Climbing Olympus. Kevin J. Anderson
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by adrenaline but held back by fatigue and weakness in the too-thick air.
As he hesitated at the broken door frame, letting his eyes adjust to the brightness, the two surviving dva women howled at him in fury. They snatched pieces of broken furniture and heavy tools from a workbench to defend themselves.
Boris reeled, feeling the wind kicked out of him as he saw Nikolas lying on the floor with rich red blood pooled beneath his crushed skull. Two dead dvas lay sprawled alongside him, blanketed in more blood. He stood motionless for an instant.
The big dva man heaved up the bloodied table and lurched toward Boris, but Boris snapped out of his daze and swung his titanium staff. Its arc caught the other man on the shoulder, cracking down and probably crushing bone. The dva man snarled, falling to one knee, and Boris kicked the side of his head with a flat, insulated foot. The dva man went down.
Then the two dva women rushed him. Boris stumbled back out into the darkness.
Outside, the burst pipe continued to howl as water and steam gushed through the ruptures. The air was thicker than ever before with cold steam, clogged with strangling vapor, making it impossible to breathe. Boris felt as if he were drowning in the dense mist. He could barely move, dragging his trembling legs one step at a time as he staggered toward the spraying water. His head pounded from the vise of pressure. Any second now his skull would crack like an eggshell.
Accustomed to the air and in their own element, the dva women went after him, wielding their sharp, crude weapons. Boris stumbled away.
The iron-oxide dirt at his feet turned to muck, freezing into slush as he ran. Though he could hear one dva woman yelling as she pursued him, he could make out nothing of the other behind him in the darkness. His eyes were still dazzled from the brilliant lights in the hut. The splash of illumination from the broken doorway did nothing but blind him.
Nikolas was dead. Boris could not comprehend it. Now we are only four.
Suddenly, silently, the second dva woman dove at the backs of his knees. Boris fell. She knocked him forward into the quagmire of icy mud under the broken pipe. The escaping water continued to scream just over their heads. She grabbed Boris’s neck, digging her knees into the small of his back. Droplets of frozen steam sprayed around them, enveloping Boris with its paralyzing coldness, so frigid he could actually feel it through his polymerized skin.
Wasting no energy on words or a roar of defiance, Boris lurched back to his hands and knees, forcing his adin muscles to do as he commanded. Struggling, he tried to find a way to hit his attacker with the metal staff, but she clung to him from behind.
The other woman reached him now, still screaming, still flailing with a steel wrench in her hand. A sunburst of pain exploded in Boris’s shoulder as she brought the sharp tool crashing down on his back, near the crease of skin that marked the implant of his second pair of lungs.
Boris heaved himself to his feet, clamping his lips shut and grunting. This was low gravity. He was strong. He could defeat these two dvas. Inside himself, he searched for the anger to give him strength, but it seemed to be fading away, running out like blood onto the ground.
The dva woman on his back tried to throttle him with her muscular forearm. Boris staggered backward, straining his leg muscles until they felt ready to rip, and slammed her into the jagged edge where he had broken the pipe. Precious water poured around her, around him, and finally the woman loosened her hold.
The other woman hurled her wrench at Boris, but it only nicked his calf as he turned and splashed away into the cold mud.
He used the titanium staff to regain his balance. The first dva woman, stunned and reeling from being hammered into the pipeline, lurched back out of the gushing water and came at him.
Boris whirled to see a figure standing in the doorway of the dva hut. For a moment, he thought it was Nikolas, still alive and coming to aid him—but the silhouette was too squat, too bearlike. This time it carried a long digging implement. The older dva man lumbered toward him with murder in his eyes.
In panic, Boris looked around, swung his staff in an empty whistling arc to ward off the dvas, and fled into the deep Martian night.
As he escaped, wheezing for breath and heading up to the blessed higher altitudes, the wailing water from the broken pipe sounded like a requiem for dead Nikolas.
THE GATHERING STORM LOOKED huge on the weather-sat images—minor by Martian standards, but more enormous than anything Earth had ever cooked up. A tidal wave of suspended dust particles and free-floating plankton, it marched across the face of the planet like Mongol hordes conquering the Russian steppes.
Rachel punched up the climate models and ran through the usual prediction algorithms. Evrani’s simulations always gave a slightly more conservative estimate than al-Somak’s, and the two meteorologists spent a great deal of time bickering about it. But the result was clear enough, even at such an extreme distance. At such incredible velocities the storm would arrive in two days, three at the most.
Rachel stared at the swirling image. It seemed a hypnotic eye, beckoning her like the back-of-the-mind yearning to jump that lurks behind an agoraphobe’s terror of heights. The storm was an inexorable force that would sweep all Earth politics—all of Rachel’s past—aside. Tempting. Perhaps the storm would hang in the air for months, preventing the lander from taking off and returning her to orbit, leaving Captain Rubens stranded on Phobos and waiting for the next launch window. That way Rachel could remain an extra half year on Mars—but she doubted that would happen. Anyway, it would be only a delaying tactic, solving nothing.
The storm seasons came half a Martian year apart, when the north and south poles alternately thawed or froze out great hunks of the atmosphere, but the terraforming efforts had thrown the weather patterns into turmoil. The last time Rachel had seen such an all-encompassing storm on the weathersat images was just before Dmitri Pchanskii and his dva team had been buried under fallen rocks in Noctis Labyrinthus.
She wondered if this storm presaged another disaster.
Moving with a lethargy she identified as sadness at ending her work—not with a bang, but a whimper—Rachel looked around the inside of the inflatable module. She wanted desperately to stay here with her dvas, to continue her work and be left alone, but she was also tired. Tired of the problems, tired of the interpersonal details she had to manage as commissioner, tired of everything.
On Earth it would be worse. Even well-meaning people would hound her, ask her for speeches, challenge her decades of work with innocent yet biting questions. Here at Lowell Base she had withdrawn over the last four months, knowing that Keefer was on his way. She felt alone and isolated … but it would be worse to be with anyone right now. She had not been close to Bruce Vickery in years, and she had found no real companion among the other fifty people at the base. She could not count even the dvas among her friends.
This morning the inflatable modules crackled with an empty white noise. All the other personnel were hard at work in their various labs, keeping schedules to fulfill the core tasks the UNSA assigned them. The air felt cold and bright, heavy with the deep chill that never seemed to leave, no matter how hard the solar heaters worked. Rachel rubbed her arms to generate extra warmth in her soft sweater.
She checked the roster to see where everyone was, punching in a request for a summary grid and a sketchy map of Lowell Base, the Spine, and surrounding environs. Evrani and al-Somak had taken the putt-putt to deploy a wide net of climatological sensors in preparation for the coming storm. The two of them jabbered at each other in a machine-gun babble of heavily accented jargon. With storm season approaching, they acted like children on New Year’s Day.
Bruce Vickery had taken Keefer and a handful of the new arrivals out in Schiaparelli to visit the solar-power collectors deployed on the Spine. A couple of the others began their orientation