis. “Who did all this?” she said with disgust, staring one night at the TV’s image of burst water pipes.
The question was torn out of her; in reality she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to think about the bigger picture, about anything but that pipeline there, broken on the dunes. But Yeli took her at her word, and said, “It’s hard to tell. The Terran news programs are all about Earth now, there’s only an occasional clip from here, and they don’t know what to make of it either. Apparently the next few shuttles are bringing U.N. troops, who are supposed to restore order. But most of the news is about Earth— the Middle East war, the Black Sea, Africa, you name it. A lot of the Southern Club is bombing flag-of-convenience countries, and the Group of Seven has declared they’re going to defend them. And there’s a biological agent loose in Canada and Scandinavia—”
“And maybe here too,” Sasha interrupted. “Did you see that clip of Acheron? Something happened there, the windows of the habitat are all blown out, and the land underneath the fin is covered with these growths of God knows what, no one wants to get near enough to find out. . . .”
Nadia closed her mind to their talk, and concentrated on the problem of the pipeline. When she returned to real time, she found that every single robot she could find was in action reconstituting the towns, and the factories were busily pumping out more bulldozers, earthmovers, dump trucks, backhoes, frontloaders, steamrollers, framers, foundation diggers, welders, cement makers, plastic makers, roofers, everything. The system was at full pump, and there wasn’t enough to occupy her anymore. And so she told the others she wanted to take off again, and Ann and Simon and Yeli and Sasha decided to accompany her; Angela and Sam had met friends in South Fossa, and were going to stay.
So the five climbed into their two planes, and took off again. This was the way it would happen everywhere, Yeli asserted; whenever members of the first hundred encountered each other, they would not separate.
• • •
They headed in the two planes south, toward Hellas. Passing over Tyrrhena Mohole, next to Hadriaca Patera, they landed briefly; the mohole