Man O' War, стр. 66

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 saboteurshad 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. Luckily, 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