Falling onto Mars

And then they went to Shalbatana base, to see whether anything left could be salvaged.

G-g-grandpa found her in the wreckage and ripped the tape off her eyes. She looked at him, her eyes unable to focus in the sudden light, and thought him one of the same group that had raped her and sabotaged the habitat. She had no way of knowing that others from his group were frantically working to patch up one of the modules to hold air, while G-g-grandpa and others searched for survivors. As the leaking air shrieked in her ears, she looked up at him, blinking, blood ru

“What?” G-g-grandpa said. It was not what he had expected to hear from a naked, bleeding woman who was about to pass out from anoxia.

“Oxygen!” she said, gasping for breath. “Oxygen! The greenhouses are dead. Some of the seedlings may have survived, but you don't have time. You need oxygen now. You'll have to find some way to heat the regolith. Make a solar furnace. You can get oxygen by heating the soil.”

And then she passed out. G-g-grandpa dragged her like a sack of stones to the one patched habitat module, and shouted, “I found one! Esta viva! I found one still alive!”

Over the following months Jared held her when she cried and cursed, nursed her back to health, and stayed with her through her pregnancy. Theirs was one of the first marriages on Mars, for although some women had been criminals infamous enough to be sentenced to Mars, still the male prisoners outnumbered the females by ten to one.

Between them, the murderer and the scientist, they built a civilization.

And still the ships came from Earth, each one more poorly built and delivering more corpses than living men. But that was in its way a blessing, for the men would mostly die, while the corpses, no matter how emaciated, had valuable organic content that could turn another square meter of dead Martian sand into greenhouse soil. Each corpse kept one survivor alive.

Thousands died of starvation and asphyxiation. Thousands more were murdered so that the air that they breathed could be used by another. The refugees learned. Led by my great-great-grandfather and grandmother, when a ship fell to Mars, they learned to rip it apart to its components before its parachutes had even settled. Of its transportees—well, if they couldn't breath vacuum (and the thin Mars air was never more than dust-laden vacuum), they had better scramble.

Only the toughest survived. These were mostly the smallest and the most insignificant, the ones like rats, too vicious and too tenacious to kill. A quarter of a million prisoners were sent to Mars before the governments of Earth learned that behavior-modification chips were cheaper than sending prisoners to Mars, and tried their hardest to forget what had been done.

My great-great-grandfather Jared became the leader of the refugees. It was a brutal job, for they were brutal men, but he fought and bullied and co

There are no love stories on Mars; the refugees had no time, no resources for love. Love, to the refugees, was an unpredictable disease that strikes few people and must be eradicated. To the refugees, survival required obedience and ceaseless work. Love, which thrives on individuality and freedom, had no place on Mars.

Yes, Jared Vargas was a dissident sent from Earth for speaking against his government. But Jared Vargas died in the desert. When the men of the fifth wave came to the rescue of the Shalbatana habitat, Jared Vargas had chased the leader Dingo into the desert, and that had been the last mistake of his life. Only one of them returned from the desert, wearing the suit of Jared Vargas, and calling himself by the name of Jared Vargas. No one recognized him, but the men of the fifth wave were from a dozen ships, and if any of them had been friends of the original Jared Vargas, they died after the new Jared Vargas returned from the desert. And the only men who would have recognized Dingo were the exiles of the sixth wave, and they were all dead.

He returned from the desert, and rescued by great-great-grandmother, and the men of the fifth wave accepted him.

But surely my great-great-grandmother was not fooled. She was an intelligent woman—brilliant, in her own field—and she must have realized that the man who claimed her for his wife was the same man who had led the army of angry rabble to rape her, rip apart her base, and laugh as they watched her friends die in the thin air of Mars.

But Mars required survival, not love. And Jared Vargas was the only leader they had.

There are many stories from the days of the first refugees on Mars. None of them are love stories.