The Clone Sedition (7 page)

Using the commandLink, I addressed the platoon sergeants and officers in the group. I said, “This is General Wayson Harris. You’ve all been briefed; but on the off chance that any of
you were not paying attention, I will remind you that this is not, repeat, not an invasion. Mars Spaceport is EME-held territory.

“This is not an invasion. It is an inspection.”

That much was bullshit, by the way. This was not an inspection or an invasion, it was a damn pissing match. We were sending a small but lethal force into the belly of the beast to prove to the New Olympians that we were still in charge. We were sending a force that was too small to protect itself and daring the bastards to attack.

“We are fifteen hundred men patrolling an area populated by seventeen million hostiles. We cannot afford to pick a fight. Sergeants, do not allow your men to touch triggers or disengage the safeties unless specifically ordered to do so. That is all.”

I entered the cockpit and watched as we launched. We floated out of the ship and penetrated the atmosphere.

Below us, Mars Spaceport sparkled on an otherwise dismally dark landscape. The planet’s rotation had the spaceport pointing away from the sun. As we descended, I saw the three raised train tracks that ran the ten miles between the spaceport and Mars Air Force Base. They looked as slender as guitar strings from a half mile up.

I surveyed the landscape below. Some people played down Mars’s unique beauty by comparing it to places like the Mojave Desert on Earth. To me, the surface of Mars looked like the deepest depths of the ocean, a silent, alien world filled with familiar elements.

I left the quiet surroundings of the cockpit and returned to the kettle, with its capacity crowd. As I came down the ladder, I used the commandLink to eavesdrop on a few of my lieutenants as they briefed their men. The company commander in my shuttle told his men, “Remember, these are friendlies. Even if they act hostile, do not aim or shoot unless ordered to do so.”

Good information, though delivered in too timid a tone.

I listened to the briefings on other transports until I heard:

“…you are a grenadier, damn it, you specking better have some launchers on you.”

“But sir, we have strict orders…”

“I know what General Harris said,” yelled the lieutenant. “I also know how things work in this man’s corps. Riflemen
carry rifles, automatic riflemen carry automatic rifles, and grenadiers carry specking grenades. If I want you to carry a slingshot, I will call you a slingadier. If I want you to carry a bucket, I will call you a specking bucketier. You are a grenadier, gawdamnit! Hide some specking grenades in your specking gear or I’ll throw your specking ass in the brig and call you a specking brigadier! Do you read me?”

Using the commandLink, I addressed the entire regiment. “This is General Harris. You have been issued special short-range rounds for your M27s. Any men seen carrying grenades, rockets, or particle-beam weapons will face a summary hearing.
Do you read me?
”

I then switched to a direct to Lieutenant Geoffrey Bates, he of the “slingadiers-bucketiers,” and I said, ‘If I ever catch you pulling another end run, Lieutenant, I will place your ass in front a firing squad and tell them you are a
targetier
.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” he shouted in the very loud fashion of a Marine who has been duly chastised by his superior.

And then we touched down. The muffled sounds of booster rockets rumbled through the walls as we lowered into place. The iron deck below my feet gave one hard bounce as we landed.

The only door on a transport was the rear hatch, a slow-moving metal slab that took half a minute to swing open. Outside, a startled crew stared in at us. On an open mike that the dockworkers would hear, I said, “We do not require your assistance, gentlemen. My men are perfectly capable of off-loading themselves.”

Workers rushed out of our way as we marched off the transports, but we still locked the birds tight for safekeeping.

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.