The Clone Sedition Read Online Free PDF Page B

is Tom Niecy. From what we can tell, he was the ring-leader,” the lieutenant colonel said. “Prior to the evacuation of Olympus Kri, he appears to have worked as an engineer designing car seats.”
    “He designed seats for cars?” I asked.
Now there’s a terrorist profile if I’ve ever seen one,
I thought.
    “Yes, sir. He specialized in ‘smart’ seats for luxury cars. The seats he designed read your
posterior
signature and automatically adjusted to your body temperature, spinal posture, and firmness preferences.”
    I said, “Seats that know you by the spread of your ass.”
    “More or less, sir,” he said.
    “Thirty-seven-year-old car seat designers don’t strike me as much of a security risk,” I said.
    “No, sir.”
    “What makes you think Niecy was in charge?”
    “He was ten years older than Grant or Rand.”
    “Who are Grant and Rand?” I asked.
    “Niecy, Grant, and Rand…the three men you kill—who attacked you, sir.”
    “The other two were named Grant and Rand? I didn’t know their names.”
    “Yes, sir. Tom Niecy was ten years older than the other men. He was the only one with an actual job on Mars. That was one of the patterns we found when we started investigating the ‘Night of the Martyrs.’”
    “The Night of the Martyrs?” I asked. I had never heard the term, but I understood what it meant. The New Olympians lost more men than they killed, and thousands of corpses turned up the next morning as well. Most of the attackers who got away committed suicide. By the end of the next day, we had six thousand New Olympian corpses on our hands.
    “That’s what they’re calling it on the mediaLink.”
    “Three of those martyrs came after me with knives and a pipe,” I said.
    “Yes, sir,” said the lieutenant colonel. What else could he say?
    “Catchy name.” I sighed.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “You might as well continue.”
    “Yes, sir. As I was saying, sir, there was a pattern among all of the teams, an older member, generally with a paying job, leading two younger men…”
    “Was he designing car seats on Mars?”
    “No, sir. Niecy worked in the spaceport loading docks.”
    “He was a stevedore?” I asked.
    “Yes, sir, and the assistant pastor of a spaceport Christian congregation.”
    “A pastor,” I mumbled. That checked out. I remembered the Bible.
A Bible and a blade,
I thought to myself.
    “Have you contacted Gordon Hughes about this ‘Night of the Martyrs’?” I asked. “What does he have to say about it?”
    Gordon Hughes was the de facto governor of Mars, or at least the population living in Mars Spaceport, which was the only known population on the planet. He’d once been an important man in Unified Authority politics, then he joined a group that wanted to overthrow the Unified Authority, only to return as an ally in the very same war.
    Hughes, who originally hailed from Olympus Kri, used whatever political capital he could muster to evacuate his home planet before the aliens cooked it. Now he and his people weretrapped on Mars—seventeen million residents trapped in a revolving-door facility meant to accommodate less than six million transients.
    “He says his people are still loyal to the Enlisted Man’s Empire, sir,” said the lieutenant colonel.
    “Do you believe him?”
    “We’re still trying to piece it all together. I spoke with Colonel Riley before coming here.” Martin Riley was the head of Mars Spaceport Security, a detail of five thousand lucky Marines attached to the spaceport as a peacekeeping force.
    “What does Riley think?”
    “He believes the spaceport is a powder keg with a lit fuse.” The lieutenant colonel checked his notes, and said, “His exact words were, ‘They’re going to start eating their babies and blaming us for it.’”
    “It sounds like Colonel Riley and Governor Hughes don’t exactly see eye to eye,” I said.
    “No, sir. According to Colonel Riley, Governor Hughes has become something of a