As they stood in silence, Hawkes thought about all the different riots he had witnessed in his time. Streets running red with blood; women and children screaming in the darkness; neighbors killing neighbors, stoning members of their own families, burning their own homes . . .
Just like here, the cynical side of his brain whispered to him. Just like now.
Breaking the silence in the elevator, Jarolic asked,
"You can see what they've done, can't you? You know what they're doing? This is all going to be used as an excuse."
"I know," agreed Hawkes. "I wouldn't be surprised if there are troopships already pushing off from the Moon."
"Troops?" sputtered Waters in disbelief. "You don't . . . heh, then again, sure you do. Sure you do." Looking at the level monitor, he said, "Next level. We'll have a good mile to go to get to the broadcast center."
"No telling what we'll find," said Jarolic, referring to the noise level coming from outside the car. Turning his neck first one way, then the other, he worked on the kinks he could feel in his back as he said, "We may have a real fight on our hands."
"We're human beings," said Hawkes, flashing the younger man an optimistic grin. "Every day fate lets us wake up again we have another real fight on our hands."
"You will grant that some days can be worse than others," asked Waters, some of his tension passing. "Won't you?" The elevator clicked quietly to a halt.
And then they were back in the midst of things. The new level was even smokier than Recycle had been. Waters theorized that someone might have sabotaged the air filtration system. Other systems seemed to have gone bad as well. The floor was wet, some unidentifiable liquid washing across the tiled concrete in sheets. There were electrical hisses in the background, sounding dangerously like live wires exposed to the open atmosphere.
Stopping in his tracks, Jarolic said, "Someone's got to check on the life-support systems—make certain they're actually running. Maybe there're people working on it now and I can give them a hand. Maybe there's . . . no one. Talking's more your jobs. You two go for the broadcast—I'll do what I do best." And then, before either Hawkes or Waters could say anything, the younger man was gone, headed in the opposite direction toward the main control section.
Moving on toward their own objective, they had not gone fifty yards when a swarm of angry, screaming people rounded a corner, coming straight for them. The ambassador hesitated a moment, but Waters moved forward, heading straight into the crowd.
"Stop," he shouted, his voice entreating friends rather than commanding lackeys. "Please—for all our sakes. For the sake of Mars—please, stop!"
The crowd slowed its pace. This was something new. Since the riot had started, people had either run from them or attacked. No one had bothered to talk. Before they could act, Waters continued, "We've got to pull together. We've got to turn this around. If we don't, we're all going to die. All of us—our families, our children. We've got to stop, or we're all going to . . . die!"
The mob moved on toward Waters and Hawkes. They were bruised and bloody and angry. Their clothes were covered with the smell of smoke and their faces streaked with soot and tears. Many of them were carrying knives or makeshift clubs. Standing his ground before them, though, with Hawkes behind him, Waters put up his hands, begging, "Listen to me, please. Please . . . think. Think! Who are you fighting? No matter who you are, what you think you're fighting for—you're wrong. We were tricked. We've all been tricked!"
The ambassador studied the approaching crowd. The leaders seemed to be hearing Waters, moving slower, their anger diminishing as their attention began to focus on what Waters was saying. Here stood Waters, who was so ready to explain the intricate uses of sponge/mush fibers, who was so proud of his home garden and his hors d'oeuvres, bravely speaking out over the noise all around him.
"Someone out there wants us to fail—they want us to live in the dirt forever—never seeing the sun, never breathing fresh air, never seeing a lake . . . never knowing anything at all but work. Working to fill their pockets with plenty of bank, working to stuff their mouths with food we'll never taste, working until we drop, until we die, until our children and our grandchildren and our greatgrandchildren die behind us."
The crowd stood, restless but listening. Hawkes knew that they had to be tired by that point; he and Waters had stumbled across this group when they were ready either to quit or to turn the march into a mindless rampage. He knew they were a powder keg, he only hoped Waters knew how to defuse them.
"And," the manager shouted, his voice harsh, his eyes dark and strained, "when we do finally die, do we get to leave this world in peace? No! After they're done working us to death, our bones aren't even buried. We're Recycled. Recycled! As if that were a fit way to spend eternity."
Waters paused to catch his breath. Every eye in the crowd was on him as they waited for him to speak again. As he began to realize that dozens of armed people had been stopped by his voice, he had time to be very afraid.
But before his fears could take complete hold of him, he felt his lungs fill and his pulse quicken. Pushing all his doubts aside, he shouted, "Well, no more. No more! We're not going to let them distill us down into the water they wash their feet with. We are not their dogs, their slaves, or their fools . . . not anymore. We're Martians! Martians! This is our world, not theirs . . . not anybody's but ours. And today we take it back!"
The crowd broke into cheers. This was no polite applause, but screaming, whooping, crying joy that thundered through the halls and corridors with an energy that increased with every new person it touched.
The crowd fell in with Waters, ready to obey his every word. As he led them to the broadcast center, Hawkes simply fell in step beside him, knowing there was nothing he needed to do. He had always known that he was only a mediator . . . that his job was not to wield power but to help others to understand how to use their own.
For the first time since landing on Mars—since he had left his ranch—he felt that things might turn out all right.
Of course, his cynical side reminded him, it was also quite possible that within a few weeks everyone around him— himself included—might be dead.
Well, as long as we die fighting for what we believe in, that's all right, too.
With that, the ambassador gave up debating the future. He had finally stopped hating Mars. For Hawkes, it no longer mattered what the fourth planet lacked. Suddenly, it had something the Earth had lost a long time ago.
It had hope.
32
"ALL RIGHT, WE KNOW WE DON'T HAVE A WHOLE LOT of time, so let's get things in order."
Hawkes stood in front of the Martian General Assembly. It had been two days since Samuel Waters had dispersed the crowd in the hall to spread the word, and then gone on the broadcast network to make the same impassioned plea to all of the colony. It had taken that long to restore enough order to be able to have a meeting.
Jarolic had been correct about possible sabotage—more correct than he had thought. Peste's accomplices had released Deselysurgamide, a psychotropic hysteriant, into the air-recycling system. After it was certain to have reached all levels they had shut the system down, as well as overflowing the fresh water and sewage systems.
"We've learned a lot in the last two days. Now we need to review it and get down to what we're going to do about it."
Because they had been down in the Deep Below, Hawkes and the others had not been affected by the hysteriant. Jarolic had found it reasonably easy to get the air, water, and sewage systems running again. The saboteurs had not wrecked any of the necessary equipment—even they knew that if the systems had not been brought back up within a few days, everyone on the planet would have died. The people giving them their orders wanted a subdued colony, not a graveyard.
"We know that the violence Mars recently lived through was not the fault of her people. Outsiders drugged the entire colony, then incited the riots. During the madness the colony sustained a horrible amount of damage. Luc
kily, however, reports show that most of it was superficial in nature."
"The grandolds built Mars to last," came a cry from the assembly. Hawkes chuckled along with the rest before answering, "Well, then, let's take advantage of that."
Then the ambassador got down to the issues of the meeting. He started them small, getting easily finished business out of the way first so that everyone could enjoy a sense of having accomplished something by the time they broke for lunch.
First, the life-support managers reported on the status of the air and water systems. Next, Reclamation and Recycle reported on the cleanup efforts. They were followed by the colony medical staff, who gave what figures they had on the deaths and injuries that had occurred during the riots. They followed that with a report on what they had done to halt the spread of contagious diseases that might be caused by the sewage backups and water shortages.
Lunch was served in the assembly hall, for twenty minutes only. Having given them what he hoped was enough of a sense of accomplishment to get them charged up, and enough of a break to brace themselves for what came next, Hawkes called the afternoon session to order.
The head of security, a stocky, big-shouldered man named Norman Scully, took the podium at the ambassador's direction. He did not appear very happy. When the assembly heard his report, they were not very happy, either.
The forces Scully had available had been reduced by half. Nearly 190 of his people had been murdered during the riots, along with 30 of the Bulldog's marine contingent—including the pair assigned to guard Peste. Almost 160 security people were missing-—no trace of them to be found anywhere in the Above or the Deep Below. The explanation for it all, given what Hawkes and Jarolic had learned on the outside, seemed simple to Scully.
"We believe that security was the department most heavily infiltrated by the outsiders. Apparently the Earth League has been sending people here for years in anticipation of what they did to us the other day."
"But, Norm," shouted out one of the assembly, "you said you searched the entire colony for this Peste son of a bitch and that he and all the rest of these buzz are missing. What do you mean, missing? Where the hell did they go?"
"Outside."
The single word threw the entire assembly into an uproar that took Hawkes a solid half minute to gavel into submission. Once he had restored order, he gave the floor back to Scully, who said, "The ambassador was set upon twice by people on the outside. It ain't hard to figure out they've got a base out there somewhere."
Cries of "How?" and "Where?" filled the room. After order had been restored, Scully answered them.
"We've checked the old, outer domes, but didn't find any trace of anyone using them. Likewise with the greenhouses, the vats, the factories . . . wherever the outsiders ran to, it wasn't anyplace we know." The security chief paused, then dropped his bombshell.
"There's little doubt that when the colony was first built, some other structure was put together in secret. Most likely it is below the surface. I've got people searching for it now, but it doesn't seem likely we'll be able to find anything for a few days."
The assembly went into an uproar again. Hawkes gaveled them into submission once more, thanked the security chief for his update, and promised that any pertinent facts discovered would be brought to the floor immediately. Then he turned things over to Waters so he could tell his fellow Martians what he had learned about the shipping, pricing, and profits on sponge/mush—both the figures the colony had been given over the years and what the real numbers might be.
As the manager began his speech, the ambassador accompanied Scully to the rear of the stage. Once they were far enough from everyone to talk privately, Hawkes said, "Good job. I liked that touch of bitterness in your voice when you said you didn't have any idea where our runaways could be hiding."
"Have to be careful," answered the big-shouldered man. "These people know me. Had to make it look real."
Hawkes and Scully knew exactly where their enemies were. In the opening days of Red Planet, Inc., an emergency shelter had been constructed to protect the workers in case of a systems failure. It had been closed down and forgotten years earlier—forgotten by everyone except a few old-timers like Scully.
"I agree with you that the League probably put most of its spies in my backyard," said the security chief in a low growl. "But that doesn't mean that they're the only ones. That bein' the case, it wouldn't make much sense to announce to some of them that I'm planning a raid on their brother snakes."
Hawkes had some misgivings about the plan. Even with the reinforcements from the marine contingent, Scully barely had a hundred people fit for combat. After making duty assignments for the minimum colony posts that would have to be monitored, he had only sixty-three troopers to take on his raid of the enemy stronghold— and that included the volunteers he had agreed to take from among the Resolute.
At first it had been argued that perhaps there was no need to go after the renegades, that the colony had more important things to worry about. Hawkes and Scully had pretended to agree, then gone ahead with their plans. Both men felt that having an uncontrolled force roaming Mars—with unknown amounts of supplies and munitions—was a threat too great to risk. They would have enough to worry about when the troopships arrived without having to look over their shoulders for Peste and his fellow traitors.
Traitors? To whom? he wondered. To Mars?
The ambassador turned the notion over in his mind. He had come to Mars searching for the people responsible for his own troubles—the ones who had attacked his ranch and killed his friends. He had hated the thought of Mars his entire life because of his father's tragic death.
Now, he thought to himself, you're acting like a Martian yourself.
As his eyes met Scully's, the ambassador calculated the odds against the older man. Their most conservative guesses had put their foes' strength at three times their own. Adding to that the fact that he would be laying siege to a strongly defended position, one manned by troops armed with weapons far more deadly than his own, the ambassador could but marvel at his courage.
Noting the look in Hawkes's eye, the old security man said, "Hey, don't worry, we'll get these bastards."
"I have no doubt," Hawkes lied.
"I appreciate the concern," Scully said, "but I'll get through this—all of it. I've been outnumbered and outgunned before. But I'm here. They ain't. End of story."
"I wasn't so much thinking of you, Scully," answered Hawkes. "You'll do what you have to. All of us will. We don't have much choice. I was just thinking about the troopships that launched from Earth two days ago."
The security man gave Hawkes a wink. "So was I." Patting the ambassador on the back, he said, "Buck up, sonny. You do your job, I'll do mine. We'll get this mess fixed up."
He turned and left the room, off to begin the preparations for his assault.
Turning back toward the assembly, Hawkes motioned to one of Waters's aides. The woman came over to him quickly. "Yes, sir. What can I do for you?"
"Tell Mr. Waters that I'm turning the rest of this afternoon's proceedings over to him."
"Yes, sir," responded the young woman. "Can I tell him what you'll be doing in case he needs to know?"
"My job," the ambassador answered. Then he turned and headed for the same door Scully had gone through, thinking, And, let's pray I start doing it right.
31
"MR. AMBASSADOR," CAME MARTEL'S VOICE OVER THE com, "your call is ready."
"Think this will work?" asked Hawkes.
"We won't know until we try," she told him.
"All right," said the ambassador, indexing to open his vid circuit. "In that case, here goes nothing."
Forty-five minutes after the outbreak on Mars had begun, troops had been sent to the Skyhook. Their mission was approved, and appropriations were found. A force of more than a hundred thousand, prepared for urban combat, had been gathered, armed, and sent on its way . . . all in forty-five minutes. Hawkes knew there was
no way such a thing was possible. No way at all.
Which means, he thought, carefully keeping his smile etched across his face, that some son of a bitch has been planning this for weeks. Maybe months.
"Benton," came Mick Carri's thick baritone. "What's up?"
"From what I hear," said Hawkes, forcing a tremor into his voice, "a lot of very heavily armed men . . . heading for Lunar City . . . on their way here. Should I pretend to be politely amazed or just shocked?''
"Polite amazement will do," answered the senator. "No need to strain yourself."
"No need to send any troops, either," countered Hawkes. "We've got everything under control. Apparently you didn't have much faith that we could, but we have."
"No faith in you?" Carri put on a wounded face. "We've got all the faith in the world in you."
"Oh, I see," answered Hawkes. "You do have faith in us. You just happened to have a hundred thousand armed warriors standing by, all packed and ready to ship out for Mars . . . just in case we couldn't handle things."
"Okay, you want blunt, Ben, I'll be blunt. Yes. Yes, we've been getting troops ready for some time now. What did you expect? Pirate attacks, assassination attempts . . . and now, let's face it, you've got a situation on your hands."
"We do not have a situation."
"Of course you do, Ben. And it's one that's deteriorated to the point of a murderous uprising. I'm sorry if I've wounded your pride, but when things get this out of hand, steps have to be taken."
"I'm the territorial governor, Mick," sputtered Hawkes. Looking tense and worried, he glanced about the room as if searching for something, then added weakly, "I'm telling you we don't want those troops on our soil."
Carri made a noise halfway between a laugh and a bark. Then he rose out of his chair, thundering at the camera, "And I'm the head of the senate of the United States of America, Mr. Governor. And I'm telling you that the Earth League has requested we intervene in this matter, and with half the world's resources at stake, I'm inclined to follow through. Now, you make that sound any way you want. It's not going to change."
Man O' War Page 21
