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FIFTEEN

Tuesday, July 29, 2155

Sol 25 of Martian Month of Leo

THE THING GANNET BROOKS LIKED BEST about Mars was the lightness of the place, a feeling she could only describe as a kind of buoyancy.

That sensation of lightness returned to her gradually today as the transport vessel’s gravity plating finished making its slow adjustment from an Earth-normal one g to the thirty-eight percent that prevailed on the Red Planet’s surface, which still lay thousands of kilometers away. In the meantime Mars loomed ever larger, having grown before Brooks’s eyes from a ruddy, coin-sized disk until it had become the pockmarked sphere that now dominated the broad transparent aluminum ports of the transport’s “walking lounge.”

The haze of atmosphere was clearly visible now along the periphery of the daylight crescent that Brooks could see from the vessel’s present angle of approach, apparently thickened somewhat since she had last visited this place three years earlier. Either the Martian terraforming project was making far faster progress than anyone had anticipated, or else she was letting her imagination run away with her again. That same imagination led her to almost feel an enormous rush of wind parting her shoulder-length brown hair as the transport skimmed uncomfortably close to the gray, rocky bulk of Phobos, which reminded Brooks of nothing so much as a gigantic, acne-scarred potato. The Stickney crater yawned wide across the body’s lumpen surface, like a hungry maw nearly nine klicks wide and capable of making a quick meal of the transport on its way into the sixty-seven-hundred-odd kilometer-deep gulf of cisphobian space that separated the larger and innermost of Mars’s two moons from the planet itself.

Makes sense that something named after an ancient legend about fear would put images like that in my head, she thought as the planet transformed yet again before her eyes, this time changing from a globe suspended against an infinitely large velvet blanket of emptiness to a very real place that a human being could relate to, a place that was familiar despite its obvious alienness.

Less than four hours later, Brooks made her second Martian landing approach of the day, this time on a local private skimmercraft she had boarded a little more than an hour after disembarking from the interplanetary transport at Bradbury. Because it was designed to fly only in the rarefied Martian atmosphere, the skimmer was configured quite differently than the vessel that had brought her here from Earth. It resembled one of the old-style airplanes that had ruled Earth’s skies for much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although this craft’s wings possessed far more lift-generating surface area than those of any terrestrial plane or glider, a feature made necessary by the relative insubstantiality of the atmosphere. The thinness of the Martian air also placed a fairly low ceiling on the skimmer’s maximum altitude, which Brooks estimated to be perhaps two-thirds that of a twentieth-century commercial jet. But even though the skimmer had to stay well inside the bounds of suborbital flight, and was presently descending at a far shallower angle than the interplanetary transport had, the aerial view it presented of this cold, rusty desolationscape of a world looked even more spectacular to Brooks than the view she had had from space.

“Glorious, isn’t it?” Representative Qaletaqu said from a seat on the opposite side of the skimmer’s modest passenger compartment, which was empty except for the two of them.

“Now I think I understand why you went into politics,” Brooks said, unable to tear her gaze away from the exterior view. “You’re telepathic.”

She heard him chuckle gently in response as she watched the rough southern highlands of Margaritifer Terra rolling away behind the skimmer’s belly as the craft headed nearly due west into the rising sun. The oddly diminished orb’s yellow rays scattered across the boulder-strewn eastern edge of Ophir Planum and glinted against the large pressure-dome habitats to the