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