The chairs were made from industrial cowling and modified crash couches. If the village had been in a more temperate part of the planet, there would have been more local flora, some sort of wood analog, to use. But this was where the lithium was nearest the surface, and lithium was what would bring money to the community. So like a microorganism moving along a concentration gradient, all of humanity had come to these twenty square kilometers.
Elvi sat at the back with the other RCE employees, except Reeve and the security detail, who sat closer to the front with the locals. She watched them all segregate without a word. No one enforced the separation, but it was there. Michaela, an atmospheric physicist, sat beside her with a smile. Anneke and Tor, both geoengineers, sat on her other side, hand in hand. Fayez in the couch beyond her, talking with Sudyam, who had come down with the first small shuttle after the accident. The incident. The attack. Anneke leaned in and murmured something to Tor. He blushed and nodded a little too vigorously. Elvi tried to ignore the sexual byplay.
The mayor of First Landing was a thick-featured Martian woman with a broad accent and finger-cut hair named Carol Chiwewe, only they called her the coordinator, not the mayor. She called the meeting to order, and Elvi felt her heart starting to beat faster. The Belters had set the agenda, and so it started off with issues that were more important to them than to Elvi or RCE: the maintenance schedule for the water purification systems, whether to accept a credit line from an OPA-backed bank at unfavorable terms or wait until the first load of lithium came back and try for better. Everything was talked about in calm, considered terms. If there was anger or fear or murder, they had buried it so deeply that the mound didn’t show.
Reeve’s turn came, and he stepped smartly to the front of the room. His lips made a thin, forced smile.
“Thank you, madam coordinator, for inviting us to speak,” he said. “We have confirmation that the independent observer is on the way with a commission from the UN, the Martian congress, and the OPA to assist with moving the development of the colony forward. It is our hope to have the security issues addressed before they arrive.”
We hope to hang the bad guys on a rope before anyone gets here and says we can’t, Fayez translated quietly enough for the words to reach Elvi’s ears and no farther.
“We have definitively identified the explosive used in the attack, and we are looking into which individuals had access to it.”
We don’t have a goddamn clue who did it, and since you hicks store mining explosives in an unlocked shed, we aren’t going to figure it out anytime soon.
“I don’t have to explain the gravity of this situation, but Royal Charter Energy is committed to the success of this colony for both our employees and this community. We’re all in this together, and my door is always open to anyone with questions or concerns, and I hope that we can rely on the same kindness and collaboration that you’ve extended to us since we came.”
So since we’ve got nothing, we’d really appreciate it if those of you who know who set the charges would just tell us. And also please consider not murdering us in our sleep. Thanks for that.
Sudyam coughed to hide her laughter and Fayez flashed a grin. At the front of the room, Reeve nodded and stepped down. The coordinator stood up, looking toward the back of the room. Elvi felt the sudden, powerful need to urinate.
“Doctor Okoye?” the coordinator said. “You wanted to speak?”
Elvi nodded and rose to her feet. It was about ten meters to the front of the room, and Elvi walked forward with her nerves screaming. The heat of the crowd’s bodies seemed suddenly oppressive, the smell of sweat and dust overwhelming. Her tongue felt sticky and thick in her mouth, but she smiled. At an estimate, two hundred people sat before her, their eyes on her. Her heart ticked over so fast she had to wonder whether there was enough air in the room. She remembered someone telling her once to look for a friendly face in the crowd and pretend she was only speaking to them. Four rows in on the left, Lucia Merton was sitting with her hands folded in her lap. Elvi smiled, and the woman smiled back.
“I just wanted to take a minute,” Elvi said, “to talk about how we can limit cross-contamination with the environment? Because we lost the dome? The hard perimeter dome?”
Lucia looked grave. Elvi chanced a look at the rest of the crowd and then wished she hadn’t.
“Part… um. Part of the RCE’s agreement with the UN was that we do a complete environmental study. We’re in just the second biosphere that we’ve ever seen, and there’s so much we don’t know about it that the more we can keep it pristine, the better we’ll be able to understand it. Ideally, we’d have a totally enclosed system here on the surface. Tight as a ship. Airlocks and decontamination rooms and…”
She was babbling. She grinned, hoping that someone would smile back. No one did. She swallowed.
“Every time we breathe, we’re taking in totally unknown microorganisms. And even though we’ve got different proteomes, we’re still big blobs of water and minerals. Sooner or later one of the indigenous species is going to find a way to exploit that. And it goes the other way too. Every time we defecate, we’re introducing billions of bacteria into the environment.”
“So now you’re going to tell us how we can shit?” a man’s voice said.
Elvi felt the sudden heat of a blush in her neck and cheeks. Even Lucia’s expression had gone cold and distant, the woman’s gaze fixed on nothing.
“I only meant that if we were doing this right, we’d have a protected, sterile environment and we wouldn’t be going out into the ruins or cultivating crop plants in the open air because—”
“Because you think we did it wrong,” the man sitting at Lucia’s side said. He was a big man with a dusting of gray at his temples and in the stubble of beard and a permanently angry face. “Only you don’t get to decide that.”
“I understand that we’re working with a complex situation here,” Elvi said, her voice getting rough with desperation. “But we’re all living in this massive Petri dish already, and I have a list of a few little sacrifices that we can all make that, from a scientific perspective—”
The man beside Lucia Merton flushed, and he leaned forward, his fists on his thighs. His eyes fixed on her like a predator’s.
“I’m done sacrificing things to science,” he said, and the buzz in his voice was a promise of violence. Lucia put a restraining hand on the man’s wrist, but others around the room had taken up the man’s disdain. The sounds of their bodies shifting in the seats, the murmur of voices in small conversations of their own filled the air. Whoever killed Trying is probably in this room, she thought. And then, immediately after that, What the hell am I doing here?
Carol Chiwewe stood up, her expression pained. Embarrassed on Elvi’s behalf.
“Maybe we better come back to that another time, Doctor Okoye,” she said. “It’s late and people are tired, ne?”
“Yes,” Elvi muttered. “Yes, of course.”
Her skin burning with shame, she walked back toward her seat, and then past it, out into the street and alone in the deepening night toward her hut. Her shoes scraped in the gravel and dirt. The air was cool and smelled like coming rain. She wasn’t more than halfway there, moving slowly in the near-black starlight, when a voice stopped her.
“I’m sorry about my dad.”
Elvi turned. The girl was little more than a deeper darkness in the night. A slightly more solid shadow. Elvi found herself thankful that the voice wasn’t a man’s.