“Clear,” came the leading Marine sergeant’s voice on the tactical channel.

“Nothing moving or alive within a kilometer of Site One,” rasped the lieutenant of the Home Guard. “Bodies in the street.”

“Clear here,” said the captain of the Swiss Guard.

“Confirm nothing moving in Arafat-kaffiyeh except your people,” came the voice of the captain of the Jibril.

“Affirmative,” said Holy Office Security Commander Browning.

Feeling foolish and disgruntled, the Grand Inquisitor swept down the ramp and across the sandy commons. His mood was not lifted by the silly osmosis mask he had to wear, its circular boostirator slung over his shoulder like a loose medallion.

Father Farrell, Archbishop Robeson, Governor Palo, and a host of functionaries ran to keep up as Cardinal Mustafa strode by the kneeling security forms and, with an imperious wave of his hand, ordered a portal cut in the containment field. He passed through over the protests of Commander Browning and the other forms in black armor who were scuttling to catch up.

“Where is the first of…” began the Grand Inquisitor as he bounced down the narrow alley opposite the commons. He still was not used to the light gravity here.

“Right around this corner…” panted the Archbishop.

“We should really wait for the outer fields to be…” said Governor Palo.

“Here,” said Father Farrell, pointing down the street onto which they had emerged.

The group of fifteen stopped so quickly that those aides and security people in the rear had to catch themselves before bumping into the VIP’s in front.

“Dear Lord,” whispered Archbishop Robeson and crossed himself. Through the clear osmosis mask, his face was visibly white.

“Christ!” muttered Governor Clare Palo. “I’ve seen the holos and photos for two weeks, but… Christ.”

“Ahh,” said Father Farrell, taking a step closer to the first body.

The Grand Inquisitor joined him. He went to one knee in the red sand. The contorted form in the dirt looked as if someone had fashioned an abstract sculpture out of flesh, bone, and gristle. It would not have been recognizably human had it not been for the teeth gleaming in the wide-stretched mouth and one hand lying nearby in the shifting Martian dust.

After a moment the Grand Inquisitor said, “Did scavengers do some or most of this? Carrion birds, perhaps? Rats?”

“Negative,” said Major Piet, the Governor’s Pax Fleet groundforce commander. “No birds on the Tharsis Plateau since the atmosphere started thinning two centuries ago. No rats… or any other moving thing… have been picked up by motion detectors since this happened.”

“The Shrike did this,” said the Grand Inquisitor. He did not sound convinced. He stood and moved to the second body. It might have been a woman. It looked as if it had been turned inside out and shredded. “And this?”

“We think so,” said Governor Palo. “The militia that found all this brought out the security camera which had that thirty-eight-second holo we’ve shown you.”

“That looked like a dozen Shrikes killing a dozen people,” said Father Farrell. “It was hazy.”

“There was a sandstorm,” said Major Piet. “And there was only one Shrike… we’ve studied the individual images. It simply moved through the crowd so quickly that it appeared to be multiple creatures.”

“Moved through the crowd,” murmured the Grand Inquisitor. He stepped over a third body that might have been a child or small female. “Doing this.”

“Doing this,” said Governor Palo. She glanced at Archbishop Robeson, who had moved to a wall for support. There were twenty to thirty bodies in this section of the street. Father Farrell knelt and ran his gloved hand across the chest and into the chest cavity of the first cadaver. The flesh was frozen, as was the blood that fell in a black icefall. “And there was no sign of the cruciform?” he said softly.

Governor Palo shook her head. “Not in the two bodies the militia returned for resurrection. No sign of the cruciform whatsoever. If there had been any remnant at all… even a millimeter of node or bit of fiber in the brain stem or…”

“We know that,” snapped the Grand Inquisitor, ending the explanation.

“Very strange,” said Bishop Erdle, the Holy Office’s expert on resurrection technique. “To my knowledge there has never been an instance where the body was left so intact where we could not find remnant of the cruciform in the corpse. Governor Palo is correct, of course. Even the slightest bit of cruciform is all that is necessary for the Sacrament of Resurrection.”

The Grand Inquisitor stopped to inspect a body that had been thrown against an iron railing hard enough to impale it at a dozen points. “It looks as if the Shrike was after the cruciforms. It tore every shred of them out of the bodies.”

“Not possible,” said Bishop Erdle. “Simply not possible. There are over five hundred meters of microfiber in the cellular node extensions of…”

“Not possible,” agreed the Grand Inquisitor. “But when we ship these bodies back, I’ll wager that none are recoverable. The Shrike may have torn their hearts and lungs and throats out, but it was after their cruciforms.”

Security Commander Browning came around the corner with five troopers in black armor.

“Your Excellency,” he said on the tactical channel only the Grand Inquisitor could hear. “The worst is a block over… this way.”

The entourage followed the man in black armor, but slowly, reluctantly.

They catalogued 362 bodies. Many were in the streets, but the majority were in buildings in the city or inside the sheds, hangars, and spacecraft at the new spaceport on the edge of Arafat-kaffiyeh. Holos were taken and the Holy Office forensic teams took over, recording each site before taking the bodies back to the Pax base morgue outside of St. Malachy. It was determined that all of the bodies were offworlders—i.e… there were no local Palestinians or native Martians among them. The spaceport intrigued the Pax Fleet experts the most.

“Eight dropships serving the field itself,” said Major Piet. “That’s a serious number. St. Malachy’s spaceport uses only two.” He glanced up at the purple Martian sky.

“Assuming that the ships they were shuttling to and from had their own dropships—at least two each, if they were freighters—then we’re talking about serious logistics here.” The Grand Inquisitor looked at Mars’s archbishop, but Robeson merely held his hands up.

“We knew nothing of these operations,” said the little man. “As I explained before, it was an Opus Dei project.”

“Well,” said the Grand Inquisitor, “as far as we can tell, all of the Opus Dei personnel are dead… truly, irrecoverably dead… so now it’s a responsibility of the Holy Office. You don’t have any idea what they built this port for? Heavy metals, perhaps? Some sort of mineral mining operation?”

Governor Palo shook her head. “This world has been mined for over a thousand years. There are no heavy metals left worth shipping. No minerals worth a local salvage operation’s time, much less Opus Dei’s.”

Major Piet slipped his visor up and rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Something was being shipped in quantity here, Your Excellencies. Eight dropships… a sophisticated grid system… automated security.”

“If the Shrike… or whatever it was… had not destroyed the computers and record systems…” began Commander Browning.

Major Piet shook his head. “It wasn’t the Shrike. The computers had already been destroyed by shaped charges and tailored DNA viruses.”

He looked around the empty administrative building. Red sand had already found its way in through portals and seams. “It’s my guess that these people destroyed their own records before the Shrike arrived. I think they were on the verge of clearing out. That’s why the dropships were all in prelaunch mode… their onboard computers set to go.”