See The Worlds Read Online Free PDF

old days it wasn’t even a garrison - it used to be the USAN
Research Center.  It was about thirty scientists working away at various
projects, trying to figure if Mars was habitable in the long run, what the
impact of the low gravity and confined living conditions might be on human
beings.
    After Venkdt arrived in 2143 the Research
Center’s raison d'être faded away.  Venkdt’s operation expanded so fast that
they ended up doing the things that the Research Center was researching the
viability of.  Pretty soon the Venkdt operation dwarfed the Research Center,
and the scientists were called home.  In their stead the USAN put a garrison on
the site.
    It was one of those decisions that I guess must
have felt right, even though there was no logical justification for it.  It was
small, to be sure, with just over two hundred personnel.  But that was still
two hundred people, a long way from home and with nothing to do.
    As a sort of post-hoc justification for the
garrison they fell to the role of an informal police force.  They flew the
flag, reminded everyone that Marineris and the rest of Mars was an outpost of
the USAN, and then calmed domestic disturbances and threw old soaks into the
drunk tank on a Friday night.
    It was a huge waste of tax-payers’ money in
truth, but it’s what they had been doing for over a hundred years and it just
seemed like one of those normal things that nobody questions.  It’s what we had
to train for, anyway.
     
     
    The launch was amazing.  I’d been on sub-orbital
flights before but that was something else.  Greeley slept through it, or at
least he pretended to.   He had to have been faking it.  The sound, the
vibrations were enough to wake the dead.  I loved it.  You don’t get excitement
like that in southern England.
    The HLV took us out to the solar orbiter.  We
transferred to that, and that was the ship that took us to Mars.  We were on
there for six months, which was fine by me.  They had artificial gravity, AG,
which they subtly lowered over the course of the journey.  By the time we
reached Mars we were at 0.38 Earth gravity, ready for life on the surface.
    There wasn’t much to do on the orbiter.  There
was a gym and some IVRs, so we did a bit of training in them.  Some of the time
we did ‘enhanced sleep’.  That involved taking some pills and hooking yourself
up to some monitoring equipment.  I think there was something that sent waves
into your head, or something, too.  Anyway, you could sleep for two or three
days at a time, and that helped to shorten the journey a bit.
    At Mars we transferred to a local shuttle craft,
and that took us down to the surface.  That was another wild ride.  From there
we went to the garrison, and that’s where we met Colonel Shaw.
    Colonel Katrina Shaw was a good commanding
officer.  I liked her from the off.  That first day on the parade ground, she
gave a short speech and she seemed like a straight up sort of character.  I
think she knew that Mars was a bullshit posting but she wasn’t going to let
that be an excuse for any slackness or shirking.  She was army to the core, so
I felt like we knew where we stood with her.
    Her two subordinates were poles apart.  Major
Edley seemed fine.  Like Shaw, she was old school and down the line.  She
seemed to get that it was a weird gig, but that we had to maintain standards
and do our part and get to the end of it.
    The other guy, Major Bowers, was a different
case.  He seemed to take it seriously.  Shaw and Edley seemed to know that
there was a job to be done, and we had to do it to an acceptably high standard,
and that beyond that it was just a case of seeing the tour out.
    Bowers, though, seemed to take everything way too
seriously.  Everything, and I mean every little thing, mattered to him.  It
wasn’t just about maintaining discipline.  It mattered to him that your creases
were out of line.  It mattered to him that your cap wasn’t quite straight.