Seeding the Red

By Benjamin Bielert

I raced along the rusty landscape, kicking up a cloud of orange dust as I went. The swirling trail threatened to catch me whenever I stopped to bury a bio-orb in the thin, sandy soil. The sun overhead was weak and cold, and there were only the slightest wisps of cloud. Some progress from when those in my profession had started their work on Mars, but still a far cry from our end goal.

The money for this venture came from asteroid harvesting from the Aristotle and the Regus runs. Astromorph Co. put an open offer out to college graduates to help terraform Mars. It was a good deal, six months of paid training followed by lengthy contracts. All you had to do was risk life, limb, and forgo any comfort for a few years.

The income dwarfed any opportunity on Earth.

So, I did my work. We, me, and the thousands of other terraforming technologists scattered across the Martial surface, planted the little orbs that we carried, one every hundred meters or so.

Each orb was about the size of a golfball, perfectly spherical and with multicoloured granules inside. They looked like a multivitamin for a giant; in a way, they were. Each was packed with microbial life hand-picked, and at times tailored, for speeding up the process of terraformation on the red planet.

I leapt over the surface, bounding like a kangaroo, moving with the wind, but staying alert to changes. Out here, the winds could change and send you flying. They could launch you up, and although the gravity was weaker, you could still fall back to the planet quick enough to badly injure yourself.

A voice broke through my reverie, reverberating through the helmet I wore.

“This is base. Echo 14, do you copy?” it said.

“Echo 14 here, I read you loud and clear,” I replied.

“Glad to hear it Echo 14; how’s the first measure?”

I gave my bag a shake and looked at its contents.

“I’m doing okay, base. I’ve unloaded about half my capsules, and I’m going to be cutting east by northeast in a second here and plotting the new line back to Echo field camp.”

“Well goddamn, Echo 14, you unloaded those things fast. The rest of the team isn’t a quarter of the way through their bags yet. Colour me impressed.”

I grinned and shook my head, cumbersome as that was in my suit and pointless as it was over radio. “It was nothing. I have fairly flat terrain on this route, and the soil is soft and sandy. The others are probably climbing up mountains and trying to plant in rock. I got lucky today.”

“Ahhh stop with all the false modesty, Echo 14. We all know you normally set the pace.” The voice from base said.

My operator was a woman; she had a husky voice that was not unappealing. I was fairly certain I’d never met her in person. Syrtis Base was a big place. Field techs like me rarely had the time to meet even half of the staff stationed there.

I knelt, burying the last of the first half of my bio-orbs, gently patting the Martian earth over it. What a funny thought, Martian earth. In a few hundred years will they just call the soil on Mars, mars?

“I appreciate it, but honestly, I’m just trying to get as much as I can while I’m here. When you’re paid by the piece, it’s smart to be quick. Can’t wait to cash in from this latest quota and get a good cup of Irish coffee and a sonar shower.”

“You should splurge for the real deal and use the high-pressure hydro,” my operator said.

I turned the grid system on and followed the augmented reality markers that led me to the next row to be planted. “First half completed, heading to eastern vector and then following it back to field camp.”

“I’m watching your progress on satellite; I see a little dust devil kicking up north of your location.”

I peered across the barren terrain and used the helmet’s magnification to enhance the image. There was a bit of a dust storm whirling in the distance, but nothing to be concerned about. I communicated as much back to my operator and continued.

When I’d been going for a little while again, my operator spoke, “If you don’t deserve the water for a real hydro, then I don’t know who does.”

“It’s a huge expense and hard to justify,” I said, bounding along the sandy surface, those dust clouds forming like spectres wherever I set down. Martian gravity is light, about a third of Earth’s. Even with the weight of my suit I was lighter here than back on Earth.  It’s a hard adjustment for most people at first, but once you’re used to it, it’s fun.

“Haven’t you earned enough money?” She asked.

“I need to save my money,” I said.

“Why what are you saving for?” She asked.

More daring operators sometimes asked personal questions, it was how they sold you things.

“I have a family back home.”

“Oh,” she said. “A wife and kids?”

“No, two younger brothers going through University so they can get up here, and a mother who needs to save every penny she can for retirement on Earth.”

“So, you’re picking up the slack.”

“Not exactly, but kind of,” I said. “With the economy on Earth over the last couple of decades, who’s been able to save? My mom was raising three boys on her own after my dad… I just want to see them have enough.”

“But do you get enough, 14?” She asked

“I get what I need,” I said, chuckling. Cue the sales pitch. “I understand I must be a tough assignment for you. I’m not easy to sell things,” I said.

“That’s only part of my job, and honestly the part I hate the most. It occurred to me today, you and I have been talking during this assignment, for almost a week now, but you’re one of the most interesting techs I’ve encountered. Almost everyone else is ready to spend their earnings on a nice steak dinner, or time in a jacuzzi tub, massages, the company of pleasure bots, but not you. I guess I started to wonder about the tech who consistently planted more than the others but never took anything for himself. So, can you please not dodge the question; do you get enough out of all your hard work, 14?”

I didn’t respond right away, I just leapt along the barren landscape.

I reached the next seed location, the marker glowing brightly through the augmented view on my helmet’s lens. I dug a little hole in the soil and dropped the packet of archaea and bacteria in.

I looked up at the corner of my suit’s display and saw that she was still on the line, waiting for my response.

I wasn’t sure I was going to respond, but then it spilled out of me like I were a water balloon with a hole poked in me.   It was all there, just waiting to spill out, only held back by the flimsiest barrier.

“I send them back most of my earnings every cycle. Just take enough for me, no extravagances. My quarters are delta, my ration is delta, and I occasionally allow myself a treat, like a coffee or something. The treat after this run is the coffee, can’t splurge on a hydro too when a sonar shower does the job just fine.”  I said in a rush, wishing I could justify that small luxury.

“Sonars don’t get you quite as clean and everybody knows it,” she said. “What happens if you get some sort of mineral shard on your skin? It happened to a tech down in Tango team, burrowed into his skin somehow, got an infection and couldn’t work for a month. All the while, racking up expenses from quarters and meals. You wanna run that risk, 14? The hydro shower is a justifiable expense.”

A strong wind buffeted me from the north, and I hunkered down for a moment, clutching to a large boulder so as not to be knocked off my feet. I looked behind me, the storm was getting closer.

It all sounded like fair logic to me. “Well, maybe I should take a hydro then when I get back.”

“Definitely, besides, sonars never quite get all the suit stench off you techs,” she teased. “Sitting in those things for a week or more, you get a bit of a funk going.”

“You’re telling me? I have to live with it.” We both laughed. “Are you tracking that storm, operator?” I asked, peering back at the angry cloud of dust and wind.

“It seems to be moving west. I’m watching it.”

Within the suit, I pulled my right arm in and out of the suit sleeve so that I could scratch the underarm of my left arm. So much of me itched and my skin crawled with the sweat, now many days old and growing thicker. I put my arm back in the sleeve of my suit and carried on.

“Good luck, guys, make this world a paradise, will ya?” I said as I planted the next seed. “Then we’ll be able to work on this planet without these darn things.” I patted the shoulder of my suit.

“Hey, don’t knock your suit,” the operator said. “Without it, you wouldn’t last long.”

“I know, I just can’t wait until the time when there’s some atmosphere and I don’t have to spend a week on end inside a pair of prison pyjamas.”

“You have the mess back at camp.”

“Right, because one room with a hundred or so of us stinky techs is exactly where you want to chill outside of your suit.”

At the field camp, the only place we could get out of the suits was in the mess hall, it was an encapsulated and atmospherically stabilized space at the center of the mobile base. Mess hall had to be atmospherically controlled for us to eat, but few got completely out of their suits there. Most of us just removed our helmets, ate our meals, and then sealed ourselves right back into our suits.

Our quarters were not atmospherically controlled; the suits were supposed to provide that. We could charge our suits in our cramped field quarters, but that was about it. There was a charging port and a place to lay down. There were no blankets, no sheets. You slept on a platform in your suit, with it plugged into the wall.

Water was strictly rationed and only for drinking in camp. You went for a week and a half, you suffered, and you came back to your region’s base camp where there were far more amenities, although, all with a price.

“If you guys got out of the suits more often, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Maybe, or maybe we’d just exchange more of our brewing bio flora. Since I got here, I haven’t gotten sick once, I’d like to keep it that way. I prefer to open my suit enough to eat and drink, but I stay in it. It’s only ten days. I’m fine for ten days, or ten years if that’s what it takes. But I look forward to the day when I can walk on this planet’s surface and do it without this suit. When the forests are growing, and the Arabia Sea exists again.”

“Well, be prepared to wait. We might see it, but nobody knows for sure how long this is going to take,” my operator said.

She was right, there was no telling how long the work on Mars would take. I was optimistic, but that wasn’t the consensus among most experts. The popular prediction of the day was quite pessimistic, a centuries-long endeavour at best.

“Sometimes the things we do are not for us; they’re for future generations,” I said, repeating something my father had once said, his words spilling out of my mouth. “That’s the way things should be anyway. It’s nice to think we might make a planet more capable of harbouring life for once.”

“Or are we just interfering with another world and changing it to suit us?” she asked.

I sighed, hating this so-called dilemma. “We’re improving it.”

“We’ve often thought that,” she said, regurgitating some of the tired arguments anti-Mars groups made.

I laughed derisively, stopping to plant another bio-orb. “Careful, base, you sound like a Natural Mars protestor.”

She clicked her tongue. “No, that’d make me a hypocrite. I’m making money off a contract up here just like you. Can’t take the money then bitch about the process. I just wonder sometimes, is seeding this world the right thing to do?”

“It’s not like we’re taking life away from anything else, if we were, different story. But there’s no habitat here to mess up, no native species at all. Maybe Mars did have life at one point, but at this point, it’s a lifeless rock without us. We’re reviving this husk. We’re doing it for our ends, but I think it’s still a good thing. How much extinction has our species caused? It’d be nice to think of us as helping life, increasing the net life in the universe.”

“Is that why you do what you do? To try to balance the scale a little?”

“I do what I do because I am paid well to do it. Thinking that I might be applying the paddles to this corpse of a world is just a fringe benefit.” I planted another of the bio-orbs; I was zooming.

She laughed, but then gasped suddenly.

“What is it?” I asked.

“14, you’ve gotta move now, I advise you to adjust your course. That dust devil is kicking up, it’s doubled in size and is moving towards you.”

I took a look at my suit’s satellite imagery, and I shot a look back to get a visual of the storm. She was right. It wasn’t a dust devil anymore; the thing had grown into a tornado. Mars could get some killer tornadoes, but this was only low tier still. It was moving towards me but was still a good distance off.

“Negative on the course adjustment, Base,” I said. “I can’t afford to cut my numbers today.”

“It’s a tornado, 14, you are advised to adjust your course,” she repeated.

“And I have considered your advisement and decided against,” I snapped back. “I will resume course and adjust should the threat become more imminent. For now, I need to focus on the task at hand, Base, so let’s cut the convo, I’ll put my head down and try to get further ahead of it. You only open the line again if you need to.”

She grumbled, “understood, God speed, 14.”

I signalled my suit to administer a quick hit of caffeine, taurine, and B vitamins, and then set into a run, planting seeds for a few kilometres, stopping every hundred meters and burying the little pods. The contents would almost immediately begin to leech out through the cellulose casing and work into the soil to spread and propagate.

As I moved, I kept an eye out for the tornado, it was still a fair distance behind me, but getting closer. It had been a few kilometres off, now it was a little over one, moving diagonally to the line I followed and likely to cut across my path sooner than later. It was a possibility we would miss each other and it would pass behind or in front of me. I continued for another kilometre. Echo mobile camp was only a few more kilometres away and if I could get there, I would be safe.

The camp had ways of hunkering down in a storm, hydraulics and anchors it could deploy.

All mobile camps had to have similar precautionary equipment after what happened to Foxtrot.

The tornado gained. It was less than ¾ of a kilometre back from me now and the winds were picking up, slowing me, stopping me from being able to jump as often. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it had grown bigger too, not just an illusion of proximity.

I considered deviating from my path, but the next seed to plant was just up ahead. The terrain had begun to grow rougher along this path, with ravines rising on either side. Maybe this would protect me from the tornado.

“Echo 14, do you copy?” My operator’s voice came across the intercom.

“I copy, base.”

I could feel the wind pushing me in all directions, nearly knocking me off my feet. I deployed my suit’s enhanced traction features, spikes on the arms and the shoes. With this newly gained purchase on the terrain, I pushed forward.

“You need to deviate from your route, 14. That damn cyclone is closing in on you, going to fall right over that ravine you’re heading towards,” my operator said.

The storm was quickly approaching but it was going Northeast, whereas I was going Northwest. I was heading into the mouth of the ravine, but the tornado looked to me as though it would cut across it and keep moving along the terrain.

“I think if I can get into that ravine, I’ll be safe,” I said, and I started running towards it.

The tornado approached, whipping bits of stone and clouds of dust, threatening to pull me off my feet.

“No, 14, you fool!” my operator yelled. Her voice was crackling, even the signal from the satellites was disrupted by the storm that was barreling down on me.

I got to the ravine and began pulling myself in along the exposed stone, the marker for my next seeding glowed just ahead of me, perhaps ten meters in.

The tornado approached and pulled at me like the hands of Satan, whipping larger stones around. These stones were far larger than I would believe, things I thought immoveable pieces of the landscape were flung angrily into the air, only to come crashing down. Thankfully, the rising shelves of stone around me provided some protection. It was a furious storm and I crawled along the ravine, driving my wrist spikes into the stone and pulling myself forward with alternating arms as though I were climbing. Even still, I was nearly knocked off my feet. With one of my wrist spike’s firmly driven in, I freed my other arm and knelt to bury the next seed, but I didn’t get the chance.

The tempest passed the mouth of the ravine, hovering in front of it and suddenly catching me in an instantaneous wind tunnel as it did. Before I could close it firmly, a handful of my bio-orbs flew from my bag and into the tornado. I lost 40 or so before I managed to close it.

I drove my other spike into the stone wall and hunkered as best I could while the winds grew stronger. I was pelted with sand and stone flying up the ravine. The entire time I contemplated if my operator had been right, or if I was.

Would the tornado arc into the ravine? If it did, I would be thrown into the air like those stones. Had she seen something about the path of the storm that I couldn’t from the ground?

It had looked like it would arc wide of the ravine. Oh, how I hoped that it would arc wide.

I was clinging to the rock, both spikes on my wrist driven into the stone, and I felt like it was going to tear my arms off. My leg spikes had given out, they were too shallow and the terrain too sandy. My legs and body beat against the side of the ravine as I waved in the gale like a flag in a hurricane.

Finally, it grew less. Then, it was less, and finally, my feet touched back down. It had passed. I withdrew my wrist spikes. Warily, I knelt and planted the next of the bio-orbs.

All of me ached, but I made my way up the ravine and along the line, planting as I went. I wouldn’t have enough to complete the line I was on, but I would plant them until they ran out.

“kkrshhh me?” her voice came in, crackling and hard to understand.

“Hello, Base?” I replied.

“Do krshh read rkk?” she said.

“I read you, base. You’re a little distorted,” I answered.

“14, you’re krshh, I krhs hszh you survived that,” She said.

“I may have survived, but I hurt everywhere,” I said.

“Do you want me to send someone to pick you up?” she asked.

We both knew he unspoken fact that there would be a cost for the ride back to camp.

“That’d be good,” I said, peering into my bag and doing a quick spot of mental math, “meet me 2 clicks up this vector.”

“You’re going to pay for a ride?” she asked, mock surprise in her voice.

“Are you kidding me, Base?” I said, wincing through the pain as I kept limping along, planting what was left of my orbs. “After the day I’ve had, I may even splurge for a bath and some booze.”