Free They Dreamed of Poppies (a novelette) by Saul Tanpepper

 
    We really didn’t know what to expect. Most of us didn’t even know how we were supposed to feel about the whole situation, the mission. The likelihood of survival wasn’t very good to begin with. Then again, chances were no better had we chosen not to go.
    Much of the doubt stemmed from the mystery of the colonists who went missing fifteen years ago. The uncertainty infected us all, though not enough to dispel the hope we clung to as if it were a life raft. Everyone believed that we would somehow, despite the heavy odds against us, persevere. We would make this work, even if it turned out the planet was just as dead as we feared the colonists were.
    Hope. In the entirety of human existence, no tool has ever been wielded to greater effect. And no weapon has ever caused more to be lost.
    For those few of us old enough to remember what it was like to stand on solid ground, to dig one’s toes into the damp earth, to feel the wind from some far-off place on our skin, this mission represents more than just a chance to live. It’s about ensuring the survival of our species. It’s about bringing this long journey to an end.
    For the rest of the people, the ones who can only attest to knowing the insufficient whisper of filtered air pulsing onto the backs of their necks by the station’s decaying pumps  — air that has been recycled so many times that the very essence of vitality has been leeched from it — their excitement is more a sort of psychic resonance than it is genuinely emotional. It’s an inherited memory of what it was like to live outside , with a sky overhead. They’ve spent their entire lives without setting a single foot on the ground, without feeling the sting of raw sunlight on their faces or smelling a dozen different flowers blooming all at once. They cannot know what it means to connect to a world, to a place .
    From my reading of the reports I knew that the Mars terraforming project had achieved its every milestone, at least up until the point when communication with the various colonies abruptly stopped.
    They had just proven that plants could grow in the nascent atmosphere. Robust plants, fast-growing, though mostly inedible. Most pioneer species, such as mosses and microscopic fungi, saprophytes — plants living off dead, organic matter — bear little nutritional value to humans. Nevertheless, they are essential for establishing and boosting the otherwise infertile soil so that the plants from which we can draw our own nourishment may then thrive.
    Based on their progress, they had predicted that the planet would be ready for full-scale habitation and cultivation in less than ten years. Unfortunately, our projections had the hydroponics lab on the station failing after just seven. The colonists were instructed to do whatever they could to advance their timeline.
    For years after communication stopped, we debated whether it was that request itself or something they did in response to it which led to our being cut off. We still don’t know.
    Naturally, we tried everything we could to reestablish contact, save for actually making the trip out to them. We had  — make that have  — only the one functioning ship, the one I now pilot. At the time, it was deemed too risky, the likelihood of success too small, to chance a scouting mission.
    So, instead, we waited and listened. Weeks turned into months, months into years, and no word came. We finally had to admit that something had gone terribly wrong. Four colonies’ worth of people, a fifth of our population, were gone.
    The project was scrapped.
    We decided instead to focus our energies elsewhere, living on the hope that an alternative to Mars would present itself, and that meanwhile the biolab would outlive our direst projections, that it wouldn’t fail  . . . wouldn’t fail . . . wouldn’t fail.
    It failed. After fourteen years of constant fixes and tinkering, the lab’s nutrient recyclers chugged to a stop. And in the