One Day on Mars
by
Travis S. Taylor
Table of Contents
24 Hours on Mars—
That Will Change the Course of History
ONE DAY ON MARS
Travis S. Taylor
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Travis S. Taylor
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN 10: 1-4165-5505-6
ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-5505-6
Cover art by Kurt Miller
First printing, October 2007
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Taylor, Travis S.
One day on Mars / Travis S. Taylor.
p. cm.
'A Baen Books original'--T.p. verso.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165- 5505-6
ISBN-10: 1-4165-5505-6
1. Mars (Planet)--Fiction. 2. Martians--Fiction. I.
Title.
PS3620.A98O54 2007
813'.6--dc22
2007028327
Printed in the United States of America
Baen Books by Travis S. Taylor
with John Ringo:
Vorpal Blade
Manxome Foe (forthcoming)
Chapter 1
6:25 AM Mars Tharsis Standard Time
Nancy peered through the viewport at the faint blue-green luminescent hue of the planetscape as it skittered beneath them at a few hundred kilometers per hour. To the north there were several geodesic domes giving off slight metallic glints each time Sol peeked through the smoky gray plumes being emitted from the exhaust portals atop each of the greenhouse gas factories. The smoke poured and rolled gracefully upward and mixed with the tropospheric breezes scattering the smoky plume's content across the planet's atmosphere.
The little plutonium reactors within each dome slowly crept deeper into the Martian soil, melting and vaporizing water ice, iron-rich soil, oxygen, and various forms of soot smoke into the smoky gray steam plumes boiling upward into the sky above the metallic domes. Occasionally, one of the reactors would reach a water-rich depth and the cloud would turn to mostly white steamy water vapor for a while. Those domes were very easy to distinguish from the others for weeks at a time.
'I know that. . . .' Nancy whispered softly, not wanting to disturb the calm moment, but still reflexively used audible speech.
Nancy watched the domes pass behind the ship as new ones appeared over the horizon both to the northeast and to the south.
Each of the domes was at least the size of a large sports arena and perhaps taller. The exhaust stacks flooded the Martian atmosphere with greenhouse gases and oxygen and had been doing so for nearly a century. The atmosphere on Mars was dense enough to support life but not yet warm enough or oxygen-rich enough for humans to survive unprotected. In fact, there was almost enough oxygen to be similar to that of Earthly high altitudes like on Mount Everest, but there still remained far too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to safely breathe it. The Martian trees and grasses were slowly taking care of the carbon dioxide, but it would still be a century or more before Mars would be Earthlike enough to go outside without oxygen or scrubbers. Pressure suits had not been needed for decades, but heated environment suits and oxygen supplies or carbon dioxide scrubbers were still the common fashion of Martians, tourists, and of course the military.
Nancy, being from Virginia, had only studied about the Martian geology transformation industry. Being half Martian, on her mother's side, she had also heard stories firsthand from her mother of Mars and how wonderful it would be someday. Her mother had been from the southern glacial region, which was a hemisphere away at the moment, where the water ice was being heated by large space-based laser systems that were in non-Keplerian orbits about the planet's pole. Standard Keplerian orbits actually circumscribe a planet, but the nonstandard orbits of the space-based lasers allowed them to hover over a single Martian location while not being at the Mars
