Up Against It - M. J. Locke [19]
One last thing to check. Upside-Down may not have their cameras shoved up your asses, she thought at the Ogilvies, but I have other ways of finding out what you’re up to.
She sent Jonesy out onto the Solar wave, and in a while it brought her reams of Mars imagery—all online and available for free. She studied various tourists’ and satellite photos of the docks where those ships had landed, for a range of dates surrounding when the ships had touched down. What she found was every bit as bad as she had feared. Jane had Jonesy gather all these images, do some calculations for her, and organize the rest of the data for her presentation. Then she sat for a moment, pressing palms to her eyes.
She did not want to dredge up her long-buried memories of her stint on Vesta, and what the Ogilvies had done there. But Benavidez had never taken the Martian mob very seriously. If he failed to this time, Phocaea would be lost. She changed into a clean suit and then lofted herself up the Easy Spokeway to the prime minister’s offices.
An angry mob of ships’ captains and owners clogged the entry to the prime minister’s antechambers. Their vessels had just been confiscated—she had heard it on the news. The faces she recognized among them might as well have been strangers’.
Security made a path for her. Her bad-sammy bar crept upward as she moved through, a growing red stain at the right-hand side of her vision. Shouts of “Who do you think you are?” “Fascists!” and “When do I get my ship back?” accompanied her. The air was thick with mote glamour.
In open public spaces, particularly when the event had a high enough newsworthiness quotient, Upside-Down Productions dispersed spy motes in mass quantities. The first time Jane had seen them, she had thought they were beautiful. Now they filled her with loathing.
Then she passed through the prime minister’s “Stroiders” barrier: a curtain of moist, floral-scented air that expelled the choking clouds of “Stroiders” motes. She drew a deep, relieved breath.
Benavidez was one of only six people who lived in a bubble perpetually protected from “Stroiders” scrutiny, and all his support staff benefited, at least during their workday. She envied them that.
Jarantillo, one of Benavidez’s senior administrative staff, greeted her. “It’s getting ugly out there.”
“Sure is.”
He preceded her from the entryway into the antechamber itself. A famous hand-blown glass sculpture, Beatnik Jesus, showed Jesus wearing swimming trunks and an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt made of stained glass that rippled out behind him in an unseen breeze. He balanced on his toes, arms joyfully outspread, hair whipped around his face as he looked back at the blue-green wave that broke over him. It had been a gift from the president of the Christian Federation of American States, on Benavidez’s election. Above the executive assistants’ cubbies, a Ceren upside-down plant spread willowy, orangy green tendrils across the ceiling, its roots sprouting purple flowers heavy with yellow pollen; a collection of Jovian lightning-bulbs crackled and flashed, bobbing in a convective column of colored gas, against one wall. Beyond it was a honeycomb of small offices and cubicles, where people crouched over screens at their workstations, shifting anxiously, exchanging whispers.
Jarantillo shook his head. “I saw two of my neighbors out there. What if they attack us on our way home? Val”—the security chief—“said he couldn’t give my people escorts.”
“Don’t worry,” Jane said. “They’re just caught up in the initial shock. Val’s people will get them dispersed soon enough.”
He nodded,