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.
Over the suit’s external mic, the wind sheared across the open plain, a thin, high whistle. Oliver tried to concentrate on the sound. The sun was almost down now, a half-disc above the far horizon, red on red, the mountains a deep, scabby maroon.
The techs joked about the dumbest ways to die on Mars. They were all, at base, stupid. Only an idiot spent twenty years of his life in the most unforgiving environments on Earth to get his ass up here, the shittiest place of all. But the idea was you got to be a hero. He was supposed to die decades from now, the elder of a new planetary society, the Greener of Mars, not slumped next to yet another failed crop of space potatoes.
He tried to remember more survival training. All he could recall was the beige conference room where the former Navy SEAL had lectured. The windows had been set high-up, offering a measly glimpse of sky. He could have walked out of the conference room and stood under the blue and taken a big, deep breath.
• • •
He came to sprawled in a beaten-up rover chair, the garage’s low metal ceiling blurry above, and a plastic oxygen mask over his face. He tried to pull it off. Anthony Hernandez yanked Oliver’s hands down. His broad, gigantic face was gray with anxiety.
“Take some more sips of the O2. You can’t forget how to grow carrots. The only thing I look forward to is those carrots,” the mechanic said.
The suit was busted. Anthony said that morning the Prince had insisted he’d fixed all three of them, so there was no need to share His Majesty’s spare. No need at all, except now Oliver was sucking down emergency oxygen (“Ox-y-gen,” Oliver’s brain sang), and two other techs had almost been in the same position earlier that week.
Anthony got that conspiratorial look and said, “This shit can’t go on. No resupply. Equipment breaking down weekly. A ban on asking for any kind of aid from New Beijing, because, what, it would look bad? That’s why, that thing I talked about . . .?”
Oliver tried to pull the mask off his face again. Anthony pulled his hands down more gently, but his grip was firm.
“I almost died,” Oliver said, his voice muffled and whiny beneath the mask. Why was Anthony pushing him on this right now? The oxygen loss was making him feel impulsive, and he almost blurted out the “u” word that would ping this camera log to the Prince’s attention.
“You almost died,” Anthony repeated.
“We live on Mars,” Oliver said. For many people in the habitat, the phrase had become a joke. Water system broken, so they’re drinking purified pee? We live on Mars. Months spent digging ditches, because the backhoe got silt in all its gears? We live on Mars. Nuclear reactor almost melts down—for the second time? We live on Mars.
But for Oliver, the phrase held trace magic. He hadn’t died. He lived on Mars.
• • •
A couple days after Oliver’s suit had failed, the Queen invited him over. She lived in her own dome on the edge of the cluster. It was decadently spare. Every other dome was crowded with supplies and equipment; sleeping quarters were bunks surrounded by duplicate air filters, spare dome plastic, and broken construction equipment. The clear wall of the Queen’s bubble looked out over the sublime plain beyond. She slept on a king-sized futon piled with quilts she’d made herself post-voyage, after dedicating precious weight allowance to scraps of fabric.
The Queen greeted him in one of her other luxuries, a flowing pleated dress printed with the image of the landscape outside. Her elfin face was tired and cheerful, and her gray-threaded auburn hair fell loose. She greeted him with a hug and a shower of loose, burbling chatter about the crystalline quality of the sky that day. She was always ascribing poetic qualities to the bare landscape. They sat down together at her low Japanese-style table and drank tea made from the pineapple sage Oliver grew and dried for her.
“Anthony said you almost died,” the Queen said, taking a sip of her tea. “I hope he’s being a drama queen.”
“It was a close thing.”
“Fuck,” she said, the word bright and forbidden-sounding, as if it had been said by a tween. “Glad you’re here.”
When he first started working for the family, Oliver had dismissed this tiny woman, only a few years older than him, who wasn’t content with the attention of millions on the streams, and instead wanted billions to watch her on another world. After culinary school, he’d worked as the private chef on the King and Queen’s ranch in the Texas Hill Country. The Queen had spent a lot of time there on her own, since it was located in her hometown, the place she’d transformed from a run-down, forgotten stagecoach stop to a rural lifestyle theme park.
Back then, over the black and white marble kitchen island, she had talked about the flight to Mars like it was a vacation she had planned for next year. But the more she described training her body for lower g environments and the risks and benefits of small-scale nuclear reactors while Oliver chopped herbs for dinner, the more he started to believe. She was the only person Oliver had ever met who seemed optimistic about the future, optimistic the way Oliver also felt, for the first time in his life, after he’d started T.
After a few months, the Queen had given him her blessing to plant a large, drought-tolerant vegetable garden on the ranch. In addition to the okra and hot peppers and tepary beans and sweet Texas onions and lambsquarters, he planted some trial potatoes the King’s R&D team were developing in the worst, sandiest soil he could find. They flourished. Oliver had fudged things a little bit, adding extra water and compost, but nothing crazy. When the King had arrived for a surprise dinner, Oliver served those potatoes simply boiled and dressed, and the couple couldn’t believe how sweet they were. “We’ll eat better food on Mars than on Earth, and you will grow it,” the Queen said with a dreamy, poetic lilt. The King had liked it so much he made her say it again on video, and then posted it so several million other people could hear her say it, too.
The family recruited people for the mission like that: based on a single great deed or a gut feeling. Since they were building a new society, it had better be full of people the royal family liked! Oliver spent the next fifteen years learning to be a space farmer on Mars Settlement Corporation credit. He worked with NASA and JAXA and several university science departments; he spent a season at McMurdo in their greenhouse and two years working with Saudis, greening the desert to mixed success. His own farms had flourished in the southern Peruvian desert and in the climate-change-baked remains of what had once been the Mojave. He’d lost friends over the royal family, who had the weirdo libertarian politics of rich Texas people, plus the King had a habit of saying incendiary shit. But the Queen had always been his friend. When the press had concern-trolled about sending someone with a testosterone implant into space, she declared Mars was for everybody, and the King hadn’t dared disagree. She was going up first.
Over the first cup of tea, Oliver shared the story of his ordeal, and the Queen made appropriately concerned noises and promised to look into the suit situation. Over the second cup of tea, they slid into gossip. Since boarding the spaceship together, they had become less like boss and employer, and more like friends. As far as he knew, he was her only confidant up here. That day, he nodded along as she described how Ixxy was in a fight with his fiancée, ostensibly because she kept missing his video calls, but the Queen suspected it was really because the girl wasn’t going to be on the ship launching from Earth in two days. All of twenty years old, with the King’s large, stocky build and the Queen’s frizzy, dark hair, the Prince spent his days alone piloting the overland vehicle over the planet’s surface, creating oceans of content about exploring the wild frontier. Oliver had known the Prince since he was a little boy. His full name was Exploration, which as a toddler he could only say as “Ix.” He was the King and Queen’s only shared kid and had spent his life being streamed and then streaming himself, climbing and swimming and canoeing and riding. He’d wanted even more than Oliver to live on Mars, but since they’d arrived, Ixxy had grown depressed. The crew disliked him and felt no sympathy, no matter how often Oliver pointed out that spending your prime early adult years locked in a bubble with your mom sucked.
After too long spent processing the Prince’s maximally long distance relationship—the only one that had lasted, because it was the only one with any hope of a reunion—the Queen widened her eyes playfully and said, “I heard there’s some discontent brewing.”
Still in the cocoon of friendly gossip, Oliver said, “I mean, what a dumb idea. Everyone’s gotten bored up here and wants something to change. You can’t unionize against a planet.”
Her hands clenched, and she stared down at her tea. Had she not known?
Oliver poured more from the pot and tried to hide that he was watching her. The relaxed, happy glaze over her eyes—her mask, he thought of it—was gone, replaced by something frightened. No, furious. Oliver had played along with Anthony’s secrecy, but he’d imagined they were keeping it from the Prince, which the rest of the station kept all sorts of problems from because he tattled immediately to the King. He’d never imagined the others had all decided to keep the Queen, who had a strong independent streak, in the dark.
He’d messed up. He’d really, really messed up.
She ignored his nervous stare and said, “Did anyone mention United Space?”
Interplanetary United Space Workers had successfully unionized a private space station built by one of the Mars Settlement Corporation’s competitors, and had reached an agreement with NASA that if they built another, bigger moon base, it would be staffed by union workers. It was both impressive and also represented a measly slice of the space exploration industry. They liked to talk shit about the King, and the King unfortunately took the bait. Oliver found their antics exhausting. In the lead-up to the colony’s launch, people had started harassing the crew online, people from every political persuasion and personality disorder, but the core group had been dedicated haters of the King and Queen stirred up by United Space. One of Oliver’s most persistent trolls had been an overzealous United Space fan who sought out every measly stream to call him, of all things, a cishet bootlicker. During one of these public tirades, some other stranger had broken in and said Oliver was trans and linked to some long-ago article about him farming in Peru. The harasser had disappeared after that, which had been the most annoying part of all of it.
“What? No,” Oliver said. “This isn’t some real thing—”
“Oliver, if you know anything else about this, please tell me. The King—you know him.”
The shit the King talked about United Space, specifically, was that he would leave any colony they unionized to die. He blamed the oil and gas workers unions for slowing his transition of the family energy business to wind, and while Oliver wasn’t sure if that was true, the King believed it with a dangerous vehemence.
“I don’t know anything. I don’t even know if I know what I told you.”
“Fuck,” she said again, and it was the tone of the real Queen, the iron rod. Reaching that person was, oddly, a gift.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” he said.
The Queen smiled at him. It was a sweet smile, nothing untoward. He felt the urge to touch her shoulders. It was a familiar feeling. He’d given in to it, once, five or six months into their settlement, when everything had felt maximally unreal, like they were getting away with something by breathing. She’d pushed his hand away. There was nothing like being shut down by one of the nineteen people who composed your entire world. The urge still came, though. Like an idiot, he sublimated it into dumb, lackey shit, like saying he would spy on the only other eighteen people in his world. It felt bad. It probably should have felt worse. This wasn’t the first time he’d done it.
She said, her voice businesslike, “Could you guest on my stream today and talk about the better life we’re building, free of all of Earth’s baggage? You always speak so wonderfully about your experiences as a leveraged tech.”
Oliver and fourteen of the other colonists were “leveraged,” which was a polite way to say indentured. The average person here was in debt to the company for something like twenty million dollars. Oliver’s education had been leveraged, too, so his debt was higher. But who cared that he owed the company thirty million and counting? The banks were all on Earth.
That evening, he sat on the edge of the Queen’s bed and chatted with her as she re-wove the tapestry she’d brought here, a fully terraformed, green Mars, which looked a lot like the Texas Hill Country, complete with a vineyard and a little brick town. The other techs called the Queen dead weight behind her back, but Oliver knew that without something organic and old-fashioned, like her weaving, life here would feel as hard and cold as the metal that surrounded them. She’d finished the tapestry twice, already. She streamed herself unwinding it, too.
As her hands worked, he talked sunnily about his work on the farm. She described working in the greenhouse alongside him, which she did do, every once in a while. He could tell how happy it made her to be around the plants. She didn’t stay away out of laziness. There was too much to do.
“It’s amazing that Mars Settlement gave you the chance to come here,” the Queen said.
“All I ever wanted was to live on Mars,” Oliver said, hating the saccharine in his own voice, but unable to stop it.
Kai, the comms tech, was monitoring the feed. He looked up at Oliver in a way that could have been accusatory. But the streams were always goofily positive. It was in their own best interest. Twenty people could not sustain a colony long-term. Oliver’s dad had worked in real estate, selling plots in big flat expanses of cleared dirt with one gleaming house surrounded by bright green grass. The colony was like that. They were the model home.
• • •
The next morning at breakfast, which happened in a cramped storage space around the hot water dispenser, Lillian, their doctor-slash-biologist-slash-plumber came up to him with her steaming cup of millet gruel and flicked his forehead with her finger.
“Where did you get that scab, Oliver?” she said.
He put his hand up and felt nothing. “I don’t have a scab.”
“I’m a medical expert. I know a scab.”
Then, he got it. “You’re not using that word right.”
Anthony butted in and said, “Lillian, whatever you think you’re doing—”
Lillian, who Oliver would have gotten into a physical fight with long ago if she weren’t the person who fixed their compost shitters, said, “The Queen gave him that scab. It’s never going to heal.”
“Only because you’re a shitty doctor,” Oliver said.
“I told her not to do that,” Anthony said after Lillian had shoved her way out of the tiny room full of people wolfing down the morning’s sustenance. Lillian stormed out of breakfast at least once a week; everyone else had gotten used to turning away. “You’re scheduled to do another walk today. You want company?”
Through a mouthful of scalding, goopy porridge, the same porridge he’d eaten for two years every morning, which had once had sugar and salt and now had neither, Oliver said yes.
• • •
Outside with Anthony a few hours later, Oliver’s eyes registered a “warm” day, clear and bright. But instead of savoring the tricks his brain played to convince him he was outside on a pleasant hike, he kept checking the suit monitors. Was the O2 dropping faster than normal? He’d been out for thirteen minutes, and it said he’d gone through seventeen minutes of oxygen. Thought he’d never looked at his O2 levels walking uphill before. It was kind of Anthony to be here. No one on this station could admit to being scared, so they were all stuck reading each others’ minds and offering plausibly deniable support. Anthony was one of the best at it.
Then, he saw pods. They were still far-off, and he wondered if he was imagining things. But nothing stood out against the color red like green.
Oliver clambered up the hill so quickly he was wheezing when he got to the top. They were real. In two of the pods, the potato plants had survived. The tongue-like, poisonous leaves had unfurled to soak up the sun.
Anthony hustled up after him, and then grew very still. “Is that what I think it is?”
“They survived.”
Anthony whooped. Oliver yelled, too, something raw and wild and maybe even angry. After so much failure, he’d had to fight so hard to believe this was still possible. Now that the moment he’d dreamed of had arrived, he couldn’t quite experience it.
He forced himself to open up the pods and take some readings, even though he wanted to leave his perfect potatoes under glass and never disturb them again. There were seventeen total that had made it, out of about sixty starts. The chemical mix of the soil in these two pods had been nearly identical, but with subtle differences in nitrogen. It was even more exciting to have two to test against each other. Both were primed with a new chemical admixture. The so-called farming expert heading toward them in the next colony ship, Dr. Willis, had gone for weeks without replying to Oliver’s video messages. He was a paying colonist, newly retired from Monsanto, and didn’t think much of the royals’ pet farmer. But talking out loud had gotten Oliver’s brain moving. Most of the plants looked leggy and light-starved, but a few were healthy. They would be the ones to breed. Real Martian potatoes.
“This is it, right? Like, you never had any make it this long?”
“No one has!” Oliver said sharply. To him, it felt like asking if anyone had ever breathed the air here before. No, they had not, and now that they could, it changed everything.
“I can’t wait for mashed potatoes. Or French fries? I’d blow six months’ worth of cooking oil on that shit for sure.”
“And two months’ worth of salt.”
“We get salt out of our pee, it’s all good.”
“I don’t want to leave them.”
“Isn’t the whole point of them that they can survive out here without you?” Anthony sounded oddly guilty when he said this.
Oliver had lost crops a lot of ways. Heat, wet, dry, cold. Dead soil. Contaminated soil. Over-fertilization, chemical imbalances. Pests: worms, beetles, caterpillars, flies. The beauty of farming on Mars, in theory, was that there was little weather and no bugs. The soil was dead, but it wasn’t polluted. The farmer could control everything.
Or nothing. There were cameras out here. Oliver had turned them off over a year ago, because the feed was too depressing. He flipped them on now. The feed went right to his greenhouse.
It pained him to leave his miracle crop. As they headed back to the habitat, he fantasized about the hero’s welcome he would receive. Anthony would hype everyone up, and the whole crew would cheer and somehow the potatoes would already be ready to harvest and Oliver would serve them mashed and fried, and they’d be the best thing any of them had ever had. Even Lillian would smile at him. Then, Oliver remembered why he’d wanted Anthony out here. “Could you keep it a secret?”
“Why?”
“I want to announce it on my own terms.”
Anthony agreed, emphasizing that he got it, that Oliver had risked his life for this.
Then, Oliver forced himself to say, “So tell me about this union.”
Early on, techs had disabled the suits’ auto-transmit for audio. Their stated reason was hearing a constant chatter made it too difficult to determine if someone was in distress, but really it was about privacy. One couple had fast-tracked a surveying project so they could go outdoors to have fights, and eventually, break up. The comms cut-off began the moment you went planetside, but no one had private conversations close to the colony.
When Anthony started talking, it was clear he’d had a lot of practice. Oliver suspected he was the last person on the station to get this speech. “The line is we’re all in this together, right? But that’s not true. The company controls what gets sent here, what information gets out. The Queen and Prince have direct lines back to Earth. It’s us, the leveraged, who are up here all alone. They treat us like pieces of equipment.
“So some of us got talking, and we realized we need representatives on Earth, too. And a contract. We’ll figure out how to make this colony work. Us. The people who actually know!
“The union will be us. United Space will just give us more numbers, more leverage on Earth, lawyers, experience. They’ve already gone above and beyond to help us have a real democracy in this little slice of paradise.”
None of this was surprising. Even worse, it sounded good. “The King will cut us off.”
“And be the person who let twenty brave explorers on another planet perish? Including his wife and kid? Hell, he’s sunk most of the fortune needed into this place already. We could go co-op.”
Oliver couldn’t stop himself from asking, “How are you talking to United Space? You said it yourself—the company reads all our texts and listens to all our calls.”
“There is that one kind of call they don’t monitor, for, uh, morale reasons?”
“You’re having phone sex with a union organizer?” Oliver said.
“She calls it sticking it to the man.”
Oliver couldn’t help it; he burst out laughing.
Then, Anthony added, “These are your plants. Not the company’s. You’re breeding them, right? Extracting IP is impossible on Earth, but the courts are deciding different things about space, about shit we give up our lives for. Listen, maybe colonization has to involve a lot of nineteenth century bullshit, indenture and company towns and eighteen-hour work days. But that doesn’t mean the companies own us, and that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. It’s all up for grabs. Right now.”
Oliver had long ago accepted that his life’s work was owned by the Mars Settlement Corporation. All he’d ever hoped for was to be the face of it. To have his name on the patents and reports, to speak on the streams. What Anthony described was of a different order, and he made it sound plausible. Like how on Mars, the farmer would control everything.
What counted more? His years of failure, or those green shoots? “I agree with you that what we’re doing isn’t working.”
“Will you sign a card? There’s not a lot of time.”
“Before what?”
This time, Anthony paused. “Sign a card, and I can tell you. Okay?”
Oliver said he had to think about it. Anthony said he understood, but there was that guilty undertone to his voice again. Fine. Oliver felt guilty, too.
Back in the habitats, Oliver went to the Queen’s chamber the moment he and Anthony parted. If he waited, he might not be able to go through with it, and anyway, she’d seen him come in with Anthony over the security system. She’d expect something. When he walked in, she flicked off her video call; he thought he’d seen the King’s face, but he wasn’t sure. He’d told himself he wouldn’t tell her everything, but habit, or panic, or something darker, self-loathing, took over, and he reported all that Anthony had said: United Space, the phone sex, new contracts, the card request, some kind of deadline. The only thing he hid was the most important thing of all, the green shoots. He sold out his friend to hoard his miracle.
• • •
The next day, the essential work of the colony, monitoring the reactor and cleaning the air filters and manufacturing the water, paused as the entire human population of this corner of Mars gathered. They had cleared the equipment out of the command pod to make it look presentable; equipment cluttered the hallways, which would probably kill someone if they had to evacuate.
The first Launch had been a year and a half ago, for an unmanned rocket, and the energy in the room had been giddy. Spend six months barely surviving on a desolate planet with what you’d come with, half of which was already broken, and new stuff took on the allure of high-grade drugs. That rocket had exploded. The looks of horror and dismay on the colony’s faces must have been too much even for their engagement-obsessed sovereigns, because they didn’t live stream the next launch, which had also failed.
Now, they were borrowing multiple nations’ communications arrays to live-stream their reactions while watching the first colonist launch, which fast-text comms had already confirmed went off smoothly. Then, they would do a brief co-live-stream with the King and the crew on the rocket.
Oliver had decided he would announce his news on that live stream. The company would have over-managed this whole thing, instead of letting him share the unvarnished and magnificent truth: food grew on Mars! Bright nervousness burned inside him.
The Queen stood in front of the camera, her features decorated in lipstick and eyeliner she hoarded like medicine, her perfect vision of Mars wrapped around her body. Next to her stood the Prince. He wore his exterior suit without the helmet, which doubled as lightweight body armor, and had his rifle slung over his back. The rest of the colony was arrayed behind them; Oliver had made sure to stand in the first row so he could butt in at a choice moment.
On screen, the ground crew counted down, and the rocket ignited. Oliver couldn’t believe he’d come here in the same way, a storm of fire and screaming noise, even as the sight gave him ghost pains of the g’s compressing him into his seat. Each engine stage fired prettily, with flashes of white and red. Everyone in the habitat applauded.
The video feed switched to the future Martians strapped into the spacecraft, now live, and the King joining from Earth. He was sitting in a chair fashioned to look like a starship captain’s chair (Oliver had overheard the design calls) in the center of the half-circles of mission command, video feeds of the rocket and colony projected behind him. He’d begged off this mission the way he’d begged off the last one—there was too much work to be done, regrettably, on Earth. His thin, angular face—a wizard’s face, though whether Gandalf or Oz, Oliver never could decide—was dewy and smooth, an eerie contrast to the age he couldn’t fully erase. “Today is a glorious day in the history of the human race,” he said. “We are sending twenty more private citizens to their new home. Our next spacecraft will take fifty. And the next one hundred. Sooner than you think, thousands of people will be heading for Mars, all of them building our next great civilization.”
It sounded impossible, but Oliver listening to him say it here on Mars had been deemed impossible, too. The King had not been a frontrunner in the race to Mars. But as other efforts went down in flames, figurative and all too often literal, he had enough money, and enough savvy, to buy up assets and recruit disillusioned engineers and scientists until Mars Settlement Corporation stopped sounding like a joke and started landing probes and rockets with payloads. And then people. Honestly, the King had always driven Oliver crazy. He’d grown up rich and fucked up and needy. But even if he wasn’t the most deserving, he was the one who’d done it.
On the other half of the screen, the rocket’s passengers were able to unstrap their arms and wave to the camera. Or, at least, the four people in the front, the paying colonists, waved. In the back rows, the other fifteen people, leveraged techs and scientists and manufacturers, held up their gloves with their fingers closed and their thumbs overlapped, forming a “U.”
Back in the habitat, everyone around Oliver held up their hands in the exact same formation. The King kept talking, but the Queen turned around, bewildered. As the King praised the might of private space exploration, Anthony stepped forward with a stack of what looked like the index cards that were stored on the station, supposed to be used if there was a network failure for record keeping, and said, “The Martian Workers’ Union formally requests recognition from the Martian Settlement Corporation. We strongly encourage you to do so based on card check, so we can build a better Mars together.” Everyone else kept their hands raised in the “U.”
The Queen took the cards with a robotic grace. The King’s speech cut off, and the screen went blank; had it been cut? Oliver craned his neck looking for the stream. He couldn’t have missed his chance.
For one long, tense moment, the Queen stared at Anthony, and Anthony stared back. She clutched the cards in her hands as if she wished to rip the whole stack.
“Ixxy and I have put ourselves on the line alongside you,” the Queen said. She didn’t sound like herself; she was stiff and poised, her “we” royal. The Prince loomed over her shoulder, looking like he was forcing himself not to speak. “I cannot say the same for the so-called union organizers who have been preying on us from three hundred million miles away. They are seeking to insert themselves into humanity’s next frontier by using our bravery for their own benefit.
“And they have put you all in danger. We are not in the United States right now. Space and outer planets are international territory. Whether in transit on a spacecraft or living in this precarious colony together, we live as if we are far-off at sea. We are forced to treat this as a mutiny.”
The crew kept their faces largely blank, but one or two looked at Oliver. His hands had hung slack at his sides on a global stream.
The Queen was first and foremost an influencer, but she was used to performing to a screen, not a wall of hostile people, and she stumbled when she spoke again. “So. You have three days to renounce this mutiny. Any who do not renounce in three days will face a rations cut, with penalties compounding from there.
“These measures are harsh. We live in a harsh place. But any who renounce will be met with compassion and forgiveness.”
Without another word, she processed out of the room, followed by her son, who stomped on the smooth metal floors in boots meant to grip rock and sand. The rest of the colonists left with an odd determination, as if a starting gun had been fired.
Anthony approached Oliver, who stood alone and furious. “She seemed oddly prepared.”
“You abandoned me on that stream,” Oliver said. “I gave my entire adult life to this colony, and you didn’t have the decency to warn me? Billions of people think I’m a scab now.”
“That’s not how you use that word.”
“They think I’m a bootlicker! A snitch!”
Anthony slid a piece of paper into his hand and said, “Whenever you’re ready to join, you’re welcome.”
Back in the greenhouse, Oliver took advantage of all the leaf cover to read Anthony’s note. In neat printing, it read: BRACE FOR NO HELP WITH FARM.
One of the many reasons a union was stupid was that it was impossible to strike when every day is an unending grind for survival. But they had minimum viability protocols. During emergency drills, Oliver was assigned to the reactor team or to water, and no contingencies were planned for the farm. If their survival was at stake, it would be abandoned. Was that what Anthony was trying to tell him? He’d seen those potatoes. How could he let them die?
• • •
The three days between the union going public and a rations cut were tense and miserable. Quiet. It reminded Oliver of their last few days in space, waiting to find out if the rocket would land, or slam into the planet’s surface.
It had landed. They’d believed it would land, and it had. Going to Mars required a clinically insane amount of optimism. Maybe this bout of space madness had been unavoidable. Everyone here believed they could accomplish their goals despite overwhelming odds. That meant they would try anything.
The first day, Oliver had tried to see the Queen. Usually, this involved nothing more than knocking on her door. Now, the Prince was standing outside in his lightweight spacesuit, holding a rifle. Firing a rifle inside the shelter would be like setting off a bomb. It was idiotic, yet still an effective bit of theater.
“The Queen is not receiving any visitors,” the Prince said.
“I have something urgent to discuss.”
“More urgent than saving this colony from mutiny?”
Oliver considered telling Ixxy about the potatoes. The kid never told anything straight to his parents. By the time it got back to the Queen, Ixxy would have been the one to have grown them. “Is that thing loaded?”
“Of course. I don’t miss.”
“Everybody misses. When you see your mother, tell her I didn’t sign a card, okay? And I need to speak with her.”
“We know you’re not a mutineer, Oliver,” the Prince said, and Oliver felt like he was being called a coward.
He worked. Any maintenance that was due in the greenhouse, he did: he repaired a drip hose, cleaned out the air filters, thinned the seedlings, planted new seeds, harvested bunches of mint and pineapple, sage and thyme to make way in their bins for fledgling carrots he would normally have left in their start-pots longer. He did the full battery of chemical tests on the soil, the compost, and the outside dirt inoculated with bacteria, fungus, and his preferred mix of minerals. He got out the ladder and cleaned the ceiling glass, and installed the last three grow lights alongside their legion of dark brethren. The southern side of the greenhouse, which he’d left solely to Martian sunlight a few months ago, was looking thin and anemic as the red Russian kale reached for sun that had to travel sixty-one million miles further than the plants were used to.
No one came through to get their allotted “green time,” as they called it. It had been about two months in, two surreal and harrowing months. Every day, Oliver had woken up afraid he would die, and also afraid that this was a dream. When the first seeds had sprouted, he’d gathered the whole colony into the greenhouse. Twenty-one terrified people, leveraged and royal alike, had witnessed the sprouts in reverent silence, like the miracle they were. After that, taking some green time had become part of the day’s rhythm.
But as the lights had burned out and the green had yellowed, fewer and fewer folks had come. Oliver hoped the rocket on its way wouldn’t slam into the surface, either. Everyone dying would be bad. But, honestly, the people hurtling toward them felt like an invasion. Their dynamics would be permanently upended, and that was before the union mess. New, working things, on the other hand, he desired with a sharp hunger. He hoped they’d carefully packed the bulbs for his grow lights.
In between his frantic greenhouse prep, he worked his maintenance shifts. Everyone was a specialist in one, if not two or three fields but they also had been trained to do the grunt work every single sector would require. Oliver scrubbed down the western bathroom. He sterilized the water filtration system. The last day, he pulled dinner duty. Even when he showed up with the thinned baby carrots and an armful of mint, the other two people working with him didn’t make eye contact. He’d had conflict here before. Lots of it. But instead of a spiky aura around one particular person, there was a bright, glowing wall between him and every other soul on this colony. They treated him like he was invisible, which made him feel hyper-visible. Like when he’d stood with his hands by his sides on the stream, conspicuous for doing nothing.
Whenever the feelings of hopelessness became unbearable, he allowed himself to look at the potato starts on the remote feed. A single black-and-white camera watched over what had been for years the saddest place in the colony, and that was a competition. He’d stopped checking it, honestly, and was afraid checking it too often now would set off some alert to the Prince. Whenever he peered into his plants’ cocoon, they were still thriving. The moment he looked away, it felt impossible to believe.
The last day, Oliver went down to the garage, which was also the airlock, and suited up to go outside, even though the potatoes technically didn’t need inspection. He needed to look at them. The suits had been cleaned and prepped, and the air tanks were readied. They were supposed to be maintained this way even under emergency protocols, but Oliver suspected they wouldn’t be if there was a strike. It would take him another hour, at least, to prep a suit on his own.
Anthony worked on one of the tires off the rover, and studiously ignored Oliver until he went over for the mandatory inspection.
“When will you be back?” Anthony said.
“Sixty minutes,” Oliver said.
“Sixty minutes, noted,” Anthony said, and went back to the tires without another word.
The surface was bright and open. Oliver had been spending the past few days hunched over his seedlings. Out here anyone could see him.
He started hiking, then stopped to check the suit’s oxygen levels. “Six hours and thirty-three minutes,” the readout’s voice said. That was too low. Then he remembered the tank had only been filled eighty percent on his inspection, and he’d skipped the top-off, something they regularly did when going on short excursions. Requesting more O2 from Anthony would have been humiliating. He kept hiking. It felt harder to breathe than it should. He asked again. “Six hours and twenty-seven minutes,” the suit answered.
“Check rate of oxygen usage,” Oliver said.
“Within normal range.”
Nothing was wrong. He forced himself to continue to the top of the first rise. The grow pods were over the next, further ridge. The potatoes were still thriving, he knew from the camera. He was coming out to double-check their irrigation lines and temperature shielding, not because that was something he normally did, but because he’d never had plants live before and he didn’t know what to do besides take another look. It wouldn’t be his final look, no matter what happened on the colony. He couldn’t allow that.
Breathing still felt difficult. He queried again. “Six hours and fifteen minutes.”
The suit hadn’t warned him the last time that oxygen use was abnormal. Maybe its calibration was off. Maybe it had re-normalized around leaking suits, because they all leaked.
Oliver imagined himself all the way out by the pods, radioing in for help. Would Anthony come get him? He would. But would he rush like he had before, skipping his own safety checks?
Oliver stood at the top of the ridge for a long time. Occasionally, he would query his air levels. He couldn’t get himself to move forward. His plants were so close. He just. He couldn’t do this alone.
When he came back in the airlock, Anthony called from over by the tires, “All clear?”
“All clear,” Oliver said through his helmet. Then he took it off and gulped air.
• • •
The fourth morning dawned. Mutiny morning. Oliver had spent the night sleeping in the greenhouse, a violation of twenty-seven protocols, because he couldn’t stand his bunkmates ignoring him. No one had come to check on him, which violated another thirteen protocols. But what were a few protocols between friends.
He was late arriving to breakfast. When he got there, the hallway was crowded with nearly everyone who lived on the colony. Blocking the door to the slop room was Ixxy. He still had that rifle.
“Mutineers are restricted to one meal a day on subsistence rations. Only loyal colonists are eligible to enter,” he announced.
The group gathered wasn’t really a crowd in their energy. More like an assembly. They stood silently, neither advancing nor making any moves to disperse. He could easily push his way through.
As long as Oliver stood here, he was technically part of the assembly. But everyone was waiting to see if he broke ranks and crossed, or stayed still and by doing so, shifted his allegiance. His hip hurt from sleeping on the hard floor of the greenhouse. In front of him was Conor Wolenski, the structural engineer who was building their permanent underground home. Oliver had always felt a kinship with him, since they were both creating the colony’s permanent future. Conor’s shoulders were tense, but his hands hung easily at his sides, as if he were forcing himself to seem calm. Oliver noticed his own hands were clenched, and opened them. He didn’t feel any better. If anything, it made him want to use those hands to slap the back of Conor’s head, like his mother had when he’d done something stupid and stubborn.
Ixxy stood in front of the door. The rest of the colonists faced Ixxy. No one spoke, and the only movements were unconscious fidgets, a head scratch, a shifted stance. The tension first built, and then unspooled, like a fishing line when the catch had slipped the hook. How long were they going to stand here? Oliver wished he’d stayed in the greenhouse.
The chime that went off every morning sounded, a tinkle of bells that indicated mealtime was over. The assembly didn’t budge. Unable to stand it any longer, Oliver started pushing his way along the edge of the crowd, toward the perpendicular hallway, muttering excuse me as he did, his low voice indecently loud in the silence. Then, the rest of the assembly began to break up. He walked ahead of the dispersing group, his steps fast and a little panicked as they gained on him. If they passed him, it would be unbearable. At the fork in the hall, Oliver swerved toward the Queen’s chambers, now unguarded by Ixxy. The footsteps continued toward the heart of the colony. The machine hum of all the devices keeping the colony alive filled the silence.
He rang, and the Queen buzzed him in like she always did. He found her seated at her low table, scraping the last of her porridge out of her bowl. It looked like it had dried seaweed and soy sauce in it. No one had seen those in a year.
“Did you have a good breakfast?” the Queen said and smiled at him as if this were a social visit. She sat like a much younger person, knee cocked up, slouching backward. She wore the same regulation pale blue jumpsuit he wore that morning, and her hair was looped around her head in a braid.
“Everyone was crowded outside.”
“You could have gone through. Ixxy was there to make sure of that.”
“I can’t—” Oliver began, and then shut his mouth. She never wanted anything explained to her. Especially feelings. “You’re putting the colony in danger.”
She dropped the cheerful routine. “What other insights have you come to share?”
“No, I mean. The last round of potato starts. They’re growing. Outside.”
It was an awful morning, but he’d still hoped for a brief moment of surprise, or even happiness, to cross her face. But she wasn’t surprised at all.
“You know.”
“You’re broadcasting them.”
For two years, there’d been no sign anyone could see his camera but him. No reason for anyone to look. Maybe that aborted trip outside had tipped her off. Stupid. He said, “This union is ruining everything.”
She stood from the table and started to pace, humming. Behind her, the clear wall of her bubble looked out onto the planet that was everything and nothing.
“We’ve been here for two years. No one knows what that does to human psychology. Clearly, it’s done something. I can’t decide if I’m too attached to Earth, and the way we did things there, or if I’m already dangerously adrift.” She looked back at him, and he was shocked by the anger on her face. “What I don’t understand is why you would keep from me the breakthrough we’ve been working on for twenty years.”
The Queen had spent twenty years recording albums and touring and breaking up with the King and getting back together with him and raising money for the colony and raising Ixxy and training her body and her mind for this new planet. Occasionally she checked in on Oliver’s latest project, or informed him she’d kept the King from cutting his funding, again. He’d never imagined she thought the farm was a group project. Maybe she hadn’t until a week ago, when it bore fruit. Or maybe he’d wrongly assumed she was vapid and uncaring. Everyone else did.
“Growing our own food makes this colony real. It’s the crossover from being a bunch of doomed glampers to being Martians. And you gave it to United Space, and hid it from me.”
“I didn’t give United Space shit. Anthony was out there because you asked me to spy on him, one of my closest friends. And I did.”
“I asked you to help save this colony.”
“I wanted something here to be mine.”
The Queen dropped her arms, and her anger slid into something contrite, but also a little like pity. “They are yours, Oliver.”
“They’re the property of the Mars Settlement Corporation.”
She took a few steps toward the table, and dropped to her knees to join him. “What if we gave you a piece of that?”
He couldn’t have heard that right. “I owe you thirty million dollars.”
The Queen described an offer to wipe out his debt, and to give him a one percent share in the company.
“What do you want in return?”
“This isn’t a bribe,” the Queen said. “But if you were an owner, your role here would change. For one, you would not be eligible for the union. You might prefer that, honestly.”
“I might,” Oliver conceded. “But calling this a mutiny, and denying people food—it’s crazy.”
“It’s consequences,” the Queen said. She grew hard. “A union cannot work. The sooner everyone accepts that, the better chance we have of survival. If there’s a strike—an escalation of the mutiny, I will take control of the colony. I’ve done probably a hundred simulations of this scenario back on Earth. This complex is designed to be run by three people, if need be.”
Three people. The Queen, the Prince, and the King. But the King had stayed on Earth. “You have some secret training in water filtration? Air generation? Because I can’t do any of that.”
“We have an AI for complex engineering support.”
“The AI that kept killing us?” Oliver said. The company had spent ten years trying to integrate AI into these systems, but anything with too much independent authority concluded that keeping humans on Mars was inefficient, irrational, or even cruel. Several chose a humane solution of slowly poisoning the water. A memorable simulation melted down the reactor to keep anyone from coming back.
“The entity uploaded to us yesterday had been running a virtual colony for over a year with no issues,” the Queen said. Oliver must not have looked convinced, because she added, “Xin Beijing has ten entities, and there’s never been a problem. They shared some strategies.”
This was the first Oliver had heard of Mars Settlement being in communication with the Chinese colony. If he became an owner, would he find out how things really worked?
“Can I see what I would sign?”
“Oliver, isn’t this what you’ve always wanted?”
She looked at him with such fulsome affection that it was difficult to form words. Only his twenty years of navigating her love of promises, beautiful and impossible promises, gave him the strength to say, “I’d still like to see it.”
She frowned. As if this were personal, and not the biggest business there was. “I can give you twelve hours. After that, I’ll be forced to assume you’ve taken the side of United Space.”
Oliver said he understood that. He thanked her for the offer. He was halfway to his feet when he said, “What about the potatoes?”
“Ixxy can take you out in the rover, if things are calm. Likely they won’t be.”
“You said the plants were the most important thing here.”
“They are. But only if we have a colony. We have to hold the colony first.”
Oliver returned to the greenhouse in a fog. He pulled more carrots than he should have, and ate them tip to tail, including the stalks. He didn’t believe it until the contract was transmitted. It was over a thousand pages long. No one rich enough to receive a contract like this read it. They hired lawyers to do it, or used custom entities they owned a piece of, too. What did he think he would find here? One percent of the company would make him a billionaire several times over, if a value could be put on a human settlement on another planet.
The paying colonists bought their way onto the rocket, nothing more. The only owners here were the Prince and Queen. He would be, if not the King of Mars, then its Lord. Lord of dead dirt and red sky.
No dumb trans kid from Texas got the chance to become interplanetary royalty. But signing immediately was too thirsty, too servile. He had twelve hours. Once he signed, a war would begin. First, he would go for a walk.
• • •
Oliver followed the path of the buried irrigation line on his hike out to the grow pods, the thing he’d failed to do before, checking for leaks or any sign the relentless wind was exposing it. He’d double-checked his suit’s tank and drawdown rate before leaving the airlock. Still, he’d had to stop at the top of the first ridge again, gasping for breath.
When he reached the pods, the potato plants were still there, as they’d been on camera, though this had felt impossible until he set eyes on them. He’d hauled out a new sealed pack of seed potatoes to plant while he was out here. Why? It felt impossible to waste a visit. Planting something new was his own act of clinically insane optimism.
First, he forced himself to check on the living plants. He unzipped the outer chamber of the potatoes’ pod, and then entered the main area. They’d been growing for eleven days now, and it was obvious what hadn’t been over the video: many were pale and leggy and appeared to be dying.
Oliver ripped the ailing plant closest to him out of the ground and sliced open the seed potato with his utility knife. Mahogany veined its white flesh—an injury from cold. The damage was enough to kill off the emergent plant. But how had it happened? The temperature in here was a controlled seventy degrees. He pulled off the backpack that held the seed potatoes and checked its status. It was set to seventy, but the real-time temperature gauge read thirty degrees. This pack had been designed for Antarctic expeditions, but he might as well have been carrying a fucking backpack. He picked up one of the potatoes; he couldn’t feel its cold through his suit gloves.
Oliver slammed the case shut and lumbered out of the airlock to the planet’s surface. The pods were flimsy and idiotic-looking against this endless expanse of dirt. He popped open the case, and in violation of every contamination regulation ever drafted, threw them into the valley below. Each painstakingly preserved spark of life hit the scree and rolled out of sight.
He’d almost interrupted a global stream to declare he’d successfully grown plants on Mars. But he hadn’t. He’d lost another crop because his equipment wouldn’t stop breaking.
After he’d hurled the dead potatoes, he slumped down on the ridge and stared out at the mountains. He used to fantasize about climbing them. On Earth, he’d trained himself to scale fourteeners in Colorado and California, thinking it would harden him for life on a hostile planet. He imagined himself now, in this bulky, failing suit, scrabbling for a handhold, and trusting that pivotal moment when his weight shifted, and he could fall.
On his last hike out here, it had felt impossible to make it out this far. Now it felt impossible not to keep going. Once, soon after they’d landed, Ixxy had refused to come back to base and had to be hauled back by force. It had taken a team. They’d almost died. He feared if he moved at all, he would march off like the Prince, except no one would come after him.
• • •
Anthony’s voice came over the comm, not speaking to him but about him. “No, there’s a heart rate, and the O2 is drawing down—Oliver? You read?”
It felt better to stay silent.
“I repeat, Oliver Judd, do you read?”
“I read,” he said.
“What’s your status?”
Oliver flicked up his air gauge. Five hours and thirty-seven minutes left. Was the suit leaking after all? Or had he been out there for that long?
“I’m not authorized to leave the station,” Anthony said. “Can you make it back on your own?”
“I’m sure I can.”
“Will you?”
“They’re dying,” Oliver said. “A stupid malfunction. God, we’re so fucked.”
“Want to come back in and talk about a solution?”
“I’m gonna stay out here a little longer.”
Oliver stood. He started walking. Down the ridge, toward the mountains. What would happen to that shiny contract if the Queen found out he was still a failure? He could lie. The King always did.
Another voice came on. Lillian. “Oliver, the compost mix is too hot again. You’re on roster to rebalance it.”
They must have thought he was dying or dead out here if the doctor was on the comm. “Maybe I’m on strike,” he said.
“A strike is a group project.”
Anthony butted back in. “If you want to go back outside, you could go tomorrow. But what if you walked back now while we talked? What was the malfunction?”
Oliver’s foot slid as he skidded down the scree, but he caught himself and did a controlled slide. He was officially further than he’d ever been from the habitat. Had the Queen watched him go over the edge of the ridge, too? Nothing was private here, she’d said. But she wasn’t on the comm.
No one spoke as Oliver hiked into the valley. Then, Anthony said, “Even if those starts die, it counts for a lot to show it was possible. Don’t you think?”
Oliver said, “Our shit is breaking. It’s all going to fail.”
“We came out here knowing that’s how it could go.”
“But I don’t want it to!”
No one on the other end of the comm responded. Getting angry at the planet, visibly angry, was like taking a shit on the floor. Though was Oliver angry at the planet, or the company? Could they be disentangled?
Lillian said, “You can’t outrun the compost, my friend.”
Oliver stopped trudging on the wide, empty plain. God, he hated her. His grand, self-destructive gesture boiled down to avoiding chores. There were a lot of stupid ways to die on Mars. Walking out here alone, letting his air run down, was textbook stupid.
“I don’t know why they survived this time,” Oliver said softly. “I don’t know if I can do it again.”
“Dude, we don’t know if any of this will work.”
Oliver turned back toward the ridge. The pods glinted in the sunlight. A few of the starts were still green. In the dream of this colony, that green filled this valley, rows upon rows of pods growing improbable food. He would be an old man then.
When Oliver was old, who would plant? Whose backs would be bent, nestling potatoes into the ground with practiced hands?
A lord stood up on the ridge and looked out over his lands, watching the work. But when Oliver imagined that moment in the future, he was down here, digging a hole and nestling in something that might live.
About the Author
Meghan McCarron’s short fiction has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy awards, and reprinted in multiple Year’s Best anthologies. She lives in Los Angeles.
Please visit Lightspeed Magazine to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the July 2025 issue, which also features short fiction by sadoeuphemist, Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, Katherine Crighton, Spencer Nitkey, Naomi Kanakia, Paul Crenshaw, Leah Cypess, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.