28-03-2004, 22:20
Phobos hung like a ball of ash over the blue green red of Mars, an ominous sphere shroud compeltely in the swirling vield of Mallbertan biomass. Here and there bits of steel poked through the otherwise unbroken sea of smoke, towers and spires exposed naked to space, docking stations, recievers and transmission coils, the necessities of communication and commerce.
Sporadic bursts of light, reflecting pallidly against dull carbon hulls gave away the dozens of irregular craft, grown rather than constructed, which navigated the upper reaches like insects on a murky stagnant pond. They were freighters mostly, holds swollen to bursting with ores unique and abundant mined from the inscrutable surface below, perparing for the brief trip home to Mallberta proper.
Periodically, these tiny motes would lift nearly silently, arcane drives humming with nameless energies propelling them unheralded into the thick darkness between Martian orbit and terrestrial hive, only to return days later, bellies shrunken and empty, or perhaps half-full with rarely needed equipment or supply, the odd commander or colonist.
One of these prodigal sons, eager on the homeward stretch, listed strangely, course ragged and uncertain, a viscous fluid pouring langourously out its ruptured hull. It was barely a thousand kilometers away, a brief moment, when the reactor finally gave out, a dull thump of inaction nearly audible as it's running lights flickered then extinguished. Turning slightly, a victim of inertia and gravity, it began to twist and fall, a wasp killed mid-flight tumbling slowly, but with increasing sureness, to the foreign lands below.
Sporadic bursts of light, reflecting pallidly against dull carbon hulls gave away the dozens of irregular craft, grown rather than constructed, which navigated the upper reaches like insects on a murky stagnant pond. They were freighters mostly, holds swollen to bursting with ores unique and abundant mined from the inscrutable surface below, perparing for the brief trip home to Mallberta proper.
Periodically, these tiny motes would lift nearly silently, arcane drives humming with nameless energies propelling them unheralded into the thick darkness between Martian orbit and terrestrial hive, only to return days later, bellies shrunken and empty, or perhaps half-full with rarely needed equipment or supply, the odd commander or colonist.
One of these prodigal sons, eager on the homeward stretch, listed strangely, course ragged and uncertain, a viscous fluid pouring langourously out its ruptured hull. It was barely a thousand kilometers away, a brief moment, when the reactor finally gave out, a dull thump of inaction nearly audible as it's running lights flickered then extinguished. Turning slightly, a victim of inertia and gravity, it began to twist and fall, a wasp killed mid-flight tumbling slowly, but with increasing sureness, to the foreign lands below.