with him. Lisa and Brian both let a small sigh of nervous relief escape their lips. Though the crowd continued to shout insults and accusations, they kept their distance. In the world of modern law enforcement, that was perhaps the best that could be hoped for.
The first of the two-person emergency medical teams from the Department of Public Health and Safety arrived a moment later. They were dressed almost identically to the two police, lacking only the combat goggles and the weapons belts. The design on their blue helmets and on their bulletproof armor was a little different — it featured a star of life instead of a police oval — but except for that they were virtually indistinguishable from their law enforcement counterparts. Lisa and Brian watched as they wheeled in a stretcher upon which blue bags of equipment were resting. As soon as the medics came through the rickety front door they paused, eyeing the obviously hostile crowd nervously. The ghetto class often verbally and physically abused the dip-hoes as well, and for much the same reasons; misallocation of scarce resources and widespread abuse by other aspects of the medical system.
'It's okay, guys,' Lisa called to them before they could slink away. 'It's safe. C'mon over.'
Plainly trepidatious, they nevertheless approached and went to work. They pronounced the first of the victims, the one with the exposed brain matter, officially dead. The second victim, the one that had been beaten with the arm of the chair, they paralyzed with a stasis drug and then installed an artificial breathing mechanism. By the time they were done doing that the second team had entered the building and gone to work on the woman that had been choked. As they performed their duties the crowd stayed at a reasonably safe distance, only shouting the occasional accusation about how if they'd been employed people they'd be getting better treatment.
'Fuckin vermin,' Brian said softly into his throat microphone as he kept a wary eye on the crowd.
Lisa, who was watching the two suspects on the ground (they were stirring around and shouting insults of their own now) heard him but did not respond. Though most cops, like most employed people in general, disliked the welfare class immensely; Brian's hatred of them was unique in its fury. Six years before, his pregnant wife had been raped and killed by a group of welfare class thugs as she got off of the public transit train in the notoriously dangerous Helvetia Lowlands section of the city. Mandy Haggerty had been twenty-eight years old at the time and working as a fifth grade teacher in one of the public schools of the Helvetia district. She had dedicated her life to teaching the welfare class children and had been quite good at it. But some of the welfare class youths in the neighborhood, emboldened by a combination of Fruity and dust, had spotted her one morning on her way to work and that had been the death of her. Brian had long since gotten over the grief of her loss but his flaming hatred of the vermin, as the derogatory term for those of the welfare class went, had never so much as flickered in its intensity. Lisa, who had yet to marry and produce her one legally allowed offspring, knew that she could not fathom the depth of his feelings. But at the same time she knew that working among the very people he hated so much ten hours a day, four days a week, was poisoning his mind.
By the time the DPHS teams carted away the two surviving victims of the attack the homicide investigation, such as it was, was in full swing. Two additional patrol units had arrived and were questioning members of the crowd (and taking a lot of verbal abuse) about what had transpired. They were just going through the motions of course. The answers were all the same, no matter who was talked to. 'I didn't see nothin,' was recorded for the reports more than twenty times. Though everybody present had seen what had happened, nobody would admit it. They all knew that the accused murderers had a right to face their accusers in court. Bearing witness against dusters or street gang members was not a healthy thing to do in the ghetto. It went without saying that no matter how ironclad the case against them was, the two dusters would not spend more than a year in prison. There simply was not room to lock up every duster that killed a piece of vermin in Eden, not for very long anyway. Those rooms in the prison had to be kept free for more serious criminals like those who pirated software that was produced by the media corporations or those who illegally distributed commercial music or video files.
Sergeant Franklin, their immediate supervisor, arrived a few minutes later. He brought in a digital camera, which he used to photograph the crime scene just in case the two dusters did not cop a plea or were not set free due to lack of evidence. Lieutenant Duran, the watch commander, showed up right behind him. She was not part of the standard homicide investigation assignment but her presence was required to take the use of force report. She was a tough, battle-hardened cop in her mid-fifties that had seen a little bit of everything during her twenty-five years on the job. She pulled her two subordinates aside, out of earshot of the suspects and the crowd, and offered each of them a bottle of flavored water.
'Thanks, Lieutenant,' Lisa said, opening the plastic bottle. The label identified it as 'Raspberry Surprise', produced and bottled by JuiceCo, a subsidiary of Agricorp. She took a large drink, soothing her parched throat.
'Yeah,' Brian agreed, opening his bottle of Apple Delight. 'This'll help wash the taste of these vermin out of my mouth.'
'Watch your language,' Duran intoned gently. 'You wouldn't want to get caught using a forbidden term now, would you?'
Brian snorted in disgust. The use of the word vermin, as well as many other derogatory slang terms, was deemed a firing offense by the public relations oriented department. General terms such as 'asshole' or 'dirtbag' were considered distasteful though acceptable, but specific slurs having to do with social status were not. The distinction dated back to a civil court case more than fifty years before in which a third generation unemployed man had successfully sued the New Pittsburgh Police Department for referring to him as vermin during a physical altercation. 'You know something, Lieutenant,' he told her, taking a drink of his juice. 'Every time I come into a place and run a call like this and deal with a bunch of... people like that, the idea of losing this shitty job seems like less and less of a threat.'
'I know what you mean,' she soothed, patting him on the shoulder. 'But remember, if you get fired from here, you'll be unemployed too. You'll have to move to public housing and live off welfare donations. You'll be considered vermin along with everyone else that's unemployed.'
'And you'll have to quit the MPG,' Lisa added, a little worried about her partner's mental health. 'You won't get to fly your Mosquito anymore.' It was this argument that would carry more weight with him than anything else. Unlike Lisa, whose MPG assignment was administrative, Brian, as a male, was a member of the elite air guard portion of the service. He flew the winged attack craft that had been developed by New Pittsburgh Enterprises and were specifically designed for operation in the thin Martian atmosphere. Though the WestHem armed forces considered them to be quaint, useless wastes of money, the pilots who drove them and the ground forces they protected considered them to be the finest piece of military engineering since the stealth attack ship. Brian was no exception to this. His one great thrill in life was climbing into the cockpit of his Mosquito and rocketing down the runway.
'I know, I know,' he said, frowning a little. 'Sometimes that's all that keeps me here. I don't know why the hell I didn't listen to my old man and spend my career training money on engineering school instead of the fuckin police training school. I could be workin at the damn water plant or the fusion plant or the air production plant instead of dealing with these animals every goddamn day.'
'Well you're stuck with us now,' Duran told him, 'so you're just gonna have to hang in there. Keep your sanity intact another four years or so and you'll be able to transfer to a working class neighborhood.'
'I keep that vision before me like it was expensive pornography,' he told her, seeming to lighten up a little. 'Imagine, dealing with people who have jobs every day, who don't suck the money right out of my pay before I ever see it. It would be like paradise.'
'It will be paradise,' Lisa, who kept the same image at the forefront of her brain, assured him. 'Four or five more years of hell, and you're in.'
Now that Brian seemed to have calmed himself a little, Duran proceeded with her investigation. She questioned each of them regarding the events that led up to the use of force and as to why they thought the use of force was needed in the situation. Their answers were recorded and instantly transcribed by her investigation computer program. Both were veterans of such investigations and kept their voices neutral and professional, not allowing any sort of emotion to leak through.
'Can you think of any other option to the situation,' Duran asked Lisa near the end, 'other than striking the homicide suspect with your elbow?'
'No ma'am,' she replied. 'As I stated earlier, the suspect was quite agitated and was refusing to release his grip upon the victim's throat. Furthermore he had struck me in the face with his free hand at that point. Due to his contact with the victim and with my partner I was unable to apply electricity to him with my tanning device. It is regretful that such violence needed to be employed to diffuse the situation, but I saw no other option.'
