Mars Year One Marooned!

Chapter One 1.1"If you forget everything else, remember the most important fact about this planet: Mars has a million ways to kill you."Lieutenant Mpondo swept his gaze over the twenty new arrivals. Sean Doe, in the fourth and last row, met his dark brown eyes without smiling, nodding, or blinking. Sean was over fifteen years old, and for most of that time people had been trying to kill him.Sean and the nineteen others -- all of them adults -- sat strapped in, since theArgosywas still in space and they were weightless. Mpondo, a man of twenty-five with his hair cropped to a shadow on his skull, hovered with his feet just off the deck, a wall belt looped around his waist to keep him from drifting. He wore the orange uniform of the Interplanetary Service. It was the worse for wear, but after more than a year of traveling, the same could be said for everyone's clothes. Mpondo opened a panel and pressed a button, and the viewport, a ten-foot square 3-D screen, cleared to give them a view of space.And of Mars, closer than ever before.The ruddy reddish-orange disk nearly filled the viewport. The hemisphere of the planet that Sean could see lay in full sunlight. Mars looked like a ravaged world, all her blemishes showing: long shadowed cracks that were really canyons deeper than any on Earth, impact craters, a south pole ringed with an icy white cap, blurred haze. Someone in the front row murmured and pointed as a falling meteorite sketched a brilliant line across the planet near the polar ice cap."Just a delivery," Mpondo said in a loud voice. "That's ice, coming in from the robot mass driver on Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Approx-imately twice a day the mass driver fires a projectile of compacted ice in an orbit that whips it around Jupiter and sends it to Mars. After a journey of years, the projectile comes into the Martian atmosphere within twenty degrees of the south pole -- yes?"A man in the row ahead of Sean had his hand up. "How big are these things?" he asked."On Earth they would mass about twenty-five tons," Mpondo replied, looking mildly irritated at the interruption. "And to answer your next question, they pose no threat to Marsport. They don't come anywhere near the base. Their orbits bring them in at a shallow angle over the south polar regions, where they mostly evaporate -- because of the heat of entering the atmosphere -- before they even reach the surface. They've been crashing into the Martian atmosphere for more than thirty years now, adding water, carbon dioxide, and other gases to the planet. As a result, the Martian air is growing denser. One day it will be rich enough in oxygen to allow you to breathe on the surface, and thick enough to hold the sun's heat. But that day's a long time off."Sean could make out cloud patterns in the atmosphere of Mars, swirls and sweeps of pale color, and he noticed now how the edges of the planet blurred to blue haze against the darkness of space, unlike the sharp lines of Luna, the Earth's airless moon, where he had trained for the trip to Mars.Mpondo was holding up a finger. "Right now, if you tried to breathe the atmosphere on Mars, it would kill you." He held up another finger. "Right now, if you took an unprotected stroll outside of Marsport, you would freeze to death. Right now, if Marsport didn't receive regular resupply from Earth, the colonists would starve. I could go on, but I think that makes the point. Mars is a deadly world."A new world, though,Sean thought. He felt strange just contemplating his trip -- no, his escape -- from Earth. His chest tingled as he reflected on being among the first humans to live on a different planet from Earth, from the homeworld. So Mars was deadly? So what? Bring it on.1.2Sean could not remember his parents. He could barely remember his rescue. He was one of a dozen survivors of the Aberlin tragedy, an act of biological terrorism that had erStrickland, Brad is the author of 'Mars Year One Marooned!', published 2004 under ISBN 9780689864001 and ISBN 0689864000.