by Graham Brown
The rest of the Terra-formers were now living in fear. It came first and foremost via the terrorist threat against them. If the Core Unit and electromagnetic shielding were destroyed, there was not enough food, oxygen or shelter for the remaining workers. Half of them would die before help could arrive.
But another fear, in some ways more sinister, had gripped them as well. In the name of security, Cassini’s men were questioning everyone. Each day additional members of the Terra-forming crews were being rounded up. A few were released but most of those questioned were held under guard. No charges were made and no visits were allowed. People began to fear their neighbors might be informants. They began to fear any stray words they might have let slip before the crackdown began.
Paranoia was growing. It showed in the drawn faces and the tired eyes of the remaining workers. It was palpable in the thick silence that now gripped the cafeterias and meeting places. No one knew the rules anymore. No one knew what kind of slip up might single him or her out for arrest and isolation. Worst of all, no one knew when or where it would end.
Hannah eased through the hallway with a mix of speed and caution, eventually arriving near the secondary recycling plant. Spotting a mark on a bay door, she knocked.
It cracked open and then was pulled wider to let her in.
She entered to find a half dozen others already inside. One man hugged her. The others just nodded. In the corner she spotted her friend Davis, the man who’d gone with her to find the half buried bodies of Lucien’s slaves.
They looked at her expectantly.
“I’m so glad you’ve all come,” she said to the leader of the group, a councilman named Julian. There were several other members of the disbanded council present, along with representatives from the technical teams and the maintenance crews.
“Davis told us you had urgent information,” Julian said. “Though I must say, we’re all a little surprised at the location and manner of this meeting.”
“The current situation forces us to meet like this,” she said. “It’s for our safety. I’m hoping all of you can be trusted with the truth.”
“Truth about what?” a woman named Isha asked.
“The orders coming down from Earth, the sudden imposition of Martial Law. The heightened presence of the military.”
“Are you suggesting they’re not necessary,” Isha asked.
“More than that,” Hannah said. “I’m suggesting they didn’t come from President Collins.”
They stared at her, hesitating.
“What are you trying to tell us?” Julian asked finally.
Hannah had thought about this question long and hard. After the initial attack, she’d desperately wanted to contact President Collins on the private channel they’d established, but all communications were now restricted. And she wasn’t about to blow her cover by asking Cassini for access. She had no choice but to wait. But days had turned into weeks and she’d heard nothing from the president. It seemed to confirm her worst suspicions.
“I think a move has been made against the president,” she said. “A coup d’état. We know the president was attacked. At the very least he was badly injured. The prime minister and forty-nine members of parliament were killed. The president’s son was also killed.”
“But Collins survived,” Isha said.
For days Hannah had wanted to believe this but she doubted it with all her heart. She looked at Isha and asked a simple question. “How?”
Isha stared.
“We’ve all seen the damage,” Hannah explained. “If Collins was anywhere but the basement he wouldn’t have survived.”
“But the burns…”
“Too much to be touring military bases and giving speeches, too little for that type of explosion.”
Julian’s eyebrows went up. “You realize what you’re suggesting?”
“Of course I do.”
“Maybe it’s a good thing,” Julian said. “We’ve been talking about the president’s thirst for power for months. If a move was made against him, we might be better off.”
“That might depend on who takes his place,” Hannah suggested. “We’ve all been critics of the president,” she replied. “I certainly have been. And so have you, Julian. And yet he still allowed both you and I to come to Mars, to be part of the council. And while all our ranting against him has produced little movement, he’s never tried to silence either of us.”
“A mere concession to the façade of democracy,” Isha said with disgust. “All departments and decision making bodies have been stacked in his favor. Allowing for a little dissent here and there just makes the process seem fair, makes the decisions seem more palatable when he rams them down our throats.”
Julian nodded. “President Collins had always allowed for opposite voices,” he said. “He just makes certain that his words drown them all out. It’s part of his genius.”
Hannah knew this. She’d once heard the president say that allowing people to dissent was a safety valve. But she understood it on a different level. One day, he often insisted, when the looming disaster had been averted and put behind them, separate parties and powers would be allowed again. Until then, however, he could not trust such a system to get Earth through the crisis. He’d once told her in confidence that he was an emperor who did not want anyone following in his footsteps.
She returned to the point at hand. “And yet in his moment of rage and retribution, Collins has not seen fit to have either of us questioned, accused or detained, even as some of his strongest supporters have been taken into custody.”
Julian nodded. “Yes,” he admitted. “Curious.”
“Who would risk such a thing?” Isha asked.
Hannah thought she knew. Speaking it out loud might bring a death sentence if the wrong person was in the crowd. She took a breath. “Only someone who had much to gain if Collins was out of the way and much to lose if he remained in power. The only ones who fit that bill are Lucien Rex and the Cartel.”
The room went deathly silent. The members of the gathering exchanged glances with one another. Isha shook her head softly, but Hannah couldn’t tell if it was disagreement with her conclusion or just a way of warding off the thought that they’d gone from Collins to something worse.
Julian paced the room. The others watched him. But still no one spoke.
“It can’t have escaped you,” Hannah added, “that martial law is being imposed not by the military, but by these mercenaries who now claim to be working for the president. But I ask you: When has Jackson Collins ever needed mercenaries? When has he ever used anything but the professional army?”
Julian and several others nodded.
Isha shook her head. “We might get a better voice in this new government,” she said. “Whoever’s running it.”
“How can you say that?’ Hannah replied. “We’re already living in a police state. Have you forgotten all of history? When has any group of people found more freedom by giving it up in the first place?”
“If Collins’s supporters are taking the brunt of this, I say we let them,” one of the group said.
“The military has run roughshod over us for years,” Isha added. “If their power is being weakened I say it’s a good thing.”
“We can bide our time, strengthen ourselves at their expense,” a third representative said.
Hannah glanced around the room. She was losing them.
They couldn’t see beyond the immediate. Couldn’t see what was over the horizon. “If it’s a coup, the first phase will be to eliminate all direct support for Collins. But once power has been solidified, what do you think will happen to us? We’ll no longer be needed. In fact, our independent minds will be a threat to whoever takes over. Surely you can understand that?”
No one replied immediately and felt as if she’d staunched the bleeding, but the question still hung in the balance. The group looked around at one another for direction and then, almost simultaneously, they turned to Julian. The man had r
emained silent for quite some time, mostly staring off into the distance.
“What do you think?” Isha asked him.
He looked up as if disturbed from a trance. A brief, sad smile appeared on his face. Finally, he answered.
“First they came for the Socialists,” he said, speaking in an odd distant voice. “And I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
“What are you talking about?” Isha asked.
“It is a quote,” Julian explained, “with apologies for any mistakes I may have made. It comes from a poem of sorts, written and recited by a man named Niemöller, a priest who opposed the Nazi’s in the nation state of Germany two hundred years ago.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means, we must act,” he said. “If we wait and allow those we think to be less worthy than us suffer, we will eventually all suffer together.”
“So we’re next,” Isha said.
Julian nodded. “Sooner or later. But I’d say Hannah’s right, it’s only a matter of time.”
Julian looked around and one by one the others nodded. They understood. They turned back to Hannah. “What should we do?”
“First, we have to find out exactly what we’re dealing with,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do about that. And then we need to find out who among us might be willing and ready to fight.”
A few of them looked ill at the thought, but they didn’t reject it.
“We’ll have to do it quietly,” Julian mentioned.
“Agreed,” Hannah said. “Be careful. Word of mouth only. Don’t use any form of electronic communication, and start with those you feel you can trust implicitly. If word gets out to the wrong people, none of us will live very long.”
A few of them nodded. All seemed gripped by the depth of the moment.
Across from her Davis pointed to his watch. “I think we should go.”
“Let’s meet here again in five days,” Hannah suggested. “If I have to get word to you, Davis will bring it. No one else.”
Davis moved to the door and opened it. He glanced down the hall in both directions. Looking back inside, he nodded.
One at a time the group began to file out, leaving some time and space between their exits and heading in different directions. When the others were all gone, Davis looked back at Hannah, nodded and then left.
For another minute Hannah waited in the room all by herself. But for the first time in weeks she didn’t feel utterly alone.
CHAPTER 17
James Collins woke up to a splitting headache. He was cold, chilled to the bone and laying awkwardly on a metal floor. He moved to straighten his legs and realized others were lying beside him. Hundreds of the them, sprawled out, unconscious.
He had a strange sense of déjà vu. And for good reason. He’d woken like this at least a dozen times, only to see men wearing oxygen masks and backpacks walking though the dimly lit room with what looked like small fire extinguishers in their hands.
They moved here and there, checking through the heap of bodies and discharging a white fog over the mass of sleeping men and women as if they were spraying for lice.
In his vague memories, the mist drifted through the huge room and overwhelmed anyone who’d begun to wake up, including himself. Though he saw others slump to the deck upon breathing the gas, James could never remember breathing the mist in, until he woke up to experience it yet again.
Moving only his eyes, James glanced across the carpet of men and women. No one walked among them at the moment. The mist was nowhere to be seen.
Feeling weak but in pain from lying on the cold metal floor, James began the process of stretching and eventually getting to his feet. By grabbing a support column that ran through the center of the open space, he was able to pull himself up.
Holding onto the column to keep him up, James studied the mass of humanity. There were hundreds of men, women and children around him. Most of them snored and lay still. A few were moving, waking groggily. Their clothes were mostly tattered rags, their faces grimy and dark. He guessed most of them had been rounded up from the sub-levels.
James brought a hand up to his own face. Half of it was caked with dried blood from a scabbed over gash above his eye. The rest was sticky with salt from his sweat and what felt like a week’s worth of beard growth on his jawline.
As he waited, the feeling began returning to his legs but they still felt weak and shaky. It might have been the drugs or the fact that he was literally starving. His stomach was so flat it felt concave.
He began to walk, moving awkwardly through the crowd, studying the faces, looking for Bethel. For a brief moment he wondered if Bethel had been killed or somehow escaped, but he soon found him lying near the far wall.
He crouched and shook him gently. “Bethel… time to wake up… “
As James shook him again, Bethel’s weary eyelids opened revealing a sliver of white.
“Are you okay?” James asked.
Bethel didn’t respond for a second. He seemed confused. He glanced past James, made a swallowing motion and then finally nodded.
“Can you get up?” James asked.
“I can try.”
With James’s help, Bethel got to a sitting position. But an attempt to stand was too soon and as Bethel’s knees buckled, James eased him back down against the wall.
“What happened to us?” Bethel asked. “Where are we?”
“Someone stunned us,” James said, remembering the flash. He looked around. “Not just us either.”
Bethel followed his gaze taking in the mass of humanity around them. “Who was it? Soldiers?”
James thought about the possibilities. He might have vainly hoped it was the military, but a half conscious memory of the men who’d wandered through the cargo hold gassing the prisoners to put them back to sleep, told him all he needed to know. Long, straggly hair, baggy uniforms, odd, geometric tattoos.
“Private soldiers,” he said. “Mercenaries.”
Bethel seemed to take this news with less surprise than James might have thought.
“There have been rumors floating around for months,” Bethel said. “People have been disappearing. Entire groups. Whole sections of the sublevels left suddenly vacant and empty. No one knows where they go. Most of us assumed it was an eradication program of some kind. Extermination of the undesirables. At least we’re still alive.”
James nodded. “If they were going to kill us they would have done it already.”
“So we’re hostages of some kind.”
It made little sense. The gangs and clans of the slums were known to kidnap their enemies in fits of rage or revenge, but those unfortunate souls didn’t live long. The wealthy and well off were often abducted for ransom payments and, for that reason, traveled with bodyguards. But indigents from the tunnels? It made no sense.
“Seems like it,” James said. “The question is why? Why kidnap people from the sublevels?”
“Because no one would miss them,” Bethel said bluntly. “Or raise a finger to look for them.”
James nodded slowly. His mind was clearing. His thoughts becoming more coherent.
He put his hand against the smooth metal wall. It was frigid, covered in a layer of frost that flaked away under his fingernails. He scraped some of it off and watched the flakes fall. They drifted down like snow, only slower like puffs of pollen. He could feel a near silent hum resonating through the wall. Though it didn’t seem like it, they were moving. The question was, to where.
He looked around, studying the shape and dimensions of their prison, thinking about the growth of his beard, the borderline starvation he felt and the men who’d kept them asleep for God knows how long. A thought came to mind, a possibility too ghastly to discuss.
Bethel seemed
to notice. “You know where we are,” he said. “Don’t you?”
“We’re nowhere,” James whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“This isn’t a prison,” he said. “It’s a transport. We’re moving. Heading somewhere.”
“Where?”
Before James could offer his guess, the main doors swung open and a squad of twenty armed men entered. Several of them remained near the door, weapons ready to fire at anyone who moved, while the others walked through the chamber dragging a cart stacked high with bottles of some peach colored liquid.
“Bet you dogs are hungry,” one of them said, handing the bottles out. “This is mito-cellular protein and vitamin mix. It will restore part of your strength. Drink it slowly or you’ll be puking all over the place, and it stinks bad enough in here as it is.”
“Where are we?” someone asked.
“What’s going on?”
The first question was ignored, the second answered with a blow from a baton that dropped the man who’d asked it to the ground.
“No questions!” the leader ordered. “You’ll get your answers soon enough.”
The men continued on through, handing out the plastic bottles and placing others beside those who were too weak to stand or still under the influence of the sedatives. As they finished up their rounds a second group entered.
These men said nothing. They traveled methodically looking at those who still lay on the ground or who seemed uninterested in the liquid rations being offered to them.
James watched this group sharply. As they moved, the leader inspected the faces and eyes of those he came across. The two men with him hung back, only becoming active when one of the prisoners rolled over and tried to conceal his eyes. They grabbed him.
“Let the inspector see your face!” one of them growled.
The man didn’t comply and the mercenaries grabbed him and forcibly twisted his face around. The inspector studied him, shining a black light into one and then the other.
After a second he switched the light off. “Let him go.”
Clearly they were looking for something, and for a moment James feared that something might be him. He wondered if they could possibly know they’d caught him in their net.