2503.02 2/31 — Rights #Writever CW: Fictional Violence

Prologue

May Ri clanged the arm of the mining exoskeleton into the wall of the habitat, drawing sparks, blocking the onrushing man, cutting him off when he tried to dodge under—before flipping him backwards back down the corridor. Blood gushed from his nose to match what stained his hands.

"I have the right!" he yelled, arm across his face to stem the flow. "She's my wife!"

May Ri's footsteps clanged as she stomped forward. He slid himself back on the floor as the other women in the Vigilantes caught up. They'd used the ugly word, Vigilante, intentionally; women weren't allowed but needed to police their domes, or risk injury from stronger men who suddenly got ideas.

She said, "Your wife is an import, like me? You left her to give birth alone, to raise her daughter, and now you want to take that daughter away? To sell to your boss? Really? Your right?"

She looked at the harried women, some breathing hard, sweating. Faces gone pale in fear, others with wide eyes trying to process how cruel reality had once again smashed all sense of security. May Ri understood: if they kept the male returnees from the inner belt disaster locked out of the habitat long enough, they'd have to capitulate. However, if she failed to demonstrate now that the Vigilantes could hold firm when a man broke his wife's arm, beating her to have his way—

He yelled back, "Marrying her off to a better life? Yes! Who are you to argue a man's God given right—?"

"Really?" she interrupted. Women had never had reliable rights, if you trusted history hadn't been rewritten. She didn't. She'd read books made of paper, yellowed, that smelled of centuries past! Her five kilogram gauntleted hand already in motion, she screamed, "Mars is not Earth! It never will be!" #RSMarsNeededWomen

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2503.03 3/31 — Housewife #Writever CW: Dystopian

The day May Ri found an advert for the EM Mars Colonization effort wasn't a good one. During school prayer in history class, she moved her mouth with her head down, reading her book plate instead. She hadn't suspected the substitute teacher could read lips.

"Miss Ri, continue alone."

When she did an imitation of a gasping fish, the whole 9th grade history class watching, the teacher asked, "Were you even praying?"

May Ri went from embarrassed to angry in a heart beat. "I'm an a-theist. What do you think?"

That got her a meeting with the public school's Decath minister. Her father had told her to hide it, that the laws made pro forma good enough so long as she didn't hurt the feelings of her classmates—but it depended on the believer you mouthed off to.

When she later told Reverend Peters, "I don't have an invisible friend like you do," the elderly man smiled, turned away, hands behind his back, to look out at Lake Le Salle from their vantage on the 95th floor of the Chicago Lakeshore arcology. After minutes being ignored, she stepped beside him, to examine the expanse of blue water, framed by storm clouds to the north, wondering what caught his gaze.

He said, "Makes you feel small and insignificant, doesn't it? God knows you are. What are you planning on when you grow up?"

"I—I like building things. I can do maths."

"Not happening."

Her face heated up as he added, "You lack the necessary blessings. Let me explain it in a way even a girl can understand—" His lips were pursed as his brown eyes caught her gaze.

Only then did she realize she'd begun to sweat, that the temperature in the room was dropping quickly.

"Learn to keep your mouth shut," he said, counting on his fingers, lifting his forefinger. "Some man will marry you not because you are passably pretty but because you look strong enough to bear healthy sons." Another finger. "Become a housewife, do as he tells you, keep quiet, and allow him to teach the blessing to his children." Another thin finger. "Do so and you may yet live a good life, if undeserving..."

After school, she studied the advert posted outside the admin office, later saving it to her book plate. EM Colonizations paid a premium for women, provided schooling. It was understood in not so many words that she needed to bear children, but all hands male and female were precious so she didn't fear that. She understood also that she'd be able to build things, that she'd be able to put to use any engineering skill she acquired. If she couldn't prove Peters wrong, starting that day she had a plan.

Becoming a revolutionary? That was something you don't plan for. #RSMarsNeededWomen 03

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2503.04 4/31— Glue #Writever #gender #fiction #SF

The young woman—no, teenage Martian—leapt up from her frog squat, unstrapping her respirator mask and removing thick rust-stained gloves when May Ri entered the dome. The place smelled of chemicals. Filter fans whirled loudly as she said, "I read that you want to build things. Right?" Slightly taller than than the Earther, she reached out a hand, smiling.

"Right." They shook. Warm, firm.

"Didn't get to finish school before the emergency boarding call? I got you assigned to me. I'll be your teacher. Isn't that nice?"

Emergency boarding, May Ri thought. A euphemism for kidnapping. Not this girl's fault.

The woman squatted, like a frog. Her thighs showed muscles, which in 1/3rd gravity spoke volumes. May Ri sat beside her. She saw no EM Mars tattoo anywhere on her body, easy enough since the Martian basically wore skimpy tight underwear despite the temperature being at most 12ºC. Some sort of synth silk that outlined too much, with rubber-soled powder blue knit socks. She displayed serious curves, but only needed the tight black tank top on Mars to contain it. On Earth, scandalous; Decath propriety police would arrest her on the spot.

Pointing, the Martian said, "These cans are myco-epoxy. These bricks are shrooms grown with symbiotic proprietary algae and bacti." The cheerful egghead rambled on, thumping the rubber balloon outer dome membrane to show where the bricks would go.

"What's your name?" May Ri asked.

The girl stopped short, looking shocked as if static electricity had jumped between them. Redheaded, faintly freckled but with Asian eyelids, and very innocently sexy, her grey eyes blinked. "Um. S-sorry. I'm the first nisei—" First generation. "Reina Itō. Most people call me Onēsanue, which is kind of stupid." She continued her mycological construction techniques lecture.

When May Ri held up a hand, Reina interjected, "No fears! I'm teaching you all about martian building techniques and engineering because you missed out. I'm tops in it! I've got all the books."

She looked the age to be growing out of dolls and rebelling against her mother's clothing choices. It said something about Martian society, but May Ri wasn't sure what. "How old are you?"

"Just turned 7." She grinned brightly, holding up a left hand with long fingers. She proved her age by one thing: a barely suppressed squeal as she rotated a rusted-and-waxed steel ring on her fourth finger. It had a pebble texture that might be interpreted as artsy.

May Ri blinked, shook her head unable to not convert in her head: 13 years, 2 months? "The ring?"

Now Reina smiled. "Roger paid for it. He's on the Belt Asteroid Assessment crew. I married him on vid downlink on my birthday. He's a very cute hardworking import, like you, though kind of quiet, your age, and he'll be returning on resupply in half a year for our honeymoon!"

A Martian half-year. Reina bounced in her squatting position with tendons of elastic, but it was low gravity. May Ri thought it fortunate that no men were there to witness the spectacle. The movement caught her like a magnet to steel.

"We are going to be the people-glue that makes Mars strong, my sansei children and I. Can't wait. Sooooo excited...!" #RSMarsNeededWomen 04

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2503.05 5/31 — Mirror #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

Walking out of the cafeteria, May Ri got a ping. Her book plate read, "You've got a berth. Report immediately." When she touched her ear, Chip, her Mars T.A., shouted, "May Ri, where are you?"

Another scheme to collect his commission? "I've three more years to my degree and I'm tracked for the masters program, so No to the berth."

Her last word echoed. She saw Chip's shaggy head bobbing in the thin crowd as he ran her way, followed by a brawny brown-haired guy in a greenish jumpsuit with a EM Mars triskelion patch.

It matched the tattoo on her forearm.

"Look, look," Chip said, showing his book plate while glad-arming her down a side hall. She struggled when the EM goon clamped an aromatic wet rag over her nose and mouth.

Waking weightless and nauseated—stuffy head pounding, being floated somewhere—despite grogginess, she eyes-closed punched someone, spinning away to bounce off a wall. The click of cartilage, the thump off a bulkhead, the blare of a warning horn, and "Rig for ring spin!" rang in her ears. A tech clapped a bag over her mouth before she vomited up her last meal, while enduring the blonde's glare as blood beaded around her nose. May Ri glowered back. Sitting on the wall, dragged on her butt, her inner ear then her innards, informed her it was now the floor.

Calming down, she noticed soft pastels of the ferrous, ferric, and ferrosoferric colors of Mars on the ceiling, new walls, and spin floor: greenish, pale red, and slightly black. When the tech said, "This one's combative," May Ri saw a grey-haired woman in a ferrous colored uniform approach. She sported a tiny gold braid embroidery patch and a bored expression.

"I was kidnapped!" May Ri shouted, jumping up, nearly losing the weighty barf-bag as she clunked the ceiling with her head. The woman caught her and handed off the bag, placing her on her feet, then let her complain until she lost steam and felt the cold ventilator breeze ten minutes later. She asked, "Are you the captain?" then thought, She's a woman!?

"His wife. I command third shift. What do you want me to do? Turn the ship around?"

It struck her. She was in transit to Mars.

Her kindly eyes were caramel brown. "Engineering student? I get it, but because of a financial disagreement this may be our last transit out for years. Your contract allows managers to make decisions based on your prior choices." She pointed at May Ri's triskelion tattoo that showed the faces of Mars on it. "That's a Yes if we cannot otherwise guarantee fulfilling your contract."

May Ri shivered. Reality had a knack for beating her bloody.

"We will transit back, but insisting on returning means breaching your contract, paying back scholarships, and facing your Decath sponsor to explain why you didn't take the blessing granted you." A glance at a book plate; she frowned. "Reverend Peters? Guess you're from Chicago, too."

The one who'd told her she was undeserving of even being a housewife. Had he approved her application as Mars colonial fodder to get an a-theist off Earth?

"Few Decath ministers choose the high ground. A few recently died. Just saying. Look, other than apologizing to Anne—she's in your cohort—no hard feelings?" She offered a hand, then scrolled her book plate. "Says here you've earned prelim suit qualification. I've exterior maint that needs doing. Since you've missed out on your degree, a space qualification would rank you up. Wanna try...?"

May Ri didn't seethe for long. A woman, especially, couldn't fight the male dominated system. Five days later she found herself outside, tethered, magnetic shoes clamped to the spine of the ship. Behind, aft, she saw the black radiator plate beyond which lay the nuclear rocket. A totally reflective, totally misnamed Starship shuttle stood as a fat needle at the bow. A clip from an ancient vid called 2001: A Space— something had featured in EM Mars propaganda. The five rings looked like that, but silver. The stars, though: Static, unmoving, except as reflected in the rotating rings. Enthralling.

Still...

She regarded herself in the mirror-sheened stainless steel cladding of the transit vehicle. Her tools? She could easily mischaracterize them as a mop and a wash bucket (they weren't), and herself as an exhausted housewife with a sweaty brow (it was) left home to do worthless work. Yet... she could properly characterize it as removing rocket burn debris and polishing out micro-meteor gouges. Most of all, she was doing it in a spacesuit, not Mom's kitchen apron.

"Kind of exciting," she said.

"May Ri?" a comm duty officer asked.

She smiled. "Nothing." #RSMarsNeededWomen 05

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2503.06 6/31 — Equality #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

Free fall and zero gee felt equally like floating, May Ri thought. She liked floating. She liked flying. Through the sky, and on rare occasions in bed.

An hour after the EM Mars plane last dove from a high altitude to give them 30 seconds of nograv, she still felt the sensation of all her flesh not buoyant but lazily filling the space around her body. No weight on any tendon. Her racing heart pumping her up like a balloon and her inner ear telling her she was falling, though that was the point! She scooted across the tubular padded room, screaming in glee. Her attitude didn't earn her points with the other five applicants, one of whom had vomited.

Now, walking out to the concourse at O'Hare, she looked out multistory metal-framed windows at a blue sky of fluffy clouds and the Chicago arcologies in the distance. She thought of the L line she needed to catch to Lakeshore. A swarthy short man with a mop of black hair wildly waved his arms, dark eyes and lips smiling as she veered his way. Chip put his arm around her shoulders and guided her under the sign that read,

Transportation 🚃 Baggage 🛄

"I got pinged. You passed the cert like you passed last week's spin test."

The centrifuge hadn't been half as much fun, but she'd easily imagined flying catapulted to hypersonic in a suborbital needle, or on a lit candle riding in a silvery starship.

"Earned a Plus Plus," Chip continued. He was a T.A. in Space Engineering 201, affiliated with EM Mars. "You're nearly ranked up!"

He handed her papers, made of real wood fiber not plastic—clearly embossed with an EM Mars triskelion logo—then patted his chest, adding a stylus that emitted ink. EM was archaic about some things.

"What is it?"

"Your space-ops contract. Your ticket to the High Ground— Oops!" He glanced at his book plate. "Gotta another arrival. See you at dinner? Sign, now. Ciao!"

She realized she felt more than fondness as he jogged off. Besides looking delicious in tight pants, he listened to her talk about adjusting to uni out of JC, and about everyday life. He was helping her with her dreams of a EM Mars contract job (with childcare!) that meant she'd not be a housewife because a husband could never prevent her from taking a government-favored corporation job.

He also touched her without hesitation. She felt his equal.

Few were the women in her uni cohort, and those were there for MRS degrees. Most guys worried about graduating a girl and what the Decath propriety police might think. She was graduated, and over Raymond and the mistakes she'd made. She wasn't over her hormones, however, and had a black market connection to make sex safer, if no less illegal.

She wasn't sure Chip got her ESP. Doubly so when she waited an hour alone in an intimate part of the floor 106 cafeteria. He arrived breathless, landing in his chair and almost tilting it over, then forking a piece of her cold truBoeuf ™ stew.

"Hey!"

Chewing, he glanced at the contract on the table. "You haven't signed! If it's the Mars colony option, check that." He was sweating.

"I've been thinking—"

"Don't do that," he snapped.

She froze taking back her fork. His privileged male tone chilled her. She jerked the utensil from his grip.

"It's standard boilerplate. You earned this." His smile didn't reach the rest of his worried face. "Sign it while you—" He swore and rushed off, knocking over the chair, catching the eyes of other patrons.

A black suit with black-tinted glasses walked up, motioning a coworker in Chip's direction, glancing at her, the contract, and her average body. "Huh. Latest socket he's been trying to pry a commission out of?"

"Get's a commission if I sign?"

He nodded.

Her flush wasn't embarrassment, so much as growing anger... at herself and at her earlier thoughts. "Let me guess? Third Floor Casino?"

He chuckled. "Ponyville on 60th." Not the infamous cartoon reboot when she was 11—which got banned by the propriety police as explicit—either. "Do you know where we can meet the nopay?"

May Ri grinned. "Actually, I do..."

It earned her twenty silver—folded plastic green bills not E—as she wasn't going to let her sweet innocent book plate anywhere near his book plate; might catch an ETD.

She bought condoms from her black market guy on the 73 Zocalo, ones the seller admitted he gave his daughter, and bought a lead on contraceptives with the change.

After lots of thought, she went to the EM Mars office and checked off the Mars Colonization box—on a contract that bypassed Chip completely. The hefty commission would pay for her books and dorm.

Having the green, red, and black EM Mars triskelion tattooed on her right forearm proved rather painful, though. #RSMarsNeededWomen 06

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2503.07 7/31 — Consent #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

"I'm going to choose," May Ri told herself, building her courage, to get it over with. Her heart beat too fast; she hyperventilated. Her hands felt damp.

Anticipation.

Anticipation of disappointment!

Having lived four months on Mars, if May Ri knew anything, she knew that people lived differently here than on Earth. Today was no exception. Since the cut-off of transits (supplies and new colonists) from Earth, situations like men doing only the dangerous space work polarized male-female interactions further.

As for women...

May Ri knew when signing up that the underlying reason she was here was to expand the gene pool, thus the auditorium she entered. Chicago held similar expectations for her: Under the Decath regime, what was a housewife? Here, she worked to expand the habitat, farmed, and trained in Mars machinery design while living segregated in the women's connected domes. Men visited during scheduled Honeymoons. The contract she'd signed detailed her responsibilities: She'd consented to marry within a (Mars) year.

That Reina called today's meet and greet the "Meat Market" drew recollections of sub-penthouse level Zocalo butcher shops only the most wealthy could visit back home—her previous home. May Ri's body kept its own count of time, way more than the 73 day transit and 120 days on Mars—Men looked really good, today. Within the year time limit, she got to choose a husband, not her parents or a Decath minister.

But...

Considering her bad luck at barely 22—no, 11 Mars—deeper worries stopped her with a hand on the doorframe at the entrance. Her hand shook.

The door monitor said, "Show some confidence, girl, or he'll say No."

May Ri had completely missed the older woman. She rushed in...

Auditorium was too grandiose a word. Seven men in greenish EM Mars jumpsuits stood on a raised stage of epoxied regolith inside a small up-lit shroom dome of pastel greens, reds, and black dusting. Since most Martians squatted or sat crosslegged, the younger women congregated together on square pillows, talking lowly and pointing. Six men talked quietly between themselves.

The seventh...

May Ri inhaled sharply, holding it, walking slowly, scanning the meat for sale. She'd seen few men during the last months; only in intradome meetings or by vid.

She needed to focus.

Look at each.

But, she looked at the seventh again. Stopping when she barked her shins on the knee-high stage.

The seventh had coffee-color skin diluted with a lot of oat milk. Long fingers poked furiously at his book plate. While the others seemed preoccupied by their audience, the sandy-haired guy with cowlicks poked, then touched his ear implant, turning away to talk lowly in a pleasant voice.

That was a magnetic sight.

She warned herself it might be her abstinence, so she judged the rest of the exterior, up and down, and his smile and happy nod when he finished. A glance at the other women confirmed they'd noticed, too.

May Ri said loudly, "I choose him," pointing.

One of the other women jumped to her feet, bowling over five others. In the chatter, May Ri heard, "Can she do that?"

A hand on May Ri's shoulder made her glance back to see red hair and freckles. Her half-pouting teenage tutor, Reina said, "I was going to choose him, too."

"I—" May Ri sputtered.

Reina shook her, giggling. "Take him."

"Wait, Roger? You're married. Via Vid-downlink!"

Does that mean... Two...? Wait, what?

Reina directed her grey eyes at the other group of men. She whispered, "Roger died a month ago in an airlock accident. Didn't want to depress you. I get to choose again." The men heard it and looked worried when she pointed. "I'm choosing Rodriguez." A short swarthy man with short-cropped black hair stood bolt upright.

A shadow made her look up. Her gaze met deep brown eyes and an apprehensive smile. "I'm Randolf," he said in a West European Conglomerate accent. He offered a hand. Professional, doubtless. Not a day under 30 Earth, maybe 35. "What's your name?"

She blinked, hand rising, but didn't turn away; forced herself. She couldn't interpret his nod. She forced herself to think Lust at first sight.

And failed. What came instead was the hope of someone who might treat her as an equal.

Stupid.

Reina cut in. "May Ri's training as an engineer. She never gives up. She's fun, too."

"Fun?" May Ri thought, scoffing, looking at Reina. Then Randolf took her hand. They locked gazes again.

Reina whispered into her ear, mischievously, "I hacked the showers and Rodriguez's cabin cam. His nickname, The Rod, is well deserved. As for Randolf, he's—"

"Randy?"

Reina laughed. Randy answered, "Yes?" looking confused. #RSMarsNeededWomen 07

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2503.19 8/31 — Mental Load #Mars #SpaceOpera

On the occasions when first-wave male colonists, or too many husbands, took up residence in the connected domes usually reserved for women, May Ri worked (hid) in the crèche. Her cheek still burned with the memory of a slap-down two Mars years ago; her subconscious still feared retaliation for the revenge she'd exacted on the Director. Her "vacation" didn't mean she was excused from her design review, which was also a final engineering exam.

Her book plate bounced on her chest on a lanyard. She'd steal any unwary moment that presented itself. "Steal," being the keyword.

Marisela was 1½ Mars. May Ri's eldest nisei was keenly aware when her mother was Dome-Ma. The little one not only tagged around her mother—a little fist in the belt of her mother's hip huggers, nearly pulling down what May Ri would have called underwear, and had on arrival on Mars—but the savvy girl marshaled the other nisei toddlers (7 girls and 1 boy) such that they—and their shroom-blocks, communal red ride-on tunnel digger, flex sheets colored with charcoal and said charcoals, and pastel pony dolls (a new yet ancient girl-toy craze)—seemingly mag-levved around the room, always within May Ri's reach.

Good and bad points to that. Not being able to steal a moment. Bad. Being able to grab and catch an errant frog hopper. Good. With Mars-gravity-tuned tendons, squatting Nisei did hop like frogs.

Fahad, the boy, knocked over his sipper bottle, causing the lid to pop off. May Ri sighed and let go of her book plate. She stood as the boy started sniffing as a girl pointed. "He spilled!"

Carla, one Mars year older than May Ri, gave her a sympathetic smile. The tiny woman in the corral cared for May Ri's recently weened Manette; also her own crawling daughter, and four infants. May Ri was glad to avoid communal wet nurse duties. Not as glad while mopping up the spill, then judging fidgeters for rapid response loo visits or inspecting bottoms in case she missed an indicator. She did like sneak-hugging the two squabbling youngsters on the floor, getting squeals, and having Marisela join hugging her shoulders.

"What if the axles were shorter," she said to herself, a brainwave hitting. As little ones piled on, the best she could do was repeat "Axles" to remember her idea. Tapping her ear, calling it in, would disrupt the workstations as well as the crèche, and she wasn't sure yet it was a good idea—

"I have such a cute daughter!"

"Randy?"

"She really wants to help Mama, doesn't she?" Her husband finished, swinging their squealing daughter through the air. Too soon she quieted, making him set her down. Their little nisei, with toasty skin like her father and dark hair like her mother, swiftly hid in the crowd of children. "What's your schedule?"

Randolf visited, as did all the men, on honeymoons. May Ri doubted Marisela really knew her father as more than a recurring scary stranger. In an Earther sense, he was one to May Ri, too. She mentally scheduled that talk between the three of them.

"Can you help me?" May Ri asked.

"I don't know how to take care of kids."

"You say that a lot," she said, handing off a pony toy, three hands grabbing for it, to which she said, "Play nice," at them, then at him, "You do fine when we're alone."

It was hard to get a sitter when all other women were enjoying their husbands being local and real time. Him managing the girls well meant fun time later. They had lots of fun.

"Do I?" he asked, stepping away from the toy melée. "I've got what I'm good at. You've got yours. Never received the instruction manual for Marisela."

A joke?

The one thing she'd learned running the crèche, other than the extreme sport of multitasking, was anger had its place; here wasn't it.

"I'll send you the book," she joked back darkly, standing. She held out her hand. His eyes went to her chest, larger now than when they met. It had been three months. When he took her hand, she directed him closer as she would a little boy. Instead of kissing, she applied downward pressure. "Sit!"

He sat. Unlike many men, he was good natured even when contradicted. She liked that.

Little hands and little hugs mobbed him; he got peppered with giggling requests to play. She added, "Learning by doing works."

Carla snorted. When May Ri looked, she got an A-ok gesture.

Marisela belatedly realized her status change. Two parents, not one! Plowing through her competition for affection, she squealed, "Daddy!"

May Ri got time to make the axle revision before the next kid-tastrophe. #RSMarsNeededWomen 08

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2503.15 9/31— Freely #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera, Fictional #journalism

Dispatches from Mars: 16 Psyche Disaster a Software Lock Problem?

When critical mechanical parts on the Robinson Crusoe's NTPU (Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Unit) broke, a crew of 73 that included machinists, metallurgists, mining specialists, three maker specialists, and one mechanical engineer should have been able to fix it.

Not having achieved circular orbit yet, the men of the fourth Martian mission to the massive asteroid had five days to prevent an intercept on the ambitious orbital plan that would prove too trusting of equipment thirty years in service. The intrepid self-reliant men, later tarred as stupid and arrogant by the Green Tractors Corporation, felt they didn't need to contact the Earth for assistance. Following safety regulations and allowing a proper cooldown period, they proceeded with disassembly and isolation of a part for which GTC has never provided schematics, and allegedly didn't even provide the emergency repairability cache required by most national laws. That search despite high radioactivity for the presumably misplaced cache ate up six hours of the crew's time. When their maker machines refused to make the scanned parts, or parts that could be refined in time by lathe work or manual labor to necessary tolerances, the ship's engineer reported it through approved channels.

The lunar deep space network promptly experienced an outage.

Let's unpack what looks like a conspiracy and a subsequent cover-up...

...Because corporations still design without repairability in mind for "cost" reasons, and even make it impossible to fix bugs found in logic, or add an enhancement that could have served as a lifesaving workaround in the Robinson Crusoe's case, disaster can and will happen. Not being able to freely use and repair equipment that the now bankrupt EM Mars Colonizations Corporation purchased, is a travesty of ethics. For a corporation that resides in a deeply Decath nation, it's a moral failure.

And, for what? Profit from costly maintenance and repair services only available in Earth Space? Are the 7,983 Martians, now less 73, not human? Does is their ability to only pay upon achieving profitability in a future decade strip them of their humanity? Why isn't there at least one tech available for Mars Space?

As you know from other coverage, the Robinson Crusoe went down in Panthia crater, hitting 100 meters below the rim ridge. In the end, despite applying boosts from both their landing vehicles and jury-rigged satellite boosters, all their sims had to tell them an hour before that it was hopeless. Worse, even with the cobbled-together low-bandwidth network the Martians got up, none of the all male crew got to send their families a proper goodbye.

All 73 sailors went down with their ship. They leave behind 73 wives on Mars, together with their 125 first generation (Nisei) Martian children, 24 boys and 101 girls, none over 17 Earth years of age.

#RSMarsNeededWomen 09

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Image credit: By NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU - nasa.gov/feature/jpl/how-nasa-…, Public Domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.…

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2503.21 10/31 — Empower #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

"I'd like to talk to you about your mine car design," Reina's voice said in her ear after a ping, near bedtime for the girls. May Ri's stomach tightened, she even sweated, as if Mr. Cummerbund in high school had called her to his desk. Except the Onēsanue tutor was only 17, eight years younger than her—and brilliant.

Randy gave her a look.

"Tonight?"

"Bring the girls, hubby-doo, too. My private dome."

The first born nisei got her way more so than the imported women, was open about sex and TMI matters that would make any stuck-up Decath shudder, but visiting her home?

Never.

It interested Randy enough that he walked Marisela over, even strapped Manette in the cradle pouch over his chest. When the double spring-doors unlocked, they walked into sculpted fairyland space that displayed Reina's Martian aesthetics. Shroom blocks acted as cabinets, low tables with sunken chairs, multi-level perches upon which a true Martian could squat, pulsating hidden rainbow lighting, piles of artful epoxied regolith, and shelves of real books that May Ri rushed towards.

The exuberant teenager frog-hopped into May Ri's arms, embracing her with arms and legs. She whispered loudly into her ear, "I just learned you graduated!"

"Graduated?" Randy asked, "That's great!" Marisela hugged his leg, turning shy.

"Get off!" May Ri growled, but ended up walking where the clingy teenager pointed, supporting her bottom like a child. On Earth, impossible. On Mars, an exercise in managing inertia.

What looked like a pile of giant children's blocks proved to be mounts for randomly placed vid feeds. An old woman swam into view. Her flexed arms and the languid motion of her long grey hair said low grav.

"Secretary Itō," Randy said instantly, bowing and holding Manette at the same time. The satellite link delay let May Ri deduce she was at Deimosbase, and that the moon was on the opposite side of the planet.

"No, no, none of that, child."

"Okāsan," Reina said, waving.

May Ri summarily dropped the teenager, looking from her to her husband. "What? Am I missing something?"

"My mother," Reina explained. When May Ri asked the reflexive question, she got, "I've many fathers," which meant Itō was a matronym, which left her mother in a precarious situation, especially on Deimos were a Decath minister was in residence.

Her husband of two years Mars looked to the woman, who nodded.

He sighed. "The Itō family sponsored me because I won a woman's rights essay contest when I was 9. I studied relevant law and became a feminist organizer with their financial support out of college, before the North American Block fomented a reactionary backlash, which helped the Decath Republic Party win squeaker elections. I've written lots of articles—"

"He now writes under the byline Dispatches from Mars," the woman put in.

"I got death threats. My wife succumbed to pressure and converted to Decatholicism when we moved to Britain—"

"Wife?" She walked over and snatched up Marisela who looked ready to cry. An excuse. Patting her, she realized she didn't know him well. She felt cold.

"I divorced Cantata when she threw out her contraceptives for religious reasons—not that we'd gotten along well; we hadn't. The recession that followed the Brexit III vote led me to accept Secretary Itō's suggestion that I could help empowering women by going to Mars." Taking a deep breath, he pointed at the teenager. "I was supposed to marry Reina, but it turns out I like aggressive women who know what they want, who I thought wanted me... and I'd not have had to be abstinent for five years." He grinned as Manette woke and yawned widely, but never opened her eyes. She smacked her lips a few times as everyone held their breath for an outburst that never came.

Reina pouted. "I wouldn't have made you wait."

"Why am I hearing about this now?" May Ri asked.

"You never asked?" he tried. "I mean, for those handful of weeks directorate assignments let us spend together yearly, you're very focused on your studies and having fun together?" he asked tentatively.

She averted her gaze, admitting, if only to herself, he was right. He was fun in bed. It also explained why he treated her as an equal. Reina's family had trained him. In her chest, her heart felt like it was growing. She wasn't going to admit anything like love. Her first relationship with Raymond had burnt that to dust, but still... When she looked at him, an aura glowed around him.

That was the rainbow lighting.

"We're going to talk about all your history, and why you were going to marry Reina."

"As well you should," stated Secretary Itō. "Which brings you to why we're here."

(Continued) #RSMarsNeededWomen 10

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2503.22 11/31 — Manifest #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

May Ri's ire flared. She disliked people controlling her; she'd be in the master's program at Northeastern Illinois and child-free if not shanghaied to Mars. "It's a setup?"

The elder Īto said, "Consider it a graduation present. Your design wasn't entirely innovative, but well engineered. You earned Pass-Plus. You'd get job requests, but you're listed with a return berth in the manifest of the Russian Supremacy Faerie King, arriving in 33 sols. You're the only woman of five forcibly colonized before the bankruptcy. You're a cause célèbre on Earth—"

"The daily outrage," May Ri corrected.

"—The ship's purpose is to repossess EM equipment. We'll fight that. Your berth adjudicates an Earther issue, and our accountability."

Silence descended. Nothing comparable to back home. Loneliness had this sound, the ringing in her ears was her sense of place crumbling. Back home? she thought, breathing hard, heart thumping. Wasn't here home?

"Carlos! Get down!" Īto said.

Grasping Marisela tighter, May Ri looked up as a lanky nisei frog-hopped from a perch on the wall. Reina intercepted and they tumbled together, her laughing. Native Martians wore tight pajama silk that was especially revealing on a man. Back home— Raised in a Decath nation, she looked up reflexively.

"My new husband," Reina said, rubbing noses.

"Rodriquez?" May Ri asked.

Randy sighed, "He died 71 sols ago on the Robinson Crusoe." Men died disproportionately often on Mars.

Carlos asked, "33 sols? Makes you happy, right?"

She shivered. Silence descended. Standing before Randy, she strapped Manette's carry pouch, strapping it on herself. She walked toward the door, nobody saying anything before she realized: A berth. A single berth, as in only one not three. Her babies were Randy's. He was a man, of course, her husband. He had that thing between his legs that Carlos' silk outlined; she didn't.

They weren't saying anything!

A sense of betrayal grew as sweat cooled her skin. She stood frozen, starting to freeze. Marisela squirmed silently to be put down. Her daughters were nisei.

They were Martians.

She was not. Not a Martian.

Secretary Īto added, "Unified home schooling laws let us confer a baccalaureate and credit toward a masters."

"Momie!" Marisela cried.

She held her too tightly. Sitting on a bench, energy zapped, May Ri sat her down; her look made the 3-year-old shrink behind her.

The latent horror of Reverend Peters damning her to a life as a worthless housewife surfaced, with her dream of EM Mars self-agency shattering. Back home? Would her remarried father take in a divorcée? EM had promised her money, college—but were now bankrupt.

Home?

She blinked. A lot. She didn't do crying. But—

Carlos stood centimeters away, in her face, hazel eyes considering her.

May Li jerked back, Marisela fled, and Manette woke—sniveling ramping toward a tantrum. With fine facial features and muscles that showed he took weight training seriously, she approved Reina's choice in the baby-making sense.

"What?"

He asked, "Is she Earther? Or? Is she Martian?"

May Ri kicked; Carlos jumped away. A concerned-looking Randy hovered. Angrily, she unstrapped Manette, shoving the crying infant into his arms, eyeing the door.

May Ri answered. "She's nothing. Worse... she's unwanted."

"Are you accepting the berth?" Īto asked.

"Do I have a choice?" Manifestly, she did not. May Ri moaned, blinking, eyes burning, reaching for the spring door pull.

Reina intercepted, unwonted worry causing her freckles to collide. She shoved a book plate in front of her showing her mother, nose into the camera, grey hair agitated, asking "Who said you don't?"

"I'm a woman. That's synonymous with not choosing. Always will be."

"No it won't. Am I male? Reina?"

Reina said jokingly, "I chose Carlos, Rod, Randy—though you poached him—and Roger!"

A tear ran down May Ri cheeks.

Īto said, "Choose."

May Ri whispered, "I always lose. Women always lose. You'll get your accountability adjudicated! I'll accept the berth... but if I could choose, I'd choose Mars."

Somebody batted her hand from the door pull, causing her to look up. Carlos. He stood to her right, grinning. Īto's smile grew on the book plate, mirroring her daughter's ready one. The teenage man, a year younger than his new wife, declared, "She's a Martian!"

When Randy embraced her from behind, with Manette's pouch pressing the noisy squirming infant into her, May Ri broke. Reality ceased to make sense. Her daughter, her shiny shy nisei, even hugged her leg to comfort her mother.

May Ri didn't do crying, but turned into a spring shower, nonetheless.

(Continued) #RSMarsNeededWomen 11

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2503.25 12/31 — Echo #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

May Ri pushed everyone away, to cry, her forehead against the soft shroom wall. Everybody but Marisela, whose fist held the leg of her jumpsuit tightly. When May Ri spent herself, and turned on her tormentors, giving them grief about purposely making her misunderstand that they wanted her to return to Earth when she didn't, the suddenly exceedingly cute toddler waggled a finger up at the adults facing her.

"Yeah, that was my idea," Reina admitted without a hint of trepidation. "You were full of resentment when you arrived, but were so earnest trying everything and anything to be useful I decided to befriend you. Still, you reflexively fight changes."

May Ri proved the point by glaring at the 17-year-old.

"We all worried what we could tell you. Were you resigned to fate, Mars-friendly, or Martian in your heart?"

The others nodded, the elder Īto once again on one of vid feeds on Reina's dome wall, saying, "We all concurred with her."

"Sorry," Randolf said, "Even me." Right. He'd been a women's rights advocate on Earth. An HR rep and arbitrator on Mars.

Īto added, "Your engineering design qualification lets you accept jobs from management, and I have special jobs for you. If you were leaving, it wouldn't do to have you saying things on Earth you shouldn't know."

"I shouldn't? What? Know what?"

Silence. Circumspect, but still... May Ri began to seethe, until her daughter began to growl.

Everyone laughed, then Īto asked, "Are you Martian?"

On Earth she'd been an a-theist in a Decath nation, female, a nobody even if a man deigned to marry her to bear his sons. Hopeless. Martian as in a patriot? Maybe not there yet, but, "This is my home, full stop."

"That's a Yes?"

"Absolutely, yes."

Reina embraced her and danced May Ri around. She had to untangle herself, peeling off hands, pushing at her chest.

"Okay! Okay!" Freed, she asked, "What jobs?"

Īto answered, "The creditors' agent on the Faerie King wants two of our remaining makers, and we lost two on the Robinson Crusoe. And other things we can't make on Mars, even with makers. The other directors and I aren't sure which nation is angling to take over the infrastructure we built. The Russian Supremacy is too pat, but who knows? Did you know makers can't make makers? Or NTPU parts? Dozens of other patented things. Weapons?"

"I can understand weapons, but—" May Ri froze where she stood. ... saying things on Earth you shouldn't know. "You want me to make a maker? Th—th—that's crazy. It'll turn all the corporations against me... Us!"

"As if they aren't already against us? EM's bankruptcy may have been forced. It's blood in the water. Reina, that's a shark reference from Earth."

Her daughter looked thoughtful, then nodded. May Ri blinked, breath hitching up. "Can't make a maker."

"Maybe not you, but I like your tenacity. We can, together. We have to!" The other vid feeds lit up. Dozens. Maybe a hundred. All women. Every earthly ethnicity. A handful of nisei, two of which waved at Reina who waved back. All Martian; you could tell by how they moved on screen, how they held their heads against gravity. Three were on Deimosbase based on how they floated. "Meet your peers, May Ri."

The room filled with "Hi" and "Hola" and a few "Bonjours," beside others, dispelling a lingering sense of loneliness her grilling to discover whether she was a Martian had fomented. Some announced their dome locale. Most waved.

I'm not alone, she thought.

Reina said, "This is our echo group. You're our newest participant in engineering, along with me, Telsi, Julie, Saniya, and Rosa." They waved. "Okasan is sensei for that one. The rest in the community listen in to help or discuss the topic we're learning or the problem we're solving. Don't worry, there's some boys, too, some cute like Carlos, but not in engineering!"

Īto added, "There's over a thousand. It's our Martian upper educational system, and with the Faerie King arriving, it became critical that we included you. You see, you have an affinity for..." #RSMarsNeededWomen 12

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2503.10 13/31 — Exploit #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera CW: Fictional violence, women fighting back

Angry to the point of trembling, May Ri gathered in the auditorium with the other women with "non-essential tasks," as ordered over the loud speakers. She, Randy, Reina, and Rod had been waiting for the Deimosbase Decath minister to call to marry them when an emergency in a far off colony separated the men from them. A man past 50—with a gold braid patch on his helmet-less form-fitting Mars-green pressure suit— marched in trailed by his all male goons as May Ri characterized them.

She knew she was right when he said, "You are Mars' improperly exploited resource. Today we are redistributing that labor." That caused a massive cringe amongst the women amidst a growing roar of desent.

He yelled, "Quiet!" shutting them down.

When a selection criteria was, "Are you married?" a bristling May Ri found herself backing the teenager into a wall, trying to hide her.

"You!" the man motioned Reina to the exit.

May Ri put her arms out. "Not happening!" She glared into blue eyes.

The man—who turned out to be the Head EM Director and an original colonist—backhanded her.

In Mars gravity, she flew against the wall and slumped, seeing stars. He bent over Reina—May Ri's fall had knocked her over—offering a hand. When May Ri's eyesight quit swimming, face burning and tasting blood, she launched herself head-first at his gut. She still had Earth muscle. He deflected her, but her leg hit the big man's hip and they tumbled together. She landed no punches before he wrenched her upright, arms locked behind her.

Chuckling, he said, "I like determination—"

She jerked, stomping at his foot. He shoved her cheek and nose into the wall, pinned her arms, and pushed a hand into small of her back, preventing anything but sputtering.

"Fights back. I value that. Sexy. Are you married?"

"You interrupted our ceremony."

"Ah." He chuckled more. "About Reina—?"

"You know her name!"

"I won't pick the Onēsanue if you calmly come with me."

May Ri found herself swearing and cursing in her head. She spat blood, which dripped down the wall, noticing the other prey had slunk away from the predators. His goons watched silently at a distance. Reina looked pale, shaking, sitting limbs akimbo, hands on the floor. Red hair flew as she shook her head vigorously.

May Ri shouted, "Did you hear that promise?"

Women's murmurs proved they did. Heart ricocheting off her sternum, she said, "Fine."

Minutes later, the man dragged her by her wrist with a long stride she could barely match. Spring doors guarded all the domes against vacuum breach, but the crèche had windows, as did the farms. Women worked in each, some men in the farms. Nobody in the halls. She thought about crying for help, but thought of Reina whilst palpating her bruising face.

Was he simply redistributing her labor to another job?

Equating the, "are you married," question with Decath purity standards, she whispered, probing, "I've been with other men."

"Experience makes you more qualified," he returned.

Could her stomach knot up worse?

Best to seem docile, she thought, to hope for weapons. He was an EM Corp manager, bound by the charter. Theoretically. Was she over-reacting? The corporation had run out of money; all Earth transits with supplies and people, cancelled. The term corporate reorganization came to mind. Was the Martian board of directors reorganizing?

She recognized the docks as she let his pace slide her into a doorframe. She saw the circular glass corridor that surrounded a Martian "tarmac." Rovers and motels, with flatbeds, were parked to the right—three orange dust-coated helios, with multiple stacked blades and lots of hyper-nacelles, sat at priority. Jetways connected to two passenger cargoons and one long distance pinnace. He shoved her through the spring door of the latter, following. It jostled like the flex tube it was, with his massive form clumping behind—bouncing her, she thought, to intentionally panic her.

Rushing, she grabbed the spring door. Stuck! It didn't even rattle.

He plowed into her, flattening her against it. With a snigger, he unlocked it. When it opened, still smooshed, she stumbled flat onto the deck. The spring door snapped back with a bang as he clamored over her. Vac-safe cargo boxes littered the inside. With no preamble, he unzipped his pressure suit.

She sucked in her breath, scrambling bruisingly into a bulkhead.

He had a jumpsuit underneath. Scoffing, he said simply, "Remember Reina. See that bench? Toss the boxes down the cargo chute." He stomped to the loo, shutting it behind himself.

Sweating, heart racing, she thought, Now what?

(Continued) #RSMarsNeededWomen 13

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2503.28 15/31 — Feather #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

Today May Ri tested. Things she invented. A daughter she gave birth to.

The Meadowbrook rickshaw climbed the sandy hill strewn with rocks, the huge hoop wheels and isolated suspension rolling over obstacles with aplomb. She drove the tractor legs with her reins, to minimize jostling the cart, and got to the solar array minutes earlier than by taking the road compressed into the Martian regolith.

Marisela hopped out instantly, rolled upon landing to her feet, and rushed the blue and black panels. Though shy, she had taken to suit-qualification... like a duckling to water—a phrase the 4 Mars-year-old wouldn't understand, but her mother did. She stopped before touching, looked expectantly at her mother, her eyes gleaming in the coming sunset inside her glare-free helmet. May Ri's maker v3.2 made spacesuits, something they'd had to import from Earth—Mars was never meant to be isolated from EM Mars Corp. Bankruptcy changed things, maker manufacturing locks only making it worse.

At May Ri's nod, her daughter climbed the array, giggling, full of energy. Mars-refined metal platforms were simple tech, even gimbaled ones; the array wasn't fragile, only the sweepers and cables. Marisela had trained and given promises.

She was an inspector!

The girl's suit was a first production suit, and the only one sized for a child. Colonial planners hadn't thought through the implications of kids. May Ri patted the emergency balloon as she vaulted out of the tall cart and plopped down on the sand.

"What about this?" Her monkey girl pointed out a bent wire feather wiper over a windblown deposit of red five aisles in. May Ri noted it on the wrist-mounted book plate. The regolith crunched under her shoes. The wind whistled faintly, mixing with the hum of the comm. A massive dust devil spun in the distance, which was why they were here—not for testing the cart, tractor legs, or the pink-striped Mars-green suit her daughter wore.

Danger of a planetary dust storm was no joke. With a doubled population and dome construction, array efficiency was paramount; the anti-static feathers were her idea to replace fans.

Men prospected for Thorium, but aeolian monzonite deposits were rare. Finding the mineral deposits on 16 Psyche proved difficult, but the effort searching for them and the Robinson Crusoe disaster had brought them the dented maker her echo group dissected. At the slow orbital speed required for an asteroid, the ship had flipped and disintegrated, leaving rather gruesome remains of the men and partially intact machinery scattered over kilometers of cratered rusty metallic rock.

May Ri felt proud of her maker derivative. V4.1 had built a compact thorium reactor prototype (another restricted device). In a dust year, a working reactor would prevent starvation.

Mars grit and dust clung to everything, compromising moving parts. Together the two identified five repairables and reattached a cable. In the dusk, illuminated by bluish noctilucent clouds, May Ri drove the cart along the "paved" road. Marisela swayed and hummed happily to herself.

At their dome, May Ri got her chance at exuberance: Randy had returned days early. She jumped into his arms, but knocked him over.

Marisela said surprisingly dryly, "Momie's going to be making funny noises tonight." She quickly hid behind May Li's legs when she stood, peering apprehensively with green eyes as Randy smiled at her. It had been three months since his last visit, a lifetime ago to a kid.

Taking a deep breath, May Ri knelt and and pointed at her daughter. "This is Marisela, a brave little girl who today completed her first Mars surface expedition in a plus-plus fashion, the first suit-qualified girl to do that, helping her mother at the Array."

Randy scooted over. Pointing at him, she said, "This is Randolf, an illustrious Martian arbitrator and HR wunderkind, an all around loving fellow, and your Dadie."

He reached out a hand.

Marisela's reddened face screwed up in an expression May Ri couldn't predict, but when she reached out her little hand to his big one, she burst into wild giggles. They shook in the handshake ritual du jour, laughing, before she warned, "Momie loves you, so you keep her happy."

Martian nisei, besides being hoppy little frogs, were surprisingly open. Precocious. They had no Decath ministers to shame them, girls and boys lived and slept communally most days, and fathers were absent. Nobody bothered—or had time—to teach gender roles, so no nisei acted as either.

May Ri approved. Which meant...!

"Marisela is suit-qualified. Take her on your next assignment to teach her your job." With ever fewer men, Mars needed women doing men's work. #RSMarsNeededWomen 15

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2503.24 16/31 — Work #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

"I've made new friends," May Ri's little girl said brightly over vid-downlink, waving her favorite, worse-for-wear, pink pony toy. "I'm fine." Dozens of nisei girls and boys bounced and hopped behind her to greet Marisela's mother. The image stuttered. An echo group worked furiously on a maker to build a new sats before they lost them all. Marisela added, in a barely quieter child's whisper, "The other fathers are real mean meanies—"

"Not my Dadie," said a 10 Mars-year-old girl, but otherwise nodded. The kids housed, realizing en masse it was secret stuff.

Marisela finished, whispering, "—the moms keep everyone here so they can watch over us." (In the crèche domes.) Louder, "Momie, tell everyone we're really friends with the Onēsanue? Please!"

"We are," May Ri affirmed, to which the kids cheered.

May Ri felt her gut wrench. When she'd suggested Marisela accompany Randy on assignment, it had been a battle. He wasn't against training the girl, or thought that a girl would be denied a man's job.

No.

Former Director Ezekiel Stan had won election as Dome Manager at South Elysian Township. Elected solely by the men. Women hadn't voted, at all—had been intimidated, everyone figured—despite being 2/3rds of the population thanks to the growing number of widows.

The man who'd tried to rape her eight years ago had recovered his health, and marginal power. She muttered under her breath, "Should've left him in vac."

No wonder Randy kept being assigned to arbitrate disputes at Elysian, especially between spouses! Stan professed to be Decath, and was blessed by the minister on Deimosbase. Hypocrites! It made the remaining Directors waver.

Reportedly, the man didn't remember "the accident." Secretary Īto, Reina's mother, had seen the vids. She'd kept Randy's marriage details and all vid out of the public record. Privacy. He might not know who May Ri was. What Īto didn't know, since Stan's management kept vac-safe control, was how the Elysian nisei and mothers fared, other than the contact Randy was allowed arbitrating between spouses, or interviewing chaperoned women. EM Mars Corp had a Decath charter; protecting propriety was interpreted as Elysian's right.

In the end, it was the ugly face of Mars that Marisela might inherit that made the choice for them. With her father, ten suits, and weeks of training others, Marisela would work "teaching" suit safety to "help" qualify nisei who had the knack at Elysium City.

All near Marisela's age had the knack, and the desire. Management excluded girls, though.

"...I just teach the girls in the crèche domes with the spare suit. No dadies." Marisela tittered evilly.

"...Yesterday, Rufus' twin Raquel went outside."

"...Ran out of boys today. Nobody's checking the visors! Can't men count?"

"...The girls won the boy-girl soccer game."

On day 17, May Ri's call failed at their regular time. Management restricted in-base addresses to the office, which made her call back later. When she got, "Routine Maintenance. Call back tomorrow," she ran shaking to Reina, who spooked worse. Secretary Īto sent a cargoon from Gale crater.

They might never get the full story, and Elysium couldn't (wouldn't?) find the culprit...

Lured outside at dusk, a man in an enviro suit stabbed Randy multiple times, then slashed Marisela, ripping her suit before running. Safety drills triumphed over panic as the girl glued herself—wound then suit—then glued Randy's worst injuries as he went unconscious. Leaking too much air, she stuffed him in an emergency balloon, then dragged him unsure he lived, crying, blaming herself having fun, to the dome. A comms-down didn't apply to inter-suit channels, only range. When Raquel, practicing with her brother, answered, the mothers smuggled them through the docks. That she sat on her father to apply pressure had staunched the bleeding. First aid stabilized him, barely. The cargoon arrived late night; with comms down, they walked in, demanding resupply. Suit comm alerted them and they sent a medic. By early morning, the men on the cargoon smuggled 6 women, 21 nisei, and the two out.

Reina jumped ahead of Marisela's mother, grabbing the child, hugging her crying, while the slightly dazed girl (May Ri could tell) comforted the Onēsanue. Other nisei—and the new nisei, one waving a pink pony toy—all piled on, giving their hero support, allowing May Ri to tend to Randy who'd never completely recover.

Stan raged about nobody reporting in for treatment, found no evidence, claimed no witnesses, lied saying it was fabricated, and manipulated.

It felt like a turning point. May Ri saw old power grasping to control women. She vowed to help the nisei change that. #RSMarsNeededWomen 16

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2503.16 18/31 —Cook #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

It was Randolf's birthday. His third since the attack. He was disabled.

Could Randy have returned to Earth soon enough, he'd not have been paralyzed. The knifing cut nerves. Marisela's gluing had prevented bleeding, but interstitial blood applied pressure, killed tissues. Delayed surgery and first aid affected recovery. This was Mars. Men died disproportionately. Only men were doctors.

The nisei, when not thwarted by Elysium, worked to change that.

May Ri used her engineering design skills to make him feel more able bodied. Today—after letting him sleep in—that meant hanging pulls, mattress handholds, and a bed wedge. Kind of selfish of her because nothing would convince her to be sex-deprived without a fight. Making him confident ensured her satisfaction (well, more than just satisfied as it happened), which in turn worked for him, causing him to drift off into a happy sleep afterwards.

Most days they ate at the Commons, but today she cooked vegetable soup. Raquel, who worked the farms, insisted if she wanted fresh, she had to pick fresh. They roamed the acres and acres of green fields set to specific Earth months and climes. She cut Napa cabbage, pulled parsnips, carrots, and leeks, shucked corn, snipped basil and herbs. The 14-year-old even "dressed" a chicken for her, but didn't make her watch or listen. She splashed it into a pot to boil for hours.

Reina, Carlos, and Adrian brought fresh-baked bread, the yeast fragrance melding with the spicy meaty soup aroma in the humid kitchen alcove. When Marisela (who went by Mari now!) arrived with her pod mates, Rufus and Raquel, carrot cake, sparkle candles, and her little sister—who walked holding her hand—the 4-year-old immediately promised to behave herself to join "the adults."

May Ri didn't understand the nisei term pod, other than it was a very nisei-type friendship that was likely more, but she had decided her daughter deserved being trusted amongst other Martians. Nobody had trusted her when little, so she was going to trust now. The mothers in the crèche watched the twins. Mari had hit her growth spurt, and though three years younger than her friends, she was their height.

And excited.

When her Dadie returned, on a crutch, she was pointing with a thumb that he'd missed the big box behind the sofa, bouncing, which he noticed and ruffled her hair. With Secretary Īto and her onigiri meal joining via vid-downlink, May Li served bowls and Randy tore bread. They celebrated.

Chewing, behind a hand he said, "Your spinlaunch maker build-test completed successfully today."

May Li stood reflexively, splashing soup. "Really?"

That meant machinery and supplies spin-thrown along the projected monorail line retroing safely, then building track-makers that became a length of track that in turn built the next segment, ad infinitum. The problem of transporting from the factory and steel mill, solved.

"Next year we ride to Isidis Township!"

Not to closer Elysium. Nobody wanted to encourage the ridiculously religious domes. The nisei, now the majority of the population with more teenagers than imported men, had vetoed Elysium—not that they had actual power, but the board of directors absent mandates from Earth wasn't disputing them.

Spinlaunchers, one of her projects, already orbited refined metals for Deimosbase, and orbited parcels from 16 Psyche. V3.0 would be powerful enough the throw 16 Psyche's ore into high eccentricity Mars orbit. A better version that could throw to Earth-Moon orbit wouldn't go over well, May Ri thought. She broke out the berry wine and tumblers. Though Randy didn't drink, they all toasted. Mari dutifully diluted hers 1:4 and let Manette sip.

Presents were an Earth thing, not a Mars thing. Martians lived communally. Nisei always said Your presence is all the presents allowed. Today was special, though. Mari, giggling, forgetting she was grown up, skipped to the box and rolled it to her Dadie.

Confused, he asked, "What's this?"

The girl returned, as precocious as ever, or maybe she was making a Nisei-centric point: "You always make Momie happy, so she made this to make you happy."

Everybody said, "Awww." May Ri felt her face warm.

He opened it, revealing a bunch of blue denim-covered flex-shroom pipes and harnesses. May Ri punched the control, and it unpacked itself with a soft hum. They'd revived a century old idea of exoskeletons for mining and heavy construction, which women wore to replace missing men in open jobs. It made for safer work for women, and men.

This one was lightweight and stylish, designed for inside wear. She had a pressure suit version in the works, but would surprise him with that tomorrow. #RSMarsNeededWomen 18

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2503.23 19/31 — Intersectional #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera CW: Crude Language

"No! Worse," Raymond answered, "May Ri was an animal in constant heat! If I didn't satiate her, I'd get clawed—sometimes she'd claw me anyway. I should never have walked away from her! Look at this scar...!"

That was in answer to Randy's question, after he'd found May Ri chatting with her first lover, over a 13m light delay, however inadvertent it was. Stepping in front of her with a kiss, he'd asked, "Was she always so athletic and insanely inventive in bed?"

Boy talk...! Over the still-up little-used open deep space network.

Crosstalk was how Princess May Ri of Mars and her Five Daughters, formerly a Mars kidnapping sensation, earned her title (it wasn't her friendship with the Onēsanue) and her second infamy. The two men and her reminiscing inspired Raymond to scan and send his entire uncensored paper library over the open network during idle time, which led to how May Ri arranged the first Lunatic trade transit to Mars, in order to deliver a cargo of refined asteroid metal and martian machinery to Earth space.

May Ri sat hands steepled across her mouth touching her nose, watching the vid, barely breathing. A telepresence of a dozen nisei women representatives joined with five Directors (which made a quorum including Īto), together with the hispanic male Captain of the Pride of Selene from his stateroom office desk. A stylized pale white and grey full moon hung behind him.

Animated red, green, and grey sprites chased one another in a Mars globe outline.

Wait...

Wait...

After multiple hop light transit times of 4m 40s Mars-Earth-Lunar Republic, decrypting multiple keys, fortunes in E currency bouncing back and forth...

Document icons turned green. They opened. Most were E-signed Princess May Ri on Behalf of Nisei Mars.

May Ri thought, Couldn't I have been the face of Mars for my engineering contributions? Noooo. She asked, "What's it mean? It's done? Do I have to sign anything else?"

"The banks and creditors signed off," the captain acknowledged, giving a quick salute. "Consider this our final handshake. Now, I take my cargo to its new owners."

Secretary Īto explained, "We've officially bought the debt and remaining assets of EM Mars Corp. As agreed, I move to vote to dissolve the corporation—"

One of the hundreds of lurker sprites bloomed into a new male face on the vid. He was a sixth Director—accompanied seconds later by two others, and Former Director Ezekiel Stan, manager of Elysium. He shouted, "Not so fast! Per our charter, and the Decath codicils, I dispute that you have a majority of the population to move to vote..." He meant male population, despite the nisei outnumbering the imported men.

The trade ship captain said, "We break orbit in 32 minutes. Enjoy your freedom." His link faded out.

Three days later, she received notice that the City of Chicago PD had a warrant out for her arrest for 1st degree Murder and Infanticide by Abortion and 79 counts of Illegal Sexual Activity by an Unmarried Woman, cc'd to all the Directors of EM Mars Corp. She tried pinging Raymond but got an incorrect address error. A memo promulgated by the new Elysium Consortium of Domes (ECD) suggested she be stoned to death.

A month later, May Ri killed a man with an exoskeleton gauntlet†. He had beaten his wife half to death and was caught while kidnapping his daughter (now 13) whom he had never visited. The witnesses, the mother and daughter, insisted it was self-defense and accidental. Elysium issued a warrant for the Aggravated Assault and Murder committed upon their dome citizen.

Five days before the Pride of Selene entered lunar orbit, a cargo vessel at the International Earth Docks was hastily reflagged with the blue-white-red registration of the North American Decath States (NADS) and loaded secretly. Two days later, it fired missiles on the Lunar Republic Orbital, destroying their patrol ship tug and damaging their search and rescue shuttle. NADS announced it was annexing the "breakaway" state. The Pride of Selene declared it piracy when later boarded.

The Decath minister on Deimosbase agreed to an ECD request granting, per his interpretation of scripture with due consideration to the diminished population of men on Mars, that men be allowed and encouraged to take multiple wives. Alarmingly, the remaining starship shuttle in Mars space (two were deployed on asteroid mining missions), was rebased to Elysium Township, in compensation for never receiving a monorail connection or makers to build spinlaunchers—restricting human orbital access to the Decath domes. #RSMarsNeededWomen 19

———
† #Writever 2503.02 Rights Prologue eldritch.cafe/@sfwrtr/11409208…

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2025-03-02 09:18:02

2503.02 2/31 — Rights #Writever CW: Fictional Violence

Prologue

May Ri clanged the arm of the mining exoskeleton into the wall of the habitat, drawing sparks, blocking the onrushing man, cutting him off when he tried to dodge under—before flipping him backwards back down the corridor. Blood gushed from his nose to match what stained his hands.

"I have the right!" he yelled, arm across his face to stem the flow. "She's my wife!"

May Ri's footsteps clanged as she stomped forward. He slid himself back on the floor as the other women in the Vigilantes caught up. They'd used the ugly word, Vigilante, intentionally; women weren't allowed but needed to police their domes, or risk injury from stronger men who suddenly got ideas.

She said, "Your wife is an import, like me? You left her to give birth alone, to raise her daughter, and now you want to take that daughter away? To sell to your boss? Really? Your right?"

She looked at the harried women, some breathing hard, sweating. Faces gone pale in fear, others with wide eyes trying to process how cruel reality had once again smashed all sense of security. May Ri understood: if they kept the male returnees from the inner belt disaster locked out of the habitat long enough, they'd have to capitulate. However, if she failed to demonstrate now that the Vigilantes could hold firm when a man broke his wife's arm, beating her to have his way—

He yelled back, "Marrying her off to a better life? Yes! Who are you to argue a man's God given right—?"

"Really?" she interrupted. Women had never had reliable rights, if you trusted history hadn't been rewritten. She didn't. She'd read books made of paper, yellowed, that smelled of centuries past! Her five kilogram gauntleted hand already in motion, she screamed, "Mars is not Earth! It never will be!" #RSMarsNeededWomen

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2503.20 20/31— Shelter #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

"Ow!" May Ri cried, tightening a screw under the maker, startled into hitting her head.

"Sorry," Reina said, "It's important! Mother won't send the cargoon, but the nisei need to flee Elysium. Their mothers are in danger and are insisting on shelter."

Taking multiple wives— The Decath patriots were implementing it literally with a mass wedding vid-downlink. They'd announced they'd confiscate by force any vehicles landing at their docks.

Mari, squatting beside the spidery device, said, "We women are better prepared than the imports think." Mari, now 17, had implemented universal suit training, secretly in some places.

Reina stood listening, nodding, while gently shaking her little infant son Joyous. He was ebony-skinned like Adrian, not the crème shade of Felice, who seemed to take after Carlos. The nisei hadn't objected to multiple wives; no, they'd reinterpreted. Reina, the Escalante Dome manager and Onēsanue, approved the plan and started pinging women.

With one Martian time zone, 2 am was early morning local, with bright green skies. The cargoon settled into shadows cast by a rocky black crater wall, rotors at idle. Mari in an exoskeleton, a medic, and an assistant jumped to the red sands, having made suit-comm contact with refugees half a kim outside the docks. Suited up in the cockpit with the pilot, May Ri lowered her binocs to point, saying, "There!" Mars green suits. Adults, kids, infants in rescue balloons. Relieved, she added, "According to plan. 10 o'clock."

"Ack!" Mari replied.

Movement caught her eye. She panned left, scanning upslope. Focused. Made no sense: Two men holding bent sticks vertically? Horizontal sticks? "Arrows!" she shouted. "They've got long bows! Your 8—"

They fired.

Mari screamed.

Pointing furiously, May Ri yelled at the pilot, "Get them!"

"With what?"

She shoved the throttle forward.

The pilot lunged, getting them airborne, stating, "No weapons."

"He shot my daughter! Run him over!" May Ri had resisted letting makers make weapons. Long bows! Good idea, she admitted.

"What!?"

"Do it!"

The helieo pitched forward, banked left. With the thin air, them shooting sunward, the men didn't immediately notice.

"Lower! Lower!"

When the pilot flinched, she clapped a gloved hand over his. The bowman ought have dived aside, but she heard a thump. Front hyper nacelle. The second man scrambled to a rock outcropping. Collision avoidance braked them, lifted them. The pilot spun them around, looking. "Where is he?" the nisei cried.

"Mari?" Her skin cooled. "Anyone see him?"

Not Mari: "Pulling himself up on your running board."

"Pitch us!" May Ri cried.

The helieo waggled. Then: "He's up!"

And could climb into the cabin!

She rushed rearward, heart racing, stomach clenching. She had no time to don the exoskeleton. In cross-section, the cargoon was }O{ shaped, the upper a VTOL and rotor downdraft shield, the lower landing skids. Handholds, yes, but not easy to shift as the helieo waggled and pitched. A hammer slid and clanked a bulkhead. She grabbed it. The spring doors, timered open, could be opened from the outside. With Mari down, the man could fight the refugees boarding, or would fight her if inside.

"Where?"

"Three meters to the door."

Handholds at the door. Ok. Swing out? Hit a hand? Snow his visor?

"He's close!"

Fist tight on the hammer, the other grasping the hatch bar, she braced a foot and made like a flag as the wind changed. She swung the hammer.

They belly-whomped.

Caught him reaching.

Tall, his arm warded her attack, but kept him from grappling her. She swung again, the hammer grazing his suit. She kneed him and curved the trajectory up at the visor at the same time; the weak hit barely left a white dent. As he jerked away, she kicked his chin, then swung for his other hand.

He jerked it back—letting go.

"Pitch us!"

The ship slammed her into metal, then flung them both. She cried as her wrist wrenched. The downdraft caught him, swatted him down like a toy to the rocks.

Bruised, despite the suit, wrist screaming, shoulder sprained, she swung back in. They boarded the refugees. The medic treated the arrow in Mari's right arm, cutting open the suit in the pressurized cabin.

May Ri hovered, despite the blood, despite the women, some crying.

Mari growled. "Momie!"

Back in the cockpit, she mused she'd get charged with two more murders. Reaching for her book plate, she punched in ¡PanDORA! backwards, thumbed the screen in three spots, and released her software lock on the maker base system she'd designed. It could now make Martian weapons.

They had opened the box, not her. She hoped not to regret her actions, like the mythical woman. #RSMarsNeededWomen 20

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2503.31 21/31 — Sorority #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

Seeing her daughter on stage—her arm splinted because an arrow had fractured her ulna, squatting like frog, smiling and chatting privately with Raquel and Rufus in the audience—made her stop at the door of the stuffed auditorium. Nisei in towns across Mars had reacted hearing of the ambush rescuing the women of Elysium. Cargoons got dispatched to neighboring Decath domes even before requests arrived. Some had been commandeered from timid dome managers by nisei pilots driven to end the suffering they'd witnessed, but had been powerless to remedy.

Decath and the word "divorce" didn't mix, but mix it did, had the last week. At Shiaparelliburgh, red blood mixed with red sand. It could not stand.

Reina stood beside her, nursing her son. Manette hugged a toddler, Reina's Felice, while May Ri's twins waved a worn pink pony toy to keep her quiet while May Ri's unplanned-for fifth little girl worried her favorite hand-me-down might yet break. The Onēsanue waved May Ri inside.

She'd pinged May Ri. Said, yes, May Ri should bring her work in progress. She was needed.

This audience...

It quieted and parted as she walked in, the tip-taping silvery spidery maker keeping pace with her. 300 humans taxed the ventilation, but nisei and sansei packed cheek to jowl never tired of physical closeness. Only the imports, the issei with a red triskelion Mars tattoo of a contract colonist on their forearm, stood apart. Refugees sat embraced by daughters and sons of different mothers, learning they were no longer alone, no longer unloved, if by sheer force. May Ri thought of the crèche system, and the culture of shared-mothering it fostered: Intelligence valued at a young age, no harassment about being yourself, the not ever being forced into gender roles, the knowing helping another was helping one's self...

Her sense of having a comparatively barren childhood percolated up from memory.

Blinking tears, she saw people of all shapes and colors, clothed in a rainbow of synth-silk. Thousands more filled vids lining the hall. May Ri checked her hair, pushed a lock in place, felt conscious of the maker clicking and ticking, dog-like in its obedience. Reina handed Joyous to Manette.

"What's it making?" the firstborn of Mars asked, the Big Sister of all native Martians.

"Attitude thrusters."

At 29, her bronze hair had darkened to red. Freckles emphasized smiling grey eyes, "Why?"

Spinnerets hissed; 79 manipulators formed metal cones. "We own the V7.0 starship IP, so if Elysium won't let us fly theirs, I thought I'd build one."

Addressing the crowd, Reina said, "Like we own the IP to build this thruster, we own the Mars we built with years of effort at the cost of our fathers' lives." She smiled. "Everyone, meet May Ri and her Five Daughters, the Princess of Mars. On our behalf, in her name, she bought the corpse of EM Mars, and with it, our slave contracts. We own ourselves, the remaining ships, our domes, even Deimosbase. We, nisei and sansei, mothers and fathers, own Mars. Our nisei vote outnumbers all male imports. We govern this world!"

A set of vids to the left flashed, the women onscreen replaced by the weathered, burnt-into-her-memory, shouting face of Manager Ezekiel Stan of Elysium, now in his 60s. A moderator swiftly muted him. The audience broke into angry conversation, glaring his direction.

"Princess? Do you cede your ownership of Mars?"

"I— Do I? What?" She hit the off button on the spider, blinking. Well. Actually. She'd signed the "paperwork" for the transaction she negotiated for all the 16 Psyche ore collected over the early years, refined martian metals thrown into orbit, and space machinery built in the half-year after the deal was struck.

Her name, Mars' fortune. As owner on paper, she outranked the directors!

She looked around her. She saw friends, peers, a world that accepted her—a woman. All else was meaningless in the face of that! She said, "I'll cede ownership, but to whom?"

Reina paused, nonplussed. Mari knew her mother overthought things, and tittered, then so did the twins. When Reina laughed, the entire room—no Mars—laughed with her. "I thought of a new charter, but not a name. How about The Nisei of Mars?"

"Um," May Ri said. The nisei nodded, but their second generation sansei kids caught the discrepancy.

"Right," Reina said, tapping her chin.

May Ri studied the native Martians. They shared a characteristic beyond squatting like frogs: Lacking interest in gender roles, most looked androgynous. Many men styled themselves like women. Birth rates, affected by gravity and iron intake, left men as barely 1/5th of the population.

May Ri's eyes widened. "How about The Sorority?" #RSMarsNeededWomen 21

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2503.12 22/31 —Emancipation #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera CW: Sex

"So, let me get this right," May Ri said. She sat in a small supply dome cleared for the purpose, a light glaring overhead, a table, two chairs, a chamber pot, and a vid, currently blank but recording. She scrolled her book plate. "Dug… not Doug… not—"

"Douglas," the dirty haired, dumpy import snapped, ankle chained to the floor. Her age. She'd researched how police ran interviews in Randy's library, but between the textbooks and police procedural novels, the latter was the most helpful.

He had had a second child, a son, after a 14 year contraceptive hiatus, never having visited his daughter, only his wife. She did not like him. "You took Howy, H-O-W-Y—?"

"Yes. My son."

"—From the crèche to form your own, to homeschool him?"

"…"

"With these guys?" She listed 20 men, returned from Olympus Mons.

"And their sons." Seven, of 35 total kids.

"Over the objections of your wife?"

"My son. My wife. What don't you get about 'Obey,' woman?"

She let the book plate clatter. "So you beat her?"

He crossed his arms. She read, God-given right. After five minutes silence, he slyly asked, "Ever read The Book?"

"The one full of obscene stories, wild sex, war, genocide, bloody executions, vindictive men brutalizing women for their property?" She nodded, thumb down.

"No. Scripture."

"Yes, that one." Study thy enemy. During school prayer, right? "The riot you started killed a boy named James."

"Went to a better place, a-theist. The women aren't teaching the Decath blessings per charter—"

Seven hours later, she returned to a room reeking of a latrine, weirdly thunderstruck: "Where'd you get the idea for a boy-only crèche?"

"Reverend O'Neil gave a sermon..."

—2—

Yuki Īto touch-walked into Reverend O'Neil's office, mostly floating, elegantly, her cotton tabi (toe) socks letting her anchor to the desk easily. She wore an Earth-imported yukata. White, with fluttering orange, red, and gold autumn maple leaves tied with a black obi sash, the little-used garment felt soft and symbolic. Feminine, yet powerful. She had grey hair; his had thinned to white floss that showed scalp. The last Decath Minister in Mars space was fifteen years older than her. Gone was his red hair and ronin's lecherous smile from when fate had stranded them on Deimos, alone.

Without contraceptives. Before the "bone issue" that left them and six others only able to live in Deimos' microgravity.

"Secretary Īto—" The smell of a mocha in a ceramic liquigrip waft in as she docked it on the imported mahogany desk and he stared. The Decath were all about wealth. For them. Not Japan, which NADS, a Decath country, had helped East Imperial China "annex" when she was three.

"Reverend." Yuki sank to the chair, then sipped her hot barley tea. Cocoa was no longer extinct, and coffee was a staple that could be spin-thrown from Mars—thanks to May Ri.

He finished, "I told you never to visit me again."

"Oh?" She tapped her temple, then sipped.

He sighed, took up the cup two-handed Japanese-style as she'd taught. Sipped. He smiled faintly. "Okay, what?"

She sipped.

He sipped.

A meter wide window ran from floor to ceiling to floor across the dome, displaying Mars like a faux painting in all its ferric, ferrous, and ferrosoferric Lowellian glory. Monorail lines not canals crisscrossed the equator, invisible to the eye, of course. She spotted Isidis Planitia. "A beautiful prison," she said, adding, "Time!" reaching for his vid.

"For what?"

"Wait." Nisei. A townhall, a podium, a speaker…

"The Harlot Princess of Mars!" His breath hitched. Behind her, "Our indiscretion," Reina.

"…The Sorority Charter we voted for prohibits slavery contracts. You cannot give the right to another to force you to obey. You cannot be made property. Because of recent abuses, and a history of abuse against women, today we voted to abolish marriage." A crowd of nisei roared approval. "No man may own a woman, enjoin her, force sex, assert right to her property. Her children are hers to raise, never his. This vote annuls all Martian marriages. Sex ceases to be illegal, but consent remains mandatory. Be civil, Martians, and… have fun!"

"Not Decath marriages!"

"Contact your diocese." Yuki directed men to remove his comm devices from his beautiful prison.

—3—

Randy, 55 today, lay spread-eagled. May Ri knelt between, with a two-handed grip. He asked, sweating, then really sweating, "What do you mean I should think of bedding another woman—? Don't squeeze!"

"What I said. Think about it. If it helps. If it gives you… ideas." She squeezed.

"You're already more than I can handle, Princess!"

She grinned evilly, freeing her slave—temporarily. "Good answer!" #RSMarsNeededWomen 22

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2503.09 23/31 — Ceiling #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

She stood at a workstation, finally catching up her projects, the vids of dozens of Mars makers letting her supervise construction of everything from avionics to a zorothopic reactor tuner, while talking to her nisei teams that made the innovations possible.

"May Ri!" It felt like a shout. It was a worried normal voice, albeit in her ear. She jumped aside. Reina startled.

"Couldn't you've pinged me?"

The lithe Onēsanue held a hand over her likely racing heart, like May Ri did. "Too—" Grey eyes surrounded by freckles glanced at the two-way vids. "—sensitive." After farewells, Reina showed her book plate. Silently.

"Wait? Is Elysium fueling their starship?"

Reina nodded, flipped her book plate, and showed it again. May Ri flicked through anonymous reports.

Spies.

It was bad enough they had to work with the Decath discontents, helping them adjust in the loving domes (not May Ri's term, a nisei one). She thought, Marriage ceased to be legally binding. W-T-F? Have a good relationship! Romantically pretend you're married. "Feel" God's word. Whatever! Men like sex, too; can't they see the benefits!?

She read the summary. "'Re-education?' Wow, what a loaded word. Some fascist Decath patriarch was reading his copy of Raymond's uncensored library—and got the idea why the 2025-oligarchs banned them, huh?"

"Somebody leaked our plans for the crews of the asteroid ships next week."

May Ri chuckled at the irony. "No, deduced them. I'm no genius. Likely the strongarm tactic they'd do— Wait! If Elysium takes over Deimosbase—"

"Exactly. Can a spinthrower knock a rocket from the sky?"

"And they call me the Bloody Princess! No. It shoots payloads to fixed locations. Chaotic movement through air, let alone predicting a powered trajectory, makes it useless. The railgun can't be retargeted, so don't ask. Besides, that vehicle is our access to orbit."

May Ri asked to see the refueling feed. She scrolled the dashboard, rabbit-holing links, finally finding an interesting link under Starship Comp Manage. "Firmware?"

Reina beamed. "Earth developers didn't get the real Mars. When we met—" at thirteen "—my mother had me writing interfaces for martian sensor packs."

May Ri punched the link as if she would break the screen.

"Let me." She tapped in a code… revealing their peaceful solution.

May Ri sat on the terminus of the Gale crater monorail spur to Elysium, boots dangling five meters above the rusty regolith, awaiting the local dawn which brightened the east a strange blue, ignoring her stomach growling about not getting lunch. Cargoons idled at ready behind her, but nobody joined her. Mari would've suited up, but she'd excluded her from the raid.

"Final countdown," came over the comm.

Due to Martian conditions, EM's starship model was two-stage-to-orbit. Disabling the vehicle fifteen hours prior would have made Elysium isolate their network and reload softs. Instead, Reina incremented the separation timer. They'd miss a timely sep. When they fell under their orbital ceiling and got sep, they'd be forced to emergency land, stranding their "Soldiers of God." May Ri planned a rescue… in a few weeks.

"Lift off."

May Ri had the best seat! She lifted her binocs as a miniature sun crested the crater wall, rising, sparkling, leaving a trail dyed orange by the real sun rising beyond a crater-hidden horizon. Another countdown whispered in her ear… "Engine cutoff."

May Ri clicked the stopwatch. The diamond in the sky dimmed, but the pale contrail followed, thinning. The starship reflected orange and yellow. The arc of the sky made it seem it still climbed, but cresting the zenith with a minute to go, it would soon fall below ceiling—

The ship flared.

May Ri juggled the stopwatch, lost it over the edge, grabbed her binocs… "Did they bypass the timer—?"

"No," said Reina's voice over the frenzy of others, on a private comm.

May Ri realized the magnitude of the flare. Not sep. No benign peeling off of three boosters. It brightened, quickly blinding. One flare, five, then twenty. A string of pearls in the heavens, snapped off a mythical deity's neck, strewn angrily across the sky. A swarm of fireballs, another flare, two, then red comets that looked that way due to the increasing friction of re-entry.

"Oops," said Reina. "Should've run more sims."

May Ri pinged Elysium reflexively, not thinking she might be rejected. Surprisingly, Stan's wife answered, "E—Elysium—"

"Patch me into Ezekiel!" she shouted.

The woman burst into tears. "He was on the flight!" With 69 other men, three nisei, two her sons. "Is this the Princess?" Her voice lowered, broke as she sniffled. "Please. I think we need some help here…" #RSMarsNeededWomen 23

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2503.24 24/31 — Work #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera CW: Fictional Mentions of Rape

May Ri had read that power structures (human ones) were fragile; remove the keystone, the bridge collapses. Ezekiel Stan had maintained power by intimidation and retribution. He'd taken the men he thought could beat Deimos into submission. In Elysium, May Ri found a collapsing bridge.

Five days later, Stan's wife, Gwen, and May Ri got to talk. Somehow it turned into an interview. In a dome living room appointed with Earthly leather sofas, tables, and lamps, Stan's six new wives also waited, ranging from 37 to 16; three were nisei, two visibly pregnant, one nursing a fussy red-faced newborn to hush it. Gwen's eight remaining children, all girls, attended, sitting, touching, studying intently a shared book plate despite their ages. All dressed in synthsilk, including the prim and proper matriarch, who was 45, tall, thin, white, and feminine. Nobody looked happy. Randy recorded.

May Ri: I'm sorry for your loss.

Gwen: Sure.

MR: Everybody—

G: Zek made them honest women before the end.

MR: You're a first contract colonist. What made you sign-up?

G: [Sighs] Naïve? Heard Mars needed women in a sermon about brave men. I'd be 14 in two weeks, but rushed out into the fields to record an application. I tugged up peanuts setting flowers in the ground, got sweaty under the sun, got mud on my big sister's flimsy top and shorts and paid hell for that. The shoulder kept sliding off, and I kept pulling it back barely in time. The wind pressed the cotton against my chest. The shorts rode up into the crack of my butt when I bent over. I smiled and giggled.

Father served an elite niche farm-fresh clientele; I got to be retro-exotic. I lied about my age.

Ezekiel liked young. [Waves at nisei co-wives] The minister okayed my EM Corp contract when I promised to pay for church repairs. I also paid off father's mortgage. Nine months later I landed at Elysium. Nine months later I had Gabriel.

Ok? Now, how did you meet Zek?

MR: He tried to rape me.

G: [Nods] I was a good Decath girl with good Decath folk raising me. Nobody thought to tell me what to do other than obey him. He'd lived six years on Mars; I frustrated him. Not rape if you're married, right? [Waves hand in negation, points at Randy] You love him, right?

MR: [Freezes, blinks, then smiles, looking at the blue Mars-denim clad man] We make each other very happy.

G: Love?

Randy: I love her. MR: Yes.

G: Other women?

R: She's too much for me as it is!

G: Men?

MR: Quality over quantity.

G: He was a good teacher?

R:

[Laughs]MR: I studied then practiced, a lot. Decided I liked it, despite the drawback.

G: Five daughters? I've 10 kids. I win.

MR: I love them all.

G: Zek liked variety, because of me. Three years later, a girlfriend a year older than me taught me "tricks."

MR: Not your fault he was trash. Don't think that.

G: [Shakes head] Easy for you to say. [Her eyes widen] Ah. Rape. Right. You "caused" his "stroke." I should thank you for a year of peace.

MR: The only weapon I had was decompressing the cabin.

G: Yet, you saved his life?

[Gwen and May Ri study each other]

G: So you sold your body for a college education, I heard. Then got shanghaied and swindled out of your silver coins. Was it worth it?

MR: Was going to fail at being a housewife—

R:

[Coughs]MR: Not completely. I like sex. I earned lots of opportunities to do what interested me. Earth made a mistake by not ignoring my gender and failing to educate me. I hope men will regret it, maybe some already do.

G: Opportunities? There's little women's work.

MR: Women's work. Men's work! If you can do the work, that thing between his legs makes no difference.

G: Raphael [Gwen's 2nd son, 17 at his death] always hung around the crèche, helping, cleaning up messes, toileting, playing with kids, teaching letters and numbers. Women's work. When his father broke his arm, I think it broke him. He had no business volunteering for Deimos, yet he did, because "soldier" is men's work and he had learned he was a man.

MR: [Growls] You understand why marriage—

G: Is illegal?

MR: Not illegal. Non-binding. You can act married, but you could have prevented Ezekiel—

G: [Eyes shut tight] —from doing what he wanted? Seriously? You know how strong he was?

MR: We will. Women will. We must. [Places a ceramic cup from the coffee table in the exoskeleton hand of Randy's paralyzed arm. Nods. He pulverizes it] Technology is gender-agnostic.

G: [Thoughtful, then:] I know you are an a-theist, but one day you'll understand you've been blessed. My late husband, too many men, have forgotten that the "love, honor, and respect" part in God's vow is due men and women—but you haven't. #RSMarsNeededWomen 24

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2503.13 25/31— International #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

A channel blinked: a priority ping but not Reina or the other heads. May Ri tapped her book plate, instead of ignoring it. She traced the missive to the deep space network, origin Earth. Manzanar Partners: the firm had negotiated the buyout of EM Corp's debt and assets for the Sorority. To a logo screen, May Ri recorded herself waving, "May Ri here. Please state why you've pinged."

A 21m 3s round trip. Intuition soured her stomach the instant she tapped Send, so she pinged Reina who camped on. Reina pinged her mother, section heads, and a few dome managers to lurk.

Twenty-five minutes later, she accepted the offered duplex. It cleared, muted, to show…

She recognized the pale unwontedly frail 63 year old man with grey hair and deep wrinkles, wearing a blue suit two sizes too big—not his.

A Decath minister in his 30s, wearing light blue robes with white edging, stood stage left in what, thanks to the sun through stained glass that illuminated carved wood and gold, had to be a Decath church property. She did not miss the dagger in a gleaming ruby-encrusted gold sheath.

Her father was an a-theist—like his daughter, who swore as she lip read because her father exaggerated his words: "Yes, she's the Princess of Mars."

The feed unmuted.

"For shame!" her father said, voice quavering. "You have led the Righteous Men of Mars astray with your Temptations and your Evil Words! Ha—h-h-" He couldn't say the word she deduced was harlot.

His eyes glanced to the minister, his handler, then her. Monotone speech: A script. The reason he was pale and prematurely old looking.

Two years ago Raymond had disappeared, after broadcasting his uncensored library. May Ri started shaking.

"Repent!" he went on. "Accept God's Blessing as I, your father, have done, so you may ask a Forgiving God that you not be Eternally Damned." He started coughing, his hand shaking until he caught his wrist. "They want—" His chest expanded in a deep breath. "Release the Deacon of Deimos. Sign EM Mars over into the Loving Hands of the International Decath Crown and your life shall be Spared—"

As if…

Crying, May Ri shouted over her father. "I love you, Dadie. You hypocritical Crown trash, or whoever filth you really are: You… have… attacked… My family!" She punched her book plate, severing the link, dropping the device to clatter, certain she'd never see the man alive again.

Reina's own book plate flew from her grasp as she half-tackled May Ri, having run from her office dome, hugging her so tightly May Ri couldn't breathe. "I'm so sorry!" She cried. They both cried.

"No," May Ri said, her sobbing stopping in an instant. Was it an oath, or maybe a hope? "One day they will be… very sorry."

The deep space network lit up. It was a real international conspiracy, May Ri decided, not a theoretical one. Too much coordination, the timing making it manifest that partial national adversaries had joined forces. Lawyers filed suits declaring EM Mars Corp stolen. The International Criminal Court, for a century obviously a delegitimizing arm of the American and European states, issued warrants for May Ri's and Reina Īto's crimes against humanity, various murders, and an ethnic cleansing of Decath believers. All their assets on Earth (nil) were impounded. All assets in Mars space were immediately forfeit.

As if…

The North American Decath State's Secretary of State pinged Mars. Though the Onēsanue was the "Head of State" requested, an operator connected May Ri. After the light delay, the face of a man in a red silk suit displayed, before he adjusted his blue tie and smiled with big teeth at the looping greeting she'd recorded. He'd gotten the real Princess of Mars on the line. His voice squeaked, ruining the virile look his hair style tried for.

"Princess May Ri. Congressional appointees today voted to declare war on the Sorority. Co-President Smith is assigned to execute that declaration by the blessing of God. I'm here to offer you a chance to surrender unconditionally, before we devastate your world—"

As if…

May Ri asked, "Killing an entirely civilian population?" speaking over him, oblivious to how they would spin the sound bite. Rolling her eyes, she disconnected.

She hadn't said defenseless. A nuclear thrust model of the starship was flight testing. Everyone had ideas. Amazing how a common enemy unified even dissenters.

Two days later, the Russian Supremacy declared war on NADS, reasoning the States had declared war on their vassal.

As if…

Insurgent forces on the Japanese archipelago and the Korean peninsula attacked East Imperial China. The clean nukes fired in retaliation against Tokyo were accidental.

As if… #RSMarsNeededWomen 25

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2503.17 26/31 — Strike #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

"Premature" seemed to be a male thing, in politics as in sex. The "clean" fallout from the Chinese strike on Tokyo crossed to the Hawaiian Islands. State media called it the start of the Small World War.

May Ri saw it differently: Males posturing and playing WAR, performing for an audience of the powerful, of presidents and prime ministers, of the wealthy who tugged the reins of a spooking horse, and of the vocal fraction of the believers and prophets who oversaw holy missions that whipped the growth of congregations to build spiritual wealth. Spit on the ordinary folk, like Gwen Stan had been before her decision, like May Ri herself with hope beyond being a housewife, like the nisei and sansei of Mars.

May Ri didn't play male games like War and Mercy. Men threaten your kids with a weapon… you kill them. Her female philosophy. What you get after millennia of being the weaker gender: an understanding of what men do to you if you let them.

NADS had warned them!

Don't posture if you can't punch, yet two solar conjunctions with Earth passed; the Sorority took advantage of both, and every day between. Meanwhile, Earth nations ate other nations. Democracies were born; the KJC (Korea-Japan Confederacy) barely survived as the dust settled. NADS held delayed elections; the Forever Free party won on the strength that Mars' Princess would "kill the entire civilian population" of the States. Her words, twisted.

Approaching Mars opposition, NADS and the UN launched a fast fleet. They converted five old freighters plying the Lagrange colonies and lunar runs. They loaded missiles, leftovers from the fun and games. Faithful Decath men would show the heathen Sorority what Armageddon looked like.

All gleaned via feeds on the deep space network. Hundreds of nisei monitored Earth's nations of mostly, at best, frienemies, correlating, verifying, deducing what was real, what might be hidden, and what was diversionary. Not much of the latter, it seemed. Earth powers as a whole thought the Sorority a "country bumpkin" state. Considering Mars hadn't evidenced Martian maker tech in their one sale, and had decided it was of no use to trumpet their achievements, maybe it was a realistic deduction.

May Ri jerked her fried chicken drumstick when Mari pinged her from the capital in Herschel Crater. "We're approaching point of no return. Can you look now?"

"Physics," May Ri said, licking her lips then wiping her hands, but her daughter was having none of it.

"Can't defy physics, right. They're still running silent for Mars orbit."

"Trajectory?"

"Unchanged."

May Ri sighed. "You want to contact them?"

"We should try! Backup spinlaunchers show nominal."

May Ri pinched out the view. Radar and telescopic feeds showed five torches in formation, gasfire blue, expanding them to show green trailing and red forward trajectories with orbital predictions. "We could be wrong about the boost on their missiles. Any delay might let them fire them. They're not a peace mission or missionaries."

"Momie!"

"If—"

"If I lived on Earth I'd understand how to trust Earthers. I remember Ezekiel Stan ordered Dadie's murder." Her eyes narrowed and her sweet voice sharpened.

"Ok."

"Wait." Quieter, "Broadcast comm frequencies. Ask to talk."

May Ri finished her garlic whipped cauliflower, scooping with her drumstick. Time counted down in a corner of her book plate. No more reviewing her v17 railgun design.

The feed patched in suddenly. May Ri got to wipe her face with a napkin on camera as an officer on a ship's bridge spoke, "—what we want? Seriously?"

May Ri said, "That's your opening negotiation bid?"

After short light delay, the man shook his head, barely stopping himself from a facepalm.

"We want your immediate and unconditional surrender, or we will demolish all your infrastructure and your capital domes in our first strike."

"Killing civilians, check. We don't have a military." Per se. "I'm broadcasting this over the deep space network."

The man stuttered for a second. Men liked to negotiate in private so they could preen and posture. "Surrender, now."

"Any better offer?"

"No."

"May I ask you if you'll surrender?"

The man's mouth opened, then he chewed on a laugh. "Sure! Answer's, 'No.' Here's what we expect when we reach orbit…"

May Ri said, "I tried," and reached for a chocolate soya dessert, listening as the man droned on and on while the countdown went to zero. She heard a bang on the feed, then three more, then a staccato. People looked around, the man jumping when his feed froze on the last frame.

Torches winked out, one flaring explosively, as the fleet intercepted the 7th of 9 bands of spinlaunched boulders. #RSMarsNeededWomen 26

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2503.27 27/31 — Voice #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

May Ri's daughter Marisela barged into her book plate on a priority director level key. "One of the warships reignited its torch!"

May Ri had been caught in the gym, running. Her sweat cooled immediately. "Not happening!"

Reina camped on. "We've gotten a channel 16 distress call:" A man's voice, warbly due to filters, cried, "Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is the NADSS Bonhomme Richard attempting Mars orbit with forward ship section lost. I require…" Reina added, "LOS."

"Still boosting," Mari confirmed.

May Ri buried her face in terrycloth. "Spinlaunchers?"

"Most report 'Regenerating.'"

"Whatever's ready, target it."

Reina said, "We need to attempt a rescue."

"Bad idea." Very nisei.

"They're transmitting on the deep space network."

"They're staging this. Worse idea."

"Take precautions?"

May Ri remembered a broken condom over 20 years ago…

The cargo ship sported a railgun and a docked tug. She didn't pilot. The NADS warship had achieved a highly elliptical orbit as if aimed by eye, and would soon thunder past Mars. No-grav had delighted her once, but the thumping feeling of pooling blood made her stomach clench, heightening her worry.

She'd failed to make the Earth fleet disappear without a trace from Earth's POV. She recalled who'd murdered Raymond and her father as she studied the truncated stack of cylinders, strap-on tanks and cargo trucks, above a reactor plate and a badly dented engine bell.

As reported. Truthful.

The railgun hummed through the ship superstructure. Unnecessary, but May Ri had made it a feature to ensure people knew they held a sword. Deadly force was a game to men, never to women.

She'd convinced Reina anything could be recorded, rebroadcast, and used against them. If they had radar or a lens, Earth would see a vid of a Sorority "warship" approaching, backlit by the growing disk of the planet of war. Couldn't be helped. May Ri shivered, despite the warm enviro suit. Her fingers on the board, constantly readjusting the targeting, literally itched. They ached to push Launch. Aware she watched a wounded wolf, her heart raced.

So easy to end her misery.

"Go, Helen," she instructed over laser comms.

"Ack." The blocky silver tug retroed toward the kilometers-distant threat.

Later: "Not sure how anyone survived that. Must be an engineering pod with the lit portals. Infrared shows it's not cooling to ambient. Ask?"

"Ask."

"Bonhomme, this is Search and Rescue. Can we assist?" rang over channel 16. "Wait, what's that?"

"What's what?" May Ri cried.

Her vid feed lit up. Doors on the strap-on trucks jettisoned, tumbling away from the hulk, a tiny cloud of sparkles (bolts) reflected ruddy light. More doors sprung away.

Her ship shuddered seemingly before she pressed the button. The recoiless action pounded metal and her joints. An electric Thwat! resounded through her magnetic boots. Again and again.

The view of the warship receded at high-gee as Helen retroed away. Small black spring-loaded missiles, smaller tactical short-range types, lit up even as steel bars tore through bulkheads and ripped cargo trucks, bashing off twisted debris, jerking and rattling sections of the hulk. May Ri saw the lit engineering section's portals explode outward. Little comfort, that.

Later she'd think she'd screamed inarticulately, but she hadn't. The pilot reported seeing spittle spraying her visor.

Targeting solutions against stealth missiles flashed past her eyes; she accepted repeatedly. The high tech machine-gun fired manically, vibrating her flesh, rattling her teeth, as it heated rapidly toward mechanical failure whilst her ship rotated toward the planet.

She swatted poison needles flung into the face of Mars. Debris of a missile shot past her ship unnoticed.

— 2 —

Marisela froze when her mother's voice shouted over the speakers. "They've launched missiles. Take cover!"

Raquel, who worked Alt Comm also, dragged her from her workstation chair, scraping open her arm against a corner. She shoved her down a hall filling with people running for the bomb shelters. Her mother had been so confident, but she'd always thought her Earther cynicism overblown, so not nisei. When Raquel dragged her past a bleeding man who'd been shoved against a wall, she flashed on her spacesuited father stabbed and bleeding onto the red martian sands outside Elysium. This time, all she could do was run.

Run faster.

Run farther.

Run deeper.

The deep thud made her stop. It traveled faster through rock than through the compartmentalized air of a domed city built of regolith concrete and archecultured schoom brick. She never felt the heat blast.

— 3 —

"Two got through. They nuked Herschel." #RSMarsNeededWomen 27

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2503.14 28/31 — Veil #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

The day the Decath pressured Marisela's grandfather into denouncing her mother's achievements for Mars, announcing he was a hostage with a knife to his throat, Mari had wanted to announce she was pregnant. Her synthsilk hid little by the time the NADS Secretary of State delivered his ultimatum, but Mari put it off again. Because of her part in "Suiting up the Nisei," then with her father's help, convincing people that women could perform increasingly unoccupied men's jobs, she earned recognition for marshaling people to causes. On vid from Herschel, having helped win a vote to build the martian-designed cargo vessels the Onēsanue championed, her mother stopped mid-conversation, pointing.

Mari hadn't known how to interpret her shocked expression. "I chose Rufus."

"I'm going to be a grandma?"

May Ri worked at it, volunteering crèche duty with Rufus since critical work took Mari all over the globe and her makers and designing didn't require travel or set meeting hours. Mari's second, a boy, was thanks to Rachel, who turned out to be biologically male to some people's chagrin, but not entirely to Mari who'd wondered about her attraction to the girl—which went out the airlock when she later found herself attracted to other women. The nisei often slept in pods, and no martian cared about biological correctness the way Earthers did. Regardless, it was a cute rando on one of the old asteroid ships (best she could calculate) who accounted for her third sansei, fulfilling her colonial duty early. Like her father, like most male imports, she visited her family a week every couple months.

May Ri missed her eldest despite the grandkids.

Manette, her second, filled the void, joining May Ri's engineering echo group as a trainee, taking after her mother. Both homebodies, they often worked together in the same dome, Mani helping iterate May Ri's railgun development before May Ri's departure, this despite having her first girl by a podmate. That meant nursing, which she was especially well built for. She became a wet nurse when she decided she liked it. Her mother thought her weird, but at 18 she was a grownup. A book plate let Mani work both jobs effectively.

May Ri's unplanned for 5th daughter, Moria, found a special place in her heart. Unlike her mother, her quiet loner girl got the luxury of doing what she wanted from the start: paint—which meant murals. The 13-year-old's rainbow-colored abstracts increasingly filled hallways and entire domes with joy, with rolling melting circles and ellipses, or fractal explosions, or… was that daisies? Auntie Reina found ways for her to travel between dome crèches, to spread her visual happiness wider.

Maureen and Miriam, the twins, turned into stalkers at puberty, startling their mother, suddenly anywhere she might be. Worse, they finished each other's sentences; they were fraternal, one with sandy and the other with dark hair, which ruined the effect. Soon they finished May Ri's sentences, often predicting what their mother would say to colleagues, or want, bringing her that. The uncanny pair studied everything, but especially liked vehicles—helios, rovers, shuttles, gunships. Not building them, but fixing and maintaining them. The mechanics loved living in no-grav and suits, but kept returning to their mother's construction unit, to "care" for her, because they of all May Ri's daughters understood their mother's demons.

The twins gathered their siblings and their father, Rufus and Raquel, Reina and her pod, the week before the Earther fleet encounter, celebrating their mother's birthday with Chicken Three Ways (eggs, soup, and fried spicy) cooked by Mani, eggy-fluffy golden challah fresh-baked by Raquel and Mari, and chocolate cake baked by Mani decorated by Moria. Even the sansei grandkids attended, kept strategically occupied and fed by Mani.

Ten days later, NADS nuked Herschel, where Big Sister worked as vice-director. The family never saw Marisela again. Reina remarked that at least after Hiroshima—nuked by NADS's secular precursor state—survivors had air to breathe.

The twins characterized it as a veil lowering across their mother's heart. The years of preparation, the building, the launching, the trips to 16 Psyche, the provisioning—it went from protecting Mother Mars to revenge at all costs, even if it cost of her life.

Nobody could guarantee success, regardless of vehemence. More importantly, their mother had taught them emotion interfered with getting the job done.

The twins won their berth on the SS Bradbury by merit, and kept it over May Ri's objections because the Onēsanue insisted. They hoped it would give the mission commander a reason to live. #RSMarsNeededWomen 28

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2503.26 29/31 — Night #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

"You still insist the damage is consistent with meteor strikes?" the HighGo supervisor asked.

"I've matched V with the debris field." Kyv, the acting Lunar Territory COO sighed. "I've eyes on; the holes are irregularly sized. Not slugs! You don't believe me?"

"No vid feed."

"HighGo cut out our maintenance staff."

"RTFM. It's a coincidence International Earth Docks got hit in HEO and Earth LR Docks got hit in LO, but your Lunar Orbital didn't?"

"Yes."

"This won't fly. Out."

Kyv rubbed the bridge of his nose. The vid would have shown multiple angles of attack. Attack! He whispered, "Bad enough we're virtual slaves. Now NADS wants us as a scapegoat for some bogie that escaped their cage?"

Krump!

His transorbital shuddered, and he cringed. A meteor? While long range comms went solid red, ship-to-ship now blinked green. A survivor?

He tapped it. "LT-TO-1 here."

"Look outside." A young woman's voice said, before a collision warning went off.

A shadow that ate night swam in the stars, eclipsing tumbling metal and plastic. Faceted but rounded, it looked spidery as he squinted. A weak radar reflection screamed stealth, military—but nobody had rebuilt the deadly toys since the Orbital Reaping 35 years ago. Economics.

"Identify yourself," he said.

"Is she friend?" asked the voice. A second added, "Or is she foe?"

A third woman said, "Mau, Mi, stop that! Please deorbit to base. You'll find a gift there."

With LRCs down, what choice did he have? When he set down at Southhome Docks, a three story cylindrical package rested beside its tumbled over retrounit. The spider craft set down beside his and turned lunar grey.

"Invite us in."

The two… were they really teenage girls? They caught his eye, more than their spidery haystack automaton or the suited-up industrial robot holding a book plate toward them; suited because a man rode inside. Kyv saw no guns; he hoped. A sandy haired and black haired girl unzipped their suits and squatted provocatively with frog-like agility. He smelled rose.

One waved, saying, "We wanna make friends." The other added, "Are you excited about your gift?"

The book plate lit up. Kyv recognized the woman on vid. "The Princess of Mars and her Five Daughters!"

May Ri, in her alighter outside, watched the growing crowd of men, wiry, lightly muscled, androgynous for that, all moonborne, adapted to 1/6th gravity. No weapons. She sighed. "You saw the vid of the nuking of Hershel?"

Many nodded as Kyv said, "That viral 'hoax propaganda' that got us ordered to shut down the deep space network?"

"I now have four daughters."

He looked down. "To live is to be beaten up, or crapped upon."

"Please don't retransmit our visit."

"How would I explain you being here?"

"Or the 50 MW Thorium SMR I left on your tarmac?"

"A 'gift?'"

"Yeah," Mau said. The twins studied the handsome night-skinned moonborne leader, as he had them. Green eyes, white teeth, and a tight jumpsuit made a nice package. It explained Mi whispering, "Mars needs men."

May Ri quickly said, "With an offer to restore the Lunar Republic, or you can join the Sorority on Mars."

"In exchange for what?" he asked.

"Let us complete a project that would be detectable from your orbital—"

"The meteor shower?"

"Not natural, but you guessed that. We want you to overlook some escavation. The projects will protect the Moon and Mars."

"If we don't agree?"

"You lose your orbital, maybe take damage in the attacks if we're detected. You miss out on our friendship—and get to explain the SMR to your NADS overlord."

While he discussed it with the others, May Ri's comms squawked, "Vandeburg SFB just launched to polar, likely headed your way."

May Ri asked Kyv, "Are you expecting resupply?"

"This decade? Ha!"

"Explain this."

He peered at a vid of a tiny torch rising over cloud cover.

"Want to ask HighGo?"

When Kyv frowned, she said, "I snooped your HighGo convo; they distrust you. They've left you stranded because you can't live on Earth, which means they can't close up shop. I'll trust you to ask."

Nodding, Kyv tapped the address… and got a banner:

NADS Central Command
Your key is invalid.

"But… I've got a COO key!"

May Ri shared a squawk, "Confirmed its leaving Earth orbit," then showed a plot curving toward the lunar south pole. "A ballistic trajectory. They really distrust you."

"You're faking that."

Mau and Mi said, "Maybe she—"

"is. Maybe she—"

"—isn't?"

"Here's a freebie: Boost your orbital 1 km ASAP…"

"…Okay, we'll agree to your request. What about—"

"—that starship? On it. If we get it right, they'll blame a malfunction."

Mi walked up to Kyv with a real pen and paper. "Real friends sign contracts." #RSMarsNeededWomen 29

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2503.29 30/31 — Matriarchy #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

Maurine watched Miriam slightly brush her chest against Kyv as she adjusted the book plate. Mau whispered in Mi's ear, "He's going to have trouble standing again."

"I know!" her sandy-haired twin mouthed. "Cute."

Kyv, their mother, and moonborne staff concentrated on a vid. The cargo starship jerked suddenly, starting to tumble. Res and perspective changed as the flyby view and magnification changed. The precision strike burst the fuel tank. The cargo bay opened; a robot arm checked damage.

"Maintain weapons range."

"Aye."

When the arm lofted a long black cylinder that resolved to a missile, their mother went pale. The scene before Hershel. "Fire! Fire now!"

Seconds later, the booster section shattered to shrapnel, parts tumbling, including the cargo arm.

"Ma'am?"

She wiped her forehead. "It's defanged—"

The vid whited out. Mi reflexively hugged Kyv. Ten mags out, a nuclear spawned sun faded to orange then red.

Kyv said, "Earth will see that."

"They pressed the button," their mother corrected. "Future May Ri's problem." She shuddered, sighed, and looked at Mi. Clutching Kyv. She grabbed Mi's ear and pulled her up.

"Ow! Ow!"

"Kyv? Are you married?"

"My wife died in the fighting when NADS took over."

"Girls. See what you get when you ask? Decath?"

"Is anybody still religious? After they crapped on the moon?"

"These two are serious. They're also adults. Mi!"

"Ow! Ow!"

"Mau?"

She got The Look and stood straight.

"Explain to him about consent and get it, both of you. Then about marriage, pods, nisei, and your expectations. Got it?" Waving at the embarrassed moonborne audience, "Them, too. So arriving crew won't cause problems."

Mau started breathing again.

May Ri discovered the moon wasn't devoid of women. 23, all with their tubes tied, forcibly, to 417 remaining men. They lived separately, in telescope and deep space network housing. When they voted to join the Sorority, the men agreed.

Soon parts of the DSN came up, including Sorority Prime, all narrowcast. NADS had isolated the dirigible station on Venus and the Long Term Titan Survey. May Ri spent more time as a diplomat listening to people vent than an engineer monitoring construction projects.

Thirty more vehicles launched toward Southhome; all quietly reduced to tumbling metal. May Ri thanked the ether for uncatalogued launch sites. Meanwhile, judging by actual ham radio traffic, Earth was losing its collective mind. Even readonly, the DSN became a rocket nozzle. If it weren't for the twins' insistence on finding "friends," they might have missed a missive in the torch.

"Raj has friends in the KJC," Kyv said. "Says the address looks good."

May Ri nodded, standing out of camera view. Kyv tapped and the vid cleared to show middle-aged and elderly men. Some balding. Asian features. Suits, two military with brass. A conference room. Scattered sitrep feeds. A simple white flag with a blue and red yin-yang sun. A man with dark eyes and hair bowed and spoke…

Mau said, "That's Japanese."

May Ri restrained her, so she translated where she stood. "We represent the Korea-Japan Confederacy. May we speak to the esteemed leader of the Lunar Republic?"

Kyv looked to May Ri. She whispered to Mau, who said, "Is this conversation private?" And, after an exchange of keys, it was. She added, "May we ask the matter at hand?"

"We politely wish to inquire with your friends about the status of an EM Mars colonial scientist named Yuki Īto."

"Reina's mom?" Mi asked quietly, now beside her twin. Both looked sad.

The hair on the back of May Ri's neck prickled. "We're supposed to make friends?"

"The KJC is not NADS' friend."

May Ri nodded.

"We're curious."

"Me, too."

With a RT of 8 minutes, which everyone understood, May Ri patched into Reina, giving a sitrep, before walking into view holding up her book plate.

[Translated]"Princess May Ri of Mars!" All those standing, bowed.

May Ri waved a hand in negation. "More of a joke than a title. I do what I can."

Reina started. "I am the Onēsanue of the Nisei. Yuki Īto died two days after the bombing of Herschel by our mutual enemy, from grief and sadness. Many mourn her. Why do you ask…?"

"Reconstructed war records indicate Yuki Īto was the last surviving child in the imperial line, daughter of Princess Sakura, daughter of the 131st Emperor of Japan, Ryohito…."

"I am Reina Īto. Yuki was my mother. She did tell stories about being adopted in the states after the war…"

All the men in the room stood. Those of Japanese heritage bowed deeper and longer, the spokesman saying, "I think our countries have a basis for alliance."

May and Mi said, "Isn't seeking friendship—" "—wonderful?" #RSMarsNeededWomen 30

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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2503.30 31/31 — Wave #Writever #Mars #SpaceOpera

Marisela, aged 10, wearing her little Mars green enviro suit, smiled and waved a rust-stained gauntleted hand. They'd traveled to Jezero Crater. Behind her lay a famous scene of twin dark red rover tracks gouged into orange soil, between hills strewn with dark boulders and rusty shingle rocks. Dust storms and dust devils over the years had softened them. A crater wall stretched like a mountain range to the greenish hazy horizon. May Ri had wanted to celebrate Mari having suit-trained 2,000 nisei. Mari asked for a trip to Jezero with Momie. Reina made it so.

The image looped every 10 seconds with a blink.

In that blink of darkness, in memory, the cargo doors of the decapitated warship flew open. Her two-second delayed reaction had cost her daughter's life.

The North American Decath States had killed her daughter. She'd failed to stop them. She pounded the table. On the moon, that action pushed her from her chair.

"There you are," a dark-haired teenager asked, climbing the stairs into the observatory. Domes were built fully or partially buried, to protect from radiation. Few had windows, but this one did. Thick. 360º, with a full black sky above and a sun always peaking over the horizon. A cloudy blue world opposite entered a full phase, sliced off by crater walls.

Distracted by Mau approaching, she looked for Mi.

"No Miriam?" Rare.

"We caused Kyv to pull a muscle, but Mi's better at massaging. Give me something to bolt together any day! So, I answered a ping." She handed over May Ri's intentionally-left-behind book plate, then swiped the memory cube faster than her mother could jump, and slept it.

May Ri tapped a priority from Reina.

"I trust you," the recorded Onēsanue said. Her red hair hung limp. Her grey eyes displayed dark circles below them, transforming her freckles to ashes. "Your intuition said shoot the Bonhomme Richard despite the mayday. I insisted on international norms, that we attempt a rescue. I was wrong. My intuition was wrong. 1,323 people and your precious daughter died because I'd never been abused or oppressed by Earthers. I did not understand. I still don't understand, so I will say this: If leveling cities is your decision, or standing by and letting them cower in fear at what we might do is your decision, I shan't second guess you. I trust you." The message ended.

"Pfft! That was helpful!"

Maurine hugged her mother from behind, squeezing tightly, head on her shoulder. May Ri smelled sweat and Mi's rose perfume.

"Mau—?"

"Not happening, Momie!" She tried to bite her ear.

May Ri shoved her, laughing.

"Seriously. Ten minutes to the astronomical new moon. Next month a partial solar eclipse; today, we're in the sun's glare. You picked now symbolically, but you need to choose a plan." Mau's book plate filled will warning messages. One stated, "Get May Ri's rear in gear!!!" with 3 exclaims.

What was she to do? A blue world with billions of people led astray by a belief in an all-powerful invisible friend, or two, and a belief only money made friends. When she closed her eyes, she saw the red face of Mars, a flash, then another, then a distorted mushroom of fire and debris rising, as her daughter—

—had ceased to exist.

She envied the Decath, envied their certainty that there was a "better place" the dead would populate, would "live" happily forever.

She hugged herself. No. Her daughter was gone. Half-a-year ago. Nothing would bring her back.

Reina's trust did nothing to help. May Ri needed to prevent a repeat of that day.

Today.

Men had a brutal history of conquest, of killing the husbands and the children so the subsequent babies were theirs. May Ri read the books, understood the patriarchy and theology supporting it, and the Game of War. Women were no more than a prize.

Would she play? Destroy the capital of the States like they destroyed Herschel?

What would Marisela think? The girl had taught the Nisei to wear spacesuits because it made her more friends. Mau and Mi always said to make friends. Very Nisei.

"Friends?" May Ri asked.

Maureen gave a thumbs up.

May Ri didn't know what she'd choose. Her fingers typed in a code and keys.

Thorium SMRs across the Moon responded to loads as newly built spinlaunchers powered up, soon casting ton-sized payloads skyward. Southhome vibrated as the south polar set of twenty launched with a faint whump, whump, whump.

She looked at her book plate. She read the first target sweeping east to west. Cape Canaveral not General Washington City. She sighed. In three days, Earth would cease to have launch capability, except for the KJC.

"Let's warn them to evacuate two hours before impact."

"Sounds good," Mau said. #RSMarsNeededWomen 31

—END—

[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]

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