Encouraged by the response to her words, Laura Whiting congratulated the Martian people that night during her speech and continued to encourage them to follow through for the entire week. Smith and company gave another speech that night, this one directed at the welfare class. He invited them to several locations in each city to sign up for job training to replace the unskilled workers that were on strike. It was a fairly good gamble that they made but unfortunately it was a losing one. Less than two hundred people planet wide showed up for his job seminars on Tuesday morning and all of them were sent away in disgust when their numbers were realized. As for participation in the strike, nearly ninety-nine percent of the workforce stayed home on this day.
For the rest of the workweek this went on. Smith would beg and threaten the Martians at night on Internet addresses with what would happen if they continued to defy their employers and the next day his words would go unheeded and no one would show up for work. Back on Earth the stock market actually went into a free fall as food stocks and manufactured goods were virtually cut off at the knees. Pharmaceutical supplies, of which Mars manufactured greater than eighty percent for all of WestHem, dropped to an alarming level for certain brands in a shortage that would reverterbrate for weeks across the solar system.
When Saturday dawned on Mars, the first general strike officially came to an end. The first workers to return to their jobs were those who worked weekends: the maintenance techs and the service personnel, less than six percent of the grand total. They found their work backed up beyond belief but still waiting for them. No reports of dismissals were reported from any portion of the planet. The same occurred when the rest of the workforce returned the following Monday. Once again the commuter trains were full of Martians heading to their jobs and the various industries were able to staff themselves and get some work done. No one was fired or disciplined, they were simply told to get back to work.
"The first strike was a rousing success," Laura Whiting told the planet that night on MarsGroup. "I'm sure you've all noticed your various employers trying to pretend it was no big deal, that they all enjoyed their little vacations, but believe me, you folks hurt them badly. I congratulate you on your unprecedented unity. But this is only the beginning. This is only a taste of what we are really capable of. We must now follow up our actions with demands. Please allow me the liberty of making these demands for you. Since the corporations now know that their workers are capable of crippling them, we must demand that they open negotiations with us within the week for a peaceful transfer of assets and recognized autonomy for our planet. If they do not, then we must initiate another general strike fourteen days from now, this time for two weeks."
Corban Hayes was a man who looked ten years older than he had just a few months before. The stress of trying to keep a handle on the Laura Whiting situation while forcing his underlings to participate in a crackdown of citizens not seen since the beginning of World War III were taking their toll on him. He had already been treated by his private physician for a bleeding ulcer and irritable bowel syndrome, afflictions he had never been bothered with before. His face was now gaunt and drawn, streaked with age lines that had not been there at the beginning of this miserable year. And now one of the worst fears of all had just come to pass. A general strike had occurred on the planet, a strike that had shut down everything and everyone and had come on his watch. And that bitch Whiting was already trying to arrange another, even longer one. He could almost feel his head rolling across the table.
The door to his office slid open late Tuesday afternoon to reveal Don Mitchell, one of his senior field agents, the man who had led the New Pittsburgh portion of the crackdown. Mitchell was not a very bright person and certainly was not the best-qualified agent for the position that he held. But, in the world of the FLEB bureaucracy, which was WestHem politics at its finest, that factor was not often considered when promotions and assignments were handed out. Walker was well-connected and had the ear of Director Clinton himself since he was married to Clinton's daughter, thus he would more than likely be the man to replace Hayes when he (Hayes) was eventually reassigned to some shithole office management job in South America or Greenland.
"You called for me, Corban?" Mitchell asked him, using Hayes' first name when hardly anyone else would dare to.
Hayes let it slide, as he almost always did. "Yes, Don," he told him, waving him to a seat. "It's about the Laura Whiting investigation."
Mitchell smiled predatorily. The Whiting case had of course been handed to him once the Eden crackdown got up and rolling. He and a team of fourteen agents had been working twelve-hour days on it ever since the order from Clinton had come in. "We're pretty close to having an airtight case file drawn up," he said. "It's a lot easier to build a case when you don't have to worry about things like real evidence." He seemed to find this deliciously funny.
Hayes on the other hand, did not. He had at first been unable to believe his ears when the order to draw up false charges against Whiting had come across his terminal on the secure link. Though he had bent the law to his liking many, many times in his career, he had never been asked before to actually make up charges and back them up with falsified evidence. And in such an important, potentially explosive case at that! He strongly suspected that Clinton and those controlling him were forcing him to pull the pin on a hand grenade. Nevertheless he had followed orders. It was all that he knew how to do. "I've just received a communiqué from Director Clinton himself," he told Mitchell.
"Ah, my good father in law," Mitchell said affectionately. "What did he have to say?"
"Nothing very good," he said. "It seems that the various business interests of Earth and the executive council are rather upset about the little strike we just had. They are even more upset at the prospect of another, even longer one. The picking of the grand jury in Denver is being fast-tracked even faster and they are quite eager to have the complete case file against Whiting so they can get her out before she has a chance to get another strike organized. How close to finished are you?"
"We're just drawing up the final documents now," he said. "You know? Making them look all nice and official, cross-referencing a few of our sources. We could probably have it done in another three days if we rushed."
"Rush even faster," Hayes told him. "Even if it means that it's not quite as pretty looking or complete. Clinton wants the entire file transmitted to him within twenty-four hours."
"Twenty-four hours?" Mitchell said doubtfully.
"That's what your father in law tells me," he confirmed. "And as you know, what he says goes. So get your people together, get some coffee brewing, hell, go buy some dust from one of the vermin if you need to, but have that report finished by 0900 tomorrow."
"We will," he said.
Two days later, in Denver, Nora Hathaway, the WestHem attorney general, was reviewing the Whiting file from her office atop the Department of Justice building. She was a portly woman of sixty-two years, an appointee of the last administration that had managed to hang on due to her astute political savvy. She scanned through the hundreds of pages of evidentiary documents, getting a thorough read on just what the charges against Whiting were going to consist of and how good of a job the FLEB agents had done "gathering" the evidence. Once she had the basics of it down she put in a call to FLEB director Clinton on her terminal.