In order to terraform Mars, Earth first had to transform people …

The Red Planet is a harsh place, and normal humans cannot survive there during the many years of taming the planet. But a group of humans—called “volunteers,” even though they were taken from prison gulags—have been surgically altered to survive the environment.

They are exiles, never again able to breathe Earth’s air.

But for all their work, as they make Mars a place where normal humans can live, these altered humans are no longer suited for their own home.

They are obsolete people.

They sacrificed their humanity to become the first Martians. And they will not stand by as humans come to take their home.

Climbing Olympus

Kevin J. Anderson

Climbing Olympus

Copyright © 1994, WordFire, Inc.

Originally published 1994 by Warner Aspect

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

WordFire Press has chosen to reissue selected out-of-print novels, in hopes of creating a new readership. Because these works were written in a different time, some attitudes and phrasing may seem outdated to a modern audience. After careful consideration, rather than revising the author’s work, we have chosen to preserve the original wording and intent.

EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-248-3

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Contents

Preamble

1. Rachel Dycek

2. Jesús Keefer

3. Boris Tiban

4. Rachel Dycek

5. Rachel Dycek

6. Boris Tiban

7. Jesús Keefer

8. Boris Tiban

9. Rachel Dycek

10. Rachel Dycek

11. Cora Marisovna

12. Jesús Keefer

13. Rachel Dycek

14. Cora Marisovna

15. Stroganov

16. Rachel Dycek

17. Jesús Keefer

18. Boris Tiban

19. Boris Tiban

20. Rachel Dycek

21. Jesús Keefer

22. Nastasia

23. Cora Marisovna

24. Jesús Keefer

25. Boris Tiban

26. Rachel Dycek

27. Jesús Keefer

28. Rachel Dycek

29. Rachel Dycek

30. Cora Marisovna

31. Rachel Dycek

32. Jesús Keefer

33. Rachel Dycek

34. Dmitri Pchanskii

35. Stroganov

36. Rachel Dycek

37. Jesús Keefer

38. Boris Tiban

39. Rachel Dycek

40. Jesús Keefer

41. Rachel Dycek

42. Boris Tiban

Acknowledgments

About The Author

If You Liked …

Other WordFire Press Titles

Dedication

To Doug Beason, who has collaborated with me on many books and still remains one of my best friends. Imagine that …

Preamble

“Bend your heart, proud man,

And bow your pride before all.

Bend your head, insignificant man,

And suffer on Earth before all.”

—Pushkin

“When the heart is bleeding, only home does not disappoint us.”

—Russian peasant song

“It is easy to start a revolution in a country like this. It is easier than picking up a pen.”

—Vladimir Ilitch Lenin

Rachel Dycek

Under a salmon sky, the rover vehicle crawled over the rise, looking down into the cracked canyons of Mars. Without a pause, the rover descended a tortuous path into the gorge, feeling its way with a thousand sea-urchin footpads.

The site of the old disaster lay like a broken scab: fallen rock, eroded fissures, and utter silence.

Alone in the vehicle, Commissioner Rachel Dycek held a cold breath as she looked through the windowport at the debris crumbled at the bottom of the toppled cliffside. The avalanche had been enormous, wiping out all thirty-one of the dva workers who had been tunneling into the canyon network of Noctis Labyrinthus, the “Labyrinth of Night.”

Around Rachel, the wreckage still appeared fresh and jagged. Even after a full Earth year, the pain burned inside her. Another loss, the largest link in a long chain of disappointments, against which she had kept her face of stone. Russians were good at enduring, but inside she felt as fragile as stained glass.

The weathered rock walls of Noctis Labyrinthus formed barriers of reddish oxides, gray silicates, and black lava debris—all sliced a kilometer deep by ancient rivers. For millions of years, the entire planet had barely changed. But now, after six decades of terraforming activities had bombarded the planet with comets and seeded its atmosphere with innumerable strains of algae and free-floating plankton, Mars looked raw. The terraforming had awakened the planet like a slap in the face—and occasionally Mars lashed back, as it had with the avalanche.

The rover’s engines hummed, and the telescoping sea-urchin feet underneath made popcorn-popping sounds as the pressurized vehicle scrambled effortlessly over the rough terrain. Letting the Artificial Intelligence navigator pick its best path, Rachel brought the rover Percival to a halt next to a stack of granite boulders. Back at Lowell Base, operations manager Bruce Vickery had reserved Percival for later in the day to check his remotely placed instruments, but Rachel had traveled only a hundred kilometers. She had hours yet before she needed to worry about getting back.

Alone in this desolate spot, Rachel felt as if she were entering a haunted house. She listened to the intense, peaceful emptiness. Then she began working her way into the protective environment suit. The slick fabric was cold. The chill never went away on Mars—but it slithered up her legs, hugged her waist and shoulders, and clung to the damp sweat of her hands as she worked her fingers into the tough gloves. It took her fifteen minutes, but Rachel was accustomed to suiting up by herself; she didn’t like the interference of too many hands.

Technically, she was not supposed to be out in the rover by herself, but Rachel was still commissioner of Lowell Base—for the moment, anyway—and she could bend the rules. She had logged her intentions on the vehicle assignment terminal as “historical research.” Duration of outside activity: half a sol (which was the correct term for a Martian day, though the fifty human colonists at the base simply called them “days”). And she had set out across the sprawling wilderness by herself, leaving Lowell Base behind.

Rachel sealed the suit and powered it up. A thin hiss echoed in her ear, and the stale metallic smell of manufactured air spilled into her nostrils. Pressurized, the suit puffed up, pushing the fabric of the suit away from her skin and making her feel less confined. The oxygen regenerator on her back burbled as its chemicals reacted to make air thick enough for her to breathe.

Lowell Base environment suits were lighter, more streamlined than the bulky monstrosities the original visitors to Mars had been forced to wear. After many decades of terraforming, Mars was more hospitable to human life, nearly as pleasant as the worst day she had lived through in Siberia.

Rachel clambered through Percival’s sphincter airlock and stepped out onto the powdery red dirt of Mars. With a crackle like wadded tissue paper, the cold wrapped around her body, and she turned up the suit’s embedded heaters so that she could stand tall.

On the eve of her forced return to Earth, Rachel Dycek felt a profound sense of displacement. But she wanted to return to this place one last time, to see her shattered expectations, to see the buried dreams of Dmitri Pchanskii and his dva group who had given up everything for Mars, even their lives.

One Earth year ago today, a team of surgically augmented humans, the dvas, had been mining the labyrinth, using explosives to uncover channels of primordial ice. The blasting had brought down a huge section of the canyon wall, burying everything beyond hope of recovery.…

Standing next to the rover, Rachel felt the weak but insistent wind push against her suit. Rust powder gusted into the air in tiny whirlwinds. She had been on Mars for a decade now, and she no longer felt light and springy on her feet. The red canyons, the extinct volcanoes, the growing tendrils of green in sheltered areas, no longer awed her. She had lost the energy for enthusiasm.

Rachel picked her way into the rubble, half expecting to hear some sound, some echo of the rocks crashing down into the gorge … the screams of dying dvas, pitched high in the thin air. All the tracks from the Lowell Base rescue missions and search parties had long ago been wiped away by storms and sifting microfine dust. Nothing left, just dreams.

In one wash of sloughing boulders that fell slowly in the low gravity, but with just as much mass and just as much inertia, thirty-one of Rachel’s best dvas were lost—a sixth of their population. Rachel could not understand why her augmented human beings had been fated to suffer such disasters.

The dvas, an English bastardization of the Russian word for “two,” were the second and most successful phase of humans surgically altered to live in the rigorous Martian environment. Performed under the bright lights of world scrutiny, the dva surgery had been much more successful than the great gamble of the adin, Rachel’s secret initial phase.

The dva volunteers had been willing individuals, rather than subjects pulled from Siberian labor camps. The first three shipments of dvas were tough and dedicated workers, while the fourth group of fifty were true jewels, members of the intelligentsia who had volunteered for the augmentation surgery because they considered it their duty to the human race. A brilliant flash of glory, now smothered forever.

Dr. Dmitri Pchanskii himself, a talented Belorussian obstetrician and surgeon, had set an example as the leader of the fourth group of dvas. Watching his outspoken commitment, other medical professionals and scientists volunteered for the extreme surgery, with the justification that becoming a dva would be the best way to do research on an alien world. After the surgeries, they could be part of the environment, studying Mars hands-on, the same way field researchers studied Earth.

Firebrand legal representatives for the dvas had even demanded of the UN that their clients actually “own” the land they worked, not just receive lifelong leases. A Volga German lawyer named Rotlein had played on public sympathies—everyone admired the dva bravery, especially after learning of the horrors that had befallen the adin phase. Why not throw the dvas a bone? The dvas would probably not live long in such a harsh environment anyway.…

For a time, the dva project appeared to be a complete success. Over the years, the dvas had received enormous, robotically piloted shipments containing the modules for Lowell Base and the four other human bases scattered across the surface of Mars. Before the first unmodified humans arrived to stay, the dvas completed all the prep work, like servants sent ahead to prepare the master’s room. Three years after the last dva landing, Rachel and fifty others arrived at Lowell Base to prepare for the “Grand Opening” of a terraformed Mars.

But, when a project was as large as an entire planet, the work never ended. Pchanskii’s team of dvas had been searching for subterranean water in Noctis Labyrinthus. But Pchanskii had been a surgeon on Earth, not a geologist or a construction engineer. He had not understood what he was doing when he blasted the fragile rocks.

When Lowell Base received no progress reports from them for several days, and with a large seasonal dust storm approaching, Rachel had dispatched a search team. She herself had rushed out on the rescue mission, as others watched the green-and-pink skies thicken with approaching waves of dust. Rachel had stared at the fallen rocks, the sheared-off cliffs, and the fine dust that refused to settle, whipped back into the air by precursor gusts of wind.

As much as a week could have gone by since the collapse; little wonder they found no survivors, no sign at all.

With grim irony, Pchanskii’s avalanche had exposed a rich vein of water ice that looked like a steaming white gash on the rock. It created a thick, temporary fog in the canyons as the ice sublimed in the thin air.…

The weather satellites politely advised everyone to take shelter at the base and ride out the storm. The rescue team, unable to recover dva bodies or precious equipment from under tons and tons of rock, was forced back to the base. Later, after the abrasion from the month-long storm, there had been little point in even looking.

Pchanskii’s group had been swallowed up by the tumbling walls of rock, but Rachel was left to face the avalanche of recriminations, and “I-told-you-so”s, and the sadly shaking heads. She had endured it, barely flinching, with no more than a tic in the right eye and a grim twitch at the corner of her wide mouth.

She could no longer deny that the entire dva project, her brainchild, was at an end, with only a few messy loose ends to tie up: 150 dvas still toiling on the surface of Mars, while spacesuited humans plowed ahead with their own work. In a few more decades, neither surgical augmentations nor environmental suits would be necessary to survive in the cold, brittle atmosphere. The remaining dvas were obsolete, the program a dead end, and they would live out their lives on Mars with no hope of returning to Earth.

Now, Rachel’s decade as commissioner seemed like such a grand folly. She stared at the motionless rubble in the canyon and listened to the whispers of wind and the burbling of her air-regeneration system.

In the first launch opportunity from Earth after the dva disaster, the UN Space Agency had dispatched a new commissioner along with a dozen more mission members assigned to Lowell Base. Jesús Keefer, her replacement, would arrive tomorrow. The Mars transfer vehicle was already in orbit. She craned her neck, looked through her polarized faceplate up into the frigid sky that sometimes showed a few bright stars even during daytime when the dust or the algae clouds weren’t too thick, but she saw no sign of the orbiter.

She stayed at Noctis Labyrinthus for a few useless and depressing hours. Finally, leaving the wreckage behind with the wreckage of her dvas’ future, Rachel returned to the rover, brushing the clinging dust from her thermal suit.

She should get back to the base and put her things in order.

Jesús Keefer

The Mars transport slid into high orbit as if with an exhausted sigh after the long marathon across interplanetary space. Then, in a leisurely manner over the next two days, the captain damped velocity to shrink and circularize the orbit in preparation for deploying the lander to the surface of Mars.

During the final weeks of the slow approach, Jesús Keefer ran thin fingers through his neat, dark hair and watched the disk of the planet grow larger. Though the ground-based sensors indicated phenomenal improvement in the Martian environment, sixty years of aggressive terraforming had left little to be seen from this high up. It seemed disappointing, as if belittling the extensive efforts of mankind. But then, Mars was a big place.

Finally, Keefer distinguished a tinge of green through the on-board telescopes, a smear of murkiness in one of the deep canyons, which he insisted on showing to Tam Smith, the young agronomist, and Chetwynd, and Ogawa, and Shen, and any of the other passengers bound for Lowell Base. Everyone quickly learned to avoid him when his enthusiasm began to get out of control.

The terraforming process was working, by God, and it shored up his faith in the slow, long-term project. He cracked his knuckles and grinned like a kid in the small lounge. So much more exhilarating to see the awakening planet with his own eyes, rather than just viewing status reports and video-bursts from the five UN bases on the surface.

Inside the cramped-but-tolerable craft that had been their home for four months, Keefer felt the tug of shifting forces as another short engine burn diverted the craft into parking orbit. Captain Rubens announced over the intercom that orbital insertion was successful. The Mars-bound people in the lounge cheered.

Though the view had changed little over the past few days, suddenly everybody hurried to the lounge viewport. Ogawa and Shen, Chetwynd, and Tam each took turns to gawk, silently jockeying to keep Commissioner Keefer last in line, since he had already spent more than his share of time at the observation scopes.

Keefer simply sat back in his webbed relaxation seat with an inward smile, feeling at peace.

Mars. At last.

He had been only twenty-eight when he had begun working with the United Nations Space Agency on the terraforming efforts. He had served with the ground support staff on Earth, watching the first manned landing in many years. The small multinational team of explorers had collected geological samples, taken data on how much hydrated water in the rocks was boiling out and how much permafrost was thawing and oozing into the soil to chart the progress of the terraforming efforts, already several decades underway. The mission specialists had endlessly imaged sun-exposed outcroppings and sheltered crannies, cataloging which species of the robotically introduced simple plants were gaining a foothold. The astronauts had returned to Earth to a genuine ticker-tape parade, leaving Mars to continue its slow and inexorable progress toward paradise.

Only four years after that, Dr. Rachel Dycek and her team from the Sovereign Republics had thrown everything into confusion with the surprise landing on Mars of the adins—monstrously altered human beings—long before any humans were expected to live on Mars.…

Tam Smith moved away from the viewport and gestured for him to look, her wispy blond hair crackling around her head with static electricity. “You’re not fooling anybody with that bored act, Keef,” she said with a smile. “Go ahead, take a look.”

“Caught me,” he answered and launched himself out of the web chair. At the viewport he peered down through a wispy veil of thickening atmosphere, the faint milkiness of high cirrus clouds smeared out near the poles. The bloody-ochre surface carried a flush of olive color, the first heartbeats of new life. He realized he was grinning with glassy-eyed delight, and his enthusiasm was infectious. Ogawa and Shen were chuckling at him and whispering to each other.

What other project could be so grand? Keefer asked himself. This sculpting task could make men approach the level of gods. They were remaking an entire world! This had been his dream since his adolescent years.

Rubbing his black-brown eyes in the lounge’s dry recirculated air, Keefer stretched out to touch the insulated wall of the ship. He pushed away from the port, drifting toward the center of the room. Ogawa and Shen claimed his space to ogle the planet once more.

History would eventually imbue the Mars project with the grandeur it deserved, although the apathy shown by Earth’s general population frustrated Keefer. People had no patience for long-term projects. What was a hundred years or so in the grand scheme of things? The universe itself would blink its eyes in astonishment at how Sol’s frozen fourth planet had suddenly exploded into life.

Long before Keefer had even been born, governmental huckstering had finally brought about a flags-and-footprint manned mission to Mars that managed to accomplish real science as well as take care of the political obligations for worldwide viewers, including the “For All Mankind” plaque.

But during the years of preparation and the actual landing, the world’s space agencies carefully avoided the question of what to do next. Was Mars destined to be a dead end, a dusty trophy like the Moon? The red planet had enormous resources, but the sheer distance and the travel times involved made it unlikely that anything available there could make a difference to lives on Earth.

Seeing that the governments did not have their hearts in exploiting Mars, multinational corporations scrambled to put together their own resource expeditions. Though Keefer had no love for the sheer-profit-motivated industrial mindset, he did credit the multinationals with finally forcing the UN Space Agency into action, to secure a beachhead on Mars before the companies could. In a bold move, UNSA absorbed and adopted the other fledgling programs, arm-wrestled all the competing work into a pool of combined resources, and secured the backing of the major governments. Riding the wave of support, UNSA struck out on a century-long program to make the fourth planet more like Earth, to change its hostile environment so that people could live there.

The terraforming process would be costly, but no more so than a handful of short-term missions to Mars. Terraforming involved merely a lot of time, a lot of tedious long-distance maneuvers, remote operations—and thinking on scales larger than anyone had ever tried before.…

Keefer found a coffee tube in the wall locker, pulled the zip-tab that made it heat itself, then sucked on the nozzle, careful not to burn the inside of his mouth. He frowned at the taste—he had accidentally removed a tube with cream-and-sugar flavoring. “Want this?” he asked Tam, who took it from him, brushing his dry fingertips with hers, but he was too preoccupied to notice her flirtations this time. Keefer rummaged in the wall locker again until he found a tube marked CREAM ONLY, and sipped idly.

Back at the viewport, shoulder to shoulder with the other four, Keefer saw how the orbit had carried them over Mars. Below stretched the gouge of Valles Marineris, the “grand canyon” of Mars, miles deep in places and wider than the entire United States. In the northern highlands, a giant whitewashed crater marked Encke Basin, the scar left by one of the comets that had been hurled into Mars as the first step in the terraforming process.

UNSA had undertaken a rendezvous mission to Encke as the comet whipped close to Earth on its 3.3-year orbit, detonating precisely positioned nuclear warheads that sent Encke straight to Mars, where it grazed the atmosphere, aerobraking to slow its descent. Thus it burned up and dumped its contents into Mars’s atmosphere rather than ionizing all the gases into space. The comet strike brought with it cubic miles of free water, as well as enough energy of impact to warm the atmosphere. The shock wave and the heat imparted by the collision released an additional four times Encke’s water vapor from the soil into the air.

The resulting Encke Sea had volatilized in only two years, but the changes in the Martian atmosphere were permanent. The upset in the climate and the brief greenhouse effect melted part of the ice caps, which increased the atmospheric pressure further, which melted more.…

The escalation had begun. Mars had been locked in an unsteady climatic equilibrium, waiting for a shove from ambitious humanity.

A year later two transports released samples of airborne algae—voracious for carbon dioxide—into the Martian atmosphere. The algae included a dozen different varieties genetically engineered to thrive in Martian conditions. They soaked up the weak sunlight, gathered minerals from the ever-present fine dust that whipped through the air, settled on exposed surfaces, and released bound oxygen. All this laid the groundwork for a terrestrial ecology. Two years later another cargo ship dumped more algae into the air, new strains. Monitors showed measurable improvements in the air concentrations.

That was the year Keefer had been born.

Six years after that, new algae and free-plankton strains were deployed, tweaked to optimize their metabolism in the changing environmental conditions, while the first species grew obsolete in an atmosphere becoming too rich for them.

Nineteen years after the first cometary impact, a second ice ball crashed into Mars. The long-period comet Harlow-Burris, previously undiscovered, roared down into the solar system in an orbit that would take it astonishingly close to Mars on its trip through the ecliptic plane. A frantic mission was set up to give Harlow-Burris a nudge and change its course just enough to smack it into Mars, dumping more water, adding more heat, freeing more of the locked moisture and oxygen buried beneath the sands and hydrated within the rocks.

During Earth’s worldwide recession, when Keefer himself began working as a student in planetary geology, most of the cost-intensive terraforming work ground to a halt, but the wheels of nature had already been set into motion. Algae strains continued to swarm over the planet, making the Martian atmosphere thicker in the lowlands, trapping more sunlight, reducing the rocks and the oxide soil.

When humans again set foot on Mars after an eighteen-year hiatus in manned missions, things had changed dramatically. Preparations for a permanent UNSA base were made. Living modules were sent by slow cargo ships, for automatic landing and robotic assembly. Supplies were delivered in cheap but slow trajectories, preparing for the day when people could establish a long-term presence.

As he continued his headlong drive for Mars Mars Mars, Keefer had tried to engender in his twenty-year-old son Allan an appreciation for the magnitude of the terraforming task. Keefer spent two months a year with Allan, who feigned interest whenever he talked to his father; Keefer felt sorry for Allan, because the boy had no burning goal. But Keefer vowed that when he finally set foot on the surface of Mars, waving his gloved hand at the cameras for newsnets back on Earth, Keefer would be waving at Allan and no one else.

The boy was entering college, where he would probably study space science because Keefer had opened all the right doors for him, planned out his courses, urged him to follow a good curriculum, pointed the way. Keefer had worked hard to ensure that his son’s future was established, since his own new job as commissioner of Lowell Base would keep him away for years. Keefer promised himself he would pay the price just to make sure Allan had a clear trail of footsteps to follow.…

Now, hand over hand, he pushed his way to the orbiter’s bridge. Captain Rubens sat back with all lights down except for the instrument panels, enjoying the best view available on the craft. The cherub-faced captain bore a wistful expression; he would not be going down to the surface with the rest of them.

Rubens swiveled around. He wore a bulky green sweatsuit and thick socks to insulate him from the ever-present chill on the spaceship. “Ah, Commissioner! I was going to go get you. I’ve contacted Lowell Base because I thought you might want to talk to Commissioner Dycek, but she’s unavailable at the moment. Think that means she’s in the bathroom or something?”

Keefer didn’t know yet how he was going to deal with Dycek. He had never met the woman, but her work had certainly raised enough eyebrows and thrown a monkey wrench into UNSA’s neatly planned terraforming schedule. Her surprise project had placed augmented human beings on Mars years before any other permanent presence. First the unruly adins, then the more cooperative dvas set up modular buildings and infrastructures that would have taken ordinary humans many years to complete. But though the 150 or so surviving dvas still provided a good pool of laborers, their special skills were no longer really needed now that the five human bases had expanded their complement of inhabitants.

He nodded to Rubens. “No matter. I’ll have plenty of time to talk to the commissioner once we get down. We’ve got a lot of transition details to work out, but you’ll be sitting on Phobos for two weeks refueling.”

“Yeah. Get some rest. Lander’s leaving early tomorrow morning.”

As a special treat, Captain Rubens allowed his dozen passengers to transmit brief messages back home. Keefer addressed his videoletter to Allan, admonishing him to work hard in school, making chitchat about how much he was looking forward to feeling real planetary gravity again, not just the artificial tug from a spinning ship. He edited his message several times, vaguely dissatisfied that he could think of nothing important to say that he hadn’t already said. As Terrence Chetwynd took his place at the communications station, Keefer pulled himself back to the lounge compartment.

Looking out the porthole, he could see the dark terminator sweeping around the planet, folding the long breach of Valles Marineris into darkness. He recognized the giant swelling of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the entire solar system, rising to the upper fringes of the atmosphere.

Keefer picked out three smaller volcanoes clustered at the equator: Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons, each about seventeen kilometers higher than the surrounding plains, thrust out in a great swelling called the Tharsis Bulge. Lowell Base was centered between Pavonis Mons and the tangled badlands of Noctis Labyrinthus. The other UNSA bases were located at the eastern end of Valles Marineris, at the northern and southern poles, and in the lower part of the Hellas basin.

As the orbiter’s local night approached, the twelve new arrivals went to get some rest for the last night in their cramped ship quarters. Unable to sleep, Keefer doublechecked all the preparations himself, then stewed with anxiety for another half a day. Tomorrow morning they would touch down on Mars.

In his mind he pictured the Mars he had read about as a child, the visions that had haunted his dreams after reading Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs. A shiver of anticipation fluttered down his back. The UNSA terraforming work was changing the real Mars into the Mars of fiction. And he was a part of it.

Boris Tiban

An inhuman hand added finishing touches to the human face.

The sculpted visage stood two meters high, with pointed nose, Cossack beard, thick eyebrows, and a superior grin that scorned fear. Lighter rocks set into molded sockets gave the eyes a blank stare, looking down the slopes of Pavonis Mons. The black pupils would be painted on later.

The adin Boris Tiban squatted on the rough volcanic ground, ignoring discomfort as he watched his companion Stroganov work. The cold poked fingers through small rips in his worn jumpsuit, but could not penetrate his polymer-insulated skin.

His adin eyes were set deeply under a continuous frilled hood to shield them from the cold and the blowing dust. A transparent plastic membrane covered the eyeballs to prevent them from freezing solid. An additional membrane draped over the broad nostrils to help retain exhaled moisture. A set of auxiliary lungs mounted beneath the shoulder blades and surrounded by artificial diaphragm musculature made the adins look like grotesque hunchbacks. Their skin had a milky cast, nearly dead of feeling due to the long-chain polymers grafted onto the hide like an insulating suit.

The sculptor cupped a lump of hot mud in one tough palm as he took a final glance at his creation. Touch-up dabs of mud on the towering bust froze into cement within a few moments in the harshness of the Martian high altitudes. Stroganov had to pry the ice-covered scraps from his numb fingers, plopping them back into the steaming bucket at his side.

“Another one finished,” Stroganov said, his voice reedy in the thin air. “I apologize for the delay. You can call the others now, Boris. Not that they haven’t been watching from the caves.…”

Behind Stroganov, like guardians around the volcanic caves where the five surviving adins lived, stood glowering busts of other Russian rebels—Stepan Razin, Ivan Bolotnikov, Kondrati Bulavin, even Vladimir Ilitch Lenin himself.

Grumbling, Boris had argued against that sculpture of Lenin, since the man had fallen into disfavor with the backlash against communism and the resurgence of nationalism. But Stroganov argued quietly and patiently—in his teacher’s way that always drove Boris to frustration—that Vladimir Ilitch, too, was a rebel in his time, and that Lenin had also been exiled to Siberia, though his sentence was vastly more pleasant than what the adin volunteers had experienced in the labor camps.

In the gathering twilight, Boris used his long titanium staff to haul himself to his feet beside Stroganov’s sculptures, digging its hard point into the dirt and making a satisfying scar. Boris had torn the rod from UNSA’s transmitting dish ten years before, when he and the other adins had revolted against Earth, taken whatever equipment they could salvage, and hiked off to higher elevations where they could live more comfortably and breathe the thin air for which they had been created.

Even here on the highest slopes of the enormous volcano Pavonis Mons, the air tasted thick and spoiled to Boris, a flavor of too much oxygen, ripe with airborne algae, tainted with toxic pollutants from the dva mining and excavation settlements that sprang up like mushrooms in the lowlands. The air grew worse each year. Boris wanted to mutter a curse and spit at the ground—but he and all the adins had learned never to waste valuable moisture in pointless gestures or unheard words.

Brushing red dust from his arms, Boris turned toward the cave mouth to call the others. The shadows of Stroganov’s sculpted heads grew longer, like the distorted silhouettes of history. Stroganov stood proudly beside his new creation, anxious to tell another story.

Night fell rapidly on the Pavonis caldera. Stars blazed down, more brilliant than the darkest Siberian night. Knowing where to look, Boris could make out the two tiny moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos—Greek for “fear” and “dread.” The moons were tiny rocks, fossilized potatoes in orbit. Phobos scurried across the sky three times in a single sol, while Deimos hung in nearly the same spot, day after day. Fear and Dread. Boris wondered how two such small pebbles could inspire such terror.

Cora Marisovna, Boris’s almond-eyed lover, crouched in the darkness of the cave mouth, unwilling to come outside. Wiry and thin Nikolas, the youngest of their group, came out, hovering beside Nastasia, the adin woman he shared with Stroganov. Since Stroganov had been busy with his new project lately, Nikolas had taken extra turns with Nastasia, who never seemed to know where she was anyway.

She came out beside Nikolas, gasping in amazement at the new sculpture, and as she had done with each of the other faces before, she pointed a blunt adin finger. “I knew him! I remember him!” Nikolas gave her a condescending smile. Boris kept his face expressionless.

There was no real love between Nastasia and Stroganov or Nikolas, because the person who lived within the mind of Nastasia changed from hour to hour. She was one of those who had suffered a defect in the adin augmentations; oxygen had been cut off to parts of her brain during the first few days, before she had somehow adapted and survived. All that remained of her personality were scattered fragments of memories, things she had imagined and things she had experienced, puzzle pieces that did not belong next to each other, but were forced by clumsy hands into a crude interlocking.

Nikolas helped Nastasia squat down beside him on the rocky soil. “Who is it this time, Boris?”

Boris shrugged. “Wait until Stroganov tells you. Some-body you’ve never heard of, no doubt.”

Nikolas nodded. Of all the adins, Nikolas looked up to Boris Tiban the most, and Boris considered it his duty to adopt a protégé. Back on Earth, Nikolas had been in the Siberian prison camp for a stupid reason—he had stolen construction equipment for the black market but gotten caught when he tried to sell it back to its original owner. Boris had helped the young man survive the rigors of the camp when he would surely have died in the first year otherwise.

“I give you another hero,” Stroganov said proudly, “someone we must not forget from our history.” He stood beside the recently completed monument and raised his hands. The new sculpture looked darker and sharper than the others, unworn by abrasive dust. Next to the stylized human face, Stroganov’s adin modifications made him look even more of a monstrosity.

Stroganov bent forward, as if to make certain his audience remained attentive. Nastasia could not focus her mind clearly enough, but she made a great show of it. Nikolas raised his watery blue eyes, though, and Cora Marisovna listened from the shadows.

“I give you Emelian Ivanovich Pugachev.” Stroganov smiled.

At last, Boris thought, someone we have heard of.

The Sovereign Republics had seen many changes of boundaries and governments, but the people had a common history, common hostilities, occasionally even common cultures. They were tied together by strands much too strong to be severed by the winds of changing politics.

One of the strange consequences of the fall of the Soviet Union among ethnic Russians was that they looked at their Russian imperial history as a golden age, resurrecting tsarist heroes: Ivan the Terrible battling the boyars, Peter the Great and his eccentricities, Alexander I and his wars against Napoleon.

Boris Tiban was Azerbaijani, with a dash of Armenian and Georgian—but in his foster homes he had been forced to attend Russified schools that taught Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky. All schoolchildren had heard of the great Pugachev Revolt.

Stroganov began to tell his story: “During the time of Tsarina Catherine II, whom old historians used to call Catherine the Great, Emelian Ivanovich united the Cossacks in a rebellion that stretched from the Urals to the Pacific. Pugachev forged serfs and enslaved ethnic groups into such a powerful army that the tsarina had to conclude an unsatisfactory peace with the Turks so she could turn her military against him.

“Pugachev gathered fifteen thousand supporters, claiming to be the true tsar whose death Catherine had falsely staged thirty years before. But when Catherine sent her full army against him, even Emelian Ivanovich could not survive. The tsarina’s army captured him and brought him to Moscow in a cage. Pugachev was beheaded and quartered, and during the following months, peasants in the rebellious villages were hanged and tortured, their homes burned.”

Stroganov sighed. “Pugachev was a brave man, but he struck at the wrong time. I think he would have done well on Mars.”

“Yes,” Nastasia said, “I remember him! I do.” Nikolas shushed her.

Boris nodded grimly. “A good choice, Stroganov. Pugachev was one of Russia’s greatest heroes.”

Boris liked the great rebels. Even their missteps sent ripples through the tsarist governments and the mindset of the Russian people. Boris’s own adin rebellion on Mars had caused as great a stir—for a time—though now it seemed Earth had forgotten all about his grand gesture.

Caught up in bickering and their own internal ethnic problems, the Sovereign Republics had remained side players in the terraforming of Mars. But all along they had had a surprise up their sleeves that would let them steal the show from the UN Space Agency, and at a relatively low cost.

Thirty adins were shipped to Mars in a cargo transport officially described as “unmanned,” filled only with supplies for the eventual human colony. But when the ship landed and opened its doors to a worldwide audience, the transmission showed a human being—augmented, yes, but wearing no environment suit—setting foot on Mars. The adins were the showpieces of the Sovereign Republics, displaying an imagination, bravery, and efficiency that no one else in the world expected of them. The uproar could be heard practically across interplanetary space.

Cut off from their Earthly masters, the adins had not meekly tamed a world and bowed to every command transmitted to them, though a few of the adins behaved like cowering serfs instead of pioneers. Sixteen years ago Boris Tiban had led his own bloody rebellion, like Pugachev. He had freed the adins to make their own lives on their own world. Now, though, only five of them remained.

The Martian atmosphere grew thicker and warmer. Hundreds of the second-phase dvas swarmed over the surface, trained dogs of the UNSA project. And now unmodified, unwanted normals had established a clumsy foothold with their permanent bases.

The adins were obsolete, no longer needed.

As night fell and the air grew even colder in the star-streaked darkness, Boris squeezed his fist until the reddish rock crumbled into powder, like freeze-dried blood. Taking one last look at the towering statues Stroganov had constructed, he turned and walked without a word into the caves.

Cora backed out of his way. She did not say a word to him. He glared at her, at how her body had betrayed both of them, and felt the long, dull rage eating at his stomach. Without the furnace of anger he kept stoked within him, Boris felt nothing at all.

I am obsolete, but I am not a museum piece! he thought. Statues and trophies gathered dust. But Boris Tiban could still act against his oppressors.

Rachel Dycek

By the time Rachel brought the long-distance rover back to Lowell Base, meandering aimlessly across the Martian landscape as she gathered her thoughts, the distant sun had already fallen behind the line of crags called the Spine.

Operations manager Bruce Vickery was there to meet her at the parking shelter, hands on stocky hips, suited up and ready to clamber into Percival as soon as Rachel opened the airlock. The speakerpatch in Vickery’s helmet flattened his annoyance.

“Hey, Rachel, I needed to go out a lot earlier than this. You were scheduled to be back hours ago.” Vickery turned his back on her and popped open the rover’s storage compartment, slinging in a backpack of tools he had with him. It landed inside the bin with a hollow thunk. “It’s going to be damn tough to calibrate those meteorology stations without the sun.”

The strong tone in his usually even voice triggered her defensiveness, and she turned to him. The base had two long-distance rovers, after all. “Why couldn’t you take Schiaparelli?”

“It’s being serviced. Al-Somak is using it to meet the lander tomorrow, and he wants it bright and clean. I’ve been waiting here for you for hours. I wish you wouldn’t do this to me, Rachel.” Vickery sounded like an exasperated father trying to talk sense into his teenaged daughter. Rachel felt small, and hated herself for feeling that way.

“Take it then. It is all yours.” Behind her, she heard Vickery climb through the sphincter airlock. The thousands of small telescoping legs reset themselves with a whisking noise, levering the body of the rover high enough off the ground to clear any obstacles on the terrain. Like an impatient bull, Percival snorted a thin whistle of cold steam as it cleared its exhausts.

Still sluggish from her self-indulgent afternoon, Rachel walked along the packed-dirt path to the outer module’s entrance, then let herself through the main airlock into the changing area. She used one of the wall-mounted vacuum hoses to remove as much of the red dust as she could from her suit, then disconnected her helmet. The air smelled sour and metallic, with a musty, carbolic smell from the air-regenerating unit. She switched off the backpack and slipped it from her shoulders, then shucked her suit. Glowing resistance heaters shed small pools of warmth in the changing area, but they could not beat back the ever-present cold of Mars. The changing stool felt like ice against her bare legs as she tucked the suit components in the designated storage cubicle.

With a damp poly-sponge, Rachel rubbed down her body to remove the sweat and grit. The cold dampness made her skin tingle, like sitting in a sauna and then running across the snow in the camp in Siberia where she had secretly performed the adin surgeries.

As she dressed in a clean jumpsuit, Rachel checked her trim and compact body. Even under the one-third gravity, she had not degenerated to flab over ten years. At fifty she looked hard, annealed by the fire of human scorn and the cold of Mars.

Back on Earth, though, in the oppressive gravity of her forced retirement, she would become a fossil soon enough.

Rachel made her way through the bulkhead door into the narrow corridor connecting the inflatable modules. As she passed into the central module that housed the main computers and communications facilities, Dr. Evrani, the meteorologist, burst in on her, waving his hands and simmering in anger. He was a little man, scrawny and hyperactive, as if his body were too small to contain the energy he generated. Even after five years of listening to his loopy Pakistani accent, Rachel still found him hard to follow. He reminded her of the Indian inquisitor that had dissected her on the world newsnets during the UN adin hearings, which might partially account for her dislike of Evrani.

“You were not here, Commissioner!” Evrani said, his pecan-brown eyes wide, as if Rachel had somehow forgotten about being gone all day. “I had to accept the transmission myself from Commissioner Keefer in the orbiter. How could you forget? Why were you gone at a time like this?”

“So what did he want?” She walked to her desk screen and activated it. Leaning over the clutter in her personal area, Rachel read the message herself even as Evrani summarized it.

“They have reached orbital insertion on schedule and all systems have checked out. They will deploy the lander at our local sunup—”

“—tomorrow morning,” Rachel said, on top of his words. “Then everything is on schedule and routine? No problems?” She glared at him with cold gray eyes. “So what are you so upset about?”

Evrani shook his narrow, big-knuckled finger at her. “You should not go out of sight alone in a rover. We are on the buddy system. Those are the regulations.”

Rachel scowled at him. “I will take your words under advisement, Dr. Evrani.” In the back of her mind, she wondered how Evrani had ever passed all the human factors tests. Cooped up together under pressure on Lowell Base, the fifty people had broken into a bunch of insulated cliques, and Evrani had become the tattletale.

Tomorrow morning, Commissioner Jesús Keefer would land, and she had to prepare to be rotated home. After two weeks, Captain Rubens would have refueled his interplanetary shuttle from the oxygen mining station on Phobos and prepared for the launch window to return to Earth. Rachel Dycek and five others would be rotated back home. Settling into her retirement, she would sit back in a comfortable dacha on Earth, maybe go on a speaking tour, maybe write her memoirs of the days of the adin project, or publish a final report on the success of the dva phase of human augmentation.

Though her work on Mars had been superseded by other terraforming concerns, Rachel did not want to go back home. Adapted humans had always been intended as a short-term phase in the overall scheme. But she was having trouble adjusting to that reality.

Erasing her screen, Rachel shut down the terminal. Feeling claustrophobic in the confined module, she envied the dvas out there in the open, breathing the air, feeling Martian breezes against polymer-insulated skin. “Excuse me, Dr. Evrani. I have a lot of preparations to make before tomorrow.”

Rachel made her way to the tiny cramped cabin that had been her private quarters for a decade—“cozy,” the habitation engineers had called it. No doubt they would have said the same thing about a coffin.

Rachel folded down her bunk and snapped it out from the wall with a tight clack to lock it into place, then adjusted the controls to soften the mattress. She lounged back on the thin, spongy layer and pulled a thermal blanket over herself to keep warm. As she closed her eyes, Rachel thought back, trying to count how much of her life she had wasted on augmentation projects.

For twenty-one years of her career she had been involved with the concept, initially as an assistant, then section leader, then overall head of the adin project while hiding in a secret installation built within the Neryungri labor camp. She had started the job when she was twenty-nine, rosy-cheeked and idealistic, with enough stamina to surpass her competitors and no politics to speak of—nothing to offend the changing groups in control of the Sovereign Republics. She had excelled in medical school, practiced surgery for two years, before her real work had begun. Separating from her husband Sergei after a lackluster marriage, Rachel had vanished into the labor camps at the far edge of the Earth.

As she worked her way up, she learned all phases of the project, supervising specialists who took care of the specific details in each area—artificial lungs, mechanical secondary diaphragm muscles, long-chain polymer skin insulation, genetically modified hemoglobin molecules to process precious oxygen more efficiently. She studied autopsies on the failures to improve the process for next time.

In the cold isolation of Siberia, under the gray skies of incessant winter, she had fallen into a brief affair with one of the other doctors. But the intensity of Rachel’s personality, her single-mindedness, had driven off close relationships all her life; the doctor had requested a transfer shortly afterward.

Throughout her career, Rachel marched straight ahead in a lockstep that allowed for no distraction, no deviation. Now she felt as if she had taken three steps beyond a precipice before realizing that the bridge was out beneath her feet. The adins and the dvas were her life: her substitute for everything she had left behind along the way.

Rachel remembered the eleven months of intensive interviews with hardened prisoners who grasped at any sort of straw that might mitigate their sentences. She and her assistants searched for volunteers, conducted endless physiological and psychological tests, preliminary surgical inspections.

The sheer numbers of people were a blur, and she often forgot that they were people—not specimens. But she gave them hope, and they gave her a chance to make an impact for the Sovereign Republics, which sorely needed something to regain their lost prestige in the international community.

Many types of government had been tried since the fall of communism, and now the loose federation had many different flags, currencies, and languages. But the Sovereign Republics had been weaker many times before. The people viewed the seventy-five years of Communist control as a part of their history, a stumble in the progress of time, much the same as the Mongol invasions, the Polish invasions, the oppression of the Teutonic knights.

The “united Earth” terraforming project had been an enormous drain on the world’s treasury, siphoning off resources that—some said—might better be spent at home. Fifty years had passed, and still no humans smiled under the olive sky or romped through the rust-colored sands, as UNSA propaganda had promised. People were tired of waiting; the work seemed an unending quest, led by fools. With its own severe economic problems, the Sovereign Republics had declined to take an active role in making Mars fit for human inhabitants.

Officially, that is.…

In her quarters, Rachel cracked open her gray eyes and searched for the chronometer on the wall. Tomorrow morning Keefer’s lander would be down, bringing another dozen workers for Lowell Base. Twelve hours from now, she would be shaking the hand of her replacement, welcoming him to Mars. She would make the transition in a politically smooth way, helping him to take over his new duties, helping him to take duties away from