Year one

Bull adjusted his hard hat and shouted"heads down!"

The station's windows were small and utilitarian, but looming in them, was a giant globe of ice rock. The berr-ack of a warning horn mixed with the chatter coming through the comm links, as crewmen scrambled to get back through the station's air locks.

In a rush, Peavy pulled up, a bare foot short of colliding with Bull. "All greens for the bounce, Boss. Techs say three minutes to go."

"Get 'em all back in, buzz me when we're clear. I'm going up to the bean-can and warn Phobos platform that the last of 'em are on the way. Conway on the damn switch?"

"Yup."

Facing the space rock, a bank of firing plasma thrusters mounted to "the shack" were already hazing blue, as the space-faring rig started to put extra miles between it and the largely ice asteroid.

Bull huffed and quick stepped along the rigid carbon fiber band that formed the stiffened walkway for the space platform, which was basically just a rotating, inflated doughnut of composite plastics built around a central hub, the bean can.

He took a sharp right, and banged up half-slanted riser treads, hauling his bulk away from the centrifugal force of the rotating doughnut-ring towards the metallic hub. The bean can, suspended in the middle hole of structure, was in a "float zone", as it did not rotate fast enough to create any centrifugal "gravity" to speak of. The ring was mostly used for storage, sleeping quarters, and as an exercise area. The gravity free center module. or hub, contained the work center's guts.

Bull eyed the approaching module's hatch with distaste. He had watched when the construction shack was first inflated, and had snorted that the metallic, so called "Hard-zone module" mounted in it's middle "looked like a bean-can". The term stuck. He pushed through, into a short, barely man-sized service tunnel, and on to the cramped compartment of the work center.

Conway sat before the Fire control/Detonation/Safety station, eyes glued to an illuminated countdown. The men now aboard and accounted for, an all clear shuddered through the air and Conway pushed and held down the fire switch. The "burn" was ignited directly by timer, of course, for accuracy. As long as Conway held the switch closed by main force, the ignition would go forward. If released, the thrust system would abort, for the sake of crew safety. Bull watched the last flickering blue decimals count down, then flash green. On the far side of the asteroid, six pits bloomed with white fountains of gas.

Each pit contained the volume of an oil storage tank, like the ones he'd constructed for Texon back home. A mixture of frozen oxygen, harvested by heating local oxides, and liquid methane, fountained up under the heat of thermal lasers, driving the asteroid to a new course. A "soft" explosion of gas with enough thrust to send it into a collision course with Mars.

Pretty anticlimactic, thought Bull, no noise, nuthi'n. Takes all the fun out of the construction game.

"Okay. Good job, Conway."

"Hey, how come you never call me Bert like everybody else?"

Bull squinted. "Honestly? Its the gray hair. Reminds me of my old man. Don't want ta' call you Pops by mistake, Mr. Conway's to formal, so... Bother you?"

Bertrand Conway's seamed features flattened in a disgusted sort of way. "No. Just as long as it's spelled right on my check, you can call me anything you like. Speaking of which, that was rock 247 of 247 total. We get to go back now?"

"Yeah. Gotta call Mars Platform, let em' know, but yeah."

Once the scientists had used up their budgets poking holes in Mars, and speculating about what kind of mummified bacteria they might have found, had there been any, the 'Man to Mars' projects had pretty much stalled.

No air, barely any water, and what there was, buried in the rocky chemistry or existing as thin films of frost beneath the dust. Sure, you could free it up, extract it like some freaking mad science project, haul it from the poles, or rocket up tons of it from earth, all for about a thousand bucks a gallon, but bottom line, no way residents would ever be able to pay their water bills.

Mostly though, the planet was just too damn cold. Temps between 20 degrees centigrade at best, to 87C below zero, all the time.

The government was considering formation of MASA, Mars Aeronautics and Space Administration, to study what else congressmen might do about that. Budget projections ran to a billion a year, just to fund the bureaucracy. That was when Bull Construction put in a job bid, and got the development contract.

In ten years, Bull promised a warm planet with water, and something like a real atmosphere, albeit not a breathable one. But something that offered a P.S.I higher than it gets in Earth's Ionosphere.

Part of the project were two large customized Tokamak-like magnetic field generators , one at each pole. Not as good as the earth's magnetic field, but the power plant's magnetics could be shaped to stave off solar flares when they came around. Bull Co. would own the concession to distribute fusion power pretty much forever, to the whole planet, as part of the deal, when they weren't used as shields. A few specially clad nukes the government set off near Mars supplemented that, yielding a particle shield as well. This also raised the rad count temporarily, but ended with an overall reduction in inbound radiation, from solar perfusion and other sources, which the nukes cladding compounds dispersed. Yes the whole thing was dirty and violent, but quick, as such things go.

All the raw materials were free, in orbit between Mars and Jupiter. NASA's Far-eye survey found and tracked all the rocks they needed, and supplied the high tech needed for free. The giant rocks were relatively small, without expensive-to-navigate gravity wells. So easy on, easy off. The rocks were movable, too.

So here he was, four years later, with ten Astro-engineers, plus his regular crew, on budget and on time.

Bull tried to remember how many of each type of rock he had boosted. This had been one of the three really big ones, all water ice. When they hit, Mars would go up about 12 C, even after evaporating off enough water to put cloud cover on the planet. The techs said they would still put a good sized lake back in the Mawrth Vallis. Other rocks would bomb in CO2, Oxygen, burned out from the rocky substrates of his meteor storm, other stuff. All of them would heat the place up, create enough green house gas and particulate cover to keep it that way, at least for a few thousand years. Power, pressure, a few degrees warmer, and some open water. Didn't sound like much, but enough to kick start a real effort to colonize the hell hole it otherwise was.

Conway lifted his head. "Phobos."

Bull grumbled and snatched at the floating mike. "We're done here. Ten months of euchre with these jack-asses and then beers all around. I want to get back before the first meteor strikes blow in. Save me a seat. Your people better have the Tokamak sub-assemblies ready by then, Or it's your ass. Over." Waiting through the ten minute radio delay was exasperating.

While waiting for the reply, Bull thought about the overall project. It would take most of its remaining years just for the dust to settle, and there were a million things yet to finish up. He wondered what his punch list would look like. Ten months wasted. But off-work seasons were always rough. Construction was a tough game.

***

Year 100

Carl Witherton hated the suit. You couldn't scratch where you itched. Regardless of what the techs said, the cold seeped into it when you hit a shadow, and the weak sun was slow to make a difference when you left one, even on the hottest days. Rain descended slower in the one-third gee gravity, wind whipped fat globules of falling rain, often as not blowing parallel to the ground, or crashing down as hard hitting hail. Today, it was a slurry that froze on contact, and the helmet washed with it, blurring everything.

Sure, it pulled dust out of the air, getting rid of the worst Martian dust-devils, and was likely a blessing, but it left you totally dependent on the heads-up display. It was like walking through a video game, and it left you cross-eyed.

The wide canister on his back sloshed beneath its dust cover, tugging him off center, so he walked drunkenly in the light gravity, swaying against the shifting liquid inside. The lake, his destination, was in a crater though, and the erupted rim was rocky and steep, so you couldn't motor up to it. The whine of his compressor/filter vibrated against his chest. It fed in, scrubbed and vortex filtered what passed on Mars for atmosphere to the suit helmet, maintaining a near Earth-normal pressure there. The result was still bitter and sulfurous, still stung at his flat Mongolian nose, a heritage of his mother's Sherpa forebears. He twisted up, passed the red rock eruptions, gaining the much colder rim at last.

One foot caught in a slippery crack, and pain shot along his leg. Off balance, he fell. Bouncing heavily, Carl rolled onto his side. A tear ripped along three inches of seam, near the ankle, and chill bit quickly along his right side. Not instantly lethal, it was only twenty-five below or so here at the ridge. But the mini-compressor had sustained damage, and breathing turned from being a chore to impossible. Red spots danced before him as he fumbled for the auxiliary oxygen bottle at his waist. A hiss, and before blacking out, ice cold sweet air.

Carl came to, head throbbing in time to his heart, vision blurred. Woozily, he checked the heads- up chronometer in the helmet. Five minutes. Fifteen in the cylinder, so say ten left. His legs and lips were mostly numb, but the right foot was worse. The laboring heater coils were unable to compensate much for the ripped seam, and trying to pull himself up, he saw a red frozen crust frothing it.

"Shit." Carl toggled on the suit radio.

"Reagan, I'm at Crater lake two. Got mashed up pretty bad. You copy?"

"Reagan. God, Carl, help is dispatched, hang in there. You're twenty minutes out! How bad?"

"Bad. Compressor's compromised. Leg's screwed. On Bottle Ox. Twenty feet upside the rim wall from the rover."

"How much O2 left?"

"Maybe nine minutes. Blacked out. Still groggy."

There was an intake of breath. "Can you fix it? Dial down? Try and crawl back to the rover. Carl, I can get Mike there in fifteen, but..."

"Don't think so. Too far without legs. Waist seal is OK." Carl turned painfully toward the rim lake.

Blue-gray. The first bit of color, except red, he had seen since leaving the dome. The thin ice surface seemed to ripple in the fog of wind-driven ice-drop. He removed the canister on his back, balancing it on the fine, frozen red mud of the lip, just before the waterline. The solar panel array to his left terminated in a sealed plastic lump from which two leads ran into the crater-lake. Bubbles would be surfacing between the two lines. A low current electrolyzed and heated the water here, breaking a little of it into oxygen and hydrogen. Most of that oxygen dissolved back into the crater lake, but maybe even enough still fizzed up. A few strikes with a rock hammer broke open a hole in the ice near the iridium anode.

He dragged the container closer, fumbled it open, and dumped it in. Twenty carefully adapted bottom feeders swam out, that would hopefully survive on the algae already established. Algae fed on the products of special rock-eating bacteria and molds, genetic hybrids cultured from deep caves on Earth. For eight years, twenty pioneers had been alone here, and now, he thought hazily, maybe a few mutant Carp. Carl watched them swim hesitantly, pearling about close to the bubbler, but not too close due to the mild current, maybe ten feet down.

In another eight years, if I get through this, maybe I'll come fish for some. He chopped around the electrode cables, brought them closer together, wrangling them into two masses. The bubbles got bigger, more frequent, boiling up through the hole. It was the anode, he remembered, which released the O2, the other bubbled out the hydrogen. The outside pressure was awfully low, but if he could just...he ripped the dust cover off the empty container, and spread it over the anode's hole, then ducked beneath it.

Checking the chronometer, he had less than a minute left on bottled air. Breathing deeply twice, Carl cracked the helmet's seal. Blackness again encroached. Here's hoping I can still be revived when Mike gets here. God, I miss Earth.

***

Year 200

"There's just too many damn people!" Reggie swept his hands out to encompass the canyon rim. "Just look at 'em all, lined up to stare into the thing, like fish eyeing a worm. I hate tourists!"

"They're not tourists, Reggie," I sighed. "Not really. Most of them are Martian born, just not from around here. The Rift is one of the few natural wonders we have to gawk at. Gotta admit, it's something to see. The few real tourists are all in sealed choppers, flying around down there where the air is thicker." I waved generally down into the bottomless gash.

Actually, the thing scared the shit out of me from vertigo. I didn't care much to stare over the edge, or even think about the three to seven mile drop to its floor. The choppers looked like swarming gnats from here. "Too much big money and time lost to come out here from Earth, just to oogle and go back, for more than a handful of VIP's."

We had this argument regularly. There were real obvious differences between Earthers and Martians. They say we look like poster-kid basketball stars—thin and tall. We were all gene modified by the second generation, to increase birth lividity, and Martian gravity provided its own twists to our natural growth. To us, they looked stumpy and obese. Every one of them fitted with supplemental oxygen breathers, like asthmatics. They defined the word "tourist", as the term applied to Mars. Reggie held that anyone not from the rim-dome community was a tourist, and watched his 400 hectare property lines rabidly for trespassers.

Most of the domes were still up, if not pressurized these days, but really, the term "dome" had just come to replace "city" over the years. A tourist once told me that "Doma" was a Russian word for home – don't think there's any connection there. Most residences sprawled out and away from those glassed bowls that once kept the colonists alive. There is a movement to establish a community in the Rift Basin, where the extra five miles of "Up" provides a somewhat greater air pressure. But as that means travel out of it would be by 'copter mostly, it's kind of speculative, and Martians are rather adapted to the thinner atmosphere of the rim and surface generally. Well, at least away from the Mons, and higher altitude structures here.

Reggie ranched cattle, one of the few people I knew involved with that. Real beef was a recent luxury good. Only lately had enough engineered ground lichen and hardy grass proliferated for the enviro center to approve limited ranching. Wasn't beyond the pale that a few head might get driven off by"Tourists" to stuff homesteader larders. There was, of course, no wildlife on Mars, the diet being predominantly vegetarian, save for some synthetic protein, so that was a real threat.

"Thieves then," he grumped, "or at least, some of 'em. Lost four head last month."

I refrained from mentioning that some had perhaps sauntered too close to the rim and simply slipped over the edge. Reggie was a little shorter than my seven feet, so I got to see the tips of his ears redden, whenever I brought that up.

"You know though, you might make some money from all this interest in the canyon. You really don't need your herd that close to it anyway, and your rim-side property has some of the most spectacular overlooks on the south edge. Could set something up there, charge admission."

Reggie looked startled for a second. "You think so?"

"Sure. Maybe open up a grille there, too. Sell steak meals to the visitors for hefty prices. Might even attract some of the "real" tourists."

Reggie scratched himself in thought. "Mean a lot of extra fencing and grading. Actually, not a bad idea."

I still had a good income from my great grandfather's power concession at the poles. Old Bull had made a decent profit from them back when, though by contract, most of the output was plowed into maintaining magnetic field regeneration. As less and less got siphoned off beyond that, to maintain the domes, the government checks attenuated, but the giant Tokamaks still supplied the small power grids in the deep north and south, proceeds which his heirs still split, including me. While the power itself was basically free, maintenance charges still were assessed, and there was a small profit attached to that. So I had some savings. Much as the trench scared me, I didn't have to look at the damn thing to appreciate the investment opportunity.

"You know, Reggie, I might be convinced to put something into that, if you decide to go ahead with it."

***

Year 300

"So, how does it feel. I mean, how do you feel?"

"Good." Ben turned his hands up off the table in a sort of palm shrug. That kind of off-hand response was promising.

"There are differences. Touch is more localized. Tips and pads of the fingers, only four spots on each foot--that sort of thing, but phantom nerve effect, kind of fills in the gaps."

"That's not what I mean. You don't feel, disconnected, remote?" I knew the phantom effects would eventually wear off, but by then, he'd be used to changed tactility the exoskeleton provided.

"No. It's me, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes."

He looked good. They always looked good. Like golden, diamond statues. I checked the Mag shielding. The flux meter showed a good field. Between it, and the collapsed crystal armor, he should be able to fiddle around during solar storms without damaging himself. Still, there were other things. Human things.

"Any phantom pain, unnatural sensations?"

"Nope. We already did the range of motion and sense routine, remember? Ann, I'm fine. Can I go now?"

I looked at the pressure tests, cold penetration results. All were highly compliant, still I was reluctant to let him leave.

"Remember, there's no such thing as ambient sound in a vacuum, Ben. External sound cues come to you only from other Belter's transmitters, or from impacts on the suit skin, or are internal. Think of sound as non-ambient, or as a knock, unless you are on a breather ship, or in a breather dome."

"Yes, Ma'am. No offense, but I've had the training. I'm of age."

I nodded. The problem was with me. I had passed the opportunity – no that's not the truth, I had chosen against conversion when it was available to me. Fear? Something religious?

Out the port window, small flashes of milling citizens darted among the rocks and platforms of the Albequere' collective. He would be fine here. They were all fine. Mining, exploration, energy without limit, entire world-lets of resources. Even with Mars port just ten months away, it just seemed—alien. I waved Ben off the table and escorted him to the lock.

"You have family here?"

Ben hesitated, one metallic hand glittering on the seal frame. "Uh, no Ma'am. Some class-mates though. My family is, um, well, we're founders. My great-great-great-grandad was "Bull" Harrington."

I felt a bit shocked. "That Harrington? The terraformer? Your family owns the polar generators?"

"Yeah. They were not amused about my decision to come here."

I bit back my tongue, embarrassed. Albequere' was a new collective. There were no breather domes here. His parents and such, would be mostly too old, not convertible so as to face the vacuum or impressed with their sons abandonment of his heritage. The hardness of space, probably seemed a desolation to them.

They scooped out the human body, to do this. Only the spine, for stem and blood cell generation, along with the nerves and organs, transferred to the shells. Took three weeks. Bone wouldn't be of any use anyway. Mesochimal tissue got replaced with vita foam, to pack the organs with. First year without gravity you'd lose more than half the mass of any reminant bone, and sixty percent of any muscle you had. Wouldn't be safe, to try and pack all that extra baggage along, maintain it, heat it. Martian Gene-jack heritage, and adaptation to low gravity made the process barely possible. The Exo-shells had to provide a substitute for all that support and much more. It wasn't without risk.

Ben lifted his hand from the frame; made a tentative motion towards me. "You okay? You did a good job. Glad I had you for final orientation."

"Just thinking. Good luck; it was nice knowing you."

Their was a small whine from the electrics that drove the plastic replacements for muscles the suit was fitted with, still audible in the thick atmo of the ship.

He snapped off the external speaker and stepped through into the lock.

I cycled him out.

The outer door opened on two golden, floating figures--the Welcome Wagon, I guess.

Odd, knowing that while they could come visit me, I could never even survive the life they lived. But, when I get back to Mars, well, we have trees now, grass, blue skies, my parents are there, I've real wood furniture to wax, spend Sundays at the Xeno-Zoo. I remain content, just a homebody at heart, I guess.