Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [271]
“I doubt it will,” Sax said.
“What’s our destination?” Nadia asked.
“Well, there is an emergency station in Aureum Chaos.”
So they had to thread the entire length of Valles Marineris—5,000 kilometers! “How will we do it!” Maya cried.
“We have canyon cars,” Michel said briefly. “You’ll see.”
The road was a steep one, and they kept up the fast pace, punishing their joints. Nadia’s right knee began to throb, and her ghost finger itched for the first time in years. She was thirsty, and cold in the old diamond pattern. It got so dusty and dark that they turned on their headlamps. Each bobbing cone of yellow light barely reached to the road surface, and glancing back up Nadia thought they looked like a string of deep-sea fish, their luminous spots glowing on a great ocean floor. Or like miners in some fluid smoky tunnel. Some part of her began to enjoy the situation— it was a tiny stirring, a sensation mostly physical, but still, the first positive feeling she could remember since finding Arkady. Pleasure like the ghost itching of her lost finger, faint and slightly irritating.
It was still the middle of the night when they came to the bottom of the canyon, a broad U, very common to all the Noctis Labyrinthus canyons. Michel approached a boulder, pushed its side with a finger, then lifted a hatch in the boulder’s side. “Get in,” he said.
There were two of these boulder cars, it turned out; big rovers, shelled by a thin layer of actual basalt. “What about their thermal signals?” Sax asked as he ducked into one.
“We direct all the heat into coils, and bury the coils. So there’s no signal to speak of.”
“Good idea.”
The young driver helped them into the new cars. “Let’s get out of here,” he said brusquely, almost shoving them through the outer lock doors. Light from the lock illuminated his face, framed by his helmet: Asian, perhaps twenty-five, he aided the refugees without meeting their eye, appearing disgruntled, disgusted, perhaps frightened. He said to them scornfully, “Next time you have a revolution you’d better try some other way.
Part 8
Shikata Ga Nai
Prologue
When the occupants of the elevator car Bangkok Friend learned that Clarke had broken away and the cable was falling, they hurried to the foyer and the locker room and pulled on emergency spacesuits as fast as they could, and for a wonder there was no general panic, it all happened in the heart, on the surface everyone was businesslike and attentive to the small group at the lock door who were trying to determine where exactly they were, and when they should abandon the car. This steadiness amazed Peter Clayborne, whose own blood was hammering through his body in great adrenal shocks; he wasn’t sure he could have spoken if he had to. A man in the group at the front told them in level tones that they were approaching the areosynchronous point and so they all pulled into the lock together until they were jammed in like the suits had been in the storage closet, and then they locked the lock and sucked the air. The outer door slid open and there it was, a big rectangle of starry death-black space. It was daunting indeed to launch into it in an untethered spacesuit, it felt to the young man like suicide; but the ones at the front pulled out and the rest followed, like spores from an exploding seed pod.
The car and the elevator dwindled eastward and quickly disappeared. The cloud of spacesuits began to disperse. Many of them stabilized with their feet toward Mars, which lay below them like a dirty basketball. When steady, they ignited their main rockets and lofted upward. The group doing the calculations