Mars was screaming in pain; I suddenly specked hearing the collected information as one voice. I shied from that quickly. I could not afford such grim inspiration now.

On the shuttle flight to Many Hills, I tried to rest, but couldn’t close my eyes for more than minutes at a time. Unexpectedly, I started feeling my enhancement again, and began calculating the adjustments necessary to move a mass the size of Phobos. I visualized in multiple layers of equations the functions which described transfer of co-responsibility for conservation of these quantities to a larger system… The entire galaxy. Nobody would miss it. We had become thieves in a vast treasure house.

I murmured aloud some of the enhancement’s activities.

Dandy came into the darkened cabin with my dinner. “Excuse me?” he asked.

“My muse,” I said. “I’m possessed by physics.”

“Oh,” he said. “What does ‘physics’ tell you?”

I just shook my head. “I’m not hungry,” I said.

“Tarekh says if you don’t eat he’s bound by duty to force-feed you.” He smiled thinly and set the tray down before me. I picked at the food for a while, ate a few bites, and returned to my efforts to sleep.

I must have succeeded for a short while, for Dandy and Lieh stood before me suddenly. Lieh shook my arm gently. “Madame Vice President,” she said, “it’s official. She’s alive.”

I stared up at her, muzzy and confused.

“Ti Sandra is alive. We’ve had it confirmed.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I have a message from the President,” Lieh continued.

“She’s been injured,” Dandy said. “They have her in recovery at a secret location.”

I took my slate, touched it to Lieh’s, and they left me alone while I listened to Ti Sandra. My eyes filled with tears when I saw her face; I could barely discern the support equipment around her. She did not seem in pain, but her eyes lacked focus and that clued me. Her nervous system was under nano control.

“Little sister Cassie,” she began. Her lips stuck together for a moment, muffling her words. Someone gave her a sip from a cup of water. Drops glistened on her lips. “I am so grateful that you carried this horrible burden the past week. Our little trick nearly turned true. We had a real shuttle crash on the slopes of Pavonis Mons. Special targeting for me. Paul is dead.“

My tears spilled over then, and my entire chest gave a sharp lurch. I felt as if my body might suddenly fail, my heart give out. I moaned.

Dandy looked in briefly, then closed the door again.

“I’ve lost half my body, they say. My big, lovely body. I’ll recover. We’re growing new stuff right now. But no thinker controls, no computer controls — just twenty human doctors round the clock. I feel so greedy, taking so much when so many others are injured… But they won’t let me near anything that could do any more harm. I don’t feel any grief right now, my dear. I won’t for a long time, they say.

“Cassie, I told Charles and Stephen to do it, right after my accident, before I was put completely under. I hope I was in my right mind. It does accelerate things, doesn’t it? I asked, and they assured me they were ready. There was danger, but it could be done. Now it’s done, and you must let them know how grateful we all are. There’s so much more to do, though.

“You must act for me a while longer. You’re more than my crutch now, Cassie, You must be me as well as yourself. I can’t think as well as I should.”

I wanted so much to collapse into being a little girl, irresponsible and protected by others. Worse, a feeling of absolute dread had rooted itself. I turned off the slate, halting Ti Sandra in mid-statement, and almost screamed for Lieh to come in. She came through the door, face white, and kneeled beside my seat.

“Find Ilya,” I demanded, grabbing the back of her neck.

“We’re trying,” Lieh said. “We’ve been searching since dataflow started coming back.”

“Please just find him and tell me!”

She nodded, squeezed my arm, and left the cabin again.

Ti Sandra resumed at my touch. “ — think we have very little time now to put together a consensus. Elections are impossible. The Republic is still under threat, perhaps a greater threat than ever before. This Solar System is fatal. It’s fatal for Mars. Ask Charles to explain. Everything is out of balance. We have used fear to fight the effects of terror. Listen: we’re lambs, you and I. We’re expendable for the greater good.

“I don’t mean our lives, honey. I mean our souls.”

The research center at Melas Dorsa had been abandoned at the beginning of the Freeze. Charles and Stephen Leander had departed in the Mercury; the others had been brought out by tractor, with as much equipment as could be salvaged. Pictures of the site confirmed the wisdom of keeping the Olympians on the move: the remains of all tunnels, the grounds of the station itself, had been uprooted as if by thousands of burrowing insects or moles.

Locusts. Earth denied planting them, so we broadcast evidence of their use across the Triple, another part of the war of nerves. Tarekh Firkazzie and Lieh suggested we consider Mars as forever “bugged,” that all future planning allow for the emergence of hidden warbeiters. We would never be able to sweep the planet completely.

Firkazzie had grimly surveyed the remains of the Melas Dorsa laboratory and decided that it could never be occupied again. We had to locate a new site for an even bigger laboratory, to house an even bigger research effort.

From orbit, Charles suggested the site for a new laboratory. He remembered his father’s search ten years past for ice lenses not quite sufficient to support large stations. Such a lens existed beneath Kaibab in Ophir Planum, the remains of a shallow dusted lake from a quarter of a billion Martian years past. It was unlikely, it was in a desolate and difficult land, it was far from any other station, and there was little chance of encountering locusts.

In just twenty-four hours, architectural nano delivered and activated by a squadron of shuttles made a solid, moderately comfortable preliminary structure, a hideaway near the edge of the plateau. For the time being, a few dozen people could stay there in seclusion. Later, the site could be expanded for the larger effort.

Charles and Stephen Leander returned from Phobos, bringing the Mercury down under cover of a thin dust storm from Sinai. A few hectares of crushed and flattened lava served as a rough landing pad.

My shuttle landed at Kaibab hours after the Mercury’s arrival. The terrain was hellish — sharp-edged rills and ancient pocked high-silica lava flows, every edge a knife, all depressions filled with purple vitreous oxidizing rouge. These were badlands indeed, worse than anything I had ever seen humans inhabit on Mars.

Following Lieh and Dandy, I stepped out of the shuttle lock and squeezed under the low tube seal. I saw Leander and Nehemiah Royce first. Then I turned and saw Charles. He stood at the end of the ramp. Gray surgical nano marked parts of his head and neck. He smiled and extended his hand. I shook it firmly and enfolded it with my other hand.

“It’s good to see you, Madam President,” he said.

“I’m not President any more, thank God,” I said.

Charles shrugged. “You have the power,” he said. “That’s what counts.” He gestured for me to lead the way.

As I passed Lieh, I grabbed her arm again and stared at her. Ilya was still missing.

“We’ll find him,” she said. “He’s all right, I’m sure of it.”

I ignored the reassurance. Tough as nails, I thought. Winston Churchill in the Blitz. Remember. Tough as nails.

The “tweaker” had been removed from the Mercury and sat on a bench in one corner of a cramped tunnel. I quickly looked over the zero-temp chamber with its gray, squat force disorder pumps, the Martian-made QL thinker and interpreter, cables, power supply.