| Story |
 
|
(Page 3 of 18) Martian Summer: Comet Night by Stuart Atkinson
 (12 ratings)
|
What had seemed to her wide young eyes like a bustling martian metropolis was, in fact, little more than a chaotic jumble of a half dozen Habs and a pair of burning-green hydroponics bubbles, criss-crossed by roads, paths and tracks, growing reluctantly around a single shuttle pad.
And so small! Gusev was a vast expanse of tan and dun-coloured rock and dust that stretched off the low mountains on the horizon, a seemingly endless, sun-baked and star-chilled sea of rock, and sitting there, huddled up against the base of the Columbias, the Gate was like a stain on the floor!
She'd heard many visitors and incomers moaning about how the fledgling community was pretty pathetic as martian settlements went, and was more like an outpost than a genuine settlement, and she'd always defended it, without really knowing why. But that day, gazing down on it from the summit of the Hill, Sarah was proud of her home for the first time.
Having led his only daughter to the summit, her father hadn't been able to resist slipping back into Guide mode and giving her a history lesson, and so as they sat together on the rocky summit, resting side by side, leaning against each other as they always did, Sarah had learned how "The Gate" had originally been just two pressurised habs attached by a tunnel, basically just an informal and primitive "Base Camp" to support the first scientific missions to the Hills – the cartographers, areologists and meteorologists who had flown down from Ganges Base to carry out a proper, detailed survey of the area. However, as the human population of Mars had increased, the Columbias had, inevitably, become a popular destination for historians and then sightseers and tourists, all of whom wanted to walk in the wheel tracks of Spirit, the "plucky little rover" that had struggled up the hills a century before. Soon the dozens of visitors became hundreds, and the Gate had grown and evolved to accommodate them.
Consequently, by the time Sarah completed her first ascent of the Hill, and stood looking down from its summit for the first time, the Gate had grown into an infant town, with just about enough boarding habs, shops and bars to accommodate and entertain the tourists who flocked there from Mars - and Earth too, and looking down on her home that day Sarah had felt her chest swell with pride. One day Gate would be as grand and as busy a settlement as its nearest neighbour, Chalmers, she was sure of it...
As she'd sat beside her father, drinking in the view, Sarah had watched a shuttle coming in to land, and felt a brief pang of regret that she wasn't there to watch its passengers disembark. There wasn't much for the town's kids to do in Gate, other than chase each other through the narrow streets or surf the SolNet in their rooms, talking to and flirting with other kids on Earth, Luna or one of the space stations, but Sarah always found it entertaining to watch the wide-eyed men and women jumping out of the shuttles, spectacularly-overdressed in their gleaming-clean skinsuits and weighed down with state of the art – and totally unnecessary - navigation gear and hiking accessories, impatient to pay a small fortune to anyone willing to lead them up the Hill and photograph them standing beside such famous landmarks as Larry's Lookout and Ustrax's Leap, the undulating ridge down on the crater floor, close to the red-rock Comanche and Miami outcrops, from where the rover Spirit had enjoyed its first clear sight of El Dorado, the dark, black dust dune-rippled slope a Terran Mars enthusiast had christened "Ultreya Abyss" after being entranced and intrigued by its blurred, grainy image on orbital photos...
Her father had sighed as the shuttle banked in for its landing too, mentally counting the money he had lost through not being there to offer his services to the tourists onboard.
| |
