[Nightmare Wars 01] • Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

The Martian Imperium is coming.

Fifteen years ago, the unhappy people of Mars rose in a desperate fight to throw off the tyranny of the Governors sent from the Earth. The Terrestrial Council had given the Earth three centuries of the best government it had ever enjoyed, but that benevolence had not extended to Mars. Hidden behind censorship and secrecy, the Martian Governors had for over a century enforced policies of corruption, poverty, and savage injustice, always to their own profit.

The war that the Earth called the Martian Incursion, and that Mars called the First War for Liberation, had started with a nuclear attack that left two hundred million dead on the Earth. In a rage of vengeance, I became the Governor's most feared assassin, known everywhere by my code name Ghost. I had murdered anyone I was ordered to kill, or chose to, notorious crimes that grew with each telling but never came close to the true horror of my treachery. The Earth had crushed the rebellion, and everyone on Mars knew I was responsible. They just did not know who I was.

The Martian people had recovered. They had learned from their mistakes and would not repeat them. They remembered my crimes. The minimum price of peace with the Earth would be full independence for Mars, and Martian justice for me. They would hunt me down and execute me, along with all the Ghost Followers, anyone who had ever worked for me or with me.

They would kill the woman I loved more than life itself.

(Author's note: Space opera, in which I explore politics, religion, sexuality, economics, crime and ethics in a space-based culture, constrained by vacuum, radiation, distance and isolation, as they are shocked into awareness that the Final War was not final.)