The Rainseekers

by Matthew Kressel

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

Burned out and looking to put her past behind her, a former addict and recovering influencer interviews her fellow travelers en route to witness the first rain on Mars.

Sakunja Salazar had it all. Money, toys, women, and all the drugs money could buy. A breakout Holo influencer, seemingly overnight she lifted her family out of their tiny Mexico City apartment and into the world of the rich and famous. That all changed when she hopped on a rocket and blasted into the cosmos, never to hawk lavender moisturizer again.

What goes up must come down, and when Sakunja finally crashed back down on Mars an alcoholic, addict, and has-been she thought her life was pretty much over. That is, until a magazine editor discovered her photography and offered her a job. Now, she’s the resident documentarian on a barebones expedition seeking to be the first humans to witness rain on Mars. For the first time in her life, Sakunja is turning the spotlight on someone else–interviewing her fellow travelers about what brought them to join this incredibly foolhardy crew of souls adrift in a world unseen.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: February 17, 2026

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 151

Sample

1THE LONG ROAD OUT

Our march out to Hephaestus was long and bumpy, but when we arrived, and we set up the first tents, and Hanzila Olembe, our unofficial cook, brewed the first pots of black tea, delivering their warm bulbs to our frigid little fingers, an expectation grew among us—at least I sensed it did—as we looked at each other’s cold-flushed faces, that this would be worth it, that our long trek across these frigid Martian plains would not be for naught. We would be the first people to feel it rain on Mars.

Mama thinks I’m mad. A young woman trekking out with a bunch of strangers, half of them high more than half the time. (No, I’m not going to tell you who does what and when; useless gossip is best left to devils and AIs.) And maybe I am a little crazy, venturing this far from Elysium, the city I’ve called home for the last seven years, ever since I flung myself out from Earth atop a screaming rocket. Out, out, out has been my MO of late, the default mode of my motivational network. And maybe after this I’ll head out with some BASE jumpers into the deep again and walk, heavily suited, across some icy plain under the blue glow of Uranus. Who knows? That’s for tomorrow. For today, my goals are:

Helping make sure our sleeping tent (that I share with three others) is free from microtears so an unexpected cold snap or passing pocket of low-oxygenated air doesn’t kill us in our sleep, and—Assembling my bunk bed with Arkadia Meesang, with whom I will share this surprisingly complicated contraption (she swears she doesn’t snore, but I have packed a bag full of earplugs just in case), and—Helping with the preparation and dissemination of the evening meal, a stew of freeze-dried veggies and protein culture that some dozen or so generations back might have begun inside an animal but bears little resemblance to one now, and—Finding time, between all of this, to have at least one person tell me their story before bed.Number four proves surprisingly hard. And not for lack of time, but because setting up the tent, assembling the bunk, and handing out dinners to forty-six ravenous adventurers turns out to be far more exhausting than I had originally supposed. Not to mention the nine hours spent inside a cramped and malodorous buggy this morning as our caravan trekked west across Mars’s equatorial plain.

But Ghleanna Watanabe, four decades older than me, seems none the worse off for the journey, and maybe even a little better for it. She leans forward and grins at me like a child awaiting handouts of candy.

Does she imagine I have hordes of eager readers hanging on my every word and, by the course, hers? I don’t have the heart to tell her this is only my second gig for Ares magazine, that any fanbase I did have wilted like a plant one forgets to water when I left Earth and spent my subsequent years (after a not-so-brief stint touring the outer Solar System) photographing Martian landscapes, which was ridiculously fun, but not exactly lucrative, and so the primary reason I’ve taken this gig is for the money. (Mama always says a painful truth is better than a comforting lie, and like a sadist I tell the truth more often than is convenient, to my frequent detriment. Mama, this is why I have few friends.)

Ghleanna takes a generous swig from a small aluminum flask she reveals from a concealed pocket of her coveralls and gives it to me. “Drink this,” she says. “It’ll warm your skinny bones.”

The flask is whiskey, Islay Scotch, and better than anything you can find on Mars, even in the dockyards of Hellae Planitia, which means it’s absurdly expensive, and yet here Ghleanna is offering this rarest of treasures to a near-total stranger whom she’s only met just twelve hours ago. Such is the power of fading glory.

“What do you want to know?” Ghleanna says, leaning back, sparkle-eyed, her body’s heat radiating like a furnace.

I’ve been pondering the same question for days. What to say, what to ask? When it comes to interviews, I’m as green as the newborn Martian grass. But after much thought (and drink) I came to the firm conclusion that every soul has a story worth telling. All we have to do is just shut up and listen.

“It’s pretty simple,” I say as the whiskey-fire simmers in my belly and a Jupiter mass’s worth of gravity tries to pull my eyelids down. “Just tell me how you came to be here.”

“To Hephaestus Basin?” she says.

“No,” I say. “To Mars.”

Ghleanna leans back. Stares. Smiles. Her dark eyes flash in the deep blue light of our communal tent, as if I just gave her permission to share a great secret. Perhaps I did.


Copyright © 2026 by Matthew Kressel