Quoted By:
“The NOVEMBER RAIN has always been a trueborn daughter of Mars.
Her keel was laid down between the sweeping struts of the Phoebe docks, concealed from the prying eyes of old earth. Her thermonuclear heart was constructed in the depths of my birth-city, tested for half a decade before ascending on a gossamer thin wire to catch its first hint of orbital sunlight.
Every piece of ablative plating that protects her hull is a piece of Martian land: iron, aluminum, and carbon lifted from the blood-red dunes of our homeworld.
I was there when she first journeyed away from her dock – when we had first broke ceremonial melt-water across her bow.
And so I knew that she would not falter.
The RAIN punched through Mizar-A’s corona like a railgun shell, her outer hull glowing red-hot from radiative heating. Fifteen minutes after our insertion maneuver, she reoriented to fire her main drive: skimming off the boundary layer demarcating the lower chromosphere from the upper photosphere. The rapid, violent maneuver exposed the RAIN to temperatures several thousand degrees higher than her nominal operating range. No combat maneuver – not even a trans-atmospheric insertion burn – could compare to an extended brush with the furnace-heart of an O-type star.
And yet the RAIN held. As our slingshot maneuver continued, our vessel navigated through Mizar-A’s solar landscape – dodging transient plateaus of hydrogen plasma and perilous magnetic whirlpools. Not once did her sensors fail or her thrusters stutter. Her resilience allowed us to travel at a blisteringly high speed, cutting the total time of our circumnavigation by more than half.
Through the plasma scorched windows of the observation blister, I tracked our progress. The needle-thin line of the launch station’s propulsion beam grew until it split the sky with red light. But there was no sign of drive activation – no blue glow that indicated sustained ignition of the weapon’s ram-fusion drive.
On the morning of our final day, I saw the bright mirror-flare of the launch station crest the edge of the burning horizon. The RAIN readied her weapons, and we steeled ourselves for our last – and perhaps only – chance at turning aside our extinction.”
- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, SEPTEMBER 9th, PERSONAL JOURNAL
