Chapter 9

Tessellation Tesseract was dusty.

She had not realized until she was put to work on Mars for a week what dusty meant. Dusty, on Earth, meant being a bit dusty, maybe a little sandy, in need of a shower. But the dust on Mars, doubly so when you were working back to back shifts at constructing the solar system’s biggest and most desperately needed refugee camp, got into everything. It got under her nails. It got between her teeth. It got into her hair, into her eyes, into the folds of her skin, into her pores, into her brain, into her dreams. When she slept, she didn’t have confusing sexual dreams about a sleek boy with dancing eyes and a wicked smile – no, no, she had dreams about drowning in dust. She had dreams about dust pouring in over her head – red dust, and screaming.

And then there was how it hit the machines. Every day it felt like she was spending half of it trying to track down some electrical fault or mechanical failure in a cutter, rover, roller, or press – and every time, she would get into the guts of the machine and find, yes.

More dust.

The reason was that the terraforming of Mars was centuries out from being completed, and most of it had been centered around the old cities – cities people called ‘the domes’ despite none of them having anything even close to a dome capping them. Around those cities, the initial growth of fixing and cleansing lichen, mosses, and rudimentary shrubs had spread out on seeds carried by drones and bots and the whistling wind herself – and around those cities, the dust had started to become less common, clumping into soil that was nowhere near close to growing a single plant, but was still a major stride forward.

Not so here.

Not so out in the outback, in the areas that the local Martians called Comet Central because the spacy had been dropping icy rocks onto it for decades to warm the planet and to spread moisture into her atmosphere. The only human constructions had been parts of the vast artificial magnetosphere that humanity had been tentatively threading over the planet. Calling it that was a ludicrous exaggeration, it was just the bones of the bones of the precursor of something that would one day shield the planet from the constant bombardment of the sun’s radiation – but now, those spines were being in-filled by her own slapdash buildings.

Tessa’s grandfather had been a farmer, and he had been very disappointed in her for many reasons. But she couldn’t help but remember what he had said, once, when grumbling about some ... vote or another in the council.

Eating your seed corn.

“Yeah, well, the corn’s all dust now,” Tessa muttered as she slammed her sealer into place, worked the trigger, and popped it down with a cha-chunk cha-chunk cha-chunk. When she stepped back, she regarded the final bit of wall on unit 3A-41, which was going to house ten more civilians. The pressurization team got to work and within a few minuets, the interior was a place that humans could live without breath masks. She nodded to herself, and then turned to watch the hive of drones skimming by to start laying down the foundations for 3A-42. The buildings were connected but subdivided – it was one of those devil’s calculations that the high forehead types had crunched.

How many people can we lose if we get a hole punched in here? How many is acceptable versus how much more can we save on construction time.

The issue was the closer they cut the construction time to impact and final evacuation, the less time they had for safety and-

The ground quaked.

Tessa swore. “Shit!”

She sprinted over, others loping after her. As she ran, she heard Gillian’s sharp, acerbic voice over the line.

“Gods damn it, Lunty, I told you that wasn’t a cleared zone!”

Two cargo drones had tried to occupy the same location. With their safety margins cut down for speed and their sensors overworked and overwhelmed by the sheer number of people in the area they had to track for – combined with the lack of proper intelligence networks due to the limited infrastructure – the two beetle like skimmers had slammed into one another. One was now turned over, and the other was burning merrily as oxygen and accelerant worked together despite the thin atmosphere. Tessa gestured with her left hand.

“Come on!” She said. “We have to get this out, we have to get beetle-5 back upright and moving, lets go, people!”

Fire extinguishers gushed, though they didn’t need to work nearly as hard as they would have on Earth. A Devonian woman wrapped in the cold gear and pressure coveralls that everyone else was wearing used a mag-crane to drag the ruined beetle out of the way, and the cargo bot that was only tipped over was righted by the simple expedient of revving its skimmer engines, lifting with their hands – a massed group of twenty people putting their backs into it – and then stepping backwards.

Which was when it happened.

Tessa clenched, gasped, jerked upright, her hands going to the small of her back. Breath whuffed out of her and she gasped.

“Tesseract, what’s wrong?” the voice was of their work-team leader, Yale.

“I’m fine!” Tessa hissed. No. No, no, no, I’ve been so fucking careful.

She started to hobble away from the loader, but Yale was already walking towards her. “Fine, huh?” he asked, underhanding her a wrench. Tessa caught it, then gasped, grabbing at her back. “Can you bend over?” he asked, and Tessa clenched her teeth.

“I can,” she said.

“The fuck you can,” Yale said, grabbing her arm. He frog-marched her, which was agony, to the nearest airlock. Once inside of the refugee camp, he lifted her pressure coverall as tears of shame and pain burned in her eyes. She closed them tightly as Yale prodded at her back. “Your back feels like it’s got steel plates back here – you’ve pulled a muscle.” He yanked the pressure coverall down, then snapped. “Get to the medtech.”

“I can keep working,” Tessa said.

“Do I have to make it an order?” Yale asked.

“You’re a civilian contractor, you’re not in the spacy, you’re not under military discipline,” Tessa said, her voice growing mulish.

“Doc. Now.”

Tessa clenched her jaw. She felt like blood was sliding down her cheeks – tears bobbing in the rust red. She started to walk forward, hobbling slightly, as Yale hurried back outside. The interior was already beginning to look like a classic Martian city – the Martians were taking this all in stride. Bonded pairs were arranging their planters and eco-pets, while a communal kitchen was already working on turning the collected rations into something tastier than just classic slop. Someone had a small indoor cricket arena set up, and that was entirely occupied by Devonians, who loved their racial sport with a wild abandon. Tessa shook her head and kept limping along. Only Devonians would set up cricket before they got beds installed.

When she finally came to the medical center of this part of the refugee complex, there was a short line, mostly people with chronic ailments who had needed to scarper from their homes with only a modest ration of their supplies. A diabetic woman was sitting ahead of Tessa, and ahead of her, there was a Devonian with Sutter’s Syndrome, his skin looking washed out and pale. He was running right up on the edge of his treatment running out.

They were sat across a holovid that was, thankfully, not showing the news. Unfortunately, it was showing the latest run of Brood War competitions and Tessa hated Brood War. She glared at the screen as SpookyChamp, the current best Protoss main of the Luna/Lagrange, set his army moving out at some tactically advantageous moment, producing excited wails from the commentators.

“Three hundred year old sport and they still haven’t fixed Dragoon pathfinding,” she said, angrily, as the Devonian ahead of her got up to get his treatment.

The game kept going and Tessa continued to hate herself. She hated herself for being weak. For being stupid. Lift with your back, you stupid big blundering bitch. The acid thought bit deep – and morphed, as she continued to glare at the screen showing the pixilated warriors in humanity’s oldest electronic sport do battle. Can’t even leap for something ... just because you’re worried, what, it makes you less of a woman? Stupid. Stupid! Either shit or get off the pot. Either go for Leo, or stop thinking about him.

But she couldn’t help it. Her mind kept drifting back to Leo, seeing his sleek body, his thick, heavy cock.

She liked cock – but she liked it on women. For a moment, she thought of her first lover – awkward and stumbling, her a young and shy girl who had just finished her first regime of hormone replacement therapy, still feeling out what it was like to not feel like she wanted to chew her own skin off. She had gone to a club that she definitely shouldn’t have gone too, and met an older woman named Heather. A lot older. That awful old woman had husked about how she really shouldn’t be robbing the cradle, and that had been it, Tessa had lost her virginity to a woman old enough to be her mother, a smoker whose kisses had tasted like the ashes of a nuclear holocaust.

So, no.

She liked cock.

But she liked women.

But gods.

Gods she had fallen for Leo. Hadn’t she? Her cheeks burned furiously as she remembered Gillian’s moans and grunts – but her skin had felt the prickling attention of Leo. When she had noticed him slipping out, her heart had sank. Had he not wanted to watch her with his girlfriend? Was she not good enough?

Not good enough? Idiot! Moron! What the fuck are you even talking about!?

Well, he’d definitely hate her now, if he learned she was such a stupid mess in her brain. That she had gotten easy chicks so long that it had taken him giving her a stern talking to to even get a foot in the door with Gillian – and what kind of a pathetic, stupid-

“Miss Tesseract? You’re up?”

Tessa blushed, lifting her chin. “Right!” she exclaimed and stood – and gasped as her back flared in agony. She hobbled into the med-tech’s office and was taken, first, to the scanner. The scanner was based on a bit of Devonian biotech that people had been modifying since the Arcship had first been towed into Earth orbit. It was, in effect, part of their original bio-replication program, their artificial wombs. It was how Devonian populations had grown so quickly on Earth – those wombs had needed pretty stiff scanning and overwatch programs to make sure that the babies inside grew up healthily. Machines could be mass produced, but it remained highly difficult to beat mother nature at her job.