Now the whole Moon was shifting across Bisesas field of view. Craters flooded with shadow fled before the fragile windows of the bridge. Bisesa felt Myras hand tighten on her own. There are some sights humans just werent meant to see, she thought helplessly.

Then the Moons terminator fled over them, a broken line of illuminated peaks and crater walls, and they were plunged into a darkness broken only by the pale glow of Earthlight. As the suns harsh light was cut off the lightship lost its thrust, and Bisesa felt the loss of that tiny fraction of gravity.

17: WARSHIP.

John Metternes came bustling up to the flight deck of the Liberator.

Edna asked, Everything nominal?

Bonza, the ships engineer said. He was breathless, the soft Belgian accent under his acquired Australian making his sibilants a rasp. We got the mag bottles loaded and interfaced without blowing our heads off in the process. All the protocols check out, the a-matter pods are being good enough to talk to us...Yes, were nominal, and fit to launch. And about bloody time.

Around forty, he was a burly man who was sweating so hard he had stained his jumpsuit armpits all the way through the protective layers. And there was a slight crust around his mouth. Perhaps he had been throwing up again. Though he had a nominal navy rank as a lieutenant commander, and was to fly with the Liberator as the chief engineer, John had come to space late; he was one of those unfortunates whose gut never adapted to microgravity. Not that that would make any difference when the A-drive cut in, for in flight the Liberator would thrust at a full gravity.

Edna tapped at a softscreen, skimmed the final draft of her operation order, and checked she had clearance from her control on Achilles. The launch window opens in five minutes.

Metternes looked alarmed, his broad stubbly face turning ashen. My word.

You okay with this? The automated count is already underway, but we can still scrub if Good God, no. Ah, lookyou took me aback, is all, didnt know it was as quick as that. The sooner we get on with it the better. And anyhow something will probably break before we get to zero; it generally does...Libby, schematics please.

The big window in front of them clouded over, replacing the view of Achilles and its backdrop of stars with a side-elevation graphic of the Liberator herself, a real-time image projected from sensors on Achilles and elsewhere. When John tapped sections of it the hull turned transparent. Much of the revealed inner workings glowed a pastel green, but red motes flared in scattered constellations to indicate outstanding engineering issues, launch day or not.

The design was simple, in essence. The Liberator looked like nothing so much as a Fourth of July firework, a rocket no less than a hundred meters in length, with habitable compartments stuck on the front end and an immense nozzle gaping at the back. Most of the hull was stuffed with asteroid-mined water ice, dirty snow that would serve as the reaction mass that would drive the ship forward.

And buried somewhere in the guts of the ship, near that nozzle, was the antimatter drive.

Liberators antimatter came in tiny granules of frozen hydrogenor rather anti-hydrogen, stuff the propulsion engineers called H-bar. For now it was contained inside a tungsten core, isolated from any normal matter by immaterial electromagnetic walls, the containment itself requiring huge energies to sustain.

H-bar was precious stuff. Because of its propensity to blow itself up on encountering normal matter, antimatter didnt sit around waiting to be collected, and so had to be manufactured. It occurred as a by-product of the collision of high-energy particles. But Earths mightiest accelerators, if run continually, would produce only tiny amounts of antimattereven the great alephtron on the Moon was useless as a factory. A natural source had at last been found in the flux tube that connected the moon Io to its parent Jupiter, a tube of electrical current five million amperes strong, generated as that moon ploughed through Jupiters magnetic field.

To mine antimatter, all you had to do was send a spacecraft into the flux tube and use magnetic traps to sift out antimatter particles. But there was a world of engineering challenge in that all.

When Edna gave the order the magnetic fields would pulse, firing out the H-bar pellets one by one to hammer into an oncoming stream of normal hydrogen. Matter and antimatter would annihilate, every scrap of mass flashing immediately to energy. Asteroid ice would be sublimated to superheated steam, and it was that steam, hurtling out of the nozzle, that would push Liberator forward.

That was really all there was to it, aside from the hugely tricky details of handling the antimatter: Liberator was a steam rocket. But it was the numbers that were so impressive. Even the great mass-gobbling that went on in the fusing heart of the sun converted only a small percentage of fuel mass to energy. When matter and antimatter annihilated they went all the way; you just couldnt get more juice out of Einsteins famous E equals mc squared.

As a result, a mere pinch of antimatter, just fifty milligrams or so, would provide the equivalent of all the energy stored aboard the great chemical-rocket launch systems, like the space shuttle. That was what made the new antimatter drive so useful to governments intent on giving themselves a fast-response capability in the face of an invasion of the solar system. The Liberator was a ship so powerful it would deliver Edna to the Q-bomb, half Jupiters distance away, as far as from Earth to the asteroids, in just a hundred and twelve hours.

The Liberator would have been dwarfed by the Spacers lightships. But where a lightship was all spiderweb and sail, the Liberator was a solid mass, a club, a weapon. And the design was stupendously phallic, like so many of mankinds weapon systems in the past, as more than one observer had wryly remarked.

There really wasnt much for John to do; Libby handled the details of a countdown that was as simple as it could be made to be. John grew steadily more nervous.

Were being watched, Edna said evenly, to distract him.

We are? Who by?

From Achilles. Engineers, administrators, other crew.

Edna cleared the screen and they glanced down at the ice moons surface. The graving dock crawled with spacesuited figures.

Well, so much for the safety protocols, John muttered. What are they doing there? Libby replied, I imagine they have come to watch the launch of mankinds first spacegoing warship. Wow, John whispered. Shes right. Remember Star Wars, Star Trek? Edna had never heard of these ancient cultural relics. It all begins here, John said. The first warship. But surely not the last, my word. Thirty seconds, Libby said evenly. Thank crap for that, John said. He clutched the arms of his couch.

This was real, Edna thought suddenly. She was committed; she really was going to ride this ship into battle against an unknown foe, propelled by a drive that had been tested in anger only a couple of times, in a ship so new it still smelled of metal polish.

Libby said, Three, two, one. Somewhere in the guts of the ship a magnetic trap flexed. Matter died. And Edna was shoved back into her chair with a thrust that drove the breath from her lungs.

18: MARS.

The journey wore away.

Even now Alexei wouldnt allow any communications about sensitive matters, or even loose talk in the cabin of the Maxwell, in this tiny volume drifting millions of kilometers from the nearest human. You never know whos listening. And though the space was bigger than aboard the spider, the paper partitions werent very soundproof, and Myra and Bisesa felt they had no real privacy.

Nobody talked. They were just as shut-in a crew as they had been on the spider.

After a timeless interval marked only by the gradual dwindling of the sun, Mars loomed out of the dark. Bisesa and Myra peered curiously through the bridge windows.

The approaching world was a sculpture of orange-red, its surface pocked and wrinkled, with a broad smearing of gray mist across much of the northern hemisphere. Compared to Earth, which from space was as bright as a daylight sky, Mars looked oddly dark to Bisesa, murky, sullen.

But as the lightship looped around dwindling orbits she learned to read the landscape. There were the battered southern uplands, punctuated by the mighty bruise of Hellas, and to the north the smoother, obviously younger plains of the Vastitas Borealis. Bisesa was struck how big everything was on Mars. The Valles Marineris canyon system stretched around nearly a quarter the planets circumference, and the Tharsis volcanoes were a gross magmatic distortion of the whole planets shape.

So much she might have seen had she visited in 1969 rather than 2069. But today Marss air was streaked by brilliant white water-vapor clouds. And on one orbit the Maxwells path took them right over the summit of Olympus itself, where black smoke pooled in a caldera wide enough to have swallowed up New York City.

If the scars of the sunstorm were evident on this new face of Mars, so was the handiwork of mankind. The largest settlement on Mars was Port Lowell, an equatorial splash of silver on the fringe of the battered southern uplands. Roads snaked away to all points of the compass, reminiscent of the rectilinear tracery of canals that the last pre-spaceflight observers had imagined they had seen on Mars. And amid the roads and the domes were splashes of green: life from Earth, flourishing under glass in the soil of Mars.

But Myra pointed out more green, a belt of it stretching across the northern plains, and puddled in the great deep bowl of Hellas, a darker, more somber strain. That had nothing to do with Earth.

Alexei told Bisesa that they would spend a few nights at Lowell. As soon as a surface rover was free she was to travel on, heading northall the way to the pole of Mars, she learned, with gathering incredulity. She peered down at that dense lid of northern fog, wondering what waited for her beneath its murk.

They spent a whole day floating above Mars, as the gentle pressure of sunlight regularized the Maxwells orbit. Then a squat, boxy craft came lumbering up from Lowell.

The shuttles sole occupant was a woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties. Dressed in a bright green coverall she was slender, rather fragile looking, and her face, open, somewhat empty, bore a neat ident tattoo. Hi. Im Paula. Paula Umfraville.

When Paula smiled directly at her, Bisesa gasped. Im sorry. Its just Dont worry. A lot of people from Earth have the same reaction. Im flattered, really, that people remember my mother so well...

For Bisesas generation Helena Umfravilles face had become one of the most famous in all the human worlds: not just for her participation in the first manned mission to Mars, but for the remarkable discovery she had made just before her own death. Paula might have been her double.

Im not important. Paula spread her arms wide. Welcome to Mars! I think youre going to be intrigued by what weve found here, Bisesa Dutt...

The shuttles descent was a smooth glide. As Bisesa watched, the wrinkled face of Mars flattened into a dusty landscape, and ocher light seeped across the sky.

Paula talked all the way down, perhaps delivering a patter intended to reassure nervous passengers. I usually find myself apologizing to visitors from Earthand especially if theyre heading for the poles, as you are, Bisesa. Here we are coming down at latitude ten north, and well have to haul you all the way to the polar cap overland from here. But all the support facilities are here at Lowell, and the other colonies close to the equator, because the equatorial belt was all those first-generation chemical-engine ships could reach...

Myra was more interested in Paula than in Mars. She said awkwardly, I went into astronautics after the sunstorm. Helena Umfraville was a hero of mineI studied her life. I never knew she had a daughter.

Paula shrugged. She didnt, before she left for Mars. But she wanted a child. She knew that on the Aurora 1 she would spend months bathed in deep-space radiation. So before she departed she left behind eggs, other genetic material. It was transferred to a Hibernaculum during the sunstorm. And after the storm was over, my fatherwell. Here I am. Of course my mother never knew me. I like to think she would have been proud that Im here on Mars, in a way carrying on her work.

Im sure she would be, Bisesa said.

The touchdown was brisk and businesslike, on a pad built of a kind of glass, melted out of the crust. Bisesa stared. This was Mars. Beyond the scarred surface of the pad everything was reddish-brown, the land, the sky, even the washed-out disk of the sun.

Within minutes a small bus with blister windows came bouncing up, puppy-like, on huge soft wheels. It was painted green, like Paulas jumpsuitof course, Bisesa thought, you would use green to stand out on red Mars. Bisesa clambered through a docking tunnel, following Paula, with Alexei and Myra and their luggage and bits of kit. The bus, with rows of plastic seats, might have come from any airport on Earth.

As the bus rolled off Paula chattered about the landscape. She seemed proud of it, engaging in her enthusiasm. Were actually on the floor of a canyon called the Ares Vallis. This is an outflow canyon, shaped by catastrophic flooding in the deep past, draining from the southern uplands.

That ancient calamity had lasted just ten or twenty days, it was thought, a few weeks billions of years past when a river a thousand times as mighty as the Mississippi had battered its way through the ancient rocks. This sort of event had, it seemed, occurred all around the great latitudinal frontier where Marss south met its north; the whole of the northern hemisphere was depressed below the mean surface level, like one enormous crater imposed on half the planet.

You can see why the Aurora crew were sent here for the first human explorationand in fact why NASA sent its Pathfinder unmanned probe to the same area in the 1990s...

Bisesa, peering out, tuned out the words. This dusty plain, littered with slablike boulders, was Earthlike, and yet immediately not Earthlike. How strange it was that she could never touch those dusty rocks, or taste that thin iron air.

As they neared the domes of Lowell they passed cylinders mounted vertically on tripods. To Bisesa they looked like the power lasers of a space elevator. The Martians didnt have their beanstalk yet, it seemed, but they had the power sources in place.

And the bus rolled past flags that fluttered limply over markers of Martian glass. Bisesa supposed Paulas mother was here, with those others of Bob Paxtons crew who had not survived their stranding on Mars. If Aress geology was forever shaped by that tremendous flood in the deep past, so its human history would surely always be shaped by the heroism of the Aurora crew.

The bus drove them up to the largest of the domes and docked smoothly.

They passed through a connecting tunnel and emerged in a warren of internal partitions, lit by big fluorescent tubes suspended from a silvered roof. Bisesa felt very self-conscious as she walked into the dome, practicing her Mars lope. The noise levels were high, echoing.

People bustled by, many dressed in green jumpsuits like Paulas. They all seemed busy, and few of them glanced at Bisesa and her party. Bisesa guessed that to these locals she would be about as welcome as tourists at a South Pole base on Earth.

Alexei felt moved to apologize. Dont mind this. Just remember, every breath you take has to be paid for out of somebodys taxes...

Bisesa did notice that very few of the Martians wore ident tattoos on their cheeks.

They dumped their luggage in rooms provided for them in a cramped, shacklike hotel, and Paula offered to fill their few hours at Lowell with a tour. So they went exploring, following Paula, working their way from dome to half-inhabited dome through tunnels that were sometimes so low they had to crouch.

They bought their own lunch at an automated galley. Their Earth credit was good, but the bowls of sticky soup and bitter coffee they bought were expensive.

As they ate, a gang of schoolkids ran by, laughing. They were skinny, gangly, all at least as tall as Bisesa, though with their slim bodies and fresh faces it was hard to tell how old they were. They ran with great bounds.

Alexei murmured, First-generation Martians. Grown from conception under low gravity. The next generation, their children, will be very interesting...

Bisesa was sorry when they had passed out of sight, taking their splash of human warmth with them.

One big translucent dome enclosed a farm. They walked between beds of lettuces and cabbages, all proud and healthy, and shallow ponds that served as rice paddies, and trestle tables bearing pans of some turgid fluid from which grew beans and peas and soya. There were even fruit trees, oranges and apples and pears growing in pots, obviously precious and lovingly tended. In here they were at last exposed to pink Martian daylight, but the light of the remote sun was supplemented by banks of hot white lamps.

But they walked on quickly. Under a faint scent of some industrial perfume was the cloying stench of sewage.

They reached the domes translucent wall, and Bisesa saw rows of plants marching away, set into the soil beyond the dome. She noticed how they glinted, oddly glassy, and the green of their oddly shaped leaves was a deeper shade than the bright plants around her.

But she wasnt yet used to Mars. It took a beat before it struck her that these rows of plants were happily growing in the Martian air outside the pressurized dome. Oh, my, she said.

Alexei laughed.

They walked on through more inhabited areas. They passed what had to be a school, and Bisesa longed to walk in and discover what kind of curriculum was presented to these first young Martianswhat were they told of Earth?but she didnt have the nerve to ask Paula.

And they found a bar, called Skisapparently after Schiaparelli, inadvertent discoverer of the Lowellian canals. There was alcohol available, but only fruit wines and whiskeys. They tried an apple wine, but it tasted weak to Bisesa.

Low gravity, low pressure, Alexei said. Its easier to get drunk here.

The last dome they explored was the largest, and looked the most expensive. It was constructed of panels laid over immense struts of what Myra identified as lunar glass. The interior was mostly disused. Aside from a few corners used for stores and small workshops, there were only dusty partitions, cables, and ducts lying over an unfinished floor.

Its as if they dont quite know what to do with it, Bisesa said.

But it wasnt the Martians choice, Paula said. After the sunstorm there was a lot of sentiment about what happened to the Aurora crew, and a lot of money was put into getting the Mars settlement going properly. And this was one result. It was going to be a slice of Earth, here on Mars. She waved a hand. Those glass struts came from the sunstorm shield itself. So this is a sort of memorial, you see. There would have been blue sky, projected onto that big dome. They were going to call it Oxford Circus.

Youre kidding.

No, Alexei said. There was even going to be a zoo here. Farm animals. Maybe an elephant or two, Sol, I dont know. All shipped up as zygotes.

And weather, like Earths, inside the dome, Paula said. They even got that part of it working for a while, when I was little. The thunderstorm was quite scary. But it all broke down and nobody bothered to fix it. Why should we? Many of us have never seen Earth; we dont miss it. And we have our own weather. She smiled wider, her young face so like her mothers, her eyes blank.

That night, Bisesa settled down in a stern monkish cell that seemed designed to remind her that she wasnt a guest here, not welcome, that she was here on sufferance.

But there was a row of books above her bedreal paper books, or anyhow facsimiles. They were editions of classic novels of Mars as it had been dreamed of during the long years before spaceflight, from Wells through Weinbaum and Bradbury to Robinson and beyond. Flicking through the old books oddly pleased her; for the first time since she had arrived, she was reminded how many dreams had always been lodged on Mars.

She clambered into bed. She read a few chapters of Martian Dust by a writer called Martin Gibson. It was a colorful melodrama that, with the comforting gravity, soon lulled her to sleep.

19: THE SANDS OF MARS.

She was woken by Alexei, shaking her shoulder. We have to move.

She sat up, rubbing her eyes. I thought you said we have to wait for a rover.

Well, we changed our plans. They dont have too many assets on Mars, but they started to move during the night.

Who is they? Astropol. The Space Council. Look, Bisesa, well have time to discuss this. Please, right now you need to shift your ass. She had trusted him, and Myra, this far. She shifted.

The rover, trundling to its docking port on the central dome, was visible through a small window. The rover had a number: it was the fourth of Lowells fleet of six such long-distance exploratory vehicles. But it also had a name, stamped in electric blue on its hull: Discovery. About the size of a school bus, painted bright green, its hull bristled with antennae and sensor pods, and a remote manipulator arm was folded up at its side. The rover dragged an equally massive trailer at its back, connected to the parent by a thick conduit. The main body and the trailer were mounted on big complicated-looking wheels on loosely sprung axles. The trailer contained stores, spares, life support gearand, unbelievably, a small nuclear power plant.

This rover was big enough to carry a crew of ten on a complete yearlong circumnavigation of Mars. Bisesa realized it was wrong to think of it as a mere bus. It was a spaceship on wheels.

And it had pressure suits stuck to the outside of the hull. Bisesa said, Reminds me of Ahab strapped to the side of his whale.

But none of them, not even Myra, had heard of Moby Dick.

So why Discovery? For the old space shuttle?

No, no. For Captain Scotts first ship, Paula said. You know, the Antarctic explorer? We use this particular rover for polar jaunts, north and south, so the name seems appropriate.

Expeditions to the poles had always been a tradition of Lowell Base, Paula said. The astronauts of Aurora, in fact, in their long years as castaways before the sunstorm, had made expeditions to the south pole, intent on coring the ancient ices and so deciphering Marss climatic history.

Paulas bright chat filled the time as they waited for access to the rover. But Alexei bit his nails, desperate to be away.