Green on Red

5: Rover Seventeen

Simha 3, 28 AL

Terra Sabaea

In the beginning, I guess, it would have been a problem of survival. I can imagine the first landers struggling to sustain on their own providence. By my time, however, there were already the beginnings of a civilized world, and Mars had begun to beat its visitors down in another way. It was vast, it was unchanging, and it was cut off from all but the most basic contact with Earth. Quite simply, it was boring.

For three weeks, we trundled across the planet. It had taken close on a week alone to leave the forests of Aresia. As the rover rolled through the lanes of pipeline-fed trees, the senior officers would take shifts at watch in the cockpit. We stopped often that first week, to patch pipelines, spread fertilizer, and generally tend to the passing vegetation.

I learned more by trial that week than in the month of study aboard the London. One tends to remember the distance-to-pressure equation for water lines better after one bursts, blinding visors with a spray of hydroponics that freeze into a thick frost. For two days afterwards, the smell of thawing nitrates lingered in the airlock. I lost the awkward movements of the atmosphere suit as it began to mold to my form, becoming little more bothersome than any other clothing.

Past the final Ecodome, the stands thinned out, the canopy opening more often to the sky. Mars went from a desert-dotted forest to a forest-dotted desert. There was no set boundary to the forest from what I saw, but at a certain point, Dev informed us that we had passed the most westerly grove fed by Aresian waters. We were beyond the edge of the largest system on the planet, stretching over a fair fraction of Isidis and Syrtis. From here out, we were in the wild wastes of Sabaea, as he emphasized dramatically to the trio of us Skippers. A map was brought up showing the locations of groves therein. Each was watered by its own discovered source: an icepack at the bottom of a crater, an ice-filled borehole in a valley wall. They looked close together on the map, but as we soon discovered, there were days of slow rover travel in between each.

Those days, a steady roll across endless ruddy plains, filled with endless card games and rewatchings of whatever movies any of us had saved on our computers, Devin pointed out to me, "This is the real Mars, Threesie. All they show you Earthside is the big mountains and fancy bases. But trust me; this is most of the planet right here. Big, red, empty and boring."

There was no internet on Mars beyond the few company net pages, no stores or libraries in Sabaea, and you couldn't exactly step outside for a refreshing walk. As such, even as lowly skippers (though I was convinced my movements were steadily adapting to the water-like gravity), we had more than enough time to know each other.

Mark, I learned, was the son of some low-down Monacian government workers, who had sent him off to Mars under the pretense that the Europeans were on the verge of breaking through their borders.

"I doubt it," Emily snorted at this statement, "They've been saying for years back home that the Monacians were close to winning."

"Ah, Europia," Scott McCreighton sighed sarcastically, "The grand dual shitpiles of great empires from a thousand years ago."

It was generally agreed that political discussions were irrelevant now, as we no longer had any legal involvement with our home nations - or for that matter, any nation.

After a few days, even News.mar, a site that was more advertising than actual news, served acceptably as entertainment. I failed to see the purpose in so much promotion on a site only accesible on Mars - people were, by definition of being here, already dependent on the Company for everything, unless an American wanted to seek asylum at New Washington, the secretive old American base somewhere on the planet.