let’s all meet at the east gate, okay? You go ahead and go. Frank,” he said to the screen, “you should get over there too when you can. I’m going to try some things with the physical-plant robots that should keep those people out until dark at least.”
It was now three P.M., although it seemed like twilight, as the sky was thick with high, rapidly moving dust clouds. The forces outside identified themselves as UNOMA police, and demanded to be let in. Frank and Cairo’s mayor asked them for authorization from U.N. Geneva, and declared a ban on all arms in the city. The forces outside made no reply.
At 4:30 alarms went off all over the city. The tent had been broached, apparently catastrophically, because a sudden wind whipped west through the streets, and pressure sirens went off in every building. The electricity went off, and just that quick it went from a town to a broken shell, full of running figures in walkers and helmets, all of them rushing about, crowding toward the gates, knocked down by gusts of wind or by each other. Windows popped out everywhere, the air was full of clear plastic shrapnel. Nadia, Maya, Ann, Simon and Yeli left the city building, and fought their way through crowds toward the east gate. There was a great crush of people around it because the lock was open, and some people were squeezing through; a deadly situation for anyone who fell underfoot, and if the lock were blocked in any way, it could turn deadly for everyone. And yet it all happened in silence, except for helmet intercoms and some background impacts. The first hundred were tuned to their old band, and over the static and exterior noises Frank’s voice came on. “I’m at the east gate now. Get out of the crush so I can find you.” His voice was low, businesslike. “Hurry up, there’s something happening outside the lock.”
They worked their way out of the crowd, and saw Frank just inside the wall, waving a hand overhead. “Come on,” the distant figure said in their ears. “Don’t be such sheep, there’s no reason to join the toothpaste when the tent’s lost its integrity, we can cut through anywhere we want. Let’s go straight for the planes.”
“I told you,” Maya began, but Frank cut her off: “Shut up, Maya, we couldn’t leave until something like this happened, remember?”
It was near sunset now, the sun pouring through a gap between Pavonis and the dust cloud, illuminating the clouds from below in a garish display of violent Martian tones, casting a hellish light over the milling scene. And now figures in camouflaged uniforms were pouring in through rents in the tent. There were big spaceport shuttle buses parked outside, with more troops emerging from them.
Sax appeared out of an alley. “I don’t think we’ll be able to get to the planes,” he said.
A figure in walker and helmet appeared out of the murk. “Come on,” it said on their band. “Follow me.”
They stared at this stranger. “Who are you?” Frank demanded.
“Follow me!” The stranger was a small man, and behind his face-plate they could see a bright ferocious grin. Brown thin face. The man took off into an alley leading to the medina, and Maya was the first to follow. Helmeted people ran everywhere; those without helmets were sprawled on the ground, dead or dying. They could hear sirens through their helmets, very faint and attenuated, and there were soundlike vibrations underfoot, seismic booms of some kind; but other than that all the hectic activity occurred in silence, broken only by the sounds of their own breathing, and their voices in each other’s ears, “Where to?” “Sax are you there?” “He went down that one,” and so forth, a strangely intimate conversation, given the dusky chaos they ran through. Looking around Nadia almost kicked the body of a dead cat, lying in the streetgrass as if asleep.
The man they were following appeared to be humming a tune over their band, an absorbed little bum, bum, badum-dum dum—Peter’s theme from “Peter and the Wolf,” perhaps. He knew the streets of Cairo well, making turns in the medina’s tight warren without a moment’s pause for thought, and leading them to the city wall in less than ten minutes.
At the wall they peered through the warped tenting; outside in the murk, anonymous suited figures were running off alone or in groups of two or three, in a kind of Brownian dispersion