There were hoarse objections to this, angry shouts: “No! No! Never! Bring down the cable!”

Ann waited them out. Finally she raised a hand, and slowly they went silent again.

“It could backfire all too easily if we fight the greens now. It could give the metanats an excuse to come in again. That would be far worse than dealing with a native government. With Martians we can at least talk. The environmental part of the Dorsa Brevia agreement gives us some leverage. We’ll just have to keep working as best we can. Start somewhere else. Do you understand?”

This morning they wouldn’t have. Now they still didn’t want to. She waited out the protesting voices, stared them down. The intense, cross-eyed glare of Ann Clayborne. . . . A lot of them had joined the fight because of her, back in the days when the enemy was the enemy, and the underground an actual working alliance, loose and fractured but with all its elements more or less on the same side. . . .

They bowed their heads, reluctantly accepting that if Clayborne was against them, their moral leadership was gone. And without that— without Kasei, without Dao— with the bulk of the natives green, and firmly behind the leadership of Nirgal and Jackie, and Peter the traitor. . . .

“Coyote will get you off Tharsis,” Ann said, feeling sick. She left the room, walked through the terminal and out the lock, back into her rover. Kasei’s wristpad lay on the car’s dashboard, and she threw it across the compartment, sobbed. She sat in the driver’s seat and composed herself, and then started the car and went looking for Nadia and Sax and all the rest.

• • •

Eventually she found herself back in east Pavonis, and there they were, all still in the warehouse complex; when she walked in the door they stared at her as if the attack on the cable had been her idea, as if she was personally responsible for everything bad that had happened, both on that day and throughout the revolution— just as they had stared at her after Burroughs, in fact. Peter was actually there, the traitor, and she veered away from him, and ignored the rest, or tried to, Irishka frightened, Jackie red-eyed and furious, her father killed this day after all, and though she was in Peter’s camp and so partly responsible for the crushing response to the Red offensive, you could see with one look at her that someone would pay— but Ann ignored all that, and walked across the room to Sax— who was in his nook in the far corner of the big central room, sitting before a screen reading long columns of figures, muttering things to his AI. Ann waved a hand between his face and his screen and he looked up, startled.

Strangely, he was the only one of the whole crowd who did not appear to blame her. Indeed he regarded her with his head tilted to the side, with a birdlike curiosity that almost resembled sympathy.