Pirius’s reaction to Mars seemed to disappoint Nilis. Apparently Mars held a sentimental place in earthworm hearts. Mars was a small world, but it had as much land area as Earth, Nilis said. It had canyons and mountains and huge impact craters—in fact the whole of the northern hemisphere appeared to be one immense basin—and its range of elevations, from the depths of the deepest basins to the heights of the highest mountains, was actually greater than anything on Earth, even if you were to strip away that world’s oceans.

Geology was never going to appeal much to a Navy brat. But Pirius was intrigued by Mons Olympus, the tallest mountain in the whole of Sol system—and their destination. For in a grandiose, astonishingly arrogant gesture, the Interim Coalition of Governance had built its Secret Archive into that mightiest of monuments.

The corvette landed at Kahra, the modern capital of Mars. This was a city in the Earth style, a Qax-design Conurbation, a series of domes blown out of the bedrock. But only a few hundred thousand people lived here. In fact there were only a few million on Mars, Pirius learned, less on the whole planet than in a single one of Earth’s great cities.

The Martian citizens seemed about as bland and fat as those Pirius had encountered on Earth, though a little taller, a little longer-limbed, perhaps an adaptation to the one-third gravity here. But the officials who processed their arrival stared at Pirius’s bright red Navy uniform. Even here, it seemed, his unwelcome fame had spread, which was why Nilis had brought him in the first place. Nilis said conspiratorially, “You are my battering ram as I smash through layers of officialdom, complacency, and sheer obtuse bureaucracy.”

They had a day to wait in the city. Pirius spent some time in fitful exploration.

But even Kahra itself turned out to be something of a fake. During the Occupation the Qax had come to Mars only to destroy its human colonies. They had shipped the surviving settlers back to Earth—where they had almost all died, unable to adapt to a more massive planet’s clinging gravity and dense air. Even the exotic-matter factory had required only a handful of indentured humans to oversee its automated operation.

So for humans to throw up a Conurbation here, where none had existed before, was an absurdity. There was no Martian Occupation to memorialize; it was an “empty gesture by earnest Coalition politicos eager for advancement,” as Nilis put it. This Conurbation didn’t even have a number, as did those on Earth; it was known as Kahra, the name of the older city which had been demolished to make way for it, and whose foundations now rested under the dull pink-gray domes.