SIX.

I was the first man off the transport. One of the dockworkers asked me, "Who's in charge of this?" as I waited for my men to form ranks.

Each of my men's armor gave off a unique signal identifying his name, rank, serial number, and area of military occupational specialty. I could see those signals through my visor. The man who approached me did not have that advantage.

I said, "I am. Is there a problem?"

"Oh," he said.

He was big, strong, natural-born, and unarmed. I was as tall as him, armed, and wearing combat armor. I had fifteen hundred armed men at my command-all of them carrying M27s with the detachable rifle stock in place. In close quarters like these, the stocks would get in the way if a firefight started, but they made our guns look bigger and more menacing. It was a bluff. I hoped we could avoid shooting our guns by making sure everybody saw them.

Having been built to serve as a pangalactic commercial port, Mars Spaceport had enormous landing areas designed to accommodate freighters. My fifteen transports did not fill even a tenth of the loading area in which we landed, and the spaceport had twenty-five freight docks.

Crews of longshoremen stood still as statues as my men finished forming into ranks. They eyed us warily, not moving, not speaking, afraid to turn away.

In military parlance, this was an inspection, not an invasion; but they did not know our intentions. It was also a show of force, and I would not say anything to change that impression.

Once my various companies had formed into a regiment, we marched out of the hangar without saying a word.

Thanks to our combat armor, we would not need to deal with Mars Spaceport's unique charms. We could see the squalor, but the head lice could not penetrate our bodysuits. Our rebreathers recycled the air inside our armor, allowing us to breathe without inhaling the sweat-permeated spaceport air.

I saw the grime and wondered if Riley really did sleep in his helmet.

We entered a long service hall. Here the floor was only thirty feet across, but rows of families occupied the areas along each wall. The word LEGION had been written in ten-foot-tall letters above their hovels, the letters badly scrawled in runny bright red paint. Beneath the word, the artist had sketched a row of bloody combat helmets, some modern and some that looked like they came from ancient Rome.

"You seeing this, Jackson?" I asked. This mission belonged as much to Colonel Curtis Jackson as it belonged to me. Tarawa was his unit. That had been the nickname for the Second Regiment of the Second Division since the regiment won a battle on a tiny island nearly six hundred years earlier, Tarawa. It was a newly reactivated unit, created over the last month.

"Yes, sir. Hard to miss," he said.

The spaceport's lights were dim, and the floors were crowded. Looking around that first corridor, I saw families living on tattered blankets, their only belongings were a pot for water, a few dirty dishes, and the clothing on their backs.

Like a mass picnic in Hell, I told myself. From that moment on, I thought of the people on their blankets as "picnickers." Assigning names like "picnicker" was a coping mechanism. Thinking of these people as picnickers made the bleak reality of their existence easier for me to ignore.

The blankets were spread one right beside the next. They stretched the length of the hallway. I saw a woman nursing her baby. She did not bother covering her exposed breasts. Living as refugees had forced these people to abandon every hope of privacy. If this woman could not nurse her infant in a crowded hall, the infant would starve.

Walking through that hall, we passed a twenty-foot mountain of trash that touched the ceiling. Flies buzzed around the pile. How flies had migrated to Mars I could not understand. The spaceport must have had equipment for disposing trash into some kind of landfill, but these people had long since abandoned such civilities as burying their trash.

Most of the people we passed just stared at us. One clever fellow, dressed only in his underwear, stood at attention, saluted, and then farted so loudly that I heard it fifty feet away. A little boy no older than three pointed a toy gun at us, and yelled, "Bang! Bang!"

When I passed within ten feet of an old man lying on a blanket, he asked, "Are you speckers invading the spaceport?" Without waiting for me to answer, he added, "You can have this hole as far as I'm concerned."

"Do you know who painted that wall?" I asked, pointing to the Legion graffiti.

"Nope. Must have happened when I was taking a shit," he said.

While my fifteen hundred Marines marched past, I approached a woman with three children and asked her the same question. She ignored me.

My Marines marched with perfect precision down one decrepit corridor and into the next as we made our way to the administrative offices. A woman jumped up from her blanket and threw something at one of my men. Whatever it was, it hit him and splattered across the back of his armor.

We passed a water dispensary. A line of people carrying pots waited for a turn at the water. Lines for food, lines for water, lines to use the bathroom and bathe, no wonder these people were hostile. Living on Mars, these people were no more self-sufficient than newborn infants.

Maybe they were right to hate us; but until we sorted out their civil unrest, they would remain on Mars. In their eyes, the same clone military that had saved them from destruction on their home planet had abandoned them in a dump.

We originally promised them a short layover on Mars. Now, one year later; they were prolonging their incarceration by their actions. The way station had become a quarantine.

We could have turned into one of the spaceport's bigger and more populated hallways, but I wanted to avoid the masses for as long as possible. Instead, we followed the service hall as it snaked around a line of passenger-boarding areas.

I had a copy of the floor plan in my visor, a rotating three-dimensional map that included photographs of Mars Spaceport back in its halcyon days. Using optical commands, I spun the floor plan and viewed it from all sides, looking for detours; but our options diminished as we marched on.

In order to get to the administrative offices, we would need to enter the grand arcade, a two-mile corridor of stores and restaurants. There would be multiple millions of people in the arcade, maybe even a full five million.

I looked back down the hallway behind us at the people lying on their blankets with their belongings scattered around them. They were dirty, and their blankets were filthy and tattered. They'd spent a year like this, with no more dignity than cattle locked in stalls.

Using the commandLink, I contacted Cutter on the Churchill. I said, "Admiral, do you have any spare service blankets."

He asked, "How many do you need?"

"Seventeen million," I said.

"How bad is it?" he asked.

"Dante Alighieri wouldn't have survived this," I said.

"I don't know Alighieri. Is he Marines or Navy?"

"Neither," I said. Cutter was a good officer, but his interests did not extend to the classics. "He's a civilian."

"So what is the situation?" he asked.

"We had no problem landing," I said. "The natives aren't especially friendly, but no incidents. We've been avoiding the main areas, but we're going to need to enter the hub to get to Governor Hughes."

Mars Spaceport had six passenger wings, one for each of the Milky Way's spiral arms, all of which connected to a central hub. We had entered the spaceport through a loading dock in the Orion Wing. Now we were just outside the grand arcade, the hub. The administrative offices were just off the arcade.

"It's not too late to withdraw," said Cutter. "You're sitting on a 'powder keg.'"

I'd never wanted to be an officer. I hated wearing the weight of men's fates on my shoulders. Depending on what happened next, seventeen million lives could hang in the balance.

I said, "It's too late to back out now."

I led my men to the end of the service hall, turned a corner, and got my first look at the grand arcade.

What had once been a glorious atrium ringed by five floors of upscale stores was now a slum of lean-tos and blankets. Sixty feet up, an enormous banner hung from the ceiling. It was not a gleaming, streaming, glorious banner announcing a sale or welcoming travelers to Mars. It was a torn swath of dirt-colored carpeting, forty feet long and twenty feet wide with the words: LEGION: NIGHT OF THE MARTYRS painted across it.

"Check your console, I'm sending you a streaming feed," I told Cutter. Using an optic command, I transmitted the images. Now he could see everything I saw. I stared up at the banner.

"What is that?" he asked.

"It's a banner."

"I can see that," he said, sounding peevish.

"It says 'Legion: Night of the Martyrs,'" I said.

"Yeah, I can read," he said.

"Then why did you ask what it was?" I asked.

No answer.

I looked away from the banner and gave Cutter a panoramic sweep of the area. I showed him throngs of people leaning over the rails of the upper floors. The place was dark and dingy and teeming with refugees. Like I said before, the people crowded together like termites in a nest, and they did not seem happy to see us.

A loud and angry howl filled the air as we emerged from the service hall. People screamed, they shouted, they booed. Teenage boys ran in front of our column and made obscene gestures. One kid dropped his pants and showed us his ass.

Crowds of people stood on either side of us. There had to have been more than a million people crowded onto the main floor and hundreds of thousands more along the railings of each of the upper-atrium floors.

From a tactical perspective, we had walked into an untenable nightmare. I had led my men into a deep ocean never realizing just how helpless we would be against the tides.

"Keep 'em moving," I told Jackson.

"Aye, sir," he said. Curtis Jackson had a temper. He wasn't hotheaded, but he wasn't the type of man who tolerates bullshit and smiles.

"Order your men to set their sound filters," I told him.

"Aye, aye."

Our helmets were soundproof and equipped with microphones for picking up ambient sound. People become paranoid when they cannot hear what goes on around them; it's human nature. So we generally allow the boys to leave their mikes hot.

Having them turn off their external mikes would cut them off from the outside world, a move that would make them tense; but I compensated by allowing them to speak to each other.

"General, sir, should we proceed as we are?" asked Jackson.

"We discussed this route back on the ship," I said. "There aren't any alternate routes."

"You could return to the Churchill," said Cutter. I had forgotten he was still Linked in.

"Begging the general's pardon, sir, but what this Marine means to say is that perhaps we should give them a show of force. We don't want them to think we're scared."

"You aren't scared?" I asked.

"No, sir."

"Not even the least bit nervous?" I asked.

"No, sir,"

"You should be, Colonel. There are ten thousand New Olympians for every one of us."

Fortunately, we did not need to walk the entire length of the arcade to reach the administrative offices. The alley that led to Hughes was only a hundred yards away.

We passed what must have once been a water garden, a series of ramps, falls, and pools that now sat as dry as the Martian landscape outside. Unlit signs, some shattered but many still whole, identified stores that had long since been emptied of merchandise and furniture. Inside, in their shadowy reaches, people stood and stared out at us. They looked like ghosts.

The people on the upper decks began hurling trash at us. It fell like enormous balls of hail. Articles of clothing, shoes, burning shreds of paper, bits of carpet, a grating from a ceiling vent, and more rained down, mostly missing us. Ceiling tiles, so light they seemed to glide on air currents, tumbled through the air and shattered a few yards ahead of us.

For a moment, and just a moment, I turned on my external microphones. I heard such a cacophony that I could not interpret a word of anything that anybody yelled.

The people seemed to sense that we had not come to fight. Small bits of debris rained down on our heads, but the bigger stuff crashed and splattered fifty feet ahead of us.

Then it happened. Something about the size of a motorcycle cascaded down from one of the upper floors and hit three of my men. Whatever those people had thrown, it crushed two of my men and grazed a third before hitting the ground and disintegrating into a cloud of dust.

The two dead Marines lay ruptured on the floor, the exoskeletons of their armor broken to pieces and their legs and arms stretched out so that they looked like man-sized insects that had been crushed. Blood pooled onto the floor around them.

That stopped our parade. Jackson told the men to halt and guard their flanks while a medic checked the bodies. We didn't really need the medic, the cracked helmets told the tale well enough. He ran a scanner over the bodies and pronounced both men dead, then he went to see after the injured man, who was struggling to remove his chest plate.

The parade wasn't the only thing halted at that moment. The fusillade of debris dried up. So did the shouting.

"What do we do now?" asked Jackson.

By this time, I was in the throes of a full-fledged combat reflex, lying to myself that I cared about these people, that they deserved mercy, and that I did not want to kill them all.

"We walk," I said, ignoring the way the hormone-tinged blood running through my head screamed for violence.

"They killed two of my men. They don't get away with killing my men."

"Yeah?" I asked. "And what exactly are you going to do about it, Colonel? What the speck do you suggest we do?"

"We find the people responsible and make an example."

"How are you going to find them?" I asked in a silky, serpentine voice.

People flooded into the already packed atrium, gawkers hoping we would put on a show, protestors looking to show their anger, and a small battalion of men in suits. The gawkers and protesters kept their distance. The men in suits walked toward us.

Like any standoff, this one seemed to generate electricity. As many as a million pairs of eyes stared at us, waiting for us to make a move. If we stayed in the center of the atrium, they could stone us to death with their debris. If we opened fire, there was no telling how many people we would kill.

The combat reflex distorted my thoughts. I wanted revenge. I wanted violence. I wanted to increase the amount of the hormone in my blood, and the only way to do it was to attack, to kill. Think! I told myself. Stay focused.

The men in suits pushed through the crowd. I did not recognize any of them, but I knew who they were. They would be the politicians. Hughes must have sent them, I told myself. Just hold on. Have these men take you to Hughes.

"General, are you going to let them get away with killing Marines?" Jackson asked.

"The men who dropped that...whatever the hell it was, are long gone, Colonel," I said. The words came out slowly now. I had to force myself to speak calmly. "They're long gone, and I can just about guarantee you that you won't find anyone who saw what happened."

"Somebody saw," said Jackson.