PART I.

THE NIGHT.

OF THE MARTYRS.

CHAPTER.

ONE.

"What were you doing on the waterfront?" the cop asked.

"This is the hospitality district," I said.

"Not at midnight, it isn't."

"I came for a drink."

"Didn't you say you're staying at Fort Lewis?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"I don't buy it," said the cop. "You drove fifty miles for a nightcap. What? They don't have bars on base? How about in Tacoma? They got bars in Tacoma."

He had a good point. Tacoma, a fairly good-sized town, was located just north of Fort Lewis. I'd driven forty miles to reach Seattle.

I said, "I felt like celebrating?"

"By yourself?"

Granted, my reason for driving to Seattle sounded thin, even to me. I said, "I didn't come trolling for Christians."

I wasn't going to say it, but the person I had come to see was the opposite of the men I ran into. I came in search of a mercenary named Ray Freeman. He never showed.

As a civilian, the police detective had absolutely no authority over me. Even if he'd caught me torturing these guys red-handed, he couldn't have arrested me. My participation in these crimes automatically put them under military jurisdiction. Had I wished, I could have ended this street-side interrogation at any time, but I hoped maybe my cooperation would foster a little goodwill. It wasn't working.

Four hours had passed since the confrontation began, and I was still on the street, standing around in the fog and the cold, watching the crime-scene-investigation unit scour for clues. The police cars' spotlights illuminated a forty-foot circle with a shortwave light that penetrated the fog.

Why, I wondered, are they searching for clues when they have the confessed killer?

With the cars here, I could see the scene clearly. Mostly I saw the bodies of the victims, three soft, domesticated types, two of them barely over twenty years old. They looked like college students.

"Why don't you tell me the real reason you came?" the policeman repeated.

"I like the bars in this part of town. I like watching the waterfront," I said. It was a lie, and the detective saw through it.

He pretended to suddenly notice the thick fog shrouding the docks, and said, "Yeah, nice view."

"Are you quite finished, Officer?" asked Travis Watson, my civilian advisor. I had hired him because he was smart, competent, and natural-born. I needed a natural-born aide to help interface with the civilian population. Having recently been conquered by the all-clone military, a lot of people were wary of clones. Go figure.

Watson was also fresh out of college, brash bordering on disrespectful, and easily distracted by women.

No one is perfect.

"You know what I think, Harris?" the detective said, clearly ignoring Watson. "I think these kids came to the bar for a drink, and you lured them out and killed them. You probably had friends hidden out here in the alley. That's what I think.

"How many men did you have with you?" The detective was in his forties, a large, pudgy man in a long coat that kept him warm. He glared at me, knowing that I was above his law.

I said, "That's an interesting theory. Does unsubstantiated guesswork count as police work these days?"

He gave me a wolfish smile, and said, "Listen to you. You've got three stars and a civilian assistant, General, but you don't have an alibi. Does your rank let you get away with murder in the Army, too?"

"I'm a Marine," I said.

"Same difference. Marines are like ants, they're real tough in a group. How tough are you when you're all alone?"

"Good question," I said. "Why don't you ask them?" I pointed to the three dead men lying on the concrete where I had left them.

"You want to know what I think..." the detective began.

"Not really," I said, shutting him down before he blew off more steam. "Look, we know who killed these men, so there's no point investigating the murder. I did it. My fingerprints are on the rod, my shoe print is on that one's neck," I said, still pointing at the corpses. "Now that we know who killed them, the next step in the investigation would be to find out who the speck they are. I want to know why they came downtown and why they were following me, and why they had two knives and an iron rod. What I really want to know is why that asshole over there was carrying a damn Bible.

"Do you get that a lot up here...thugs carrying Bibles and butcher knives?"

"No, we do not have a lot of Bible-toting thugs," growled the detective.

I turned to Watson, and asked, "Is it just me, or do you find his taste in books as fascinating as I do?"

"We'll look into it," the detective barked. Clearly, he did not like taking direction from criminals.

"You might take DNA samples, too. Find out why these clowns attacked a Marine, and you might even save a few lives in the process," I said.

"Since when did you care about saving lives?" he asked.

"Oh, Detective, my entire existence is about saving lives...both natural-born and synthetic."

He looked back at the corpses, then turned to me. "You still haven't told me what you were doing out here."

"So what were you doing out here?" asked Watson. Like the detective, my civilian adjutant did not entirely trust me. Like the detective, he had been woken by an early-morning call. But the detective had probably woken up on the wrong side of his own bed.

Watson, on the other hand, had been in someone else's. I didn't even let him go home to change. I told him to get his ass over to Bolling Air Force Base, where a plane would be waiting to take him to Seattle. Three hours later, he met me on the street, still dressed in his bar hopper's sports coat.

Watson came across as sensible though I wavered between not approving of his lifestyle and envying it. He was a big, good-looking kid who'd slept in every bed in Washington, D.C., except quite possibly his own. He knew all the bars in town and had a mental catalog of every woman he'd seen in them.

He didn't brag about his conquests. Had I not sent spooks to follow him a few evenings, I never would have known. As my aide, he dealt with sensitive information, and I made a point of knowing what he did in his off-hours.

Nearly a year had passed since the Enlisted Man's Empire had conquered Earth. It was a fight that nobody wanted, but we didn't have much choice.

The government of the Enlisted Man's Empire was really just an expanded military chain of command, a collection of clones. Originally brewed to serve the Unified Authority, the Earth-centric empire that colonized the Milky Way, we clones began our existence protecting natural-born-mankind's 180 colonized planets. The Unified Authority wanted to protect its citizens without sacrificing their own children, so the government amassed a vast military with clone enlisted men to do the heavy lifting. The officers were natural-born, but they didn't stay around when the fighting began.

That system worked just fine right up until an alien army stormed the galaxy, capturing 179 of our 180 colonies. When the natural-born politicians asked what went wrong, the natural-born officer corps blamed their failures on the clones, and the natural-born public took them at their word.

In response, the Unified Authority decided to ditch us. We were shipped out to obsolete fleets stranded in deep space. Two things ended our exile. We figured out how to return to Earth, and the aliens launched a new kind of attack. They started incinerating planets to exterminate the inhabitants. With the Avatari burning our bridges behind us one planet at a time, we turned our sights to the home world.

I led the Enlisted Man's invasion of Earth. We beat the Unifieds, then we dug in and waited for incineration. A year had passed with no sign of the aliens, not that anyone complained.

Ask a dozen people why the aliens never reached Earth, and you'd hear a dozen explanations. The prevailing theories were that (a) God destroyed the aliens; (b) having been turned back before reaching Earth on their first invasion, the aliens now ignored the planet; and (c) a small fleet sent out to track down the aliens had located their planet and destroyed them. I personally preferred the third option, though I could not imagine how they'd managed to accomplish such a feat.

"General?" Watson said, bringing me back to the present again.

"Yes?"

"Why did you come into town?"

That was another of my reasons for hiring Watson, he was persistent. It was one of those chicken-egg quandaries-did he learn persistence hunting for scrub (Marine-speak for one-nighters) or had his bar-hopping safaris ended in success because he was naturally persistent?

The guy was six-foot-five. He was trim because he had good genes and good eating habits, not because of exercise. As far as I could tell, he had no tolerance for pain. It wouldn't have taken more than a paper cut to bring tears to his eyes. I could not imagine how he would react to a broken bone or a gunshot wound.

Watson had an easygoing nature. Angry detectives didn't bother him, neither did angry Marines. I could swear at him, threaten him, call him out of bed, he never took offense.

When I responded to his question with, "I don't see where that is any of your business," he said, "It is, and it isn't. You killed three civilians. If you want to label the killings as a 'need-to-know-basis Marine Corps operation,' then it's none of my business. If you want to keep on good terms with the local police, you need to give me something."

I said, "Drop it."

The final lingerings of the lustrous night still hung over the city. Streetlights and headlights and the occasional lit window pierced the darkness, but daylight was only an hour or two away. The air was still cold and wet, but the fog had thinned.

We walked in silence for a few seconds, then I said, "I came to meet a friend...well, a business associate, a guy named Freeman."

"Did he show up for the meeting?"

"No."

"So he wasn't one of the three guys back there?" Watson confirmed, sounding a little nervous. Maybe he was starting to take my Marine Corps "killing machine" jargon a bit too seriously.

"No," I said. "He is not one of the corpses."

"Are you sure your friend is safe?" Watson asked. "Maybe we should have the police look for him?"

Worrying about Ray Freeman's well-being was like worrying about the welfare of a shark or a missile. "There's no point involving the locals," I said. "If Freeman doesn't want to be found, the last thing you want to do is find him."

"Would you like me to contact Naval Intelligence? Maybe they can track him down."

I thought about that and smiled. Naval Intelligence had more than its share of smart-ass officers. Assigning a few of them to track down Freeman would send a wake-up call.

Watson had flown to Fort Lewis on a military jet and driven to Seattle in a staff car. He'd parked the big sedan far enough up the street to give us a chance to talk. As we reached the car, I said, "Freeman will find me when he's ready."

Watson asked, "Do you want me to take you back to Fort Lewis?"

"Might as well," I said. "It's been a long night."

I looked back toward the crime scene. The fog had mostly cleared, and an overcast morning had begun. I wanted to end my day, not begin a new one.

As he climbed into the car, Watson pulled out his LifePad and stared at it for several seconds. Then he said, "There's a plane waiting at the base to fly you back to Washington, General. Admiral Cutter wants to meet with you."

"Do you know what it's about?" I asked.

"Apparently, you weren't the only Marine mugged last night. The admiral thinks this may have been the first shots fired in a civil war."

There were 1,723 Marines attacked on the night of January 9, 2519. The Marine Corps lost 108 men and killed over two thousand.

All things considered, it was a pretty good night.

CHAPTER.

TWO.