xlaunch was running.The metal doorway began to swirl with color, washing out the dark blue of the ceramic canister that lay balanced inside it.
She got to her feet, felt Curtis’s hands close around her left ankle. Her right leg was free and she pulled it back, then drove the point of her toe between his legs, using all her strength.
He must have screamed, but she couldn’t hear it. He thrashed and shook like a drowning fish, and she pulled her leg free and ran for the Japanese screen in the center of the room.
“Molly, no!”Verb’s voice, higher, louder than the sirens.
With her gloved hands she grabbed the power board and yanked it loose from its connections.
The voltage kicked her ten feet across the floor, sparks dancing in front of her eyes and smoke trickling from the forearms of her suit. She couldn’t breathe, but air wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to see...
She pulled herself up, literally crawling up the side of the wall.
The canister was still there.
Thank God, Molly thought.That much saved; that many more that didn’t have to die.
The dome, she thought. Had the Russians really done it?
She couldn’t stay on her feet. She slumped to the floor, one foot sending the power board skittering away across the durofoam.
The sirens wound down and the sudden silence hit Molly like a physical blow. She passed out for a moment, and when she forced her eyes open again, she could see Curtis moving toward her.
“—the panel back in and we’ll have another go,” he was shouting to Alonzo. He had the gun again, and now he was looking at her.“And you, bitch, are going to die.”
She put out one hand, tried to lever herself up. Her muscles had no strength.As her fingers clutched uselessly at the durofoam floor, she saw Verb, standing behind a row of machines, watching her.
Curtis picked up the panel and held it under one arm. He brought the gun up, and Molly watched numbly as his elbow locked and his shoulder moved in toward his chin.
Somebody stepped in front of her, and she couldn’t see Curtis anymore.
“No, Curtis,” Lena said.“It’s over.”
“Over?” Curtis, said.“They destroyed the dome, they killed God knows how many people, and you say it’s over?”
Molly felt a hand pulling at her and managed to stand up long enough to brace herself against the rear wall of the cave.The touch of the fingers was strange, hesitant, and Molly looked over into the face of her daughter.
“I’m sorry,”Verb said.The girl’s eyes were red, but she had stopped crying,“I screwed everything up. I just got so hurt and angry, and I...”
“It happens,” Molly said, the words coming out a little breathlessly. “You’re just human, that’s all.”
“I don’t know if I like that,”Verb said.There was a tension around her eyes, a distance that had never been there before. She’s growing up, Molly thought. She hasn’t got long now at all.
“I know,” Molly said.“I know.And I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have kept anything from you.Whatever...whatever time we have left, I’ll try to do better.”
“Okay,”Verb said.The pressure of the girl’s hand on her shoulder was strong, comforting. I can’t remember the last time, Molly thought, she touched me on her own.
Curtis was staring at Alonzo.“Come put this panel back in,” he said, “while I watch these assholes.”
Alonzo stayed where he was, behind the crt. Molly heard the beep as he switched it off.“They’re right, Curtis.This is where it has to stop.”
“I don’t believe it,” Curtis said.“I don’t fucking believe it.You’re going to just lie there and let this happen to you? I could kill you all.”
“Not all of us,” Hanai said, moving over to stand near Lena.“One or two of us, but not all of us.”
Curtis began to back away, toward the airlock.“I know what you think, all of you.You think I’m the Fisher King or something, that I’m all dried up, that maybe you can sacrifice me and get a new king and everything will be okay again.” He stepped into the bottom half of his suit, and then he had to put the panel down to get into the upper half.
“It’s easy to blame me,” he went on.“But it wasn’t my fault. I never lost my faith. I always believed we could change this place, and I still believe it.” He picked up the panel again and held it over his head. “With this kind of power we could have started those changes months ago, maybe even years ago. But you kept it from me, you refused to trust me with it. But now I have it, and I’m going to build the new Mars I promised.And if you won’t help me, I’ll find somebody else who can.”
“How many have to die first?” Molly said. She reached her right arm across and held onto Verb’s hand for just a second, then took a couple of shaky steps away from her.“We can’t build a new world and then turn it into Earth all over again, with factions and war and bombs...”
Curtis’s expression was feral, crazed, a cornered animal’s. He put on one glove at a time, keeping the gun up and trained on the room with the other hand.
“Even Morgan,” he said,“even Morgan would not be this stupid. He’d know what to do with power like this.” He grabbed a helmet and slid into the airlock feet first.
The ship, Molly thought. He was going to take Reese’s ship.
He could do it, too—any of them could; in an emergency, it would only take a single crewman to get the lander back up to Deimos, to refuel the Mission Module, to pilot the big ship all the way back to Earth.
“Don’t—” she said, but the hatch had already closed, and the indicator over the door flashed red.
No one else seemed to understand what was happening.They stood frozen in place, their shoulders starting to relax, Frontera forgotten, Curtis dismissed.
Somewhere she found the strength to walk. She looked at the charred spots on her gloves, couldn’t see any serious damage to the suit. She pushed a helmet over her head and got a green telltale on her chest pack at the same time she started the pumps to fill the airlock.
She looked back, saw the others starting to move, the fear taking hold in their faces, but she couldn’t hear them in the sealed environment of the suit.The airlock light went green, and she opened the hatch and got inside and slammed it shut again.
The wait seemed impossibly long, but there were no thoughts at all in her mind, just an agonizing awareness of how slowly time was moving. And then, finally, the outer hatch cycled open, and she crawled out into a hell of blowing sand.
Hydraulics drew the hatch shut behind her. She took a few staggering steps into the night, unable to see anything but the billowing dust in the light of her helmet. She switched off the lamp and let the darkness close in around her.
There, in the distance, barely visible through the storm, were the lights of Frontera.
She dropped to her knees and held onto a chunk of frozen lava, weak with relief.There was time yet.
“Hello?” she said into her suit radio.“Hello, is, anybody monitoring?” She fumbled with the switch on top of her chest pack and tried the emergency frequency.“Mayday, for Christ’s sake, somebody answer me!”
No one there. Of course not, the alarm had gone off, they had abandoned the dome. She tried the short-range frequency again.“This
is Molly, I need to get through to Mayakenska, is she there? For God’s sake, if you can hear me—”
“Mayakenska is gone,” said a voice in her ear. She thought she recognized the voice of the other Russian, the tall blond.
“Gone?”
“It is too late,”the voice said.“There is nothing you can do to stop it now.”
“No,” Molly said. She stood up again, lost her balance, and rolled four or five meters down the slope.“No, you have to stop them—”
She looked up to see a line of ruby light, narrow as a spotlight beam, connect Frontera to the sky overhead.