We had paid our tuition but couldn’t go to classes. Most of the voided faculty and students had little choice but to go home. The university generously gave us free tickets on state chartered trains. Some, including Diane, declined the tickets and vowed to fight the illegal voiding. That earned her — and, guilty by association, me, simply slow to pack my belongings — an escort of UMS security out of the university warrens.
Diane walked stiffly, slowly, defiantly. The guards — most of them new emigrants from Earth, large and strong — firmly gripped our elbows and hustled us down the tunnels. The rough treatment watered my quick-growing seed of doubt; how could I give in to this injustice without a cry? My family was cautious; it had never been known for cowardice.
Surrounded by Connor’s guards, packed in with the last remaining voided students, we were marched in quickstep past a cluster of other students lounging in a garden atrium. They wore their family grays and blues, scions of BMs with strong economic ties to Earth, darlings of those most favoring Dauble’s plans; all still in school. They talked quietly and calmly among themselves and turned to watch us go, faces blank. They offered no support, no encouragement; their inaction built walls. Diane nudged me. “Pigs,” she whispered. . I agreed. I thought them worse than traitors — they behaved as if they were cynical and old, violators of the earnest ideals of youth.
We had been loaded into a single tunnel van and driven to the depot, still escorted by campus guards.
The depot hummed.
A few students wandered down a side corridor, then came back and passed the word. The loop train to the junction at Solis Dorsa approached. Diane licked her lips and looked around nervously. The last escorting guard, assured that we were on our way, gave us a tip of his cap and stepped into a depot cafe, out of sight.
“Are you coming with us?” Diane asked.
I could not answer. My head buzzed with contradictions, anger at injustice fighting family expectations. My mother and father hated the turmoil caused by unification. They strongly believed that staying out of it was best. They had told me so, without laying down any laws.
Diane gave me a pitying look. She shook my hand and said, “Casseia, you think too much.” She edged along the platform and turned a corner. In groups of five or less, students went to the lav, for coffee, to check the weather at their home depots… Ninety students in all sidled away from the main group.
I hesitated. Those who remained seemed studiously neutral. Sidewise glances met faces quickly turned away.
An eerie silence fell over the platform. One last student, a female first-form junior carrying three heavy duffels, did a little shimmy, short brown hair fanning around her neck. She let one duffel slip from her shoulder. The shimmy vibrated down to her leg and she kicked the bag two meters. She dropped her other bags and walked north on the platform and around the corner.
My whole body quivered. I looked at the solemn faces around me and wondered how they could be so bovine. How could they just stand there, waiting for the train to slow, and accept Dauble’s punishment for political views they might not even support?
The train pushed a plug of air along the platform as it passed through the seals and curtains. Icons flashed above the platform — station ID, train designator, destinations — and a mature woman’s voice told us, with all the politeness in the world and no discernible emotion, “Sou’s Dorsa to Bosporus, Nereidum, Argyre, Noachis, with transfers to Meridiani and Hellas, now arriving, gate four.”
I muttered, “Shit shit shit” under my breath. Before I knew what I had decided, before I could paralyze myself with more thought, my legs took me around the corner and up to a blank white service bay: dead end. The only exit was a low steel door covered with chipped white enamel. It had been left open just a crack. I bent down, opened the door wide, glanced behind me, and stepped through.
It took me several minutes of fast walking to catch up with Diane. I passed ten or fifteen students in a dark arbeiter service tunnel and found her. “Where are we going?” I asked in a whisper.
“Are you with us?”
“I am now.”
She winked and shook my hand with a bold and happy swing. “Someone has a key and knows the way to the old pioneer domes.”
Muffling laughter and clapping each other on the back, full of enthusiasm and impressed by our courage, we passed one by one through an ancient steel hatch and crept along narrow, stuffy old tunnels lined with crumbling foamed rock. As the last of us left the UMS environs, stepping over a dimly lighted boundary marker into a wider and even older tunnel, we clasped hands on shoulders and half-marched, half-danced in lockstep.
Someone at the end of the line harshly whispered for us to be quiet. We stopped, hardly daring to breathe. Seconds of silence, then from behind came low voices and the mechanical hum of service arbeiters, a heavy, solid clank and a painful twinge in our ears. Someone had sealed the tunnel hatch behind us.
“Do they know we’re in here?” I asked Diane.
“I doubt it,” she said. “That was a pressure crew.”
They had closed the door and sealed it. No turning back.
The tunnels took us five kilometers beyond the university borders, through a decades-old maze unused since before my birth, threaded unerringly by whoever led the group.
“We’re in old times now,” Diane said, looking back at me. Forty orbits ago — over seventy-five Terrestrial years — these tunnels had connected several small pioneer stations. We filed past warrens once used by the earliest families, dark and bitterly cold, kept pressurized in reserve only for dire emergency…
Our few torches and tunnel service lamps illuminated scraps of old furniture, pieces of outdated electronics, stacked drums of emergency reserve rations and vacuum survival gear.
Hours before, we had eaten our last university meal and had a warm vapor shower in the dorms. That was all behind us. Up ahead, we faced Spartan conditions.
I felt wonderful. I was doing something significant, and without my family’s approval.
I thought I was finally growing up.
The ninety students gathered in a dark hollow at the end of the tunnel, a pioneer trench dome. All sounds — nervous and excited laughter, questioning voices, scraping of feet on the cold floor, scattered outbreaks of song — blunted against the black poly interior. Diane broke Martian reserve and hugged me. Then a few voices rose above the dull murmurs. Several students started taking down names and BM affiliations. The mass began to take shape.
Two students from third-form engineering — a conservative and hard-dug department — stood before us and announced their names: Sean Dickinson, Gretyl Laughton. Within the day, after forming groups and appointing captains, we confirmed Sean and Gretyl as our leaders, expressed our solidarity and zeal, and learned we had something like a plan.
I found Sean Dickinson extremely handsome: of middle height, slight build, wispy brown hair above a prominent forehead, brows elegantly slim and animated. Though less attractive, Gretyl had been struck from the same mold: a slim young woman with large, accusing blue eyes and straw hair pulled into a tight bun.
Sean stood on an old crate and gazed down upon us, establishing us as real people with a real mission. “We all know why we’re here,” he said. Expression stern, eyes liquid and compassionate, he raised his hands, long and callused fingers reaching for the poly dome above, and said, ‘The old betray us. Experience breeds corruption. It’s time to bring a moral balance to Mars, and show them what an individual stands for, and what our rights really mean. They’ve forgotten us, friends. They’ve forgotten their contractual obligations. True Martians don’t forget such things, any more than they’d forget to breathe or plug a leak. So what are we going to do? What can we do? What must we do?”