To escape, so long Ares.

This is a piece by John Grieve.

I am Bardo Forsberg and I want to set down how it happened. My name is not that unusual, a fair number of Scandinavians headed to Minnesota so I grew up in a in a town full of bergs and ssons. They were still wondering why they had swapped dark and frozen and mountains for dark and cold and flat though. You have spotted my first name though. I firmly blame the sixties for that, and that hippie misunderstanding of other cultures. So that Buddhism had gotten run over by some escaped prayer wheel and a hellish purgatory while waiting for birth became a name of opportunity and choice for my confused but I think well meaning parents. They did not pay much attention in dharma classes in the commune and managed to end up living out in normal world just as that world started to really come apart.So I had been free to go to normal high school and nerd out on finding that I enjoyed math and physics and pretty much all this material world. So much so that scholarships at MIT followed and with the ROTC program that took me into Space Force. While it paid for my education it proved to be something of a disappointment with it more being concerned with the admin of satellite orbits and preventing or at least delaying a Kessler cascade. Which is where space debris hits other debris and creates clouds of waste potentially stopping you being able to leave the Earth. Think George Clooney progressively getting broken into smaller and smaller pieces like in that old movie “Gravity”. So once my initial enlistment was finished I did not re-up but headed off to the private sector. Here my timing was impeccable as Space X was just ramping up its astronaut program to deal with all the Starship launches for the Mars program. So I sailed through training and was soon a regular truck driver on launches out of Texas along with construction gang work as we put Mars delivery units together in orbit. When complete they Solar sailed over to Mars to deliver there loads of hab modules or auto construction units.The money was fairly good. The experience excellent. The living in Texas was pretty shitty, the state continued to fail. Electricity outages were the start of it. Water failures followed. Commercial agriculture was struggling. Many rural areas had deputised militias to deal with the migrants (refugees) from the cities who were moving by car or even on foot to find somewhere cooler with work that would pay enough for power and housing. Living out in the gated communities of Elon town seemed the best of a pretty poor deal.So when the chance of taking a run all the way to Mars with some of the first, I hesitate to use the word but colonists, I accepted as much to get a room where the a/c worked as anything else. So within the year I was sharing a relatively small space with a bunch of past it Gen Xers who had drank the koolaid and had paid the big chunks of change to get in on the Mars property ladder on the ground floor. They responded pretty well to space and doing the hours on the exercise bikes to keep some sort of condition. We only lost one to some sort of heart condition on the way. Wrapped him up and took him out of the airlock and fired him off toward the sun. He would already have had to change his will to leave everything to the company so no loss only gain for not delivering him.I made a good landing on the new concrete pads at Musketoon base in Valles Marineris where the surveys had found water under the regolith and the atmosphere was a bit thicker due to the lower altitude of the canyon areas. The base come town was just as grim as you would expect. A mining town trying to be run by entitled oldsters who weren’t up for the physical demands of what they had signed up for. The farm was they only boom area as it processed all the expired tech bros into compost and grew vegetables on them. Of course everything was failing. Nowhere near enough planning for how aggressively the sharp never water smoothed dust of Mars would get into everything and destroy seals and wear metal parts. So of course the refuelling of the ship never happened. I was stuck. The increasingly exasperated messages from Texas seem to think we are not trying hard enough and deliberately breaking stuff as our list of spares required to try and keep the base operating get longer and longer and the months of delay to get them mean they might as well not come at all.So here I sit in a cold that is becoming increasingly like the depths of a Saint Paul winter with power that is intermittent as the solar panels dust up and cleaning them scratches them so much they short out. The supposed permanent residents wander around looking increasingly like they expect the hired help to arrive and start doing the messy jobs for them. I’m not sure anyone else has taken notice that the CO2 scrubbers have been failing and that we only have a few days left before we can’t breathe. I will have a final go at the fuel transfer pumps today, but I accept that if they don’t work we are going to be the Roanoke or Darien of Mars.