Martians, keep out!

A POWERFUL NOVELET
Illustration by Luros
Hatred of the Martians was being deliberately exploited, and Scatterday knew why. And the only way to fight the enslavement of humans, was to assist the Martians, even though it meant risking lynch-law!
And as if that sign weren't enough, someone with a red spray pencil had added
THAT MEANS YOU, BUG!
The stiff, black-shelled form, impaled on a spike beside the trafficway, with gummy beads of blue blood glistening in the sun, told the pretty little story much more graphically.
It hadn't been decapitated; Martians lack external heads.
Scat scanned the tableau, his scarred lean features impassive. They didn't mention this, he commented. Do we still go in?
You ask questions like that just for the sake of the record, don't you? Click-Click replied, using his black pincers to produce code in a way that explained his nickname. Though headless, Martians didn't lack brains. Definitely.
Scat switched to the turbine for jetless surface-drive, and the utility car crawled into Bronsco.
A hick town, Scat decided. A couple of 100-story skylons, a mainstreet of glastic commercial buildings, and rows of distressingly similar homes, all of them Paradise-37's or Eden-2's. But the skylons looked dead; the glastic was dingy, and the shrubbery drooped. A few cars were untidily parked by trafficway. Footpaths worn in the grass showed that the slidewalks hadn't been strategically placed, and not all of them seemed to be working.
Crummy.