Page 57 of The Mars House

“Each block of each train weighs nine tonnes,” Gale said. “Each train has twenty blocks. One horsepower equates to two hundred and fifty kilograms lifted up by one foot in one second.”

January wondered who just knew the energy equivalents of horsepower off the top of their head. Gale wasn’t reading any of this from inside their lenses; their focus was solidly on the table and the people around it.

Gale thought, but only for half a second. It was too brief for them to be using the internet or anything else to help calculate it. “That’s seven hundred and twenty horses to lift the trains by one foot per second. And more to switch them out once they’re tired. The Valley is four miles high; twenty-one thousand feet. There aren’t that many horses on Mars. Human strength, over any period of time, is only about point one horsepower, so we’d be looking at seven thousand people to raise all the trains. Even lifting only one, which would generate less power than Tharsis needs in a day, would take about nine hundred. Twenty-one thousand seconds is about six hours; so that’s six hours to raise one train, which would power the city for less than twenty-four; in winter conditions. Worst-case scenario, we can revisit that, but it’s not an efficient solution.”

There was another long quiet. Gale came back around the table to sit down again. They were walking slowly, favouring one side. The prosthetic must have been hurting. January swallowed. It was amazing he hadn’t broken Gale in pieces, slinging them onto the floor yesterday.

“So,” Gale concluded. “Back to where we started. We need to find a way to get from three weeks of power to ten weeks. Today. Dr Molotov, you also need to let the administrative staff know about contractors, steel, and design work for getting the array into orbit. We need to know whose launchpads we can use, whose foundries, and how much energy that in itself will take.”

Dr Molotov hinged forward. “Senator, we might come up with a good way to generate emergency power but we might not. I think we need to implement rolling blackouts right now. The longer we wait, the more power Tharsis consumes while we’re still not producing more.”

Everyone looked at Gale, who was quiet for a second.

“The last time we had rolling blackouts was under Kali,” Gale said at last. “And that caused widespread riots, and three hundred deaths. It’s winter. People will freeze overnight if we cut their power even for a few hours. I understand what you’re saying, doctor, but—blackouts are a last resort.”

“Then we at least need to shut down power-hungry industries,” Dr Molotov persisted. “Currency mines eat power like nobody’s business. The Rings at the Tiangong, those are insane. Ideally we should pause interplanetary shipping—the electricity required to fuel those engines is a significant percentage of the city’s whole consumption. Please, Senator. I know nobody wants a repeat of the Power Riots, but . . . it can’t be business as usual until we come up with something, because we might not come up with anything.”

“That will seriously damage the economy,” Mx Ren murmured.

“If we start shutting down industries like that, it sends a message that House Gale can’t keep the world open for business,” Mx Francis put in. “The Consul will mince you.”

January realized Gale was looking at him, dark eyes full of a plea to say something, and he understood suddenly that they couldn’t say it. They couldn’t be filmed saying, Screw all that, morons, because that would then be what the Consul broadcast on loop. He had to say it, because then, Gale was a good knight who was listening to their consort, not a radical. It was such delicate choreography.

And it was amazing, because even a few weeks ago, he had been glad when they’d got string and tin cans over the distance between them. This was a lot more than string. This was a bridge. They had a bridge. It was a good one, too. He didn’t know anyone else well enough to read what they meant just by the way they were looking at him.

“Stop being dicks,” January told the others. “You want to prioritise the Rings at the Tiangong? They’re for eight super-rich people who will absolutely not die if it shuts down. They can sod off home to Dubai and enjoy their gold-veneered racing cars. Mars isn’t open for business, there’s a giant dust storm, and trying to pretend otherwise will make you look like you’ve lost your minds.”

Gale bowed a little where they sat, and shot him a glance that said thank you. “Mx Stirling and Dr Molotov are right. We can do without heavy-energy luxury industries. I’ll give them some warning now. Everyone else, go to work.”

Nobody could get away fast enough. Gale didn’t stand again, though. They stayed still, both hands pressed to their bad leg where the join of the prosthetic must have been.

“Is there anything I can do?” January asked quietly.

Gale took a breath to lie, but then stopped. “No. It’s . . . This will sound really creepy,” they added, looking apprehensive, and he tipped back, because he honestly couldn’t imagine Gale ever sounding creepy. They were the opposite of creepy. He was pretty sure that for ninety-eight per cent of humans alive, if it were to turn out that Gale had been spying on them from inside their wardrobe, having followed them secretly for months and held their poodle hostage, they would be delighted with the attention.

“What do you mean?”

“It hurts because I can see that your knee hurts.”

January tilted his head down and to the side. He had heard and he had understood, and he fully had not, at the same time.

He had never seen anyone look as paralysingly ashamed as Gale did then. “It isn’t you personally, that came out wrong. It just happens, if you’re missing a limb. If you see someone else smack their knee, it hurts in the knee you haven’t got. I get it all the time. Something about mirror neurones.”

He thought about it, then put both hands around his own knee and pressed carefully. It hurt a lot less now the painkillers had kicked in. Gale sank back in their chair, as obviously relieved as if he’d done it to them.

“Thank you. I’m so sorry.”

“No,” he said, and kept his own knee cradled to make sure Gale could see he had no weight on it at all. He saw their shoulders relax. He kept watching, fascinated, and pleased that it was something so easily fixed, and then felt a rush of awkwardness, because what it meant, when he was sitting here holding his own knee, was that in a very real way he was also holding theirs.

“Anyway, I wanted to talk to you.” They glanced back to check there were no drones immediately nearby. “We have some numbers in this morning, about you,” they said. “Viewing figures, social media trends, all that.”

January nodded, tight. Gale was going to say it was over. They’d both tried, but events were conspiring against the whole thing. He’d fade into the background now and after a year there would be a divorce.

“Instant hit,” Gale said, turning a tablet around to show him a graph he didn’t understand, but it went steeply upward. “Media interest is surging. Mx Francis is hoping that you might do an interview circuit with some of the news and the talk show people in town today about your arrest, and about the situation on Earth, if you feel up to it. They’ll brief you.”

January had to wait for a second, because it was so the opposite of what he’d expected to hear that it didn’t filter down properly at first.

“We’ll start to see the Consul attacking you openly in the press soon, too. The more people focus on you, the more you legitimise everything I say. So they’re going to try and make sure no one is looking at you for any of the right reasons. If you can’t weather it in front of all the cameras, we’ll put on you on sick leave for a little while. Altitude. Tinnitus from the bomb, anything you like. I know this is a lot.”