“We shall return in a few days, Cora,” he said. The wind snatched his words away. “I shall think of you.”
He turned to leave her but, just as he ducked out of view in the downturning passage, he heard her say in a half whisper, “Be careful, Boris. Please.”
Boris and Nikolas set off down the slope of Pavonis Mons in the early morning, before the frost faded from the shadowed rocks. They ran down the long slope, at times laughing and enjoying themselves, but never forgetting their main mission. In the low gravity they could run all day long. They were adins.
Overhead, a few glimmering streaks marked the passage of meteorites through the atmosphere. Shooting stars had once been a rare sight in the skies on Earth, but the terraforming comet strikes had left a great deal of debris in nearby space for the battering ram of Mars to mop up on its journey around the sun.
Nikolas kept pace with Boris, breathing through his nose, working all four lungs to maintain the oxygen level in his blood. Boris put on an added burst of speed, and Nikolas ran right beside him like a loyal dog, flat-footed on the long and steady slope of Pavonis.
Back at the labor camp of Neryungri, Boris had been surprised when Nikolas turned out to be such a ready friend, eager and clinging, but much stronger than he had first appeared. Somehow, Nikolas had made it through the rigors of the adin selection process, just so he could remain with Boris.
Boris himself couldn’t give a damn about making the adin selection. Whether in a Siberian labor camp, or sweating in the Baku oil fields, or turned into an inhuman on the surface of Mars, his life was shit and it would stay that way until he could make it something else, until he could wrest his due from the oppressors. And there were always oppressors.
Boris Tiban was the illegitimate son of some Azerbaijani government official who had abandoned his mother; in turn, Boris’s mother promptly turned her young boy in for adoption when the money got too tight. By that time she had moved to the Armenian Republic, and the state placed him in a succession of orphanages, bouncing him like a soccer ball when he proved too intractable.
With the economy and social laws of the Sovereign Republics in constant flux, he went from reasonably comfortable conditions to austere barracks, from fresh meat to near starvation. He never felt happy, because he never knew how long anything would last.
At the age of fifteen he ran away from the foster home and wandered from Armenia, to Georgia, then back to Azerbaijan, finding work and trying to grab something worthwhile. Buffeted around so much in his life, Boris’s standard response was to lash out first, before anyone could strike against him.
During his exile in Neryungri, he had viewed the testing for the adin project and the subsequent surgeries as another way for the system to slap him down against his will, to force him into doing something that would cause him pain and lead to someone else’s benefit. He had volunteered, supposedly of his own free will, but what choice did he have?
The others treated Boris as a small man, an annoyance, an underling. But he had proved time and again that with unexpected brashness and no conscience he could make even powerful men quake in their boots, as he had done at the Baku oil fields and during the adin revolt when he had killed Vice Commander Dozintsev on worldwide Earth television. And now, after hiding for so many years, Boris Tiban would strike again. It would be his greatest act. …
Because of its smaller size, the horizon was foreshortened, and so sunset came rapidly. The sun set behind them, spilling the shadow of Pavonis Mons ahead of them. Darkness fell into a deep stained-glass violet with the air too thin to cloak the wealth of stars.
Breathing heavily through their noses, Boris and Nikolas stopped by a sheltered ledge of weathered rock, the collapsed walls of an ancient lava tube. “Down there,” Boris said, pointing toward the flat ochre plain with his long metal staff. “Look.”
Below, they could discern a metal pipeline leading away from the volcano, the small cluster of Quonset huts surrounded by cairns of rock. Distant substations run by dvas served as roasting plants for mineral samples to extract hydrated water molecules as well as freed oxygen and other volatiles. But this settlement was a pumping station at the intersection of two pipes. One line extended in the direction of the human base camp, while the other spread out to supply various dva mining clusters in the area. The water, kept liquid by volcanic heat in a reservoir deep under Pavonis Mons, could be carried all the way to Lowell Base in insulated pipes.
The work was done by dvas, the successors to the adins—but Boris looked on them as usurpers.
Through extreme measures, revolutionaries had succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and the Bolsheviks had slaughtered Tsar Nicholas II and the entire Romanov family in 1918. He looked at the dva buildings and felt anger like an ulcer burning in him.
Boris Tiban held all the power in the world, because he had so little to lose.
“Let us rest here awhile, then keep moving,” Boris said, tossing a loose stone over the precipice. It dropped too slowly, tumbling end over end, then struck a boulder below with a high ping.
“We shall strike in the middle of the night.”
ABOARD THE ORBITER, Keefer issued departure orders, studiously verifying the steps from the online checklists even though he had memorized them long ago. Eager to go, he felt like an enthusiastic child waiting to dash onto a playground, but he was also self-conscious about being in command. He preferred being a hands-off sort of boss, but he would have to make sure everyone else performed their appropriate tasks. The other eleven crew members bustled about, doing their jobs as they had been drilled, looking at Keefer’s anxiety with bemusement.
In the main compartment of the orbiter he shook Captain Rubens’s hand as the others climbed into the lander module. “I envy you, Keef,” Rubens said. “This is my third back-and-forth, the last one the UN rad limits will allow, and then I’m grounded on Earth.” He sighed, then clapped Keefer on the back. “I wish I could have set foot on Mars at least once.”
Chetwynd popped into the doorway and slapped his palm twice against the frame of the airlock, “Let’s go!” then slipped into the foremost seat of the cramped lander. He would pilot them down to the surface while Rubens and his copilot remained in orbit, “minding the store,” as they called it.
Tam, Shen, and Ogawa crowded into their seats up front with Keefer. Ogawa giggled nervously, flicking his eyes from side to side, but Tam shushed him. Keefer ducked his head and followed them into the lander, where the sounds were muffled. The other eight buckled into the rear seats in the lander’s passenger bay.
“Right on,” Rubens said as he closed the hatch. “Smooth sailing. Come see me when you all get back to Earth in a few years.”
“Get prepped, ladies and gentlemen,” Chetwynd said to the complement of passengers, then remembered to add, “if you please.”
Keefer was out of the loop at this point, more a mascot than a leader. The others knew their tasks, and he let them do their jobs. Keefer heaved a sympathetic sigh for Captain Rubens: he had spent four months in a cramped ship with the man and had not realized the captain’s desire to set foot on Mars. But then, Keefer had been frequently told by Gina—his son Allan’s mother—that he had a “clueless streak in him a mile wide.” He just didn’t notice when other people had hidden problems. Why couldn’t they just come out and say so when something was bothering them? It exasperated him. Had everyone but him noticed Captain Rubens’s deep desire? Probably.
Maybe Keefer could see to it that they named a Martian mountain after Captain Rubens or something.
With the chatter of operations going on around him, Keefer strapped himself into the descent chair, then closed his eyes, taking measured breaths of the stale, metallic air they had been breathing for the past four months.
With