Date: January 13, 2519

I did not need anything new on my plate.

I had Marines playing policemen on Mars. I had a corps to run. I had bases and operations to look after. Now that we had brought down the Unified Authority, the Enlisted Man's Empire was creating a government to replace it. We had laws to write and enforce and two angry populaces to placate. Nearly a year had passed, and we were still trying to round up the politicians and officers who had led the Unified Authority into starting the war. Most of the sons of bitches had gone into hiding. We caught scapegoats during the early days after the war and locked them up in jail. A few kindly Unifieds had even been good enough to fall on their swords, so to speak. We buried them quietly.

On top of that, there was another nagging security issue that needed to be resolved-broadcast travel.

Measured from edge to edge, the Milky Way was one hundred thousand light-years across, give or take a trillion miles. Man had not yet invented a ship that could travel at the speed of light, meaning that a quick jaunt across the galaxy and back would take a minimum of two hundred thousand years.

Enter broadcast physics, a technology that enabled ships to travel to any precalculated spot instantaneously. Broadcast travel, which involved unleashing incredible amounts of energy, rendered questions of distance irrelevant. Once you plugged the data into a broadcast computer, it no longer mattered if you were traveling to Earth's moon or to another galaxy. You vanished from one spot in an eruption of energy and you arrived at your destination in a similarly powerful eruption instantaneously.

The Unified Authority Navy had a fleet of self-broadcasting ships, which vanished during the war. They had broadcasted to a battle in the Scutum-Crux Arm of the galaxy, and no one ever heard from them again.

A year had passed with no sign of those ships. In my book that meant they were sunk.

Officially, the Enlisted Man's Navy did not have self-broadcasting ships. We used a pangalactic highway called the "Broadcast Network," a series of satellites that broadcasted ships from one location to another. Unfortunately, the satellite that connected Earth to the rest of the galaxy no longer existed. We were home, and we were stranded...in theory.

The Enlisted Man's Navy was supposed to have one self-broadcasting ship, a stealth cruiser designed for spying. That ship had disappeared during the battle for Earth. For all I knew, the spy ship might have been orbiting Earth or it might have been parked on my neighbor's front lawn. How do you track an invisible ship?

One of the reasons I missed my former life as an enlisted man was the simplicity of that existence. You take a private or a corporal or even master sergeant, he generally tackles one assignment at a time. That assignment might involve running into burning buildings or facing down mortars; but I liked the life of a grunt. What I never liked was juggling multiple concerns.

Mars was a problem that might evolve into a catastrophe, but it was not the only thing on my plate. There was another hole in our security. Somehow, this hole had become my direct responsibility as well...Smithsonian Field.

We rode out to inspect the site in a staff car. I did not know the sergeant driving the car; Watson and I rode in the back. "Are you taking me to an airfield or a bird-watching event?" I asked. "There aren't any Air Force bases out here."

We had driven forty miles out of the city and were deep in the forests. There were no buildings out here, just trees and rocks. It was a great place to visit if you wanted to go snowshoeing, maybe hunting for deer or rabbits.

I'd been prickly of late. With Mars and natural-born relations on my mind, I snapped at officers and staff. People began referring to me as "sir" more often than needed, a bad sign. Watson did not have that problem. As far as he was concerned, I was either "you" or "General." The word "sir" had not found its way into his vocabulary.

"The Air Force didn't build it, they took it over," said Watson. "It used to be a museum."

"No shit?" I said. "And people drove out here to visit it?" I asked.

"Not exactly. It was top secret under the Unified Authority as well."

We wound around ash-, alder-, and beech-covered hills, driving deeper and deeper into a no-man's-land until we left the paved road and went another five miles over gravel.

We weren't just a million miles from civilization, we were in a high-security forest. We passed four checkpoints before reaching the facility's front gate. Along the way, we drove through acres of trees lined by miles of electrified fences. There were guard towers hidden among the ash and cedars, and I spotted a missile battery as we approached the front gate.

As far as I was concerned, Smithsonian Field should not have existed at all. Since it did exist, I was glad to see the Air Force taking its security seriously.

There, in the middle of nowhere, behind the electrified razor-wire fence, was a series of oversized bunkers that looked like missile silos. Beyond the bunkers lay an unadorned airstrip mostly covered in snow.

"This is it?" I asked.

"Smithsonian Field," said Watson.

Our driver parked beside a jeep in which two officers waited. Watson and I transferred from our staff car to the jeep, traded names and salutes with our new driver, and our journey continued. We drove down a snow-covered ramp and entered a bunker, only it wasn't a bunker. It looked like a bunker from the outside, an underground fortification with reinforced walls. That ramp led down twenty-five feet and wound into an enormous hangar with thirty-foot ceilings.

The place was as clean as an operating room and brightly lit. It looked like a showroom for luxury cars. It wasn't, though. It was a museum with 207 antique spaceships that posed an enormous security risk.

"This is the original scientific explorer fleet, sir. These ships are one hundred years old, sir," said the Air Force major conducting my tour. I heard awe and reverence in his voice.

The spoon-shaped ships had silver hulls. Each ship was about thirty feet long and no more than fifteen feet tall. They had retractable wings and clusters of booster rockets for vertical liftoffs.

The Air Force maintained these ships in pristine condition. These were the ships that had mapped the galaxy. It was on these small ships that mankind eliminated so many astronomical myths. Entering this hangar was like stepping onto a dock and seeing the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

I said, "Destroy them."

"General, these ships are an invaluable treasure."

"And an incalculable security risk," I said. "These ships are the key to the galaxy. Anyone getting their hands on these ships can go anywhere they want. They can go looking for U.A. ships. They can transport Unified Authority enemy troops."

"But...but...General, these ships are our history!"

"We'll let future generations worry about preserving history, I'm more concerned about survival, Major."

"General, sir, these ships have no strategic value. It takes them an hour just to charge up for a broadcast," the major said.

"An hour?" I asked. "It takes them an hour? That means they can travel from Earth to Terraneau in an hour." Terraneau was the last-known location of the Unified Authority's self-broadcasting fleet.

That comment ended the tour. The major must have begun the day seeing himself as some kind of museum curator; now he realized he was a military man and part of a chain of command. He said, "Yes, sir."

Watson did not speak a word.

We returned to the staff car and started the drive home in silence. As we traced our way back along the gravel road, I asked, "What the hell did you expect me to say?"

Watson did not respond.

I repeated myself. I asked, "What the hell did you expect?"

Watson's answer was honest and bigoted. He glared at me, and said, "You probably can't appreciate the value of those ships."

"Yeah? Why would that be?" I asked.

He went silent. Smart man.

"Let's hear it, Travis. I can't appreciate their value because they are part of human history, and I'm synthetic. Is that it?"

He did not answer.

Normally, Watson and I had an amicable, almost friendly relationship. I didn't scare him. I was the Liberator clone, a monster most everyone classified somewhere between sharks and rabid dogs; but he'd never seen me kill anybody. In our dealings, I generally behaved like a bureaucrat.

I said, "Watson, six thousand New Olympian refugees made it from Mars to Earth by means unknown. For all we know, they traveled in those very same self-broadcasting ships." Actually, we knew they hadn't, but I was making a point.

CHAPTER.

FOUR.

Location: The Churchill

Date: April 3, 2519

Three months had passed since the Night of the Martyrs, and nothing significant had happened, no arrests, no attacks, no further intelligence gathered; but tension was growing on Mars. Mars security reported riots and disobedience. The Enlisted Man's Empire had a time bomb in its closets. We either needed to disarm the bomb known as the "Martian Legion" or detonate it.

"Remind me again, Harris. Why are you going to Mars?"

"I want to find out about Legion," I said.

"As I understand it, the term 'Legion' may very well be their code name for us, isn't that right?" asked Admiral Don Cutter, the highest-ranking officer in the Enlisted Man's Military. He had four stars, I had three. He didn't have any stars when the war with the Unifieds began; but having always been a big believer in a clear chain of command, I gave Cutter three stars during the war and a fourth star after it ended. He generally treated me as his equal. In his mind, the fourth star was ceremonial.

The man had brown hair and brown eyes and all of the other clone features. He was in his forties, some of his brown hair was turning white.

He said, "Harris, the New Olympians are an infestation. Have you actually been in the spaceport?"

"Dozens of times."

"Since we converted it into a flophouse for wayward New Olympians?

"I haven't been there since the evacuation," I admitted.

"It's a cesspool."

"Flophouse" and "cesspool," ancient terms still in circulation even though nobody knew precisely what they meant. Despite the certainty in his voice, Cutter had been no closer to Mars than he had been to a cesspool or a flophouse. I reminded him of that.

He went from authoritative to formal, and said, "I have discussed the situation with Spaceport Security. That's as close as I choose to get to that rat's nest. Colonel Riley says the air is so bad that he sleeps in his helmet."

Cutter was a Navy man, clearly he'd never worn combat armor. He was a fine officer, but his breath smelled like coffee.

I knew Marines who had coffee on their breath as well, but their halitosis did not carry the same connotation. While I and my men were out in the battlefield, he was safe on his ship, never more than a few feet away from his next cup of coffee.

"Hyperbole," I said. "Sleeping in a helmet is like sleeping with your back on a floor and your head on a bookshelf. Next time he says that, ask him if he has ever actually done it."

"Maybe it's time we shipped those people to Earth," said Watson. EMN procedures barred civilians from military ships; but I had brought him along just the same.

"Sure, we can ship them to Earth," I said, "Once we know who's loyal and who's looking for a change of government. They're not going anywhere until we know who is who."

Cutter glanced at Watson, and asked, "Who is he again?"

"He's my adjutant," I said.

Cutter asked, "Why do you have a civilian adjutant?"

I said, "Because I deal with a lot of civilians."

"And you're taking him to Mars as a civilian advisor?" Cutter asked. "As I understand it, this will be a military operation."

"He's not going to Mars," I said. "I'm leaving him with you."

Cutter arched an eyebrow as he said, "I don't remember authorizing that."

Watson said, "Leaving the New Olympians on Mars is a bad idea. The longer they are stuck there, the less loyal they will become."

"If we ship them to Earth, they'll infect the general population," said Cutter, a notion I shared. "I can work around seventeen million angry New Olympians on Mars. If they stir things up on Earth, we'll have forty million angry people on our hands."

"What do you plan to do with them, Admiral?" asked Watson, not showing the admiral proper respect. He was such a damned natural-born. He couldn't help himself. I suppose he was born that way.

Cutter said, "Like I said before, the place is a cesspool, we should flush it."

"Admiral, you are talking about killing seventeen million people," said Watson.

Cutter said, "I don't want to kill them, I want to wash my hands of them."

"Isn't that the same thing?" asked Watson.

"One more time, Harris, who is this man?"

"He's my civilian aide," I said.

"And who gave him permission to come aboard my ship?"

"I did."