Page 47 of The Mars House

There was a strange silence in which everyone, at different lags, realized Gale was serious.

January waited with everyone else, frowning, but unlike everyone else, he could see that Gale had both hands locked together between their knees, knuckles white. If Gale had been anyone else, he would have brushed their elbow, half to ask what the matter was and half to say they weren’t alone, but whatever the new trust that seeing him dance had given them, it was brand new. It was the first film of ice over very deep water. He was scared of breaking it.

When Gale did finally speak, it was quiet. “What I say now doesn’t leave this room. You delete it from any memory recordings you might be running, and if I see it on social media, you will be fired.”

More silence.

“AI cannot disobey the sitting Consul. If Ariel were to try, he would shut down immediately. He just told us that this is all because of naturally occurring silver iodide. Silver iodide is not naturally occurring; you have to burn it out of its ore with hydrochloric acid. Silver iodide is what they use for cloud seeding on Earth. Do it here, where there isn’t enough moisture to generate rain, it just pulls what little water there is off the surface and what you get is . . .” They pointed out the window. “What Ariel was trying to say is that this is an artificial storm and he’s been forbidden to say so.” Gale paused, and because their throat was stark against the black fall of their hair on their far side, January saw them swallow. “Historically, artificial storms on Mars have lasted in excess of six months. They were catastrophic in the early colonies, which is why we have only . . . one . . . colony now.”

Before, even though they had been quiet, everyone had been shifting—pulling their chairs nearer to the table to hear, clicking styluses on tablets, all the ordinary fidgeting that happened in big meetings. But everyone had gone still now.

“Dr Molotov; please work out what it would cost to build a new array in the atmosphere, and how fast we can do it. My preference is—very fast.”

“Yes, Senator.” Dr Molotov fell gratefully out of the room and hurried away. The person in the rust-coloured jumper left too; perhaps they only listened in for the first half hour. Dr Molotov must have been too worried to notice, because they let the door shut almost right in the other person’s face; they had to catch it on their knuckles and slip through sideways.

January stared after them, and then at Gale. He had spent a lot of time wondering how anyone could possibly get so high and mighty that they could countenance just shoving two hundred thousand people into naturalisation camps, but in a rhetorical way. He hadn’t expected to arrive at a real answer, never mind to see it firsthand. But if Gale’s whole function was to make decisions about questions so vast as how Tharsis got its power, if it was normal for them to round up legions of people to put a solar array into space on no notice whatever, then probably two hundred thousand people who mostly couldn’t vote didn’t even seem like a large number. It was a little problem with a logical solution and that solution was naturalisation.

Jesus.

“Are we saying,” Mx Ren began slowly, “that there’s been some kind of accident? Ariel dropped a vial? Or are we saying—someone did this on purpose?”

January noticed something coming at the window while they were talking. It was a strand of amber light, like a rising whip. There were others behind it too, and at the end of each whip line was a brighter light. He would have thought it was fireworks if the light strands weren’t all looping towards them, and so his first thought was some extraordinary type of plant that had learnt to glow.

He was still wondering about it when the lights exploded through the windows.

Chunks of glass and concrete flew everywhere. Later, he remembered that they flew impossibly slowly. He saw the comb patterns they left in the dust as they sliced through, ethereal, like miniature jet trails in a war zone only thirty feet broad. He had time to snatch Gale onto the floor and pin them under him, and think quite logically that the spine of his cage was broad, as good as armour. He felt shrapnel clang off it. Even though it didn’t cut him, it still felt like being punched.

Smoke boiled into the dust until the air was solid with it, and through that weird darkness, voices were yelling from outside somewhere, maybe down on the ground, but his ears were ringing too much to understand anything except that the cadence sounded like English—and then, from the direction of the main wing of the house, the sternum-hammering thump of gunshots.

Ten minutes later, everyone was sitting in a safe room with no windows. There were security people everywhere, coming in and out, two always at the door, somebody showing Gale something on a tablet, and beyond the door, the hum of a disturbed hive. Someone else called that the police would be another two hours, because of the dust. Two producers all but ordered Gale to say something to camera about what had just happened.

“Christ, can you not?” January protested. He went into English without meaning to. When he tried to find it, he realized his Mandarin was scattered in bits over the meeting room floor. He wouldn’t get it back for a little while.

Gale was ashen from the smoke, and grazed down one arm. A doctor was cleaning the cuts with what smelled stingingly like ethanol.

“We need a raw reaction for the news,” Mx Francis insisted from behind the cameras, terse and urgent, and grey. They were grazed too, but what January had come to learn about publicity-campaign-manager people was that probably even from inside a coma, they would find a way to get at viewer metrics and polling data. “This is important. Senator—can you hear me?”

January didn’t think so. Gale was looking at a patch of air in the middle distance, expressionless.

“Senator?” Mx Francis said, clasping Gale’s shoulder. They sounded like they were just about to panic.

But then Gale seemed to come back, and wrenched their thoughts into that same militaristically straight line they had in the meeting. They put one hand over Mx Francis’s and held it.

January looked away, feeling irrationally like he was spying.

And maybe he was. He had never asked Gale if they had a partner already, an unofficial one. Christ alive, maybe they were involved with Mx Francis. Mx Francis was bloody stunning, and young and cultured.

It shouldn’t have felt like tripping on the stairs, but it did.

“Why are you talking to me?” Gale said to Mx Francis, in English, for—mortifyingly—literally no one’s benefit but January’s. Impeccable courtesy even under actual gunfire. “You’re concussed, sit down.”

“It really doesn’t matter if I’m concussed, Senator,” Mx Francis said, voice juddering with relief, and January realized that no one would mind if he had been killed just now. It would be annoying for Gale, but that was all. Val had never written back. There was no one.

There had never been anyone, though, and he couldn’t see why it was striking him as all tragic and gooey now. Some people didn’t get a person. It wasn’t a right; it was a gift, and you couldn’t go around sniffing about it as if you were entitled to be worried over.

The thing was, it did seem to be a gift that everyone else got at least once.

“Are you okay?” Gale asked Mx Francis.