Free Red Mars Love by Stephanie Owens

 
    The planet hid many valuable resources beneath its surface which reduced the colony’s dependence on Earth and helped them to be successful and quite prolific, I might add, it seemed the Martian atmosphere promoted twins, triplets and even quadruplets with every birth making the population grow rather quickly. 
     
    I was a triplet myself and had just enjoyed spending time with my two brothers who also worked as planetologists, traveling from world to world establishing new colonies and aiding the planets they visited with solving planetary crisis and other ecological issues. 
     
    I enjoyed my work but it was lonely at times.
     
    I laughed thinking that I would forget my own name was Chris at how infrequently I got to hear someone say it.  I programmed my name into the ships onboard systems just to hear a more familiar manner of address while I was traveling alone.
     
    My brothers and I had all been athletes throughout the university and played a modified version of rugby that had become popular on Mars.  They called it Rugby but I had to believe that in the low gravity of the red planet it couldn’t have been the same as the Earth version of the sport.  With the long leaps and tackles in the reduced gravitational pull of the red planet we looked more like superheroes than rugby players.
     
    Since we were identical triplets we all had the same tall stature and rather rugged good looks.  We had broad shoulders and dark hair with dark brown eyes.  Our mother had come from a Lebanese decent giving us the deep expression that made women fawn over us, well at least it worked for my brothers.
     
    I envied my two brothers, both of which had found wives while we were in university together and they traveled the worlds together with their partners making this lonely job more tolerable. 
     
    But, they couldn’t take away the freedom I had found when I explored new planets and the amazing races I had encountered.  Each trip I lent my expertise and training to investigate some phenomena that the planet was experiencing and resolving the issues that they faced.  I never knew what I would be facing on each trip and this one was no exception.  I had just responded to a call from my home office on Mars, the technological hub for planetology tasked with resolving the issues being faced by all the different races within the universe.
     
    I couldn’t imagine having lived in those ancient times before space travel evolved.  In those days the trip from Earth to Mars was almost 200 days long, today’s trip was about 20 minutes with the new technology.
     
    The Martian colonization took off and with it so had the evolution of space travel, once they dismissed the antiquated concept of simple fuel based propulsion and looked at coordinate based jumps or blinks as we called them we were finally able to visit more distant worlds.  I knew how the system worked, it was mandatory studying in the university in case our ships network went down but I chose not to think about it when I was traveling between planets.  I chose to just set my coordinates for a safe distance outside the planet’s atmosphere dedicated to blink travel then slowly set down on the planet’s surface using the propulsion system.
     
    The beeping on the console of the ship brought me out of my reverie.
     
    “We will be landing in 20 seconds, Chris” the console reported in a cool feminine voice. 
     
    I got to choose the settings on the ships controls, after all, it was the only voice I often heard in my own language on these long assignments.
     
    My assignment on this particular trip was on the Kepler-186 system’s seventh planet. 

 
    Its designation had previously been Kepler-186f but the more common name was Cygnus for the constellation those on Earth could use to identify the planet. 
     
    The local inhabitants that we had encountered on our first trip to this planet used some unintelligible utterances I still couldn’t quite wrap my tongue