Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [188]
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.
“It does matter!” John cried. “We’ve got as much chance as anyone does of directing what happens here.”
Sax shook his head, but the others were listening to John, and most seemed to agree with him: Arkady, Ann, Maya, Vlad, each from their different perspective. . . . It could be done, John could see it in their faces. Only Hiroko he could not read; her face was a blank, closed in a way that brought back a sharp pang of recollection. She had always been that way to John, and suddenly it made him ache with frustration and remembered pain, and he got annoyed.
He stood, and waved a hand outward. It was nearing sunset, and the enormous curved plate of the planet was dappled with an infinite texture of shadows. “Hiroko, can I have a word with you in private? Just for a second. We can go down into the tent below here. I just have a couple questions, and then we can come right back up.”
The others stared at them curiously. Under that gaze Hiroko finally bowed, and walked ahead of John to the tube down to the next tent.
• • •
They stood at one tip of that tent’s crescent, under the gazes