The Sunborn

by Gregory Benford

Genres: Hard Science Fiction; Science Fiction

Synopsis

The award-winning author of Timescape and Eater returns with a gripping new novel set in the same dynamic future as his wildly popular The Martian Race.

Their historic mission to Mars made Julia and Victor the most famous astronauts of all time. Now, decades later, they are ordered by the Consortium to Pluto, where they will rendezvous with another starship led by the brilliant, arrogant Captain Shanna Axelrod. Here, on the frozen ammonia shore of Pluto’s methane sea, Shanna has discovered intelligent creatures thriving in the -300° degree temperatures. But even as their findings shift from the amazing to the inconceivable, the two crews must overcome their own intense rivalry to work together, for the most remote reaches of the solar system are filled with unimaginable wonders … and countless forces that will crush all human life.

Release date: October 15, 2007

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 336

Sample

1.

FIRM, FRIENDLY, POSITIVE

JULIA TURNED HER BEST SIDE toward the camera, a three-quarters shot, and spread her arms. Okay, maybe a bit theatrical, but she had the backdrop for it.

“Welcome to Earth on Mars!” She always opened firm, friendly, positive. She swept an arm around, taking in the stubby trees with their odd purple-green leaves, the raked mounds barely sprouting brownish green patches, and above it all, the shiny curve of the dome, a hundred meters high. Beyond the dome’s ultraviolet screening hung the dark bowl of space. The somber cap was always there, reminding them of how little atmosphere shielded them.

“We showed you the inflation of the big dome a month ago, the planting of trees right after—now we have grass.”

Not any breed of grass you’ve ever seen before, though; it’s a genetically modified plant more like a dwarf bamboo, and technically bamboo is a grass, just a really stiff one, so . . .

“It’ll be a while before we can play football on it, true. We’re pretty sure nothing like grass ever grew on the surface of ancient Mars, even back in the warm and wet period. So this prickly little fuzz”—she stooped to stroke it—“is a first. It’ll help along the big job that the microbes are doing down in the ground already—breaking up the regolith, making it into real soil.”

Was she sounding strained already? It was getting harder to strike the right level of enthusiasm in her weekly broadcast to Earthside. She could barely remember the days, decades before, when she had broadcast several times a day, sometimes from this same spot. But then, they had been breaking new ground nearly every day. And betting pools on Earth gave new odds every time they went out in the rover, for whether they’d come back alive. Usually about fifty-fifty. The good ol’ days.

She smiled, strolling to her right as Viktor panned the camera. She had to remember her marks and turns, and to keep out of camera view the crowd of camp staff watching nearby.

Viktor called, “Cut, got sun reflecting in the lens.”

“Whew! Good. Let me memorize a few lines . . .”

She was glad for the break. It was getting harder to sound perky. The Consortium people had been grousing about that lately. But then, they had done so periodically, over the two decades she and Viktor had been doing their little shows. Media mavens had some respect for The Mars Couple (the title of the Broadway musical about them), but the long shadow of the Consortium, which had backed the 2018 First Landing (the movie title), wanted to keep them on the air for the worldwide subscriber base—and always pumping the numbers higher, of course. Axelrod, still the head of the Consortium, The Man Who Sold Mars (the miniseries title), and now probably the wealthiest man in the solar system, played diplomat between them and the execs Earthside. Exploration? Discovery? Yes, they still got to do some. But a safari that turned up nothing new—like the Olympus Mons fiasco (Climb the Solar System’s Highest Mountain!)—could drive down Consortium shares, send heads rolling at high corporate levels, and make headlines. So she and Viktor tried not to think too much about the eternal media issues. It never really helped.

Viktor was fiddling, changing camera angle, and here came Andy Lang, trotting over with his studied grin. “Julia, got an idea for a last shot.”

“What is it?” She looked beyond him and saw the two arm wings Andy had brought from Earth the year before, bright blue monolayer on a carbon strut. “Oh—well, look, we’ve done your flying stunt three times already.”

“I’m thinking just a closing shot.” He gestured up to the top of the dome, over a hundred meters above. “I come off the top platform, swing around the eucalyptus clump, into Viktor’s field of view—after you do your last line.”

“Ummm.” She had to admit they had no good finishing image, and Earthside was always carping about that. “You can do it?”

“Been practicing. I’ve got the timing down.” He was a big, muscular guy, an engineering wizard who had improved their geothermal system enormously. And a looker. Axelrod made sure to send them lookers. After all, thousands volunteered to work here every year. Why take the ugly ones when the worldwide audience liked eye candy?

Julia looked up at the ledge platform near the dome peak. Andy’s earlier flights had gone around the dome’s outer curve, pleasantly graceful. The eucalyptus stand at the dome’s center was her pet project. She insisted on some blue gum trees from her Australian home, the forests north of Adelaide. Earthside dutifully responded with a funded contest among plant biologists to find a eucalyptus that could withstand the sleeting ultraviolet here. Of course, the dome helped a lot; chemists had developed a miracle polymer that could billow into a broad dome, holding in nearly a full Earth atmosphere, and yet also subtract a lot of the UV from sunlight—all without editing away the middle spectrum needed for plant growth.

The blue gums were a darker hue, but they grew rapidly in the Martian regolith. Of course she had to prepare the soil, in joyful days spent spading in the humus they had processed from their own wastes. The French called it eau de fumier, spirit of manure, and chronicled every centimeter of blue gum growth. She’d sprouted the seeds and nurtured the tiny seedlings fiercely. Once planted, their white flanks had grown astonishingly fast. Their leaves hung down, minimizing their exposure to the residual hard ultraviolet that got through the dome’s filtering skin. But their trunks were spindly, with odd limbs sticking out like awkward elbows—yet more evidence that bringing life to Mars was not going to be easy.

She considered. Andy was a media hit with the ladies Earthside, if perhaps a bit of a camera hog. She had been giving him all the airtime he wanted lately, glad to off-load the work. “Okay, get on up there.”

She checked the timing with Viktor while Andy shimmied up the climbing rope to the peak of the dome and its platform, the big arm wings strapped to his back making him look like a gigantic moth. They moved location so that Andy would be shielded from Viktor’s view until he came around the clump of whitebark eucalyptus trunks as Viktor panned upward from her concluding shot.

In a few minutes more they were ready to go. Julia wondered if she could ease out of this job altogether, letting Andy the Hunk take most of it. She made a mental note to tactfully broach the subject with Axelrod.

“Positions!” Viktor called. Andy nodded from the platform, wings in place. “On,” Viktor said.

Without thinking about it Julia hit the same marker where she had left off. “You can’t imagine how thrilling it is to walk on Martian grass, without a space suit, breathing air that smells . . . well, I won’t lie, still pretty dusty. But better, yes. To think that we used to test the rocks here for signs of water deposition! Once the raw frontier, now a park. Progress.”

Of course, the hard part was turning regolith rocks and sand into topsoil, but that’s booooring, yes. Earthside had developed some fierce strains of bacteria that could break down all comers—old running shoes, hardbound books, insulation, packing buffers—into rich black loam almost as you watched.

She ducked as a white shape hurtled by, narrowly missing her head. “Chicken alert!” she said lightly, gesturing toward it with her head. It squawked and flapped, turning like a feathered blimp with wings. “Who would have thought chickens could have so much fun up here, in the low gravity? They find it far easier to fly here than on Earth. Of course, we brought them here so we could have fresh eggs, and they do lay, so we predicted that part correctly. But we don’t always know everything that’s going to happen in a biological experiment. This is the Mars version of the chicken and egg problem.”

Viktor smiled dutifully; they’d shared this little joke before. The Earthside producer would more probably wince. Okay, back to the script.

She waved a hand to her right, and Viktor followed the gesture with the camera, bringing in the view of the slopes and hills in the distance, beyond the green lances of the eucalyptus limbs. The slopes were still rusty red in the afternoon light, far beyond the dome that sloped down to its curved tie-down wall eighty meters away. They stood out nicely with the green eucalyptus foreground. The other trees—ranging from drought- and cold-resistant shrubs from Tasmania to hardy high-

altitude species—almost made a convincing forest. The “grass” was really a mixture of mosses, lichens, and small tundra species, too. A big favorite of the staff was “vegetable sheep,” soft, pale clumps from New Zealand’s high country. Convincing to the visual audience—a golf course on Mars!—but also able to survive a cold Martian night and even a sudden pressure drop. The toughest stuff from Earth, made still more rugged with bioengineering.

Axelrod had insisted on the visuals. Make it look Earthy, yes. She had worked for years to make the inflated domes support life, and there was still plenty to do. Making the raw regolith swarm with microbes to build soil, coaxing lichens onto the boulders used to help anchor the dome floors in place, being sure the roots of the first shrubs could survive the cold and prickly alkaline dirt . . . Years, yes, grubbing and figuring and trying everything she could muster. For a beginning.

Pay attention! You’re on-camera, and Viktor hates to reshoot.

“Ah, one of my faves . . .” She altered course to pass by a baobab—a tall, fat, tubular tree from Western Australia, with only a few thin, spidery limbs sprouting from its top, like a nearly bald man. Early settlers had used them for food storage, take shelter, even jail cells. On Mars they grew spectacularly fast, like eucalyptus, and nobody knew why. Aussie plants generally did better here, from the early greenhouse days of the first landing onward. Maybe, the biologist in her said, this came from the low-energy biology of Australia. The continent had skated across the Pacific, its mountains getting worn down, minerals depleted, rainfall lessening, and life had been forced to adapt. A hundred million years of life getting by with less and less . . . much like Mars.

“For those of you who’ve loyally stuck with us through these—wow!—twenty-two years, I say thanks. Sometimes I think that this is all a dream, and days like this prove it. Grass on Mars! Or—” She grinned, tilting her head up a bit to let the filtered sunlight play on her still-dark hair, using the only line she had prepared for this ’cast. “Another way to say it, I started out with nothing and still have most of it left. Out there—in wild Mars.”

Not that this little patch is so domesticated. It’s how we find out if raw regolith can become true soil, and what will grow well here.

“Already, there are environmental groups trying to preserve original, ancient Mars from us invaders.” She chuckled. “If Mars were just bare stone and dust, I’d laugh—I never did believe that rocks have rights. But since there’s life here, they have a point.”

This was just editorial patter, of course, while Viktor followed her on the walk toward the fountain. It tinkled and splashed in the foreground while she approached, Viktor shooting from behind her, so the camera looked through the trees, on through the clear dome walls to the dusty red landscape beyond. “I like to gaze out, so that I can imagine what Mars was like in its early days, a hospitable planet.” She turned, spread her hands in self-mockery. “Okay, we now know from fossils that there were no really big trees—nothing larger than a bush, in fact. But I can dream . . .”

She smiled and tried not to make it look calculated. After a quarter century of peering into camera snouts she had some media savvy. Still, she and Viktor thought in terms of, If we do this, people will like it. That had been a steadier guide through the decades than taking the advice about exploring Mars from the Earthside media execs of the Consortium, whose sole idea was, If we do this, we’ll maximize our global audience share, get ideas for new product lines, and/or optimize near-term profitability.

She paused beside the splashing fountain. She plucked up a cup they had planted there, and drank from it. “On Earth you can drink all the water you want and leave the tap on between cupfuls. Here, nobody does.” She smiled and walked on. “You’ve seen this before, but imagine if it were the only fountain you’d seen in a quarter century. That’s why I come here to read, meditate, think. That—and our newest wonder . . .”

Let them wait. She had learned that trick early on. Mars couldn’t be chopped up into five-second “image bites” and leave any lasting impression. She circled around the constant-cam that fed a view to Earthside for the market that wanted to have the Martian day as a wall or window in their homes. She knew this view sold especially well in the cramped rooms of China and India. It was a solid but subtle advertisement.

Crowded? Here’s a whole world, only a few dozen people on it—well, actually, about ten dozen—and it has the same land area as Earth. A different world entirely.

Things were different, all right. The dome was great, the biggest of several, a full 150 meters tall. It would have been far more useful in the first years, when they still lived in apartment-sized habs. Now her pressure suit was supple, moving fluidly over her body as she walked and stooped. The first expedition suits were the best of their era, but they still made you as flexible as a barely oiled Tin Man, as dextrous as a bear in mittens. The old helmets misted over unless you remembered to swab the inside with ordinary dish soap. And the catheters had always been irksome, especially for women; now they fit beautifully.

Outside, the wind whistled softly around the dome walls. Another reason she enjoyed the big dome—the sighing winds. Sounds didn’t carry well in Mars’ thin atmosphere, and the habs were so insulated they were cut off from any outdoor noise.

The grass ended, and she crunched over slightly processed regolith. Lichens could break the rock down, but they took time—lots of it. So they’d taken shortcuts to make an ersatz soil. They mixed Martian dust and small gravel-sized rock bits with a lot of their organic waste, spaded in over decades—everything from kitchen leftovers to slightly cleaned excrement. Add compost-starter bacteria, keep moist, and wait. And hope. Microbes liked free carbon, using it with water to frame elaborate molecules. She and Viktor had doled it out for years under the first, small dome before even trying to grow anything. The Book of Genesis got it all done in six days, but mere humans took longer.

She hit the marker they had laid out—a rock—and turned, pointing off-camera. “And now—ta-daah!—we have a surprise. The first Martian swimming pool.”

Okay, no swimming pools in Genesis—but it’s a step.

“I’m going for my first swim—now.” She shucked off her blue jumpsuit to reveal a red bikini. Her arms and legs were muscular, breasts midsize, skin pale, not too many wrinkles. Not really a babe, no, but she still got mash notes from middle-aged guys, somehow leaking through the e-mail filters.

Hey, we’re looking for market share here! She grinned, turned, and dove into the lapping clear water. Surfaced, gasped—she wasn’t faking, this really was her first swim in a quarter century—and laughed with sheer pleasure (not in the script). Went into a breaststroke, feeling the tug and flex of muscle, and something inexpressible and simple burst in her. Fun, yes—not nearly enough fun on Mars.

Or water. They had moved from the original base camp about eighteen years before. Once Earthside had shipped enough gear to build a real water-retrieval system, and a big nuke generator to run it, there seemed no point in not moving the hab and other structures—mostly light and portable—to the ice hills.

Mars was in some ways an upside-down world. On Earth one would look for water in the low spots, stream channels. Here in Gusev water lay waiting in the hilly hummocks, termed by geologists “pingos.” When water froze beneath blown dust, it thrust up as it expanded, making low hills of a few hundred meters. She recalled how Marc and Raoul had found the first ice, their drill bit steaming as ice sublimed into fog. Now Marc was a big vid star and Raoul ran Axelrod’s solar energy grid on the moon. Time . . .

She stopped at the pool edge, flipped out, and sprang to her feet—thanks, 0.38 g! “The first swim on Mars, and you saw it.” Planned this shot a year ago, when I ordered the bikini. She donned a blue terry-cloth bathrobe; the dryness made the air feel decidedly chilly. “In case you’re wondering, swimming doesn’t feel any different here. That’s because the water you displace makes you float—we’re mostly made of water, so the effect compensates. It doesn’t matter much what the local gravity is.”

Okay, slipped in some science while their guard was down.

“Behind all this is our improved water-harvesting system.” She pointed out the dome walls, where pipes stretched away toward a squat inflated building. “Robotic, nuclear-powered. It warms up the giant ice sheets below us, pumps water to the surface. Took nine years to build—whoosh! Thank you, engineers.”

What did the water mean? She envisioned life on a tiny fraction of Mars with plentiful water—no longer a cold, dusty desert. Under a pressurized dome the greenhouse effect raised the temperature to something livable. Link domes, blow up bigger ones, and you have a colony. They could grow crops big-time. Red Kansas . . .

A gout of steam hissed from a release value, wreathing her in a moist, rotten-egg smell. Andy had put the finishing touches on the deep thermal system, spreading the upwelling steam and hot water into a pipe system two meters below the dome floor. Their nuke generators ran the system, but most of the energy came for free from the magma lode kilometers below. Once the geologists—“areologists” when on Mars, the purists said—had drilled clean through the pingos and reached the magma, the upwelling heat melted the ice layers. Ducted upward, it made possible the eight domes they now ran, rich in moist air. Soon they would start linking them all. She smiled as she thought about strolling along treelined walkways from dome to dome, across windblown ripe wheat fields, no helmet or suit. Birds warbling, rabbits scurrying in the bushes.

In the first years their diet had been vegetarian. It made sense to eat plant protein directly, rather than lose 90 percent of the energy by passing it through an animal first. But from the first four rabbits shipped out they now had hundreds, and relished dinner on “meat nights.” They’d have one tonight, after this media show.

“So that’s it—life on Mars gets a bit better. We’re still spending most of our research effort on the Marsmat—the biggest conceptual problem in biology, we think. We just got a new crew to help. And pretty soon, on the big nuke rocket due in a week, we’ll get a lot more gear and supplies. Onward!”

She grinned, waved—and Viktor called, “Is done.”

She had waited long enough. She shucked off the bathrobe and tossed the wireless mike on top of the heap.

“Am still running.”

“Check it for editing,” she said quickly. “I’m going to splash.” She dove into the pool again. Grinning, Viktor caught it in slow-mo.

Julia rolled over onto her back and took a few luxurious strokes. She caught Andy’s kick off the platform and watched him swoop gracefully around the dome. It was still a bit of a thrill to see. They kept the dome at high pressure to support it, which added more lift for Andy. He kept his wings canted against the thermals that rose from the warm floor, camera-savvy, grinning relentlessly.

Even with the lower gravity and higher air density, Viktor and Julia had been skeptical that it could work. But Axelrod and the Consortium Board had loved the idea, seeing tourism as a long-term potential market.

And Andy did look great, obviously having a lot of fun, his handsome legs forming a neat line as he arced above. He rotated his arms, mimicking the motion birds make in flight, pumping thrust into his orbit. His turn sharpened into a smaller circle, coming swiftly around the steepled bulk of the big eucalyptus. His wings pitched to drive him inward, and wind rippled his hair. Julia watched Viktor follow the accelerating curve with the camera, bright wings sharp against the dark sky. Good stuff.

But he was cutting it close to the tree, still far up its slope. The Consortium Board had chosen Andy both for his engineering skills and for this grinning, show-off personality, just the thing to perk up their audience numbers.

His T-shirt flapped, and he turned in closer still. She lost sight of him behind the eucalyptus, and when he came within view again, there seemed to be no separation at all between his body and the tree. Ahead of him a limb stuck out a bit farther than the rest. He saw it and turned his right wing to push out, away, and the wing hit the limb. For an instant it looked as though he would bank down and away from the glancing brush. But the wing caught on the branch.

It ripped, showing light where the monolayer split away from the brace. Impact united with the change in flow patterns around his body. The thin line of light grew and seemed to turn Andy’s body on a pivot, spinning him.

The eucalyptus wrenched sideways. It was thin, and the collision jerked.

He fought to bring the wing into a plane with his left arm, but the pitch was too much. Julia gasped as his right arm frantically pumped for leverage it did not have. The moment froze, slowed—and then he was tumbling in air, away from the tree, falling, gathering speed.

The tree toppled, too.

In the low gravity the plunge seemed to take long moments. All the way down he fought to get air under his remaining wing. The right wing flapped and rattled and kept him off-kilter. His efforts brought his head down, and when he hit in the rocks near the pool, the skull struck first.

The smack was horrible. She cried out in the silence.

Andy had not uttered a sound on the way down.

2.

BOOT HILL

THE TRADITIONAL DUNE BUGGY with the shrouded body crawled slowly up the small hill. Footprints had made the entire area smooth, and the cortege followed a well-worn path. The stone cairn, which they’d erected twenty years ago when the first mission landed, had had many visitors. Also by tradition, the burial would be late in the day. Boot Hill looked out over the red and pink and brown wilderness of Mars. With the domes of the colony in the distance the mourners were reminded of the strangeness of their new world and surrounded with the beauty of a Mars sunset. It was a fitting send-off to a fellow explorer and served somehow to lessen their grief.

Julia well remembered that small party of five who’d established the graveyard with the mounds for Lee Chen and Gerda Braun. Today there were twelve mounds and ten times as many mourners. Every time they did this the line was longer.

We lost Alexev in a fall, Sheila Cabbot in an electrical failure. And, of course, two aerobraking tragedies. Andy is the thirteenth.

Over the years they’d added far more graves than Julia had ever wanted to see, and had to expand the original boundary circle of rocks several times. None lost to disease yet. All accidents. She reached the top of the hill and scanned back along the line of suited figures trudging up the rise. The newcomers were easy to pick out, stumbling slightly in an uncertain rhythm. The efficient “Mars gait” took a bit of time to master. Also, the harsh reality of Mars was likely hitting them full force for the first time. The younger ones tended to babble in times of stress. The chatter in the suit mikes was unsettling; she switched hers off.

Someone Julia didn’t immediately recognize was scanning a small vid around the scene. Most everything they did was recorded; she should have been used to it by now. But she still chafed under the watchful lens eyes. It seemed like an intrusion here, just to make a fleeting news item Earthside. But then, Andy had loved the spotlight. He wouldn’t mind.

She looked carefully at the figure holding the vid. Still no recognition.

We’ve really grown; I used to know everyone instantly, just by gait and size. Usually without looking at their suit markings. Hope this guy is new, and not someone I’ve forgotten.

Viktor jogged her arm, and she turned back to the ceremony.

She leaned over and touched her helmet to his. “Who’s the guy with the vid? Is he new?”

“Didier Rabette. From machine shop. Here two years already.”

One of the geologists was a lay preacher, and she’d volunteered to officiate. That, too, was new; they were really beginning to specialize. Progress.

The ceremony was brief but effective. Julia thought suddenly about navy sea burials. Regrets, but the mission must continue.

She let the bulk of the crowd leave, stung anew by the suddenness of death. She never got used to it: how someone you’d just talked to, or someone who had always been there, was now gone. She still held internal conversations with her parents, although both were gone. Her father had slowly declined from one of the newly emerging killer viral diseases, the zoonosis class that migrated from animals to humans, fresh out of the African cauldron. It was really no surprise when he died. But her mother’s death had been sudden: a brief respiratory illness, one of the “new” flus that roamed the crowded Earth, and she was gone in less than a week. From “doing fine” to “done for” in just over twenty-four hours, actually.

Julia realized that even if she’d not been 50 million miles away, she likely would not have rushed to her mother’s bedside, because the course of the disease had been so ambiguous, the decline so sudden. At least, she thought ruefully, it helped assuage her guilt a little. But now Andy—plucked from them in a heartbeat. As a biologist she understood intellectually that evolution requires death; if all the original forms were still around, there would be no room for the new ones. But emotionally it was very hard to understand.

Afterward, on the way down, she was surprised by how large the colony looked. In the gathering dark, lights twinkled in the distance, stirred by the dusty breeze. “Mars City” was beginning to take shape.

3.

THE MARS EFFECT

“WE MUST MEET WITH the new ones,” Viktor said crisply the next morning over breakfast in the compact cafeteria. “First thing today.”

They were sitting at their usual table, and nobody in the crew sat with them, by tradition. They were the founders, after all. Julia sometimes waved some of them over, but usually she and Viktor wanted privacy. It reminded them of the early years, when the two of them had had Mars to themselves. No one within 50 million miles. They’d staved off the lurking fears of abandonment and ever-present danger by creating their own private reality. By focusing closely they became the whole world to each other.

As they had come into the cafeteria, the audio switched to some gospel music, an unusual choice for her, but it fitted her current mood. “Trouble of This World” by Bill Landford rang gracefully amid the clatter of breakfast.

In the two days since Andy’s death a numb, gray pall had descended. Julia and Viktor had taken full responsibility, and meant it. The Consortium Board, meeting in emergency session, had rejected that explanation. Andy had flown inside the dome over a hundred times. Hang-glider enthusiasts around the world had endlessly rerun the pictures of Andy’s tight glide, and they emerged with a consensus: he had cut the margin too fine. Andy had never flown that tight a circle around the eucalyptus before. He had simply misjudged.

The vast Martian subscription audience felt the same. There had been the usual abrasive commentary, asking whether Julia and Viktor had simply lost their judgment from the long years of running the Gusev Mars Outpost, but that was so expected that nobody paid attention.

Not that any of it helped Julia and Viktor. They did feel responsible, and no media mavens could change that. “Trouble of This World” mournfully underlined their mood. Julia sipped coffee and let her doubts well up within. It was better to let the feelings wash over her and live in them fully, knowing they would pass.

They had found long before that music knitted together the small community here, made it seem less isolated from humanity. The occasional disputes over what to play—the opera buffs thought Wagner for breakfast was fine—were worth it. Today it certainly helped to hear a chorus singing quiet spirituals over the breakfast clatter.

She said nothing and gazed out the big window. Their table commanded its view, taking in the big new dome to the left, and beyond it the dozens of lesser domes, habs, Quonset huts and labs and depots. All with sandbags atop to shield against the solar wind and cosmic rays that sleeted down here eternally. Tracks crosshatched the whole area, and color-coded, suited figures moved everywhere in pressure suits.

Ugly, she had to admit. Immediately she looked beyond the bustling colony. There lay beauty. The roll of dark hills across the crater floor blended into