The planet below looked deceptively normal, its old harsh face only a bit whiter on the north faces, as if aged by its parasite infestation. But then they flew out over Arena Canyon, and saw running down it a dirty glacier, a river of broken ice blocks. The glacier widened frequently where the flood had pooled for a time. The ice blocks were sometimes pure white, but more often stained one martian shade or other, then broken and tumbled into a mix, so that the glacier was a shattered mosaic of frozen brick, sulfur, cinnamon, coal, fertilizer, cream, blood… spilling down the flat bed of the canyon all the way to the horizon, some seventy-five kilometers away.
Nadia asked Yeli if they could fly north and inspect the land that the robots were going to build the pipeline over. Soon after they turned they received a weak radio message on the first hundred band, from Ann Clayborne and Simon Frazier. They were trapped in Peridier Crater, which had lost its dome; it was to the north also, so they were already on the right course.
The land they crossed that morning appeared negotiable to the robot team; it was flat, and though littered with ejecta, there were no little stopper escarpments. Farther on in this region the Nili Fossae began, very gradually at first, just four very shallow depressions, curving down to the northeast like the fingertips of a faint handprint. A hundred kilometers farther north, however, and they were parallel chasms each five hundred meters deep, separated by dark land that had been heavily bashed by craters-a kind of lunar configuration, reminding Nadia of a messy construction site. Farther north still, they got a surprise: where the easternmost canyon debouched onto Utopia, there was another aquifer outbreak. At its upper end it was simply a new slump, a big bowl of land shattered like a broken plate of glass; lower down, patches of frosting black and white water surged right out of the broken land, ripping at the new blocks and carrying them away even as they watched, in a steaming flood that caused the land it touched to explode. This shocking wound was at least thirty kilometers across, and ran right over the horizon to the north, with no sign of dissipating.
Nadia stared at the sight and asked Yeli to fly nearer. “I want to avoid the steam,” Yeli said, absorbed in the sight himself. Most of the white frost cloud was blowing east and falling down onto the landscape, but the wind was fitful, and sometimes the thin white veil would rise straight up, obscuring the swath of black water and white ice. The outflow was as big as one of the big Antarctic glaciers, or even bigger. Cutting the red landscape in two.
“That is a hell of a lot of water,” Angela said.
Nadia switched to the first hundred band, and called Ann down in Peridier. “Ann, do you know about this?” She described what they were flying over. “And it’s still running, the ice is moving, and we can see patches of open water, it looks black or sometimes red, you know.”
“Can you hear it?”
“Just sort of like a ventilator hum, and some cracks and pops from the ice, yeah. But we’re pretty loud up here ourselves.”
“Hell of a lot of water!”
“Well,” Ann said, “That aquifer isn’t very big compared to some.”
“How are they breaking them open? Can people really break those open?”
“Some of them,” Ann said. “The ones with hydrostatic pressure greater than lithostatic pressure are in essence lifting the rock up, and it’s the permafrost layer that is forming a kind of dam, an ice dam. If you drilled a well and blew it up, or if you melted it…”
“But how?”
“Reactor meltdown.”
Angela whistled.
“But the radiation!” Nadia cried.
“Sure. But have you looked at your counter lately? I figure three or four of them must have gone.”
“Wow!” Angela cried.
“And that’s just so far.” Ann’s voice had that distant, dead tone it took on when she was angry. She answered their questions about the flood very briefly. A flood that big caused extreme pressure fluctuations; bedrock was smashed then plucked away, and it was all swept downstream in a pulverizing rush, a ripping, gaseous, boulder-filled slurry. “Are you going to come over to Peridier?” she asked when their questions trailed off.
“We’re just turning east now,” Yeli replied. “I wanted to get a visual fix on Crater Fv first.”
“Good idea.”
They flew on. The astounding roil of the flood dropped beneath the horizon, and they flew over the familiar old stone and sand again. Soon Peridier appeared over the horizon ahead, a low, much-eroded crater wall. Its dome was gone, tattered sheets of the fabric thrown aside, still rolling this way and that over the crater rampart, as if a seed pod had burst. The piste running south reflected the sun like a silver thread. They flew over the arc of the crater wall, and Nadia peered down at the dark buildings through binoculars, cursing in a low Slavic chant. How? Who? Why? There was no way to tell. They flew on to the airstrip out on the far crater rampart. None of the hangars were working, and they had to suit up and drive some little cars over the rim into town.
All the survivng occupants of Peridier were holed up in the physical plant. Nadia and Yeli went through its lock and gave Ann and Simon a hug, and then they were introduced to the others. There were about forty of them, living off emergency supplies, struggling to balance the gas exchange in the sealed buildings. “What happened?” Angela asked them, and they told the story in a kind of Greek chorus, interrupting each other frequently: a single explosion had burst the dome like a balloon, causing an instantaneous decompression that had also blown up many of the town’s buildings. Luckily the physical plant was reinforced, and had withstood the internal pressures of its own air supply; and those inside had survived. Those out on the streets, or in the other buildings, had not.
“Where’s Peter?” Yeli asked, startled and fearful.
“He’s on Clarke,” Simon said quickly. “He called us right after this all began. He’s been trying to get a spot on one of the elevators down, but it’s all police at this point, I guess there were a lot of them in orbit. He’ll get down when he can. It’s safer up there right now anyway, so I’m not in that much of a hurry to see him.”
This made Nadia think of Arkady again. But there was nothing to be done; and quickly she set herself to the task of rebuilding Peridier. She first asked the survivors what their plans were, and when they shrugged, she suggested that they start by setting up a much smaller tent than the dome had been, using tenting material stored in the construction warehouses out at the airport. There were a lot of older robots mothballed out there, and so reconstruction would be possible without too much preliminary tooling. The occupants were enthusiastic; they had not known about the contents of the airport warehouses. Nadia shook her head at this. “It’s in all the records,” she said to Yeli later, “they only had to ask. They just weren’t thinking. They were just watching the TV, watching and waiting.”
“Well, it’s a shock to have a dome go like that, Nadia. They had to make sure the building was secure first.”
“I guess.”
But there were very few engineers or construction specialists among them. They were mostly escarpment areologists, or miners. Basic construction was something that robots did, or so they seemed to think. It was hard to say how long they would have gone before they would have started in on the reconstruction themselves, but with Nadia there to point out what could be done, and drive them with a brief burst of withering scorn at their inactivity, they were soon under way. Nadia worked eighteen and twenty hours a day for a few days, and got a foundation wall laid, and tenting cranes into action over the rooftops; after that it was mostly a matter of supervision. Restlessly Nadia asked her companions from Lasswitz if they would join her in the planes again, and move on. They agreed; and so about a week after their arrival they took off again, with Ann and Simon joining them in Angela and Sam’s plane.