RED: Burning Skies

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“Two minutes,” Shan said, his warning going out to his squad of men.

Looking through his helmet’s visor, he saw awkward nods from the closest of his suited brothers as the voices of others came back over the open channel to answer in his ears.

They all stood ready, whether under the cover of the red rock overhang with him or under the Martian camouflage tenting just down the gully on the opposite side. The tenting covered the big lander vehicle the crew had come down on a week ago, and also the factory lander which had arrived a year ago packed full of robots and equipment.

Around them spread the ochre rock and gravel of their new home, a Martian gully at the edge of a huge crater so wide that the far rim looked like a distant range of mountains. The basin down there opened as a wide plain so featureless and flat that it was like some kind of still orange sea.

The landscape was stark, shaped by a dry and cold climate no human could really comprehend, and all of it shrouded in a thin and lethal atmosphere.

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