Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [265]
And now it had happened. She couldn’t believe it. She took the box from her walker’s thigh pocket, turned it over in her hand. Phobos shot up over the western horizon like a gray potato. The sun had just set, and the alpenglow was so strong that it looked like she was standing in her own blood, as if she were a creature as small as a cell standing on the corroded wall of her heart, while around her swept the winds of her own dusty plasma. Rockets were landing at the spaceport north of the city. The dusk mirrors gleamed in the western sky like a cluster of evening stars. A busy sky. U.N. ships would soon be descending.
Phobos crossed the sky in four-and-a-quarter hours, so she didn’t have to wait long. It had risen as a half moon, but now it was gibbous, almost full, halfway to the zenith, moving at its steady clip across the coagulating sky. She could make out a faint point of light inside the gray disk: the two little domed craters, Semenov and Leveykin. She held the radio transmitter out and tapped in the ignition code, MANGALA. It was like using a TV remote.
A bright light flared on the leading edge of the little gray disk. The two faint lights went out. The bright light flared even brighter. Could she really perceive the deceleration? Probably not; but it was there.
Phobos was on its way down.
• • •
Back inside Cairo, she found that the news had already spread. The flare had been bright enough to catch people’s eyes, and after that they had clumped together around the blank TV screens, by habit, and exchanged rumors and speculation, and somehow the basic fact had gotten around, or been worked out independently. Nadia strolled past group after group, and heard people saying “Phobos has been hit! Phobos has been hit!” And someone laughed, “They brought the Roche limit up to it!”
She thought she was lost in the medina, but almost directly she came to the city offices. Maya was outside: “Hey Nadia!” she cried, “Did you see Phobos?”
“Yes.”
“Roger says when they were up there in year One, they built a system of explosives and rocketry into it! Did Arkady ever tell you about it?”
“Yes.”
They went in to the offices, Maya thinking aloud: “If they manage to slow it down very much, it’ll come down. I wonder if it’ll be possible to calculate where. We’re pretty damn close to the equator right here.”
“It’ll break up, surely, and come down in a lot of places.”
“True. I wonder what Sax thinks.”
They found Sax and Frank bunched before one screen, Yeli and Ann and Simon before another. A UNOMA satellite was tracking Phobos with a telescope, and Sax was measuring the moon’s speed of passage across the Martian landscape to get a fix on its velocity. In the image on the screen Stickney’s dome shone like a Fabergé egg, but the eye was drawn away from that to the moon’s leading edge, which was blurry and streaked with white flashes of ejecta and gases. “Look how well balanced the thrust is,” Sax said to no one in particular. “Too sudden a thrust and the whole thing would have shattered. And an unbalanced thrust would have set it spinning, and then the thrust would have pushed it all over the place.”
“I see signs of stabilizing lateral thrusts,” his AI said.
“Attitude jets,” Sax said. “They turned Phobos into a big rocket.”
“They did it in the first year,” Nadia said. She wasn’t sure why she was speaking, she