Page 81 of The Mars House

35

People here didn’t do Christmas. It existed, but it was a day when couples went out and had fried chicken, and the whole building site outside Songshu smelled strongly of it already, a day in advance. How Christmas had morphed from the original model to this one was lost to history and everyone had different theories, but the consensus seemed to be that somehow it was Tokyo’s fault, though nobody remembered why. And for some reason, everyone kept giving him apples as if they were seasonally significant, and nobody explained why.30

After spending another morning filming another dance class—so many people were furloughed from shut-down industries now that they needed some kind of home exercise plan and it turned out, thanks to Mx Francis’s advertising campaigns, that he was it—he felt coddled and pointless. He was dancing inside in the warm while a thousand people worked outside in minus forty degrees. A lot of them were Earthstrong. Most were commuting from the nearest naturalisation centre. It was close, right at the foot of the Valleyside, so it was just a train ride away, but he was worried. The centre was overcrowded already. He’d been down a lot, every third day, to keep checking that nothing horrible was happening, not that he had any idea what he’d do if it was. It wasn’t, but things were creaking. It was six to a room already, pallet beds pin-neat just like on Crossing ships, and the longer the police didn’t lock the gates, the more people came.

He was starting to hope that Gale didn’t mean to do anything at all except let people live there for the length of the storm. It was a painful kind of hope though, the sort that was like a spider; it had spun a web across his chest and the web had turned so solid that it was hard to breathe past it. He couldn’t help being vividly aware that Gale only needed those people while the building work went on. After that—well.

He was on his way down again, walking towards the train station with a drone and a polite security officer who stayed five paces behind him, when he saw a shadow in the dust that looked wrong.

He was nearly used to the dust tornados and the purple lightning that snickered inside them. They hadn’t let up for a month. He was used to the breathing mask too, and how the lenses caught the dim light in a funny way and cast reflections that looked like ghosts.

But there was a shadow. It was big, very big, and not the right shape for a new tornado whirring in from across the Plains. It looked like a hill, but there were no hills here.

He stopped when the ground juddered. It was slight, but it was there. He glanced back at the security officer, because there were no earthquakes on Mars, and the security officer looked just as puzzled as he felt. The judder came again. He set one hand on the ground, trying to tell if it was something they were doing on the tower, drilling or something. Beside him, the little drone drifted up into the air to try and get a better view, but there was so much iron in the dust that its gyroscopes got seasick, and it wobbled uncertainly. The producers had been hurrying around with anglers’ nets to catch them if they fell. Probably it was very stressful for the producers, but personally January felt you hadn’t lived if you hadn’t watched someone in designer shoes lunging after a queasy air-bauble with a big net.

The drone fell and he caught it, and he was still trying to see if it was okay when the sirens blasted.

Not the dust sirens. This was something else, a much more urgent wail, the kind of siren that something in his bones remembered from wars long since lost.

“January!” It was Mx Francis through his earpiece. “Get back inside! Now!”

He was going to ask what was happening, but there was no time before he saw exactly what was happening.

He had known that they existed here. To get ecosystems going here in the early days, the first colonists had introduced extinct cold-weather species, and so there were all sorts now. Tourists could go on safari looking for them, and souvenir shops in town sold fluffy toy versions, but somehow, it had never quite gone through his head that he might actually see one.

There were mammoths, on this side of the railway line.

He didn’t know how big they had been originally, on Earth. In this gravity, they were bigger than he imagined even dinosaurs could have been. The looming shapes in the dust must have been at least a third as high as Songshu’s main tower, titan things, and even though the sirens were still blaring and in his head somewhere he knew he should be running, he couldn’t do anything except watch them plough through the young trees at the edge of the pine wood. One of them dipped tusks that must have been fifty feet long and ripped up a tree like it was a matchstick.

And they were talking to each other. It was so low he couldn’t hear it, only feel it, a primal rumble that vibrated the roots of his teeth. When one of them trumpeted, it was deafening, even through his mask, and he had to half collapse with both hands clamped over his ears. They were starting to run—something had made them panic, maybe the dust catching fire from all those welding torches on the steel rig, or maybe the lightning in the dust—and under him, the ground jumped.

He realized what was going to happen a good few seconds before it did. Songshu was up a slope, and even in the dust, you could see the headlamps of the cargo trains coming along the railway from the Valley. The one coming now had slammed on its brakes so hard the track was sparking, and just like the welders’ torches, those sparks made the dust on either side catch alight in streams of wispy fire, and of course that scared the mammoths more than ever.

One of them ripped the train right off the track and hurled it.

The steel girders in the first cargo container spilled out and flew. He lost them in the dust, but he heard them land and slung himself into the roots of the nearest tree. There was a deep dull thump that must have been what a falling star sounded like as one of those girders drove itself ten feet deep into the ground, upright at a slant, right next to him.

And then the herd was gone, and all that was left were eddying dust-fires, puffing out nearly as quick as they started. He crawled out into the open again to see if the security officer was all right, the blood hammering at the inside of his skull and the need to just curl up and hide for much longer still more powerful than he’d ever thought it could be. They were; they were coming out from among the roots too, and together the two of them stood and looked at the wreckage.

The train track had been ripped up too. It was just a twisted mess.

It took a little while for that to sink in.

There was only one track, and one train, up here. One track and one train to bring a thousand Earthstrong construction workers every morning; one track and one train to bring the steel for the tower.

He had no idea how long it took to repair damage like this, but sure as hell it would be longer than two weeks.

30 Mandarin was sometimes like a huge, industrialised version of Cockney rhyming slang. This was why the number four was unlucky (“four” and “death” were both si) and why January’s security codename was Railway; Jan, zhan, was “station.” “Apple” was pingguo, and at Christmas, people wished each other peace and safety, which was ping an. Ping and ping. Peace apples.

36

Gale called a senior staff meeting in the dining room. Because Mx Ren was trying to run Songshu on as little power as possible, they were burning wood from the pine forest in the hearths now instead of relying on central heating. The hearths were glass, set at intervals all through the room, so you could circle them just like campfires, and as everyone sat down, January had a feeling that soldiers who had to camp on beaches in ancient wars would recognise the scene exactly.

Mars was traditionally good at cold weather living, and there was plenty of provision for it. Now, everyone was wearing lab-grown sealskin and polar bear fur, even the sixth- and seventh-generation Natural people. Inside, the temperature hovered around zero the moment you strayed away from the fires. The only reason there wasn’t ice everywhere was that there wasn’t enough water.

“Right,” said Gale, who was reminding January more and more of those beleaguered generals who had to somehow get by with a fifth of what they needed, uncomplaining and flinty and always balancing on the edge of collapse. January had never met anyone who took disaster so steadily, and the more he saw it, the more grateful he was. It wasn’t just courage under fire; it was showing the way. Everyone else was much calmer and more workmanlike than he would have expected as a result, himself included. His mind had changed gears to keep up with Gale, and now, if he personally wasn’t right now on fire, he usually felt like he was having an okay-to-good day.

“Immediate problem number one: we have a thousand Earthstrong workers on the rig who can’t get back down to the Valley tonight. We need to work out what to do with them before it gets dark tonight or we will—no longer have a thousand Earthstrong workers.”