Quoted By:
“The scent of sharp chlorate and cloying petrichor. Dawn breaks, and rivers of sunlight drain lazily into rust-red canyons.
Mars is different during the mid-summer festival. For a brief time, the water rations are lifted, and the ever present-hum of the atmospheric reprocessing columns dim to a quiet whisper. Rainwater cascades from freshly seeded clouds, pooling into hundreds of pre-seeded basins.
Tomorrow, they will bloom into rolling seas of mellow lavender and bright aster. Mars will exchange a shard of her rust-red armor for brighter, more peaceful colors.
I hug my raincoat tighter, listening to the soft patter of precipitation against tight fabric. The throughway in front of me has been mellowed by mist and fire-light. Slowly, lanterns drift up from the residential levels below – carrying sounds of celebration and warmth – the murmur of adults, and the chattering of children. The celebratory festivals will begin in full force tomorrow, and the massive field generators buried beneath our city will propel our magnetic lanterns far into the stratosphere. Wishes for the future, and laments over the past. The lanterns do not discriminate.
But by then, I will have left this place. Tomorrow I will travel by ramliner to wind-scoured Olympus, and then by orbital elevator to glittering Phobos. I will watch the lantern-clouds make their customary orbit around my homeward as I depart for the solar outskirts.
There, I will listen for a message – a whisper of distorted gravity from a system eighty-three light years from Earth. There, the gravity-bound remnants of an F-type star await our investigation with patient insistence.
It will be a long journey. Two years out and two years back on a scouting vessel, traveling a hair’s breadth below light speed. Months of watching the cold black, feeling the light of distant stars fall upon my eyes.
But I will not make the journey alone.
I met her last night, several hours after the conclusion of our mission briefing. I saw her filigree-bound faceplate and heard the thrum of a military-grade generator buried within the curve of a pale-ivory chassis.
I have no memory of her, but the converse may not be true. When the skies finally dimmed and the Beta Taurids burned copper-blue beneath auburn counterglow, she moved closer enough for me to feel a familiar static on my skin.
She told me that she has found me. She told me that she will show me the stars again.”
- [UNSIGNED], AD. 2241, NOVEMBER 23
