Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Find your friends if you can. If you can tell who
they are.
    She collected herself and continued looking for Kasei’s group,
going to where Dao had said they would be, and then trying to think where they
would go next. Outside the city was a possibility; but having come inside they
might try for the next tent to the east, try to take them one by one,
decompress them, force everyone below and then move on. She stayed on the
street paralleling the tent wall, jogging along as fast as she could. She was
in good shape but this was ridiculous, she couldn’t catch her breath, and she
was soaking the inside of her suit with sweat. The street was deserted, eerily
silent and still, so that it was hard to believe she was in the middle of a
battle, and impossible to believe she would ever find the group for which she
was looking.
    But there they were. Up ahead, in the streets around one of the
triangular parks—figures in helmets and suits, carrying automatic weapons and
mobile missile launchers, firing at unseen opponents in a building fronted with
chert. The red circles on their arms, Reds—
    A blinding flash and she was knocked down. Her ears roared. She
was at the foot of a building, pressed against its polished stone side.
Jaspilite: red jasper and iron oxide, in alternating bands. Pretty. Her back
and bottom and shoulder hurt, and her elbow. But nothing was agonizing. She
could move. She crawled around, looked back to the triangle park. Things were
burning in the wind, the flames little oxygen-starved orange spurts, going out
already. The figures there were cast about like broken dolls, limbs akimbo, in
positions no bones could hold. She got up and ran to the nearest knot of them,
drawn by a familiar gray-haired head that had come free of its helmet. That was
Kasei, only son of John Boone and Hiroko Ai, one side of his jaw bloody, his
eyes open and sightless. He had taken her too seriously. And his opponents not
seriously enough. His pink stone eyetooth lay there exposed by his wound, and
seeing it Ann choked and turned away. The waste. All three of them dead now.
    She turned back and crouched, undipped Kasei’s wrist-pad. It was
likely that he had a direct access band to the Kakaze, and when she was back in
the shelter of an obsidian building marred by great white shatterstars, she
tapped in the general call code, and said, “This is Ann Clayborne, calling all
Reds. All Reds. Listen, this is Ann Clayborne. The attack on Sheffield has
failed. Kasei is dead, along with a lot of others. More attacks here won’t
work. They’ll cause the full UNTA security force to come back down onto the
planet again.” She wanted to say how stupid the plan had been in the first
place, but she choked back the words. “Those of you who can, get off the
mountain. Everyone in Sheffield, get back to the west and get out of the city,
and off the mountain. This is Ann Clayborne.”
    Several acknowledgments came in, and she half listened to them as
she walked west, back throtfgh Arsiaview toward her rover. She made no attempt
to hide; if she was killed she was killed, but now she didn’t believe it would
happen; she walked under the wings of some dark covering angel, who kept her
from death no matter what happened, forcing her to witness the deaths of all
the people she knew and all the planet she loved. Her fate. Yes; there was Dao
and his crew, all dead right where she had left them, lying in pools of their
own blood. She must have just missed it.
    And there, down a broad boulevard with a line of linden trees in
its center, was another knot of bodies—not Reds— they wore green headbands, and
one of them looked like Peter, it was his back—she walked over weak-kneed,
under a compulsion, as in a nightmare, and stood over the body and finally
circled it. But it was not Peter. Some tall young native with shoulders like
Peter’s, poor thing. A man who would have lived a thousand years.
    She moved on carelessly. She came to her little rover