While I am querying agents for my first novel, I’ve started a new writing project. It will probably end up about novella length, though that is yet to solidify.
It’s common knowledge that certain tech moguls want to colonize the planet Mars. They have seemingly prioritized solving the problem of getting stuff to Mars over the problems of figuring out everything we’d need to know for humans to actually live there. They excuse this neglect with handwaving about how artificial intelligence — meaning, specifically, sophisticated chatbots — will solve all the other problems for us. Some of them are willing to consume anything and everything on Earth to make this vision happen.
This is the story of how their descendants escape.
Here is the first scene.
Yawning, Brad watched the cargo rocket ignite its landing engine with a crackling roar that penetrated even the thin Martian atmosphere and his surface suit. The tall cylinder plummeted down through its own exhaust, sooty combustion products depositing on the bottom of its gleaming silvery surface. It arrested its descent just above the landing pad. The towering vehicle tilted slightly, sliding sideways to center itself on the landing zone. Three landing legs popped out.
Brad squinted. He felt behind him for the lip of the hatch.
Beside him, Tyler shifted his weight. A sharp intake of breath registered through the helmet comms. Connor took a step backwards into the air lock.
The fourth leg extended.
The engine performed a brief set of small adjustments, and the rocket thumped down on the pad with a metallic ping. The flame went out. Brad watched its nose, high in the air, sway back and forth in the silence.
“So cool,” Connor said, moving out of Brad’s shadow.
“I guess,” replied Brad. His hand still gripped the edge of the air lock door to the ramp underground.
“Brad,” HARI’s pleasant, male voice crackled from the helmet speakers, “it is time to unload the cargo.”
“Yeah.” They walked out onto the packed-regolith causeway toward the mobile cargo lift that they’d take to unload the supply ship. This would be the fourth supply ship Brad had unloaded in the last couple weeks. About every two years—once a Mars year—a whole series of cargo rockets would land at Mars City and then depart again. Three of the empty ones still stood in the landing zone. Brad’s eyes slid over to the desert at the side of the landing pad, where the toppled wreckage of a few identical silvery cargo landers sprawled in irregular heaps of twisted metal. He slowed.
“Inattention is a risk to surface operations,” said HARI.
“Yeah, sorry.” Brad hastened to the cargo crawler and clambered up. The metal access stairs, once a safety-bright color, had been scoured down to a rough rusty orange. The controls at the top handled both the vehicle’s rover treads and the scissor lift that raised and lowered the flat cargo platform. Brad waited for Connor and Tyler to sit down on the deck. Besides the differently colored stripes on their suits, Brad could tell the men apart by Connor’s wirier build. Once they were situated, Brad drove the crawler to the landed rocket. The deck rolled and listed as the ungainly vehicle trundled over the compacted Martian dust.
Brad nudged the crawler lift up against the side of the latest rocket’s tall cylindrical tower. Once in position, he held his gloved hand on the button to elevate the platform. The mechanism whined. “Hey, HARI? How often do these rockets crash?”
“You’re asking about the design and safety record of the Kestrel Cargo Lander. The Kestrel is a game-changing technological system for delivering supplies to Mars City. Since its invention by the revolutionary tech mogul Trevor Sweet, the Kestrel has had a mission success record unparalleled in the history of space exploration.”
“Trevor Sweet was amazing,” Connor intoned.
The lift platform reached the cargo hatch in the vehicle’s side. Brad took his hand off the control. “I didn’t ask about my grandfather, I asked how many of these crashed.”
“Great question. Kestrel engines are designed with a factor of safety—”
Connor and Tyler went to work unlatching the cargo hatch. Brad sighed, turning away from them. He looked back at the wreckage near the pad. “One, two, …three,” he counted. “How many crumpled landing engines am I looking at, there by the side of the landing zone?”
“There are six landing engines beside the landing zone.”
Brad nodded, returning to the side of the metal cylinder. He signaled to the others to haul the pressure hatch open. It had been just over fifty years since Sweet led his people to their new life in Mars City, saving them from the ravages of dead Earth. So… “HARI, what’s fifty divided by six?”
“Let’s work it out. Fifty divided by six is eight and one-third, or eight point three three repeating in decimal notation.”
About one crash every eight years. Brad was twenty-two and hadn’t seen it happen. Maybe they were due for another one.
He stepped into the cargo space and looked around, his helmet light catching the round edges of the plastic-wrapped boxes within. They were stacked solidly against the inside circumference of the lander. He grabbed the first box by its inset handle and pulled it out to carry outside. There, he tore the outer plastic wrapping off, crumpled it in his hand, and tossed it into the cold Martian wind. CORN, read the tag on the box. Connor approached, pulling the plastic wrap off an identical box.
Brad skirted the smaller man, went back in, and pulled the next container. It also said CORN. He stacked it with the first one.
The exertion felt good. He grabbed two boxes, holding them by their handles, and hefted them up and down while he walked to the back of the lift platform. He’d get some good reps from this. CARROTS and BEEF, GROUND started new piles next to CORN.
Brad’s life was pretty good, but he had been too long inside. The people of the underground Mars City rarely saw the sky. Everyone knew that this colony was the salvation of humankind — the only way to ensure the continuation of the human race after disaster consumed the overburdened Earth. This City was all that was left of human civilization. Life could be boring inside the walls, though. It was nice to look out to the horizon. Brad wouldn’t say that out loud. HARI listened to everything, and even Trevor Sweet’s grandson got tired of its lectures.
He positioned a container labeled 3D PRINTER FILAMENT. On his way back to the lander, a sharp pop-pop-pop startled him. He spun toward the sound. One of the six-wheeled sentry drones had stopped its endless patrol around the City and swiveled to face a dust devil spinning through the red desert. Pop-pop-pop-pop went the gun on top of the drone again. Brad saw the bullets kicking up red sand and rock chips from a crater wall beyond the dust devil.
“HARI,” he said, “what are you shooting at?”
“As the guardian of human civilization in Mars City, one of my primary functions is to protect the city and its environs from outside invasion. I identified an invader violating the Mars City land claim.”
Brad looked out at the desert. The whirl was gone. “I don’t see anything.”
“I detect no invaders now. You are safe.”
The drone backed up, wheeled around, and continued across the landscape.
Brad sniffed.
Four hours later, he held his hand on the button to lower the lift platform, staring at the stacks of boxes through the fog condensed on the inside of his helmet. They’d already had to rebalance the load twice. That was unusual. This time, there were so many more CORN and CARROTS boxes compared to the BEEF, GROUND boxes that Brad had thought the platform was going to tip over if they kept stacking like boxes together. He wondered whether there had been another cargo drop in the past with so little meat. Brad sniffed. They could already grow carrots in the City. Usually, these supply shipments had stuff they didn’t grow.
HARI could probably tell him why things were different this time. But Brad was tired, feeling flushed from the exercise, and didn’t really feel like asking. When Tyler closed the Kestrel’s hatch and sat on a pile of boxes next to Connor, Brad simply signaled them to hold on and started driving the crawler back to the City air lock.
