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The four soldiers standing in front of the closed station wore thick plated are lines the sae and steel as the corridor They carried intie assault rifles and scowled at the crowd of a dozen orin around them
“I am on the transportation board,” a tall, thin, dark-skinned woer on one soldier’s chest plate “If you don’t let us past, then you’re in trouble Serious trouble”
“How long is it going to be down?” ato be down?”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the soldier on the left shouted She had a powerful voice It cut through the ru to restless schoolchildren “This settlement is in security lockdown Until the military action is resolved, there is no movement between levels except by official personnel”
“Whose side are you on?” someone shouted “Are you Martians? Whose side are you on?”
“In thethe question, “we are going to ask you all to be patient As soon as it’s safe to travel, the tube syste to ask you to reoing to speak until he heard his own voice He sounded whiny
“My daughter’s in the eighth level Her school’s down there”
“Every level is in lockdown, sir,” the soldier said “She’ll be just fine You just have to be patient”
The dark-skinned woman from the transportation board crossed her ar back down the narrow, dirty hall, talking to each other In the old tunnels this far up, the air smelled of recyclers—plastic and heat and artificial scents And now also of fear
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the soldier shouted “For your own safety, you need to remain calm and stay where you are until the military situation has been resolved”
“What exactly is the military situation?” a wo the words a deht there was a dangerous buzz in her voice She was as scared as anyone Only she had a gun So this wasn’t going to work He had to find so Glycine kenon still in his hand, Prax walked away froht years old when his father had transferred froh-population centers of Europa to help build a research lab on Gany which Prax had gone through a rocky adolescence When his parents had packed up to move the family to a new contract on an asteroid in eccentric orbit near Neptune, Prax had stayed behind He’d gotten a botany internship thinking that he could use it to grow illicit, untaxed marijuana only to discover that every third botany intern had co to find a forgotten closet or an abandoned tunnel that wasn’t already occupied by an illegal hydroponics experiood sense of the tunnel architecture
He walked through the old, narrow hallways of the first-generation construction Men and wo the walls or in the bars and restaurants, their faces blank or angry or frightened The display screens were set on old entertainment loops of music or theater or abstract art instead of the usual newsfeeds No hand teres
By the central-air ducts, he found what he’d been looking for The maintenance transport always had a few old electric scooters lying around No one used them anymore Because Prax was a senior researcher, his hand ter He found one scooter with a sidecar and half a charge still in the batteries It had been seven years since he’d been on a scooter He put the Glycine kenon in the sidecar, ran through the diagnostic sequence, and wheeled himself out to the hall
The first three ramps had soldiers just like the ones he’d seen at the tube station Prax didn’t bother stopping At the fourth, a supply tunnel that led from the surface warehouses doard the reactors, there was nobody He paused, the scooter silent beneath hiht acid smell in the air that he couldn’t quite place Slowly, other details registered The scorchthe floor He heard a distant popping sound that it took three or four long breaths to recognize as gunfire
Rapidly evolving apparently e of Mei’s classroom stippled with bullet holes and soaked in children’s blood popped into his ining The panic he’d felt in the doain, but a hundred times worse
“She’s fine,” he told the plant beside hiht in a day care There’re kids there”
The green-black leaves were already starting to wilt They wouldn’t have a war around children Or food supplies Or fragile agricultural doain, but not so badly he couldn’t steer
The first explosion ca down the ra the side of one of the cathedral-huge unfinished caverns where the raw ice of thebetween a reen space and a work of art There was a flash, then a concussion, and the scooter was fishtailing The wall loo out of the way before the i Coh their radios At least, he thought they would The people screaed the cavern wall, a section of blue-white ice the size of a tractor calving off the roof and falling slowly and inexorably down to the floor, grinding into it Prax scraht His heart felt like it was trying to break out of his rib cage
On the upper edge of the curving raures in armor He didn’t know if they were UN or Mars One of theunned the scooter, sliding fast down the ramp The chatter of automatic weapons and the smell of smoke and steam melt followed him
The school’s doors were closed He didn’t know if that was o scooter to a halt, juently on the steel drop door, but his first try split the skin over his knuckle