Man O' War, стр. 64
Standing back safely behind the ambassador, Peste taunted Jarolic and the rest of the Resolute, shouting, "That's right. We killed them, hosed them, distilled them, and sent their juice on to fertilize the smush."
Turning to the ambassador, he said, "It was justified action. They killed eight of my squad. That's the tracings you saw out in the hall. They blew the tunnel on us. What was left of us came in shooting. We recycled them just like any other corpses on Mars."
Jarolic burst past Hawkes and the two marines and screamed out, "Then why the buzz lies about a suicide pact? Why the cover-up?"
"Ambassador," said Peste, ignoring the environmentalist, speaking only to Hawkes, "we had a dangerous situation on our hands. If those people had been prosecuted as unionists, even posthumously, their children would have lost everything. We chose to spin the story we did to try and keep the lid on"—the prisoner cocked his head in Jarolic's direction, then sneered—"these fanatics."
"You make a nice case, Mr. Peste," said Hawkes. "Of course, you've tried to kill me twice, and I don't think you can explain that away in the line of duty."
"No," agreed the prisoner. "Not any duty you'd agree with. But I was following orders, and I can prove it. Recycle is no more an exact science than remote boring. You get a security crew in here, let them stain the floor and walls, they'll lift blood trace—they'll find skin flakes, maybe even hair. Those wall hits . . . they'll tell you a lot." Crossing the room, Peste ran his hand over one of the broken sections of the wall, saying, "They'll find skin and blood trace underneath shot flecks. They'll be able to tell people were killed here. And they'll be able to determine something else: They'll see that the shot being used wasn't bearing shot. The pattern of cuts in the wall will show we were using flechette rounds."
Despite his years of experience, Hawkes showed a trace of reaction. Staring into Peste's eyes, he said, "Flechettes were banned on Earth forty years ago."
"That's right. Ambassador. Too horrible a weapon— cutting bodies apart. Banned on Earth, and never to be used on Mars. But when you've got the right patrons making sure you get what you need . . ."
Hawkes took a single step, stopping at exactly the right distance from Peste. Reaching out, he backhanded the prisoner once—twice. His knuckles smarting, he said,
"Now you listen to me, you smug son of a bitch. You're awfully cocky for someone who's in it as deep as you are. Helping us find the answers we need is all that's keeping you alive—and it may not do that much longer."
"Oh, certainly, Mr. Ambassador. Whatever you say. I'll just move to the back corner and strike a humble pose. You let me know when you're ready to dazzle us again with your legendary talents."
Hawkes turned his back on the prisoner, walking back to Waters and the Resolute members. He pulled them off to one side to discuss what they had found while the marines watched Peste. All the while, however, the ambassador was distracted by a nagging voice in the back of his mind—one suggesting that the prisoner knew something they did not . . . but that he should have been able to figure out.
When they finally left the Deep Below and returned to the Above, he discovered the one thing he had forgotten.
31
THEY COULD HEAR THE SOUNDS OF DISASTER LONG BEFORE they could actually see what was happening. Not in the old tunnels, of course, but in the elevator coming up from the Deep Below. When they were still a third of the way down the shaft, the noise of the bloody turmoil above them began to reach their ears.
It did not take them long to understand what it was they were hearing.
"You knew." Hawkes turned on their prisoner. Slamming him up against the wall, the ambassador hissed, "You weren't warning us that riots were a possibility . . . you knew they were coming. You knew when!"
Peste stared down at Hawkes's hands on his coveralls and smiled thinly. "You can only kill me once, Ambassador. And then you lose whatever it is I have in my head."
"Another omission like this one," snarled Hawkes, pulling the prisoner away from the elevator wall, "and I may not care."
The ambassador stared into Peste's unblinking eyes for a moment, then flung him backward again, bouncing theman off the elevator wall. The car slid to a stop, and its thick double doors slid apart. As the outer door pulled back, the noise from beyond was suddenly amplified. Waters, the closest to the front, quickly moved out of the car, only to stop after several paces.
"Oh, my God . . ."
The Red Planet manager could not believe his eyes. There was smoke pouring through the air and fire in a half dozen different doorways. The elevator had opened at Recycle, the lowest, least populated level in the Above, normally a quiet, fairly empty place. Normally. What they found on the bottom concourse was a raging battle, but a battle without sides.
There was no telling who was fighting who—or why. When the riot had first started, it might have been labor against management, workers against security—but that had most likely passed quickly. There was no telling who believed in which cause—no uniforms, boundaries, or marks to tell true friends from enemies.
So it had turned into a melee, a nightmare of random violence where men and women simply battered each other, ran from each other, and killed each other for no better reason than that someone had declared it time to do so.
How? wondered Waters. What could have done such a thing? Turned his workers, his friends and neighbors— his world—into such a