Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

Molly leaned against the rock and closed her eyes. She was still there when the first of the survivors began to climb past her toward the cave.

  TWENTY

  TWENTY MILES FROM the Salyut, when it had just become a point light-source on her screens, Mayakenska fired her retros.

  She wanted to keep the thrust at maximum, to ram them out of the sky, but her common sense held her back. And then she saw the hair-thin line of red wink into existence and she knew that it would not have made any difference, that nothing she could have done would have mattered.

  They had been ignoring her signals but now she tried again. “This is Mayakenska. You must stop this attack. You must—” She broke off in rage and frustration, trying to slam her fist into the control panel. With no weight behind it the gesture was feeble and meaningless, serving only to wrench her shoulders off to the right and nearly spin her out of her chair.

  She forced herself to lean back into the sling, tighten her straps against the negligible thrust of the retros, and concentrate on the upcoming rendezvous.

  She’d swept across the daylight side of Mars, over the western edge of the Elysium Planitia and the Syrtis Major Planitia in twenty minutes, watching the digital propellant gauge counting backwards toward empty tanks and the various forms that disaster could take. One by one she watched the gruesome possibilities put to rest: not enough fuel to reach escape velocity, not enough height to reach the Salyut, not enough thrust for the retros.

  Now she only had the docking to worry about, and that no longer mattered.

  She had defied her superiors, gambled against time, and lost. In the old days she would have become a non-person, pensioned out or even sent to a gulag as an example. She wondered what the current equivalent would be; a desk job in Yakutsk, or perhaps an auto accident on an empty stretch of road?

  Gently she nosed the ship into a higher, slower orbit as she closed on the green, tapering cylinder of the Salyut. Once her greatest pleasure had been the hours she’d bought on the simulators with her position, her blat. Now she flew the actual ship with less feeling than she’d had on the dullest hour in training, as far beyond emotion as she was beyond fatigue.

  With cautious puffs of hydrazine from her attitude jets, she brought the nose of the lander into the Salyut berth, feeling the latches click solidly into place.

  She reached for the toggle switches that would pump air into the tunnel between the lander and the Salyut, and then stopped her hand halfway there.

  What you’re thinking, she told herself, is murder. Worse than murder, it’s treason.

  And what do you call the cold-blooded destruction of the dome? she asked. Russians died down there, not just Americans and Japanese.

  She moved her arm back to her side. She felt the feverish chill of sweat drying on her forehead and cheeks. It’s not something, she thought, that you talk yourself into. It’s an emotional decision, and you know you’re not going to do it now; you’ve lost the impulse. So go ahead and turn those switches, pump in the air, finish all the seals. Don’t think about the other possibilities.

  Her radio crackled. “Mademoiselle Mayakenska, please complete your seal on the tunnel. You are hereby ordered to place yourself under arrest and surrender the landing vehicle—”

  In a rush of anger and despair, her hands shot to the console and typed in a series of numbers. Numbers Chaadayev would never have heard of, numbers known only to the most senior ground personnel. The computer asked her to verify the order and she did it.

  The explosive bolts that held the air lock hatch in place blew off in silence, shaking the lander like a rabbit in the jaws of a dog. But the latches held her firmly to the Salyut, and in a few seconds everything was still again.

  Three men had died, the air sucked from their lungs, the moisture leached from their skin, their eyes nearly blown from their sockets.

  Murdered.

  She closed her eyes.

  Go on, she thought. You can’t stop here. It’s too late to bring them back, to undo any of this. So take it one step at a time.

  But finish it.

  She removed the hatch from the nose of the lander and crawled through into the long, narrow hallway of the Salyut. The air of the ship seemed to be filled with stars, winking between the orbiting bodies of the three dead cosmonauts; after a second or two Mayakenska realized the lights were tiny, frozen crystals of blood.

  She brushed past Chaadayev’s corpse and patched her helmet radio into the transmitter. “Dawn, this is Zenith. Zenith calling Dawn. Mayakenska here. The American base is destroyed. I regret to report that our information was inaccurate, they—” She stopped, took her finger off the transmit button to get her breath, then started again.

  “The transporter did not—does not exist. I…examined the rock which was supposedly destroyed by the antimatter. I found traces of plastic explosive and indications that others of the rocks had been similarly wired. It was…only a hoax.”

  She released the button again. And now what? The lander was out of fuel, but even if she could get back to the surface, what kind of life could she have there? Curtis would still be alive, sheltered by the rock walls of his cave, and he would hold her accountable.

  For that matter, without the dome, what kind of life would any of them have?

  Her eyes came to rest on the propellant gauge, reminding her that the outboard tanks had been filled at the Phobos station. She had more than enough fuel to get back to Earth, but that, she thought, watching the frozen corpses in their grisly pas de trois, was no longer an alternative.

  She tried to remember. How big a crater would it take? Deep enough to hold in two or three hundred millibars of pressure, at least three or four kilometers deep. Would the fuel tanks, pushed by the mass of the Salyut, protected by the carbon-carbon heat shield of the lander, make that big an explosion?

  She didn’t know.

  If not, she thought, then let it be a gesture. A first, halting step.

  “Zenith to Dawn. We are preparing to leave orbit.” She flicked the power switch on and off to create static in the transmission. “Dawn, there is a problem with our attitude control. Repeat, we are experiencing—”

  She switched the radio off, then smashed it with a wrench. No backing out, she told herself. She would display no lack of moral certainty.

  A little hardship would now be required.

  She programmed the computer for a course that would take her into the Solis Planum, the frozen wasteland they used to call Solis Lacus, the Lake of the Sun. The buried ice there would melt and add to the explosion, releasing precious gasses into the air. For an instant its name would become the literal truth, and it would burn with the brightness and heat of a star.

  If Blok had sounded the alarm, then there would be survivors. That cave was the original settlement; it had supported the colony before the dome was built, and it could support them again until they moved to their new home.

  For one final time she felt the pull of gravity as the Salyut dove into the Martian atmosphere, the thin air screaming against the lander’s heat shield.

  She listened as the long, high note climbed the scale and held at a perfect B above high C.

  TWENTY-ONE

  KANE FELT THE IMPACT in his ribs and the muscles of his neck, no more, really, than a burst of light and a second of galvanic shock. He rolled onto his hands and knees and let the blood flow into his brain.

  The noise of the alarms was so great that Kane could no longer hear the high harmony of his voices. For the first time since they’d touched down on Mars—had it been only a day and a half ago?—he had his mind to himself.

  It made little difference. Even without the compulsion from the implant, his course was obvious: kill Curtis, steal the panel, return to Earth, and bring justice to his uncle.

  The sirens faltered for a second, and Kane saw a vision of depthless crystal seas fouled with blood, of butchered flesh in the wake of the ship. He saw the dusty yard of a monastery and a filthy, bearded monk on his kne
es, praying for the waters to be released.

  The sirens stopped, and the compulsion seized him again with fierce inevitability. He burrowed through the sheets of black plastic, searching for his gun, hearing only the voices in his head and not the ones across the cave from him, muted indistinct noises with no semantic content.

  The implant worked on his adrenal gland as well, renewing the effect of Lena’s adrenogen. He felt the chill of norepinephrins constricting his blood vessels; his kidneys ached from the tension of the surrounding musculature.

  He saw the gun.

  His hand closed around it and he stood up, dizzy, edgy, barely in control. He saw Curtis by the airlock, putting on a helmet, and he raised the Colt until the sight covered Curtis’s neck. Before he could fire, Curtis had moved, turning and jackknifing into the lock.

  He remembered the storm, though the image in his mind was muddled, confused with gray waves and clashing rocks. But he knew he needed the infrared helmet, could remember having thrown it somewhere near where he stood.

  By the time he found the helmet, Molly had gone through after Curtis. Kane ran for the hatch, pushing Hanai to one side. A voice behind him said, “He’s got a gun!” as he slammed the helmet in place and dived into the airlock.

  The inside of the lock was smeared with the heat of the bodies that had just passed through it. He tapped the butt of the gun against the curved metal floor of the cylinder, his right leg shaking to the rhythm.

  The hatch opened. He slid out and stared toward Frontera, at the blinding column of white light that overloaded the contrast sensors of his helmet, reducing the rest of the planet to deep green.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, only realizing he’d vocalized it when he saw the droplets of spittle on the inside of his helmet.

  He turned his head downward, blocking the worst of the light with his hands, and made out Curtis as a dull yellow blotch moving down the slope. A few yards away Molly lay with her knees drawn up almost to her chin, as close to a fetal position as the clumsy rigid suit would allow.

  Kane moved down the side of the volcano, his feet turned sideways for better traction, each leap jolting his ribcage and firing off telegrams of pain. The laser had vanished, and the ruins of the dome glittered in oily white heat, bringing the foreground back into focus, the cold lumps of rock, the molten patch where the Russian ship had been, the warm orange of Kane’s own ship, the dull red of Curtis’s suit and the brighter red of the panel under Curtis’s arm.

  He could hear Curtis’s heavy breathing through the speakers in his helmet. It would be bad for Curtis, in the darkness and chaos of the storm, and Kane knew it was his one advantage. If he failed to catch Curtis before they got to the ruins of the dome…

  No, he realized. It wasn’t the dome Curtis wanted. It was the ship.

  He forced himself into longer, more reckless leaps, and he forgot the strength of the wind. It unbalanced him as his legs reached for an open square of ground and threw him too far forward, sent him falling endlessly toward the rocks, so slowly that he had time to wrap his arms around his chest before he hit. The rigid suit bounced and rolled, rattling him inside it like dice in a cup.

  The lights on his chest pack still glowed, but his infrared scanner could not distinguish between red and green. The suit was all right, he told himself. If it were compromised, he would already know.

  Get up, he told himself.

  He got up.

  Curtis was nearly to the ascent stage of the ship, but Kane had picked up a few yards on him. He could see the articulation of Curtis’s suit in shades of red, see the man’s arms stretched blindly in front of him.

  And behind him came new shapes, a dozen or more suited refugees from the dome, stumbling toward Curtis, toward the ship, toward the mouth of Kane’s gun.

  “Curtis!” Kane shouted.

  Curtis stopped, turned halfway back toward the cave.

  Kane ran at him, holding the gun in front of him. He was a hundred feet away, eighty, sixty. He slowed himself, feet skidding in the dust, almost falling again and sighted down the barrel of the Colt.

  Now, he thought, now, quickly, before there are too many others underfoot, now while you have a clean shot.

  Something was making his helmet vibrate.

  He looked to his right, to the south and east, and saw a tiny ball of flame rip through the sky. It vanished into the horizon near the Syria Planum and a moment later a perfect hemisphere of molten white rose like a new sun.

  An asteroid? Kane wondered. If so, it had been enormous, and the impact must have been devastating.

  He whirled back to face Curtis and saw him climbing the side of the lander.

  “Curtis!” he shouted again, and he fired the Colt, missing Curtis and leaving a white hot streak where the bullet had grazed the spacecraft. Before he could fire again, Curtis dropped to the ground behind the ship and disappeared.

  The radio band hissed and rattled with the frightened voices of the refugees; Kane switched his receiver off and ran after Curtis. He dodged between the stumbling automatons who’d been left night-blind and disoriented by the storm, following the retreating image of Curtis’s suit. The heat of the ruins was closer now; the analytical circuitry of the helmet dropped Curtis to a dull yellow in comparison. Kane yearned for another shot, but had no chance in the milling crowd.

  Curtis had broken for the eastern side of the dome, dodging through a gaping, melted wound in the wall. Kane slowed to walk, his lungs burning, his concentration breaking down.

  The dome was ravaged, mangled beyond repair. Superheated gasses had blown globs and droplets of molten plastic for hundreds of yards in all directions, leaving only a few hundred square feet of limp, opaque plastic over the burned and frozen fields.

  Something moved in a gap in the wall and Kane almost fired, then saw that it was a child in a low-pressure shuttle suit. From the obvious pain in her motion Kane could see that the four psi oxygen in the suit had left her with the bends, excruciating bubbles of nitrogen in the joints of her arms and legs.

  There was nothing Kane could do for her; if she got to the cave in time, the pain would eventually go away.

  There would only be worse inside the ruined dome.

  The first thing he saw as he stepped through the wall was a corpse, embolized, nearly as cold as the ground beneath Kane’s feet. A few yards away lay a hand, with no sign of the body it belonged to.

  Kane was sweating heavily. He had no idea where Curtis was; at any moment the man could circle back and blend in with the others heading uphill toward the cave. Kane turned constantly to check his back, and at least once every minute he stumbled back outside to make sure the ship was still there.

  When the rumbling started under his feet he thought it was a hallucination. Then he saw that the brown, spongy walls of the shattered living modules were quaking and that bits of congealed plastic were falling from overhead.

  No one was left alive inside the dome. He saw a flash of heat and fired at it, then saw that it was only a jet of warm air escaping from a sealed room,

  His knees shook from the vibration underfoot. A high-tensile aluminum strut tumbled gently to the ground just in front of him, shattering frozen stalks of corn as if they were stained glass sculptures.

  He had to get out. He ran for the nearest break in the wall and saw a pane of plastic explode a few inches away from his head. Curtis, he thought, aiming at the noise Kane had made. He threw himself forward and rolled, bringing the gun up as he fell.

  Nothing moved.

  I can’t stand this, Kane thought. The roaring was in his ears now, coming up through the soil and vibrating the air in his suit. He pushed himself up on his elbows and saw Curtis running for the ship.

  The survivors, a few dozen of them at most, were bright dots on the slope leading up to the cave. No bystanders, Kane thought, no more mistakes.

  The shockwave came up out of the southeast at the speed of sound, a white-hot tidal wave of dust and ash and volatile gasses te
n miles high. It picked Kane up and flung him against the wall of the broken dome so hard that he blacked out for an instant, and when he came around he was stunned, overwhelmed by the deafening chorus of voices in his brain, hurting in at least a dozen parts of his body.

  He saw the lander still, somehow, standing upright on the plain.

  He saw Curtis get to his feet and run for the hatch of the lander, the panel still hanging from one arm.

  He raised the gun and fired, saw Curtis clutch his leg and go down.

  He pulled the hammer back, watching globular patterns of reflected heat crawl across the visor of Curtis’s helmet.

  He fired again, saw the visor split and the face behind it explode, spraying steam and tiny droplets of blood into the churning air.

  The gun tumbled out of Kane’s limp fingers. He pushed himself away from the wall, took one step, then another. He stumbled, went to his knees, got up and walked some more.

  The first time he tried to pull the panel from Curtis’s fingers he lost his balance and went down again, his knees hitting Curtis’s chest in an accidental echo of his own broken ribs, his helmet thumping into the ruin of Curtis’s face as his momentum carried him forward. He tugged again and the panel came free.

  It’s over, he thought. He stood on the threshold of the Return, the conceptual rebirth. He put one hand on the ladder, pulled one leg onto the bottom rung. Back to Earth with the panel. Kill the king, marry the princess.

  He shook his head. There was no princess. What was he thinking of?

  “Takahashi?” he said. His radio was off.

  He pulled himself another step up the ladder. He thought of the curvature of the ship’s orbit, a Hohmann ellipse that would match the one that had brought him here and complete the circle, perfect the symmetry.

  Curtis lay in the dust beneath him like the monk he’d seen in his dreams, desiccated, shattered, the promise of his Pattern betrayed.

  The body in the wake of the ship, Medea’s brother Aegialeus, butchered to delay Aeetes’ vengeance; the embolized victims inside the ruptured dome. Morgan owns you, Lena said. Symmetry breaking, the beginning of life. When I am grown to a man’s estate.