The last time I had visited Mars Spaceport, I steered fifteen hundred men into the grand arcade and started a riot. Of the 3,104 Marines I brought on this mission, I left 3,004, including Ritz, to guard the doors while I took a hundred men into the spaceport's more populated areas.

The lay of the land was straightforward: one large continuous baggage area along the outer walls filled with conveyor belts and walkways. We crossed the gloomy empty space and passed through a doorway that opened to an inner hallway. As we entered this hall, I repeated the all-important directive, "Do not remove your combat armor. If you need to shit, shit in your armor. I will personally shoot any man I see removing his helmet. Do I make myself clear?"

I did not bother telling them why they could not remove their helmets. They did not need to hear sketchy information and paranoid theories about reprogramming. Once the fighting started, they would have plenty to worry about.

The cargo area was not used as a living space for one obvious reason-it opened to an outer world. If a single seal failed, the area would fill with toxic Martian air.

As we marched through the service halls, however, we came upon civilization. Mars Spaceport was just as I had left it: overcrowded, grimy, lacking hope. Picnickers lined the unadorned walls of the corridor. They watched us and hardly responded. Some people stared. A few kids pointed at us.

"Move out," I told my men, and I led the way. Most generals avoid the battlefield. Those who do, seldom take point. If I had my way, I would trade my general's stars in for the stripes of an enlisted man; the problem was that I did not trust in the abilities of the men who might replace me as commanding officers.

A spaceport map showed in a corner of my visor. We were close to our destination as the crow would fly, if that crow could fly through walls. We were below the outer gates of the Perseus wing of the complex. We needed to climb two flights of stairs to reach what had once been the general boarding level, then we needed to wind our way to the hub of the spaceport and descend into its bowels.

If we could have walked through walls, we would have had a few hundred yards to go. Observing the laws of physics and not destroying the walls around us, we had a half mile to cross.

I kept my men marching at a fast pace. We ignored locals as we sped past them. Easy to do; most people leaped out of our way, some ran.

The area was not brightly lit, but that mattered very little. We could see more than a hundred feet ahead of us in the ambient lighting, and our visors would automatically switch to night-for-day vision in the dark areas.

"Sir, I don't get it," Colonel Ritz said over the interLink. That was Ritz. Starting out by asking for permission to speak would have been too much like following protocol for the son of a bitch. He'd managed the "sir" part, then launched right into his conversation.

He asked, "You say we came to protect the New Olympians?"

"Affirmative," I said.

The corridor curved ahead. The stairs to the next level would be visible once we turned that corner.

"Last time you came, you massacred a few thousand of them." When I did not respond, he said, "You killed off their army, and now you're back to protect them?"

"Affirmative," I said.

"So, they were the enemy last time, and this time it's the Unified Authority?"

"Renegade leaders from the Unified Authority, Colonel. The Unified Authority no longer exists."

"And you say they are here to kill the New Olympians?"

"Affirmative."

"I don't get it, sir. What would holdovers from the Unified Authority have against New Olympians?"

"They don't have anything against the New Olympians. They're after us."

A long, silent pause...something I seldom got from Ritz. Finally, "Just to make sure I have this straight, sir, a mysterious group of Unifieds who have nothing against the New Olympians is going to kill them to make trouble for us."

"That just about sums it up," I said.

"Why would they attack the New Olympians, sir? Why not attack us?"

I said, "We would be a military target. They'd need an army to hit us. The New Olympians are an unarmed population occupying an unprotected facility." Yeah, I was using military-speak. I was speaking in the language that Ritz both understood and avoided.

"Ritz, you are going to have to trust me on this one," I said.

"If you say so, sir," said Ritz.

The hall was dark and packed with people, some standing in the center and some sitting along the walls. I could see the stairs in the distance.

A muzzle flared in the distance, above the crowd. An assassin with a lowly M27 waited for us on the stairs. I did not see the man, just the flash from his gun.

A sniper with a precision rifle and an excellent scope might not have hit innocent bystanders. This asshole sprayed into the crowd and hit nothing but innocents. A man screamed in pain. A moment later, a woman began screaming about her child. The panic began. People ran for their lives. A flood of people stampeded toward me and my men.

Some of the people running along the walls tripped and were trampled. No more aware of me than he was of the oxygen in his lungs, a man dashed in my direction. As he came in range, I hit him across the jaw with the grip of my M27, and he crumpled. I heard more firing and stepped back behind a wall for cover.

The people giving the orders for the enemy were in the spaceport, trapped. Freeman must have done something to disrupt their plans. Maybe Freeman had liberated Howard Tasman, maybe he had taken something or someone else.

"General, you're saying that these Unifieds want to hurt us by killing Martians?" Ritz asked. He did not hear the gunfire. He did not know that the fighting had already begun.

I said, "Shove off, Ritz. I'm busy at the moment." Then, on an open frequency that every man would hear, I said, "We have hostiles in the spaceport."

The assassin continued to shoot, brief bursts fired into the tail end of the scattering crowd. People screamed, and, in another minute, the junction was empty except for the wounded, the dead, and the sniper. He fired one last burst into the empty hall, but my men and I were safe behind a wall. I waited a few seconds. By the time I swung around the corner, the bastard had already run away.

Using my commandLink, I listened to the chatter of the Marines I had brought with me. One man said, "I wish I had a grenade." Another said, "Speck! It's so specking crowded. There's no way we can shoot back."

One Marine said, "It's not the shooting that scares me. I don't want to get trampled." Someone answered, "You're wearing combat armor, dumb ass. Half the specking planet can walk across your back, and you won't feel a thing."

"Armor isn't bulletproof," the first guy said.

The second guy said, "So don't get shot."

I waited for our gunman to return. He never did. While I waited, I checked back with Ritz.

"Any sign of hostiles at your doors?" I asked. His men had placed sensors that would warn them when anyone came within two hundred yards of the perimeter.

"No takers yet, sir. Why would the Unifieds want to kill Martians, when the Martians don't like us?"

I said, "This is just guesswork, okay?"

"Yeah."

I started toward the stairs, knowing that the man with the gun would not be there. He didn't want to fight; he wanted to slow us down. At that moment, we had a huge numerical advantage; but in another few minutes, Riley's security troops would return, and the scales would turn against us.

I said, "The New Olympians like us."

"Then why did they send martyrs to kill us?"

"They didn't send the martyrs, the Unifieds did."

"The martyrs came from Mars."

"The Unifieds recruited them. They sent evangelists here to start a religious revival. That was where the Martian Legion came from, the Unifieds were trying to play us and the New Olympians against each other while their black ops teams carried out the real work."

Ritz said, "Reprogramming clones?"

"Reprogramming the clones in Spaceport Security."

"Son of a bitch," said Ritz. "That almost makes sense."

"From what we've seen so far, the Unifieds have a few busted-up battleships, and they might have some ground troops. They can't take us on head-on..."

"So they sent recruiters to Mars," Ritz said.

"Evangelists," I said. "They started a religious revival. The goal was to recruit fanatics who wanted to believe God could deliver them from Mars."

I had my men fan out. There were only one hundred of us, but the section was small and empty now, thanks to the gunfire. Seventeen bloody people lay on the ground, most dead but not all of them. A few moaned and moved.

My riflemen took positions along both sides of the stairs as the first fire teams dashed up the stairs and secured the way.

I said, "If you wanted to bring back the Unified Authority, you'd need to get a lot of people on your side, and the best way to do that would be to turn them against us."

"The Martians?" Ritz generally referred to the New Olympians as "Martians."

"They have numbers, but they are powerless. They're meaningless, except from the humanitarian point of view...and these Unifieds are not interested in humanitarian efforts.

"They want to cause unrest on Earth..."

"So they kill off the Martians and make it look like we did it," said Ritz. "But they still wouldn't have enough of an army to beat us."

He knew about reprogramming, but he did not fully understand the implications...neither did I. "That's where the reprogrammed clones come in," I said as I walked up the stairs.

I was still at the top of the stairs, my men all around me, when an explosion rocked the area around us. It felt like an earthquake. We were in a hall that led into the grand arcade; there were thousands of picnickers. A hole formed in the middle of the floor. I didn't see it at first. Then the screaming started, and the panic, and people slid into the hole as the floor crumbled into dust.

On the upper floors, people were able to run to safety. The main floor gave way around that hole, and the disintegration spread. It looked like the floor was made of water, and that water was being drawn down an enormous drain, and the drain sucked in thousands of people as well.

A thick cloud of dust and smoke rose out of the floor. Tactical and night-for-day showed me nothing; but switching to heat vision, I saw the specters of people running, people falling, and the bodies of the trampled.

"What the speck is happening up there?" Ritz shouted over the interLink.

The floor continued crumbling until it nearly reached the outer walls of the court. Picnickers who stayed near their blankets survived, those that weren't trampled.

"General, what just happened?" Ritz said.

I looked around the area. I had not lost any of my men. Had we been a little quicker up the stairs or sent some men ahead, we would have taken casualties. We had played it by the book, leapfrogging our positions, covering the top of the stairs, then setting a perimeter. Entering an area methodically takes time.

Not everyone who fell through the floor was killed. I could hear people screaming from below.

"They detonated a bomb, but they didn't get any of us."

"The hell they didn't," said Ritz. "Whatever they did, it blew doors off hinges down here. I lost men." A moment later, he said, "I've lost forty-seven men."

I had forgotten about the shock wave. The bomb exploded under the floor, in the halls we had just traversed. The force of the shock wave would have channeled through those corridors like medicine in a syringe.

"Forty-seven dead?" I asked. During battle, I analyzed losses by the numbers. I thought, Forty-seven men, that's more than a platoon.

"Yes, sir."

"How many injured?"

"The men near the doors were killed, everybody else walked away."

The men by the doors were killed, I repeated in my head. Men in combat armor don't worry about flesh wounds.

"There are going to be injured civilians, Colonel. See if you can run some triage in the halls," I said.

"I'm already out there, sir. Euthanizing them would be more humane."

"That bad?" I asked.

"General, I have never seen anything like this. It's like somebody painted the walls bloodred."

CHAPTER.

SIXTY-FIVE.

Location: Mars Air Force Base

Date: May 2, 2519

As he watched the explorers on the tactical screen, Watson tried to decipher Harris's strategy. He knew Harris had to be the one in charge of the explorer fleet. Cutter would never have considered using unarmed antiques in a battle with modern ships.