Chapter 7 - The Rebellion

Having little else to do to occupy himself in the back of the truck, Nestor daydreamed of the mural in the Market Plaza back at Poynting. He’d grown up staring at the mural, for it took up an entire wall of the main shaft, right above the government building, a testament to the progressive spirit of some earlier people than his own. It was titled, in fading red stencilled letters, “The Mars of the Future”, though in reality it only showed the plateau, with the Valley and Labyrinth drawn in shadow near the top and Ascraeus, Pavonis, and Arsia on the western borders as little white-capped mounds of plaster pushed horizontally out from this sideways miniature world. The bulge of the main plateau rose bulbous and misshapen from the wall, checker-marked by little brown roads, snaked through by blue rivers, and overflowing with green in between. Vignettes of the aspirationally unique qualities of the districts were scattered about the map, and the one he remembered best was an overall-clad man wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a long thin golden stalk hanging leisurely from the left side of his mouth. He was grinning with his presumptively-calloused thumbs tucked into the straps of his overalls, and was positioned almost exactly where the Creede claim was on the map. Nestor recalled staring at it, taking in freckles upon the man’s nose, the gaps between his teeth, the shape of his jawline and the turquoise color of his eyes, for only once every detail had been properly cataloged would Nestor’s silent invocation to arcane and diverse gods be complete and bring that thing there depicted into his lived reality.

He shook his head to clear his thoughts and stared out the truck’s windows at Chryse’s rock-strewn pockmarked death mask, trying to imagine what she looked like back in her prime, covered by deep blue waters with enormous waves cresting to the horizon. Back in the days when Ascraeus fell in love with her. The only image he could summon up was the sea in Juventae, the little blue teardrop at the tip of the tail of the Great Wyrm.

A few more hours on this road and they bumped to a stop in Calahorra, the sun long vanished and the stars twinkling meagerly above, and he and Jack stepped from this blessed night blinking into the harsh lights of the Calahorra main port of entry building. In this place Jack appeared much more dangerous than before. The slinky way he moved, the short, clipped way he spoke to others. It all felt like he was trying to hide, or they were trying to get away with something they shouldn’t. Nestor wondered what was in this new truck, which Jack had been so adamant upon using, even though any of the rovers would have been faster and harder to track. He felt it was a mistake to ask.

They were interviewed briefly by the customs officials, and all questions were briskly addressed and satisfactorily so using the answers Jack had drilled into him over the preceding hours on the road. Then they were back out the front door of the port and strolling mock-casually back to where Nils hid in the truck.

A short drive through the Calahorra tunnels brought them to a large underground warehouse where they left the truck and transferred to a rover driven by a short stocky dark man who introduced himself to Nestor as Andres and then proffered nothing further. They spiraled through tunnels into a part of the city that seemed to be composed of the condemned, both the decrepit homes and those who lived rough inside of them, in the upper portions of the excavation. There were entire sections of roof that had fallen in up here, and as the sort of temporary repair that inevitably becomes permanent, someone had bolted a thick metal mesh onto the adjoining walls to hold back fresh falls. The remaining rocks above were not truly being supported by anything and so had fallen to the metal mesh, which bowed deeply towards the center, straining the ten-centimeter-thick bolts from their anchor points in the walls. The roads appeared to have never been repaired at any point in their history, with some sections reduced by generationally uncleared rockfall to such thin corridors, the tunnel sides scraped the rover as they passed. Layers of graffiti covered the rock walls, using words in diverse languages that Nestor could speak none of and grotesquery mixing with beauty and depictions of variegated phalluses by the thousands.

They came upon a large flat, which was a repurposed storefront in all actuality, and was presently surrounded by a horde of dirty, bedraggled onlookers who peered through the windows and formed a rough, bulging, and transient line out of the door. A few turned to note their arrival, but most seemed taken by the proceedings within. All disembarked from the rover and Nestor and Jack fell into position behind Andres and Nils, who shouldered their way through this vagabond crowd.

They came into the main room of the flat and in the center stood an impossibly tall woman who was addressing the group in a way that was eerily reminiscent of the reverend back at the Edenite colony. She was slender, with long hair and dark skin that shone and dark eyes that did not focus on any object long, and she seemed to move in slow motion, her gracile arms and legs swooping through the air as if she were a marionette being masterfully controlled by a skilled and invisible giant hand as she spun and preached to her rapt audience.

She noted Nestor’s entry with only her eyes, not pausing in her speech, which was to Nestor indistinguishably Chrysean, and which seemed to be received by the crowd with a messianic fervor for all the gestures and ululations that accompanied her words. Nestor watched the rest in awe, not able to understand a single word and yet firmly grasping the revolutionary spirit. Eventually she concluded her speech and the entire crowd exclaimed all around him in a din that obscured all words, shouting glee and agreement and kinship at no particular target, and at this point Nils and Andres pushed forward to the woman and bowed their heads in temporary conversation with her. She glanced up at both Jack and him several times and then turned and disappeared into an adjoining room with Andres while Nils came back to bring the travellers to her.

They came into her room in a line with Nils at point and Nestor consigned to riding drag and Jack sauntering between his two outriders as if he were the one leading this herd. The woman was sitting cross-legged upon the foot of the room’s bed. Her attention was on the hand tablet she held in her left hand, and she did not acknowledge the men as they entered. Upon depositing them, Nils turned and left, at no point seeming to communicate with her in any sort of way. They stood there in front of her for some time with Jack looking like he wanted to say something and Nestor looking around the room and Andres staring at the two travelers with a bored expression. She looked up and put the tablet down and leant forward with elbows on thighs to address them.

What followed was a tense back-and-forth in Chrysean between the woman and Jack, every word and motion of the woman calculated to cause angst. At least, she seemed indifferent to the fact that they were having that effect. Their conversation drew to a close with her making a thrice-repeated assertion while Jack examined his shoes and nodded his affirmation and repeated the words with her.

She turned from Jack to Nestor and her focus shifted so completely that Jack looked around, as if he felt he should go. He was deeper in the room than Nestor was, however, and lacking an easy option for egress, he instead stood off to the side and tried to look like he wasn’t paying attention, not unlike how Nestor had been standing moments earlier.

The woman spoke now in clear Tharsian, accentless but structurally perfect, “Your name is Nestor Creede.” This was stated with the inflection of a statement, yet the woman paused all the same, watching him carefully. Nestor nodded and opened his mouth to affirm as much, but she interrupted to continue, “I am Linh Nguyen. I assume by the look on your face that you have not heard of me.” She smiled at this, pausing again. Nestor wasn’t sure if she wished for comment from him on this matter or not and returned her smile awkwardly.

Linh partially closed her eyes and glanced down at the tablet beside her. Without looking up, she continued again, “You are the young man who wished to spirit away an Edenite woman and child, is that correct?”

Nestor nodded and once again opened his mouth to speak, but Linh appeared to barely notice him and interjected yet again, “I wish to understand why you would want this.” Now her eyes flicked back up and met Nestor’s, making slight movements as she surveyed each feature on his face, waiting for him to speak.

“It jes didn’t seem right…” Nestor had to stop himself from finishing with ‘ma’am’, as it didn’t seem like a term this woman would appreciate.

Linh nodded, the corner of her mouth rising in a minor half-smile, “And what is right?”

Nestor shook his head, looking down at his boots, unsure how to respond to such a question.

“Well? One of two things is the case. Either you do not know what is right, in which case you abducted a woman and her baby because of some internal delusion. This would make you a very dangerous person, indeed. Or, you know what is right and acted to save them based upon that, in which case I would like to understand what it is you know to be right.”

Nestor looked at her and felt his cheeks grow hot. She swam before him and he couldn’t understand why he seemed to be crying, “It ain’t right to raise no baby as some sort of breedin’ slave. It ain’t right to have breedin’ slaves. It ain’t right to lie to innocent folks jes to keep it that way, neither.”

Linh nodded curtly, “Just so. But what if I were to tell you such lies are rampant and extend well beyond the simple Edenites out in their suicidal domes?”

“You mean little girls are used that way everwhere?” Nestor brushed his cheeks, trying to simultaneously look away and to look Linh in the eyes.

“I mean the lies the Edenite elders tell their oppressed are lies that have their mirror throughout our world. Lies that enable much worse than child exploitation.”

Nestor shook his head, not following, “What’s worse than hurtin’ a kid?”

Linh smiled a gracious, open smile, “It’s refreshing that harming a child is the limit of the pain and suffering that you can conceive. Where are you from, Nestor Creede?”

Nestor rattled off his well-practiced falsehood, “I was a student shuttle pilot, but my dad died back home in Tharsis. Left me nothin’, and now I don’t have enough to pay for school. I left Tharsis and got caught in a sandstorm in the Valley. The Edenites rescued me. Then, I met Jack here.”

Linh cocked her head at his strange tale and upon its conclusion, she leaned back on the bed, propping herself with her arms, “Your story sounds to be equal parts truth and fabrication, and it is fortunate for you I lack much concern about which parts of the story are which.”

She smiled again, her entire face contorted in a gesture of beneficence.

“We will allow fate to demonstrate to us what is truth and what is not. Of particular use to me would be any flight skills you possess. As I’m sure you understand, it is difficult to find shuttle pilots with…open minds. We’ve been lucky enough to find exactly one, but she is more of a hired gun than a true believer to our cause. I would prefer more of an ally, who is also a pilot, and I believe a young man, having gone through what you have gone through, might be such a person. Is that you? Do you wish to join our cause?”

“What is your cause? I don’t even know what you all call yourselves…”

“We have no name, we need only to refer to our comrades by their given names. Anything further would belie our cause, and our cause is the truth. Only the truth and encouraging the rest of our world to accept it.”

“But what is the truth?”

Linh looked at him levelly, her face grave, “There is much to learn about the truth, if you are interested in knowing it. We can teach you some. The beginning. The rest, Young Nestor, will be up to you to discover.”

*****

Nestor returned to the flat with a handcart full of supplies, the last of his chores for the day, the last from the list he’d awoken to that morning. The chores served as his rent payment to live at the flat, which was otherwise home to a never-ending rotation of scoundrels and wastrels. Months had passed, and yet Nestor still lacked a firm idea about who lived there and who was just passing through.

He was ignored by most in this place, but he came to realize that keeping to yourself was a survival trait here, for many he met had no qualms about confronting a stranger for the insult of acknowledging their existence, and Nestor soon discovered that he felt the same way. Invisible was better. He spent most evenings tucked into a corner of the common room of the house, knees hugged to chest, secretly listening to the few words spoken at volume about the place, trying to piece together the language. After all this time, he felt like he was beginning to understand, though he often struggled with finding the right spoken word.

Linh and her lieutenants, Nils, Andres, a vexish woman named Anna, and more and more so, Jack, were in the common room when Nestor walked in and were celebrating some unelucidated matter. They all cheered his name as he entered and held up drinks and wished him well in Chrysean. He looked around cautiously at their drunken faces and shuffled through to the kitchen and unloaded the supply cart there, being sure to refuse all assistance or libation offered along the way with a quiet shake of his head.

Nestor had grown quite meticulous in tracking supplies, ever since he’d witnessed Andres beat a man bloody over a single unsupported accusation of theft. A man passing through had accused another of taking a pack of cigarettes from his belongings, and though the cigarettes could be found nowhere, Andres had pounced upon the accused, a man who never defended himself in any way, a man who Andres beat until his hands were themselves bleeding, and a man who Andres then spat upon and cursed while he lay prone and sanguinary on the floor. That the accused did not defend himself in this trial by combat was agreed upon by all onlookers as proof of his guilt beyond a doubt, and Andres had left that room a hero pugilist. Nestor was determined for that not to happen to him, and so he kept a detailed running ledger of all things requested versus purchased versus used, and had thus become a formidable logistical powerhouse in this den of human refuse.

Totting up everything took quite some time and upon finishing his work, he went back out to the main room and found that all but Linh had retired elsewhere. She sat with a half-full glass in her hand and was leaning back on a couch with one leg up, arm stretched over her knee, looking off into the near distance. Nestor paused at the door and tried to decide what to do, for even crossing to the closet he shared with Jack would pass her line of sight and so disturb her. As if she might pounce upon him were he to pass near enough and the whim to strike.

Linh seemed to come out of her trance and nodded to him and lifted her glass and said in cheerful Chrysean, “Young Nestor. I’m told you are beginning to understand our language. How exciting for you.”

She gestured with the glass at the empty chairs next to her, using her slow measured movements. Nestor sat in a chair opposite, and Linh stared at him as he sat, her focus unwavering and her drunkenness seeming to slip off. She said nothing at all for quite some time while her eyes scanned each of Nestor’s features, then said in Tharsian, “You were a terrafarmer, no? Where in Tharsis did your people farm? And what?”

Nestor jumped at the sudden questioning and smiled very awkwardly and felt his cheeks redden, “Mount Ascraeus. We was hydrofarmers, been hydrofarmin’ since people come to Tharsis.”

Linh nodded serenely, almost appreciatively, “Ah, Ascraeus. Do you know the origin of that name?”

“I jes assumed the first people here named it that…”

“No…no, it was named long before any man set foot upon this planet. People back on Earth named it Ascraeus, which to them meant something like ‘rural’. They named it after Ascra, a place even more ancient. A place once referred to as ‘miserable in winter, sultry in summer, and good at no season’. Even looking through a telescope, our old-Earth forebears could tell what the future held for Ascraeus.” She smiled at her own wit, satisfied for a moment in the silence that followed.

“I guess maybe they jes figured no one would ever want to live there,” Nestor said, staring down at his feet.

Linh squinted at him, “I often suspect that the names we give things lay bare their true purpose. We think the name comes to us unbidden, but truthfully, it draws from details that we only subconsciously picked up on.”

“I think folks ain’t that complicated. Names is jes names,” Nestor shrugged.

“Do you know your Greek history?” The expression on Linh’s face said that she knew the answer to her question before it was given.

“Don’t even know what a ‘geek’ is, ma’am.”

“Grrrreek,” Linh smiled at him, “They were ancient people back on Earth. Their language is the origin of the ‘ascra’ in ‘ascraeus’. And the origin of your namesake, as well. Nestor means ‘he who returns home’, in the Greek. Have you pondered what sort of home you would prefer to return to?”

Nestor didn’t know how to answer her question and instead put forth, “My momma always said she really wanted to name me Nedrick, after Young Nedrick. Those was her favorite stories when she was little. But father wouldn’t let her, so they compromised on Nestor instead.”

“Fortuitous, wouldn’t you say? Your name was to be the one thing, but is now, seemingly at random, this different thing. Nestor, for your information, was a great Greek king, renowned for his wisdom, for giving the best advice to all the great heroes of his time. Grandfather to Homer, who was the greatest poet of all time. Which makes wisdom your true namesake. Perhaps your true destiny is to return home with much. To have greatness be your progeny. Perhaps you were chosen for more than you think, and perhaps your parents subconsciously knew it to be so, and perhaps that is why you are Young Nestor.”

Nestor looked up at Linh and studied her face, trying to decide if she was toying with him.

“I ain’t chosen for nothin’, Linh. I’m jes dirt poor and tryin’ to survive.” He looked away across the room and examined the qualities of the far wall and found there as many answers as he had upon Linh’s face.

Linh gracefully raised the fingers on her empty hand, signaling peace, “Young tempers do run so very hot. But turn not your temper towards me, young man. I’m simply trying to tell you a story of our ancestors.”

“Go on, then,” Nestor said petulantly.

“There is a connection between your homeland and your namesake. Ascra was the birthplace of a poet named Hesiod. Hesiod once took part in a famous contest with the grandson of your namesake, Homer. Homer was at this time acclaimed by all the Greeks, and Hesiod an unknown, who was quite jealous of Homer. The king of their country was holding a grand feast and asked both poets to contest their wits against one another for all to judge, promising the winner a glorious reward.”

“Hesiod stepped forward first, asking Homer, ‘It is known by all that you are blessed with wisdom beyond your years, inspired by the gods themselves, so tell us–what is best for man?’”

“Homer responded, ‘It is best for men to not be born at all. If they must be born, their lives should be lived with no fear of death.’”

Nestor looked up, startled at this. She smiled and winked at him, continuing while holding up her hands to denote each side of the discussion, “Next Hesiod asks, ‘And what do you think, in your heart, brings men the most delight?’”

“Homer responded, ‘When cups are full of drink and tables are laden with feast, and mirth flows through all in attendance, that brings men the most delight.’ The judges sitting in attendance loved his proclamations and tried to award Homer the victory then and there, but the king bade them wait until the contest was over.”

“Hesiod was very angered at this point and put more questions to Homer in rapid fashion:

‘How should men best dwell in cities, by which rules?’

‘By not taking advantage of one another, and by the rule that the good are to be honored and villains are to be brought to justice.’

‘Of what effect are righteousness and courage?’

‘To advance the common good by private pain.’

‘What is the mark of the wise man?’

‘To see the world for what it is and to march with the occasion.’

‘When should you trust another?’

‘Where danger and action are close brothers.’

‘What do people mean by happiness?’

‘A suitably long life of least pain and greatest pleasure.’”

“All the judges now agreed that Homer had provided better answers than Hesiod had questions, but once again the King bade them all to wait, for there was one final part of the contest. Each poet was to share the best passage from his best poem.”

“Homer was to go first this time and put forth: ‘For there the chosen best awaited the charge of the Trojans and noble Hector, making a fence of spears and serried shields. Shield closed with shield, and helm with helm, and each man with his fellow, and the peaks of their head-pieces with crests of horsehair touched as they bent their heads so close and stood together. The murderous battle bristled with the long, flesh-rending spears they held, and the flash of bronze from polished helms and new-burnished breast-plates and gleaming shields blinded the eyes. Very hard of heart would he have been, who could then have seen that strife with joy and felt no pang.’”

“The judges rushed to the king and demanded that he award the prize to Homer, they were so moved by his verse. But the king would not budge and called upon Hesiod for his own best verse.”

“Hesiod stepped forth and proclaimed: ‘When the Pleiades begin to rise, begin the harvest, and begin ploughing ere they set. For forty nights and days they are hidden, but appear again as the year wears round, when first the sickle is sharpened. This is the law of the plains and for those who dwell near the sea or live in the rich-soiled valleys, far from the wave-tossed deep: strip to sow, and strip to plough, and strip to reap when all things are in season.’”

“The crowd chanted to award the trophy to Homer, but the king instead gave it to Hesiod, declaring to all that the prize should go to the man who advocated peace and the growing of crops, not to the man who advocated war and death.”

Nestor interrupted, blurting out staccato, “That ain’t right. Homer won that whole thing. For most of it Hesiod was jes askin’ questions, and ever answer Homer give was a good one. So what if Homer’s best poem was about violence? His was the most beautiful, even if that’s what it was about. Plus, sometimes violence is the answer. Some folks only understand violence. The king shouldn’t’ve ever have given the award to Hesiod.”

Linh allowed him to finish and by way of response bowed her head and continued, “The prize was a golden tripod with the words ‘Wisdom’, ‘Prosperity’, and ‘Peace’ inscribed on each of its three legs. Hesiod accepted his trophy and told all in attendance that he would travel to Delphi to dedicate his award to the gods. But as he walked away from that place, certain members of the crowd came upon him and chastised him for accepting an award he so clearly did not deserve. And then they took the tripod from him, and beat him to death with it, breaking off all the legs, all except the leg that said ‘Wisdom’”.

She looked up at Nestor and leant forward to stand. “The crowd knew the truth of it, even if the king did not. And they rectified that which was wronged, Young Nestor. It was only their wisdom that survived; perhaps that was even the leg which struck the final, killing blow. If only we could all show such bravery.”

*****

Weeks passed with the same chores, the same routine. Time seemed to have as little meaning in this place as it had with the Edenites, and Nestor tracked the passing of the days, the different days of the week, the very hours of the day, by his chores. He had become expert at staying invisible in this place and in so being he’d witnessed a near-constant stream of deliveries into Linh’s room, mostly electronics and furniture. The combination of the deliveries and the furtive passage of Linh’s lieutenants in and out of the room caused Nestor to think of her room as the War Room. He monitored that place, desperate for a glance inside, or better yet, inclusion in its goings-ons.

Nestor was in the middle of his chores for the day. Today was cleaning day, and he was scrubbing the rock floor in front of the room’s largest couch, rubbing futilely at the tacky, furry residue accumulated there from countless spills caused by the unnamed horde that passed through this place week over week. He had paused to catch his breath, sitting upright on his knees and twisting to stretch his back, when he noticed in his covert way as Nils slipped from the War Room. Nils glanced around conspiratorially for a moment and, seeing only Nestor, nodded curtly to him from across the room. He appeared to be deciding something. His eyes seemed to change, to grow harder, and he stepped forward to loom over Nestor, kneeling on the floor before him.

“Do you enjoy cleaning this place?”

Nestor had been looking up at Nils and now shifted his focus down, staring at the sudsy floor before him and responding, slowly in Chrysean, picking his words with care, “Do I like cleaning? No, I do not. I do like living in a clean house, though.”

He looked back up to see if his answer was satisfactory, but Nils was looking towards the closed exterior door, as if he were expecting it to open at any moment and wished to be the first to greet whoever came through. The door remained inert, and Nils continued his vigilant stare towards it, saying to Nestor in Chrysean, from the side of his mouth, “I might need your help with something. Would you be able to pick up something for me? Something in another part of the city?”

“What do you need?”

“It won’t look like anything to you. A simple data stick. Needs to be handled with secrecy. Is that something you can do?”

Nestor considered this for a moment and rose from his knees, brushing them off as he stood, “Where would you like me to go?”

*****

Nestor had expected for Nils’s directions to lead him elsewhere in the shantytown upper excavation of Calahorra, and so was surprised whereupon following those same highly detailed directions he found himself standing in front of a Chrysean government building, all stone columns and balustrades, part of the expansive excavations in the posh deeper parts of the city. The city here was at a scale beyond reckoning for Nestor, as if someone had taken the Market Plaza back in Poynting and had stretched it by an order of magnitude in every direction. The ceiling spanned several hundred meters over his head, supported by massive concrete columns that three men joining arms couldn’t have circumscribed, spaced evenly throughout a cave that was many kilometers wide in any direction. Tall buildings crowded the cave center and thronged alongside the avenues, some buildings extending so high as to act as columnar support themselves, with lodgings peering out from towering walls that encircled the excavations. Artificial moss hung from every ledge, and spiky plastic grass thronged every unoccupied space. The air was thick and wet and smelled strongly of human habitation, an agrestal smell that clung about as a specter of the horde occupying the place.

He immediately saw his contact, a nervous-looking little man who was pacing by the water fountain in front of the government building. Nestor was otherwise interested in the fountain, having not seen such a thing before, and walked over to stand behind the short man’s pacing grounds. He looked casually between all this ridiculous, extravagant waste of water being used for nothing other than appearance and the anxious little man. The man soon noticed his glances and came to him in a quick, jerky manner, punctuated with darting looks over his shoulder that appeared in no way natural.

“You him?” Nestor asked in conspiratorial tones when the man was close enough to hear.

The man nodded. Nestor reached out with Nils’s package, which the short man aggressively grabbed from him, tearing it open to peer inside. He was satisfied with what he saw and seemed to become aware only after the fact that he was making quite the spectacle and stuffed the package inside his threadbare jumpsuit. When his hand reemerged, it was holding the data stick in his palm, and he reached out to shake Nestor’s hand with the stick thus palmed. Nestor nodded to the man and hurried away, afraid to look at anything other than what was in front of him, afraid to become further party to the short man’s illicit buffoonery.

Upon returning to the flat, Nestor found none of the normal vagrancy about the house, and the War Room door closed. He knocked upon the door and after a moment it opened, Nils’s oversize head poking out. Nils’s eyes seemed to light up when he saw Nestor, and he swung the door wider, to reach his grasping hand through the crack. As the door swung open, Nestor’s eyes were drawn to a large schematic projected on the far wall of a half dozen buildings grouped in a rough semicircle, with a long pair of parallel lines snaking down into the center of the buildings. A series of concentric circles had been overlaid onto the schematic. They were centered on the buildings and each circle labeled with numbers that incremented up by fives. Nestor was staring intently at this drawing when Nils craned up to block his view. Nils winked once and closed the door in Nestor’s face.

Just as Nestor was turning to go, the door swung back open, just wide enough for Nils to squeeze through, which forced Nestor to take a few steps backwards to accommodate him.

“You saw something just now that you will wish you had not seen,” Nils said in Chrysean, pausing and looking at Nestor patiently while he waited for Nestor to translate. “Do you know what you saw?”

Nestor spoke, in his careful Chrysean, “Nils, I saw nothing. A drawing, with some circles. That was all.”

“You do not understand. You saw a plan. It cannot be tolerated. For one so…outside…our group to know.”

“I can leave,” Nestor heard the words pass his lips, a step below a whisper.

Nils shook his head, and spoke just as softly, his words carrying a sort of finality, of resignation, “No, you cannot. You have nothing to take you beyond the airlocks of this city, no money, nothing.”

“You are going to kill me?” Nestor felt the blood rushing through his ears, his heartbeat seeming to make his entire body tremble.

“Kill you?” Nils chuffed, “No one is threatening to kill you. There is another way, if you are interested.”

“What way?”

“You become a courier for our group. No more chores, no more housework. You go out into the public and serve as the go-between in all our matters. Preserving the rest of our…privacy.”

“Say I agree. What is so secret about what you are doing? What secrets would I be transporting?”

Nils shouldered past and sat on the arm of a couch. He took off his glasses and cleaned them with the edge of his shirt in his strange, exacting way. Nestor watched him clean the glasses in silence, wondering if he should repeat his question, if he misspoke somehow in this alien language.

Nils looked up at him and pushed his glasses back into place, the lenses shifting from light to dark and then back to light again. In the same structurally perfect but unaccented Tharsian that Linh spoke, he said, “What do you know of Isidis? Anything?”

Nestor shook his head.

“Isidis is an ancient basin thousands of kilometers east of here. It was originally a vast crater, fifteen hundred kilometers wide at its widest, bordering the Utopian Ocean billions of years ago. The ocean carved an opening in the crater water and in-filled it thousands of meters deep. One of the lowest spots on this planet, as low as we are here, as low as the Valley. Only the Hellas crater is deeper.”

“The Isidians are very near to closing the throat of the Isidis plains with a massive project to remake the ancient crater wall. A man-made levy stretching a thousand kilometers, composed of trillions of tons of rock and dirt. The next step will be to fill the entire basin, all one-point-eight million square kilometers of it, with liquid water. The smaller, newer craters will be first, then the lowlands on the southwestern side of the crater, and eventually the rest. Apparently, the cities of Isidis will be shifted to the shores of this new sea.”

Nestor shook his head in disbelief, trying to picture what was being described, and failing because of the scale of the thing, “Won’t they have the same problems as Juventae? What will they do when it turns to ice in the winter? Where will they get all that water in the first place? How do you move a whole city?”

“All fine questions,” Nils responded soberly, a minor smile appearing and vanishing on his face in a flash, “But before anyone can consider those questions, there is another major problem. The high plains to the south and the low plains to the north of Isidis naturally create a downslope effect that hits nothing in the basin to redirect the current. In fact, the crater walls help with tunnelling the winds to gain velocity and dust. Those winds are truly incredible on the Isidis plains, much worse than we see here in Chryse. Gusts to three hundred kilometers per hour. Constant dust storms, the likes of which you have not seen. Because of those winds, Isidians struggle to preserve what little atmosphere they generate. Their atmosphere is quite literally being blown away. To make matters worse, Isidis has no nearby neighbors. No one terraforms around the crater. The nearest terraforming to Isidis is the hydrofarming on Mount Elysium, far to the north.”

Nestor’s head spun as he tried to keep up with Nils, grasping only some of what was being said. He raised his hands, saying in Tharsian without thinking, “Hold on there, I cain’t keep up with all this. What are you tryin’ to tell me?”

“I am telling you that the trials of the Isidians represent the trials of terraformation entirely. I am telling you that, although they have nearly completed a dramatic construction project, the like of which few others would even attempt, they are not any closer to recreating Earth than when they began. They have the same amount of atmosphere in Isidis that they’ve always had, and the atmosphere they have created, at great expense, the work of generations, all of it has ended up elsewhere. Where the Isidians cannot use it. With no atmosphere, they will have no liquid water in their new sea.”

“But don’t it benefit us all? All that oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide they pumped into the air, the wind blew it, but it had to blow it somewheres, didn’t it? Cain’t they use the air wherever it went?”

“Certainly, the atmosphere generated ends up elsewhere. It disperses into the lower-pressure atmosphere everywhere else. But Isidis alone could never hope to produce so much atmosphere to even make a dent in the planet’s atmospheric needs, as a whole.”

Nestor interrupted, “But everone everwhere else is makin’ atmo too. We have aerofarmers back home that are runnin’ their pumps day and night.”

Nils slowly nodded, “You are correct, atmosphere is produced all over this world. But if you were to see a map of all the aerofarming stations working on Mars today, compared to all the wild lands, with no aerofarming stations at all, you would see that not only are we nowhere near able to blanket this planet in atmosphere, but we are severely lacking. Every Martian, everywhere would need to work together on just this one problem in order to properly address it, and their efforts could never truly end, for a tiny portion of all atmosphere produced is blown by solar winds away into space, impossible for us to ever recover. Which all ignores the logistical difficulty of organizing that many people to such a shared task.”

“But if everone was an aerofarmer, who’d farm water, who’d work in the factories, who’d do all the other stuff that needs doin’?”

“Exactly, Young Nestor. You have hit the problem on its nose, as they say. There is too much to be done, and it is impossible to give any portion of the effort the attention it truly deserves. Even worse, successful terraformation would need to receive sustained attention. It could never waiver, never change. Today, there is no coordination of efforts; people simply do what is most profitable. This is true of people in all countries, though different definitions of ‘profitable’ may exist. The central problem, however, is that what is most profitable varies considerably from what would be best for terraformation.”

Nils paused and looked levelly at Nestor.

“So you’re sayin’ terraformation ain’t possible, that it?”

“That is the beginning, yes. Understanding how deeply flawed the process of terraformation has been, is today, and will always be, is the first step in your awakening.”

Nils stood up and walked back to the door, reaching his hand out to turn the knob.

Nestor watched him go, and just as Nils turned the knob, said to his back, “But what does that have to do with whatever secrets you all are keepin’ in there?”

“Because, in here, we are plotting its end.”

*****

Nestor soon discovered that being the group’s courier was very similar to his former job around the house, with the major difference between the two being that he was awoken more often from a deep sleep as the courier, expected to run packages across the city at a moment’s notice. He was allowed in the War Room, but found his admittance anticlimactic. Nothing ever seemed to go on in the room when he was in there. He never again saw the schematic projected upon the wall, nor did he see or hear anything else of interest in the room.

Nestor persisted in his duties, doing everything in his power to respond to the random and often rude nighttime awakenings with aplomb and not annoyance, difficult as that was most of the time. He told himself that it was a test, that this was Nils or perhaps even Linh evaluating his fortitude and character, and that he needed to respond appropriately if he wished to begin seeing and hearing things in the War Room, or better yet, taking part in them himself.

He’d been at the position for long enough to not be surprised when Andres woke him out of bed by shaking the bedposts violently. He’d been dreaming of babies crying in the dark and was happy to be roused, leaping out of bed to stand with eyes still pinned shut by sleep and hands running through his hair to stimulate some sense of wakefulness into his psyche. He pried open his eyes to see Andres staring at him dispassionately in the dark. Having been acknowledged as more than a waking fragment of a dream, Andres spoke to him in Chrysean at a speed which Nestor was not yet capable of translating. He was pretty sure he’d heard the word for “go” in there, somewhere.

Nestor answered in his own broken Chrysean, “Go where?” He looked at Andres’s empty hands, “Where is the package you want me to deliver?”

Jack spoke from the depths of his bunk, sighing in Tharsian, “He wants you to go with him, Nestor. You and him are goin’ somewheres together.”

Andres bent to peer under the bed at Jack, his eyes narrowing to slits in the gloom. He said something to Jack as well, which Nestor’s sleepy brain still could not be bothered to translate. Jack groaned and rolled out to sit on the edge of the bed with head in hands. Andres surveyed the both of them and grunted and left.

“Are we s’posed to follow him?” Nestor asked Jack, who glared up at the boy and then stalked from the room after Andres. After a moment’s pause, Nestor followed to where a rover sat waiting with Andres already behind the wheel, looking out impatiently at the two stragglers. Nestor had only just closed his door before Andres pulled away, quickly accelerating the little rover through the dilapidated tunnels, past the masses huddled around their meager electric heaters and grouped beneath tarps to find some respite from the water dripping and running down the tunnel walls or freezing in the colder sections into long icy stalactites. They dodged the trash and the rocks and the desultory fraudsters, who were all too happy to leap in front of a speeding vehicle, gleeful to accept whatever consequences may follow, for most of those might bear fruit and the ones that did not would likely kill them, which was not an altogether unattractive form of fruit itself.

They descended from the shantytown upper excavations, and they circumnavigated the posh lower caves, and they found their way back out to the warehouses, passing down a row of gigantic doors set back into the rock, each guarded by barbed wire and camera. Eventually, Andres brought the little rover to a stop before a rusted metal warehouse front with no such security measure. He exited the rover without comment, which Jack took to mean that he should follow, but when Jack opened his door, Andres looked back over his shoulder and said a few words, none of which Nestor could make out. Whatever he’d said planted Jack back into his seat, and they sat in silence watching Andres alone enter the building.

Minutes passed and time seemed to drag and Nestor spoke up, “Where is he? What’re we supposed to be doin’ here?”

Jack glanced back at Nestor in the rover’s rear seat and shrugged, “He jes tol me to wait with the rover. I don’t know nothin’ more than that.”

Their environs were quiet and boring, and the air here tasted metallic and vaguely of oil. It reminded Nestor of the stale, chemical-laden air in the huts back home. The only thing missing was the undercurrent of his father’s liquor-breath.

“I jes don’t understand why everthing has to be so secret with these folks,” Nestor said aloud but not quite at the volume of conversation, more to himself than anything.

Jack heard his complaint from the front seat and responded over his shoulder, “They plottin’ the downfall of terraformation, Nestor. Which’s a death sentence in most places, or life in jail. Of course it’s all a secret.”

Nestor shook his head, “From what Nils tol me, it sounds like terraformation jes ain’t workin’ anywhere. Why plot its downfall when it’s already fallin’ down on its own?”

“Because terraformation cain’t be ended by doin’ nothing’. Folks’ll jes keep tryin’ new things, hopin’ they’ll work instead.”

“But ain’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t you want it to work, if it could?”

Jack turned in his seat and addressed Nestor with a face twisted by anger, “No, I wouldn’t. It’s a lie that folk tell themselves. People been on this planet for hundreds of years now, tryin’ their damndest to believe they can recreate Earth on Mars. It’s delusional, is what it is. Mars ain’t Earth and couldn’t never be Earth and look how many millions of people have died on this planet tryin’ to make it that way.”

“But Jack, it’s folks’s livelihoods. It’s food in they mouths and it’s roofs over they heads. Even if it’s a lie, everone needs to feel like they ain’t jes scrapin’ by for no reason. It’s cruel not to let them have that.”

Jack leaned toward Nestor, his eyes alight in the rover’s gloom, “Cruel? Look around at how folks live in these cities. You ain’t seen what we drove past, jes on the way here? How is any of those folks’s circumstances not cruel? Some hydrofarmer wants to own him thousands of square kilometers of rocks and dust that he can crowd up with useless thermal pipe runs, and the folks in the streets here in Calahorra or Ares or Melas jes keep starvin’, jes keep freezin’, jes keep being grist for the mill of terraformation. All so he can have his hydrofarmin’ claim. It’s the lie, keeps it that way, and it’s a lie they all ain’t gonna stop believin’, not unless they don’t have no choice but to stop. Not unless terraformation is taken away from them all.”

“What you gonna do, though? What is anyone supposed to do without terraformation? Ain’t part of the problem that we cain’t live on this planet without it?”

“Not my place to make the right choices for no one. Lots of folk live all over this solar system. The only ones tryin’ to remake Earth is here. Everone else already knows it cain’t be done. Everone else knows that our ancestors back on Earth are what destroyed that planet, destroyed it by tryin’ to do the same things we tryin’ here on Mars, and that repeatin’ the ancients’ mistakes hopin’ for better results is jes plain crazy.”

“Everone else. You mean the Floatsies? Ain’t they jes a myth too?”

Jack turned and looked forward through the rover’s windshield, “Floatsies are jes a story for kids. But the Sitaaralog is real as you and me. Folk down here jes made up a bunch of bullshit stories about them poor folks and give ‘em that stupid ‘Floatsie’ nickname so they can avoid the truth, that the Sitaaralog live better lives than we do.”

“Ain’t it harder to live in space than on a planet, though? We need gravity and farmin’ and ground to walk on.”

“They don’t. They been up there in space the whole time folk been down here on the surface, and they been spendin’ all that time adaptin’ to live there. Adaptin’ to be the next step for all of us. All humanity.”

“The next step for all humanity.”

“Yup. In ever way you can imagine. They modify their children in the womb to develop internal organs differently. They change their feet and legs, cause they never need to stand, so they modify their hips to make their legs more useful for pushin’ themselves about in zero-gravity. They add robotics to their toes and fingers to grab any surface, so’s they can move around their ships without handholds or footholds. They have adapted themselves to they environment, instead of the other way around. All this stuff they do to change themselves, makes ‘em immortal. They do not die.”

“How you know all that, though, Jack? You ever been up in space? Ever met a Star-a-log or whatever? It sounds to me like you jes tellin’ another story.”

Jack grumbled an indistinct response and shook his head, staring out of his window disconsolately.

Nestor opened his mouth to continue to press his argument and promptly closed it again as the big warehouse doors rolled open, casting an ever-widening column of light before them. Andres walked through the enormous doors and marched over to the rover. He opened the driver’s side door and leant in and looked back at Nestor.

“You will drive the rover,” he said in careful, slow Chrysean to Nestor, then turned and spoke more quickly to Jack, “And you will come with me to drive the truck. The truck will lead the way and the rover will follow as blocker. Understand?” Andres glanced back and forth between Jack and Nestor several times, making sure they were both nodding, and leaving the driver’s door wide open, he turned and marched back to the warehouse.

Jack followed him, and Nestor moved up front to the driver’s seat. He sat and pulled on his restraints and ran his hands over his pants to dry them, and then he watched as Jack and Andres ascended into the truck in the middle of the warehouse. As Nestor watched, three police trucks appeared around the corner and bore down upon the warehouse, parking crosswise before the open doorway.

Four armed men disembarked from the middle car and fanned out to approach the truck Jack and Andres occupied. Nester could see his compatriots watching the approaching police officers, but neither Jack nor Andres had his hands in the air, nor did they seem to prepare to disembark. Thus far, everyone had missed Nestor in his rover, and he shrunk in his seat, trying to stay invisible.

Without warning, the big truck launched forward at the approaching officers, careening into their empty vehicle with a crash and shoving it off to the side. The other two police cars moved to pinch Jack between them, and Nestor saw the strategy unfolding as if in slow motion before him, and pointed his rover at the one nearest him on an intercepting course.

Nestor’s rover impacted the police truck on its left side, right behind the driver’s side door, and the force lifted that other vehicle wholly into the air a few centimeters before it came crashing back down in a hail of broken glass. Nestor’s restraints dug hot fire into his shoulders, and hanging in those belts, he saw Jack’s truck swing around behind his rover and accelerate away from the warehouse down the tunnel. The remaining police truck moved to pursue, and Nestor saw this as well and reversed towards this final quarry, spinning the rover around as he backed, and dodging directly into the police truck’s path. The police truck slammed into the back of the rover and now it was Nestor’s turn to be lifted into the air and come down with glass shards flying all around him.

Nestor could not convince his rover to move again, and was pondering what his next move could be when he noticed that the four police officers who’d dove from Jack had recruited themselves to move on him instead. He heard them yelling things in Chrysean, but could not force his mind to translate that garble, and in truth he cared little for what they were saying, as he had no intention of doing any thing they may ask.

The officers were all approaching from the left and so Nestor undid his restraints and bent to crawl over into the passenger seat on the right. He heard the volume of instruction from the officers increase as he crawled and opened the passenger side door, and then he was out. He did not pause to look back at his pursuers before taking off running, crouched over to avoid the bullets whining over his head.

Down the same side of the tunnel as him, only five meters away, he could see a small access door set into the wall of the tunnel. There were now at least two vehicles between himself and the officers and he decided escape was his best option and so he ran for that door. He heard no further shots and found the door unlocked and ducked inside and reached down to find it could not be secured.

He had entered into an access tunnel, with electrical cables and pipes running all throughout, which was quite poorly lit. He could see no deeper than perhaps a dozen meters down, and in the blind he took off at a sprint until he heard the door open behind him. He held his breath and faded into the shadows and crept along until he found a junction, taking a turn at random and running as silently as he could down this newest tunnel. He followed the warren of tunnels, taking additional arbitrary turns until he came out into a dark, abandoned plaza. He crossed the plaza and took a pedestrian side tunnel and then another, and only then did he realize the pain in his hands and face. He looked down at his hands and saw both were badly cut and by looking into a storefront window found much the same for his face. He staunched the wounds as best he was able with scraps he tore from his clothing and then he resumed moving, heading back to safety within the slum town of Calahorra.

*****

The city had bestirred itself by the time Nestor found his way to the shantytown flat. He avoided the busy central excavations of Calahorra and he avoided anywhere that a police presence might exist and he moved clandestinely through the city’s many underground boulevards. Just another dispossessed, unworthy of scrutiny by the city’s more illustrious citizens. Back at the flat, he walked into the War Room to find only Linh waiting for him there. Her eyes locked onto him the moment he passed the threshold, following him closely as he walked to her. Her expression was otherwise blank, unreadable, and while she clearly saw Nestor, she said nothing by word or gesture. Nestor came to an awkward stop a meter in front of her, and not sure what to say, he asked in Chrysean, “Did Jack and Andres make it back?”

Linh nodded sedately, her eyes holding his as her head moved, a predatory nod that unsettled Nestor deeply. “They did. Andres informed me you performed admirably,” she said in Chrysean. It took Nestor several moments to process those final two words, at first assuming that they were antonymic to her true expression. Linh watched him while he pieced together her speech, tilting her head in a way that did nothing to make her seem any less predatory. After some time spent puzzling, Nestor gave up trying to suss out the last word, and repeated it to her questioningly.

Linh switched to Tharsian, smiling graciously as she did so, “Admirably, is the word. You’ve likely not heard it huddled in the common room of this place.”

Nestor shook his head, and said in Tharsian, “Why were the police after us? Did we jes steal somethin’?”

Linh looked down to examine her fingernails, and not looking back up said, “Do you know my background? The real one, not the mystical nonsense told about me by the itinerants that pass through here.”

Nestor paused, caught flat-footed by her question. Her background? “Uh, naw, ma’am, I don’t think I do know yer background. I heard some crazy things, though.”

Linh’s eyes flicked up to him and dazzled for a moment, like she was holding back a smile, “I’m sure. Have I ascended to messianic status yet? Wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

She paused and looked down again, her cheeks blushing red for just a moment, “I’m afraid my real origin is quite a bit more pedestrian. I’m the eldest of twelve children. My father is a politician back home in the Ares Valley. We were more fortunate than most. Eight of my little brothers and sisters are still alive today. Do you have siblings?”

“Not anymore. All of ‘em died when we was young.”

“Please don’t take offense, but that’s about what you’d assume. Especially in the aboveground farming communities. My siblings and I were born to a life of luxury. Quite different from how you grew up, surely. Daddy employed a number of individuals to look after us, and we never wanted for clean water or good food. We had to pass through three separate airlocks to leave the main city area in Ares. A dust-free and fulfilled existence, or as much as is possible on this toxic world. My peers, the poorer of them, even though they lived in the same place, the same environment, had much…worse outcomes.”

She didn’t need to expand on that thought, and they both stood in silence for several moments, remembering the mystery illnesses, the kids who wheezed uncontrollably, who broke into rashes that bled and became infected, whose organs failed in novel and unpredictable ways. So much suffering for young children to watch their friends and families experience.

“Terraformation couldn’t have been further from our minds,” Linh continued, still examining her fingers and nails in mock detail, “It was something our parents talked about at the dinner table, or with other adults, but it was hypothetical, distant. It was real in the same way Justice or Truth are real. Real as a concept, but not tangible, not something…lived…like it was for you.”

Nestor nodded at this and looked down to stare at his boots, shifting his weight back and forth between his tired feet.

Linh pushed on, ignoring Nestor’s discomfort, “One of the most honorable professions the daughter of a politician in Ares can aspire to is Keeper of the Seed. Do you know what that is?”

Nestor shook his head. No, he did not know what a ‘Keeper of the Seed’ was, beyond being a fairly ridiculous name for something so supposedly honorable.

Linh read his mind, “Apart from being an embarrassingly horrible name, I mean. I suppose some people like it. It does sound very formal, in a religious sort of way. Most people just shorten it to ‘Keeper’, which I always thought sounds better. Keepers are molecular biologists, by training. In point of fact, all molecular biologist graduates are sworn as Keepers, taught the ancient ways of resurrecting the seeds from the Great Seed Bank, when the time comes. The Keepers would be responsible for turning this whole world green, if the preliminary goals of terraformation could ever be reached. The individuals responsible for taking the ultimate step in remaking Mother Earth. And I was…I am…one of them.”

Nestor looked up to find her studying him, little movements of her eyes taking in the cuts all over his face, all over his hands. Looking at his greasy, mussed hair and tattered clothes. She seemed satisfied with what she saw.

“I left the Keepers because I saw lies everywhere I looked. None of my fellow Keepers took their responsibility seriously. Almost all of them, except those who are now part of our little movement here, work in cellular manufacturing. Making vats of artificial cells produce biological goods that are constructed in factories into food for the masses. They all swore an oath about this grand notion of continuing life on a hostile alien planet. An oath to make a utopia here when our ancestors failed so miserably on Earth, and that oath means nothing to them. Why should it? It is only words. And so I left, I sought the truth, and I wish to help the rest of this world to do the same.”

Nestor watched her while she spoke and tried to determine whether she wanted his sympathy or his congratulations. She waited for neither, continuing on, “And that’s it. No godhead impregnating a virgin, no magical molding from the Martian dust. Just a rich girl who earned an esteemed position and then grew disenchanted with it. Of course, that’s a horrible story to tell others. Who would join the Spoiled Ennui Revolutionaries? No one.” She smiled at her own joke and looked imploringly at Nestor.

“Well, I don’t know. I ‘spose it matters more what you believe and what you do than it does who you are,” Nestor offered, as a conciliation. Linh didn’t appear to have heard him.

“It’s that way with history, too. There’s an old saying that ‘history is written by the victors’. My father used to say it all the time, growing up. That has not been my experience. I think that history isn’t written at all, unless it’s interesting. The victors are the writers because who would not be interested in her own victory?” She smiled at him. “Did you ever learn any history in your farm schools?”

“Not really, no. I know some history, but it’s jes stuff my father taught me, growin’ up. And of course I know the legends.”

“I can assure you that your experience is everyone’s, at least in that way. Children are not taught our history anywhere. School administrators will tell you that, as a subject, history is too esoteric, too impractical to teach to children who only have so many hours to learn all the important concepts they need in order to survive in this terrible place. Too esoteric, and yet people everywhere have these little informal folk histories they learn from their parents and their friends. I always wondered which of those legends is true. If any of them are. After I left my profession, I searched for anyone to teach me real, actual history. I found only more stories. I came to realize that our people have lost our history. Humanity fled Earth en masse, came here to build a new home, and on the journey forgot our old one. They left their history behind on Earth, consigning it to the stewardship of whatever remains there. If anything does.”

Nestor watched her grow more animated as she talked, and as she spoke it felt to Nestor less like she was addressing him and more that she was addressing a crowd, and he wondered while listening to her speak if a crowd needed to all exist in the same place at the same time in order to so be. Or if a speech is repeated enough times one-on-one to enough individuals across time and space, do not those people also constitute a crowd, a movement?

“But there are all sorts of charlatans out there who have invented new, interesting histories they would like to sell to you. I think my favorite is that Earth was invaded by many-armed monsters who enslaved mankind until our intrepid ancestors fought their way free, coming here to start anew, and leaving Earth to the monsters. Of course, the man who told this to me was also selling alleged trips to view those monsters, originating from a launch pad that does not exist.”

Nestor smiled at this, “I knew someone once who tol me old Earth had been covered over in metal. The ancient people apparently couldn’t stand the sight of the natural world, and so they made their whole world artificial.”

Linh shook her head in amazement at this story. “I’ve heard that one, too. They’re all…the stories of Earth, and of our travel away from there…all slightly fantastical. I think that’s how you know a story is not real. Authentic stories are rarely all that interesting. Do you wish to hear the story of old Earth that I believe the most? It’s the story of an Earth destroyed accidentally by our ancestors. They wanted to change the environment, to hone it, and in trying to do that, they ruined it, ruined it forever, ruined it in some horrible way that we can never even dream of remediating. I believe that’s what happened because it’s boring. There’s no monster, no unavoidable disaster, no horrible dramatic tragedy, or evil scheming villain. Just people failing at being the gods we imagine ourselves to be.”

“I don’t imagine myself to be no god,” Nestor objected, looking back down at his feet.

“No, I suppose you do not. Which is to your strength, my young friend. But surely you grasp my point, don’t you? Actions, people, our very history–they draw the greatest attention when they are interesting. When they are dramatic. When a grand story can be told involving them.”

Nestor nodded, trying his best to follow along with Linh, trying to understand where she was going with all of this.

“I’m sure Andres or Jack or perhaps even Nils has by now informed you about our goals. That we seek the end of terraformation. You asked if you stole something last night. You did not. The police were after you because we obtained a device that they believe no person should have. A device that loomed large over ancient Earth, and a fitting one to bring about the end of terraformation, to do so with the appropriate amount of drama. We must make a dramatic statement, because, like all other things, people will only care if what is to be done is done in an interesting and horrifying way. The story of the end of Martian terraformation must be a grand story, one which our children and their children will pass down through the generations, and that grand story requires the absolute destruction of all hope for our people. Nuclear weapons are our most despicable legacy from our ancestors, and using one such weapon to destroy all hope, to reset humanity and prepare us for our true future, is pure poetry. It is how this must be done.”

“You’re tellin’ me we stole a nuclear bomb? From a shitty warehouse in Calahorra?”

“We procured one, yes. But it was made specifically for us, not stolen. Which is not to imply that this makes it any more legal to possess.”

“Where is it now? Is it somewheres around here?” Nestor asked with a shaking voice.

“It has been delivered to a staging area. Tomorrow at dawn, you will help deliver it to its final destination.”

“What do you mean? Linh, I don’t know nothin’ about bombin’ stuff. You ain’t included me in any of your plans. How am I supposed to deliver it?”

She raised her fingers in the graceful way she had of requesting silence. “You shall go on a shuttle tomorrow with Jack and Anna. We shall test your piloting abilities, as you’ll be Anna’s co-pilot on this mission.”

“But Linh, I don’t know nothin’…”

Linh motioned him towards the door with her arm held out, bringing it around to hover just behind his shoulder, turning him about with an invisible force that guided him from the room.

“You know exactly as much as you need to know to be Anna’s co-pilot. Which wasn’t even a position on the team until I created it. For you. But do well in your bespoke role, and it will erase any suspicion that I and others may have about your allegiance to our cause. Do well enough, and there may be more opportunities for you to contribute in the future. You will not fail.”

The door to the War Room closed on Nestor. He stood there for a moment, unsure what he was supposed to do now. Eventually, he turned and walked through the empty house and climbed into his bed. He was asleep the moment he stretched out on that thin mattress.