The truck slowed to a stop twenty meters from the edge of the crater around midday. A few minutes later, four people in pressure suits climbed out the vehicle’s airlock and down the extended set of stairs. They walked to the back of the vehicle and opened it, the back folding out into a ramp. There a dozen robots of different sizes, from the size of a robotic vacuum to the size of a small fork lift, left the vehicle. The leader of the people removed a tablet from his chest and touched the screen in a few locations, sending out the majority of the robots to travel around the outside of the crater. One of the robots went nearby and drove in a circle before sending data back to the leader and driving away.
“Ok, everybody. Let’s start unloading.” The leader said, and two of the others activated the two forklift robots, sending them back up the ramp to remove crates. “Kevin, you’ll be helping me set up the base camp.”
A slightly smaller person walked over to him. The suit contained Kevin Wilson, the son of a middle manager in the company. If he was back on Earth he probably would have been working at a fast food restaurant, earning between forty and forty five thousand credits per year overseeing and doing minor repairs to the automation. Here on Mars, however, due to the severe shortage of workers, he was making over three times that, at one hundred and fifty thousand a year, overseeing robots at a construction sight. “Do I need to help unload the tent?” Kevin motioned towards the truck.
“No, Gary and Amir will unload the truck. Once they get it down here, I’ll have them move the primary and secondary tent crates into place for us, then we can set everything up.”
A few minutes later three crates were unloaded and set near where the two men were standing. “Here, help me move the tent off the pallet.” Jim, the crew leader, told Kevin, and the two of them lifted the 1500kg object onto the ground. Though the planet only had 38% of Earth’s gravity, the two of them wouldn’t have been able to do the job themselves without the artificial muscle tissue that was built into their suits to help them lift heavy loads.
With the tent off of the crate, Kevin moved it out of the way before he and Tim unrolled it. It was a five meters wide dome made of concrete and fabric, with a single basic airlock. Once it was flat on the ground in the area the robot had already verified to be almost perfectly level, they unpacked the second crate, connecting the air pump contained in it and plugging the pump into the truck for power. As the tent inflated they set up the other equipment from the second crate for the tent’s life support and water recycling, then went to the third crate labeled “power system” and unloaded the solar panels. They set up the four panels inside and plugged them into the side of the tent.
The tent had finished its inflation by this time, so they plugged a cylinder labeled “hardening solution” into the series of tubes that was within the concrete of the tent and the liquid began flowing into the tent. Five minutes later the tent had set up hard enough for them to turn off the air pump and enter to begin setting up the inside. It took them another hour to move all of the equipment inside, starting with plugging the battery pack into the inside part of the solar panel plug and the tent’s main power grid. This would take the unknown voltage of the panels and convert it to the 24 volts their equipment used.
By the time they were done, the tent had finished its initial hardening, so they reversed the air pump, drawing vacuum on the tent, then turning on the already primed life support system to refill it with a breathable mix of 52.1% Nitrogen, 27.8% Argon, 20% Oxygen, and .1% Carbon Dioxide at 100kpa. The mix of Argon and Nitrogen didn’t match Earth exactly, but it did match the relative amounts of those gasses in the Martian atmosphere. The air even contained enough nitrogen for the slightly stunted growth of nitrogen fixing soil bacteria, though that wouldn’t be needed for this base. Those facts made it the most common mixture used on the red planet.
After waiting another ten minutes for the base temperature to get above freezing after dumping evaporated liquids and high pressure gasses into the tent, Jim and Kevin went inside and started setting up the inside equipment they had brought with them. There was still frost on a few metal items, but at 5c it was warm enough to remove their suits and just wear the inner, uniform like, undersuit. By the time the sun had gone down the tent’s computers had been connected to the external satellite dish, restoring communications with the base and robots, making routing those things through the truck no longer necessary.
Just as the sun started to set the two other men squeezed through the airlock, and, once inside, a man from the India region of Earth began to speak. “Well, everything is unloaded. The drones should finish mapping out the edge of the crater by tomorrow morning and we can get started on clearing the regolith away while you two set up the ISRU and extra power system.”
“Thanks, Amir.” Tim responded. “So, everything is going according to plan?”
“Pretty much. One of the lifts had a bad battery, but I was able to replace it with a backup. Still, they give us extras of those, so it shouldn’t be an issue.” Kevin handed him a reheated food tray, and he stopped talking in favor of stuffing the pasta dish into his mouth, something that was basically a luxury good back in the city.
A few minutes later Kevin set down his tray. “So I didn’t want to sound like I was complaining earlier, but do any of you know why we are out here, setting up a farming dome?”
“Do you like eating algae?” asked Gary between bites.
“Of course not, I always buy decent food, which is where a lot of my disposable income goes. But I wasn’t asking why we need farms. I was wondering why we are setting up here specifically instead of closer to Olympus, where the food is needed.”
“Oh, well that’s simple. What do you run into if you keep driving this road?”
Kevin thought back to his introductory training at the company. “There’s a Bauxite mine in three kilometers, and a Rare Earths mine in five, which is where most of Olympus’s Thorium comes from.”
“Right, and if you go back towards the city?”
“A Malachite and Ilmenite mine. So this is an emergency outpost?”
Gary nodded. “I used to work at that Rare Earth’s mine, and one time the truck broke down on the way back to the city. If we had had an outpost to limp the vehicle back to we wouldn’t have been stuck in a half-dead truck for a week as they brought out the replacement part and replaced it. Instead we would get to stay in a decent dome. You’ll realize how important outposts are when your water use is limited and you can’t heat your food because the leader of the mission isn’t sure the power supply will last until help arrives.”
Kevin nodded. “Fair enough.”
After the meal was done they took turns in the miniature toilet/shower combo and hopped in the bunks that had been assembled just three minutes before the other two returned.
The next day Jim and Kevin got to work assembling the prefab equipment they had brought with them and the four crates of solar panels meant to power them. The equipment included a centrifuge device which could separate the local regolith into fairly pure versions of its constituent parts, a device to make concrete from the bulk of local regolith, a smelter which could turn any metallic sands that came out of the centrifuge into metal ingots, powder, or rods, a stamp machine to turn the ingots into plates and sheet metal, and a metal 3d printer which could turn the metal powder into more complex objects. The ceramic and plastic 3d printers could wait until later, as they required pressurized areas to work and were too large to fit through the door of the tent.
This equipment, when combined with the solar panels for power, and the robots for labor, should be able to build an airtight dome across the crater along with an elevator to move thing into the bottom of the crater. This would allow a biology team to come out here and finish setting up the life support and lifeforms needed to raise plants and animals.
They managed to get the centrifuge, smelter, stamp machine as well as the 16 solar panels and battery pack set up by the time the sun had started to set. An experienced pair could probably have set up the 3d printer or concrete mixer as well, but they weren’t strictly needed yet and things tended to go more slowly when you had a trainee with you.
Jim and Kevin made it inside just before sunset and finished up their bathroom use before the others came inside. Amir had ordered one of the dozers to begin clearing regolith from near the edge of the crater and using it to keep the centrifuge full, using the crates they had taken the gear out of for temporary storage of the processed materials. This equipment would be remaining here after the job was complete, so the equipment wouldn’t need to be repacked in them later, making it unnecessary to keep the crates clean or in good condition. At most they would be broken down as feed stock for the plastic 3d printer once they needed that piece of equipment.
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After another supper filled with meaningless talk and Gary and Amir contacting their girlfriends, the guys turned in early.
The next day Gary went to examine a small Magnetite deposit on of the probes had found, while Amir oversaw the drones at the base and Jim and Kevin finished setting up the last two pieces of equipment. They had just finished when the tent’s computer relayed a weather warning to them about an incoming storm, so they all headed back inside around midday. The storm lasted until early the next morning.
The next morning they left the tent to find that all of the equipment was covered in dust. Jim, Kevin, and Amir were forced to spend their morning cleaning off the equipment as Gary double checked all of the drones to make sure they were fine. Luckily, by mid afternoon everything was operational again and they could continue with the manufacturing.
A week passed in this fashion as the two dozer drones cleared the regolith from around the crater’s edge to guarantee that the concrete would form an air-tight seal with the underlying rock. Finally, however, the drones had finished and they could begin forming a perfectly circular wall around the top of the crater. Thanks to the discovery of the magnetite deposit their stores of steel reinforcement bars were well ahead of schedule, and it only took another two weeks for them to reach the point where the robots could begin forming the dome.
At that point Jim and Kevin had moved to printing out massive numbers of transparent metal sheets to fill in the future grid of the geodesic dome the drones were building from thin metal beams. Greg and Amir had been running the drones, smelter, and centrifuge, though when the first of the drones started to develop issues Greg had moved to keeping them repaired as well.
It was another month before the dome was finished and they could begin pressurizing it. Jim and Kevin had built two other devices using the equipment they had brought with them in that time, an atmospherics device ten times as powerful as the one their tent used and most of a Liquid Thorium Micro Modular Nuclear Reactor, and would finish the last when they had a pressurized environment to finish making the parts in. The device was an open source design that became popular in the late 2050s due to the safety inherent in its design. In the last 60 years there had been only one accident involving that reactor and it’s sister designs, when someone attempted to extract U233 from it during operation and died of radiation poisoning. This one, however, wouldn’t be brought online until the nuclear team could come out and run an entire suite of diagnostics on it and its automated control systems, then another suite of tests after fueling it.
Once the base had a proper atmosphere they took the cargo elevator along with several of the drones down into the crater. Greg had refit one of the dozer drones to collect and bake the regolith down there to remove the perchlorate salts, so it began its job once they were at the bottom. The other drones went over to where the house was going to be built and began preparing the area. Once the area was clear the second dozer would be given a concrete 3d printer nozzle and begin printing the house. In another week the place would be built, painted, and furnished, ready for the biology and nuclear teams to finish the job.
Two months after they arrived on sight the four construction crew members took the now-constructed personnel elevator back to the surface, then showed the biology and nuclear teams around. Once they were done they once again boarded the truck and returned to the city. They would have between one and two weeks of downtime before the company would be sending them out to anther crater to repeat what they just did, only this time Kevin would be assigned to work under Greg to learn the drone controller role and Amir would be helping Jim.
The Biological and nuclear crews only had a few weeks of work to do at the sight. The biological crew started by building pH and nutrient maps of the bottom of the crater, and the Nuclear crew got to work on their diagnostics.
Once the maps were done they started using the drones to spread nitric acid onto the regolith to neutralize the alkalinity and add nitrates, and after the pH was correct they added what nutrients were missing and seeded it in multiple places with bacteria samples. The bottom of the crater now had a small pond of water, and that was being pumped to sprinklers in the dome to simulate rainfall.
Once the Nuclear crew was finished with their initial diagnostics, they replaced a few components that were operating on the border of their proper performance specifications and added the fuel. Once the fuel was added it took them a day to slowly bring the reactor up to 150% power in order to test how it responded to being forced beyond its design limits. When it passed the test, they brought it back down to normal range, reengaged the safety protocols, and let the onboard AI take over operation. The AI, seeing that the power it was outputting wasn’t needed, dropped output to the minimum 1% of its rated limit, putting only ten kilowatts of power into the dome’s systems. If large amounts of power were needed later, the backup batteries could handle it as the reactor powered up.
When the week was over the biology crew refit the drones to be used as farm equipment, the two dozers becoming a combine and a tractor, and planted grass seeds over the entire dome. Their growth would be monitored remotely and the grass would be plowed in every few months to build up the organic content of the soil. By the time someone bought the sight, it would be ready to grow any crop that could survive in sandy soil.
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Philip Grayson looked out the window of the ship at the growing silhouette of the red planet. Phillip had begun his career as an author as a teenager with a book about a group of people living in the Amazon that were attacked by aliens from a hunter culture. The publisher liked it so much that he convinced Philip to write two sequels to it. After that Philip decided that he wanted to write a different series about an alien shapeshifter attacking colonists in Antarctica, so he moved to one of the colonies there. This resulted in a seven part series. In truth, the two stories were based on two twentieth century movies he once downloaded, one an action movie from the 1980s and the other a mystery horror movie, also from the 1980s but based on a story from 1938.
After that he had moved to Luna to write a story with an original premise, about a corporation making monsters at a remote sight on the moon and the creatures breaking loose and terrorizing a lunar colony. This series had lasted for five books before interest died down to only his core fanbase.
Now he was on his way to Mars to write a new series about a serial killer who was murdering colonists there. He had been trying to convince his publisher to let the monster actually be a human this time, but had been forced to compromise by making the man a cyborg with poorly installed implants. He wouldn’t be able to finish the story until he was actually living on Mars and understood the way things were there, but he had finished the action bits of the first book in the series.
In order to achieve the level of realism and authenticity his fans had come to expect of him he had purchased a crater farm 20.7 kilometers from the city of Olympus, a major underground city of over twenty thousand people that was experiencing a bit of a food shortage. There he would live among the locals, growing wheat for export to the city while paying off the farm.
The company that built the place had charged him five million credits for it, fully furnished, and because they were desperate for someone to move in he wouldn’t have to pay interest as long as he repaid the loan within ten martian years. Philip did some quick math. The dome had point seven hectares of good farm land. Wheat averaged ten tons per hectare and sold for ten credits per kilo. That meant he would earn an average of seventy thousand credits per harvest, minus maybe two thousand for the fertilizer he would need to make up for the nutrient loss. At seven harvests per year, what most farmers could expect, that would be 68k * 7 credits, or 476k. Compared to his expected payment it didn’t seem to be enough, until you considered that straw and oxygen could also be exported at one credit per kilo. According to the Space Farmer’s Almanac, you usually got an equal amount of straw and 1.5 times the dry mass of oxygen from your crops, but without knowing how badly the dome leaked, he cut that down to an equal mass. That meant 7k for the straw and 7k for the oxygen, seven times a year, or 98k per year. That totaled 574k. After repaying his loan, earning 74k per year would put him in the low income bracket for the planet. He didn’t, however, need to pay rent, or for water or oxygen or power, and could probably farm enough to feed himself on the unusable parts of the dome like between buildings. He could even get protein from the catfish and tilapia they stocked in the dome’s pond to keep the algae from eating up all of the soil nutrients.
This would also leave him plenty of time to write his books. Who knows, maybe he would stay on Mars for the entire ten Martian years of the loan? He had over seven million credits in a bank on Earth, and could buy the farm outright if he wanted, but in order to maintain authenticity he would only be touching that money in an emergency, with his attorney having to agree that purchases over one hundred thousand were needed due to an emergency.
An hour later he made his way to the shuttle. The ship wouldn’t be going into circular orbit of the Red Planet. Instead, all cargo and passengers that needed to go to Mars would be launched as they approached, and all cargo and passengers that needed to leave Mars would be launched for a rendezvous shortly after that, matching orbits with this ship before docking. Such was the way the Cycler ships had moved people and cargo between the Red and Blue planets for decades.
All of his baggage had already been loaded by the crew before he got there, and someone was there to meet Philip as he boarded the vessel. Her name was Vanessa and she was one of the people who lived and worked onboard. Due to having tiny populations of two dozen people at most, Cycler tradition had evolved to include them entertaining passengers and attempting to expand their gene pool through the same means. Thus, she had spent most of her nights sharing a bed with Phillip, though he knew he wasn’t the only one. Even with the promiscuous culture pregnancy rates aboard Cycler ships were abysmally low due to the zero gravity, even with everyone spending at least an hour a day in the spin-grav ring, so Phillip doubted he would receive word that he would become a father after arriving on Mars. Still, if he did, he had no issue with the financial responsibility, and he was certain that his attorney would recognize child support payments as valid deductions from his account.
After kissing goodbye and promising to call each other the next time she approached the planet in sixteen months or so, she pulled away and Phillip boarded the ship. A few minutes later, his ship and three others launched and set a course for the Martian Space Elevator.
Almost a day later Phillip exited the elevator and entered the city of Olympus. It was one of three cities with a main leg on the elevator line, so several other people left the car as well. Fifteen minutes later, he had stacked all of his luggage onto a rental cart and walked to the exit. There he found a teenager holding a holo-sign projector which displayed his name. “I take it you are from the Realtor?” Phillip asked.
“Yes, sir. My name is Kevin Wilson, and I was sent to drive you out to your new farm for the initial inspection. I was actually on the crew that built it, so feel free to ask me any questions you might have about it.”
After loading all of his baggage into the truck that was docked at one of the city’s vehicle airlocks and returning the cart to the spaceport they set out. This was actually the same truck that was sent out to build the farm, Kevin explained, and it was set up to support a crew of four people for up to a week without external inputs. The front section had a cockpit, sleep area, bathroom and kitchen/dining room, as well as storage for four backup pressure suits. The back was a large pressurized container which could haul around 200 cubic meters of goods, and was often fitted with additional food, water, life support or fuel for long journeys.
About an hour and a half after they left the city they pulled up to the dome and docked at one of its six vehicle airlocks.. After double-checking the seal, Kevin informed him that it was safe to leave without a pressure suit and helped Philip unload all of his things from the truck into the personnel elevator. They then took it down to the bottom of the crater where a cargo robot was waiting to take the luggage to the house. “Welcome to your new home.” Kevin said, motioning to the farm and house in front of them.
They spent the next several hours double checking that everything was in order, with Kevin explaining many of the farm’s features, and around sunset another truck docked. This would be Kevin’s ride back to the city. He said goodbye, shook Philip’s hand one last time, and took the elevator up.
Now that he was alone, Philip sighed. ‘It has been a long day’, he thought, looking over the field of almost-ripe wheat that surrounded the central pond, ‘but now I am officially a Martian Farmer.’