King of Mars

by Jack Stornoway

almost a week for the house's oxygen recylcer to grow enough algae to get the oxygen levels in the house high enough that they could remove their respirator masks. It took longer to warm the old house up. It was winter in the northern hemisphere, and the only source of energy the house had was its solar panels. The walls of the old red concrete house had electrical heating built in, but the solar panels weren't receiving enough light to heat the house to much above freezing.

  About a week after they arrived in Milanković Crater Ozzy started to complain about a strange electric feeling in his skin. A couple days later he was incapacitated in his bed, unable to move due to shooting pain in his muscles. There was no doctor in Milanković Crater, but the priest came to their house to check on Ozzy. He lived in the old Corporate Era Catholic church, however he didn't appear to have any formal training. He said Ozzy's condition looked like Gadolinium poisoning. It was a condition that sometimes affected miners, and would subsided in a few days.

  "I'm sorry, Eve," Ozzy said after the priest left. "When I get well, we'll get out of here and I'll make it up to you." He coughed, and his teeth started chattering.

  "Get some rest, honey" she replied. He smiled and relaxed, breathing more easily. She sat there in the cold, a thirty-two-year-old woman who had failed in life, and fled with her husband, a lifelong prospector, to ended up here, in a virtually abandoned crater in one of Mars most remote areas.

  Her parents had been British colonists that had settled in Sirenum colony, half way around the planet. Her husband's parents had been the same, and she'd met him in Sirenum when they were in Icaria College. Ozzy and her both had an interest in the early prospectors, although in Ozzy's case it was more of an obsession. Those early explorers who worked for the corporations before the Mars Treaty had divided the planet into colonial zones. They who explored an unknown world with no hopes of help if they ran into problems. It was a romantic notion, an unreal concept of Mars only a century earlier.

  Unfortunately, as obsessed as he was with the early prospectors, Ozzy never seemed to find a great stake of his own. For more than a decade, they'd searched the isolate regions of the planet, but everywhere they went, someone had beaten them there. They'd lived in the old Russian airship they'd bought real cheap in Daedalia, as the revolutionaries drove the Russian government from Mars. They'd lived on that airship for more than a decade, and now it was gone.

  Ozzy Mac an Bhaird had made his fair share or poor decisions, and he'd never had much luck either, but he always met the morning with a smile, and fixed his eyes on the horizon. Ozzy had planned the trip north to explore the lowlands, as they'd spent almost a decade floating across the southern highlands and had little to show for it. They'd prospected at various places as they moved north of the equator, but found nothing of consequence. If they could find a major deposit of a rare metal they could sell the location to one of the mining corporations in Marte Vallis, and they'd be setup for the rest of their lives. It was the dream of every prospector.

  But now they were stranded here in this dismal crater, and Ozzy was very sick. Eve put her husband to bed and went to the station for medicine.

  "Medicine?" Suleiman asked. "We don't have much medicine. I can get you something for the pain, and some vitamins. If he starts vomiting we have something for that, or for diarrhoea. Not much else."

  Tadeusz came into the shop and Suleiman wandered of to a store-room to get some pain-killers. Despite her dislike of the man, she forced herself to stand still, but couldn't look Tadeusz in the eye.

  "You know," Tadeusz broke the silence. "You and me should be friends. The winters here are very cold and very long, more than an Earth year long."

  In the store-room Suleiman started chuckling.

  "That won't be happening, Mr. Warszawski. When husband gets better, we'll leave."

  "And if he does not get better?"

  A jolt of fear shot through Eve. "He will," she said firmly. "He'll get well, and then we'll leave."

  "Maybe," Tadeusz said grinning at her, his teeth yellow and broken. "If I take you to Ciudad de Arcadia. But, maybe I will just keep you here. More workers is a good thing."

  "That's ridiculous!" Eve looked directly at him for the first time since he'd entered. "You couldn't get away with that! What about the authorities?"

  "The Sudaméricans?" Tadeusz laughed with genuine amusement. "They do not come here. This is a Corporate Mining Zone from before the Mars Treaty. We are autonomous. Do you know why the people here don't talk to you? Because I told them not to. Do you know why they stay here at this mine? Because they can not get away either! They are mining gadolinium for me and Suleiman and they are not even paid! I feed them, and Suleiman ships the gadolinium back to Arabia without the Sudaméricans in Ciudad de Arcadia, or anybody in Europe even knowing! KGHM Polska Mars went bankrupt decades ago! I pay no taxes! In this place I am a king! And these are my subjects. And now you are my subject also. This place is so far from the other colonies that nobody ever comes here, and nobody ever leaves."

  Two days later Ozzy was dead.

  He died suddenly in the night, but was rational until the end. That evening before he died, he told Eve something he had been keeping to himself. It seemed he knew he was going to die. "Eve, I know what happened to the airship. Tadeusz towed it away. He hid it on the north side of the dunes. One of the miners told me, that last day prospecting."

  "It's all right Ozzy, we'll find it," she said gently. The thought of the distant rim-walls that trapped them filled her with horror. In all of Mars, there could be no more desolate place than this crater out in the northern lowlands.

  "We'll manage," she whispered, but she knew he was dying.

  They buried Ozzy Mac an Bhaird in the old cemetery dating from the Corporate Era at the edge of the colony. The priest gave a eulogy in Polish. Most of the miners were at the funeral, there wasn't much the way of entertainment in crater. It became clear that no one in the crater wanted much to do with her. They were all thin, obviously malnourished and terrified of Tadeusz and Suleiman.

  She found out that there were only ten men and six women in the colony. Four of the men were Sudaméricans, and six were Polish, descendants of the old corporate mining colony. The six women were all Polish except one, a Persian woman from the old Iranian mining colony in Hyperborea far to the north. The Sudamérican men and Iranian woman had been hired by Tadeusz in Ciudad de Arcadia. Homeless people with no family, and no one to miss them.

  After the funeral, Eve talked with the miners while Tadeusz and Suleiman ignored her. Tadeusz and Suleiman had the only weapons in the colony. Besides the laser pistol that Tadeusz always carried, he and Suleiman had sonic blasters and Suleiman also had a laser rifle. She found out that Tadeusz had killed a man just a week before Eve and Ozzy had arrived.

  Eve realized Tadeusz's greatest fear as she spoke to the few miners that would talk to her. She remembered Tadeusz's anxiety that first night when Ozzy and her had arrived. Here in his little kingdom, he ruled supreme while the miners slaved for him and depended on him for food and water. He controlled the only means of escape, as well as the only source of food, drugs, and liquor. He had complete control. Most of the miners didn't even have a still-suit, they wore homemade clothes sewn together from the carbon-fibre sacks the food came in. Several even shared old respirator masks, meaning only one could go outside at a time.

  "What about the auto-gyros?" she asked Dariusz, one of the miners. "Couldn't you steal one and get away?"

  "No chance!" he answered. "Warszawski's airship is faster that any of the auto-gyros, and he'd have us before we made it to the rim-walls. Besides, where could we go on the supplies we have? We are a long way from any other colonies."

  During the morning before her husband's burial, she tried to remember exactly what the map-display in the airship had shown when they'd landed. The crater was in the northeast sector of Arcadia Colony, and far to the south was Mars Colony. There wasn't much else on the chart. The northern lowlands were never-endin
g sea of sand-dunes occasionally pockmarked by the odd crater. It was nothing like the rugged highlands where her and Ozzy were from.

  A dust storm blew into the crater as the funeral service was finishing. She started walking away as soon as the frail old priest finished the eulogy. When the grave had been filled Tadeusz found her in the bar talking with a few miners. They disappeared as he approached.

  "Get your things together," Tadeusz ordered. "You are moving in with me."

  The day had been emotional enough, and Tadeusz was the last thing she needed. It didn't take much to bring her to tears, but she intentionally milked it for all it was worth. "Oh, not now! Please!" She sobbed hysterically. "My husband just died! My husband! My Ozzy!"

  She made the most unappealing spectacle of herself she could, and finally, disgusted, Tadeusz shrugged it off. "Fine, tomorrow, then," he declared and trudged away.

  Eve was packing up her husband's still-suit a few hours later when she found the knife. He must have planned to use it himself because he hadn't mentioned it to her. She didn't recognize the