Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [228]
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Then in the northern middle winter the occupants of the oldest American tent on the east slope rioted, and threw out all the UNOMA police inside, and locked themselves in. The Russians next door did the same.
A quick conference with Slusinski gave Frank the background. Apparently both groups were employed by the road-building subdivision of Armscor, and both tents had been invaded and attacked in the middle of the night by Asian toughs, who had slashed the tent fabric and killed three men in each tent, and knifed a bunch of others. The Americans and Russians both claimed the attackers were yakuza on a race rage, although it sounded to Frank like Subarashii’s security force, a small army that was mostly Korean. In any case, UNOMA police teams had arrived on the scene and found the attackers gone, and the tents in a turmoil. They had sealed the two tents, then denied permission for those inside to leave. The inhabitants had concluded they were prisoners, and enraged by this injustice they had burst out of their locks and destroyed the piste running through their stations with welders, and several people on both sides had been killed. The UNOMA police had sent in massive reinforcements, and the workers inside the two tents were more trapped than ever.
Enraged and disgusted, Frank went down again to deal with it in person. He had to ignore not only the standard objections of his staff, but also the new factor’s prohibition (Helmut had been called back to Earth). Once at the station he also had to face down the UNOMA police head, no easy task. Never before had he tried to rely so heavily on the charisma of the first hundred, and it made him furious. In the end he had to simply walk through the policemen, a crazy old man striding through all civilized restraint. And no one there cared to stop him, not this time.
The crowd inside the tent looked ugly indeed on the monitors, but he banged on their passage lock door and finally was let in, into a crush of angry young men and women. He walked through the inner lock door and breathed hot stale air. So many people were shouting he could make nothing out, but the ones in front recognized him and were clearly surprised to see him there. A couple of them cheered.
“All right! I’m here!” he shouted. “Who speaks for you?”
They had no spokesperson. He swore viciously. “What kind of fools are you? You’d better learn to operate the system, or you’ll be in bags like this one forever. Bags like this or else bodybags.”
Several people shouted things at him, but most wanted to hear what he would say. And still no sign of a spokes-person, so Chalmers shouted, “All right, I’ll talk to all of you! Sit down so I can see who’s speaking!”
They would not sit, but they did stand without moving, in a group around him, there on the tattered astroturf of the tent’s main square. Chalmers balanced himself on an upturned box in the middle of them. It was late afternoon and they cast shadows far down the slope to the east, into the tents below. He asked what had happened, and various voices described the midnight attack, the skirmish in the station.
“You were provoked,” he said when they were done. “They wanted you to make some fool move and you did, it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. They’ve gotten you to kill some third parties that had nothing to do with the attack on you, and now you’re the murderers the police have caught! You were stupid!”
The crowd murmured and swore at him angrily, but some were taken aback. “Those so-called police were in on it too!” one of them said loudly.
“Maybe so,” Chalmers said, “but it was corporate troops that attacked you, not some random Japanese on a rampage. You should have been able to tell the difference, you should have bothered to find out! As it is you played into their hands, and the UNOMA police were happy