The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [68]
“Shows how long it’s been since I’ve been to Luna,” Qaletaqu said. “Here on Mars, we’ve come to think that Earth regards us as another Canada. Looks like the Moon has become another Florida.”
Brooks allowed a wry snicker to escape her lips. “It’s also a tourist trap. Did you know there’s a hotel and casino right smack in the Sea of Tranquillity now?”
He scowled. “No. But I hope they haven’t messed up the old Apollo landing sites. We learned our lesson about that sort of thing here when the workers at the Utopia Planitia settlement nearly backed over the Viking 2 lander with one of the mohole borers.”
“It looks like the Lunar Schooners had a similar experience,” she said. “At least all the artifacts and bootprints that Armstrong and Aldrin left behind are right there in the hotel lobby, on display in a vacuum chamber surrounded by a bunch of red velvet ropes. Uggh.” She shuddered theatrically.
She turned back toward the window as the skimmer plunged over the lip of the immensely broad, four-thousand-kilometer-long canyon, whose eastern side, now probably more than one hundred fifty klicks distant, had already retreated over the horizon. The skimmer then dived into the valley’s frost-and-fog-shrouded vertical expanse, spaces some seven kilometers deep that the approaching dawn had yet to penetrate. A pattern of approaching lights quickly emerged from the mist as the skimmer descended into the disconcerting darkness that obscured the canyon floor despite the persistent presence of a brightening purple-and-salmon sky directly overhead.
It took nearly a minute for Brooks to realize that the lights she saw weren’t intended to guide the skimmer to a landing strip on the ground. She grasped this fact at the same instant she realized that the lights weren’t even on the ground; rather, they were nestled all along the expanse of the vertical face of the rough southern wall of the Valles Marineris, like the windows of a steel-and-glass high-rise building melded seamlessly with the natural contours of Mars.
“Welcome to Popé Pueblo, Miz Brooks,” Qaletaqu said, speaking a place name that evoked images of the cliffside cavern dwellings in which his Anasazi, Hopi, and Pueblo ancestors had dwelled during pre-Columbian times in the deserts of North America’s southwest. “You’re about to visit the jewel of the Mariner Valley, and the home of my people—for now, at least.”
Brooks paused for a moment to wonder just what he meant by that. But before she could ask, the skimmer’s wheels made percussive but not violent contact with the kilometers-long ribbon of pressed regolith tarmac on the canyon floor. Her weight shifted forward distractingly against her seat restraints as the pilot began the final deceleration that would bring the vehicle to a slow, rolling stop.
Gannet Brooks’s first impression of the vast subterranean complex built by the citizens of Popé Pueblo—known as “Canyontown” to the locals—was that they had done an incredible job of living off the land.
According to the background Qaletaqu’s office had provided, this was no mere metaphor. The interiors of the Canyontowners’ pressurized, cliffside cavern dwellings had been hewn directly out of the red-brown Martian rock, thick stone walls being a survival necessity because the planet’s relatively insubstantial atmosphere provided essentially no protection against incoming radiation. The radiation-resistant windows through which the Canyontowners looked upon the still mostly untamed Martian surface were synthesized from the local minerals as well. The very air they breathed and the water they