In a Martian Dawn, How Bright is Earth? Part 2

Seventy-five days after their initial landing, thirty-nine after they arrived at their claim, they had their first run of hydrogen and oxygen. They had locked up their run in the massive pressurized tanks hastily printed with the last of the original supplies and headed into the main settlement with their load. The machines were automated, after all, and they wanted to sell their first load at a profit. The month-long trip was as dull as before, but the Company had finally finished its network of satellites. The Martian Internet was a small thing at that time, a few forums and a few flaky websites, but it was a connection. Meyers was particularly excited to uncover a antebellum meme stash. The jokes were lost on Hiroshi, who had never enjoyed the idea of gluing pictures to trite phrases, but Meyers’ spirits were flushed for a week when he discovered that.

They sold their run at the low level of the spaceport and went in search of a drink. The Third Colonization had developed a small business economy, the type that had three bars in a city and every single one stocked the same three types of beer.

Their return was done with a caravan. Three other prospectors were heading out to the southern cone. Two (a married couple) were simply betting on life on Mars. The other was a former mining engineer displaced by the wars. She swore she knew the exact make and model of the boring machine Meyers had tried to shoot. They were hired on a provisional basis - food, air, water and medicine were considered the unconditional right of a Martian citizen, and there was almost no profit to share. In return, Meyers and Hiroshi, Inc. acquired the claim rights of all three prospectors and a growing workforce.

The engineer proved to not only know the boring machine, but to be very handy with printing software. She soon had several improvements in the AI mining script as well. Meyers tried desperately to transfer her success into a romp on sterile fold-down cots, but she refused. Meyers had laughed it off over moonshine, but it reminded Hiroshi that on the lonely frontier opportunities to get laid were going to be few and far between.

The couple, in turn, proved to be more useful than they had seemed at first. She was a former software engineer and proved remarkably adept at developing printing programs and making the refining process more efficient. And he had been a gourmet chef. He spent most days with Meyers, out working on maintenance tasks and the thousand things that could be done by robots if only they could be spared. Every night, however, he served up a meal that, while consisting of the same freeze-dried ingredients, were the best eating Hiroshi had ever had.

Hiroshi himself alternated between running the chemical processes and delivering the runs to town. His first, and most important, task was to find new ways to supply the printers with material for printing. He had built several types of chemical baths and refineries, until he was running a metallurgical establishment on par with a small conglomerate back on Earth. He was still unable to produce some of the more complex silicates and carbon nanotubes, but it was surprising what you could find in the ground when a thousand robots were at your disposal.

It was the runs back to town that were most draining to Hiroshi. He preferred the quiet and the calm to Meyers’ insistent chattering and memes, but thirty-six days was a long time even for him. There was talk of running railways between some of the settlements, but the cost out to the southern cone was too great for Meyers and Hiroshi, Inc. Aircraft were impossible to build in the thin Martian atmosphere.

But the profits from transporting methane to the thirsty rockets were enormous. And it is precisely these types of profits that lead, inevitably, to the purchase of five methane engines and an AI module suitable for driving a hovercraft. Or, in Hiroshi’s meticulous notes, a hovertrain.

“Whatever possessed you to buy methane engines?” demanded Meyers, when he returned.

“Watch,” Hiroshi had said. The man’s incessant prattle and ignorance were wearing thin, but he was a fantastic drinking partner.

The hovertrain neither hovered nor was much of a train. It jerked along, barely clearing the crevices and boulders of the Martian terrain, and used up a little of their run. Still, it was a vast improvement over having a drive a buggy and it could make the trip in fifteen days. Meyers began referring to it as the “Sunshine Express,” for reasons not even he could comprehend.

They celebrated their first Martian anniversary with moonshine and a weeklong climb up to the South Pole.

“We’re the first,” Meyers said, banging his chest. He was prancing like a peacock in a shallow depression. The GPS-M insisted this was true south, although Hiroshi had spent an entire afternoon attempting to calculate it manually. This depression was unseemly for the South Pole of humanity’s second home. “They’re going to write songs about our climb. We are the heroes of Mars.”

“We are 1200 meters above sea level,” Hiroshi said.

“Ah, but we had to use oxygen,” said Meyers. “You have to do that when you’re climbing Everest.”

“It’s Mars,” said Hiroshi. “We always have to use oxygen.”

Meyers rarely let facts take the sails out of his exuberance. He made another pass at the mining engineer (or she made a pass at him, the moonshine and Meyers’ boasts muddled things a bit). Hiroshi, always self-contained, was still walking the streets of Osaka.

The second year of Meyers and Hiroshi, Inc. saw the creation of several more boring machines (all customized by the engineer). It saw the departure of the software engineer and the gourmet chef, returning to Earth and culture and the aftershocks of several thermonuclear pissing contests. The engineer (her name was Maria) stayed on for that year, but left. Meyers and Hiroshi, Inc. continued as a two man outfit.

And that was how it developed for years. A person or two would come by and work or live in the automated frontier. Meyers and Hiroshi, however, went on living, the eternal duo running what was becoming Mars’ largest supplier of methane to the transport fleet. Women floated into Meyers’ life and out with the substance of a phantagasm. Hiroshi still walked the streets of Osaka and spent his days improving the hovertrains.

For now Meyers and Hiroshi were running the largest network of railways and hovertrains on the Martian planet. This wasn’t much, since the Martian population was still barely 30,000 and their railway was only 135 kilometers. But it decreased their delivery time to a day, which allowed them to supply more methane.