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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’thotheaded, 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