Martian Autumn: Transit Day by Stuart Atkinson

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I won't be speaking to you again until after the landing, so I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you all a successful and enjoyable Transit Day, especially our member of Parliament and her shy, retiring children..." Much to Catriona's amusement, Blare actually blushed at the attention and applause (applause? For pity's sake...), and turned his face away from the smiles beamed towards him by their fellow passengers. "Thank you, and I'll see you by the Monument," the pilot concluded, and the intercom went dead.

"Oh, you're such a celebrity, mom," Catriona swooned, leaning over the next seat, "can I have your autograph? Can I? Can I?.

"Shut up, Cat," Callie replied kindly, ruffling her daughter's hair, "and strap yourself in. And make sure Blare's strapped in okay too - "

"Okay, but I think we should gag him, too," Cat suggested, tugging the straps across her lap. "You know, just to be sure."

"I do too honey," Callie agreed, smiling reassuringly at her son as the shuttle seemed to buck in mid-air, braking, "but not with all these witnesses around us. Maybe on the way back."

"Okay," Cat said, and ducked back behind the chair and out of sight.

Out the window the horizon suddenly tilted, and the cabin filled with the tell-tale whine of the shuttle's retro-engines. They were going in.

"I can see other shuttles, mom," Blare announced, leaning over his protesting sister to peer out of their row's window a minute later. "They look very small... either we're very high up still, or those hills aren't very big..?"

"Big enough," Callie replied distantly, remembering her first – and, before today, only – visit to the hills, "big enough..."

Half a dozen years ago she'd come to Gusev with Conn to celebrate a remarkable triple anniversary – the first anniversary of Conn's arrival from Earth, their first wedding anniversary, and the anniversary of the Spirit rover's landing in the crater, almost three quarters of a century earlier. Then, it had been just the two of them – Cat, a baby, had been left with delighted grandparents at Ares, and Blare was little more than a frogspawn-like blob of cells, his existence as yet unknown to them. After pinning-it down with the martian gps, they had parked their rover close to the rover's landing site, and had walked in reverent silence through the rocks and boulders to the stunningly beautiful crystal pyramid erected on the site of the Columbia Memorial Station Spirit by Mars Heritage.

All the landing site commemorations were the same - a six feet high pyramid of crystal, transparent but tinged slightly blue, like ice, with a life-size, 3D laser-etched depiction of the site's lander or rover deep inside it. Gusev's pyramid contained a laser-portrait of the Spirit rover as it had appeared before it trundled off its lander, with its wheels clean and shining, yet to feel the brittle duricrust crunching and fracturing beneath their spiky treads. Callie had wandered around the pyramid again and again, heart thumping, thinking back to how she had visited the landing site of "Opportunity", Spirit's twin, many years before, on a school trip – a school trip which had set in motion changes to her life which had transformed it beyond all recognition.