The windowless interrogation room was small, sparse and claustrophobic. Mel had been brought into the square box and told to sit at the far side of a single table in the middle. Opposite her sat the two MSS officers, Deverau and Jones. They appeared comfortable, even casual in the enclosed environment, while Mel was trying to suppress her nervousness with long, slow breaths.
Cameras nestled into the corners at the ceiling looked down on them, while microphones she couldn’t see recorded everything. Beside her, a single empty chair was reserved for legal representation if she needed it. Which she was told she did not, as she was not under arrest. She was also certain that the science would prove she had nothing to do with whatever it was they were investigating. But, as she looked across the table at her interrogators, she couldn’t stop doubts from creeping in.
“I presume you know why you are here?” said Deverau with a friendly smile. If that was supposed to reassure her, it didn’t.
“You said it was about my experiment,” said Mel. “Other than that, no. I don’t know why I’m here.”
Deverau looked down at the tablet he held, carefully tilted away from her so she couldn’t see his notes. “Your experiment involves using viruses to infect plants and change them on a genetic level, have I got that right?”
“More or less.”
“But I’m told something went wrong and the plants died.”
“That’s how science works. You test something to see what happens and you learn from the result. Whether it’s the result you wanted or the one you didn’t.”
Deverau nodded and consulted his tablet again. “Do you pay attention to the news, Mel? You don’t mind if I call you Mel?”
She shrugged. “It’s my name.”
If he was hoping that using her first name would make her feel comfortable, then it had failed. Her fingers tapped nervously on her leg under the table.
“If you pay attention to the news, you will know something has gone wrong on some of the farms on Mars and the plants have died. I’m no scientist, but it has been suggested to me that these two events could be linked.”
“Suggested by who?”
“How I come to have the information is irrelevant,” said Deverau. “Tell me why crops on Mars have suddenly succumbed to the exact same problem as the one which killed your experiment.”
“What evidence do you have?”
Deverau shrugged his ignorance. “As I said, I am only an MSS officer, but they look the same to me.”
Jones, who had been sitting quietly all that time, tapped his finger on his own tablet and passed it across the table for Mel to see. “That’s an image from one of the affected farms.”
It was an enhanced still taken from the leaked footage. In the center were the blackened leaves of a potato plant sagging in the soil, surrounded by other similarly afflicted plants. Some of them still had streaks of green on their stems as if hanging onto life.
Jones swiped his finger across the tablet to bring up a different image. A chill passed through her as soon as she recognized it. It was one of her own photos of a specimen from her field trial. The dead potato plant, complete with decayed tubers, was laid out like a corpse against a white background. A ruler alongside measured its length at thirty-five centimeters.
“Where did you get that?” Mel tapped on the screen and the stolen image responded by zooming in to the dead potato. “Those images haven’t been released – to anyone.”
“It doesn’t matter how we have the images.” Deverau raised his voice for the first time. “What matters is the similarities between them. How did what happened at your laboratory also happen at the farms?”
“You can’t make that judgment by looking at pictures!”
“How should I make a judgment?”
“By doing the science. You need to examine the farm crops to discover what killed them. If it’s a virus or bacterium, that should be easy to find. Possibly spread through the fields by workers going from one farm to another, or brought in by suppliers of seed or fertilizer. DNA sequencing can determine which strain.”
“What strain killed your experiment?”
“None – that’s what I’m telling you.” The man’s naivety was infuriating. “I had success in the lab, but when I moved to a field trial, the plants didn’t reach maturity. My guess is something happened to the seed potatoes while they were in storage. Or something about the shock of being grown outside the lab, in the equivalent of a vertical farm, caused them to die.”
She could tell by his blank expression that he didn’t really understand what she was talking about.
“Surely you don’t believe it’s a coincidence that your trial died at the same time as the farm crops.”
The patronizing way he phrased his statement only fueled her anger. “It has to be. Even if I were to find some sort of hidden pathogen was responsible for the failure of my field trial, my experiment was grown in a sealed lab, in a separate complex, inside the sealed dome of Deimos City. The farms exist in their own self-contained units out on the planet surface. The suggestion that whatever killed the farm crops invaded my lab is next to impossible.”
Deverau threw a glance across to his colleague. Jones looked decidedly unimpressed.
“Interesting,” said Deverau. “Because we don’t think it happened that way round. We think you created something in your lab which escaped.”
“What? Even if my experiment escaped from the enclosed field trial, even if it got out of the lab, even if it – somehow – made its way out of the research building, it would still have to escape the confines of Deimos City. It simply wouldn’t happen by chance.”
“So you’re saying it had to have been deliberate?”
Anger turned to fear as she realized what he was implying. “You think I’m responsible?”
The impassive faces of her interrogators continued to watch her reactions without allowing her to read their expressions.
“Do I need legal representation?” she asked. “Because if you’re accusing me, I think I do.”
“We’re not accusing you of anything. Just asking questions.” Deverau consulted his tablet again. “Erdan is your married name, is that right?”
“What of it?” said Mel, wary of his sudden change in questioning.
“You were born Mel Walker, the daughter of Frank Walker the diplomat.”
Her muscles tensed. She had worked hard to pull herself out from under the reputation of her father and the last place she wanted to be reminded of it was in an MSS interrogation room.
“He was a very vocal supporter of the interests of Earth, if I remember correctly,” Deverau continued.
“He came from Earth to work as an Earth diplomat. It was his job,” said Mel.
“Except, according to his reputation, he had a notorious zeal for it. He believed the interests of Earth outweighed those of a mere colony on a neighboring planet.”
“I’m not my father,” Mel insisted.
“Because the latest I hear is that the Terraforming Committee is appealing to Earth for help. Supplies will take months to get here, but with rationing and other measures, it might be enough to get us through.”
Mel glared back at him, daring him to come to his conclusion so she could point out how ridiculous it was.
“That’s a stark reminder of how reliant we still are on Earth, isn’t it?” suggested Deverau. “One little problem and we go running back to the mother planet to bail us out. If someone wanted to send a message, then sabotaging a few fields of crops would be an easy way of doing it, wouldn’t you say?”
“I wouldn’t do that!”
She could feel the argument slipping away from her. Her body’s natural defenses made her heart beat faster and caused heat to rise to her face, but they couldn’t help her.
Deverau looked square across the table. “It would be easy for someone with your scientific knowledge, and not unexpected for the daughter of Frank Walker.”
It was like she was back at school with the other Mars-born kids taunting her about her Earth-loving father. Long-buried feelings of injustice woke to rage inside. She had not stood up to the bullies then, but she was an adult now. She had to stand up for herself and for the science she had worked so hard to develop.
“I was born on Mars, I’ve lived my whole life on Mars,” she told Deverau definitively. “My work is on Mars, my friends are on Mars – my family is on Mars. You think I would risk the stability of this planet to send a message I don’t believe in? My son is only one year old. When I heard about the farms, don’t you think I was worried for his safety? If Mars struggles to feed itself, then I struggle to feed my son and I…”
Tears welled in her eyes as she thought about Daniel, but she was determined not to lose herself to emotion in front of the supercilious MSS officers. “I didn’t do this terrible thing that you’re accusing me of.”
Mel pushed the tablet with the image of her lab experiment back across the table at the men and sat back in her chair. She folded her arms and resolved not to say another word.
•••
Inspector Deverau stood watching Mel on the live video feed from the adjoining room. The screen showed her alone at the interrogation table, having barely moved from her resolute position sitting back on the chair. If she had been of a criminal background, holding back the tears might have been a nice touch, but for a woman whose file clearly showed she had worked all her life in biological sciences, he felt it was genuine. If he had a young child and listened to all the hysteria circulating around Deimos City, he might have been moved to tears as well.
The door opened and Sergeant Jones stepped inside. “Hey, Dev,” he said. “You still here?”
“No,” said Deverau, giving him a blank look. “I’ve gone home for a well-earned rest. What you are seeing is merely a figment of your imagination.”
Jones rolled his eyes at his boss’ attempt at humor. “Right,” he said, closing the door behind him.
Jones sat at the table, on the chair nearest to the video screen, reducing his towering Mars-born height to something a little shorter. Which was how Deverau preferred it. Talking to Jones for a long period of time while he was standing up gave him a crick in the neck.
Jones nodded across to the screen with its image of Mel. “What do you think?”
Deverau considered for a moment. “Innocent until proven guilty.”
“You don’t think she did it, then?”
Deverau didn’t know. He was a little bamboozled by the science, he had to admit. “Do I think there’s a connection between her dead experiment and what’s happening at the farms?” he asked himself. “Yeah, I think there has to be. But do I think she deliberately poisoned the means of food production on Mars? That’s a stretch, Jonesy.”
“Except,” said Jones, “she said it herself. For something to get out of the lab and into the farms by accident – well, it’s virtually impossible. Which means someone did it on purpose. Which is a crime, which is why we were instructed to bring her in.”
Deverau looked at the image on the screen again. Mel had finally moved and was leaning forward on the chair with her arms resting on the table. He had met many criminals in his time in the police force on Earth and, subsequently, in the MSS, and she wasn’t behaving like a guilty woman. “Why would she do it, though?”
“Her father,” said Jones. “She grew up in a household where Earth was considered the supreme authority. Now Mars is pushing back with increasing murmurs about independence from certain people and she wanted to teach the colony a lesson.”
Deverau understood the animosity many Mars-borns still felt toward Frank Walker, even some five years after his death. But that prejudice risked clouding their judgment. “There’s no evidence for that. I mean, how do you feel about your father?”
“My father?” Jones shrugged. “I love him, I suppose. Even though he drives me mad.”
“Precisely!”
“What do you mean, ‘precisely’?”
“You’re your own man. Just as, I imagine, a daughter with intelligence enough to get a doctorate in biological sciences and run her own scientific project for EcoLine is her own woman. The influence of her father isn’t a strong enough motive on its own. We certainly haven’t got enough evidence to hold her, let alone charge her. Can you sort out the paperwork to release her under investigation?”
“We can’t release her,” said Jones.
Deverau gave his sergeant a skeptical look.
“I mean, that’s partly what I came in to talk to you about. We have orders to send her to Noctis City.”
“Orders?”
“MSS HQ were trying to get hold of you, but there’s something wrong with your WristTab.”
Deverau lifted his arm and saw the communication device was turned off. He always turned it off in interrogations because being interrupted just as his prime suspect was about to make a confession could put a real dent in his crime clear-up rate. He was supposed to turn it back on again when he left the interrogation room, but he was usually still processing what he had heard and would often forget.
He switched on his WristTab and a flurry of messages tumbled through.
“They want a more senior team to interview her and take over the investigation,” said Jones.
Deverau confirmed what he was being told as he scrolled through the messages. “A ‘more senior team’,” he repeated, irritated that his authority was being undermined. “Do you think they mean someone who wasn’t born on Earth?”
“They said the investigation is too high profile to leave it to a regional MSS office. They say the increasing unrest in Deimos City means we’re going to have our hands full dealing with that. We’ve been told to arrest her. That’ll give us twenty-four hours to hold her while they figure something out.”
Deverau turned his back on the live video feed. It seemed that figuring out Mel’s motives was no longer his concern.
“Then I suppose you better find a reason to arrest her,” he said. “I’ll still need you to handle the paperwork, if you don’t mind, Jonesy.”
Jones stood from the chair, reaching his full height. “You do know we don’t use paper on Mars, don’t you?”
“It’s an expression,” said Deverau. Police forces on Earth didn’t use paper either, but the terminology from centuries past had stuck around and that’s how all the officers on his old beat had talked. It was one of those words that, when he was tired and stressed, came out of his mouth to remind people that he was an immigrant.
“Look at it this way,” said Jones. “If, after twenty-four hours, they take over the investigation, it’ll be one less thing to worry about.”
“Yeah,” said Deverau.
Except, interference by his superiors at Noctis City only ever increased his worries.