Welcome Aboard Air Marineris
Chapter One: The Assignment

Now, I know I am a very fortunate fem. I haven’t always felt that way. When I was young, being born Quechua, the daughter of a despised potato farmer mother in the slums of New Quito, we were outcasts. My mother loved me fiercely, but that was not enough. As I grew, I became aware of who we were. They called her putana, slut, and me buchana, dyke. Her, because she went with men, and me, because I did not. Clever, huh? It rhymes. They were hateful words. In a close place like that such talk was noxious. It made our lives excruciating. I won’t dwell on the grisly details. Every woman, at heart, knows them, and no man, at heart, believes them. What’s the point?

After grade school, where I did well, a nun got me a free place in high school. The less said about the reason she took an interest, the better. My first stroke of unusual fortune, allowing me to go beyond basic schooling, was getting a scholarship to the School of Mines in Concepción, Chile. The nun, again. I did have ability to offer, but that is not unknown among poverty-stricken children. We are poor, not stupid. That was after they had a major sex scandal at that school in 2078, well after the Impact. It was one of those periodic affairs. They wanted to show they had reformed themselves. The way I got there proved the contrary, but I was happy to be the beneficiary of such ‘affirmative action’. Knowing what I knew, I didn’t believe a word they put out. After two thousand years, they weren’t going to transform themselves overnight.

Things hadn’t changed much on harassment at the School either. It didn’t bother me; I had been coping with it for most of my life; far worse than that dealt out by university students. I had grown up quickly. I announced myself as lesbian and fought when I had to. They hated me, but my mere existence wasn’t then seen as a challenge to their manhood. Small steps. They considered me hopeless. It worked for me.

I did so well there that they accepted me for a fellowship at the Colorado School of Mines in the US, and it was much better after that. The harassment didn’t go away, but I was used to the machismo type, and the Americans discouraged more easily. I got a very good education, and the cachet of a good school. Enough to set me up as a well-qualified mining engineer.

After I graduated and started to work, I got some decent jobs. I had a good CV and, as I said, Colorado was well thought of in the mining business. I worked faithfully at them and got a reputation for reliability. I did the job. I didn’t do anything else. I was different. No drinking, no skirt chasing, and no stealing money. They liked me well enough.

Now I am here, and I have started a commercial mining industry on Mars from scratch. By this time, you must be thinking that I am quite an egotist, but I need to tell you one last thing about how I got here. It is no prettier than the other chapters of my life.

They took me because I was the only good mining engineer they could get to come. It’s taken me just as long as them to establish a reputation that my colleagues admire, but there is a critical difference between them and me. It’s partly my personality (you know that already), and partly my sex. It is still unusual for a woman to do what I do. I am an outsider in everything.

Not for me the quiet afternoons in the bars lubricating contacts in the industry. No extra innings in the boardroom, or various mannish sports that enable you to ascend promotional ladders were open to me. And, of course, I have no family ties to exploit.

I even tried the male practice of fraternization, twice. It didn’t work. Even the word is wrong for me. My colleagues immediately assumed I was after their magnificent bodies instead of being selfishly devoted to improving my career. Ambition, at least, would have gained me some respect. As a slut, I got none. Maybe even the thrill of ‘converting a dyke’ factored. Everybody knew that important detail about me, and my sophomoric colleagues always assumed the wrong motive.

I got tired of trying to be the good lesbian, the proper one. All that corkscrewing wasn’t doing me any good, and it made me feel like a fraud. If they wouldn’t accept me for who I was, screw them. I swore off those attempts to accommodate as definitely pointless, and completely repellent.

That isolation factor instantly linked me to Boris. Our shared exclusion was why I responded to him, even though he was a guy. He had achieved the same pariah status as me by pissing people off, and he had survived. His compulsions made him an active irritant, and my status as an uppity gay fem made me a passive one. Neither of us could avoid it. The same result, though. We were soulmates. We even developed pet names for one another. It’s a family intimacy. Somehow, one syllable is a better connection than more. With my lonely history, I liked that. So, I called him Bee, and he called me Mo. Appropriate for him, because he was always buzzing. He is a talker.

I was an engineer without the connections that would get me easy work in my mature years. Yet engineering remains a skill with a resolutely physical component. All I had is what ability remained, and that meant that I had less choice in the jobs offered to me. It was less ability than availability. I’m no genius. I knew who I was, and so, now, do you.

When I got to Mars, they had to be reasonably good to me. They needed me at least tolerably content because I was valuable productive livestock. Depressed fems didn’t produce the way they needed me to.They had plans for me. Challenging plans that made me expectant of a fulfilling future. So, enter Dini, whom they chose for me. No doubt they used the psychological resources that have done them proud on so many occasions. They chose exactly the right person for me. Don’t mistake me. I am grateful for her, as she is for me. They didn’t make themselves into matchmakers for anyone else. However, it does make me feel vulnerable, and dependent.That’s a feeling we both have come to dislike.

With my experience of their people management philosophy, I didn’t attribute bringing Dini to a simple desire to make me happy, for even a moment. Their usual motivation was strictly utilitarian, and more than a bit ruthless. I knew I was doing a very good job developing Mars Mining and its subsidiary, Mars Metals. We were producing and exporting a lot of much needed metal. We were making a lot of money for our employers. Money that was desperately needed, considering their proposals. That’s what sparked their interest.

If I had been more sensitive to the signs and had looked around for what more needed to be done, I would have known why they were showing such unaccustomed generosity. The arrival of Ondine should have warned me to watch out. She was no pioneer, dreaming of new worlds, like me and all my colleagues.She had never thought of going into space. She was never the least bit unhappy they had sent her. I remembered though, that they could take as well as give. I knew that perk wasn’t for the mining, even with our success. It was for something they wanted, not for what they already had. That was mere history.

We were developing the capability of mining and exporting vast amounts of many critically needed metals, much more product than we needed ourselves then. Export was the goal. I certainly knew that they would need a lot of steel and other metals to build the O’Neil cylinders for all those habitats they wanted to put in low earth orbit. And we could do it more cheaply than the Moon could. Let them fabricate them.

It was just easier to work on a daylight planet with a rarified unreactive atmosphere. Our water, easily to hand, could be used to make all the iron for steel anyone could want, no hydrocarbons needed. We just had to scrape up the material. We mix it with a little hydrogen, and we get iron, and water as a bonus. We could send it off planet almost as cheaply as the Moon, too. In the bargain, we had easy surface transport with the airships we had pioneered. Many of these advantages were unique to Mars. They could get steel and whatever, on the Moon, but overall it would be more expensive. Theyknow on Earth about the economies we can achieve. They might figure that closer was cheaper but we would prove our own point.Time does not always equal money.

It wasn’t just mining they wanted me for. I had given them that already. If it were anything, it would be our airships. From the moment I received those estimates, I knew that they intended to send them to me. They needed me to see them. It had not been some random oversight. Coincidences like that just don’t happen. A trans planet freight line to link Lowell with the proposed city of Burroughs, at the eastern end of the Valles Marineris, would require such a line. That huge planetary rift valley could be a highway to the city we planned to build at the other end, but only if we made that possible. Kilometers deep and thousands of kilometers long, abounding in obstructions, it wouldn’t be easy to negotiate the Valles. But supplies had to get to our site somehow, and the only practical method of transport would be vacuum airships. Easy connection would be vital if the populations of our two cities were to form a single functional unit.They couldn’t build another railroad in the giant’s junkpile that was the valley floor, and for the bulk shipments they would need, rockets would be insanely expensive.There could be no argument about it. Our airships were it!

The idea of it was very heady stuff. The line would stretch for four thousand kilometers. They did need me working at maximum efficiency. A super Monica who could build the sort of road that hadn’t been built in three hundred years on Earth. It was a project that would rank with the storied engineering feats of history. It was much more difficult even than building the Eye of the Moon that sealed their new city, Rubin, in a lava tube. Not many such chances came along.

I knew I was better fitted to do it than any human who had ever lived. I was right on the spot with the perfect qualifications. I had been building vacuum airships to haul my ore to the central refineries I had built on the Tharsis rise. It wasn’t my idea, but I had made it happen. They had worked fabulously well. They moved large volumes of freight on a world where it was ruinously costly to build any traditional roads. Even on the Tharsis plain the land was difficult. But in the Valles Marineris, the badlands exceeded in roughness any land I had ever seen. Of course, there was even worse in the southern hemisphere, but we didn’t need to build a road there.

Initially they had had to build the rail line to Lowell because they didn’t have the infrastructure to build anything else then, and it was well proven tech. For the Valles Marineris, it made sense to fly above its disordered mess.Vacuum buoyancy works perfectly on Mars because of the low air pressure coupled with the carbon dioxide atmosphere. Rigid ships work in the low air pressure and require nothing inside to stabilize them. Flotation lets them lift their cargo high over the rock warrens left by countless episodes of archaic flooding and worsened by eons of landslides. They jumped an almost insuperable logistical problem. The airships had worked before, and they would work again, even though the scale of this new effort was off the charts. It was so exciting; I could hardly wait. I longed to share it with Ondine and Boris immediately.

Klara Nilsson, the Director of the Mars Settlement Authority, had summoned me to her office. She rarely did that. She was a very busy fem. She didn’t often have the time to meet, so the usual mode of communication was a brief status check by way of headsup off our fons. The personal meeting was a flag that something big was up. I knew what she was going to talk about. At the time, I hadn’t known whether it was a conscious attempt to keep me in the loop, or just an oversight by someone assuming Klara had already talked to me. Whichever it was, I needed to have some serious words with Klara about it.

The best that could be said about those estimates was that they had used my figures for the building of the branch line. But that was for construction costs on a vastly different project with totally different requirements. The estimates were fundamentally deficient for a project such as the link proposed. I needed to explain that to Klara. Clients need to be aware of the demands that their plans imposed. To start a project without explaining that was malpractice. Ask for trouble and you will get it.

When I entered Klara’s office, and saw her in her battledress, I was immediately positive about the estimates. Klara is a very predictable person, very precise. She is also serious about what she does. She prepares for everything, and she doesn’t overlook the appearance factor. She had put on a fresh jumper, and her scalp was recently shaven. She gave off the scent of lemon soap and mint tooth polish.She took pains to look primped and attentive to her people, and I am certainly one of those. I replace it endearing, but I was not going to say anything to her about it. She might have been annoyed, thinking I was patronizing her in some way. It is not like that. It is respect. So, I just took it in, knowing that Klara was going to be discussing important stuff, and kept my silence.

“Thanks for coming in, Monica. We are both bottom line people, so I will get right to it. I have been watching your work at Mars Mining. I’ve told you before that you have fulfilled all our expectations, and more. Your feeder lines for the smelters were especially well handled, and people on Earth took notice. They like on time and on budget, particularly with something as challenging as new technology. It may be an old idea, but this is the only place it will work, and no-one has been on Mars to do it. You built it from the ground up.”

She paused for effect, but there was no need. The intro was over, and the payload was coming. I was hanging on her every word, expectant, almost afraid to hope. I stayed silent.

“You know why we are on Mars, and why our task will never be complete until we have a backup for this city. Everyone has been waiting for this. The last four years have been busy ones. Thanks in large part to you, we now have the infrastructure to make the next move. We have the food, the people, and now the resources.It’s a big project and it will take us a while, but you are the person to get things started. The best positioned and the best qualified. We want you to build the Burroughs line right up the Valles. It’s yours if you want it.

“It’s a pointless question, though. Isn’t it? I know you, Monica. You want to do it as much as I want to make it happen. It’s why we both came here. We will be a team. I will get you the resources and you will use them.”

There were tears in my eyes when I heard that. Tears of joy. Klara was right. I had been waiting all my life to do something like that. You wouldn’t believe how long. I had dreamed of such a task.All those years of rejection, of unfair belittlement, with large dollops of hatred and cruelty, instantly receded in the sunlight of acceptance. It was a tonic, a vindication. My mother’s potatoes had brought me to that. She still sat on my forehead, looking out through my eyes. Am I different than any other daughter? She would be happy, wherever she was, and she would be proud of me. My face burned with her pride.

I replied: “Of course I’ll do it, Klara.Boris can run Mars Mining for a few weeks, until one of the other techs takes it over. It’s running fine now. We have projects on the back burner for years. After that, though, I want him with me. His skills aren’t the best, but he is diligent and faithful. I can depend on him. Maybe there’s a hint of favoritism in my decision, but there is reason too. You know that.

“I’ve already started this job. I assume that those estimates put into my inbox were meant to be there. I’ve looked them over. They make some basic assumptions in using my small-scale costs for the feeder lines that are just wrong. We will need to do them all over again.”

Klara replied to me, stern-faced: “Those estimates were done at head office on Earth. They must be arranging their financing based on those costs. Maybe you don’t know how they are. We are going to need a good argument if you think you need to change them. They have built up some expectations. The people who did them are their experts.”

“Klara, they used my cost figures, but they didn’t think about the differences between this project and my branch line. They just had some construction estimators scale up my costs. Those people look to proven costs in standard jobs, and they are usually accurate. But, when circumstances are new, and procedures unproven, those techniques don’t work well. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I seem to be a female chauvinist, but I’ll bet the author was a male. There are certain advantages to female socialization. A female would have been uncertain enough of herself to do some background research. She would have found out that mine was a small-scale project for a line of a few kilometers where all the hardware was essentially made to order. No economies of scale at all. It would have taken only a moment to notice the difference, and she would have asked me. After all, I’m the only one who has done this. Then I would have told her what I am going to tell you, and we would have gotten some accurate estimates to make realistic budgets from the get-go.”

Klara said: “I’m listening. If I’m going to need to argue with the money men, it isn’t going to be pretty. Tell me what you need.”

I settled myself in my chair and started my lecture. I had just received one of them. I would give one back. I could do that with Klara because she is a friend, and I knew her ways.

“First, you need to understand the scale of this job as I do. It is four thousand kilometers end to end. My airships will be guided by a line that will pull them along. Airships are very efficient on Mars. They will be lifting sixty tons of freight apiece. That’s a lot of mass and a lot of inertia that needs to be controlled. The lift of the train and the pull of the dragline will be deforming the rail as the trains pass. The line needs to be stiff to stay stable. There are two ways to keep it stiff. Heavy material for the rail, or restraining pylons placed close together. It’s way cheaper and much more effective, to use the pylons. Stiffened roadbeds have their own problems, anyway. That is good news for us, because we made the few hundred pylons, we needed, one at a time, the most expensive way.

“More expensive than making them in a factory where we can get economies of scale. And we will have scale. We will need about four hundred thousand pylons. Along the way, we will replace out how to make them faster and cheaper. But we need to allow for the factories at the beginning to get to that point. That means extra up-front money, and I can’t be sure that the factory will save as much money as I hope before we start. None of this has been done in these conditions before. We will get some guidance from installations on the Moon, but even they are not nearly scaled to what we need.We will also need large numbers of rails, and appropriate chemset concrete for cementing the pylons. Some of it will need to be available before we start. There’s no one to order from here. Are you starting to see the complications of this job?

“I haven’t even mentioned the people. This job is not like the construction of other jobs they are doing on the Moon. The vagaries of the environment here will require individual operators for the drones we use to do the site work. Computer control won’t work for constantly differing conditions. No AI will suffice. You need experienced humans.

“The estimates they sent have large gaps where such needs should have been met. We need to raise that with the powers that be before we start, or we will get blamed for overspending later. I think that no one has really understood how huge this job is going to be and what the full implications are. You can’t just start it and hope for the best. You must plan the infrastructure as well. And it must be done right, or we will have even more expensive problems down the road when we can’t afford the time, or the lives, to deal with them. Nobody has done this sort of thing in a long time, and I think the lessons of history have been long forgotten.”

Klara had been listening attentively all this time. She replied:

“An education, Monica. The good thing I see is that this will contribute a lot towards economic development here. We need to do more than I had thought. I’ll admit to you that I should have known better. This will not just build a railway; it will build a planet. Big parts of the tech we develop will be exportable. I will arrange a conference with head office right away. I have already been told that everything is to be dealt with on an expedited basis. This is important enough to justify the time delay for a vid to Earth. And I want you with me. The voice of expertise is always louder.”

That meant to me that I would be the one under fire. Klara was a friend, but she was also an important executive in Starward, and she had come up through the ranks. She knew when to step out of the way.

It didn’t take them long to set up the meeting with head office. Perish the thought that they had better things to do. What was more important than three hundred trillion credits and the future of their Mars colony? They made time, and they made it fast.

Mars was close to Earth just then. Only eight light minutes, at the end of its winter.So, communication was difficult, but as easy as it got for Mars. The link was almost never used for direct video connections for obvious reasons, but they were going to be using it then to talk directly to me, and me to them. I was going to need to explain myself.

Klara told me that I would be talking to Dr. Martin Westerhauf, the CEO of Starward, the Chairman of the MSA. He was the biggest of bigwigs, the lord of all he surveyed. I wasn’t nervous. I had been talking to such clients my whole professional life. Being an engineer of much more than average ability, but also who I am, I had never gotten the plum projects that easily made a reputation dropped into my lap. I had been given the tough, unwanted jobs. I never minded that much. I got the biggest challenges, both from a material and personnel standpoint. It’s not overmodest to say I thrived on them.

I had long learned a simple truth, and it was so wedded to my approach to the job that I hardly thought about it anymore. Clients always wanted me to do the most with the least, and I didn’t mind that. It was my job to do that. But I always looked for the catch, and I made sure that the clients took full ownership of the needs of the project. If I didn’t, the client would wriggle away if the job went south because of the limitations imposed on me.When confronted, though, they almost always shied away from the prospect of a bad job with their name on it and gave me what I needed. I wouldn’t start the job without that.

To convince them, I remembered one eternal certainty. Logic alone rarely sufficed. If you wanted to convert people to your point of view, you had to convince them they would have made that same decision if they knew what you knew. You had to give them the credit, to kiss ass, if you wanted to call it that. It was the way of the world, the way of power, and there was no avoiding it. That’s how I would fend off the mighty Westerhauf. At bottom, the clients wanted what you wanted. That was a good job, well built. They naturally hesitated to give you the resources you said you needed to do that. Economy was part of their job as business people. I knew that too.

I sat with Klara in her office while the people back on Earth made the arrangements. Who knew how many thousands of credits that cost? Expense to get that done was no object for them. That was not to mention all the time they would be dedicating to delayed communication, or the inconvenience that everyone, including Mr. Westerhauf, would suffer waiting so long for responses. The conversation would probably take them hours. At a minimum of sixteen minutes for a two-way exchange at current distances, it was certainly a chore. And no one would have the advantage of seeing the opposite party’s reaction in real time. I would be talking in the dark, but it didn’t matter. I would be making the same points.

Klara did seem nervous. She busied herself with making tea for the two of us, and she went out front to the cafeteria for a few cookies to put on the desk. A frustrated exhibition of hospitality, perhaps: purely symbolic. She couldn’t offer them to our virtual guests. And she made small talk that just irritated me while she did it, asking about affairs at the mine that were the subject of frequent reports to her. It was reasonably predictable. Westerhauf was her boss, not mine. I reported to Klara, not Westerhauf.

I felt the protection of the anonymous underling, shielded from immediate responsibility by her lowly status. Not for long. But what could they really do? Who else did they have ready to start their project? And I was only going to ask for what they should be wanting. I felt secure. The worst they could do would be to send me back to mining and get someone else. But that would take time. And they had me, the only expert, available, right on the scene for a job they wanted to start right away. The meeting they were staging was evidence for that.

Soon, the viewing surface Klara had segregated on the displayscreen behind her desk began ringing insistently. When opened, the orphaned image on it presented what was probably a middle level bureaucrat in the Geneva office. He couldn’t see us as we listened to him. He spoke in an unnaturally loud voice as if he were talking to someone far away.That feeling of disconnection would be the same for us in reply. He inquired whether Ms. Nilsson and Ms. Chipana were available to meet with Dr. Westerhauf and his budget chief, Barbara Khalifa, to discuss their presentation.

He sat stiffly in his tight jumper. His voice was also unnaturally high-pitched. He had been infected by the occasion too. Klara immediately answered that we were both available. We would need to wait. It would be almost half an hour to hear back while the signal travelled both ways. Both of us sat back to drink. It was tea, for Klara, and coffee, for me. I then became aware that the meeting would be even less of a conversation than I contemplated. Submission was the essence of it. For them to assess and judge. Then to pronounce unseen by me until word came back.

After thirty-two minutes that revelation came. The functionary said “Dr. Westerhauf and Ms. Khalifa are ready to hear your submission. Ms. Chipana please proceed.”