The Colony's Fourth District Takes Its First Breath of Its Own Air

VALLES MARINERIS (via relay) — The bulletin arrived a little before noon, Earth-side, carrying the flat good news that the colony has learned to prefer over the dramatic kind: the fourth pressurized district held atmosphere overnight, seals nominal, oxygen fraction stable. It had taken the settlement eleven months to hollow, brace, and finally fill the new rooms cut into the rift wall — and when the pressure gauges settled, the administrator wrote, a maintenance crew simply took off their helmets and stood in a corridor that, an hour earlier, had been vacuum. "We opened a door that did not need opening carefully," the dispatch read. "That is the whole ceremony." The district adds housing for several thousand against a population now edging toward fifty thousand, and it was engineered, as everything here is, against the fourteen-minute lag that keeps every Martian decision local by necessity. No supply ship can arrive in time to save a bad call. On Mars they have made a virtue of that solitude. On Earth we read the news of their new air and, for a moment, envy people who build their sky by hand.