Chapter 1A

January 8, 2146
Eden, Mars

Lisa Wong drove the black and white police cart slowly down 5^th street, cursing as she had to detour around city hall. Uniformed Martian Planetary Guard squads, part of Governor-elect Laura Whiting's security detail, had closed the streets to all traffic for a block in each direction in anticipation of an inauguration party that would be taking place all day tomorrow, after the new leader of Mars was sworn in tonight in New Pittsburgh. They had erected plastic barricades and were standing by with M-24 assault rifles slung over their shoulders. Combat goggles were settled upon their faces. The soldiers and the police department usually got along well together — after all, a good portion of the police force served on their days off — but not well enough to invite the cart to pass through. They had their orders, direct from General Jackson himself.

"Fuckin' politicians," Lisa groaned to her partner as she turned onto 16^th Avenue, winding her way through a group of pedestrians that were watching the soldiers. "There won't be a single fuckin' dignitary down here until tomorrow afternoon, but they're closing everything off tonight. What the hell is up with that? Sometimes I think they have all that security as a goddamn status symbol instead of out of any real need. Who the hell would want to kill a politician anyway? All they'd do is elect another one."

"Yep," Brian Haggerty replied from the passenger seat of the cart. He took a drink from a large bottle of soda and then belched loudly, as if to express his opinion. "If there's one thing there's no shortage of, it's elected officials. They oughtta use all of those troops to come out here and run some of our calls for us. Maybe that could cut us down to eight a shift instead of twelve."

"And maybe let us get a chance to eat lunch once in a while," Lisa agreed, honking impatiently at a group of gang members that were taking too long to clear out of their way. On Martian streets it was generally the pedestrian that ruled since walking and the elevated trains were the principal means of transportation. But what little vehicular traffic did exist — police carts, dip-hoe carts, delivery trucks — was legally given the right of way. Apparently this street gang had not been briefed on that particular provision of the municipal code. Two of the gang members raised their middle fingers to the black and white without even glancing at it. Two others did glance at them but only long enough to make eye contact while they contemptuously grabbed their crotches.

"Fucking vermin," Brian said sourly, glaring at them through the reinforced mesh wire that covered the windshield. "I'd like to cram my tanner up their back doors and crank it up to full."

"They'd probably like it," Lisa replied, finally achieving enough room to maneuver the four-seat electric cart around them. She picked up a little speed and continued down the avenue, turning at the next block and circling back around to 5^th Street once more.

Lisa and Brian were uniformed patrol officers of the Eden Police Department. Both were nine-year veterans of patrol services and both had recently been assigned to the downtown division. Downtown Eden was not exactly the most desirable district to work. Once away from the office buildings and the expensive housing complexes, which were patrolled by high seniority foot patrolmen anyway, the streets were as dangerous as anything in the ghettos. Downtown was rife with armed gangs of welfare class youths that trafficked in dust — a cheap, illegal drug that was synthesized from stolen agricultural chemicals. Dust was the intoxicant most favored by the lower classes when they ran out of or grew bored with their monthly allotment of marijuana and alcohol. Those who chronically used dust were prone to fits of violent paranoia while on a binge. Between the sellers, the manufacturers, and the users, all of whom were concentrated in high numbers in the welfare housing buildings of downtown, the district was a busy, dangerous place to work. Downtown forced patrol partners into a sometimes fierce protective bonding with each other.

"What's this bullshit for again?" Lisa asked, referring to the latest call that they had been dispatched to. She knew she was heading for the lobby of the Apple Tree public housing complex at 5^th Street and 65^th Avenue, but aside from that she had not heard the particulars.

"Assault in progress," Brian told her, reading from the terminal mounted between their seats. "A young man of Asian descent is apparently beating upon someone with a piece of lobby furniture."

"So what the hell do they want us to do about it?" she asked, shaking her head. "Those fuckin' animals are always beating the hell out of each other. We haul them off to jail and they're out two hours later beating on someone else."

"Maybe he'll kill him," Brian said with a shrug. "At least that way he'll spend a few months in the slam."

"And give us more reports to compose too," she pointed out, slowing up for another group of gang members that were ambling from an intoxicant store across the street to the entrance of their housing complex. They all carried bottles of Fruity — the potent concoction of fermented waste juices from the bottling facilities. It was the favored drink among the welfare class because it was both cheap and powerful. One bottle of Fruity was more than enough to give a person of average weight a therapeutic alcohol level. Though the taste was horrid, it was very economical. This group of gang members seemed to be in a better mood than the last. Only one of them flipped the bird at the patrol car and one of them, an African descendent, actually blew a kiss at Lisa.

"It's good to see public support for the police, isn't it?" Brian asked, grinning at his partner.

"Yes," she said, shaking her head in amusement. "It makes me all warm inside."

As they continued on their path towards the Apple Tree, their talk turned to the upcoming inauguration. Lisa was of the opinion that Laura Whiting, whom she had voted for, was not quite as corrupt as the others of her species. "I mean, I actually voted for her," she said. "Me. I haven't voted for anything since I was twenty years old because it seemed like a complete waste of time and mental effort. But there's something about her that's... well... different. I just can't explain it, you know?"

Brian was a little more cynical. "She just had a better campaign manager," he said. "She's smart enough to realize that we Martians are not as dumb as the Earth politicians and the corporate assholes seem to think we are. She just played to our intelligence a little. You watch. She won't be any different. Remember how she got to where she is."

"I know," Lisa said. "By cramming her nose up every corporate ass that's been stuck in her face since law school. I'm not saying that she's going to make a real difference or anything. I'm just saying that she seems to have a little empathy for us working folks."

"Hmmm. So you seem to be of the opinion," he paraphrased, "that she won't totally fuck us, that she'll just partially fuck us?"

"Right," Lisa agreed, chuckling. "She'll put on a little bit of lube before she sticks it in."

The two partners were still mulling over that analogy when Lisa pulled to the sidewalk a half a block from the Apple Tree main entrance. They opened their doors and stepped out onto the street, taking a moment to adjust their weapons belts and resettle their Kevlar armor upon their torsos. As part of the standard patrol load out they had blue and white, bullet resistant helmets upon their heads with combat goggles mounted to the top, where they could be pulled down for easy use. Their belts contained 5mm pistols with thirty round clips in addition to three pairs of handcuffs and a tanner, which was a one-meter metal club capable of delivering an incapacitating electrical charge. They had military style M-24 assault rifles in their possession but these were usually kept under the seats of the cart and rarely taken out. On their lower bodies they wore blue shorts but their knees were protected with Kevlar guards and their feet were encased in steel-toed boots.

"Shall we do it?" Lisa asked, slamming her door shut. She pushed a button on the patrol computer/communicator on her belt and the door locks clanked into the locking position. A chirp indicated the alarm system was active.

"We shall," Brian agreed with a sigh.

Above them the red Martian sky, which was visible through the dirty plexiglass roof, was darkening with sunset. Soon the stars would be out and shining in all of their brilliance. The ninety story low rent building, most of its windows darkened, rose above them, somewhat cutting off the view. On the street before them there was not much activity. A drunken group of youths, not quite badass enough to be considered a street gang, were sitting on a planter in the middle of the street passing a marijuana pipe back and forth. The youths watched the two cops impassively, hardly seeming to notice them. Brian and Lisa gave them a once over and then turned their attention forward. They walked carefully to the entrance of the complex, keeping a wary eye on everything within view. The police department was not terribly popular with members of the welfare class and ambushes by gang members or just plain crazy people had been known to occur. Despite the armor they wore and the weapons they carried, an average of thirty patrol officers were killed each and every year in Eden alone. It was a dangerous profession where Darwinism ruled.

The main entrance to the complex consisted of glass panels reinforced with steel bars. Two sets of automatic sliding doors allowed access to the lobby area. An elderly man lay curled up and snoring next to the closest door, an empty bottle of Fruity next to him. He smelled strongly of urine and stale sweat. The two police officers stepped over him and sidled up to the door, peering through into the lobby. It was best to get an idea what you were walking into before you went and walked into it. The lobby of the Apple Tree, like the lobby of any housing building of the welfare or working class, was typically used as a gathering area for the residents. Any Internet packages or grocery shipments were delivered there before being carried up to the rooms. A large crowd of fifty or so people was gathered around the bank of elevators on the far wall. They seemed very upset and excited.

"I hate crowds," Lisa said, trying to see what the focus of the excitement was about. "A group like that could stomp us both to death in about a minute flat."

"I'm sure these fine citizens wouldn't do something like that," Brian joked, a little nervous himself. Having those that a police officer was trying to help suddenly turn on him or her was an all too frequent phenomenon in modern law enforcement. The welfare class hated the cops and the cops hated the welfare class.

"Well," Lisa sighed, stepping forward to activate the door sensor, "let's get it on."

"Right behind you, babe," Brian replied, taking up position.

The glass door was badly in need of a routine maintenance regiment. It rattled and clanked its way open with agonizing slowness, ruining their hopes of a quick, unobtrusive entry. Finally it provided them with an opening big enough to walk through and they stepped inside. The lobby was covered with various bits of trash that overflowed from the garbage containers and seemed to spread out from there. Everything from empty Fruity bottles to empty marijuana packages to empty food containers lay in piles on the carpet and the lobby furniture. The smell was of poorly ventilated air scented with sweat, urine, vomit, and even a hint of feces. It was a smell that both had long since ceased to notice, they smelled it so often.

"Yo, motherfuckers!" screamed a middle-aged Caucasian man from the rear of the crowd as he saw them enter. "Git yo asses over here! They killin peoples!"

"Yeah!" yelled an elderly Asian woman standing next to him. "Motherfuckers is dusted out!"

Hearing the words: "they" and "dusted out", both officers drew their tanners from their belts and charged them. Dusted out was street slang for dust psychosis, the paranoid, violent state of mind that came from a two or three day binge of the powerful amphetamine. One strange effect of such psychosis was that it often encompassed more than one person. If two or three or even five people binged together over a period of days, they would all tend to dust out at the same time and with the same paranoid fantasies.

"How many 'theys" are we talking about here?" Lisa, still in the lead, asked the elderly Asian.

"They's two of 'em!" she yelled. "They fuckin' killin' people! Do somethin' 'bout it goddammit!"

They could hear cusses and screams coming from within the crowd now, and the occasional thump of an object striking a human body. They began to push their way through. "Police!" they barked. "Move aside, let us in!" Reluctantly the crowd parted, more in deference to the charged tanners the two cops were waving than out of any respect for authority. As the onlookers parted, the scene became visible. Lying on the ground were two elderly men and one middle age female. One of the men was obviously dead, his skull split open and the bloody gray matter of his brain clearly visible. He lay in a twisted heap next to a broken lounge chair. The other man was alive but unresponsive. He was on his back while a young Asian male, shirtless and sporting multiple tattoos, kicked him repeatedly in the body while hitting him in the head with a piece of firm plastic that had once been the lounge chair's armrest. About two meters away the female, who was African descended and in her forties, was being choked by a Caucasian man in his twenties. He too was shirtless and bore an impressive array of both jailhouse and professional tattoos upon his torso. The woman he was choking was still struggling weakly, her arms beating ineffectively at his head and chest.

"I'll get the left, you get the right," said Lisa to Brian as she stepped forward.

"Sounds good," he replied.

They moved in, gripping their tanners in their left hands, keeping their gun hands free in case the tanners proved not to be effective. Sometimes with dusters the electrical charge didn't work all that well.

"Drop it, asshole," Lisa barked at the man with the armrest.

He didn't even look up, he just continued to kick and hit with a fury, sending little sprays of blood upward with each blow. He was yelling at the man as he went about killing him. "You wanna spy on me, motherfucker? You wanna spy on me?" he demanded, over and over. Yes, this guy was dusted all right. He and his friend had probably gotten it into their heads that these three welfare class public housing residents were members of "them", that shady group those in dust psychosis always convinced themselves were after them.

"Put the club down, asshole," she yelled a little louder. "And I mean now!"

Again the man did not even seem to hear her. Mentally sighing she stepped forward, cocking the hand with the tanner backward. She had to be careful to not actually shock the assailant while he was touching the victim. If he were, the electricity would course through the victim's body as well. Granted, the electricity would not actually hurt the victim any worse than he was already being hurt by the piece of plastic, but cops were not allowed to inconvenience or cause pain to anyone that was not a suspected criminal. Years of civil law precedence had been established in that manner. A cop that caused pain to someone, even in the act of saving them, could be sued successfully. It was insanity but it was modern reality.

"I hate this fucking job," Lisa muttered, as she swung the tanner sharply into the man's right knee. It struck right at the junction, hard enough to cause the leg to buckle but not hard enough to cause any physical harm. If she actually broke the man's knee he could sue her for excessive force, pain and suffering, and a civil rights violation. She did not key the tanner as it struck him, using it as a club only. The man did not fall but he stopped hitting the victim and surged just enough off balance to allow her to step forward and, holding the tanner with one hand at either end, give him a shove. He stumbled backward three steps and then hit the broken lounge chair, falling into it and breaking it even further. Plastic splinters went spraying out across the room.

"You bitch!" the man screamed, a mad glint in his eyes as he tried to scramble back to his feet. "They was followin' us! They was fuckin' followin' us!"

"Lay on the ground!" Lisa barked, backing up a step and holding her tanner out before her once more. "Get down on you stomach or I'm gonna zap your ass!"

"No!" he returned, continuing his efforts to stand up. He was hindered by the fact that he was tangled up in the chair. "Them motherfuckers was followin' us. Gotta kill 'em, gotta fuckin' kill 'em!"

She yelled at him to get down one more time and when he failed to obey her she put the end of the tanner against his chest and pushed the discharge button. Thirty thousand volts surged out of the end and into his body, overpowering his nervous system. Whatever damping effects the chronic use of dust had did not seem to be present in this case. He stiffened up as if in seizure and then crashed to the ground, his hands splayed out before him.

"Could use a little help over here, partner," Brian grunted from her right side.

She turned and saw him struggling to pull the other duster off of the woman. He had his tanner wrapped around the man's neck and was trying to yank him backwards but the duster would not release his grip on her. Again the easiest, sanest course of action would have simply been to zap the man right there where he stood but the contact would have resulted in a liability incurring shock to the victim.

She gave a nervous glance towards the man she had just dropped — there was no telling how long he would remain unconscious — before hurrying over to assist her partner. If was for damn sure that none of the concerned bystanders were going to help him. They would stand and watch impassively as the two dusters tortured and killed him, drinking Fruity as they did so.

"Get his arms, Lisa!" Brian barked. "Get his arms and I'll be able to pull him free!"

She bent down next to the victim and put her hands on the duster's forearm, yanking at it with all her strength. Like most cops that worked the dangerous areas, Lisa was a physical fitness fanatic. Her work-out regiment was augmented by her own volunteer work with the MPG, who's physical agility requirements, even for non-combatant positions like Lisa's, were stringent. The duster, though quite a bit larger and in the midst of psychosis, was no match for her. His arm popped free into hers, releasing its grip upon the woman's throat. She twisted it upward, putting it into a lock with her right hand so she could make a grab at his other hand. Before she could do this however, the duster released that grip on his own and swung his fist upward, striking her sharply in the face.

Pain exploded in her head, centered on her nose, and she staggered a little, seeing stars. She felt wet blood running down her face.

"Motherfucker!" she yelled, jamming the elbow of her free arm into the duster's stomach hard enough to cause tingling in her funny bone. The duster coughed and gasped as the air was expelled from his lungs and fell backwards, pulled that direction by Brian. Lisa kept her grip on his arm as Brian spun him around and slammed him to his stomach onto the filthy carpet of the lobby. She twisted the arm up further on his back while kneeling down and placing her knee on the back of his neck to keep him from rising up. Brian, releasing his grip on his tanner and allowing it to roll to the side, kneeled on the man's back. He grabbed the free right arm, which had been flailing around trying to strike something and twisted it up to join the left one.

"I got the cuffs," Brian told her, reaching to the rear of his belt and pulling out a set. In the last hundred and fifty years of law enforcement technological advances, the basic set of wrist restraints had changed little. Though they were now unlocked not with a key but with a command from the arresting officer's belt computer, the mechanism was the same as cops in the early twentieth century had utilized. He snapped the bracelet first on the wrist that he was holding and then the one that Lisa was holding.

They stood up, each breathing a little harder than normal with the effort. Brian picked up his tanner and holstered it. The duster, dismayed to have his arms immobilized and still trying to refill his lungs with air, began to kick his feet up and down, desperately trying to make contact with one of them.

"Chill out with that shit," Brian told him, "or I'll hobble your ass too."

The duster, though not exactly in his right mind, whatever that might be, was coherent enough to know that he did not want to have his feet tied together and attached to the handcuffs. More than likely he had experienced that particular form of restraint before. He let his feet lie still.

Lisa looked over at the first duster, the one she had zapped. He was moaning now and beginning to stir. Picking up her own tanner and holstering it she hurried over to him and kneeled down on his back.

"You got him okay?" Brian asked, taking a few steps in that direction.

"Yeah, he's still pretty much out of it," she replied, quickly grabbing his twitching left arm and applying a cuff to it. She twisted it up behind his back and then grabbed the right arm, bringing it into position and joining it to its companion. He offered no resistance.

Done, she stood back up. Her face was throbbing rhythmically, with the beat of her heart, from the blow she had received. She brought her fingers up to her face and touched the nose. Her fingertips came away bloody. "Asshole," she spat, wanting to go over and deliver a kick to the restrained duster, knowing she would do no such thing. A cop could end up bankrupt and in prison for doing something like that.

"You okay, Lisa?" Brian asked her as he ran a scanner over the prone body of the first duster. The scanner was low-yield ultrasound device that identified and inventoried everything in the possession of a suspect.

"Yeah," she said, reaching down for the transmit button on her belt computer. "It's just a bloody nose. I'll make it." She keyed her radio. "Four delta five-nine," she said into it, speaking to the dispatch computer back in the communications center, "we have two in custody, three victims down. Send us two dip-hoe carts for medical treatment of victims and a full homicide assignment."

"Copy that four delta five-nine," said the cheery female voice of the computer. "Two suspects in custody. I'm responding two health and safety carts and a homicide assignment right now."

Chapter 1B »