The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [69]
The Canyontowners’ basic “build it here out of whatever’s handy” ethos allowed them to elevate their self-sufficiency to a fine art, with the vast majority of their food coming from the ranks of ultravioletshielded greenhouses they had arranged along the canyon lip, as well as from underground nurseries whose full-spectrum lights drew their power from the areothermal heat released through the mining moholes that the Dytallix-Barsoom Resource Extraction Corporation had sunk deep into the Red Planet’s thick mantle.
Brooks’s second impression of the Canyontowners was gained as Qaletaqu conducted her on a tour of the underground city’s brightly lit main street. Its charmingly anachronistic-looking array of apparently mom-and-pop, proprietor-run businesses were interspersed with a number of recognizable corporate franchises—starting with a tavern and hotel whose retro architecture and dungaree-clad habitués could have been taken directly from an old vid about North America’s Wild West. The Canyontowners themselves seemed paradoxically wild in their habits and culture, despite the obvious discipline the construction and maintenance of a safe, livable, and prosperous habitat such as Popé Pueblo in an environment as unforgiving as Mars required.
The first solid evidence of this dichotomy that she witnessed directly was the bar fight that broke out right before her eyes as she and Qaletaqu walked along the concrete walkway between the tavern and the storefront office of the Dytallix-Barsoom Resource Extraction Corporation. The tavern’s swinging doors had flown open just ahead of a pair of scuffling workmen, whose movements followed a weirdly elastic trajectory dictated by the low Martian gravity. Qaletaqu wasted no time plunging into their midst in order to separate the men, sending them on their respective ways once he’d determined that neither man had sustained any serious injuries and had extracted their mumbled pledges to cause no further trouble, at least for the rest of the day.
Brooks had expected Qaletaqu to offer a bouquet-and-fruit-basket-full of embarrassed apologies immediately after the fracas was done and the instigators had moved on. Instead he surprised her by commenting that since neither man had any critical duties to perform before sobriety returned, no harm had been done. Then he simply resumed the tour of central Canyontown to which he had been treating her, as though a bar fight that spilled into the street was the most ordinary occurrence imaginable. He must be messing with my head on purpose, she thought as she walked mutely beside him along Popé Boulevard. She decided right then and there not to let herself appear to be surprised in the least by any other strangeness she might see here. Grateful at least for this little bit of local color for her next news feature, she followed him across the empty, bare-rock street beneath the simulated sun that hung suspended from the high, cathedral-like ceiling.
They came to a stop on the concrete walkway that fronted what appeared to be a cluster of public buildings. Qaletaqu gestured toward an A-frame building that was unlike all the flatter, squatter structures that dominated central Canyontown. Standing directly between the office of the local sheriff and the town hall, both fashioned from stone slabs anchored in place jointly by gravity and Martian adobe, the peak-roofed building in the middle resembled a log house of the sort built by a number of ancient North American native tribes. Upon closer examination, however, it turned out to be composed of a local pressed-regolith concrete that had been formed, textured, and painted to resemble genuine