Page 44 of The Mars House

“I think what we’re calling ballet is . . . not. Have you seen it?”

“No. It would sting too much, I haven’t been to the theatres here.”

Gale hinged back half an inch or so, as though hearing it had stung too. They looked like they meant to say something more, but they didn’t have time to.

Sirens blared out everywhere; from his phone, from the walls, from the drones. He even saw Gale’s eyes flare red, which must have been blinding, and made him glad again that he didn’t have the contact lenses that connected to the internet.

Alert. Major storm. Close all windows and doors.

It was painfully loud, and somewhere in the house, there were mechanical sounds under it; things sealing automatically.

“What?” Mx Francis said. “On the Plains? Something’s gone wrong at the Met Office, this can’t be real . . .”

Gale was already running up the stairs to look through the big window there, the first place that was above ground. January followed, surprised how fast they were.

“Jesus Christ.”

It wasn’t like the storm in the Valley. That had been what he expected, just a wall of dust—a wind front highlighted by dead soil, moving really quite slowly if you were used to Earth. Out over the big Plains sky now, there were cyclones. The gravity wasn’t enough here for a tornado to be dangerous, because the wind moved too slowly, but that meant tornados could grow immense. The window faced downhill, towards the railway station and the sun fields, the view clear with the forest hemming only one side of it, and he could see all the way out to the silver towers and the mirrors and beyond, and much nearer than the horizon, the cyclones were giants, crackling with static.

Gale pushed a button on the wall, and their voice smoked through the house’s intercom: “Senior staff to the meeting room now, please.” They let the button go and motioned for January to go ahead of them. He didn’t understand and only pointed uncertainly back at the studio, which was where he was supposed to be.

“You’re senior staff too,” Gale explained.

“I . . . am?”

“It ought to have said so, on Mx Francis’s Schedule In Excelsis,” they added carefully, and for at least the fifth time, he noticed that they handled his more confused questions like glass. It would have been easy to say, It is on the schedule, moron.

“It does, but I thought that was a lie,” he said.

An amused sparkle went through Gale’s dark eyes. “Unfortunately it was not. But there will be time later, to dance,” they added, as if they really thought that was why he’d hesitated.

19

All the motion sensors around Songshu were going off, because the dust was so thick. Sasha trudged outside with some of the younger officers, ears still ringing from the din in the security office, to have a look at the sensors themselves. So far, the pattern was that they (a) screamed for ten minutes and then (b) died, because the dust caked the sensor face.

The cameras were showing piss all except dust clouds and the occasional ghost of a tree. It was no good using infrared, either. The dust itself was freezing, and it obscured anything hot.

All of them were in masks and heat suits. The end of winter was always sharp, but with the dust all but covering the sun it was as cold now, at nine o’clock in the morning, as it would have been six hours earlier in the deadest march of the night.

“Mx Martinez, what should we do?” one of the other officers asked, having to shout over the wind and through the masks. “We—we’ve basically got no security system!”

“We’ve got us,” Sasha said, trying to sound practical and capable, even though what they in fact felt was the tight, nasty anxiety that came when you tripped over a mannequin with holes in and realized you were wandering into someone else’s firing range. “Get everyone outside, let’s do a walk-around. Bring a rifle each. The dust confuses the bears.”

Even through the mask, the younger officer blanched at the prospect of meeting a confused polar bear. “Is that safe?”

“No,” said Sasha. They paused, staring into the dust. “No, but anyone with a head on their shoulders can work out that every security system on the Plains is worthless now. Do you know how many Earth Rights groups have money on the Senator’s head?”

“Five, last time I looked at the file.”

“Six now,” Sasha said gloomily. Trawling through the grosser corners of Earth’s internet had become a significant part of their job since the Senator launched the consular campaign. “There’s a shiny new Mission from the Prophet in Salt Lake City. Apparently all those of True Faith should be looking to incinerate Senator Gale as soon as possible.”

“Oh great,” the young officer said.

There was a little silence between them, but it was heavy.

“Do we know what Mx Stirling is, in the way of True Faith? Great Britain is . . . the same thing as America really, right? It’s all one language?”

“I don’t know, but he’s spent some time in Texas.”