By Mike Muzzy · © 2026 Mike Muzzy. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER TEN

GREEN

The agricultural programme had begun before the manufacturing districts took shape. By mid-1980, its growing systems were ready for a larger test.

The agricultural breakthrough began with a dead tray of lettuce.

Dr. Alina Marković stared through the clear lid of the growth cabinet and said something in Serbian that caused the American technician beside her to look politely away.

Every plant had collapsed.

Not wilted. Collapsed.

The leaves lay against the substrate in dark green folds.

Major Li Wen crouched beside the nutrient manifold.

“Pump?”

“Pump says it ran.”

“Plants disagree.”

Alina pulled the service panel.

The pump had run. The line had not.

A film of precipitated salts had narrowed the feed tube until only a fraction of the expected solution reached the roots.

Alina sat back on her heels.

“Three weeks.”

Li looked at the ruined crop.

“We learned something.”

“I learned lettuce dies.”

“We knew that.”

“I learned it personally.”

The first agricultural work on Mars was conducted inside cabinets because cabinets were easier to pressurize than fields.

Every gram of soil substitute came from somewhere else. Every litre of water had a history. Every photon of artificial light cost power that Morozov believed should be doing something more useful.

He said so frequently.

Alina ignored him.

She was Yugoslav, thirty-six, trained in plant physiology and controlled-environment agriculture. Her military rank existed largely because the first permanent Mars settlement had been declared an international security and engineering operation, and governments understood uniforms better than colonies.

Her argument was simple.

If Mars imported every calorie from Earth, Mars belonged to the shipping schedule.

If Mars grew food, even badly, it began to belong to itself.

The first successes in Alina’s growth cabinets were unimpressive.

Radishes.

Leaf lettuce.

Dwarf wheat.

Algae that nobody wanted to eat but everybody respected because it grew with the enthusiasm of an invading army.

The first harvest from Alina’s authorised growth cabinets fit on a table.

Shaw cut one lettuce head into sixteen portions.

Morel stared at his piece.

“This is a leaf.”

“It is Martian food,” Alina said.

“It is half a leaf.”

“You may return it.”

Morel ate it.

The room went quiet.

It tasted of lettuce.

That was enough.

The agricultural dome was placed farther from the central base than most technical structures. The location offered better separation for experimental environmental controls, room for expansion and less interference from the heavy traffic around the spaceport and workshops.

Building it nearly caused a mutiny.

Every pressure panel sent to agriculture was a pressure panel not used for sleeping quarters. Every kilowatt devoted to lamps was a kilowatt unavailable to machining. Every kilogram of fertilizer represented freight capacity that could have carried a medical supply.

At a planning meeting Morozov finally put the objection into words.

“We cannot eat if the reactor fails.”

Alina leaned across the table.

“And we cannot eat the reactor.”

Nobody spoke.

Morozov considered her.

Then he laughed.

“All right. Give the woman her dome.”

The dome did not win every race it had been built to win.

Alina’s authorised growth cabinets had produced the colony’s first food harvests. Later, Cao’s rice and soybeans were harvested in the disused calibration bay inside the manufacturing section’s pressure shell, before the agricultural dome produced its first crop. The workshop experiment had begun without approval; after inspecting it, Alina had allowed it to continue under a declared budget and quarantine controls. The workshop growers had beaten the dome, not her cabinets. The distinction was precise and did nothing to improve her temper.

The workshop harvest was small. The argument it produced was not.

The first agricultural dome was not green when completed.

It was silver and grey like everything else.

Then the plants took it.

Rows of wheat grew under lamps. Potatoes spread beneath raised beds. Beans climbed frames. Trays of herbs appeared because Alina argued that morale was also a life-support system.

A technician smuggled in tomato seeds in a personal effects packet.

Alina discovered them after germination.

She demanded to know who had violated quarantine procedure.

Nobody answered.

She kept the plants.

Months later the first tomato ripened.

It was small, misshapen and divided into twelve pieces.

Hale held his portion on the tip of a fork.

“You know,” he said, “in Texas we usually give a man the whole tomato.”

Alina pointed at the airlock.

“Texas is that way.”

The agricultural breakthrough was not one crop. It was a system.

Water from the ice plant circulated through nutrient loops. Human waste, after processing that everyone preferred not to discuss over dinner, began returning useful nitrogen and minerals. Carbon dioxide from occupied habitats fed plant rooms. Plants returned oxygen. Waste heat from power systems warmed growing areas.

The colony stopped thinking of agriculture as freight reduction.

It became infrastructure.

By mid-1980, the agricultural dome supplied a small but meaningful fraction of fresh food and had proved that closed-cycle production could be expanded.

Earth newspapers printed photographs of green rows beneath a Martian pressure shell.

For the first time, the public saw something on Mars that did not look temporary.

• • •

Camp One, late June 1980

The departure order reached Hale folded inside a maintenance report. For a moment he thought somebody had sent the wrong attachment.

Then he saw the names.

Tom Hale. Sergei Morozov. Return to Earth. Civilian mission preparation.

Their departure from Mars was scheduled for the last week of June. The homeward freight vessel was expected to reach Earth orbit in November. The civilian transport was provisionally scheduled for April 1981. The programme required the two men on Earth at least four months before launch; the November arrival allowed a little more than that, provided the ship kept its schedule.

Hale took the sheet to the power room.

Morozov read it without putting down his pencil.

“They have discovered something.”

“What?”

“Instructions written on Earth are not always useful on Mars.”

“They want us to improve them.”

“They want us to stand beside thirteen people and explain which mistakes will kill them.”

Hale looked through the control-room window. A technician was carrying a replacement contactor toward a cabinet whose paint still showed the scorch mark from an old fault.

“That too.”

• • •

Diego Valdés had arrived with an engineering rotation in May. He came from Valparaíso, Chile^*18, and had spent much of his working life maintaining pumps, ventilation equipment and hauling machinery in copper mines farther north. During one underground flooding incident, he had kept a temporary pumping line operating while the last maintenance crew came out. His report of the incident occupied less space than the replacement-parts list.

On Mars, he had spent his first week asking where the drawings stopped agreeing with the pipes.

Hale liked him before he realised why and probably thats why he nominated Valdés to take over at his departure as chief field engineer: habitats, pressure corridors, outside maintenance and the practical coordination of repair crews. Colonel Shaw would remain in command. Richter retained structures and fabrication; Nakamura retained control systems and the shuttle-interface work. Nobody was being given a title large enough to make the others unnecessary.

At their first formal handover, Hale offered Valdés a binder.

“Everything important is in here.”

Valdés opened it at a page covered in corrections.

“And everything that has changed since yesterday?”

Hale reached for a pencil.

“That is why we have another week.”

Han Eun-ju had already worked alongside Morozov for six weeks. A South Korean electrical engineer, she had grown up in Busan and worked on industrial distribution systems serving the shipyards and heavy plants around Ulsan^*19. She knew what a large motor did to a weak supply and what happened when three departments all believed they had been promised the same reserve capacity.

She was small, spoke quietly and had a habit of asking for the reading from the instrument rather than the number written on the report.

Morozov tested her with a proposed load transfer. Han studied the diagram and put a finger on a feeder.

“This drawing gives the spare pump a separate supply.”

“It does.”

“The installation does not.”

He put the diagram aside.

“Good. Show me.”

Morozov nominated Han to succeed him as chief power engineer, responsible for generation, distribution and load discipline across the settlement. The post was international. It carried no authority over the Soviet Dome's residence administration or political officers. Morozov made that distinction explicit before anybody could confuse technical succession with a transfer of national obligations.

They walked the circuits together. She inspected isolation points; he showed her which switches needed a firm hand and which complaints usually preceded a real fault. When they returned, she rewrote the emergency load sheet in an order the night crew could use without searching three pages.

Morozov read it twice.

“You have removed my explanations.”

“I kept them in the training notes.”

He signed the sheet.

• • •

On their last morning together, the original four ate breakfast in Home.

The original habitat had been refurbished but not replaced. Its walls carried patches from the first pressure leaks. One corner still showed discoloration from the day-ten power fault.

Morozov looked around.

“We should make this a museum.”

Richter shook his head.

“We need the space.”

“A museum with bunks.”

“That is called a barracks.”

Nakamura drank coffee.

“Leave it as it is.”

Hale nodded.

“Best idea.”

They ate quietly.

Four men who had once been the entire human population of Mars now had trouble finding a table at breakfast.

Morozov smiled.

“What?” Hale asked.

“I was thinking of the storm.”

“Why?”

“We nearly left.”

Richter looked at the repaired wall.

“Yes.”

“If we had?”

Nobody answered immediately.

Nakamura finally said, “Someone else would have come.”

Hale looked at him.

“You believe that?”

“Yes.”

Morozov leaned back.

“I do too.”

Hale considered the colony beyond the wall.

Agriculture.

Machine shops.

Chinatown.

Arrivals.

Mining roads.

Dome lights.

A flag.

Plans for thirteen civilian places.

“Maybe,” he said.

The shift bell sounded. For once, they let it pass.

Hale laid the civilian preparation folder between the cups. Its working manifest carried thirteen places. Selection was still being revised. They would train to the thirteen-person plan; any later change would have to be reconciled against seats, skills and emergency duties.

“Four months minimum on Earth,” Richter said.

“More if the freight ship behaves,” Hale answered. “Final preparation, practical exercises, individual briefings. They have instructors already. What they do not have is anyone who has slept beside that wall.”

He pointed at the repaired pressure shell.

Nakamura turned a page. “The pilots must practise a loss of communication with orbit. The navigation people need the actual approach changes, not the original simulation.”

“And everyone learns isolation,” Morozov said. “A lawyer must know how to stop a leaking water line. A singer must know which alarm cannot wait for someone else.”

Richter folded his arms. “Teach them to report damage before attempting a clever repair.”

Hale wrote it down.

“We also need to tell them what a normal day looks like,” he said. “They will have heard about storms and first footsteps. Somebody should tell them about waiting for a shower and doing a job badly because they have not slept.”

“And asking for help,” Nakamura said.

Morozov studied the provisional files. “They are coming to live here. We cannot give them six months of military drill and pretend that answers the question.”

Outside, a trolley passed the hatch. Someone called for clearance. Another voice answered.

Richter listened until the wheels had gone.

“We used to know every voice.”

“We used to be four voices,” Hale said.

“Soon there will be shops,” Morozov said. “Families. People who disagree with us without having to submit a technical objection.”

“People who want somewhere to sing,” Nakamura added.

Hale closed the folder. “We teach them enough to survive. Then we let them make a place worth surviving in.”

For a while none of them moved. Richter finally took the cups to the little sink. Nakamura checked the hatch mechanism as he always did, though he had checked it on the way in.

Hale watched him do it.

“Keep an eye on our replacements.”

“They have already asked us to keep an eye on you,” Richter said.

• • •

The terminal board had never looked personal to Hale before.

MARS ORBIT — OUTBOUND.

Beneath it, two bags rested against his boots.

The hall remained open. Cargo personnel moved through with a trolley, apologised and moved through again. A shuttle technician waited beside the inner door with a departure list. There was nowhere on Mars large enough to suspend ordinary work for a farewell.

Shaw shook Hale's hand first.

“Tell them what this place needs.”

“I have a list.”

“Use the list that is still true when you get there.”

She turned to Morozov. “And bring us people who understand that a power budget is real.”

“They will understand before they leave Earth.”

Alina gave them a small sealed packet of dried herbs for the voyage. Morel had photographs, labelled on the back. Li carried two workshop-made metal tags, one for each bag. The letters were uneven. They had been stamped by hand.

CAMP ONE.

Hale ran his thumb over his.

“Now I cannot lose the bag.”

“You can,” Li said. “But someone may return it.”

Valdés arrived from an outside inspection with a fresh alteration for the handover binder. Hale read it, nodded and handed the binder back.

“Well thats on You to decide the next one.”

“I already did.”

Han offered Morozov her latest load sheet. He glanced at the totals and tried to find a reason to keep looking.

“It will hold,” she said.

“I know.”

She folded it and put it in her own pocket.

Before the men reached the inner door, Hale paused beside Shaw.

“When are they bringing you back?”

She glanced at the departure board.

“They have not set a date.”

“How long did you agree to?”

“Until there is a working civil authority to take over. Or until they appoint someone better able to finish the job.”

“And afterwards?”

“There will still be pumps.”

Hale smiled, then understood that she was answering seriously.

She had watched rotations arrive and leave. Her own appointment did not promise the relief of a date circled on a calendar. Somewhere ahead lay a council, an administration, a government whose shape the colony had not yet decided. Her task was to keep the place functioning long enough for its people to make that decision.

“Send us people who can do more than follow orders,” she said.

“I thought you liked orders.”

“I like the right ones.”

Nakamura embraced Hale awkwardly, then Morozov. Richter shook their hands and held each a moment longer than necessary.

“Write,” he said.

“With the delay, you may regret asking,” Morozov answered.

At the inner door, Hale looked back. The colony filled the window behind them: pressure shells, a service road, men working beside an unfinished branch of corridor. It was too small to resemble a city. It was too large to belong to four men.

The shuttle technician called their names.

They went through.

The board clattered after the pressure door closed. Valdés watched it settle, then turned toward the trolley waiting for room to pass. Han was already looking at the clock. A scheduled transfer load would reach her grid in eleven minutes.

Mars carried on.