Another interlude back on the surface, seeing how the rescue effort is developing. And, boy, is it. Even so, there’s much careful planning for phase two, the drone. Recall at this moment Kira has no idea how deep the hole is or how does it end. As she says, she is assuming the best for Allie and Zhukov and planning accordingly. I have Kira reflect a little on the political changes to Earth and Mars over the last thirty years.

The play on words of “A-Hole,” A for Alicia Alvarez, came to me before Mass yesterday, so I’m assuming the pun is divinely inspired.

Because there is a lot for me to learn in this second interlude, I may be back to a MWF posting this week. Apologies.

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In less than thirty hours, something of a small village was springing up at the base of the hill where Kira’s team had been exploring that cave.  Six prefabbed building were up and two very large Shcha Mk. VI’s were at rest just about the ground about a half-kilometer away, their submarine-looking forms two hundred meters long and forty-five in diameter, used for both inter- and intra-planetary fast shipping by the Russians. 

An improvement of the hand and foot holds they had used less than three days ago to climb the steep face of the hill, there was now a stairway made of brick or carved out of the rock.  The three meter ledge out front was packed with equipment.  Including the reactionless drone they were sending down in an hour.  Through a complex pulley system, its control wires and anchor cable went from the cave mouth, past the ledge, and down to the new camp.  Still not knowing what they up against, depth-wise, there were two five-km spools of each, ready to be spliced together if need be.

Just how far down does that hole go? Kira wondered, looking down from the ledge at the frantic activity below.  And how many twists and turns?  I, we, are still acting on the assumption that Allie is lost, not dead, and now has Zhukov to help her.  The political complications of the drone’s cameras finding bodies was nearly unthinkable.  But she had to.

Just over three years ago, on her seventy-fifth birthday – and not looking a day over fifty – Empress Faustina Hartmann resigned the throne of the imperium, passing her legal and extra-legal powers, as everyone expected, to her niece Aurelia, now sixty-eight but looking thirty from what she and her mother were.  Kira rubbed her gloved hands against her face, knowing she, too, was made of a different kind of nanomaterials, put into her blood as an infant.

And, she thought, lowering her hands and walking past one of the two armed guards at the cave mouth, Faustina then fulfilled her pledge:  to lead her people off world.  A huge caravan of Russian and imperium ships took three months to make it here.  Seventy-seven thousand people, augmenting the thirty-thousand imperials already here.  Kira knew why she chose that number:  a kind of atonement for the same number crucified by her grandfather in the leading days of the Change.

And all of them young, mid-twenties.  Fifty-fifty men and women, with about a thousand children.  And the men were mostly former legionaries.  Former, she laughed to herself.  Fussy now has an army of six legions here on Mars.  A clear warning to the Russians and Japanese about her long-term intentions.  Especially since it seemed she had at least another fifty good years in her.

Worried about the stability of the cave’s ground around the hole where Allie went missing, only she or Chief Mining Engineer Sundström were allowed in.  All work by miners or techs was done under the surveillance of one of the two of them.  It had first made her angry enough to kill that the team’s nickname of the project quickly became The A-Hole, but she relented, trying to see the honor they were showing her distant cousin.

“How are things, Pärt?” she asked Sundström, who was over on the cave wall, triple-checking the drone’s cameras and microphones.

“Five by five, Midwife,” he replied in his thick accent.  Swedish born, he trained in Moscow and worked in the Urals for over a decade before being ordered by Reina to report to Mars.  In the Russian Empire, one did what the Prime Minister said.  “If I may impose, before we start, can you go out and via your lines or just a satcom link, tell Aqua and Faustina we’re about ready here.”

“Of course.  Back in a moment.” Walking out, she passed two men carrying – slowly carrying – the forty mm diameter drone in, its two cables unwinding behind it.

Kira could save herself some stress by using a tablet or laptop, but this was too important; too personal.  She first opened her mind to her partner and master of this great project of making a new world.

Aqua, she thought, looking at the sun thirty degrees above the horizon after its rising.  We are about to proceed with the drone’s insertion for phase two of the rescue mission.

Your team putting the complex toy into your A-Hole, you mean?  His sense of humor over these decades often made her physically sick.

I look forward, someday, to tossing a bucket of water onto your servers, she tried to be just as unpleasant for someone she had in mind for forty years.  Another of his awful laughs.  But to answer your question, yes, we are.  Is there anything else you should tell me?

Me?  No.  I see you are to speak to Hartmann next.  Ask her.

The connexion was abruptly severed.  What does that mean?  Kira took a few deep breaths from her noseline and reached out to Emeritus Empress Faustina.

It means, my Russian Niece, Faustina, as always, started her conversations in the middle, that here is a report classified so secret that I am one of three alive to have seen it.

Shoved into her head, Kira quickly assimilated the report from Faustina’s son, Laszlo, from over a quarter century ago.  He and Minerva were on Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter and long thought capable of hosting life.  And that’s what they found.  An oversized slug who ate his toolbox.  Laszlo called it a bandersnatch.  Complex animal life in our own solar system, and Fussy and two others chose to repress the knowledge.  Why?

Got all that? the pushy retired empress asked.

I’ve no time for politics about covering this up, she replied.  But why now?

You are Midwife to this new world.  Your gift from God is to sense life.  I suggest you think long and hard about what’s under your – our – feet for a few minutes before tossing your probe down there.  Anything else?

I shall do everything I can to rescue your great granddaughter.

I’m aware.  And I’ll be praying for you and her.  Out.