One Day on Mars

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Nancy peered through the viewport at the faint blue-green luminescent hue of the planetscape as it skittered beneath them at a few hundred kilometers per hour. To the north there were several geodesic domes giving off slight metallic glints each time Sol peeked through the smoky gray plumes being emitted from the exhaust portals atop each of the greenhouse gas factories. The smoke poured and rolled gracefully upward and mixed with the tropospheric breezes scattering the smoky plume's content across the planet's atmosphere.

The little plutonium reactors within each dome slowly crept deeper into the Martian soil, melting and vaporizing water ice, iron-rich soil, oxygen, and various forms of soot smoke into the smoky gray steam plumes boiling upward into the sky above the metallic domes. Occasionally, one of the reactors would reach a water-rich depth and the cloud would turn to mostly white steamy water vapor for a while. Those domes were very easy to distinguish from the others for weeks at a time.

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