There he was, the legendary Morgan Atkins, looking old but very much alive. Atkins, with a stooped back and a flowing white beard that reached below his chest, walked at the head of an entourage looking for all the world like a modern-day messiah out for a walk with his apostles.
Still looking distinguished, despite the beard and degradations of age, Atkins stopped to speak to the soldiers guarding the runway. As he stood there, Freeman held out a handheld scope and captured his image. He asked, “Identity confirmed?”
A voice said, “Confirmed. Expedite.”
Atkins spoke for several seconds with one of the guards. They shook hands. The guard said something, and Atkins laughed and responded.
A device in Freeman’s helmet measured the distance. Atkins was 323 feet away.
Freeman climbed out from behind the boxes he’d been using for cover. Nobody noticed him until he started running toward the shuttle; by that time, it was too late.
A series of small explosions went off around the landing strip. These were not large detonations, just small geysers of flame that shot ten feet up. Hoping to protect their leader, some of the members of Atkins’s entourage pushed him into the shuttle as bombs exploded and guards fell dead. The explosions continued for over a minute, a chaos of fire and smoke that sent bodies flying into the air.
The shuttle could not drive across the runway, not in all of the chaos caused by the bombs. Freeman darted into the smoke and flame without hesitation, paused long enough to fire shots at the last of the guards, and leaped into the shuttle as the hatch began to close.
Three men with guns stood just inside the door of the shuttle. Freeman shot them before they could even aim their weapons. He gave no pause to mercy. He simply stepped through the doorway and shot them.
A man ran at Freeman with a knife. Freeman shot him in the head. Atkins sat unarmed. He looked terrified. Freeman shot him without saying a word. Then he went to the cockpit. He grabbed the pilot by his head and snapped his neck, then threw his dead body out of the chair.
The feed ended.
When it came to murder, Freeman seemed utterly indifferent. He did not speak to his victims; nor did he offer them the chance to surrender. From what Watson could tell, Freeman’s sense of morality belonged only to the people who had contracted his services.
Watson scrolled through the EXPEDITED files. The last one was marked, WAYSON HARRIS, 12/18/16. He stared at the monitor in disbelief, realizing that until that moment, he had considered Harris indestructible. Now Watson decided that if it came to a war between Freeman and Harris, he would bet on Freeman.
Seeing a file with Harris’s name on it, Watson wondered how Harris had survived. Maybe Freeman had killed him and the Harris leading the Enlisted Man’s Empire was a clone of a clone. Not knowing much about cloning technology, he had no idea if clones could be created with experiences and knowledge imprinted in their brains.
That thought brought him back to where he began. If clones are programmed, maybe their intelligence can be replicated, he thought as he booted the video feed.
The feed showed a Johnston R-27, a civilian craft capable of both space and atmospheric travel, landing on a small runway at night. The R-27 rolled past a row of military transports and stopped near a fence. The door of the R-27 opened and a man carrying a rucksack climbed out.
The scene was recorded through the computerized scope of a sniper rifle, possibly the same one Freeman had used when he shot John Turnbow. The lines closed in around the target.
“Do you confirm identity as Wayson Harris?”
“Identity confirmed. Expedite.”
Freeman fired the shot, hitting the man square in the chest. A woman screamed. The file ended.
As Wayson Harris’s aide, Watson had the authority to launch an “all-points alert” search, commandeering every camera on every satellite orbiting Earth. The cameras and satellites performed their normal functions, but Freeman’s image had been added into their instructions set. Security cameras in police departments, military bases, government buildings, and transportation hubs now searched for Ray Freeman. Communications networks analyzed all transmissions, searching for his voice.
If Freeman walked down a street, spoke on a telephone, or entered a grocery store, the networks would spot him.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Location: Mars Spaceport
Date: April 10, 2519
The fight took place in the train station.
I had no idea how the speck the bastards got from the spaceport to the Air Force base, but there they were.
Whoever they were, they entered the base through the train station, caught the Marines guarding the platforms napping, and blew their fool heads off. Then they crossed the tunnel and sent a team up the escalator that led into the base. That was when the shooting began.
The bastards were not well trained or well armed, but they had one thing going for them—they considered martyrdom a privilege.
I was on the far side of the lobby talking with Curtis Jackson and a lieutenant when the first grenade rolled across the floor. Someone yelled, “Grenade!” and everybody jumped.
The grenade skittered across the granite, bouncing along an erratic path. In the spaceport, with its glass walls and civilian-friendly construction, a full-yield grenade would have caused a cave-in. This was not a full-yield grenade, and we were on a military base. The grenade exploded, but the walls remained in place.
The percussion of the grenade sent a few men tumbling through the air. It knocked me over. Feeling like my head might explode, I reached down and found my M27.
I tried to stand, but my head was in a funk. I was dizzy. I was tired. I was confused. Maybe I had a concussion. Six men ran from the tunnel. I shot them at the same time as thirty other Marines did. The miserable bastards stood and shredded as hundreds of bullets perforated their front sides and sprayed their backsides all over the walls in reds and purples.
Six more men charged up the stairs. So many Marines blasted those poor bastards that I didn’t waste my bullets on the slaughter. Instead, I fished in my belt and found a grenade, which I primed and tossed into the train tunnel.
A grenade, I thought. It almost felt like I shouldn’t have had one.
My grenade arced over the bursting bodies at the front of the tunnel and vanished behind them. A moment passed, and the blast from my grenade spit body parts all over the platforms below.
The invaders caught us unaware; but we were combat-hardened Marine killing machines. Our instincts took over. As the smoke and dust cleared from the tunnel, I crouched low and rushed into the chaos. Not knowing if any of my men had already entered the quagmire ahead of me, I held my fire, which turned out to be the correct decision. As the smoke cleared, I saw men in combat armor lined up along the rail overlooking the train platforms.
The tunnel was long and dark with a squared ceiling and three sets of tracks. A train sat dormant below me.
The bastards took the train? I wondered. I told Cutter to destroy the tracks.
Using night-for-day vision, I saw thousands of men crammed on the platform below me. They were not dressed in uniforms. They looked more like a mob than an army.
Three of my men sprinted down the escalator toward the platforms below, the muzzles of their M27s flashing so steadily they looked like welding torches. Buckshot nicked the metal rails along the escalator, sending dandelion sparks in the air. My Marines ran fast, presenting difficult targets; but with thousands of shotguns, even the Martian Legionnaires were dangerous. The first men down the stairs were atomized. The third guy down died as well, but he left a corpse.
I fished a second grenade out of my belt and tossed it into the sea of men blow.
“Fire in the hole!” I yelled over the interLink. Those were the first words I actually remembered speaking since I had left Mars Spaceport. I’d been thrown around by explosions in other battles, but never dazed like this.
The Legion had placed itself in an unwin
nable situation. There were only two ways out of the train station, back into the desert or up the escalator. They couldn’t go back out into the desert without breathing gear, and they’d be sitting ducks trying to file up the escalator. They had one train, and many of them started to board it.
“I need men and guns now, now, now!” I yelled into the interLink even though I already had more than enough men to finish this skirmish.
My men responded like Marines. A wave of men ran into the tunnel, guns raised. They stormed the rails overlooking the platform and shot the enemy like fish in a barrel.
The Legionnaires carried shotguns. They hit several of my men, killing some and merely injuring others. A Marine in combat armor slid down the side of the escalator, fired, and was hit in the face. The spray from the shotgun didn’t just penetrate his armor, it tore it to pieces. Buckshot and shredded plastic slit his skin. He slumped down, a gush of blood washing through his shattered exoskeleton.
A Legionnaire pulled a grenade. Only the ones in the very front could reach us with a grenade, and it would have required a good arm to hurl that pill up to the mezzanine and laser precision to arc it over the rail. Several people shot the bastard as he stepped forward to throw. He dropped the grenade and fell on his ass.
“Live one!” I yelled into the Link.
The force from the explosion shook the tunnel. I stood, peered over the rail, and saw the swamp below. The blood looked black through my visor. It covered the floor, the walls, and the tracks. Limbs and shredded bodies stuck out of the gore like rocks in a low tide.
My men and I wore combat armor that protected our ears. Most of the surviving Legionnaires either knelt or rolled on the ground. I could hear them moaning. Amazingly, a few continued the fight. A handful of Legionnaires ran along the platform, firing their shotguns and trying to reach the bottom of the escalator. They made easy targets that my Marines picked off with their M27s.
Throughout the five-minute battle, more and more of the attackers slipped onto the train. As the fighting slowed, the lights in the cars flicked on and the train started to move. A few last Legionnaires dived into the doors as it rolled toward the air locks. My Marines fired at the train, splintering its windows and punching holes into its sides until it looked like a sieve.
With the windows gone and walls shot to shit, the men on the train would suffocate once their ride entered the Martian badlands.
“Hold your fire. Hold your fire,” I told my men.
“You’re just going to let them ride out of here?” Jackson yelled.
“Let them go?” I asked. “They’re already dead.”
I watched the ghost train as it slowly rolled into the locks. The windows had shattered and fallen from their casings, the walls were riddled with holes. No one could have survived that fusillade, it would be like running through a hurricane and dodging the raindrops.
I was curious to see if the train would run all the way back to the spaceport. If it did, it would deliver a message. We’d lost round one in the grand arcade. They’d killed two of my men and gotten away with it. I wanted them to know that further attacks would not be tolerated.
I placed a new clip in my M27 as I walked down to the platform. A couple of dead Legionnaires lay partway up the escalator. I stepped around one and nudged the other out of my way with my boot. Then I came to the knot of bodies at the base of the escalator. Instead of pushing them out of my way, I vaulted over the rail and walked around them.
Body parts. Men killed by the grenade had been thrown against the walls and onto the railroad tracks. Not even their own mothers would have recognized these blood-soaked cadavers. Some had lost arms. One guy had both his arms still attached to his shoulders. He lay in a pool of blood with what looked like a third arm sprouting out of his gut. There was no determining which limbs were which without significant DNA tests.
A shotgun lay on the ground under the train track with a hand hanging from it, the finger still trapped in the trigger guard.
A group of New Olympians ran toward me along the platform, slipping in the blood and stumbling over body parts; but they did not have the opportunity to shoot. My men spotted them and shot them from the balcony.
The wounded did not give up. Men with multiple bullet holes tried to aim their shotguns at me. I killed some, my men killed the rest. The only Martian Legionnaires who would survive this battle were the ones who lost so much blood that they were no longer conscious, and they’d die soon enough.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Location: Washington, D.C.
Date: April 10, 2519
Watson entered the Blue Duck, wearing a charcoal gray suit and a red tie. He knew where to sit and what to order. He knew how to discourage the women he did not find attractive and how to welcome the ones he did.
He kept his coat unbuttoned because he wanted to look casual. The cut of his jacket emphasized his broad shoulders and his narrow waist. As he crossed the bar, he scanned for girls of interest and past playmates. He had come for new blood; revisiting old acquaintances did not interest him.
Watson had cruised the Blue Duck before. It was one of his favorite east-side bars, but he only visited it twice a year to avoid developing a reputation. Players who went to the same establishments too often exposed themselves as players.
Travis Watson did not want to be known as a player; he wanted to play.
There were thirty-two people in the bar, eighteen of them women, one of whom mildly interested Watson. She had long blond hair with curls and twists, blue eyes, and a black dress that showed off two-thirds of her cleavage. Watson liked her face. Her breasts were small, far too small for the panoramic showcase in which she had placed them. He didn’t mind girls with small breasts, but small-breasted girls with pretensions did not interest him.
If she was around for another hour and nothing better came in, Watson might introduce himself.
In the meantime, Watson found a secluded table. He sat and watched patrons as they entered and left. Three girls walked into the bar together. One had short black hair and a red dress. Another had dark brown hair that hung past her shoulders. Both appealed. The third had red hair. Watson could not see her face. In Watson’s mind, they were not a package deal. Even when women came in with dates, Watson did not necessarily consider them unavailable.
There had been occasions when Watson had gone home with a couple of girls. In recent times, that had become fashionable, two or three women taking one man home with them. Watson had fallen into that trap a couple of times, and did not enjoy it.
When a waitress came by to take his order, Watson asked for Scotch. She returned a moment later with his drink. By this time, the dark-haired girls and their redheaded friend had chosen a table no more than ten feet from where he sat. The redhead stole a glance at him. So did the girl with the pixieish black hair. The redhead was pretty and voluptuous, but he liked the look of the girl with the short hair.
This was a moment Watson enjoyed. As they inspected him, he neither looked away nor stared in their direction. He did not pretend not to notice them. He smiled. The girl with the short hair smiled back. So did the redhead. The one with the long, dark hair turned to have a look.
Watson settled back in his seat, in his own world. Any one of these girls would have interested him. All three did not. He pushed the girls out of his mind.
He thought about his visit to the U.A. Archives and Freeman while trying not to think about video feeds marked EXPEDITED. He tried not to think about the red vapor that surrounded Turnbow’s head and the look of terror on old Morgan Atkins’s face…and Wayson Harris flying backward as his chest exploded.
How could Harris have survived that? Watson asked himself. He knew the answer. He could not have survived it. In his mind, bullets were more lethal when they came from Ray Freeman’s rifle.
“Should I feel insulted?”
Watson looked up. It was the girl with the short black hair. She had a lithe, slender figure. Her breasts w
ere smaller than the ones the blonde had on display, but this girl did not misrepresent them. She had a short, sunset red dress that showed off her hips and her legs and her tiny waist, and clung to the curve of her ass. She looked athletic.
Glad to wash Freeman from his thoughts, Watson said, “I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
She smiled and sat in the chair across from him.
Watson’s patter did not include rehearsed lines. He knew how to flirt and how to make small talk. Mostly, though, he knew how to listen. He liked listening to women, though he had no interest in listening to the same woman for the rest of his life.
In Watson’s mind, men and women did not so much chat in bars as hold negotiations. He liked the sound of women’s voices and the cat-and-mouse games of intergender conversation. They knew what he wanted, but they pretended not to know. He, being an experienced negotiator, recognized smart women pretending to be ditsy and dumb girls who needed to be praised for their intellect.
He gave them what they wanted. If a girl with insipid thoughts wanted to be told she was profound, he did it. Those deals were easy. He enjoyed both the challenge of women who were comfortable with themselves and the ease of girls who wanted compliments for what they weren’t.
Watson said, “I saw you and your friends come in.” He left it at that, leaving it to her to make the next move.
“Don’t you like parties?” she asked.
“It’s my traditional upbringing,” he said. “Two is company, four’s a crowd.”
She considered her options, made her decision, smiled. “You could buy me a drink.”
After years of flirting and playing the field, Watson had developed a reliable ability to profile and categorize. He already knew the woman better than she would have guessed. She would be a secretary or a receptionist with ambitions of office management. She was bright but not college educated. Judging by the way she talked, the way she dressed, the style of her hair, and her walk, Watson guessed that she liked to dance, and she liked the outdoors.
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