Page 55 of The Mars House

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The police stayed overnight, because the dust had clogged up the engines of their ships, and before the morning meeting, the head investigator sat down with Gale and January to explain, looking robotic, that the investigation was closed, since there were no more leads.

“It is a very difficult and unfortunate thing to have been through of course, but we believe Lucy Collins was a lone wolf.”

“You believe that in a similar way to believing in the tooth fairy and river spirits?” Gale said, gleaming.

January wondered if he should stop them, but then decided he would rather sit back and watch the blood sport.

The investigator bridled. “I beg your pardon?” they asked, with a sharp edge that must have worked on most people.

It didn’t work on Gale. Gale straightened in the happy way they always did when someone offered them a decent fight.

“She managed to get access to military-grade grenades,” Gale said. “She must have done so before the dust storm came, but she made no preparation for getting past a functioning security system. And she was sending and receiving messages from someone who supplied her with those grenades, and who assured her the system was down. There does appear to be a significantly second-person-shaped silhouette in your investigation, does there not?”

“We believe the messages were faked to implicate Mx Stirling. The Earthstrong Rights groups consider his marriage into House Gale a kind of betrayal, so anything they can do to show his sympathies truly lie with them is to their benefit,” the investigator said stiffly. “She could have got the hardware from anywhere, there’s an open black market among Earthstronger rights groups. She probably had them for a while before she seized the opportunity presented by the dust storm.”

“Then how did they fake it? How did they know where we would be and when?” Gale said cheerfully. “That tower room is four hundred feet up, she didn’t fire a grenade in there by accident. Someone who knows my schedule told them. Point them out, would you please?”

“That side of the investigation was inconclusive.”

“This is a wild guess, but is the Praetorian Service22 perhaps leaning on you to shut up and not look into this further?”

“I can’t comment on that.”

“All right. Well, thank you for your few anaemic efforts. Your ships are repaired. I’ll send the bill to your department.” Gale watched them go. “At this stage the Consul might as well write I DID IT in neon above Jade Hill,” they remarked to January.

“What can we do?” January said. He had no idea how you went about proving that the person in charge was trying to kill you.

Gale shrugged a little. “Win the election.”

Because the tower windows were broken, the morning meeting was in the dining room, around the long table that ran the length of the window. Some people hesitated before they sat down, looking out into the sepia fury of the dust. The brilliant, high-altitude blue sky was gone. Where you could still see it in tiny ribbons, it had gone amber, and the dust plumes might have hidden any number of people carrying grenades.

Sasha was still sending mistrustful looks towards January every so often, but January only felt sorry for them. It must have been horrible to be in charge of a security system that didn’t work. Maybe he would have felt differently if he had spent his entire life here knocking up against people like Sasha, but because he hadn’t, he just—didn’t.

Since yesterday, when he’d felt remarkably okay, he had stiffened up, and all the bruises he had thought he hadn’t got were making themselves heard. The cut on his hand was okay, because Dr Okonkwo had fixed it—there was a special magic spray that sealed the wound—but the rest of him felt like he’d been hit by a train. He didn’t remember going down awkwardly on one knee, the left one, but it hurt like hell, and as he sat down, he had to draw it up to his chest and push his hand under the hem of his trouser leg so he could see if anything terrible had happened to it. The joint felt swollen and hot and worryingly hard, or it did where he could get his fingertips under the kneecap of his cage. He hoped it was just a bang and he hadn’t wrenched anything. He really did not want to see any more of Dr Okonkwo than he had to. For all it must have looked odd, he kept his hands clasped around it, willing the throb to go away.

Someone plinked their fingernails against the shoulder blade of his cage—he didn’t feel it, only heard the metal sing—and he looked around. Gale bowed a fraction and set a cup of coffee down by his hand and, holy of holies, some painkillers. He blinked, surprised, and Gale gave him the cinders of a smile before they sat down. It was only for him: it was too brief and too subtle for the cameras to have caught it.

“If we explode, we explode,” Gale told everyone. “I know everyone’s frightened of another attack. But terrorists and bombs do not affect the weather. The dust is here; and the output of the sun fields is already down twenty-five per cent. So. Dr Molotov: cost and timing to build a new array in orbit?”

“Three billion yuan and two and a half months.”

“Okay,” said Gale, unmoved, as though three billion yuan was just another figure to plug into the algebra of the storm. “Which means we need to make the power we have right now last two and a half months. What do we have in storage?”

Dr Molotov stood up. They didn’t look like they should have been at work today, but as Gale had said, the dust wasn’t going to wait for everyone to recover. “Hopefully as everyone knows, our main energy storage system is sand. That’s what those silos are, out there.” They pointed out to some gigantic structures out towards the edge of the cliff. “When we have excess energy from the grid, we heat the sand up to six hundred degrees. Those silos keep it hot, and when we need the energy in winter when there’s much less sunlight, we convert it to electricity.”

January had a sinking feeling, but it was Mx Francis who said it.

“But we’re almost at the end of winter.”

Dr Molotov nodded miserably. “Yes. We have very little left in the sand batteries. This couldn’t have come at a worse time. We have two weeks of power stored in them. Usually that would be a generous margin; usually the bright season would have started two weeks ago.”

Everyone looked outside, where purple lightning flickered and the rest of the sky was roiling brown.

“We must have an emergency backup,” someone else said.

“We do; we do. That’s the gravity train, which runs down the cliff to the bottom of the Valley. It’s a four-mile drop, so it can generate a good bit of friction.” They swallowed. “We have all of the trains at the top of the cliff just now. That’s storing—uh, about a hundred and twenty megawatts of power.”