Colin Taber - RED: Burning Skies

January 22, 2037 A.D.

Two minutes, Shan said, his warning going out to his squad of men.

Looking through his helmets visor, he saw awkward nods from the closest of his suited brothers as the voices of others came back over the open channel to answer in his ears.

They all stood ready, whether under the cover of the red rock overhang with him or under the Martian camouflage tenting just down the gully on the opposite side. The tenting covered the big lander vehicle the crew had come down on a week ago, and also the factory lander which had arrived a year ago packed full of robots and equipment.

Around them spread the ochre rock and gravel of their new home, a Martian gully at the edge of a huge crater so wide that the far rim looked like a distant range of mountains. The basin down there opened as a wide plain so featureless and flat that it was like some kind of still orange sea.

The landscape was stark, shaped by a dry and cold climate no human could really comprehend, and all of it shrouded in a thin and lethal atmosphere.

Above, the salmon-pink sky matched perfectly with its bland emptiness.

Well, Shan thought, empty for another two minutes.

It was all so different to home, China and her New Provinces.

He grinned. Perhaps it wasnt so different. The polluted air that wreathed Beijing and many of the inland industrial cities was also deadly.

But none of that mattered now. Not for him or his squad brothers. Now, they were on Mars and would never see Earth again.

Today, and for all their days to come, his life would be here with his comrades helping to build a new world.

A Chinese world.

Shan could see his comms officer and friend further down the gully under the lander tenting. Wei had a hand on the vessels sturdy landing gear to steady himself, which made him look like he was either out of breath or having trouble balancing.

Wei had been caught in an accident during their landing a week ago. Hed been concussed by a heavy hand tool that had not been properly stowed.

Shan opened a private comms channel to his friend. How are you doing?

Their squad of ten was part of a network of self-sufficient missions across the surface, which did not have the authority or means to seek aid from Mars Command One. Accidents and fatalities were expected, and a missions squad was expected to continue on with their tasks and make do with their medical training and allotted equipment.

Wei answered, Im okay. Im just looking forward to getting back to work once the orbiter has passed.

Good. Dont overdo it. And if you have vertigo, you need to report it. We need you good for the days to come; it wont matter if you miss today.

Yes, my friend. Thank you.

An alert sounded in Shans helmet, so he repeated it for his squad. Ninety seconds. He made a mental note to keep an eye on Wei, but then let his gaze drift back over to the wide basin of the crater.

He still couldnt believe they were finally here!

Mars!

What a time to be alive, at the dawn of a great new age of discovery!

Unknown to billions back on Earthoutside certain government circles in Beijing and the higher echelons of the Peoples Liberation ArmyMars was now Chinese territory. Back on humanitys home world, there were rumors, of course, born of a handful of blurry orbiter images which showed the dust rays of landing jets or unexpected vehicle tracks, in spite of the countless precautions taken to hide their presence.

Precautions like they were currently taking.

The Communist Partys cyber assets also worked hard to remove or discredit any such discoveries. That work, completed by hacker teams in Shanghai, was aided by the garbled information-overloaded world the internet age had delivered.

Yet such gossip was not unique to American conspiracy theorists.

No, not at all

From the beginning, there had been stories of a similar ilk told during Shan and Weis grueling training. That had been at Ordos, one of Chinas much talked about ghost cities built during the construction boom that followed the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. Those cities supposedly all stood empty and mired in debt, funded by uncontrolled government stimulus spending as the Party tried to keep the economy growing in the aftermath of the global bust, but the truth was very different.

Some of those cities had been filled not just with the workers whod built them, but also the clandestine Chinese Mars programs training and launch assets. A network of secured sites lay spread across China, hiding within their own construction the creation of launch vehicles, cargo ships, and the habitat modules needed for the ambitious program being rolled out.

And this was no program of half a dozen missions over five or so years, but a schedule of multiple programs with no end date.

Inside Ordos, the talk was not of the rising power of China on Earth, which was all too apparent in the New Provinces and puppet states like the Chinese Philippines, Green Ukraine, and the Vladivostok Special Administrative Zone, but instead of the nations growing presence on Mars.

China was now an established superpower on Earth, but would also soon dominate other worlds.

Of course, in such a grand endeavor as the Mars program, there were dangers and many unknowns. The training facilities had always hosted whispers of strange happenings on the red planet reported by the first crews. Some of the tales were odd enough to be at home on any whacko American blog, while some held enough of a pinch of truth to be given credence.

The most persistent rumors were of unknown craft in the Martian sky, or other missions as secret as their own by rival states, and even of a Chinese base gone native, as the Americans would say. Renegades, they were called. The squads favorite was of a mission that mirrored their own, but was made up solely of women instead of the male-only program Shan and Wei were part of.

The alarm sounded again, drawing Shans focus. He put aside his thoughts and repeated the warning to the squad, One minute.

Down the gully from him, one of the camouflaged tent skirts shifted in the weak breeze. That canopy hid their factory pod. The automated unmanned landing had been on target, but the deployment of the canopy had disturbed loose rocks at the top of the gully, causing a rock fall. The slide of material had crashed down into the side of the pod, piercing the hull and damaging some of the stores and backup production units.

The units worked raw materials by various processes such as baking regolith to release oxygen and hydrogen, among other elements. The process, plan, and philosophy behind their mission was largely built upon the ideas of the Mars Direct plan hatched decades ago by an American scientist. Largely, it boiled down to Mars missions living off the land, distilling what they needed from Mars instead of bringing it all with them.

Water, breathable air, hydrogen fuelit was all there, hidden in the Martian surface awaiting extraction. And the system worked.

The squad had what they needed to survive in spite of the damaged units. The machines still intact had processed enough material over the past year after their landing to keep the newly arrived crew alive. The real concern was not that the damaged units endangered the squad now, but that it compromised some of their backup systems. They had been left with no redundancy, not unless they could repair them.

So, in spite of their hectic work schedule, Shan had allocated two of their number to get the units up and running if they could. They would need the combined outputs of all the machines to complete their mission goal of creating a stable biosphere in a sealed lava tube for ten times their number.