Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [257]
They got no reply. But more escapees from Korolyov, on the south rim of Melas Chasma in Marineris, reported over one of the rebel channels that the cable was now falling so hard it was shattering on impact. Half an hour later an Aureum drilling operation called in; they had gone out after the sonic booms, and found a mound of glowing brecciated debris, stretching from horizon to horizon.
There was an hour’s absence of any new hard information, nothing but questions and speculation and rumor. Then one of the headphoned listeners leaned back and showed thumbs up to the rest of them, and clicked on the intercom, and an excited voice came on yelling through the static: “It’s exploding! It came down in about four seconds, it was burning top to bottom and when it hit the ground everything jumped right under our feet! We’re having trouble with a leak here. We figure we’re about eighteen kilometers south of where it hit, and we’re twenty-five south of the equator, so you should be able to calculate the rest of the wrap from that, I hope. It was burning from top to bottom! Like this white line cutting the sky in half! I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve still got afterimages in my vision, they’re bright green. It was like a shooting star had stretched. . . Wait, Jorge is on the intercom, he’s out there and saying it’s only about three meters high where he is. It’s soft regolith here, so the cable’s in a trench it smashed for itself. He says it’s so deep in places you could bury it and have a level surface. Those’ll be like fords, he says, because in other places it stands five or six meters high. I guess it’ll do that for hundreds of kilometers at a stretch! It’ll be like the Great Wall of China.”
Then a call came in from Escalante Crater, which was right on the equator. They had evacuated immediately on news of the break with Clarke, but had gone south, so that the arrival of the cable had turned out to be a close thing. The cable was now exploding on impact, they reported, and sending sheets of molten ejecta into the sky, lava-esque fireworks that arced up into their dawn twilight, and were dim and black by the time they fell back to the surface.
During all this time Sax never left his screen, and now he was muttering through pursed lips as he typed and read. The second time around the speed of the fall would accelerate to 21,000 kilometers an hour, he said, almost six kilometers a second; so that for anyone within sight of it— a dangerous place to be, deadly if you were not up on a prominence and many kilometers away— it would look like a kind of meteor strike, and cross from horizon to horizon in less than a second. Sonic booms to follow.
“Let’s go out and have a look,” Steve suggested with a guilty glance at Ann and Simon. A lot of them suited up and went outside. The travelers contented themselves with a video image piped in from the exterior camera, alternating that with video clips gleaned from the satellites. Clips shot from the night-side surface were spectacular; they showed a blazing curved line, cutting down like the edge of a white scythe that was trying to chop the planet in two.
Even so they found it hard to concentrate, hard to focus on what they were seeing and understand it, much less feel anything about it. They had been exhausted when they had landed, and now they were even more exhausted, and yet it was impossible to sleep; more and more video clips were being passed along, some from robot cameras flying in