Ti Sandra acknowledged that this would be a good thing, but added, "We intend never to impede the growth of Earth or any other sovereign power within the Triple. All we ask, in the long run, is that the Triple not stand in our way. We welcome economic ties, we welcome all forms of open trade, but we must not rely on inappropriate expectations or emotions."
She had thirty seconds more for her answer, and took the time to elaborate. "Mars is a rich desert, scattered with settlements filled with a tough and loving people. We have grown as independent families, cooperating to keep each other alive, trading and sharing to prosper. I believe this is the natural order of things: good will among tough-minded but loving equals, never handicapping competitors, sharing the common resources through a strong and fair central authority. Good government keeps balances and corrects those flaws that will not correct themselves. The success of a Martian government lies in not stifling our greatest strengths to fit into some grand intellectual scheme with no precedent in history as actually lived."
Chancellor Frankel leaned over to speak to me. "Brilliantly stated and reprised," he said, nodding vigorously. "I hope she doesn't really believe all that."
Marshall's image turned to face Olson. "The interim government of President Erzul has already shown itself to be an effect effect an iv eck — "
The image abruptly froze, then winked out. LitVid displays around the auditorium spun through confined gyrations and went dark. A low hum filled the room, empty digits on the auditorium's sounder, and then that, too, fell silent. Beside me, Dandy jumped to his feet, took my shoulder, and practically lifted me out of my seat. Two guards and an arbeiter leaped on stage to surround Ti Sandra, and another guard stationed himself by Olson. The auditorium's lights went out.
"Get down," Dandy whispered harshly. I fell to my knees beside him. The auditorium filled with concerned voices and a few shouts and screams. I could feel my body becoming frightened before my mind had time to react.
Dandy pushed my butt and urged me across the floor, still on hands and knees. He covered me like a rude lover until we were in the protection of a stairwell. Ti Sandra huffed beside me. "You there, Cassie?" she asked.
"I'm here," I said.
"Quiet!" Dandy ordered.
A torch flicked on, half-hidden by a guard's hand as he read a small map on a metal plate secured to a handrail at the base of the stairs. Ti Sandra's chief guard, Patsy Di Vorno, a sharp-faced young woman with incredible aims and shoulders, slapped a thick white slab like modeling clay on my arm. I gave a little shriek as it quickly spread and covered my torso, neck, and head, bunching my hair and tugging it painfully. It left me holes to see and breath through. Di Vorno wrapped a slab around each of Ti Sandra's arms. We were now covered with reactive nano armor. The armor was intelligent and mobile; it could sense approaching projectiles and curl us into a tight ball with muscle-snapping speed. Any high-speed projectile hitting the armor would be blown to a stop. That made us dangerous to everybody around us.
With a few grunted words, the President and I were dragged, walked, and shoved up the stairs like cargo. In a small storage room, cool and dark, the guards pushed us low against a wall adjacent to the entrance. They turned their torches high and flicked them down the hall outside. Coded com links penetrated the walls like secret half-heard whispers among frightened children.
Nobody followed. Four guards and two arbeiters set up a secure station in that room, slapping quick-spread sensors onto the walls and drawing their guns. The arbeiters were much more heavily armed than I had guessed, sporting both projectile rapid-fires, short-range electron beams, and selective bio knockers that could put an army of live assailants — human or animal — into shock.
I hugged Ti Sandra and she hugged me, the armor squeaking like rubber between us. Only then did we realize that Olson was in the room with us. Ti Sandra gave him a shocked look, and we hugged him as well.
"What in the hell is this?" Olson asked, voice shaky. His dignity seemed ruffled and he pushed us back.
"Power failure," Ti Sandra ventured. The closest guard, whom I knew only as Jack, shook his head in the torch glare, a shadow above him echoing larger denial.
"No, ma'am," Patsy Di Vorno said, coming back into the room. "Power doesn't go down in buildings like this. The dedicated thinker blanked. All backup control dunked with it. That doesn't happen. We have a planned failure of support."
"Oh," Olson said, leaving his jaw open.
Patsy's mind — triggering a speed enhancement — went into high gear and she started clipping. "Now get your shuttle to unknown. Risk if unfriendly air team tracking — "
"Or sabotage," Dandy Breaker said. "We should separate prez and veep now. Candidate can serve as decoy."
Olson's jaw dropped farther.
"Sorry, sir," Dandy went on, face stony and eyes narrowed in the glare. I could hardly see except in blocks of harsh white and starry black.
"You have an obligation," Olson said, but his own guard interrupted.
"Sir, we mean to get you out of here as well. Breaker means that each team will vector separately. Three arrows out of here, each acting as diversion for the other." He raised his hand, and again we were grabbed and pushed into the hall. From the auditorium came more screams and concerned voices.
"Don't worry, ma'am," Breaker told me. "No weapons fire and no assault signals."
"Watch for peeling walls," another guard said. Nano poisons, rapid-assembly weapons and machines, anything might be possible.
"Who?" Ti Sandra asked, face flushed, large body suddenly very vulnerable and weak, a big slow target.
"We don't care right now, Madam President," another guard said.
I told Dandy, "If you grab my ass again, you better mean it." He shot me a look of surprise, grinned, and said, "Sorry, Ma'am."
We took back tunnels to the shuttle port, walking briskly with guards and arbeiters front and back. "Christ, I don't want this," Olson said before we split, his lone guard hustling him to the train tubes.
"Madam Veep, you have another shuttle," Di Vorno said. "Prez goes incom. Luck, Dandy."
Dandy, Jack, and an arbeiter guided me to the proper gate for the second shuttle. I knew the team always traveled with two shuttles, but I had not seen the second before. It did not look luxurious; spare, cut down, armored and fast.
Then Dandy did something that shocked me badly. He took a tiny package from his pocket, approached a decorative fountain in the terminal and broke the package over the main nozzle. The package quickly swelled in the water like a lump of rising dough. A tiny mechanical observer poked out of the mass and painted me quickly with a gridwork of red lines of light. The lump flopped in the pool around the fountain, popping arms and legs. The legs neglected to sprout toes, growing shoes instead.
It began to look like me, clothes and all, right down to the lumpy white armor. In a few seconds, it stood, squeaked, and with a convincing if inelegant gait, followed the arbeiter into the shuttle. The shuttle sealed the terminal bridge and its hatches, rolled away, and rose into the pink afternoon sky on flame-rooted feathers of white steam.
I shivered away the prickling hairs on my neck.
"My call, ma'am," Dandy said. He and Jack each took an arm and guided me down the corridor. "Maintenance trains go to old station tunnels from here. We'll take one of those."
So I was back where it all began for me, the birthplace of my political consciousness. The pioneer tunnels behind the UMS train depot were still dark and narrow and filled with forgotten debris eventually awaiting the recyclers. The air was downright cold and smelled bad. My head swam as Dandy and Jack paused to consult their slates.
"All com's out except for secure channels, and they're not active," Jack said. He shook his head. "Satcom's out. We might hook into a port and try internal optic."
"No ports here," Dandy said. "Why no com on the secure channels?"
Jack thought for a moment. "I doubt anybody's sending. President's crew is going to stay quiet and in t
he air until they hear from Point One."
"Point One doesn't rely on thinker coordination ..." Dandy mused. "But they have links with thinkers, and computers route the com like anywhere else."
"Evolvons?" I asked.
Dandy waggled his head, not committing himself to any theories. Jack, however, reached up to the roof of the tunnel with long arms, scraped his fingers there, and said, "We've put Terrie thinkers back in authority after sweeps. UMS was running its day-to-day with thinkers."
"Not life support," I said.
"No, but everything's coordinated . . . Computers talk with thinkers, thinkers give computers high-level instructions, even backup systems refer to the system boss . . . and that's a thinker. We swept for them and we missed, that's all."
"Earth evolvons," Dandy said. "Why?"
Jack dropped his hand to his side, wiping ice crystals on his pants, and said, "Madam Vice President, where are the Olympians now?"
"Some of your people are protecting them," I said.
"Of course, but do you know where they are?"
"I assume most of them are at Melas Dorsa. Franklin's core group. Some may be at Tharsis Research University with Leander."
"I need to know some things," Jack said. "Will you brief me?"
"I'll try," I said.
"Let's find a hidey hole with some insulation. We'll settle in until Point One tells us what to do . . . assuming they can. If we don't hear in several hours, we'll commandeer a train and move out of here."
In the dark, the three of us sat in a old branch still lined with foamed rock, marginally warmer than the long tunnels. I wondered if I could still find my way to the trench dome where I'd first spoken with Charles, where the students had gathered before going Up.
"I have a theory," Jack began. "But you should tell me some things first."
"All right," I said.
"Don't be hasty, Ma'am," Dandy said, half-joking. "Check out his clearance."
Jack nodded sincerely. "That should be first, he's right," he said.
I held my slate to his and checked his security clearance by comparison of coded signals. The signals found a locus of agreement. Jack and Dandy were both cleared for top secret, but only on a strict need-to-know basis.
"I think Earth is tapping with our dataflow," Jack began. "That isn't good. We're vulnerable as hell. Our contingency plans call for getting you to a safe location of our choosing. We'll put together the government at that point by popping up a shielded satcom. Assuming they still have evolvons in most of our thinkers, and the evolvons have polluted the computers as well, Mars is going to be in bad shape. Stations will be cut off except for direct optic links and they'll be down for a while. Governors won't be able to report to Many Hills for several days. Techs will have to go in with certified Martian computers and start rearranging dataflow."
"There will be more tapping," Dandy said. "You can bet our certified computers will be polluted."
"Comes from too much reliance on Earth," Jack said sourly. "Ma'am, what I need to know is, why would Earth do this? Just to screw up our government?"
"No," I said. "They'd want to deal with a stable government."
"Have we got something going that would scare them that bad?" Jack asked.
"Yes," I said, cutting through all my instinctive equivocation. My life probably depended on these two men.
"The Olympians?" Jack asked.
"Yes."
"I'm just asking because they were put under top security protection a month ago, and I planned the pattern," Jack said. "Unusual for industrial stuff."
"Is there any chance this is just a local failure?" I asked, the strain in my voice obvious. My last ray of hope was about to be extinguished.
"No, Ma'am," Dandy said. "We'd get Point One immediately."
"Then I'd like to be with the Olympians, and as soon as possible," I said.
Dandy and Jack considered this in silence. "Ma'am, you undoubtedly have your reasons. But we have to make you available for talks with negotiators representing the aggressor. You will be exposed before the President, in case the aggressors are trying to decapitate Mars. Security for the Olympians assumes they will be killed if the aggressor knows their whereabouts. They'll be removed from Melas Dorsa as soon as possible, and we don't know where they'll be."
"I need to communicate with them, then."
"Nobody's talking with anybody for the next few hours, perhaps longer, if we guess correctly."
"If it's that bad, then people are dying," I said.
Jack nodded. "Yes, Ma'am. Power blackouts, tunnel collapses in the fancier stations, oxydep, recycler failures ..."
My neck stiffened with rage beneath the armor. "When will Ti Sandra and I be able to talk?"
Dandy was about to answer when his slate chimed. Coded signals flashed onto the screen.
"That's Point One," he said. "Someone's popped up a mini satcom. Things are happening fast. We're to get you to a shuttle and take you to Many Hills immediately. You're to meet with someone who has a message from Earth."
"I hope you like adventure, Madam Vice President," Jack said.
"Not this kind," I said.
"Nor I, Ma'am."
"What's your last name, Jack?"
"Name's Ivan Ivanovitch Vasilkovsky, Ma'am, from Yamaguchi BM in Australe."
Terror can only last so long before it subsides into numbness and a sour stomach.
A sleek black and red maintenance train engine had been sidelined in the depot roundhouse. We boarded through the engineer's lock. Dandy checked the computer and found it had been completely deactivated. Together, Dandy and Jack pulled the computer offline so it would not start with powerup, switched the engine to emergency manual override, turned on safety sensors but left lights and beacons off, and took us out of the roundhouse. Dandy took the first watch in the driver's seat.
I did not want to go to Many Hills, but their arguments were irrefutable. Running unloaded, on a straight trace the engine could push up to four hundred kiphs. The trip would take at least fifteen hours.
Saddled with authority, away from Ti Sandra and out of touch possibly for days, I felt like a lost child. Mostly I stayed quiet in the tiny compartment, lying on a hard cot that belied the colloquial name from centuries past — "featherbedding."
Jack Vasilkovsky sat on a pulldown stool, face unreadable. He would give up his life for me if called upon. And he would kill.
I had thought these matters through before, but never with such intensity and urgency. I was no longer simply myself or even the Vice President. I was the face of the Republic until Ti Sandra could safely emerge.
In a few hours, I would examine all the contingency plans made by our defense and security staffs. And shortly after that, whether or not I had spoken with Ti Sandra, I would be facing someone representing Earth — who? And with what demands?
The compartment's tiny port allowed small glimpses of pink sky darkening into dusk. The pink shaded into deep brown filled with stars. Came a quick flash of pale blue along the horizon, something I had never seen live before, and night black and cold.
The compartment smelled of stale nano and dust. The engine flew at speed, silent on straight trace. There might be other trains stranded on the tracks, their computers dithering from Earth's merciless evolvons. Jack looked as if he was prepared to blast them out of our way — but then I thought more as he and Dandy were thinking, and realized they would simply commandeer the next engine, leaving the stranded passengers to fend for themselves.
Oddly, only now did I speck that these events were going to be historic. Whether we won or lost, the scattering of Mars's leaders — President, Vice President, and presumably the district governors — would become a Martian legend. Intrigue, decoys, shuttle flights and trains in the night.
Jack's slate chimed and another coded message came in. "Another pop-up," he said dryly. "Point One is still operating, but our satellites are brought down as soon as we put them up. They must want us really scared."
"What's the message?" I asked, rising from the cot.
"I have something from the President, your eyes only, and status on who we're talking to at Many Hills. Cailetet seems to be functioning, and maybe a few small renegade BMs. Nothing else."
He transferred Ti Sandra's message to my slate, simple text and one picture.
Dearest Casseia,
You are the negotiator now. Earth talks to us through sympathetic mouths — Cailetet. Word is you wilt meet with a negotiator chosen by Crown Niger. Earth is afraid. Somebody in the know has talked. Zenger? Olympians are all in hiding. I have issued instructions to CF too sensitive to tell you now. Say whatever it takes to put Mars on track, but in the next few months, or even years, we have the aces. You will learn of my death upon your arrival. I love you and trust you with our child. We will not talk until we have begun to fight again. There are locusts in the soil.
The text was followed by a small picture of Ti Sandra, face smiling but haggard. I signaled the wiping of the message and the picture faded.
Locusts.
Jack leaned forward, touching my hand in concern. "Are you all right?" he asked.
"What do you know about locusts?" I asked.
Jack sat upright and rubbed his hands on his knees. "Jesus," he said. "Contravened by treaty throughout the Triple. What in God's name could we do to Earth . . . Have they?"
"The President says they have."
He looked as if he might cry, caught between anger and horror and helpless to act. "Jesus," he repeated, and could say no more for a few seconds.
"Locusts," I said, trying to bring him back.
He folded his arms and looked away, eyebrows drawn together. "How do you control an entire planet from across the Solar System? Seed it with nano factories that can build a variety of automatic weapons, self-directing warbeit-ers. Mars's soil is ideal. High silicate and aluminum, high ferrous content. Choose old mines or seemingly depleted sites, still rich with the basic minerals, open to deep exploration and concealment without triggering alarm. Sprinkle nano factory seeds from orbit. A single small ship could do it. We have no defense against such an atrocity."