Glory on Mars (34 page)
Authors: Kate Rauner
Tags: #artificial intelligence, #young adult, #danger, #exploration, #new adult, #colonization of mars, #build a settlement robotic construction, #colony of settlers with robots spaceships explore battle dangers and sickness to live on mars growing tilapia fish mealworms potatoes in garden greenhouse, #depression on another planet, #volcano on mars
"It'll be easier to make glass from the sand the
meteor kicked up," Yin said. "I'll have time to fabricate some
proper martini glasses, since we're not opening another bay until
the nederzetting is up to full Earth pressure."
"And maybe we'll fabricate some nice round windows,"
Yang said. "We received a design for Claude's observation bay."
***
Daan's exploration of the Olympus peak had to wait
for Ruby to recover from space, but Emma and Claude spent the next
few sols packing for their trip. Emma slid the cheese tin from her
bag to show Claude. She'd show him her silky things later.
He grinned, tapping his personal duffle with a
conspiratorial smile.
The GPS satellites were online and Governor could
drive the rover in light or dark, but it seemed proper to leave at
dawn. A crowd wished them well as they hopped into the airlock.
Emma sneezed in the lingering smell of the Martian surface.
"Ready to go exploring?" she asked.
"With you, I'm ready to go anywhere."
"Okay Governor. Start driving."
Their fingers intertwined as the rover lumbered
across the Tharsis Plain.
###
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed the story - if
so, you may be interested in
other
books
in my "
on Mars
" series. The books are set
in the same Mars colony at different points in time and each story
stands alone.
Please post a review on your favorite retail or
reader site, or wherever you hang out. You'll be helping others and
I appreciate learning what you think.
Thanks!
Kate
Bonuses
Want more? These vignettes belong to the
Glory on
Mars
story and each links back to the story. There are no
spoilers here, so read them as you run into links in the story,
before you start reading, after you finish, or never. This is,
after all, your book. -- Kate --
Bonus Contents
Flying over Mars
(YouTube
link)
Olympus Mons
(YouTube
links)
Mademoiselle Lambert
At the age of fifty-two Mlle Lambert began her life's
work the day her father died. In a world where five hundred
families owned half the wealth on Earth, her father had been the
richest man on the planet. A wild sister escaped his grasp and
disappeared years ago so now, as his sole heir, Amelia Lambert was
the richest woman on Earth.
She moved out of his sprawling mansion and bought a
modest Dutch apartment. There she incorporated
Interplanetary
International
, which had only one employee - herself.
Immediately she awarded three contracts.
First, she hired a security firm to quietly and
secretly remove all mention of her from the internet, especially
pictures. Since her building was occupied by busy working people
with little time to ponder over the quiet lady in apartment 6C.
Amelia Lambert, like the Cheshire Cat, steadily disappeared.
Second she hired a law firm renowned for its honesty
and discretion to be her agent. She messaged her instructions
directly to the managing partner and he never met his client.
Her lawyer handled his first assignment
satisfactorily - he engaged a maintenance firm for the apartment.
Every Wednesday Mlle Lambert took her computer tablet and walked
across a park to the public library. She passed through the lobby
like a ghost and sat in the most secluded study carrel.
When the tablet detected her entering the library, it
sent a message and a bonded crew was immediately dispatched. The
crew cleaned the apartment, watered the plants, and restocked the
kitchen. They removed trash, a week's accumulation of dirty dishes,
and laundry. They replenished the drawers with clean plates and
flatware, and hung new clothes exactly as their instructions
dictated. Then, like house elves, they vanished, never seeing the
face of their employer.
If the tablet failed to detect Mlle Lambert entering
the library some Wednesday, it would message her lawyer and he
would personally enter the apartment. If she was incapacitated but
alive, there was a list of instructions. If she was not alive, the
list was shorter.
Her third contract was the most unusual. Mlle Lambert
hired the premiere company in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
It dedicated servers scattered across four continents to her
projects. The AI received a duplicate of everything she did, down
to every key stroke. Slowly it learned her values, priorities, and
idiosyncrasies. At some point in the future, when it had received
no key strokes for a week, the AI would take over
Interplanetary
International
. No one would know anything had changed, except
for the cleaning crew who would notice, but never comment, that
there were no more dirty dishes and no more laundry to be washed.
They would continue to clean the apartment and water the plants.
Forever.
Mlle Lambert grudgingly allotted a few hours a week
to managing her father's estate, homes no longer lived in, art
collections never viewed, jewels never worn - all the repositories
beyond government fiat used to store wealth in the centuries before
Bitcoin.
That left the bulk of her time for her opus. She had
studied all her life in preparation - engineering, celestial
mechanics, and every planetary mission over the past century. Mlle
Lambert would colonize Mars.
She studied the institutions that shared her goal and
determined which to support, which to acquire, and which projects
to commission directly. She herself had no desire to journey to
Mars. She disliked even her weekly walk to the library. But
humanity would spread to the stars and Mars would be the stepping
stone.
Flying over Mars
There's an animation of flying by Olympus Mons: 46
seconds at
youtube.com
.
You'll find a comparison of volcanoes on Mars to
volcanoes on Earth: 2minutes 48 seconds at
These links worked when I published the book, but if
they're broken, try searching with NASA Mars Olympus Mons for
something interesting.
Surviving the Martian
Surface
Mars' atmosphere was vanishingly thin, a hundred
times thinner than Earth and ninety-five percent carbon dioxide.
There was a bit of nitrogen, some trace gases, and way too little
oxygen to do more than rust the rocks over eons. It was also
bone-breaking cold most of the time. A summer afternoon on the
Tharsis Plain might reach a comfortable twenty degrees Celsius but
that same night would be minus seventy. A hundred fifty below
wasn't impossible.
A surface suit would protect her skin and lungs. If
it failed, she'd be dead in three or four minutes. Emma's
capillaries would rupture through her skin and her lungs would
desiccate and freeze without a suit. She shuttered to think of
Ingra taking even a few steps away from the nederzetting
unprotected.
Unfortunately, suits offered little protection
against the radiation that bombarded Mars' surface in the absence
of a global magnetic field. A major solar event could be fatal.
Emma agreed with her father though, and not just because of his
visionary rhetoric. Settlers couldn't cower inside the nederzetting
forever.
Emma pulled off her shirt and pants and stuffed them
into her duffle. Donning the suit was hard enough when gravity
helped her maneuver, but in zero-g she braced her shoulders against
the bunk wall and began to struggle with the inner compression
layer. It hung from a shoulder ring and looked entirely too
small.
Air pressure inside the helmet would protect her
face, but the compression layer protected the rest of her body,
pressing against her skin to keep those capillaries from
bursting.
Emma had to accordion the fabric into her hands to
get a leg started. She worked the fabric up, wriggled the suit over
her butt, and pulled the ring past her hips. With a grimace she
slipped a urine collection pad into the suit - she might be in the
suit for hours. The pads were reusable. Yuck.
She scrunched up the sleeves and, slipping one arm at
a time through the ring, got her hands to the ends. Finally she
pulled the shoulder ring into position without dislocating a
shoulder. The suit was tight across her chest. Pushing away a
twinge of panic, she took several long, slow breaths before pulling
on gloves and socks. Those were the parts of the suit that would
wear out first and she had spares.
In contrast, the thermal layer glided easily over the
compression layer and sealed up the front. Its outer side was tough
to resist tears, while the inner side was a spongy material
threaded with thin tubes carrying thermal fluid. Outer boots
completed the suit. She left the outer gloves in a side pouch and
pulled the life support backpack off its bracket.
She'd need the pack, even inside the ship. Already
the tight fitting suit made her feel hot and a little light-headed.
She shrugged into the backpack, snapped the quick-release buckles
closed, and tightened the straps. All the pack systems ran to the
suit through one bundled hose, providing air recycling and power.
The pack was a rebreather - no way she could carry enough air if
the suit released her breath each time she exhaled.
She pushed the connector into her shoulder ring and
twisted it till it clicked. The air flow would start when she
donned the helmet, but a side connection, twist-locked to a
receptacle at the neck of the thermal layer, would regulate her
temperature.
The surface suit was designated an essential use, so
it ran on batteries. She heard a hum as the thermal system engaged.
Emma left her bubble-like helmet stowed for now and floated into
the center of the module, happy to rest for a few minutes.
Radiation on Mars
For as long as there's been space flight, astronauts
have faced radiation exposure. Energetic solar protons and galactic
cosmic rays strike and tear DNA molecules, leading to diseases
including cancer. Outside Earth's protective atmosphere and
magnetic field, space is a hostile place.
Mars isn't much better, with only one percent
Earth's atmosphere and no global magnetic field at all. A settler's
exposure on the planet's highest peak would be eighty times Earth's
average.
There are three ways to fight radiation: distance
from the radiation source, exposure time, and shielding. Mars'
distance from the Sun doesn't vary enough to make one season's
solar radiation much less than another's, and cosmic radiation
never varies. That leaves time and shielding to control.
Colony Mars' robotic squad fabricated stone many
meters thick, so the nederzetting was as safe as Earth. But
settlers couldn't huddle inside the bays forever. Cancer was a risk
to accept and deal with.
Emma could monitor for cancer easily enough. In her
personal bag, she carried a dozen capsules of graphene
nanoparticles, biodegradable and harmless, each with a tiny
magnetic core. Every twelve months, she'd swallow a capsule and
wear the monitoring wrist band for a week. Nanoparticles would
spread out through her blood and lymph systems, bind to cancerous
cells, and mobilize into her blood. Passing through vessels under
the thin skin on her wrist, any cancer-bound particles would alert
the wrist band.
Cancer wasn't much of a problem on Earth anymore, and
would be less of a problem on Mars once Settler Mission Five
arrived. They'd bring hospital equipment, including a
radiofrequency unit, and lots more nanoparticles. Spare parts would
be included, because this unit was vital. It was the cure for
cancers that they would all face.
The unit was a three meter long tube to saturate
anyone lying inside with specific radio waves. A high dose of
injected nanoparticles would grip every cancer cell - solid tumor
or metastasized - and channel the waves in to kill cancer without
damage to healthy cells. It was the Kanzius effect, the greatest
medical advance since doctors figured out that germs cause
infectious disease. A technology as important as anything in the
life support systems.
All Emma had to do was avoid a really high-energy
flare or solar mass ejection, where the radiation might burn her
skin, blast her blood cells, and destroy her gut lining. But Earth
monitored the Sun and could predict solar weather fairly well.
Should be no worries.
Poetry
Hellas Crater
Largest impact crater seen,
The largest that we’ve found,
Could not exist on gaseous worlds,
It’s gouged in rocky ground
The Hellas Basin’s found on Mars,
From crater rim to dusty floor,
Nine thousand meters is its depth,
The height that airplanes soar.