The Rust Ball

James Nabor huddled beneath his garish polyplast desk in mortal fear. The muffled shouts and jeers of the mob in the hallway were growing ever more insistent; there were over a hundred of them out there and thousands more down in the plaza below, every one of them baying for his blood. The steel pressure lock door was now all that stood between him and his deadly visitors.

The orange-pink hues of the sky outside streamed through the viewing portal, illuminating the office with an eerie glow. Normally Nabor kept terrestrial scenes projected over the screen wall in an attempt to escape the grinding reality of his life, but the rioters had cut the power to the building and that was no longer an option. Even the quiet hum of the air recyclers, a sound he had known for almost twenty years, had been abruptly cut making the room feel strangely alien.

He gulped down the stale air and wiped away the perspiration on his brow with his sleeve. Nabor was a silver haired man, in his sixty third year of life, red faced and overweight he wore a smart brown nexoweave suit which was about decade out of fashion. For eighteen years he had served as the Administrator of the Olympus Prime colony on Mars, a job he despised.

“Damnit...” James snarled, as he attempted to remove the dust from the chamber of the antiquated plasma pistol that lay in his lap, “damnit damnit damnit! Damn it all!” Nothing from Earth worked properly here, including his sagging body.

Back home he’d had a promising career in politics laid out ahead of him; as the son of a senator all the right doors had been open and everything had seemed to be going well - right up until that fateful ambassadorial garden party. Admittedly, with two decades of hindsight he could see why the piggy jokes would have been offensive, but in all fairness, he thought, he had not known that she was the best friend of the President’s daughter. That had been end of it; his career and his life had been shelved and mothballed – he had been reassigned to the most remote posting a politician could hope to be given and all but forgotten by those at the top. He wondered if single person out there would remember him kindly once that door swung open, he doubted it.

Mars’s history had been leading to this point for some time - Earthlings had taken to calling this place the ‘Rust Ball’, supposedly a clever play upon the planet’s colour and a reference to the post-industrial poverty of a region in Earth's history known as the Rust Belt. It had been over two Earth centuries since man had first colonized Mars and like all of humanity’s boldest forays into space it had come on a wave of vain nationalism.

In the name of their nation’s greatness those first colonizers had done their best to make this place as much like home as possible; huge reserves of underground ice had been melted, refined and brought to the surface. The engineered pangealum bacteria had been unleashed to modify the atmosphere with staggeringly rapid success. Mammoth geo-engineering projects had been employed to steadily warm the planet and stabilize its temperature swings. Slowly, Mars had been made close enough to Earth to support human life, so long as that human life was willing to wear simple respirators and accept a suite of cybernetic modifications.

Despite the difficulties, hundreds of thousands of colonists were drawn to the red planet with the promise of adventure and the great untapped wealth Mars was said to possess. However this was not to be, soon after man had once again demonstrated its power and mastery of science, the fickle Earth public turned its attentions to other matters; as the funding dried up for the Martian project so did the terraforming stall. Adding to the difficulties it soon became evident that it was far more economically viable from Earth’s perspective to exploit the resources of the asteroid belt than it was to invest in Mars’s enterprises.

Hence, for these past two hundred years or so, Mars had existed in a state of inescapable poverty and subsistence upon Earth. Those proud colonists who had stubbornly remained had transformed themselves across the generations; having realised that they couldn’t expect Earth to help change Mars to suit man more, they used genetic engineering to change man to suit Mars more. These days a native born Martian was as similar to a human as a human was to an ape.

Despite Nabor’s apathetic political efforts, over the past decade animosity between Earth and Mars had reached a head. The Martians pressed incessantly for more support and investment in Mars, whilst deeply distrusting their human cousins and resenting the outsider administration which still ruled. At the same time Earth had suffered a wave of Martian terrorist incidents at the hands of several politically extreme groups and there was growing support at home for a policy of pulling all support funds for Mars which would essentially be a death sentence for the Martians.

It was in this tinderbox climate, that just three hours ago, Administrator James Nabor had been forced to announce during his annual budget speech sweeping cuts to several large administration projects. These projects employed tens of thousands of hardworking Martians.

As Nabor dwelled upon the mistakes of the past, the door of the office slid open with a hiss. He gasped as the pressure of the air dropped from a comfortable one atmosphere to thin Martian Standard, lightheaded he grabbed his respirator and pushed it to his face. He levelled the pistol at the door and got off six shots before it overheated. Futilely he flung the useless pistol at the rioters that now swarmed unstoppably into his office.

“I Hate Mars!” he screamed, as James Nabor was crushed beneath the waves of history.



(Word count: 992)