Green Mars (Mars Trilogy Book 2) by Kim Stanley Robinson

Author:Kim Stanley Robinson [Robinson, Kim Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780553898286
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-05-26T23:00:00+00:00

They approached Senzeni Na in some need. Their food supplies were adequate if they rationed them, and the car’s water and gases were recycling so efficiently that there was little loss there. But they were simply short of fuel to run the car. “We need around fifty kilos of hydrogen peroxide,” Coyote said.

He drove up to the rim of Thaumasia’s biggest canyon; and there in the far wall was Senzeni Na, behind great sheets of glass, the arcades all full of tall trees. The canyon floor in front of it was covered with walktubes, small tents, the great factory apparatus of the mohole, the mohole itself, which was a giant black hole at the south end of the complex, and the tailings mound, which ran up the canyon far to the north. This was reputed to be the deepest mohole on Mars, so deep that the rock was getting a bit plastic at the bottom, “squishing in,” as Coyote put it—eighteen kilometers deep, with the lithosphere in the area about twenty-five.

The mohole operation was almost completely automated, and the majority of the town’s population never went near it. And many of the robot trucks hauling rock out of the hole used hydrogen peroxide for fuel, so the warehouses down on the canyon floor next to the mohole would have what they needed. And security down there dated from before the unrest, and had been designed in part by John Boone himself, so it was woefully inadequate to withstand Coyote’s methods, particularly since he had all of John’s old programs in his AI.

The canyon was exceptionally long, however, and Coyote’s best way down to the canyon floor from the rim was a climbing trail, some ten kilometers downcanyon from the mohole. “That’s fine,” Nirgal said. “I’ll get it on foot.”

“Fifty kilos?” Coyote said.

“I’ll go with him,” said Art. “I may not be able to do mystic levitation, but I can run.”

Coyote thought it over, nodded. “I’ll lead you down the cliff.”

So he did that, and in the timeslip Nirgal and Art took off with empty backpacks draped over their air tanks, running along easily over the smooth canyon floor, north to Senzeni Na. It seemed to Nirgal that it was going to be a simple operation. They came up on the mohole complex without a problem, the starlight now augmented by the diffuse light of the town shining out of the glass, and reflecting off the far wall. Coyote’s program got them through a garage lock and into the warehouse area as quickly as if they had every right to be there, with no sign that they had tripped any alarms. But then when they were in the warehouse itself, stuffing small hydrogen peroxide containers in their backpacks, all the lights in the place went on at once, and emergency doors slid shut.

Art ran immediately to the wall away from the door, and set a charge and moved aside. The charge exploded with a loud bang, blowing a sizable hole in

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