The drop ship shuddered, the atmosphere outside thick enough now to cause turbulence. The acceleration alarm chimed pleasantly and a recorded voice instructed him and the other passengers to check the straps on their gel couches and put any objects more than two kilos into the lockers set into the wall at their sides. The braking burn would commence in thirty seconds, and reach a maximum burn of three gs. The automated concern made that sound like a lot, but he supposed some folks would be impressed.
He put his hand terminal in the locker, cycled it closed, and waited for the braking rockets to push him back into his couch. In one of the other compartments, a baby was crying. The countdown tones began, a music of converging intervals distinguishable in any language. When the tones resolved into a gentle and reassuring chord, the burn kicked in, pressing him into the gel. He dozed as the ship rattled and shook. The atmosphere of Mars wasn’t thick enough to use it for aerobraking on their steep descent path, but it could still generate a lot of heat. Half-awake, he ran through the math of landing, the numbers growing more and more surreal as the light sleep washed over him. If something had gone wrong – a change in the burn, an impact shudder passing through the ship, a shift in the couch’s gimbals – he’d have been awake and alert in an instant. But nothing happened, so nothing happened. As homecomings went, it wasn’t bad.
The port proper was at the base of the valley. Six and a half kilometers of stone rose up from the pads, the strip of sky above them hardly more than thirty degrees from rim to rim. The processing station was one of the oldest buildings in Mariner, its massive clear dome built with the dual purposes of blocking radiation and providing a view that would impress with its scale. The canyons ran to the east, rugged and craggy and beautiful. Lights glittered from the canyon’s sides where the neighborhoods impinged out from the rock, the homes of the insanely wealthy trading the safety of deep stone for the status of an actual exterior window. A transport flier passed, hugging low to the ground where the relatively thick air gave its gossamer wings a little more purchase.
Once upon a time, the data said, Mars had been the home of its own biosphere. Rain had fallen here. Rivers had flowed. Not, perhaps, in the geologic eyeblink of human history, but once. And would, the terraformers promised, again. Not in their lifetimes or their children’s, but one day. Alex waited in the customs queue, looking up. The pull of the planet, only about one-third g, felt strange. No matter what the math said, thrust gravity felt different than being down a well. Between the magnificence of the canyons and the eeriness of his weight, Alex felt the anxiety growing in his chest.
He was here. He was home.
The man processing the arriving travelers wore a thick mustache, white with a tinge of red. His eyes were bloodshot and his expression glum.
“Business or pleasure?”
“Neither one,” Alex drawled, “I’m here to see the ex-wife.”
The man gave a quick smile. “That going to be a business meeting, or pleasure?”
“Let’s call it not-business,” Alex said.
The processor stroked the screen of his terminal, nodded toward the camera. As the system confirmed that he was who he claimed to be, Alex wondered why he’d said that. He hadn’t said that Tali was a shrew, he hadn’t insulted her, but he’d leaned on the assumption for a quick joke. He felt like she deserved better from him. Probably she did.
“’Joy your stay,” the processing man said, and Alex was free to enter the world he’d left.
His cousin Min stood in the waiting area. She was ten years younger than him, the last vestiges of youth falling from her and the first comfortable heft of middle age creeping in. Her smile belonged to a little girl he’d known once.
“Hey there, podner,” she said, the Mariner drawl probably half a degree thicker than it normally was. “What brings you round these parts?”
“More sentiment than sense,” Alex said, opening his arms. They embraced for a moment.
“You got any luggage?” Min asked.
“Traveling light.”
“Fair enough. I’ve got a cart down at the front.”
Alex hoisted an eyebrow. “You didn’t need to do that.”
“They’re cheaper than they used to be. The kids aren’t back from lower U for another four hours. You got anything you want to do before we’ve got them underfoot?”
“The only two things I’ve been looking forward to were seeing people and a bowl of Hassan’s noodles.”
The look of embarrassment passed over Min’s face and vanished again in an eyeblink. “There’s a great noodle shop over on the south face. Garlic sauce that’ll knock you sideways. But Hassan packed it in about four years ago.”
“Ah. No, it’s all right. The thing about Hassan’s wasn’t that they were good.”