Lorian eyed the Boca Chica Starport warily. Daedalus tech's own Starport was set to be constructed near the Hawaian Islands, as a mostly submerged aquatic complex utilizing a giant magnetic accelerator to boost payloads into orbit. It would be another decade before it was finished, however, and Bill had declared that Daedalus needed to be an active part of the first Mars mission, successful or not.

"You've got to get your foot in the door," he'd declared at the company board meeting. "If we don't establish our presence and market early, Musk and his cronies will monopolize the planet."

Lorian was a little sceptical, noting that Musk was favored as much with luck as genius, but she wasn't going to turn down a chance to set foot on the planet. The composition of the crew had been splashed all over social media for months now, and Lorian had taken the time to meet all the crewmembers she could. There'd been a few mandatory group-training exercises, to make sure no truly incompatible people got stuck in the same can for seven months. The nine others aboard the Mama Falcon- which for some reason had an autographed poster of samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu hanging in its captain's quarters- were a mix of professional astronauts trained by Nasa and those trained by SpaceX. Lorian was the only crewmember not employed by either. Roscosmos had a trio of Cosmonauts aboard the Enterprise, and China had a pair on the Galactica. Three Starships, all currently in orbit, all curently awaiting transfer of crew. A different starship, Starship Twelve, stood on the launchpad to take them aloft. If all went well, they'd rendezvous with the starships in orbit, which currently waited nose-to nose around a comparitively small docking station designed to facilitate refueling and crew transfer. Over the past month the starships had been modified for interplanetary flight-an exoskeleton array of solar pannels and water tanks had been assembled around the core, serving to shield it and the crew inside from radiation and increase range, as well as some ion-drives to shorten the trip.

Preflight was several hours of prebreathing the starship's atmosphere mix to flus the nitrogen out of her system. Standard procedure for all spaceflights, to ease the dangers of high-speed acceleration. Eventually the crew was cleared to enter the starship, and they settled into their acceleration quarters, each in their own compartment. Spaceflight had come a long way in the past few years, passenger capacity per flight skyrocketing- litteraly- from less than a half-dozen persons per flight to the dozens. All thirty of the mission crew, plus the return pilot, fit comfortably with room to spare. Lorian's personal effects were stowned in an overhead compartment, just like on a commercial aircraft. There were was even a little laminated booklet of emergency procedures. True, there were about fifty more pages of procedure than on a commercial aircraft, but Aircraft tended to fall out of the sky rather quickly. Once Starship Twelve made it into a stable orbit, it could concievably stay up there for months. And on this trip, at least, everyone aboard had been certified qualified to conduct emergency repairs.

Still, the likelihood of needing to follow the emergency procedures was pretty low. It had been a minor miracle that no one had died on a SpaceX flight yet, and Musk was dedicated to keeping it that way. The flight went without incident, and the crew slowly filed throught the airlock and across the connecting node into their designated starship to get settled in for the trip. The four starships stayed docked for a couple hours, confirming that everything was aboard and topping up their reactant tanks from what S-12 had brought up. When the captains were all satisfied, the hatches were sealed and the three Mars-bound craft disengaged from the station, leaving it anchored to the nose of S-12. With precise automated bursts from their maneuvering jets, the starships swung into formation and commenced their initial engine burn to break earth orbit. They'd be using a modified Hohmann transfer, swinging past the sun to bring themselves into Mars's path.

Lorian swung herself into the main cabin, floating through the air in the weightlessness that followed the end of the primary burn. The captain and copilot were still at their stations, monitoring sensors and scopes to make sure noting was going to crash into them or explode. She hoped their job would be satisfactorily dull. moving to the exercise equipment, Lorian unfolded the tension belts that provided pressure for resistance training.

Doc. Smith, the MF's medical officer joined her a few moments later, having recieved a notification that someone had opened the exercise locker. "I'm going to end up disabling those notifications, aren't I," Smith remarked to Lorian as the two made conversation. "It's more a matter of making sure everyone gets enough exercise than making sure no one gets themselves hurt."

"Still, I appreciate the pointers," Lorian replied as the doctor demonstrated how to properly use the equipment. "I've only been up a couple times before on training flights, once on Starship Seven and once in a Dragon capsule. Neither flight was long enough to worry much about bone density."

"Well, seeing as you've obviously put some work into your body, it'd be a shame to let it atrophy," Smith eyed her exquisite form appreciatively.

"Why thank you, Doctor."

"Well, if you have any questions, feel free to message me, or just drift on over. I'll try to keep my door status updated."

The Doc left Lorian to her training regime and went to go set up some of the long-term experiments he'd be conducting over the course of the voyage. Each of the crew aboard had three roles. First, they had their role as a member of the Starship's crew. Pilot, Mechanic, life-support technician, Navigator, Communications and Code. Next, they each had an exhaustive list of experiments to perform during the seven month trip to Mars. Third, they had their roles on Mars as the crew responsible for setting up the initial outpost. About three to four months were alloted for the task, after which half the crew would make the return trip to earth and swap out for the next rotation. The other half would stay on Mars, doing their best to stay alive until their replacements landed. There were a few who didn't expect to make it. Lorian was slated for the return crew, but she knew as well as anyone that Murphy's law had a way of throwing a wrench into things, especially when something was being attempted for the first time. All she could do was hope for the best and plan for the worst.

Lorian eventually finished her exercise cycle and stowed the gear back in its cabinet. Rolling her shoulders, she performed an after-workout series of stretches and drifted back into her cabin. Calling it a cabin was a rather generous term, seing as it only had about 70 cubic feet, all in the tightest possible wedge. Still, it was enough room to stretch out in without feeling cramped, and weightlesness made the sleeping arangements simply exquisite, once she got over the initial disconcerting feeling of not having an up or a down. Lorian's experimental load consisted primarily of testing a set of semi-autonomous robots during the voyage, as well as some materials science related to manufacturing processes conducted in low-gravity environments. When she got down to the outpost, Rob had some projectile launchers and cutting implements for her to test away from the hab units. He'd been careful not to call them weapons, and Lorian had respected that, downplaying their potential for abuse when the group cleared their projects. The Captains hadn't been particularly happy that Lorian was bringing weapons that made no effort to conceal their intended purpose, but a sales pitch from Bill had managed to keep them from voting her off the mission.

"Guns are going to find their way onto Mars eventually. If we don't ship them there, someone's going to build one on planet. The odds of humanity managing to cooperate long-term without violent altercation are negligible. Better that those in authority are armed first and better," had been the gist of the conversation. Lorian had little doubt that each of the captains had their own firearm stored in the cargo slated to be unpacked upon landing. Of course no one had any intension of pulling a gun while in flight- one shot through the wrong point in the hull and they had a good chance of losing half the crew to decompression, not to mention all the fragile equipment keeping them alive. Sure, the hull-plating could take a few hits, in theory. But it was designed to take those hits from the outside, in the form of high-velocity micrometeoroids, not from the inside in the form uf full-metal jacket Hi-V submachine gun or sniper rounds. The semi-autonomous Robots were pretty tame in comparison, six-limbed maintenance units training one of ALICE's subroutines to move in zero-g. It was as much a software experiment as it was a test of hardware, and with the limited computing power available, even with the minituarised supercomputer that Lorian had brought to host ALICE's processes, it was slow going.

Three months into the trip, the first crisis arose. One of the fungal strains that Galactica used to process waste got into the water supply thanks to a faulty filter. Galactica had to boil the tank and then feed in a cleaning robot on the end of a snake to clean out the spores. Despite the claims of the Medical officers that the fungi were harmless, Lorian was pretty sure the crew of the Galactica was a bit buzzed for the next week or so. The long-term effects were a marginal loss of water and resources. Lorian, as one of the crew with the loosest schedule, ended up going through all of the MF's filters to make sure they weren't faulty.

At five months, one of the crew aboard the Enterprise snapped. He just curled up and refused to work. Doctor Scott, the Enterprise's medical officer, put him on a set of meds and forcibly enlisted him in the artificial stimulation experiment to see if steps could be taken to keep his muscles from completely atrophying. The press back home had a riot over the news, but SpaceX and Nasa kept it out of the media packets they transmitted. The Crew had made sure to stock up on digital media prior to launch, because there was no way in the void that the company was going to waste Bandwidth transmitting tv-shows or movies halfway across the solar system. And tv-signals degraded to much over the distance to get more than noise.

Still, when month number seven rolled around and the three ships dropped into orbit around Mars, Lorian counted the expedition extremely lucky. Aside from the one crewmember that had retreated from reality, The crews were in remarkable health, both mental and physical. From the concerns Smith had voiced about the radiation, she'd half expected someone to come down with cancer by now.

The three ships rendezvoused with the two automated craft already in orbit, shedding their interplanetary modifications, which were anchored to the automated craft until the time came for them to be used again. Then, with a brief prayer led by Captain Ohuyeh, they began the descent to Mars, one by one igniting their engines to drop their rotational velocity to the point where they could fall toward the planet.

#

Lorian gripped the arms of her acceleration couch tightly. Theirs was the second ship to land, the Enterprise having been given that particular honor. Their's would be the second manned ship to land on Mars, if all went well. Lorian gritted her teeth as the Starship shook under the pressure of the landing rockets, then there was a jolt, and the rockets cut out. And then all was still.

"Roll Call," Captain Ohuyeh called out.

"Present," Lorian replied, and listened gratefully as the rest of the crew sounded off. She didn't care to admit it, but the landing had been quite nerve-wracking. It was nice to have something mundane to focus on to get over the fact that they had just landed on a planet that wasn't earth. It was big. Momentous. Historic, even.

"Ohuyeh, we have a problem," the captain of the enterprise said over coms. Lorian felt her breath catch.

"Watson's blocking the exit hatch, obsessing over his Mars-landing speech. Would one of you get out there and plant some sort of flag just to steal his thunder? Please?"

Lorian burst out laughing. Oh, the sheer and utter lunacy that was that statement. Lorian ran a quick check of the spacesuit she'd donned for the descent, confirming that alll the seals were good, and that it was prepped to set foot on the planet's surface.

"I'll do it," she spoke up, thumbing the com interface. "Tell him if he doesn't get a move on, the girls are going to claim Mars before the men."

"Get out there, Lorian," Ohuyeh said imediately afterwards. "I'm not passing up this opportunity. Womankind needs to claim this."

"Aye-Aye, Captain," Lorian saluted her empty cabin and stepped out into the common area. For the first time since she'd boarded, there was gravity in this space. It took a bit of mental effort to find and use the ladder rather than just jumping out into the void like she'd been doing for over half a terrestrial year.

"Get your A** in gear, Watson," the Captain of the enterprise yelled, and Lorian watched on one of the Camera feeds showed the Eterprise's hatch cycle open, and the elevator platform begin to emerge. Lorian didn't bother with the platform, quickly cycling through the air lock and hooking a cable around one of the anchor points ringing its exterior. Then, with the rest of the cable playing out through a Carabiner clipped to her harness in proper Rappeling fashion, Lorian skipped down the side of the starship and planted her boots in Martian soil, a good minute before Watson's elevator reached the ground.

"That was ridiculously reckless, for bragging rights," Watson said as she ambled over to him, leaving a trail of shallow footprints in the Martian dirt.

"Yeah, but i'll bet the girls back home will milk them for all they're worth," Lorian said with a smile, not that Watson could see it under her mirrored visor. "Shall we get started?"

"Yeah. Though you really ought to be back with your own group."

"They won't miss me till they get the elevator running."

"No, seriously, get back to your group. We're on Mars. Bloody Mars. A dangerous planet with no breathable atmosphere and extreme temperatures. Stop being so reckless."

"Dude, I've been stuck in a can with nine other people for seven months. Let me blow off some steam, Eh?"

Lorian wandered back over to the Falcon and looked up at the side of the starship. "I think I just found a design flaw. Where's the ladder on this thing?"

#

Lorian ended up climbing the rope she'd rappeled down, as much for exercise as expediency. The rest of the Falcon's crew took their time and followed procedure, deploying the elevator platform and winches, then loading them with equipment to be lowered to the surface. When Lorian reached the airlock, Doctor Smith helped her connect an auxillary air-supply so she could stop using her suit's internal reserve. Setting up the base proceeded with only a few minor issues, having more to do with terrain composition than human or mechanical factors. Lorian recieved an official reprimand from both the mission leader and captain Ohuyeh, though captain Ohuyeh was more miffed at the fact that Lorian had taken her words as liscense to act and broken protocol than at the fact that she'd stolen Watson's spot as first Human to set foot on Mars. Lorian's concerns about ladders were dismissed, and a network of cables anchored to both starship and regolith to serve as an emergency access method and stabiliser in the event of high winds. Lorian did her share of the work setting up the outpost, lugging equipment around and driving the electrically driven cargo platform from point to point to deliver the inflatable hab modules and solar panels. The drone ships that had already landed had relied on nuclear power to operate their mining and atmospheric processing units. Now that there were humans around to dust off the panels, Solar could be employed more liberaly. Fission and decay were, at most, stopgap measures. It would never be sustainable to ship fuel of such high mass from earth to outlying orbital bodies, even if Daedalus got the mass-driver operational. Fusion would work, but it Rob had told Lorian it would be another five to six years before the technology was developed enough for use on earth, let alone on Mars.

Regardless, Lorian had about three months to enjoy her time on the red planet. She got to know the Chinese and Russian crewmembers, and joined the "Martian Bardic association"- four of the crew had brought guitars, and got together on a weekly basis to jam together. With a week left before the return voyage, Lorian suggested a shooting competition to the expedition director. To her surprise, he approved it.

#