With a few grunted words, the President and I were dragged, walked, and shoved up the stairs like cargo. In a small storage room, cool and dark, the guards pushed us low against a wall adjacent to the entrance. They turned their torches high and flicked them down the hall outside. Coded com links penetrated the walls like secret half-heard whispers among frightened children.

Nobody followed. Four guards and two arbeiters set up a secure station in that room, slapping quick-spread sensors onto the walls and drawing their guns. The arbeiters were much more heavily armed than I had guessed, sporting both projectile rapid-fires, short-range electron beams, and selective bio knockers that could put an army of live assailants — human or animal — into shock.

I hugged Ti Sandra and she hugged me, the armor squeaking like rubber between us. Only then did we realize that Olson was in the room with us. Ti Sandra gave him a shocked look, and we hugged him as well.

“What in the hell is this?” Olson asked, voice shaky. His dignity seemed ruffled and he pushed us back.

“Power failure,” Ti Sandra ventured. The closest guard, whom I knew only as Jack, shook his head in the torch glare, a shadow above him echoing larger denial.

“No, ma’am,” Patsy Di Vorno said, coming back into the room. “Power doesn’t go down in buildings like this. The dedicated thinker blanked. All backup control dunked with it. That doesn’t happen. We have a planned failure of support.”

“Oh,” Olson said, leaving his jaw open.

Patsy’s mind — triggering a speed enhancement — went into high gear and she started clipping. “Now get your shuttle to unknown. Risk if unfriendly air team tracking — ”

“Or sabotage,” Dandy Breaker said. “We should separate prez and veep now. Candidate can serve as decoy.”

Olson’s jaw dropped farther.

“Sorry, sir,” Dandy went on, face stony and eyes narrowed in the glare. I could hardly see except in blocks of harsh white and starry black.

“You have an obligation,” Olson said, but his own guard interrupted.

“Sir, we mean to get you out of here as well. Breaker means that each team will vector separately. Three arrows out of here, each acting as diversion for the other.” He raised his hand, and again we were grabbed and pushed into the hall. From the auditorium came more screams and concerned voices.

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” Breaker told me. “No weapons fire and no assault signals.”

“Watch for peeling walls,” another guard said. Nano poisons, rapid-assembly weapons and machines, anything might be possible.

“Who?” Ti Sandra asked, face flushed, large body suddenly very vulnerable and weak, a big slow target. “We don’t care right now, Madam President,” another guard said.

I told Dandy, “If you grab my ass again, you better mean it.” He shot me a look of surprise, grinned, and said, “Sorry, Ma’am.”

We took back tunnels to the shuttle port, walking briskly with guards and arbeiters front and back. “Christ, I don’t want this!” Olson said before we split, his lone guard hustling him to the train tubes.

“Madam Veep, you have another shuttle,” Di Vorno said. “Prez goes incom. Luck, Dandy.”

Dandy, Jack, and an arbeiter guided me to the proper gate for the second shuttle. I knew the team always traveled with two shuttles, but I had not seen the second before. It did not look luxurious; spare, cut down, armored and fast.

Then Dandy did something that shocked me badly. He took a tiny package from his pocket, approached a decorative fountain in the terminal and broke the package over the main nozzle. The package quickly swelled in the water like a lump of rising dough. A tiny mechanical observer poked out of the mass and painted me quickly with a gridwork of red lines of light. The lump flopped in the pool around the fountain, popping arms and legs. The legs neglected to sprout toes, growing shoes instead.

It began to look like me, clothes and all, right down to the lumpy white armor. In a few seconds, it stood, squeaked, and with a convincing if inelegant gait, followed the arbeiter into the shuttle. The shuttle sealed the terminal bridge and its hatches, rolled away, and rose into the pink afternoon sky on flame-rooted feathers of white steam.

I shivered away the prickling hairs on my neck.

“My call, ma’am,” Dandy said. He and Jack each took an arm and guided me down the corridor. “Maintenance trains go to old station tunnels from here. We’ll take one of those.”

So I was back where it all began for me, the birthplace of my political consciousness. The pioneer tunnels behind the UMS train depot were still dark and narrow and filled with forgotten debris eventually awaiting the recyclers. The air was downright cold and smelled bad. My head swam as Dandy and Jack paused to consult their slates.

“All com’s out except for secure channels, and they’re not active,” Jack said. He shook his head. “Satcom’s out. We might hook into a port and try internal optic.”

“No ports here,” Dandy said. “Why no com on the secure channels?”

Jack thought for a moment. “I doubt anybody’s sending. President’s crew is going to stay quiet and in the air until they hear from Point One.”

“Point One doesn’t rely on thinker coordination…” Dandy mused. “But they have links with thinkers, and computers route the com like anywhere else.”

“Evolvons?” I asked.

Dandy waggled his head, not committing himself to any theories. Jack, however, reached up to the roof of the tunnel with long arms, scraped his fingers there, and said, “We’ve put Terrie thinkers back in authority after sweeps. UMS was running its day-to-day with thinkers.”

“Not life support,” I said.

“No, but everything’s coordinated… Computers talk with thinkers, thinkers give computers high-level instructions, even backup systems refer to the system boss… and that’s a thinker. We swept for them and we missed, that’s all.”

“Earth evolvons,” Dandy said. “Why?”

Jack dropped his hand to his side, wiping ice crystals on his pants, and said, “Madam Vice President, where are the Olympians now?”

“Some of your people are protecting them,” I said.

“Of course, but do you know where they are?”

“I assume most of them are at Melas Dorsa. Franklin ’s core group. Some may be at Tharsis Research University with Leander.”

“I need to know some things,” Jack said. “Will you brief me?”

“I’ll try,” I said.

“Let’s find a hidey hole with some insulation. We’ll settle in until Point One tells us what to do… assuming they can. If we don’t hear in several hours, we’ll commandeer a train and move out of here.”

In the dark, the three of us sat in a old branch still lined with foamed rock, marginally warmer than the long tunnels.

I wondered if I could still find my way to the trench dome where I’d first spoken with Charles, where the students had gathered before going Up.

“I have a theory,” Jack began. “But you should tell me some things first.”

“All right,” I said.

“Don’t be hasty, Ma’am,” Dandy said, half-joking. “Check out his clearance.”

Jack nodded sincerely. “That should be first, he’s right,” he said.

I held my slate to his and checked his security clearance by comparison of coded signals. The signals found a locus of agreement. Jack and Dandy were both cleared for top secret, but only on a strict need-to-know basis.

“I think Earth is fapping with our dataflow,” Jack began. “That isn’t good. We’re vulnerable as hell. Our contingency plans call for getting you to a safe location of our choosing. We’ll put together the government at that point by popping up a shielded satcom. Assuming they still have evolvons in most of our thinkers, and the evolvons have polluted the computers as well, Mars is going to be in bad shape. Stations will be cut off except for direct optic links and they’ll be down for a while. Governors won’t be able to report to Many Hills for several days. Techs will have to go in with certified Martian computers and start rearranging dataflow.”