Page 11 of The Mars House

Later, at the trials, the prosecution lawyers said there was evidence that the event organisers had actually been hoping to start a coup.

He heard snatches of yelling as he ended up pushed that way too. He couldn’t see over enough heads to make out what was happening. For the first time, a wisp of panic unfurled in his ribcage, and he realized that if he couldn’t get out now, then there was a real chance of being crushed. Only he couldn’t move without pushing hard and hurting someone.

He didn’t know why the senators came out the front door after the vote, the result of which was going to be announced well after everyone had left the building. Maybe they thought the perimeter would hold, or maybe it was meant as a show of democracy working in spite of external pressure, or something. Whatever else it was, it was a mistake.

When people saw them, the crowd surged. The water cannons went on and instantly everything was a freezing white haze. The pressure was enough to knock Natural people over backwards. January caught someone and had to crouch over them to make sure they weren’t trampled as people surged away from the water.

But of course, all the Earthstrongers had to do to withstand the force of the water was unlock their cages, and the people at the front did just that.

Just for a second, he saw someone in red jump eight feet up onto the closest water cannon, easy in this gravity and at full strength, and hurl the soldier operating it to one side.

It was like trying to see through the strobe lights at a club. Sometimes he couldn’t see at all through the water and the plumes of mist it threw everywhere, but in snatches, he saw more soldiers go down like skittles. By then, the pressure of the crowd had changed. Instead of pulling away from the cannons, people were shoving towards them, and he was on the Senate steps now. He saw someone get hold of a senator and shove them against a wall. He thought they were trying to demand answers, and maybe they thought that was all they were doing too; but immediately out of a cage, no one was very coordinated. They were too strong, and in the next strobe-water flash, he saw the senator’s skull crumple.

He didn’t remember how he got away. All he remembered was running, and tearing off the red scarf and slinging it away, and then sitting numb in the Earthstrong carriage of a Mariner Line train, horribly aware that he was wet and smelling of explosives, and that anyone with any common sense at all would know exactly where he’d been.

In the end, the news said that a hundred people had died, among them two senators. Then, later in the evening, there were some fuzzy shots, clearly taken while security guards were hurrying the camera crew away, of Aubrey Gale in a hospital bed, missing most of one leg.

7 An inoffensive document in which a tired German sets out his grand dream of an affordable nationalised rail service.

6

Now

The microphones were neat things that looped over your ear. The journalists were all so polished they shone. January could see how shabby he and the other rigger must have looked, in their boiler suits and chemical stains, and found himself hunching forward as if he could make himself smaller. It made no sense. He was already small, in comparison.

“If you could say something to test the sound,” the camera drone operator said encouragingly. They were a rangy, windswept sort of person, the type to dive after a bear if it happened to look photogenic, but even they seemed neater than January. They had special gloves on that controlled five or six drones, and a machine that flew around looking like a giant fluffy bee but was probably to do with sound. “What did you have for breakfast?”

“Is English okay?” the other rigger asked, looking anxious.

“It’s fine,” Gale said, in their perfect American English, perfect, without even a ghost of the sharpness that usually came from listening to it from a Mandarin perspective. “Or Russian, whatever’s better.”

January wondered what kind of terrifying genius could do a broadcast in Mandarin, Russian, or English interchangeably. It was normal for rich people to have the translation augmentation here—it was a special implant which connected the language part of your brain to the internet so you didn’t just read subtitles on your lenses, you actually understood—but that didn’t let you speak other languages. He was surprised Gale could do it. The Gales of the world grew up with other Gales, all of whom had the augmentations and all of whom spoke Mandarin at home, so why had they bothered?

He hoped they weren’t one of those people who waxed lyrical about the Old Way of Doing Things and went on retreat weekends with no internet to Better Understand the Working Person and get back to Humanity’s Roots. Somehow those people always pronounced the capital letters.

The other rigger stumbled through an account of toast and some eggs.

January hadn’t eaten yet, so he recited the first verse of a sea shanty the aid workers had taught him on the refugee ship, one of the ones that wasn’t filthy.

Gale looked down at him, intrigued. “That’s hundreds of years old. Is that just floating round the factory?”

January couldn’t help feeling pleased that they knew and they were interested. “We learn them on the Crossing.”

“Do not,” said the press officer from before, pointing at Gale, “go off on one about ancient linguistics—”

Gale straightened even more. “A person can take an interest in maritime history if they—”

“Ab-so-lute-ly not,” the press officer clapped back. “Don’t encourage this behaviour,” they added to January. “Drop a pin and they’ll be quoting at you in Ancient Middle Jedi—”

“Old Church Slavonic,” Gale said, going high.

January looked up at them, disconcerted. He’d imagined they would fire anyone making a joke at their expense. But Gale didn’t even look annoyed. They looked like they had had this argument a hundred times before, usually lost, and remained only shakily convinced they were in the right.

“See!” the press officer shouted at January. “Look at what I have to deal with!”

“I had rice,” January revised, and was stupidly happy when they all laughed. Somehow he hadn’t expected any of them to tease each other or laugh or do silly things. It was something between comforting and terrifying to see that they did. He wanted crazy nationalists to be straightforwardly horrible, not really quite nice and funny.

“Anyway,” Gale said, with a narrow look at the press officer, “I’d like to talk to you both about how you feel about working here and why you chose to do this when you arrived, rather than naturalise. There are no right or wrong answers. Is that all right? You can say no.”