But the biggest event, the one that truly pushed the Martian people over the edge, occurred the following day in New Pittsburgh. A team of ten FLEB agents went to a welfare housing building on the east side of that city and breached an apartment door where six men and women were printing up some admittedly radical pamphlets calling for acts of violence against FLEB 'storm troopers'. These six people, members of a newly formed group that called themselves the Free Mars Society, saw their door being forced open and knew what it meant. They elected not to go quietly. Using the cheap handguns that nearly every ghetto inhabitant carried, they opened fire the moment the FLEB agents came through the door, aiming for the head and taking down two of them with shots to the face. The remaining FLEB force opened up with their M-24s, spraying bullets throughout the apartment and killing everyone, including a small child asleep in a crib.
The incident might have gone unnoticed or uncommented upon except for the fact that a MarsGroup reporter team had just happened to be in the neighborhood and had spotted the FLEB van parked outside of the building. The reporters and their camera managed to make it up to the apartment in question and get shots of the interior broadcast to their office before the remaining FLEB members took them into custody on incitement charges and smashed their equipment. The clip was played over and over again on the various MarsGroup channels, several times every hour. It was downloaded from MarsGroup Internet sites and emailed all around the planet. By the time the dinner hour fell, nearly everyone on Mars had seen it. When the Martian people saw the bullet riddled corpses of their fellow citizens and the black-suited and armored FLEB agents standing over them with their weapons, chaos erupted.
This chaos was fanned into fury that night by than Laura Whiting during her regular speech.
'These people are Nazis!' she yelled into the camera, her eyes blazing. 'They come storming into private homes with automatic weapon waving warrants that are shaky at best and they act surprised when the people take up arms against them? While I do not advocate shooting it out with these FLEB thugs if they should happen to choose your apartment to raid, in truth, what is the option? Our people are being hauled off of their planet to Earth where they will be crucified in staged trials and sentenced to life in some shithole Earthling federal prison. I certainly understand why our citizens in New Pittsburgh, who were doing nothing more than executing their constitutional rights, elected to chose violence to combat this.'
It was less than an hour after Whiting's broadcast that a riot erupted at the New Pittsburgh federal building in the downtown portion of that city. Hundreds of angry Martians, welfare and working class alike, gathered at all of the entrances and lay siege to the structure. They fired guns at the entrances, putting countless holes in the tempered plexiglass and badly damaging three of the doors. They painted profane words on the walls and doors — epitaphs that made EARTHLINGS GO HOME seem like a term of endearment. They smashed all of the security cameras and threw bottles of Fruity and Agricorp juice, littering the entryways with broken glass. They managed to get into the back lot of the building where they overturned and smashed six of the black vans that had been used to carry strike teams. Through it all the terrified federal agents and employees barricaded themselves inside, the agents armed with M-24s but knowing that they would not be able to gun down everyone who tried to get them if the crowd somehow managed to make it inside.
The New Pittsburgh Police Department finally broke the riot up after more than two hours of desperate calls for assistance from inside the building. The NPPD officers fired no shots, used no tear gas, and made no threats to the crowd. They simply told them that enough was enough and asked them to give it a rest for the night. Surprisingly enough, the crowd complied, all of them throwing a few last bottles or firing a few last bullets and then wandering away towards the tram stations or their housing complexes. No arrests were made or even attempted and the federal employees actually witnessed some of the rioters shaking hands with the police officers.
Director Hayes, hearing of the event, placed an angry call to the chief of the NPPD, demanding an explanation for the delayed response of his officers and the lack of any arrests. The chief shrugged off the inquiry with a flippant remark and then disconnected him. Subsequent calls were not put through.
When the crowd began to gather outside the building on the next night, the FLEB agents reacted a little differently. This time they were expecting the rioters and they had brought in extra troops and weapons for the occasion. Forty agents, all of them in full gear and armed with M-24s, pushed out the doorway of the building once the crowd of Martians began to swell and surround them. They ordered them to disperse, pointing their weapons as they shouted this. The Martians held their ground and began to lob bottles and other debris, bouncing them off of helmets and armored vests and knocking several of the agents to their knees. No one ever knew who fired the first shot but within seconds the clattering of automatic weapons filled the air and Martians began to drop to the ground, blood flying from their bodies, heads exploding into brains and chunks of skull as the high velocity rounds ripped into them. The surviving rioters ran blindly away in a panic, a few of them returning fire with their handguns but none of them causing a lethal wound. Soon the streets were filled with New Pittsburgh police carts and dip-hoe carts, their crews horrified by the carnage that had resulted. The media, both MarsGroup and the big three, soon followed. The final toll would be 43 Martians killed and 34 wounded.
Laura Whiting made a special address the next morning, demanding an independent investigation into the incident. It was a request that was all but ignored by both the big three media giants and the FLEB themselves. Two days later the FLEB office placed the blame for the shooting on the Martian rioters and the New Pittsburgh Police Department. No suspensions or disciplinary actions against any FLEB agents occurred, a fact that was leaked to MarsGroup reporters by Martian clerical staff who worked for the FLEB. Within hours of the ruling, the entire planet knew about it.
The following day the Martian people expressed their displeasure. The first incident occurred in New Pittsburgh, which was quickly becoming the focal point of much of the anti-fed movement. Two FLEB agents on a routine stakeout of a suspected 'terrorist haven' were dragged from their van by an angry mob of Martian welfare class. They had their helmets and armor ripped from their bodies and they were beaten with their own firearms so severely that both were comatose when the police finally broke up the crowd. Though neither would die from their injuries, both would be medically retired because of the incident. No arrests were ever made.
A few hours later, in Libby on the equatorial plain, an entire ten-person team of agents about to conduct a strike were mobbed by a similar crowd as they waited for the elevators to arrive to take them up to their target. In this case two of the agents were killed, shot through the head by their own weapons, and six were beaten badly enough to require hospitalization. Again, no arrests were made by the responding police officers.
Throughout that day and the next, many other, less severe incidents took place in all of the Martian cities as FLEB agents went out to their assignments and angry Martians reacted to the slaughter in New Pittsburgh. These incidents would send several agents to local hospitals and result in the deaths of three Martians. But the biggest incident of retaliation took place three days after the New Pittsburgh Slaughter — as it was being called — in Eden.
'Incoming multiple agency response call,' the dispatch computer said in it's calm, cool, collected voice. A second later, rows of text appeared on the screen.
'What is it?' asked Lisa, who was behind the wheel of the cart on this day. It had been another slow shift and she was ready for a little action to break up the monotony. A multiple agency response meant that something big was going down.
'34th Street and 7th Avenue,' Brian told her, reading from the screen. 'Heavy smoke in the streets. Multiple calls from citizens and the fire suppression systems have been activated at that intersection. Some of the call-ins seem to think a vehicle of some sort is burning.'
'A vehicle huh?' Lisa said, turning the cart around and flipping on the emergency lights. 'That could be nasty if it's a delivery truck carrying chemicals or something.'
'Yep,' Brian agreed, reaching under his seat and pulling out his gas mask.
In the enclosed environment of the Martian cities, fire was treated with considerably more respect than it was on Earth. On Mars, there was no outside to go to when things started to burn and the smoke had no natural way to escape from the area. Visibility would quickly be obliterated as smoke built up under the glass roof and people blocks away could easily be choked to death on noxious fumes if they were trapped in the vicinity. Though automatic fire suppression sprinklers were every twenty meters on the streets and every five meters in every building, they were good only for extinguishing minor blazes in the earliest stages of development. Major blazes, as this one seemed to be based on the dispatch information, required the use of high-pressure water hoses and lots of manpower. For this reason all public safety employees, the police included, were trained in firefighting and dispatched in large numbers whenever such an incident occurred.
'Holy shit,' Brian said as they approached the area. 'I guess something's burning all right.' Though they
