Hundreds had been expected to gather outside Hunter House, but thousands came, bringing with them their anger and a simmering sense of injustice. It rumbled through the crowd like their chattering voices, creating a mass of distrust and suspicion.
Mel, with her face hidden behind a scarf, was in the middle of it.
From the voices she could hear around her, many with valid food tokens had been turned away at ration queues during the day. A spate of forgeries was blamed, but rumors insisted it was an excuse to disguise the reality that there was no food. Some discussion offered an innocent explanation, that a hitch in the supply chain had meant ration parcels hadn’t arrived on time. Other people said the rich and powerful were using bribes to procure the food for themselves.
Whatever the truth, the people were hungry and they were angry.
They had gathered in Central Plaza where the impressive front elevation of Hunter House looked out onto the statue of its founder. It was a grand statement of a building, constructed to reflect the ancient architecture of some of the major cities on Earth. Its lofty stories reached up into the apex of the dome in a series of molded turrets echoing the angles of traditional carved stone, while the entrance consisted of two giant glass sliding doors set back from a set of ten steps leading up from the plaza. A line of nervous MSS officers with shockguns pointing into the crowd stood at the bottom of the stairs.
Around the edge of the plaza, MSS officers in body armor also aimed their shockguns. Despite their weapons, they were vastly outnumbered.
“Feed us! Feed us! Feed us!” came a cry from the back of the crowd.
More joined in: “Feed us! Feed us! Feed us!”
A surge from somewhere behind caused Mel to lurch forward. Her face squashed up against the back of the man in front of her, who was, in turn, pushed into the person in front of him. Screams erupted from those crushed at the end of the line.
“Move back!” cried someone. “Move back!”
MSS officers waved their arms and shouted for everyone to stop pushing.
A long, thin object – which could have been a metal piece of piping – flew over her head, turning end over end like a majorette’s baton, heading toward one of the MSS officers on the steps. The officer jumped out of the way and it landed harmlessly near her feet. But it had been close.
More objects came flying. An officer at the top of the steps turned to avoid something the size of a baseball coming straight towards him, only to put his face into the path of a spinning metal pole thrown from another direction. He staggered backwards and put his hand to his cheek, where there was suddenly blood. A colleague turned to help him.
The chants of “feed us!” became sporadic and out of time with each other as they were overtaken by the shouts and screams of people either determined to cause violence or afraid they were going to get caught up in it.
A public address system, hidden somewhere in the fabric of the dome or the buildings, resonated through the air. “Return to your homes. For your own safety, please return to your homes. Peacefully and quietly…”
But no one was listening. No one had come to Central Plaza on that day hoping to find peace and quiet.
Another surge swelled from behind and Mel was propelled towards Hunter House. Officers on the stairs fired indiscriminately into the crowd and shockdarts zipped through the air. The man in front of Mel was struck in the chest. He yelled and reached to pull the projectile out of his body. But the dart unleashed its paralyzing power before he could even touch it and he fell to the ground with his body convulsing.
Mel was pushed forward in the ensuing panic. She fell over his body and reached out her hands to protect herself from the fall. Her palms slapped hard on the tiles. People kept surging forward. Someone stepped on her fingers, crushing them painfully into the ground. She screamed, but her cry was lost in the cacophony of the crowd.
Somehow, Mel found a gap in the advancing bodies and scrambled to her feet before she was trampled.
Ahead of her, the mob had overrun the MSS officers on the stairs and was pushing at the doors to Hunter House. Even with all of that weight pressing on them, the doors held fast.
Someone began counting. “One. Two. Three!”
On three, the mass rammed the doors with a single force. The glass panels edged open a crack, but did not give way.
“Again!” shouted the voice, even louder. “One. Two. Three!”
On the second surge, the doors were ripped from their frames and crashed to the ground.
The crowd trampled over them, cheering and shouting as they poured inside. Mel rushed up the steps to follow.
Jumping over a set of security barriers, she landed in a grand entrance hall with two sweeping staircases curving down from the upper floor like two halves of a heart. On either side of her, screens on the walls showed information about Hunter House and the history of Deimos City itself.
A man brandishing a metal pole ran past Mel and took a swipe at one of the screens. He whooped with delight as historic images of Deimos crashing into Mars to form the crater where the city was built, disappeared in a shower of sparks.
As he ran off into the building, Mel realized her chances of getting near Kaito were next to zero. She had planned to slip quietly into Hunter House, not invade it with a mob of demonstrators. Security around the news briefing would be tight to the point of impenetrable.
She contemplated giving up altogether and considered taking her chances back out in Central Plaza. Then she heard a groan from under the stairs.
An MSS officer was lying on her back, semi-conscious, with a shockdart sticking out of her leg.
Mel smiled. This could be her way in.
She took the officer by the arms and dragged her to the other side of the hall and the privacy of the women’s toilets. Apologizing to the woman, as she slipped into complete unconsciousness, Mel relieved her of her uniform and left her in one of the cubicles in her underwear.
Mel changed in a separate cubicle and dumped her clothes in a corner. When she stepped out, she looked in the mirror to see that she appeared to be every bit an MSS officer. The uniform gave her authority and it also added another layer of disguise. When a person wore a uniform, they took on the identity of that uniform and most people wouldn’t even look at the face of the person wearing it.
Leaving the toilets, Mel double checked a map of the building on one of the screens and found that the media room, where the news briefings were held, was on the fourth floor. Then she found the elevator.
Holding her breath, she tried to be prepared for anything as the elevator reached its destination and opened the doors.
They revealed only the blank opposite wall of a corridor.
Stepping out, she noted the entrance to the back stairs to her left and, to her right, a long corridor with doors leading off it. According to the map, the door to the media room lay halfway down the corridor. To confirm it, two MSS officers stood on guard at either side.
She approached, her heart thumping while she tried to look like she had the right to be there. The officers glanced in her direction, but on seeing her uniform, they appeared unconcerned and returned to face forward.
When she was halfway, a Mars-born man in civilian clothes exited the media room and turned in her direction. She tried to act perfectly normally and smiled at him as he acknowledged her with a nod. He glanced away and she kept walking. Then he seemed to have second thoughts and looked again.
Their eyes locked and Mel saw recognition spread across his face. At the same time, she recognized him.
“Doctor Erdan?” It was Inspector Deverau’s sergeant.
His surprise gave her a moment to turn. But not before she saw him pull a shockgun from his belt. She ran.
“Doctor Erdan! Stop!”
The back stairs were almost in reach.
She heard the shockgun fire and, almost instantaneously, a sharp stab struck her back. She cried out as the click, click, click of the shockdart discharged its electricity. Every muscle tensed. Her brain willed her legs and arms to move, but they ignored her.
Gravity claimed her body and pulled her to the floor. She tried to move, but all she could do was quiver to the continued click of the dart until she fell unconscious.