Blue Plague, Red Redemption

Chapter 10: Jack Stilman

Stilman was savoring the view of the plateau they were passing through. Out the window, he could see hundreds of towering silver and grey cones, many of them fifty, some as much as eighty meters high. It was like a charred metal forest with fat trunks and stubby fins for branches. He felt a warm flow of gratitude rise up from his chest, privately thanking Maddie for helping him land the job that was bringing him here.

The plateau's relative flatness and the rocky hardness of the ground made it an ideal landing site for the thousands of colony ships that populated Arsia and the other nearby colonies. Some of these ships had flown several times between the planets. Most of them only made one trip, though, as it worked out to be cheaper and easier to build simple one-time-use ships than to deal with the hassle of sending giant steel cans back to Earth, and mostly empty at that. 

But such one-way landings were especially rare in recent years. These days, most people travel to Mars as cargo inside of hiberpods, transported by ships assembled in space that would make a brick look aerodynamic. Their long fragile structures could only exist in the airless vacuum of space and would get ripped apart if they got anywhere near an atmosphere. But they sure were efficient. And people didn't need to land directly anymore. The colonies had scores of reusable shuttles that could ferry people down from orbit over the course of the four-week arrival season.

Stilman shifted in his seat to get a better view through a window of the cramped double-sized rover he was in, which his nine travel companions affectionately referred to as 'the bus'. Focusing on the scenery helped to take his mind away of the terror of last few days of how he spent hiding in an unfinished and long-forgotten tunnel, waiting for Barry to sneak in and deliver whatever news was in store for him, unsure if at the end of all this, he was going to have to turn himself in to be sedated in a pod and sent into orbit to be stored as cargo until being shipped off back to Earth. Thankfully, Maddie called in a favor and got him this last-minute opportunity where they were desperate enough for a skilled tech not to ask any questions about the circumstances.

Minutes later, the rover started to descend down a ramp and his view of the rockets was replaced by walls of dirt and rock. Stilman was excited. The old rocket graveyard was ironically giving birth to Mars' newest colony, the Yan Wang Gorge, and he was about to see it for the first time.

It took them about twenty minutes to descend to the canyon floor. As they were coming down, Stilman could see that unlike the rigorously planned and organized Arsia Colony, Yan Wang was a chaotic mess. It was more of an encampment than a city, located at the bottom of a narrow canyon. What looked like a hundred pressurized domes—tents really—of various sizes were sprawled out along a quarter-kilometer of the canyon floor.

"Don't worry," said Kelly, a former Arsia tech like Stilman who was now a Yan Wang employee, and his new foreman. "Those roofs don't look like much, but most of them are made from bevlar fabric. They can absorb as much shock from micrometeorites as three centimeters of steel."

"Uh-huh. I'm actually more concerned about the radiation," said Stilman. "I have... a condition."

"Well, it's true that those fabric roofs aren't much thicker than a camping tent's with about as much radiation protection," said Kelly facetiously.

"Great. I guess I'll be bleeding out of my orifices before my first paycheck."

"Don't get your hopes up, Jack," laughed Kelly. "Living in direct sunlight is lethal for the rest of us, too."

"So what's the deal then?" asked Stilman. "Why haven't you all keeled over from radiation sickness yet?"

"Take a look over there," Kelly said pointing out the front window. "See how most of the tents are huddled around that bend in the canyon? It's in a shadow for twenty months out of the year. No sunshine means no solar wind. And then we've got forty vertical meters of rock on either side of us and the whole friggin' planet under our feet. That cuts out ninety percent of the cosmic rays coming from all directions. And the bevlar minimizes whatever's left. You know what that means?"