Location: Washington, D.C.

Date: January 11, 2519

It was beginning to look like the opening salvo of the war would also be the final shot. The mystery group that attacked so many Marines on January 9 never announced itself. Maybe they were ashamed. They lost almost twenty times as many people as they killed.

When the police, both military and civilian, found nothing useful, Naval Intelligence took over. Results followed. So did briefings.

"What do you mean they were from Mars?" I asked the officer from Naval Intelligence.

"Well...they're not from Mars. I mean, sir, Mars does not have a native population. They're New Olympian. The men who attacked you were refugees from Olympus Kri."

Olympus Kri was the first planet the Enlisted Man's Empire evacuated during the second alien attack. We crammed the entire population, seventeen million people, into Mars Spaceport, the enormous and superfluous civilian travel center that had served as the hub of pangalactic travel back in the days when mankind traveled the galaxy.

"Lieutenant Colonel, I am well aware who is on Mars," I said. "What I need to know is what the hell six thousand homicidal New Olympians were doing on Earth and how the speck they got here."

The officer had brown eyes, brown hair, and stood five feet, ten inches tall. He was a clone. Every man serving in the Enlisted Man's Military had brown hair and brown eyes. All but one of the men in the Enlisted Man's Military stood five-foot-ten. I was the only exception. I stood six-three. I was a clone just like everyone else, but I was a discontinued model.

The lieutenant colonel lowered his voice, and said, "We haven't had any success answering those questions as of yet, sir."

He was scared of me, I could hear it in his voice, and it wasn't just my rank.

With one exception, the clones of the Enlisted Man's Empire did not know they were clones. I was that exception.

My class of clones was bred for independence and violence. The lieutenant colonel was a newer model than me. My DNA included a gland that released a highly addictive cocktail of testosterone and adrenaline into my blood in battle. The scientists who invented my kind called it the "combat reflex."

I was the final specimen of a distinguished class of clones called "Liberators." Congress discontinued the Liberator Clone Program a few decades before I climbed off the assembly line because we tended to get addicted to the hormones produced by the combat reflex. Once we got hooked, the only way to keep the hormone rolling was through violence, and we sometimes stopped caring who we hurt.

My kind had been replaced by a breed of clones who were tough, obedient, and docile. They made good soldiers, but most of the independence had been jimmied out of them. Instead of a gland that kept them cool in battle, the new clones had a "death reflex," which shut them down as swiftly as a bullet to the head.

Their DNA included neural programming that made them believe they were blond-haired, blue-eyed, natural-born humans instead of clones. When they saw their reflections in mirrors and windows, they saw themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes even if they were standing beside an identical clone whom they recognized as having brown hair and brown eyes.

Anything that disrupted that programming would set off a death reflex. We called ourselves the "Enlisted Man's Empire" because the empire might suffer a mass death reflex if we called ourselves the "Clone Empire."

"General, these are photographs of the men you killed," the lieutenant colonel said as their faces appeared on the briefing tablet in my hands. "They're not the type of people normally associated with violent attacks."

Tell me something I don't know, I thought.

Autopsy photographs and identification documents appeared on my briefing tablet. Why the hell the Intelligence division ran autopsies on these stiffs was beyond me. I knew damn well how they died, I was there.

Granted, I was being obtuse. The men in charge of the autopsies, a team of experts that included civilian policemen, military police, and Naval Intelligence officers, searched for signs of drugs and other oddities. The first reports indicated clean blood and no notable brain abnormalities.

The pictures on my tablet rotated so that the autopsy photo of one of the men came to the top. I had slit his throat. No doubt about the cause of his death, bone showed in the back of the smile-shaped incision I had carved across his neck. Below his pictures, a table listed his vital statistics-Name: Tom Niecy; Height: 5'11"; Weight: 163 lbs.; Age: 37.

"This is Tom Niecy. From what we can tell, he was the ring-leader," the lieutenant colonel said. "Prior to the evacuation of Olympus Kri, he appears to have worked as an engineer designing car seats."

"He designed seats for cars?" I asked. Now there's a terrorist profile if I've ever seen one, I thought.

"Yes, sir. He specialized in 'smart' seats for luxury cars. The seats he designed read your posterior signature and automatically adjusted to your body temperature, spinal posture, and firmness preferences."

I said, "Seats that know you by the spread of your ass."

"More or less, sir," he said.

"Thirty-seven-year-old car seat designers don't strike me as much of a security risk," I said.

"No, sir."

"What makes you think Niecy was in charge?"

"He was ten years older than Grant or Rand."

"Who are Grant and Rand?" I asked.

"Niecy, Grant, and Rand...the three men you kill-who attacked you, sir."

"The other two were named Grant and Rand? I didn't know their names."

"Yes, sir. Tom Niecy was ten years older than the other men. He was the only one with an actual job on Mars. That was one of the patterns we found when we started investigating the 'Night of the Martyrs.'"

"The Night of the Martyrs?" I asked. I had never heard the term, but I understood what it meant. The New Olympians lost more men than they killed, and thousands of corpses turned up the next morning as well. Most of the attackers who got away committed suicide. By the end of the next day, we had six thousand New Olympian corpses on our hands.

"That's what they're calling it on the mediaLink."

"Three of those martyrs came after me with knives and a pipe," I said.

"Yes, sir," said the lieutenant colonel. What else could he say?

"Catchy name." I sighed.

"Yes, sir."

"You might as well continue."

"Yes, sir. As I was saying, sir, there was a pattern among all of the teams, an older member, generally with a paying job, leading two younger men..."

"Was he designing car seats on Mars?"

"No, sir. Niecy worked in the spaceport loading docks."

"He was a stevedore?" I asked.

"Yes, sir, and the assistant pastor of a spaceport Christian congregation."

"A pastor," I mumbled. That checked out. I remembered the Bible. A Bible and a blade, I thought to myself.

"Have you contacted Gordon Hughes about this 'Night of the Martyrs'?" I asked. "What does he have to say about it?"

Gordon Hughes was the de facto governor of Mars, or at least the population living in Mars Spaceport, which was the only known population on the planet. He'd once been an important man in Unified Authority politics, then he joined a group that wanted to overthrow the Unified Authority, only to return as an ally in the very same war.

Hughes, who originally hailed from Olympus Kri, used whatever political capital he could muster to evacuate his home planet before the aliens cooked it. Now he and his people were trapped on Mars-seventeen million residents trapped in a revolving-door facility meant to accommodate less than six million transients.

"He says his people are still loyal to the Enlisted Man's Empire, sir," said the lieutenant colonel.

"Do you believe him?"

"We're still trying to piece it all together. I spoke with Colonel Riley before coming here." Martin Riley was the head of Mars Spaceport Security, a detail of five thousand lucky Marines attached to the spaceport as a peacekeeping force.

"What does Riley think?"

"He believes the spaceport is a powder keg with a lit fuse." The lieutenant colonel checked his notes, and said, "His exact words were, 'They're going to start eating their babies and blaming us for it.'"

"It sounds like Colonel Riley and Governor Hughes don't exactly see eye to eye," I said.

"No, sir. According to Colonel Riley, Governor Hughes has become something of a figurehead."

"Really? When did that happen?" I asked. I had not paid much attention to Mars over the last few months. Clearly, I should have.

"According to Colonel Riley, a religious revival has spread across the spaceport. He says the religious movement has superseded the government."

"Does Hughes still live in the administrative offices?" I asked. We had installed Hughes and his provisional government in the spaceport's former administrative offices. We had originally expected to relocate the New Olympians from Mars to Earth right after our war with the Unifieds ended, then we ran into the realities of creating a new government. A year had slipped by, and those people were still trapped on Mars.

"Yes, sir."

"Governor Hughes says the New Olympians are loyal to us and Colonel Riley says they want to start a civil war," I muttered to myself.

"There is no evidence of a popular movement on Mars," said the lieutenant colonel.

"Except that two thousand Marines were attacked by six thousand New Olympians who should not have been on this planet in the first place," I said.

"Hughes says they don't want to go to war with us," said the lieutenant colonel.

"Of course they don't want a war," I said. "The ungrateful bastards can't feed themselves without us. Mars Spaceport isn't a colony, it's a damn homeless shelter. The bastards can't declare war without starving to death."

"Yes, sir," the lieutenant colonel said as he waited for permission to speak.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Governor Hughes says we can avoid further bloodshed by closing down Mars."

"He wants his people repatriated," I said, echoing the last fifty messages I had received from the man. It was a fair request. Earth had enough room for a billion immigrants. Given our current fleet limitations, it would take months to transport seventeen million people to Earth; but we could do it.

After the Night of the Martyrs, we were less likely to relocate those people than we would have been a week ago. Now we had to worry about sedition, which was a highly contagious virus. If we brought the New Olympians to Earth, their unrest could and probably would spread among the general population.

I said, "The locals didn't exactly welcome us back when we overthrew the Unifieds. We don't need Olympus Kri zealots fanning the fires."

"No, sir."

"Anything else of interest?" I asked.

"Yes, sir. Colonel Riley sent over a report about a movement called the Martian Legion."

"The Martian Legion," I repeated, remembering that one of the men who attacked me had uttered the word "legion" as he died.

A picture of a hallway appeared on my tablet. Scrawled across the wall was the word, LEGION. The picture shrank, and dozens if not hundreds of similar pictures appeared. I tapped on one. It showed an ornate archway leading into what had once been a gourmet restaurant. Somebody had carved something into the beam along the top. I zoomed in for a closer look. LEGION IS WATCHING.

"What exactly is Legion?" I asked.

"According to Colonel Riley, the important question is, 'Who is Legion?'" said the briefing officer. "When we received these images, we thought the term referred to the spaceport security detail, but it doesn't fit. We can't even tell if the New Olympians consider Legion a friend or a foe. Some of the graffiti makes Legion out to be a threat, some suggests that Legion is a savior.

"We have been able to determine one thing: Niecy and the other martyrs were connected to Legion."

The screen on my tablet showed a photograph of an elbow. Tattooed on the soft flesh inside the crook of the joint, in curly longhand letters, was the word, "LEGION." The skin around it was pale and slightly blued, the color of curdled milk. The picture had been taken during the autopsy.

"Is this Niecy's arm?" I asked.

"It could have been any of the martyrs' arms, they all have the exact same tattoo," said the lieutenant colonel.

I'll be damned, I thought, something useful did come out of the autopsies. I said, "We need to find out about Legion. Tell Colonel Riley I'm coming to Mars. A job like this could require a delicate hand."

CHAPTER.

THREE.

Location: Washington, D.C.