The door to the field slid open and revealed Kaito standing behind the automated planting equipment, waiting. She must have been expecting one of the MSS officers.
Her eyes widened when she saw Mel.
Looking at her former friend, an unexpected sadness came over her. It was almost a bereavement at the loss of what they once had. Behind Kaito was the abandoned field which Mel had hoped would grow a crop to pull Mars back from the brink. Most of the seed potatoes lay unplanted in hoppers, the forklift robots stood idle and, although the conveyor belt moved, it had no tray of soil to offer up to the planter.
Kaito regarded Mel’s stolen MSS uniform with contempt. “What are you doing wearing that?”
Mel ignored the question. “You set me up.”
“It was your crops that died in farms across Mars. I’m the one trying to put things right.”
“Don’t lie to me, Kaito.”
Mel stepped out of the embarkation room and Kaito, suddenly alarmed at her approach, backed away. “I’m your friend, Mel. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you.”
“Did you pay Ivan Volkov to steal my experiment?”
“Who? No!”
Mel advanced and Kaito took another nervous step backwards.
“Did you think no one would connect you to the son of your ex-boyfriend? You forgot, Kaito, that I know all about Andrei Volkov – you’re the one who told me.”
“Then you know I’ve had nothing to do with Andrei for years. I despise the man.”
Mel took another step and Kaito doubled back around the conveyor belt and into the embarkation room.
Mel hoped Deverau had understood her whispered instruction. If he had, then Kaito had nowhere to run.
Kaito shouted at the controls and hit it with her fist, but the embarkation room did not respond. She turned to Mel with suspicion. “What have you done?”
“It’s just you and me in here,” said Mel. “I know all the pieces, I just need you to put them together. I know the dead crops were potatoes derived from my stolen experiment and I know it was Teractor that delivered them to the farms. Was that side of the operation handled by your new boyfriend, Felix?”
“You leave Felix out of it! He has nothing to do with this!”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Mel saw Kaito’s regret that she had given herself away.
“If you know it wasn’t Felix, then you must know who it was.”
Mel approached the embarkation room. She assumed Kaito would back away again, but instead she made a break for it. She ran past the conveyor belt, swiping her arm at a basket of potatoes left there by one of the farm workers. The crop scattered across the conveyor and cascaded to the ground where the potatoes bounced and rolled like misshapen balls.
Mel ran after her, but trod on one of the potatoes and her ankle turned sideways. Crying out as the ligaments stretched, she reached out to the conveyor to stop herself from falling. But the belt was still moving and her hand shot away from her and she fell onto her hands and knees.
Kaito ran down the aisle, stopping only to set the forklift robots in motion. They trundled away on their pre-programmed pattern, resuming where they had left off.
“Where are you running to, Kaito?” shouted Mel. “There’s literally nowhere to go.”
Mel stood and tried to put weight on her ankle. A sharp pain shot up her leg. She was sure she had strained it, not broken it, but it was going to make it harder to chase Kaito. If her former friend was going to insist on playing that senseless game.
Kaito had disappeared behind the stacks of soil trays.
“What I don’t understand is why,” Mel shouted out to wherever Kaito was hiding. “If you were working for Teractor, why did they want to cause a famine on Mars?”
“No one knew your experiment was going to fail.” Kaito’s voice came from behind the stacks. “Even you thought it would be a success.”
Mel turned to face the direction of her voice and a tray shot out from the stack – pushed from behind. Mel jumped sideways as it plummeted to the ground. A mound of soil tipped out by her feet.
Limping on her strained ankle, Mel approached the bottom of the field, listening for the sounds of movement and looking between the stacks for signs of Kaito. She caught a glimpse of Kaito’s jacket, but kept walking to pretend she hadn’t noticed.
When Mel had gone past, Kaito did exactly what Mel had hoped she would. She dashed out to make a run for it. But Mel was ready. She swiveled, ignoring the pain in her ankle, and gave chase.
Kaito ran with the frantic desperation of someone afraid of being caught. Mel’s determination made her faster, but even as she gained ground, Kaito remained two steps ahead of her, with her unfastened jacket billowing out behind.
It gave Mel a new target. Mel reached out for the material and grasped. With a jerk, she tugged the jacket backwards and pulled Kaito with it.
Kaito stumbled and fell into Mel’s arms. Mel locked them around Kaito and held her tight. Kaito struggled, but her writhing was no match for the strength of Mel’s anger and sense of betrayal.
They stood in the central aisle with an innocent forklift robot trundling towards them. Mel thrust Kaito in front so she faced the machine’s two advancing prongs.
“Mel! What are you doing?” The fear in Kaito’s voice meant she understood that Mel was desperate enough to keep her there until she was speared by the forklift.
“Tell me what this is about, Kaito!”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Start with what you were doing at Teractor,” said Mel, ensuring any attempt by Kaito to break free was subdued by her locked arms.
The robot, oblivious to the women in its path, continued to trundle forward.
Kaito swallowed. “When Teractor expanded into agriculture, they realized Mars was going to face a food supply problem,” she said, fear causing her voice to falter. “Because they’d drawn up all the legal contracts which were bringing migrants from Earth, they knew the farms would soon be unable to meet demand. They needed someone with expertise in food crops and they took me on as a consultant – off the books, so EcoLine wouldn’t know. If I impressed them, they were going to offer me a better job.”
“You impressed them by plunging Mars into a crisis?”
“I thought I would be preventing a crisis! Enhanced potatoes had the potential to feed millions of people far more efficiently than fields of wheat or corn. The Science Board wasn’t going to approve it until all the trials and checks were complete – we were talking years and more migrant workers were arriving in months.”
Kaito began to tremble as the forklift closed in. “Mel, please!”
But Mel wasn’t finished with her. “Why not come to me? Why pay Ivan to steal my experiment?”
“You wouldn’t have agreed to it and the technology was owned by EcoLine,” gasped Kaito between frightened breaths. “I needed an unofficial way to get it out of the lab so Teractor could claim they were offered the technology in good faith. I thought, once it was a success, no one would care where it came from. I remembered Andrei’s son when he was twelve and knew he would do almost anything for money. I hadn’t seen him in ten years, I didn’t think anyone would trace him back to me.”
“So when it all went wrong, you set me up to take the blame. It was you who told the MSS what happened to my field trial, wasn’t it?”
“I didn’t think you would get into trouble, Mel. Believe me. I thought they would question you and let you go. I’m sorry.”
The hypocrisy of her apology rang hollow in the field of unplanted soil trays.
The prongs of the forklift were seconds away.
“You could have told the truth at any point,” said Mel. “You had the power to do anything when the Terraforming Committee put you in charge of the food crisis, but instead you continued to lie.”
“I was in so deep, Mel,” Kaito cried. “I didn’t know how to get out.”
Kaito screamed as the forklift was about to spear her. She turned her head to shield her eyes from the moment of impact.
The machine shuddered to a halt.
The whirr of its motor ceased and its wheels stopped turning centimeters before her body. The sensors had detected a person in the way and simply stopped.
She let go of Kaito’s body and she slumped to the ground, a wreck of a human being.
Mel leaned back against the nearest stack of soil-filled trays. The relief was dizzying.
At the top of the field, the door to the embarkation room opened. Four MSS officers spilled out. They took in the scene quickly and rushed to help Kaito.
Following them, at a composed pace, was Sergeant Chiang and, behind her, Inspector Deverau.
Kaito pointed at Mel. “It’s Mel Erdan!” she screamed. “The one who caused the crops to die!”
A sickening feeling rose in Mel’s stomach. Even after her confession, Kaito was still passing the blame.
Confused, the officers looked at Mel in her stolen MSS uniform and hesitated.
“Sergeant Chiang!” shouted Kaito. “It’s Erdan – arrest her!”
Chiang nodded across to them.
Mel went limp in defeat as two officers grabbed her, turned her around and threw her against the stack. One spoke the rehearsed, perfunctory words that comprised her rights, but they were just noise reaching her ears. Her face was squashed against the soil trays, her arms forced behind her and she, again, felt the metal of cuffs encase her wrists.
When they spun her back round, Deverau was standing in front of her.
“You’re arresting me?”
Mel wondered what Deverau and Chiang had discussed after she left them. She scoured his expression for some kind of hint of whether he was her ally or not, but he remained impassive.
“I can’t stop them,” said Deverau. “Your arrest warrant is still valid.”
“But she told me everything!” Mel said in frustration.
Deverau pulled his WristTab from his pocket and made play of fastening it to his arm. “It was a good job I was recording it, then.”
Kaito, holding onto the two MSS officers on either side of her, found enough strength to spin round and glare at them. “That means nothing. Everything I said was under duress.”
“It might be inadmissible in court,” suggested Deverau with an air of smugness. “But it’ll still make an interesting listen.”
The MSS officer who had cuffed her grabbed Mel by the arm. Pain shot up her leg from her strained ankle as Deverau stepped aside and allowed her to be led away.
With Kaito free and her under arrest, she feared it had all been for nothing.
“At least let them back in here to plant the crop!” she called back. “If you won’t save me – at least save Mars!”