Duran smiled and clicked off the recorder. 'Very good, Lisa,' she told her. 'I particularly liked that last bit about it being regretful. If your asshole ever sues for excessive force, that'll play well in court.'
'Shit,' she said, 'he'll have to get in line.' Lisa, like most cops, had more than thirty abuse of force suits pending against her in various stages of negotiation. Thank god there was a such thing as lawyer insurance and lawsuit insurance. True, the premiums for such coverage for law enforcement officers were almost as high as they were for doctors and lawyers themselves, but without the policies Lisa would have been bankrupt ten times over.
'So what do you think, lieutenant?' asked Brian. 'Is Lisa gonna get banged for hitting that piece of shit, or what?'
'It'll go to internal affairs of course,' Duran told them, informing them of nothing they did not already know. 'But I wouldn't worry too much. They tend to go with the investigating command officer's preliminary report and my report will be favorable to you. I honestly don't see anything inappropriate about elbowing that shitheap in order to get him to let go of the victim. In fact, I'm going to put a note on the end of my report stating that I thought the both of you exhibited admirable restraint for not kicking the crap out of both of them.'
'Thanks, lieutenant,' Lisa said gratefully.
'But in the future,' she cautioned, 'I would watch what I was doing if I were you. If Lieutenant Wilson had been the watch commander today, you probably would've found yourself under suspension by now. Wilson spent about twenty minutes or so working patrol before he got promoted into management so he doesn't really have much of a shake on how things work out here on the streets. Nor does he care how things work on the street. His interest is in making deputy chief before he's forty. Right or wrong, good or bad, Wilson thinks that collecting two- week suspensions for excessive force is putting him in favor with the brass. You get too many two-weeks under your belt and you'll find yourself on the fast-track to vermin status, if you know what I mean.'
'I know what you mean, lieutenant,' Lisa said. 'I'll try to watch what I'm doing in the future.'
Duran sighed a little. 'That's just the thing, Lisa,' she told her. 'You shouldn't have to watch what you're doing. Not like that. Those assholes in city hall charge us with protecting the public and then do everything in their power to see to it that our hands are tied behind us and that our authority is mocked at every turn. Then they wonder why crime is so fucking high.' She shook her head. 'I don't know sometimes. Laura Whiting says she's going to empower the police when she takes office. Maybe she's our savior.' The sarcasm of her last remark was quite evident in her tone.
'Yeah right,' Brian said with a cynical laugh. 'She'll make it easier for us to go after those farm workers that steal apples and oranges and marijuana buds from the Agricorp greenhouses. What the hell else did they fund her campaign for?'
'The solar system is what the solar system is,' Duran told them with a shrug. 'And we're the ones that get paid to shovel the shit.'
Lon Fargo brought the electric truck to a halt near the southern end of greenhouse A-594. The truck was about ten meters long and featured a thirty-meter extendible hydraulic boom that was currently retracted. At the end of the boom was a portable airlock that allowed a person to pass from inside of the pressurized environment of a greenhouse building onto its roof by utilizing one of the access panels. One such panel was directly above the truck now.
Lon and his fellow agricultural complex maintenance technician, Brent Shimasaki, stepped out of the cab and onto the dusty macadam surface of the narrow access road. This particular greenhouse, one of more than ninety thousand in the Eden area, was two square kilometers in size. The ground inside of it, which had once been gently rolling hills and gullies, part of an ancient wetland water shed, had been bulldozed to a nearly perfect flatness when the complex was built forty-six years before. Golden stalks of wheat, less than a month from harvest, stretched from wall to wall in all directions, broken only by the geometric rows between them and by the access roads that divided the field into grid quadrants. The air was dry and warm, kept at the perfect growing temperature and humidity by the environmental simulation machines on the roof. It was one of these machines, which were powered by a fusion plant just outside the city, that the two men had come to repair.
They stepped lightly and carefully as they walked from the doors of the truck, which were emblazoned with a brand new Agricorp decal, to the rear where a storage cabinet was mounted. The greenhouses, though pressurized and warmed, did not have artificial gravity fields in place. Inside the city buildings or on the city streets, magnetic simulation fields were sent through steel conductors that were built into the base construction. This field kept gravity at a comfortable and healthy Earth standard 1G. It had long been known that human beings could not live long term in anything less than .8G without losing dangerous amounts of bone density and muscle mass. The development of artificial gravity in the mid-21st century had been the key factor in allowing the biggest mass migration of humans in history to take place. It was the artificial gravity that allowed sixty million people to live and work on Mars and above it. But in the agricultural fields the artificial gravity was not necessary. Not only was it cost prohibitive to maintain and install, it was also somewhat of a hindrance to operations. The crops actually grew better in the considerably weaker Martian gravity. And the harvesting machines and maintenance trucks could carry more and used less electricity since they and their cargoes were lighter. But for human beings used to walking around and functioning in 1G, performing tasks in one third of that was something that had to be done carefully. It was quite easy to push a little hard during a step and suddenly find yourself a meter in the air and tumbling towards the ground.
This greenhouse, and in fact all of the greenhouses in the surrounding eight hundred square kilometers, had once been the property of Interplanetary Food Products, which had been the fourth largest agricultural company on Mars. But as of two weeks before, IFP had ceased to exist. Agricorp, thanks to a multi-billion dollar merger of assets, was now the owner of everything that IFP had possessed. It was a merger that had been much lauded in the business sections of the Internet services as being far-reaching and progressive. Agricorp stock had increased nearly fifteen percent since the merger became official.
'I hope we get this thing done real quick,' Brent said as they opened the storage compartments and removed their folded blue biosuits. 'It's almost quitting time. The overtime would be nice but a couple a hits of some good green at the bar would be nicer.'
'Shit,' Lon said, kicking off the canvas shoes he wore and tossing them up on the truck, 'we can't work overtime anymore, remember? We work for Agricorp now. Overtime has to be approved by management in advance or you work for free.'
'What do you mean?' Brent asked, wondering if his coworker was joking or not. 'That doesn't apply to overtime we pull trying to finish a job, does it? I thought it was just for shift work.'
'Nope,' Lon replied. 'It applies to all overtime, for anything. I checked with Jack before we came out here. He says if we're not done with this blower by the time 4:30 rolls around, to just pack up and leave it until tomorrow. Nobody is to run past their scheduled shift for anything. No exceptions.'
Brent shook his head at the idiocy of that. 'So they would rather have us leave a blower open to the dust all fuckin' night then pay us time and a half for thirty or forty minutes?'
Lon gave a cynical smile. 'Ain't our new bosses smart? You ask me, I'm honored to work for the biggest corporation in the solar system. Their vision and frugality is something to be admired and imitated.'
'God almighty,' Brent said, kicking off his own shoes. 'Now I've heard just about everything.'
The biosuits that they wore were designed and manufactured by the same company that made suits for the Martian Planetary Guard. They were constructed of form fitting reinforced plastic that provided near-perfect insulation. An inner sleeve that formed to the body when the suit was activated served the duel purpose of maintaining the proper body pressurization — for the atmospheric pressure on Mars was considerably less than the minimum required to sustain human life — and maintaining proper body temperature — for the outside temperature of Mars, even on the equator, rarely climbed above 0 degrees Celsius. Lon stepped into his suit and pulled it tight, making sure it was properly positioned. Having a suit activate while a portion of the inner sleeve was askew could be a painful and even dangerous experience, particularly if the askew portion happened to be near the genitals.
Once things seemed to be aligned properly he pulled his helmet from the storage compartment and placed it on his head. The helmet was a lightweight, airtight vessel that would pressurize when the suit was turned on. The air supply came from a small, flat tank on the front of the suit. Attached to the tank was an oxygen and nitrogen extractor, a much smaller version of the machines that kept the air flowing in the cities. The extractor would continually draw in those two elements from the thin atmosphere and keep the tank full of breathable air. Lon, as a
