As they flew south, down the slope of Isidis toward Burroughs, a coded message clittered abruptly over their radio speakers. Nadia dug through her pack and found a bag of stuff Arkady had given her, including a bunch of files; she found the one she wanted and plugged it into the plane’s AI, and they ran the message through Arkady’s decryption program. After a few seconds the AI spoke the message in its even tones:
“UNOMA is in possession of Burroughs, and detaining everyone who comes here.”
There was silence in the two planes, winging south through the empty pink sky. Below them the plain of Isidis sloped down to the left.
Ann said, “Let’s go there anyway. We can tell them in person to stop the assaults.”
“No,” Nadia replied. “I want to be able to work. And if they lock us up… Besides, why do you think they’d listen to what we tell them about the assaults?”
No answer from Ann.
“Can we make it to Elysium?” Nadia asked Yeli.
“Yes.”
So they turned east, and ignored radio queries from Burroughs air traffic control. “They won’t come after us,” Yeli said with assurance. “Look, the satellite radar shows there’s a lot of planes up and around, too many to go after all of them. And it would be a waste of time anyway, because I suspect most of them are decoys. Someone’s sent up a whole lot of drones, which confuses the issue nicely as far as we’re concerned.”
“Someone really put a lot of effort into this,” Nadia muttered as she looked at the radar image. Five or six objects were glowing in the southern quadrant. “Was it you, Arkady? Did you hide that much from me?”
She thought of that radio transmitter of his, which she had just run across in her bag. “Or maybe it wasn’t hid. Maybe I just didn’t want to see it.”
They flew to Elysium, and landed next to South Fossa, the largest roofed canyon of them all. They found that the roof was still there; but only, it turned out, because the city had been depressurized before it had been punctured. So the inhabitants were trapped in any number of intact buildings, and trying to keep the farm alive. There had been an explosion at the physical plant, and several others in the town itself. So there was a lot of work to be done, but there was a good base for a quick recovery, and a more enterprising population than the group in Peridier. So Nadia threw herself into it as before, determined to fill every waking moment with work. She could not stand to be idle; she worked every moment she was awake, her old jazz tunes running through her mind-nothing appropriate, there was no jazz or blues appropriate to this-it was all completely incongruous, “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “Pennies From Heaven,” “A Kiss To Build a Dream On”…
And in those hectic days on Elysium she began to realize just how much power the robots had. In all her years of construction she had never really tried to exert that power to the full; there simply had been no need. But now there were hundreds of jobs to be done, more than could be accomplished even with a total effort, and so she took the system right out to the bleeding edge as programmers would say, and saw just how much that effort could do, even as she tried to figure out how to do more. She had always considered teleoperation to be a basically local procedure, for instance, but it wasn’t necessarily so; using relay satellites she could drive a bulldozer in the other hemisphere, and now, whenever she could establish a good link, she did so. She did not stop working for even a single waking second; she worked as she ate, she read reports and programs in the bathroom, and she never slept except when exhaustion knocked her out. While in this timeless state she told anyone and everyone she worked with what to do, without regard for their opinion or comfort; and in the face of her monomaniacal concentration, and the authority of her grasp of the situation, people obeyed her.
Despite all this effort, they could not do enough; so that it always came back to Nadia, and she alone through the sleepless hours gave the system a full stretch, out on the bleeding edge all the time. And Elysium had a huge fleet of construction robots already built, so that it was possible to attack most of the pressing problems simultaneously. Most of those were located among the canyons on Elysium’s western slope. All the roofed canyons had been broken open to one degree or another, but most of their physical plants were untouched, and there were a great number of survivors hunkered down in individual buildings running on emergency generators, as in South Fossa. When South Fossa was covered and heated and pumped up, she directed teams to go out and find all the survivors on the western slope, and they were pulled out of the other canyons and brought to South, and then sent back out with jobs to do. The roofing crews moved from canyon to canyon, and their ex-occupants went to work underneath, readying for the pump-ups. At that point Nadia turned her attention to other matters, programming toolmakers, starting robot linemen along the broken pipelines from Chasma Borealis. “Who did all this?” she said with disgust, staring one night at the TV’s image of burst water pipes.
The question was torn out of her; in reality she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to think about the bigger picture, about anything but that pipeline there, broken on the dunes. But Yeli took her at her word, and said, “It’s hard to tell. The Terran news programs are all about Earth now, there’s only an occasional clip from here, and they don’t know what to make of it either. Apparently the next few shuttles are bringing UN troops, who are supposed to restore order. But most of the news is about Earth-the Middle East war, the Black Sea, Africa, you name it. A lot of the Southern Club is bombing flag of convenience countries, and the Group of Seven has declared they’re going to defend them. And there’s a biological agent loose in Canada and Scandinavia-”
“And maybe here too,” Sasha interrupted. “Did you see that clip of Acheron? Something happened there, the windows of the habitat are all blown out, and the land underneath the fin is covered with these growths of God knows what, no one wants to get near enough to find out…”
Nadia closed her mind to their talk, and concentrated on the problem of the pipeline. When she returned to real time, she found that every single robot she could find was in action reconstituting the towns, and the factories were busily pumping out more bulldozers, earthmovers, dump trucks, backhoes, frontloaders, steamrollers, framers, foundation diggers, welders, cement makers, plastic makers, roofers, everything. The system was at full pump, and there wasn’t enough to occupy her anymore. And so she told the others she wanted to take off again, and Ann and Simon and Yeli and Sasha decided to accompany her; Angela and Sam had met friends in South Fossa, and were going to stay.
So the five climbed into their two planes, and took off again. This was the way it would happen everywhere, Yeli asserted; whenever members of the first hundred encountered each other, they would not separate.
They headed in the two planes south, toward Hellas. Passing over Tyrrhena Mohole, next to Hadriaca Patera, they landed briefly; the mohole town was punctured, and needed help to start the rebuilding. There were no robots on hand, but Nadia had found she could start an operation with as small a seed as her programs, a computer, and an air miner. That kind of spontaneous generation of machinery was another aspect of their power. It was slower, no doubt of that; still, within a month these three components together would have conjured obedient beasts out of the sand: first the factories, then the assembly plants, then the construction robots themselves, vehicles as big and articulated as a city block, doing their work in their absence. It really was confounding, their new power.