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Holden’s on medications that selectively address fast-dividing tissues. Skippy’s a fast-dividing tissue.”
was hard for Havelock to remember that the stillness of the deck was an illusion. The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire.
“We’re all going to die,” Elvi said. “And we’re all very probably going to die very, very soon. And my choices are to go out and look at this amazing, strange, beautiful, ruined world or else stay in the camp and watch everyone around me die by centimeters. And I’m a coward and a hedonist and I’m sometimes very, very selfish.”
it did seem to be a microcosm of everything in life. No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get.
“My fancy alien material transfer system has been sitting unused for over a billion years and half the planet just exploded. Your ship was built less than a decade ago and you can barely keep the coffee pot running.”
At first glance, it looked like a massive collection of appendages and cutting tools. It stood on six of its limbs, and waved four others in the air like a crustacean made of steel and knives. Whipping through the air around the heavier cutting arms were a dozen or more tentacles of what looked like black rubber. As he watched, two of the tentacles gripped the inside edges of the doorway and bent them out with fearsome strength.
About the time one-celled organisms on Earth were starting to think about maybe trying photosynthesis, something turned this whole damned planet off. Took it off the grid, and killed everything high enough up the food chain to have an opinion. If I’m right, the thing that did that’s not entirely gone. Every time something reaches into this one particular place, it dies.”
But, like so many things in life, when you come to the spot where you’re supposed to do the rituals, you do them.
“Yeah. So, as far I can figure it, there are minerals native to this system that are fairly rare, galactically speaking.” “Lithium.” “That’s one,” Miller agreed. “This planet is a gas station. Process the ore, refine it, send it down to the power plants, then beam the collected energy out.”
“To wherever. There are lots of worlds like this one, and they all fed the grid. Not the rings, though. I still don’t know how they powered those.”
You think you can have an underground rail system last two billion years on any planet with tectonic action?”
“It’s too much,” he finally said. “That level of control over your environment is too much. I can’t get my brain around it. What could kill these guys?” “Something worse.”
“So there’s the thing,” the Miller-bot said, waiving its claws around at the machinery, “this right here was the point of this place. It’s why this planet exists. And right around here somewhere is a blank spot in the planetary network. A place we can’t touch.” “So?” “So, whatever’s in that blank spot, it’s not from around here. And if it’s a bullet, then whoever did this knew to shoot for the heart.”
All of nature was a record of crisis and destruction and adaptation and flourishing and being knocked back down again.
In that moment, Basia felt something like a hammer blow to his chest. Everyone in those little pockets of air was a Felcia to someone. Every life saved there filled someone somewhere else with relief and joy. Every life snuffed out before its time was another Katoa. Someone, somewhere, having their heart torn out.
Miller stopped at a seam in the wall and placed his claws on it, ready to push. “In through here? It used to be one of the major control centers for the planet. Like a… like a nerve cluster or something. As near as I can figure it, the dead spot’s in here.”
“Well,” Marwick said. “It’s good to recall that wherever people start, whatever they bring with them, humanity can still pull together in heavy weather.”
“Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. These people could just as easily have gone down with their teeth in each other’s throats. That happens too. It’s just the folks that go that way aren’t around to write the history books.”
The frames of new construction were starting to appear. People, building on the ruins of what had come before, just like they always did. So many things had been lost, but it was the missing people that hurt the most. Just like they always did.
Mars had been the first. Not the first station or the first colony, but the first attempt by humanity to cut ties from Earth. The upstart colony that declared its independence. And if Solomon Epstein hadn’t been a Martian and hadn’t perfected his drive just when he had, Mars would have been the site of the first true interplanetary war. Instead, Earth and Mars had made the kind of rough friendship where each side could feel superior to the other and they’d set about carving up the solar system. So it had been for as long as she could remember.
“Mars is dead, Bobbie. Holden and this Havelock sonofabitch and Elvi Okoye, whoever the fuck she is? They killed it. Half the Martian government understands, and they’re shitting themselves so hard, they won’t have bones left. Who the fuck’s going to stay on Mars? A thousand new worlds where you don’t have to live in caves and wear environment suits to walk under the sky. No one’s going to be here.
“The terraforming project shuts down. And upkeep on the basic infrastructure becomes harder. The tax base collapses. The economy craters. The Martian state fails. That is going to happen, and the one chance we had to keep it in check is gone. You will have a shell of a government with a planet nobody wants because nobody needs. The raw materials they have to put on the market are now abundant in a thousand new systems where the mining is simple and you don’t choke to death on vacuum if the rig fails out. And the one thing—the one thing—you have left you can sell? Your one resource?” “Is
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