I nodded without making eye contact, wanting him to go away.
“The Statists are suicidal,” Charles said mildly. “They’ll bring themselves down… even if we don’t accelerate the process.”
“We can’t afford to wait,” I said. The skinseal wouldn’t last much longer. The nakedness and embarrassment had bonded us. We knew each other; we thought we had no secrets. But we itched and stank and our indignation might soon give way to general disgruntlement. I felt sure Sean and the other leaders were aware of this.
“I was trying to get a scholarship for Earth study and a grant for thinker time,” he said. “Now I’m off the list, I’m behind on my research — ” He paused, eyes downcast, as if embarrassed at babbling. “You know,” he said, “we’ve got to do something in the next twenty hours. The skinseal will rot.”
“Right.” I looked at him more closely. He was not homely. His voice was mellow and pleasant, and what I had first judged as lack of enthusiasm now looked more like calm, which I was certainly not.
Sean had finished weeding out the bad helmets. He stood and Gretyl called shrilly for our attention. “Listen,” Sean said, shaking out his stiff arms and shoulders. “We’ve had a response from Connor’s office. They refuse to meet with us, and they demand to know where we are. I think even Connor will figure out where we are in a few more days. So it’s now or never. We have twenty-six good outfits and eight or ten problem pieces. I can salvage two from those. The rest are junk.”
“I could fix some of them if he’d let me,” Charles said under his breath.
“Gretyl and I will wear the problem pieces,” Sean said. My heart pumped faster at his selfless courage. “But that means most of us will have to stay here. We’ll draw sticks to see who crosses the plain.”
“What if they’re armed?” asked a nervous young woman.
Sean smiled. “Red rabbits down, cause up like a rocket,” he said. That was clear enough. Martians shoot Martians, and glory to us all, the Statists would fall. He was right, of course. News would cross the Triple by day’s end, probably even reach the planetoid communities.
Sean sounded as if he thought martyrdom might be useful. I looked at the young faces around me, eight, nine, or ten — my age — almost nineteen Terrestrial years — and then at Sean’s face, seemingly old and experienced at twelve. Quietly, as a group, we raised our hands with fingers spread wide — the old Lunar Independence Symbol for the free expression of human abilities and ideas, tolerance against oppression, handshake instead of fist.
But as Sean brought his hand down, it closed reflexively into a fist. I realized then how earnest he was, and how serious this was, and what I was putting on the line.
We drew fibers from a frayed length of Old optic cord an hour after the mask count. Twenty-six had been cut long. I drew a long, as did Charles. Diane was very disappointed to get a short. We were issued masks and set our personal slates to encrypt signals tied to Sean’s and Gretyl’s code numbers. We had already gone over and over the plan. Twenty would cross the surface directly above the tunnels leading back to UMS. I was in this group.
There were aboveground university structures about five kilometers from our trench domes. The remaining students — two teams of four each, Charles among them, under Sean’s command — would fan out to key points and wait for a signal from Gretyl, the leader of our team of twenty, that we had made it to the administration chambers.
If we met resistance and were not allowed to present demands to Connor personally, then Sean’s teams would do their stuff. First, they would broadcast an illegal preemptive signal to the satcom at Marsynch, forcing on all bands the news that action in the name of contractual fulfillment was being taken by the voided students of UMS. Contractual fulfillment meant a lot even under the Statist experiment; it was the foundation of every family’s existence, a sacred kind of thing. Where Sean had gotten the expertise and equipment to send a preemptive signal, he would not say; I found his deepening mystery even more attractive.
Sean would personally take one team of four to the rail links at UMS junction. They would blow up a few custom-curved maglev rods; trains wouldn’t be able to go to the UMS terminal until a repair car had manufactured new rods, which would take several hours. UMS would be isolated.
Simultaneously, the second team of four — to which Charles was assigned — would break seals and pump oxidant sizzle — a corrosive flopsand common in this region — into the university’s net optic and satcom uplink facilities. That would break all the broad com between UMS and the rest of Mars. Private com would go through, but all broadband research and data links and library rentals would stop dead…
UMS might lose three or four million Triple dollars before the links could be repaired.
That of course would make them angry.
We waited in two lines spiraling from the center of the main trench dome. At the outside of the spiral lines, Sean and Gretyl stood silent, jaws clenched. Some students shook their red-sealed hands to get ready for the cold. Skinseal wasn’t made to keep you cozy. It only protected against hypothermia and frostbite.
My own skinseal had come loose at the joints and sweat was pooling before being processed by the nanomer. I had to go to the bathroom, more out of nerves than necessity; my feet and legs had swollen, but only a little; I was not miserable but the petty discomforts distracted me from the focus I needed to keep from turning into a quivering heap.
“Listen,” Sean said loudly, standing on a box to peer over our heads. “None of us knew what we’d be getting into when we started all this. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few hours. But we all share a common goal — freedom to pursue our education without political interference — freedom to stand clear of the sins of our parents and grandparents. That’s what Mars is all about — something new, a grand experiment. We’ll be a part of that experiment now, or by God, we’ll die trying.”
I swallowed hard and looked for Charles, but he was too far away. I wondered if he still had his calm smile.
“May it not come to that,” Gretyl said.
“Amen,” said someone behind me.
Sean looked fully charged, face muscles sharply defined within a little oval of unsealed skin around his eyes, nose and mouth. “Let’s go,” he said.
In groups of five, we removed our clothes, folding them neatly or just dropping them. The first to go entered the airlock, cycled through, and climbed the ladder. When my turn came, I crowded into the lock with four others, held my breath against the swirling red smear, and slipped on my mask and cycler. The old mask smelled doggy. Its edges adhered to the skinseal with the sound of a prim kiss. I heard the whine of pumps pulling back the air. The skinseal puffed as gas pressures equalized. Moving became more difficult.
My companions in the lock began climbing. My turn came and I took hold of the ladder rungs and poked through the hatch, above the rust-and-ochre tumble and smear. With a kick, I cleared the lip, clambered out onto the rocky surface of the plain, and stood under the early morning sky. The sun topped a ridge of hills lying east, surrounded by a dull pink glow. I blinked at the glare.
We’d have to hike over those hills to get to UMS. It had taken us half an hour simply to climb to the surface.
We stood a few meters east of the trench dome, waiting for Gretyl to join us. In just minutes, smear clung to us all; we’d have to destat for half an hour when all this was over.
Gretyl emerged from the hole. Her voice decoded in my right ear, slightly muffled. “Let’s get together behind Sean’s group,” she said.