Red Mars Love

Red Mars Love

AN INTERGALACTIC AFFAIR

By

Stephanie Owens

Copyright 2015 SunChip Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system - except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper - without permission in writing from the publisher.

I guess that is just the challenge that you face trying to align hundreds of different planets onto one common system of time, it was bad enough trying to learn the complex system of languages that people spoke on each planet I visited yet alone keep track of the hundreds of different methods for keeping time; I’d leave that to my pocket com to keep my on schedule.

Despite my alignment to Earth time, I had never actually visited the planet of my ancestors, having been born and raised on the rocky red planet I called home, so it was ironic my whole system of keeping time was aligned to that archaic planet but then I digress back into that timely conundrum that I always tended to think about when I was flying, or better yet, monitoring the ship as it carried me to my destination.

I was piloting the ship down through the hazy red atmosphere having just returned from a family reunion back on Mars where I was born.  I had lived there with my family most of my life, leaving only for my university and pilot training.  My family descended from the original Mars settlers that had volunteered for the original one way trip to Mars back in 2025 that had given up all they knew on Earth for a chance to see firsthand what the planet had to offer and help to establish a colony away from Earth. 

The colonization had been a tremendous success once they arrived maybe due to the fact it was led by private companies intent on expanding their worlds rather than warring governments more concerned about domination and politics. 

My ancestors had accepted the challenge and moved to the red planet with a team of scientists, doctors and engineers who took on the task of starting a new colony on a dead planet trying to breathe life and make a living, and the amazing thing was, they were successful. 

Each person brought a specific talent to the planet and helped to establish the first thriving colony away from Earth.

The planet hid many valuable resources beneath its surface which reduced the colony’s dependence on Earth and helped them to be successful and quite prolific, I might add, it seemed the Martian atmosphere promoted twins, triplets and even quadruplets with every birth making the population grow rather quickly. 

I was a triplet myself and had just enjoyed spending time with my two brothers who also worked as planetologists, traveling from world to world establishing new colonies and aiding the planets they visited with solving planetary crisis and other ecological issues. 

I enjoyed my work but it was lonely at times.

I laughed thinking that I would forget my own name was Chris at how infrequently I got to hear someone say it.  I programmed my name into the ships onboard systems just to hear a more familiar manner of address while I was traveling alone.

My brothers and I had all been athletes throughout the university and played a modified version of rugby that had become popular on Mars.  They called it Rugby but I had to believe that in the low gravity of the red planet it couldn’t have been the same as the Earth version of the sport.  With the long leaps and tackles in the reduced gravitational pull of the red planet we looked more like superheroes than rugby players.

Since we were identical triplets we all had the same tall stature and rather rugged good looks.  We had broad shoulders and dark hair with dark brown eyes.  Our mother had come from a Lebanese decent giving us the deep expression that made women fawn over us, well at least it worked for my brothers.

I envied my two brothers, both of which had found wives while we were in university together and they traveled the worlds together with their partners making this lonely job more tolerable. 

But, they couldn’t take away the freedom I had found when I explored new planets and the amazing races I had encountered.  Each trip I lent my expertise and training to investigate some phenomena that the planet was experiencing and resolving the issues that they faced.  I never knew what I would be facing on each trip and this one was no exception.  I had just responded to a call from my home office on Mars, the technological hub for planetology tasked with resolving the issues being faced by all the different races within the universe.

I couldn’t imagine having lived in those ancient times before space travel evolved.  In those days the trip from Earth to Mars was almost 200 days long, today’s trip was about 20 minutes with the new technology.

The Martian colonization took off and with it so had the evolution of space travel, once they dismissed the antiquated concept of simple fuel based propulsion and looked at coordinate based jumps or blinks as we called them we were finally able to visit more distant worlds.  I knew how the system worked, it was mandatory studying in the university in case our ships network went down but I chose not to think about it when I was traveling between planets.  I chose to just set my coordinates for a safe distance outside the planet’s atmosphere dedicated to blink travel then slowly set down on the planet’s surface using the propulsion system.

The beeping on the console of the ship brought me out of my reverie.

“We will be landing in 20 seconds, Chris” the console reported in a cool feminine voice. 

I got to choose the settings on the ships controls, after all, it was the only voice I often heard in my own language on these long assignments.

My assignment on this particular trip was on the Kepler-186 system’s seventh planet. 

Its designation had previously been Kepler-186f but the more common name was Cygnus for the constellation those on Earth could use to identify the planet. 

The local inhabitants that we had encountered on our first trip to this planet used some unintelligible utterances I still couldn’t quite wrap my tongue around to name their planet but the universal translator just called it Cygnus so that name stuck.

“Prepare for landing in 10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…2…1”

The ship settled on the small space port dock, much like the landing pad for a helicopter, but with considerable more grace than the ancient devices.

I looked out the window of my ship and saw Sid standing there awaiting my arrival.

Sid was my contact on planet Cygnus and had contacted my home company requesting that I be the one to come assist with the issue the planet was facing.

She raised her hand in greeting and smiled at me through the window.

I closed the ship down with a simple voice command and left the main control counsel to exit through the ship port. 

The ship was intended to be both a living quarters and mobile laboratory with some of the best technology known to man available for me to use.  The living quarters were quite luxurious and comfortable so I didn’t mind essentially traveling in my home which made extended stays on less comfortable planets less tedious.

But the planet of Cygnus was far from uncomfortable, my first stay was reminiscent of a tropical paradise with the warm water and temperate air that the inhabitants of Cygnus had year round.  Plus, there was also the beautiful exotic vegetation and diverse animals.

The people who inhabited this world enjoyed a very comfortable life with warm waters that bubbled up from the center of the planet, a constant year round temperature on the planets equatorial line where most of the inhabitants were living and a beautiful red dwarf star dominating the sky shedding red hues constantly throughout the atmosphere.

The planet had evolved to accommodate lower amounts of light and the constant temperatures allowing for both vegetation and animal life to prosper.  The plants native to Cygnus had a distinct black coloring allowing the plants to prosper in the lower levels of light and they typically had very large leaves that gathered as much sunlight as possible yet shaded the lands making all other living things operate on less and less light. 

The human species themselves had evolved with the low light conditions.  They were still genetically the same as the humans on Earth but their eyesight had adapted to living in the low light conditions and their eyes appeared particularly large to those who visited from other planets. 

I had always found this particular attribute to be particularly attractive on this planet and my awaiting companion was no exception who had large doe-like eyes that I loved to look at.

There was one other interesting phenomena that was observed on this planet and that was how just about every species, from human to plant to animal developed some type of phosphorescence capability.  For humans it was their skin which had a weird glow when their native sun went below the horizon and caused rooms to have an eeriness that those who weren’t familiar with this trait might find disconcerting.

I definitely was not one of those people, however, and I found this unusual trait rather erotic and often wondered if there were any other traits they hadn’t told us about in the university.

I descended through the ship and opened the port. 

Sid waited as I walked down the ramp.

“Welcome back”

“Thanks”

She kissed me on both cheeks reminding me of what the history books said they used to do in France back on Earth.

Sid spoke beautiful English, probably better than someone who was raised speaking the language could.  She also spoke several other dialects as she was the planets universal liaison for her people.  I had meant her on at an interplanetary convention many years ago and she had told me her birth name, some long, difficult to pronounce series of clicks, whistles and enunciations that I could not remember if I tried so we settled on Sid as a way to communicate.

I smiled at the memory, since we’d both been pretty inebriated at the time and I had spent over an hour attempting to master the sounds in her name.

Sid was something like royalty on her planet.  The planet used a monarchy system yet still maintained a series of elected offices to balance the power on the planet.  Her family had been in power for generations and the planet itself was very peaceful, rather like the role model for interplanetary governance.

Sid herself was one of three children of the current king and queen, she was the youngest of the three so she had resigned herself that she would not be ruling and taken to her role of planetary liaison with dedication. 

She was tall, lithe and quite athletic.  She had long, brown hair that reached almost to her waist and she was wearing quite functional clothing like she was ready to get to work.  

She had earned degrees at some of the best universities and regularly traveled to other planets to negotiate trade agreements, gather information and study their cultures.  I had met Sid while we were at the university and while we studied different subjects we spent considerable time together discussing planetary politics and the exploration of new worlds in the universe. 

I could sit for days talking with Sid and her intuitive understanding of different cultures and extensive knowledge of how the universe worked.  I envied the brilliant woman and how she could travel just about anywhere in the universe and almost instantly adapt to the cultures, language and customs of the local people.  If not for her dark glasses and phosphorescent skin no one would ever recognize her for where she was truly from.

“How was the family reunion?”

“Well, I got to see the next three sets of triplets that were born to the family.  By time I go home for the next one there will be more people than I can name!”

She laughed, everyone knew the weird phenomena on Mars and the propensity for multiple births, it made one not want to risk having sex on the planet as one ill-conceived night could end up costing you triple!

“Come let’s go see my father.”

I followed her down the path away from my ship onto a dense plank walkway over a small flowing stream.  The sun was high overhead indicating it was mid-day but it was dark as if the sun was setting on most planets.  Tall trees with black umbrella-like leaves reached towards the sun taking in as much light as their dark leaves could absorb but making the path difficult to follow.