io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “The Lord of Mars” by Megan McCarron. Enjoy!
The Lord of Mars
by Megan McCarron
The grow pods clung to a red, humped ridge about a twenty-minute hike west from the habitats. Inside one of their plastic domes, a farmer named Oliver Judd nestled potato starts in the ground with nimble hands. It was tricky work in a forty-pound outside suit, but he’d had more than enough practice. Calling these structures grow pods was optimistic. Over the past two years, they’d nurtured coppery, barren silt.
By the time he finished sentencing the latest batch of potato starts to their deaths, the sun was setting. Down in the valley, bright blue lights pricked the habitat’s half domes, their glare sharp and spiky in the dimming red. To the north, beyond a valley of ochre dust, rose tall, jagged mountains.
His suit said, in its plummy, female voice, “Oxygen failure imminent.” That didn’t make sense: Oliver had been out for maybe an hour, and the suits were filled up for eight. There were a lot of things that could go wrong outside, but most of the time, the thing that was wrong was the computer. Oliver radioed back to say the suit was glitching.
“Fuck. What’s your position?” Anthony, who was on babysitting duty, said. Oliver relayed it. “Stop moving.”
“You sent me out in a suit with a leak?”
“No, I sent you out in the last one that hadn’t leaked.”
Four minutes, the suit said. It sounded disappointed in him. He called up the heart rate monitor before remembering that the first rule was don’t check the heart rate monitor.
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