If there was one good thing about being crammed into a tin can with a bunch of other colonists, it was the short reprieve Zed had gotten from his parents fighting. Privacy being what it was, they couldn’t have a shouting match without the whole ship hearing it, so they did whatever they had to in order to bottle it up. Whatever their issues, apparently, their pride was stronger.

Zed hoped that maybe the habit might stick once they reached the colony. His hopes were not high.

The trip had been mercifully uneventful. Twenty colonists and two pilots—or babysitters, as they were affectionately called—had docked with The Attic two days ago.

The Attic was the way station that every pilgrim to Mars passed through before making their descent to the rusty landscape below.

The ships that traversed the space between Earth and Mars weren’t built to touch down on either world. A small fleet of four landers would take the Marshes and their fellow passengers on the final leg of their journey.

Zed thought The Attic itself had a bit of a haunted house vibe to it. There were no permanent living quarters as such. It was really just meant for transfers and resupplies. Like the ship that had brought them here, every conceivable system was automated. The landers could be summoned to the ground and relaunched without the need for a skilled pilot or for any human to be present at all.

When the decision had been made to allow groups of colonists to start making their way out into the solar system, it had become clear that making everything “idiot-proof” was the top priority. This meant making the job of traveling through space require as few interactions with vital systems as possible.

The babysitters really were just that. Unless something went horribly wrong, there was no need for them to do any real piloting at all.

Zed found this reassuring but also a little sad. The reality was a bit more sterile than the stories of the first explorers he’d grown up on. He wondered how someone like Thabisa Jones felt about someone like him getting to Mars on autopilot when she and her crewmates had gone through hell to set that first boot on the red planet.

Space was still a horrifyingly dangerous place, but if things were going to go wrong, the engineers on Earth had done their best to ensure that it wasn’t human error that triggered a master alarm.

Zed made his way through the stark tunnels that comprised the interior of The Attic. He passed a row of closely set doors that he recognized as the inflatable bulb escape pods he’d been taught how to use during the pre-launch training.

For a moment, he had a dangerous impulse—the kind you get standing on the edge of a cliff, wanting to throw yourself off because you could, or to press your hand to a hot stove.

In this instance, he imagined how simple it would be to start the emergency launch sequence, inflate the pod, and hurl himself down to Mars before anyone could stop him. He’d easily beat out Miranda and George for the title of “first teen on Mars.”

“There you are!” Miranda shouted at Zed as she drifted down through a hatch overhead.

He stammered a greeting, as if caught in the middle of something questionable.

She gave him a curious look but didn’t inquire further.

“Come on, we’re gonna miss out on the good seats. George is trying to hold a few on the lander’s upper level. The babysitters said that’s where the best landing views are. Fingers crossed for a real show! Move your ass, Marsh!”

She spun in mid-air and pulled herself back through the hatch, her flowing pale blond hair giving her movements a ghostlike quality that matched The Attic’s haunted nature.

Zed hurried after Miranda, struggling to keep up. In spite of months in space, he’d never quite gotten the hang of free fall. Miranda, on the other hand, moved as if she’d been born in orbit. In short order, they arrived at the ship that would take them to their new home.

This lander’s interior was almost entirely filled with flight couches. The colonists’ stowed items and supplies would be loaded into one of the other landers that had an empty cargo layout.

Miranda’s twin, George, was waiting for them at the entrance. He swore at them.

“Took you long enough. Thought I was gonna have to start throwing punches to keep our seats.”

He gestured for them to follow him. They floated past other colonists who were making their way into the lander. A few of them gave George looks of annoyance.

Zed had no doubt that more than a few of their fellow travelers would be happy to not have to share the same tiny living space with the less mature of the Ens twins. George was a “good kid,” as they say, but he could also be a lot, especially when he’d been cooped up for months.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

George led them to the upper level of the lander. There were fewer seats up here, but larger windows.

“You guys ready for a fireworks show?” George said, rubbing his hands as if he planned to start a fire right then and there.

“Don’t say fireworks,” Miranda said. “Fireworks blow up. I’ll be happy with some sparks and a safe touchdown.”

As the three of them strapped in, an Asian man in his mid-sixties emerged from the hatch below.

“Hey, Baat!” Zed called. “You started praying yet?”

Baat was to be Inauguration’s first chaplain. Or, if you weren’t religious, he could also serve as a therapist or morale officer. Zed wasn’t sure what exactly any of that entailed, but he got the impression Baat was there to keep people from losing their minds.

Besides the Ens twins, Baat was the only other person on board that Zed considered a real friend. Zed was used to making friends with adults to a certain degree. He’d spent far more time around adults than children his own age growing up. Miranda and George were actually his longest-running in-person friendships, and he’d only known them for a couple of years.

With Baat, it was different, though. Zed found he had an easier time consulting the graying Mongolian on things that felt too heavy or serious to drop in casual conversation with Miranda or George, especially George. If anything remotely serious came up in conversation, George saw it as an excuse to crank up his already considerable immaturity to the max.

While he didn’t hang out with Baat just for fun that often, it was nice having someone he respected and didn’t fear. He felt a twinge of guilt that this description didn’t for a second make him think of his own parents, but the thought of opening up to them created a far deeper sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach than dropping to the planet below ever could.

Baat buckled himself in across from the three teens.

“Young man, we've been living in a series of tin cans with instant death lurking behind every wall and window. I never stop praying.”

George tightened his harness. Zed had long suspected that for all his bluster, George would be the most relieved of them all to have his feet on solid ground again. Though in reality, being on Mars wasn’t any less dangerous.

“So,” Baat said, “which one of you will be first?”

Zed and the twins exchanged glances. They knew that by “first,” Baat meant “first teen on Mars.”

“It’s gonna be me,” George said, with a satisfied sigh.

“We drew straws, and my little brother won.”

“Forty-five seconds younger. It barely counts.”

Baat smiled. “Well, I’m glad you found a civilized way to decide. I was afraid that the moment we touched down I’d be trampled in your frenzy to get to the hatch first.”

“Final call before separation,” came the voice of one of the babysitters over the intercom. “Check your harness and don your helmets. As soon as we get a green light from all your flight suits, we’ll start our descent.”

Zed took the simple, clear bubble of a helmet that he’d been holding on his lap and pulled it over his head, being careful to check and recheck the fit and seal. They hadn’t started moving yet, but as he heard the locks that held the lander to the station start cycling, his heart rate climbed in anticipation.

It reminded him of an old roller coaster he’d ridden once at a fair. It was the only fair he’d ever had the chance to go to, and his nine-year-old self had been determined to make the most of it. The memory that stuck in his mind hadn’t been the roller coaster itself but the clink clink clink sound the cars had made as they were pulled up that first hill. He’d started with no fear, but by the time he’d reached the top, his stomach had turned in on itself and ended up squeezing all the fried food he’d eaten right out of him and all over the helpless passengers behind him as they plummeted over that first drop.

He sincerely hoped history did not repeat itself. Vomiting with a fishbowl over your head was not a good look.

He glanced at Baat, who gave him a reassuring thumbs-up.

The lander pulled away from the Attic and rotated. Mars spun out of sight, giving way to a view of the way station as it appeared to drift off into the blackness.

As the minutes ticked by, the station passed out of sight and was replaced by showers of sparks as they entered Mars’s thin atmosphere. Thin though it was, the lander still required shielding to keep it from burning up at high speed.

Zed didn’t dare glance at the twins to see how they were handling things for fear of what they might see on his face. No matter how many times he reminded himself that this was just routine, there was nothing about falling from the sky in a ball of fire that felt normal.

The vibration of the landing rockets firing made Zed’s vision go blurry. He found himself pressed down into his seat. It felt as if the lander had decided it didn’t want to land after all and was going to try to blast itself back the way they had come.

After months in microgravity, the forces of this landing felt so much more intense than the launch from Earth.

Zed closed his eyes and tried to imagine the forces buffeting his body were coming from that roller coaster ride. For a moment, it made things more bearable, but then, as it had on that ride so many years ago, Zed’s last meal decided to make an unscheduled reemergence.

This timed out perfectly with the lander’s touchdown, giving the half-digested food in Zed’s helmet maximum splatter. Zed didn’t know if anyone had seen or noticed because all he could see was a panorama of the contents of his stomach.

The moment he heard "touchdown" announced, he tore off his helmet, gasping for a breath of fresh air.

Zed was so focused on catching his breath untainted by the burn of stomach acid that he forgot he was no longer in space and was, in fact, once more on the surface of a planet with gravity. Considerably less gravity than he’d known on Earth, but gravity all the same. So, as he tossed his helmet off, instead of drifting up to the ceiling as it would have an hour ago, it flew in a lovely arc over his head, only to finish its arc by smashing into the head it had moments earlier been protecting.

There was a sudden bustle of activity that Zed couldn’t quite track. He felt more than a little stunned but was keenly aware of a burning sensation over his left eyebrow and the fact that he could only see out of his right eye.

Then Baat was standing over him. He unstrapped Zed and helped him to his unsteady feet.

The rest was a bit of a blur: Baat helping him to the hatch to wait for the docking procedure to finish, his father speaking to Baat and asking what he’d done now, and moving down the long tunnel to the central hub where strangers greeted them in far-off voices and whisked them to a side room.

Zed came to full awareness as his mother shoved a needle into his eyebrow.