My plan was to strike the Earth exactly one year to the day of my leaving. For that to happen, I had only a few more weeks to mobilize my fighting force. This time, I would want to make use of the launch window, as I was sending a considerable amount of ships and needed to save on gas.

My initial force, I decided, would be roughly one million soldiers. Enough to go toe to toe with most countries’ active fighting force, in terms of pure numbers. Though it was true that, due to the draft, America had almost four million more in reserve, representing the one percent figure, they were mostly low level. Classes Five and Four. Kept home to serve the war economy. They were not soldier material.

No matter how I sliced it, though, I couldn’t count on facing just one country alone. Seraph was an international organization, representing the combined fighting forces of the entire remaining Anglosphere and Europe combined. I would inevitably be outnumbered.

There were two rational ways to counter this effect. Tactics and firepower.

Tactics I had in abundance. My Martians were considerably smarter and better at organizing than humans. They would be fanatical and passionate while perfectly cool and rational. Such was the strength of their willpower, which I had prized above all else.

Then came the firepower. I could have created a million different beasts to assail the Earth with. Some large and some small, but instead I had chosen to standardize my army into a single species. This did not pose a limitation, however, as I had come up with a solution. It was in their flexibility.

More than any other reason, I had chosen such a gelatinous form for my Martians so that they might easily fit into rigid and small spaces. Specifically, the inside cockpits of greater biomechanical weapons of war.

Yes, many of them would be pilots for suits of my design. Many would simply receive tougher exoskeletons to make them stronger. Something which guns could be mounted to, not like their slick exterior. And many still would simply be easy to store for the flight, while deadly enough on their own.

Their process of digestion was exterior, and this involved quite a lot of acid production. Something which could also be used offensively. As such, they did not need upgrades to be dangerous.

All in all, I was more than pleased with the setup I had, and I felt good about my odds.

If only the Heroes could be duplicated, I thought. It would have made things so much easier.

But try as I might, a given set of Powers could only be utilized by one entity at a time. If I created two versions of Daniel, for instance, I could not get two sets of his Powers. They stayed with the original.

But the good news was if they died, those Powers were apparently just waiting to be picked back up again. Floating out in space, without an owner. And so, I only had to re-clone them to get the abilities back. Instant quantum teleportation, of a sort. For once, there really was some intangible quality, like a ghost.

There was no need to be stingy or cautious, then. I would be sending every one of them down with the rest of my armies. And if one of them died, I’d send a couple backups that Sol could bring online to revive them with.

An even greater disappointment was that this effect didn’t work on me. If my mind was destroyed, it simply came back in another part of my body. And if every single one of my cells was destroyed, well, there would be no single mind for my Powers to jump to. Unlike regular people, I was more of a living Power than a being who possessed an ability, so there were far greater risks involved. My grasp on the physical plane could be tenuous, as my constant evolutions meant I lacked a canonical mind to be redownloaded into. I'd succeeded so powerfully in identifying with my biology; that was all I really was anymore.

So, I would have to trust Sol to lead my armies. I could not simply teleport back and forth. But I would be on call if he needed me and to take updates.

Yet, I didn't fret. He was everything I had hoped for, that boy. No more than a month old, now, Sol was full of fierce confidence and excitement for life. He had a burning intellect, kind but harshly demanding. He was the perfect leader for the mission.

He’d done quite well as we scaled up from just a hundred, now to tens of thousands of Martians in the colony. They were being trained to use the equipment, live in their houses, read, write and gather food. I didn’t want to force any amount of culture on them, but I had decided to teach them to read. I left it to them to find creative uses for it, however. So far, they had only taken to making up math games, but I believed they would get around to literature. For now, given that their memory was almost flawless, there was no need for record-keeping yet. Stories were being shared, but only by recitation.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Some exceptions were promising, though. One of them had tattooed their name across her appendage, which was amusing to me. She’d used the same technique that ancient humans might have, and I was curious to see if it caught on. They had a great many names now, and their language had come a long way. Though I’d predownled them with some basic words and points of reference, like up and down, light and dark, I’d not bothered naming all the creatures I’d created. Summarily, they’d come up with new words to call them by, based on visual representations using their surface lights.

Despite my attempts to be original, trees abounded on the planet. And they called these by a very vertical and green expression. That was one example of the semi-representational nature of their words.

“I still think we should go,” Hickory sighed. He appeared to me, but only in the deepest chamber of my body. Some place I had almost forgotten that I possessed eyes in. 

“It would defeat the point of taking such a secure position. We might as well have stayed on the Earth,” I replied.

“Exactly! Goddammit I been sayin’ that from the start.” He turned up the characteristic bottle he kept in his hand and took a deep swig. After a moment of looking around, he realized that Walter wasn’t about to pop out and try to counter him. For a moment, Hickory and I were alone. He wasted no time in trashing his partner, then. “It’s that little bitch who’s got your ear, boy. You shouldn't be trusting him so much. He's the one who always slowed you down.”

“Don’t call me boy,” I warned. “Respect your flesh. And slow and steady can win the race, Hickory. Evolution does not solely deal in R selection. Humans reached the highest point of achievement for any species, and none has a longer time of helplessness than our infants. High investment, high reward. Slow and steady.”

“Sure,” he tossed his bottle aside and it faded into thin air. “Whatever you say, Creep. But I’m telling you, it ain’t gonna go well if we just sit with our thumbs up our asses. We have a powerful need to grow. And by the time your boys land on Earth, you’ll have swept the surface of this red planet. And then what? Ya just stew? That ain’t fitting for a god.”

“I was under the impression that gods sat around all the time on Mount Olympus,” I said.

“Shit, boy, you-” he caught himself and quickly recovered. “You can’t forget your enemies, Creep. It is, after all, our job to love our enemies. And by love, I mean kill. Because a hatred of evil; an evil which is all that opposes us… that is to fear the Lord and respect life. Proverbs eight-thirteen.”

“Why do you bother twisting the Bible to your purposes when you’re clearly not a Christian?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be a lot easier just to call it a slave religion and go about your way?”

Hickory merely ignored the question, but I caught a brief smirk pass across his lips. He went on, pressuring me to reconsider. “Unlike Mars, there’s biomass on Earth just waiting to be converted. You can leave your base to continue growing on this planet. Hell, you could even send out some rockets for more, but we could spread like wildfire on Earth. The armies serve merely as a distraction while we infect every inch of the topsoil.”

“And if they nuke us to oblivion once more, what then? They have enough firepower to scorch every mile of the planet. Not to mention, there are Heroes like the Iron Tyrant who are completely immune to our effects. Better to hit them once they're already hurting from our armies.”

“Fuck,” he swore. “There’s just no winning with you. You’ll have to see it for yourself, boy. There ain’t no time to wait with what’s in that cave.”

“I’m quite confident that we have the single greatest Power in existence,” I said, letting my hubris show. “Aside, of course, from actual omnipotence over reality. That is, direct omnipotence. We have indirect omnipotence and could generally achieve any result with enough time.”

“And what if that’s exactly what the Logician has? The Powers of God.”

“Then there’s nothing any of us can do, least of all Seraph. Personally, I’m not that interested in meeting him. But if Seraph has a plan involving this entity, I will ruin it for them. There is ultimately no great rush, though, as far as I can tell.”

He got up and stormed off after that, shimmering away like a mirage. Walter did not show up, but part of me suspected he might have been waiting in the wings, watching. Nevertheless, he got what he wanted. The invasion would go forward and we would stay on Mars. The debate was settled.

Besides, we had Dawn on Earth to help us. With the pace she was growing, she might just have the work done before we got there. Yet, I doubted it. Our abilities were near-identical, but everything she did was orders of magnitude slower. And if I couldn’t do it…

Since she hadn’t attracted any nukes from Seraph, I could only assume she was playing it low and slow with the help of whoever she’d taken Russia with. I had my suspicions as to who that was.

With the rockets already in the works, I had nothing else to do but come up with more designs for weapons of war. Flying designs, aquatic designs, subterranean designs. Designs for urban and rural warfare. Chemical and parasitic weapons of mass destruction. There would be a lot of casualties, but I reassured myself in that, I would send out a bacterium to record the minds of everyone it could. Using much the same technology as I had with Dawn, super-efficiently storing their consciousness in DNA. I could then resurrect them once the war was over.

This way, I kept my promise to Alejandro’s people. I would not simply lay waste to the Earth. Though, truth be told, it would hardly be recognizable after I had my way. But as long Mexico still technically existed, I figured no harm no foul.

There was nothing more to be said, now.

The great war was upon us and there’d by no time to waste. It was the war to end all wars.