Mars Colony Part III: Recovering Red Xenotech
Marcus Smith was 28 when he became one of the first humans to set foot on Mars. Now he’s 50. He was a commander once, or maybe a captain. It doesn’t matter really. He’s a cave farming engineer, bunking with Aideen. This handsome black haired Irish woman can do calculus in her head and make sunshine a hundred foot underground. When they first met, she called him thick as manure and half as useful- now he had five kids, three of them hers, and a thriving colony of 300 astronauts and 400 little Martians. The colony had a real garden now, both catfish and carp spawning in the hydroponics bay under the first Martian tree, and extra food to go around. Some of the African women still wouldn’t wear shorts and some of the Japanese still smiled their embarrassment after bowing. Life was moving right along until his eldest daughter Ada radioed from a reconnaissance mission to a nearby cave. They found something amazing.
Deep in one of the caves, under a natural skylight, something round, smooth, and metallic was lodged into the stone about fifty foot up. The part they could see was oblong and about 20 foot in diameter. There was a long streak etched into the rock bellow the thing, and the geologists say it must have leaked something acidic. Earth didn’t like it, but there’s no way Marcus is waiting a year to crack this egg open on the promise that he’ll see what’s inside. They…
