Mars, ARES main base.
The Sol system’s fourth planet, if seen from a higher orbit, was completely different than it was in the past. Just two years before, it’d only had a population that could be counted on one hand... if you counted unmanned exploration vehicles, or “rovers”, as population, that is.
Mars had always fascinated humanity ever since the species had first looked to the stars and asked themselves what those lights in the sky were. It was represented in close to a century’s worth of science fiction tales, with greats like Ray Bradbury, Orson Welles, and Edgar Rice Burroughs some of the more recent people to look to the red planet and think, ‘I wonder....’
So once human technology reached the barest minimum level that would allow them to explore Mars, whether in person or not, they had immediately built exploration drones, strapped rockets to them, and threw them at the planet until one successfully survived the landing. Nobody knew what they would find, though everyone was fairly sure there would be no alien life there; the planet’s atmosphere was too thin and it was too far from the Sun to allow for liquid water on the surface.
window.pubfuturetag = window.pubfuturetag || [];window.pubfuturetag.push({unit: "64ce79d606107d003c23ea27", id: "pf-5140-1"})Most people, though, believed that they would find signs that life had once existed there. They stared at blurry pictures of the planet’s surface until they saw shapes that “proved” life had once flourished there. Anything that could potentially be mistaken for right angles or other shapes not often found in nature was regularly trotted out as “evidence” of the existence of ancient aliens. One such person was even made into a lasting internet meme after being heavily featured as an expert guest on a television show about those ancient aliens.
And the pareidolia that humanity had evolved through hundreds of thousands of years of selective evolution didn’t help, either. One of the structures on the surface of Mars just so happened to resemble a face to a disturbing degree. It wasn’t actually a face, and had been disproven through virtually every means at humanity’s disposal, but even knowing that it was just a mountain wasn’t enough to convince the collective lizard brain of humanity of its nonexistence.
(Ed note: The “face on mars” was first seen in a picture taken by the Viking 1 Mars Orbiter in 1976. Later, high-resolution images showed it for what it was, just a rock formation that, when viewed from a very specific angle on a very specific day at a very specific time, would cast a shadow that made it appear to resemble a human face. And as for the old saying that nature doesn’t DO angles, I present to you the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, or the rock formations in Fingal’s Cave. Google them, they’re quite amazing.)
The Terran Empire’s actions, however, had finally put to rest the argument over whether or not life existed on Mars at any point in its history. Short answer? No. There were signs of microbial life forms, but nothing that mankind would generally consider aliens in most senses of the word. Extraterrestrial, yes. Alien, technically. But ALIEN? No.
window.pubfuturetag = window.pubfuturetag || [];window.pubfuturetag.push({unit: "64cc9e79c7059f003e4ad4b0", id: "pf-5109-1"})The empire even went, not just a step, but an entire marathon further by not only exploring the red planet, but occupying it. The age of unmanned exploration had rapidly given way to the age of the Mars base. Enormous domes that stretched kilometers in diameter were either under construction, or had finished their build phase and entered an operational state.
In other places, the ground had been flattened and poured with quickcast, a rapid-setting form of concrete that the materials scientists in Lab City had developed that could be sprayed out in liquid form and would harden in mere minutes. Not only did it set faster than even the fastest-setting concrete previously known to mankind, but it would do so in a wide range of environments that would otherwise inhibit traditional concrete from setting. It was also vastly stronger, with a tensile strength, elasticity, and hardness upwards of fifty times the previous formulas that had been in wide usage before the empire was founded.
Those giant “parking lots” were home to defensive guns that dwarfed anything previously considered even in the technologically advanced Terran Empire. Designed to reach high orbit from the surface of the planet, the gimbal-mounted gun barrels were tens of meters wide and nearly a full two kilometers long. It was a feat of engineering that could only be seen on Mars, where the gravity was only 38% that of Earth’s. They were powered by enormous—even by imperial standards
—capacitor banks, each of which contained enough electricity to power the entire continent of Australia for just over six months.
window.pubfuturetag = window.pubfuturetag || [];window.pubfuturetag.push({unit: "663633fa8ebf7442f0652b33", id: "pf-8817-1"})The defensive guns were a marvel of engineering, and the buildup on Mars was the empire’s first megaproject. One of the first things the atomic printers had done, even before the ARES forces and hordes of engineers had descended upon the red planet, was hollow out the 2000-kilometer-wide solid core at its center and turn it into one giant fusion reactor. In essence, the planetary core had been reignited... but this time as a star, not a blob of molten metal.
The planet was slowly being renovated to live up to its namesake—Mars, the Greek god of war. In the very near future, it would not only be home to most of the members of ARES (and wasn’t THAT an ironic mishmash of mythological figures; Mars, the Greek god of war, and Ares, the Roman god of war), but also to the men and women of the Martian Proving Ground, where classified imperial military projects would be birthed, built, and tested to failure.
Even though Aron had introduced the simulation to humanity, it was perhaps a quirk of human beings’ nature that they simply couldn’t trust the accuracy of any kind of program. Not where it involved lives, at any rate. So the people who had taken to Research City like ducks to water had quite happily proposed that, after they developed hardware in the virtual city, they would then bring it into reality for testing in order to verify the projects that they had developed.
Aron felt that it was more a matter of the lab geeks wanting to play with the toys they built than anything else, but he was quite willing to entertain their fantasy in order to keep them happy... and rather more importantly, productive.
Overall, the Mars base was shaping up rather nicely and was on track to be completed well under the deadline of three years Aron had given John when the project first broke ground. In fact, over three quarters of the base was currently fully operational, and the rest was more quality of life and window dressing than necessity.
The only necessity the planet still lacked was a mana-based Planetary Defense Shield.
