Colin Taber - RED - Burning Skies

He sent a simple text message to her office, a setup that mirrored his own, aside from being signed as Mars Command Two instead of Mars Command One. There, she oversaw a mirrored command and base network, just like his own, all of it on the other side of a dividing mountain range.

The only place the two networks physically met was here, where their joint apartment was accessed via a passage that also ran beside the utility corridor from each command room to their shared reactor.

Tung hoped she would be able to come and see him, but he knew she was busy right now.

Busy continuing to deal with the Wei issue.

His own part in it seemed to be at an end.

He was relieved she had been able to help, but also troubled by how she had managed to so quickly arrange for his collection.

Had she redirected Mars Command Two assets for the sake of the lone survivor?

A strict breach of protocol.

Or, even more grave, had she somehow contacted the Renegades and sent them in?

Did the Renegades even have the capacity?

He was gravely concerned by either possibility.

Of course, he hadn’t had anything confirmed yet, but he felt he had an inkling of what was going on. She had always been a private woman, a strong but quiet lady of secrets. He had long assumed that had more to do with his arrival and posting by Beijing to not just take over from her dead husband as head of Mars Command One, but as her new husband, too.

Beijing Command arranged all the pairings, including for the crews still waiting.

She had been a reluctant partner in the latter arrangement until the past year. Only recently had she opened up to him. But he had been prepared to be patient. He could appreciate her strength and intelligence, and he had wanted her to choose to share herself with him.

And when finally she had, it was not long before she’d fallen pregnant.

But now, after the events of the past day, he felt he knew as little about her now as he did the day he had first arrived with a set of orders to take over her first husband’s command after his death from Red Lung. Still, he had grown fond of her, a feeling strengthened by the swell of her belly as she carried their babe. And while she had today saved Wei, he couldn’t help but wonder if in so doing she had put everything else at risk.

He stripped off by the small atrium garden at the heart of their apartment, and then showered before sliding into bed. While he lay there, hoping she would come and see him, he pondered what had been drilled into him all those years ago, including not just the history, but the sense of national dishonor and lost opportunity that had led to the philosophy driving the whole Chinese Mars venture.

They had all sat through the lectures as part of their training:

Just over five hundred years ago, the Europeans had crossed the Atlantic and begun looting the New World. The daring move let those cultures build huge empires with plundered riches, relegating so many others to the shadows of history for centuries, and some to suffer even graver fates as they fell to become mere footnotes.

It was a turning point in human history.

Only decades before Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, China had turned its back on what should have been its own Age of Discovery. The great treasure fleet of Admiral Zheng He had begun crossing the Indian Ocean and taking tribute from far-off lands. But the efforts were discontinued, a victim of small-minded bureaucrats more interested in palace intrigues at home than the potential of what lay over the horizon.

Once the voyages of the great treasure fleet were abandoned, the foundations were set for China’s future humiliation at the hands of the Europeans—and eventually the Americans, a nation at that time not even born.

Much more recently, Party bosses in Beijing had decided that China could not afford to make the same mistake again.

And this time they had a plan.

A Second Age of Discovery, one launched not into the seas, but into the void of space. This time, China would reach out and claim the spoils for herself!

This grand space program would start with Mars. There they would learn what needed to be done and how in relative privacy and with a whole world and its resources to plunder and build something new.

China had not just the people to do it, but a system that could be directed to the epic task. And it needed to happen. The Earth was dying, the oceans acidifying, while the climate increasingly acted like a wild dog trying to bite its master.

The ambitious plan made sense. Right now, China had the opportunity. The drunken Russians were in decline, even if they didn’t know it, while their country was riven by corruption and a deepening civil war. The Europeans were also failing, a victim of simple lethargy and decadence.

And the Americans…

The Americans were paying the price of yet more Middle Eastern wars, the latest in Iran, while distracted by a perverse anti-science crusade pushed by zealots back at home. Washington was only now beginning to recover from being stuck in gridlock at the mercy of elected crazies and the decades-long gutting of NASA’s budget.

Until now.

The current American administration had arrived on a platform of getting the lobbyists and their money out of politics, reining in corrupt Wall Street bankers, while reclaiming what the nation was supposed to be—a land of freedom and opportunity. Once the dust had settled, the American people, led by their inspirational President, had again looked to the stars.

That had been four years ago. The new administration had worked hard, but had so much ground to make up and damage to undo. A second term for their reelected president seemed to not just reenergize the US, but many allied Western states.

The West was reemerging, rising again in what some called a Second Renaissance.

In time, the US would reach for Mars, Beijing was sure of it, but for now the Americans had to make up for the decades they had wasted after losing their way. Not only did they have to rebuild their space program, but they had to recapture the technological lead in a raft of space industries in which they had at first been caught up and then well overtaken.

The only wild card the Americans held came from an eclectic pack of tech companies. The outfits had continued to research and develop space technologies regardless of the previous gutting of NASA’s funding and lukewarm interest from the federal government.

Wei slept as Ghost drove. She left Base Five Two behind them as the mushroom cloud rose over it. Midday came and went, and then the midafternoon. She paused to check on some of the readings on the rover, noting the solar panels on the trailer had stopped charging. The sudden cut of current was likely to be a wiring issue or some other fault, not dust. The buildup of fines was a constant issue for solar panels, which needed regular cleaning, but the cut in efficiency from dust was a gradual thing, not a sudden loss of generation.

Still, it wasn’t worth going out for, not now. She had enough power to get where they needed and then some. Once they stopped for the night, she’d check on it. She could guess it would be one of the sockets, which had a habit of working themselves loose on longer journeys.

And this was one long journey.

In fact, it was a rarity for anyone to go out alone like this, so far for so long.

Luckily for Wei, she had been less than one hundred kilometers away, so was able to get to him when ordered. She had been collecting salvage from a currently unmanned base that was still just a robot-driven construction site over at what was officially called Ni Zhuan Wu or Base Five Four.

Just after sunset, Wei eventually stirred. He looked outside and exclaimed, “I’ve slept through the whole day!”