any lengths, break any rules to get it. After all, your position is worth much more in terms of money and prestige than anything he could have embezzled, right?'
Smith nodded his head thoughtfully. 'Not bad,' he said. 'And I think I have just the person in mind.'
'Great,' Hayes said. 'Of course you'll also have to burn a lobbyist or two and a few middle management types in order to make this work, but I'm sure you'll have no problem thinning a few out.'
'No, no problem at all,' he said without hesitation or emotion.
'Okay then,' Hayes said with a smile. 'Assuming of course that the impeachment attempt flops, I'll get my guys working on the bribery investigation first thing tomorrow. It shouldn't take too much to get a subpoena for Whiting's bank account and financial records issued in light of her admissions during her speech. Once we have your money tracked to her I'll get back with you and we'll work out a way to weave the trail into the people you pick. If all goes well we should have enough to indict her in about two weeks.'
Sunday was usually a day of rest on Mars, much the same as it always had been on Earth. Office buildings were typically closed and empty of everyone but the security force. The public transportation system ran fewer trains across the tops of the city roofs and those that they did run were usually half-empty at best. Even the crime rate had been noted to take a significant dip on Sundays. Seemingly even the criminals needed a day to kick back and relax as well.
On this particular Sunday on Mars there was not much resting going on however, at least not among the movers and the shakers of the planet. Emails continued to roll in to the legislature representatives, at a slower rate than the day before but still quite rapidly. The representatives that received them all spent the greater part of the day in their respective offices, all of them planning strategy on how to deal with the coming flak of the Whiting impeachment proceedings. During the course of the day eight more representatives — six women and two men, all Martians of more than three generations — called press conferences to announce their support of Whiting and her goal. All of them banned lobbyists of any kind from their offices and publicly denounced all corporate contacts.
The lobbyists themselves spent their day in front of their Internet terminals trying to cajole the remaining representatives to vote for impeachment proceedings the following day. They begged, pleaded, threatened, offered bribes, and did every other underhanded thing they had learned over the years to try to convince the men and women to act in accordance with the corporate wishes. It was all to no avail. Every last one of them, even the Speaker of the Assembly herself, was forced to tell their sponsor's representatives that they simply could not do it this time, that too much was at stake. Most of them apologized sincerely for not being able to play by the rules but they were firm in their refusals and unwavering in their responses.
The corporate heads of the various Martian operations were also forced to spend most of their day in their offices as well. Their job was to take reports from their lobbyists and then call up the various representatives personally to offer one last round of threats and pleas. Again, despite the warnings of removed support in the next election, the legislature stood firm. As Vic Cargill had been told the previous day, it was a simple matter of what would kill the politicians' career first and most assuredly. In every case they were forced to conclude that they would be out for good in weeks if they voted for impeachment proceedings but that they just might survive if they voted against it. After all, the corporations couldn't withdraw support from
The small red planet turned on its axis and Sunday passed into Monday morning. At precisely 9:00 AM, Eden time, the entire planetary legislature assembled in their chambers in the capital building to be welcomed for their new session. MarsGroup and all of the big three media corporations carried the meeting live on their networks. The ratings computers confirmed that more than forty-five million households, an incredible, unheard of ninety-six percent of all viewers, were watching the meeting, most of them on the MarsGroup stations. The speaker conducted the roll and then turned the floor over to the newly inaugurated Lieutenant Governor at the latter's request.
Scott Benton took the podium and gave a very passionate, very moving ten-minute speech regarding the fallacies of the new governor. He was an exceptional public speaker and he almost managed to sound sincere as he lauded the legislature to open impeachment hearings on the grounds of misrepresentation of office. He asked the speaker to please put the issue on the floor immediately and to follow it up with a vote. The speaker, as she was honor bound to do, did so.
'There is a motion on the floor at the request of Lieutenant Governor Benton,' she said tonelessly into her microphone. 'The motion is that this assembly of planetary representatives open an impeachment investigation into Governor Laura Whiting. Do I have a second for the motion?'
The assembly chamber remained silent as a mouse. The motion died right there on the floor for lack of a second. In a way, it was almost anticlimactic.
'The motion will be shelved,' the speaker said blandly, as if she were dismissing nothing more important than a motion on what to have for lunch that day.
'Wait a minute,' Benton said, standing and approaching her. 'You can't just...'
'You are out of order, Lieutenant Governor,' the speaker said, looking at him. 'The motion has died. Resume your seat please.'
'You don't understand,' he said. 'This motion has to be...'
'Take your seat,' she repeated. 'If you do not do so immediately, I will have security remove you.'
He took his seat, fuming as he went.
'And now,' the speaker said, 'I have another special request. This one is from Governor Whiting. She has asked to say a few words to you before we convene the session and I have granted her request. Governor?'
Laura Whiting came onto the stage, dressed in a simple pair of dress shorts and a cotton blouse. Her long brown hair was down around her shoulders instead of pinned into a bun. She had a smile upon her face as she took the podium and thanked the speaker.
'Members of the Planetary Legislature and people of Mars that are watching this broadcast, I thank both of you for the support you've given me so far. With your help I have passed the first hurdle in my path to securing Martian independence.'
Chapter 3
Though there had been many advances in communications technology since the beginning of the space colonization age there was one constant that never changed and probably never would. No matter what carrier for the signal was used, be it encrypted laser beams or modulating radio waves, they could move no faster than the speed of light. As such it was impossible for a person on Mars to hold a real-time conversation with a person on Earth. Even at the closest approach of the two planets — a mere fifty-six million kilometers — it took a message more than three minutes to travel from one place to another. Now, three months after the inauguration, with the two planets within ten degrees of being as far apart as they ever got, it took just under twenty minutes. And even that was not the extreme end of the communications lag. Once the sun became positioned between the two planets it would effectively block all radio waves from traveling from one place to the other in a direct line. All correspondence would then have to be routed first to a communications array in orbit around Jupiter, a step that added anywhere from forty minutes to two hours to the trip, depending upon just where Jupiter was located in the great scheme of things at the time. This period of 'extended relay lag' as it was known in government documents, came once every twenty-four months and lasted for six weeks at a time. The next such period was calculated to begin in a little over five weeks.
William Smith sincerely wished that it were upon them right now.
He sat in his desk chair behind his desk in his office, a place that he felt he had been spending far too much time in during the last twelve weeks. He had just watched a scathing communiqué from Steve Carlson, CEO and chief stockholder of Agricorp and arguably the richest man in the solar system; a communiqué that had demanded the most immediate response. To say that Carlson was displeased with the recent events on Mars — a planet where seventy-four percent of his company's products were grown or manufactured — was the equivalent of saying that World War III had been a little skirmish. Agricorp stock, once the staple of the New York Stock Exchange, had fallen by more than a hundred dollars a share thanks to the perceived instabilities caused by the
