The longer the night went on, the better her mood became; it was beginning to seem like the plan was going to work. They were not passing hundreds of prostrate people— although the word from the cars was that a fair number of the young natives appeared to have blown it and gone out too fast, and were now requiring assistance. Everyone had gone from 500 millibars to 340, which was the equivalent of going from 4,000 meters altitude on Earth to 6,500 meters, not an inconsiderable jump even with the higher percentage of oxygen in the Martian air to mitigate the effects; thus people were coming down with altitude sickness. Altitude sickness tended to strike the young a bit more than the old anyway, and many of the natives had taken off very enthusiastically. So some were paying for it now, with headaches and nausea felling quite a few. But the cars reported success so far taking in the ones on the edge of vomiting, and escorting the rest. And the rear of the column was keeping a steady pace.

So Nadia trudged on, sometimes hand in hand with Maya or Art, sometimes in her own world, her mind wandering in the biting cold, remembering odd shards of the past. She remembered some of the other dangerous cold walks she had taken over the surface of this world of hers: out in the great storm with John at Rabe Crater . . . searching for the transponder with Arkady . . . following Frank down into Noctis Labyrinthus, on the night they escaped from the assault on Cairo. . . . On that night too she had fallen into an odd bleak cheerfulness— response to a freeing from responsibility, perhaps, to becoming no more than a foot soldier, following someone else’s lead. Sixty-one had been such a disaster. This revolution too could devolve into chaos— indeed it had. No one in control. But there were still voices coming in over her wrist, from everywhere. And no one was going to strafe them from space. The most intransigent elements of the Transitional Authority had probably been killed outright, in Kasei Vallis— an aspect of Art’s “integrated pest management” that was no joke. And the rest of UNTA was being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. They were incapable, as anyone would be, of controlling a whole planet of dissidents. Or too intimidated to try.