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Red Mars(151)

By:Kim Stanley Robinson


Hiroko’s face revealed nothing. Finally she said, “I will look into this.”

“Good.”

Sax said, “John, you said there was more than one thing going on?”

John nodded. “It hasn’t just been sabotage, you see. Someone’s been trying to kill me.”

Sax blinked, and the rest of them looked shocked. “At first I thought it was the saboteurs,” John said, “trying to stop my investigation. It made sense, and the first incident really was an act of sabotage, so it was easy to get confused. But now I’m pretty sure that that time was a mistake. The saboteurs aren’t interested in killing me— they could have done it and they didn’t. One night a group of them stopped me, including your son Kasei, Hiroko, and the coyote, who I take it is the same as the stowaway that you were hiding on the Ares—”

This caused an uproar— apparently a fair number of them had had suspicions about this stowaway, and Maya rose to her feet and pointed a dramatic finger at Hiroko, crying out. John shouted them all down and forged on: “Their visit— their visit!— that was the best proof of my theory about the sabotages, because I managed to get a few skin cells off one of them, and I was able to get his DNA read and compared with some other samples found at some of the sabotage sites, and this person had been there. So those were the saboteurs, but they weren’t trying to kill me, obviously. But one night at Hellas Low Point I was knocked down, and my walker cut open.”

He nodded at his friends’ exclamations. “That was the first intentional attack on me, and it came pretty soon after I went up to Pavonis, and talked to Phyllis and a bunch of transnational types about internationalizing the elevator and so on.”

Arkady was laughing at him, but John ignored him and forged on. “After that, I was harassed several times by UNOMA investigators that Helmut allowed to come up, and he did that under pressure from those same transnationals. And in fact I found out that most of those investigators had worked for Armscor or Subarishii on Earth, rather than for the FBI like they told me. Those are the transnationals most involved with the elevator project and the mining on the Great Escarpment, and now they’ve got their own security people established everywhere, and this roving team of so-called investigators. And then, just before the big storm ended, some of those investigators tried to get me accused of that murder that happened at Underhill. Yes they did! It didn’t work, and I can’t absolutely prove it was them, but I saw two of them working on the set-up. And I think they killed that man, too, just to get me in trouble. To get me out of their way.”

“You should tell Helmut,” Nadia said. “If we present a united front and insist that these people be sent back to Earth, I don’t think he could deny us.”

“I don’t know how much real power Helmut has anymore,” John said. “But it would be worth a try. I want these people kicked off the planet. And those two in particular I’ve got recorded by the Senzeni Na security system, both going into the med clinic and messing with the cleaning robots before I did. So the circumstantial evidence against them is about as strong as it could be.”

The others didn’t know quite what to make of this, but it turned out that several of them had also been harassed by other UNOMA teams— Arkady, Alex, Spencer, Vlad and Ursula, even Sax— and they quickly agreed that an attempt to get the investigators deported was a good idea. “Those two in particular ought to be deported at best,” Maya said hotly.

Sax simply tapped at his wristpad, and called Helmut up on the phone right then and there. He laid the situation out to Helmut, and the angry group pitched in from time to time. “We’ll take this to the Terran press if you don’t act on it,” Vlad declared.

Helmut frowned, and after a pause he said, “I’ll look into it. Those agents that you complain about in particular will be rotated back home, for sure.”

“Check their DNA again before you let them go,” John said. “The murderer of that man in Underhill is among them, I’m sure of it.”

“We will check,” Helmut said heavily.

Sax cut the connection, and John looked around at his friends again. “Okay,” he said. “But it’ll take more than a call to Helmut to make all the changes we need. The time has come to act together again, across a whole range of issues, if we want the treaty to survive. That as a minimum, you know. A start on the rest of it. We need to form a coherent political unit no matter what kind of disagreements we might have.”

“It won’t matter what we do,” Sax said mildly, but he was jumped on immediately, in an incomprehensible babble of competing protests.