The Battle of Victoria Crater
Chapter One
Merc bandits appeared on the south border of Victoriaville just before dawn. No warning was given, a hit and run attack with two fast-moving hovercraft. They vented our fragile farm domes to the brassy Martian sky with Blitzer fire and shot up our reactor. We had until sundown to patch the holes and restore power in the tokamak. Otherwise, our crops would die in the freezing cold of a Meridiani Planum night.
“Ugly business,” Captain Junior grumbled. We had been up all night hauling rolls of thick white polyethylene out of storage. Two of our town’s engineers used the plastic to seal the holes in the domes and restore atmosphere. Manual labor is miserable in any circumstance, but doing it in an EVA suit is a nightmare. Our helper bots were dead without power, forcing us to do everything by hand. The work exhausted us, leaving everyone grouchy and scared.
I helped Captain Junior unpack another roll of plastic. “Why can’t they just leave us alone?”
Captain Junior’s crisp South African accent buzzed through my headset into my ears. “Economic chaos, young Martin,” he says. “As long as we’re here, WTO’s claim against the land is contested. If we leave, they take over. Everything your Dad fought and died for would be gone.” Captain Junior was a patient man. He would rather negotiate than fight, he would rather be hurt than hurt someone. Sometimes, though, his patience looked like cowardice. Especially when you looked at it through fifteen-year-old eyes.
“Does this mean we’re going to call gunfighters in?”
“I don’t think we have a choice anymore,” Captain Junior said. Then he muttered something ugly in Afrikaans, too polite to swear in English. I know he was picturing the arguments that would happen after we get our stuff fixed. Everyone seemed to dread the violence that was bound to follow.
Personally, I was down for a little violence. On paper, Martian terraforming is supposed to be a collective, cooperative effort. Then our friendly neighborhood earth corporation, WTO, turned it into an undeclared land war. They pulled no punches, hiring soldiers right out of the service for gigs on the Red Planet. Guys like Captain Junior, if he wanted it, had an instant job waiting for him. All they had to do is harass unarmed civilians like us until we gave up and left.
If that happened, WTO would swoop in. Some sleazy lawyer would buy us out at a fraction of the cost and not lose a minute’s sleep. This isn’t a joke, it’s actually happened. Some ag outfits have folded up shop. Their families shut down operations to return to Mons City. Some families were starving in the street.
Mom trained with them when she and Dad first arrived on Mars. Hearing about them sent her into a major shame spiral. No crops grow there, bot labor is almost free, and there’s no welfare system. They wrote to us daily, begging for help, but there’s nothing we could do. The stress made Mom cry every night. I listened to her sobs through the thin fiberboard walls of our habitat.
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