Glory on Mars (36 page)

Kate
Rauner
, Hanover, New Mexico, USA

I write science fiction novels and science poetry,
and serve as a volunteer firefighter. I am also a retired engineer
and Cold War Warrior (honestly, that's what Congress called us)
because I worked in America's nuclear weapons complex. Now living
on the edge of the southwest's Gila National Forest with my
husband, cats, llamas, and dog, I'm well on my way to achieving my
life-goal of becoming an eccentric old woman.

Visit me at
my blog
or follow me
on
Facebook
or
Twitter
@katerauner

Contact: [email protected].

Also by Kate

Born on Mars,
Colonization Book 2,
is coming soon.
Subscribe
to
Kate's email list or visit
here
for the latest information. Back to
About This
Book
.

It's bad luck to be born on Mars in the second book
of the
On Mars
series, a story of our near-future. Journey
with Jake, born in the first Martian colony, as he seeks help from
the only other humans on Mars. But Earthers are as dangerous as the
hostile planet. Read this before you volunteer to raise your
children on Mars.

The colonists need resources - metals and minerals -
to survive, but their prospecting efforts have failed. Jake is a
second generation Mars-born, lucky to avoid the sicknesses that
plague the settlement, but refuses to father any children in the
doomed colony. He joins a team to explore beyond the Tharsis Plain,
but his first trip ends in near-disaster.

Half a planet away, new-comers from Earth start a
second colony, but refuse all attempts at communication. Jake, with
his friend Martha, plots a way to contact them and perhaps find
help for his family and friends. He continues to prospect despite
the risk on Mars' hostile surface, and waits for the enigmatic
Sino-African colony to respond. But greater dangers await when they
do.

Read this book to discover if humans can claim Mars
as home.

Excerpt
Born on Mars
: For two sols the rover trundled across Mars'
vast Tharsis Plain en route to Gigas Canyon, a narrow gorge beyond
the plain. This morning, when they finally arrived, Jake drew the
driver task - which was actually more like
babysitting.

Olivia and Bram worked outside while he fretted
silently over the tedious pace. Governor, their Artificial
Intelligence, was driving. It didn't mind creeping along behind
Olivia as she hauled a ground-penetrating radar sled near the base
of a collimated cliff. Bram followed her, periodically thumping the
sand with a penetrometer like an oversized walking stick, hoisting
the weight up the rod and releasing it to drive the sampler head
into the sand.

They were Pathfinding. During breaks in the work of
staying alive - subsistence farming and maintaining life support -
Pathfinders charted routes across the dunes to craters,
outcroppings, or channels that might expose minerals the colony
needed to survive.

Teams could take an intern along and Jake leaped at
a chance to get out of the settlement for a while. No one could ace
a training class better than Jake when he put his mind to it. He'd
proved that as he drifted from one job to another.

Gigas was uncharted, just the sort of trip Jake
craved - but right now he was bored and scanned the cabin for
something to do.

The rover was a boxy vehicle on knee-high tracks.
There was plenty of power, beamed from an orbiting station to a
microwave receiver on the roof. Two pairs of seats, their original
upholstery buried under overlapping patches, faced large windows in
front. Behind them an airlock extended most of the way across the
cabin, leaving an aisle to a tiny galley, sanitary unit, and life
support systems. Tolerably comfortable, but the fun was out on the
surface.

Jake opened his music files. One advantage of
Pathfinding was the personal headset he'd been issued. Everyone on
Earth had headsets, view pads, holographic rings - all sorts of
personal devices - but materials for such things on Mars had to be
scavenged from worn-out units the original settlers brought from
Earth. Earth hadn't sent any cargo in Jake's lifetime.

He checked on Olivia and Bram again, easy to spot in
their bright blue surface suits. Earth-borns call the color sky
blue, but nothing about Mars was blue. Pale orange sky, gray rocks,
rusty sand. Even the sun was an orange blob obscured by dust.

Jake sang to himself as he rummaged for a snack in
the tiny galley until Olivia's voice broke through.

"...are you? Jake."

He leaped to the driver's seat.

"I'm here." He saw one blue suit through the cabin
window and a sloping, funnel shaped sinkhole at the canyon
wall.

"What the hell? I can't move. Can't breath." Bram's
voice wheezed over the comm link.

#

Born on Mars
will be available soon.
Subscribe
to Kate's email
list or visit
here
for the latest information.

An international crew ferries the first commercial
space station to its permanent home, a position in the solar system
where an enigmatic portal to a distant star system was once found
and lost. Harry joined the mission to find a place among his
crewmates and grow a garden in space. He finds relationships grow
like gardens - not always as expected. Along the way the crew will
mine a comet and visit the colony on Mars. But tensions build among
the crew, disaster strikes, and they fight to save their mission
and their lives.

Excerpt
: Dozens of flags circled the edge of the plaza, snapping in
the ocean breeze, as Harry Gordon waited to leave Earth. Somalia
provided the perfect location on the equator, so her star on a
sky-blue field flew over the plaza, but it took Qatari money to
build the space elevator, so white and maroon flags flew next to
the blue.

Harry frowned at the high walls surrounding
the plaza, hiding the town beyond. The space elevator brought
prosperity to this African shore, and Harry had seen patches of
well-tended greenery from the plane as he'd flown in to join his
crewmates. After a year of training and PR appearances for the
Institute, today their journey into space began.

#

Self-driving cars, asteroid mining, rewilding the
American west, a private space industry in America and India and
the backlash against it. Kate Rauner's vision of our future told as
a story from Spaceport America. Rob Shay is mission controller for
a spacecraft that discovers an anomaly, a glitch in space that
leads to an unknown star - but a world out of control frustrates
exploration. At least his girlfriend sympathizes - too bad she's in
Australia.

Excerpt
: "Welcome to Spaceport America Industrial Park". A soft,
reddish light was mounted above the sign and the words stood out
clearly in the darkness. Even after five years, Rob Shay still got
a bit of a thrill riding past that sign.

#

Collections of short poems in rhyme;
Inspired all by science;
Outward to the edge of time;
Or tied to earthly cadence.
Light and written all for fun,
There is no angst to hide.
You're invited now to sample one
Of my poems inside.
And a few
Haiku
Too.

Volume One includes
Eohippus angustidens
- How the Dawn Horse
lost and reclaimed its beautiful name.

Volume Two includes
Because They're Big
- Kate's most popular
poem, from synchrotron to supervolcano.

Thanks

My successes involve help from others - errors and
inadequacies are my own.

I'm grateful to
Critters.org
. Critters
is a site where authors freely share their expertise by critiquing
each other's work. It's a wonderful resource.

Special thanks to Jorkam on
Wattpad
, who caught numerous
editing errors - always with kind words and good humor - and
discussed technologies with me.

License Notes

Back to Welcome

Glory on Mars
is authored by Kate Rauner
and published by Kate Rauner at Smashwords. Copyright 2015 Kate
Rauner.

This ebook is licensed for
your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or
given away to other people. If you would like to share this book
with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each
recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or
it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your
favorite on-line retailer and purchase your own copy. Visit
katerauner.wordpress.com
for
more information.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of
this author.

Cover by Kate Rauner, copyright 2015. Planet Mars by
NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
commons.wikimedia.org
. Back cover (print edition) by
jpl.nasa.gov
.
USGOV-NASA Images are Public Domain. NASA images have been cropped
and color adjusted. The cat's name is Harvey - he lives with
Kate.

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Connect With Kate

Visit me at
my
blog
or follow me on
Facebook
or
Twitter
@katerauner

Contact Kate: [email protected].