Chapter 1

December 16, 2162
Lake Jezero Crater, Mars

Lake Jezero was a lake of broken ice pieces. Just a few years ago, a small moon made of ice was dropped in this crater and shattered before it landed on a military base populated by the Eastern Bloc soldiers disguised as pirates. The ice reached up to five feet in depth in some places and here at the buried military base, the tops of several concrete shelters could be seen sticking above the ice, and one person with a tracked excavator was digging her way toward the shelters.

Eris Carmine-Rodriguez drove the little tracked excavator down the alley she constructed by digging out the chunks of ice then freezing a wall of ice with a flamethrower, preventing the ice from collapsing on her. She had just uncovered another Eastern Bloc treasure. Protected in a concrete shelter, the small ship was in perfect shape and Eris towed it out of the shelter with the excavator. She had connected hoisting straps to it and was headed back to the edge of the crater, where the road that angled up the side of the crater led her out of the crater and to her temporary facility. There she switched from the excavator to a scooter, a multi-use utility truck, and flew out over the crater. She landed the scooter behind her prize and connected the chain that was wrapped around her find to the hoisting hook of the scooter, then climbed back into the scooter and lifted.

It wasn’t long before her prize was dangling below the scooter. A Western Alliance F-231 SpaceStreak, the fastest interceptor/fighter in the known universe. Her collection was getting bigger and bigger. She had two of the famous F-733’s, an E model with no .50 caliber guns and an F model with factory installed 50cals. She had an older F-303 before it was ruined for atmospheric flight, a FB-719 fighter/bomber ... except for the F-231, these were all ships that fought at Venus Prime. What were these jerks doing?

She had sole permission to excavate the military base that the Eastern Bloc had built on Mars and so far she’s uncovered many vehicles which are in a garage getting repaired and ready for sale, several eastern design scooters which were gutsy but built like battleships. They needed to be lightened up before they were useful. Along with the vehicles, she had tons of tools and other equipment. She also found emergency shelters that were full of soldiers that were crushed when the weak shelter they were in collapsed under the weight of the ice. With her excavator, Eris dug a huge trench in the ground and buried them. Her time with the Western Alliance Navy Berserkers gave her a respect for military people, especially these blokes that were led so poorly.

The Eastern Bloc had built a dozen bomb proof spacecraft shelters and so far each shelter had safely held a fighter spacecraft but no spacemen. It looks like the troops weren’t allowed to shelter with the spacecraft when their world was ending. She had seven shelters and seven months to go before she had to evacuate the dig. That was ok, she had enough scrap metal, tools, electronics, vehicles, and plasticine ‘lumber’ to keep her busy for years. Everything else she gets out of that hole is ‘gravy on the taters’ as her gyrene husband would say.

The F-231 fascinated her. It was long, pointy, and nasty looking. It had a long nose and its tail was a gigantic exhaust for the N-52 engine, known as the Moon Buster. This machine was clearly designed to dip into the atmosphere because of its streamlined design and stub wing pylons. The pilot’s front view screen conformed with the tubular body, and the aft canopy for the navigator was directly behind the pilot. The navigator had no windscreens; he had no view outside his cockpit. Two stub wing pylons with missile launchers and rocket exhausts at the tips stuck out at the middle of the long tube shaped body, and at the root of the pylons were two gaping maws which held the lasers and 20mm canons. Slug throwers were becoming quite popular since Commander White created the algorithm that linked the guns with the propulsion system to keep the ship stable and counteract recoil as the gun fired. She couldn’t wait to get it back to the shop where she could tinker.

Slowly, she gained altitude, lifting the F-231 with her trusty scooter. Soon she was looking down at the crater. It was maybe a third filled with ice and from what she heard, the next solid ice moon that her brother-in-law was bringing would fill this crater to the brim with ice. Water for all of Mars for a century and more. Eris hauled the F-231 straight from the pit to her main shop and dropped it at the big air lock that closed around it. Then, going into the shop through the personnel access airlock, she opened the inner hanger door and there it was, gleaming in its anger. She hooked a tow bar to the front strut and pulled it into her main shop with a tracked excavator and the first thing she did after sealing the door was to copy down the ID number WA57-0002. Sitting down at her desk, Eris pulled off her gloves and fired up her computer terminal and logged into the Shipfinder’s database, then typed in the serial number. After a few moments, the information on the F-231 popped up.