Excerpt

She was the kind of girl who slept with books on her bed. Not merely collections of books stored on computer wafers, but actual paper-made books from Earth, one of which lay upon its belly, spine protesting. It was this unforgiving surface that woke Jessamyn early, having already imprinted a crease along one side of her face. She sat up rubbing her cheek, rolled over, and kicked off the bed, landing silently so as not to awaken her family.

The getting-out-of-bed-before-the-sun wasn't a preference for Jess; rather, being perennially out of funds forced her into resourceful behaviors where she spent time (which she had) instead of credits (which she lacked.) She wished she were the sort of daughter who purchased thoughtful gifts for the ones she loved, but she couldn't hold on to credits very long. The cause for this littered her bed.

As she crept through the central room of the dwelling, Jess saw her walk-out boots, leaning upside down next to the heat exhaust. The sight made her smile; her older brother had placed them there, of course. Ethan had known his sister would be ice cutting today. He understood, as Jessamyn did, what would make their mother happy on her birthday. As long as you didn't blatantly hoard, Mars Colonial generally turned a blind eye to the mandate against water acquisition for personal consumption. Jessamyn was no water-grubber—she hadn't flown to the northern polar cap for lucky ice since her mother's last birthday, and birthdays only occurred twice annually.

Slipping into the airlock that kept Mars's frigid air from entering their home directly, Jess shivered. The thermometer told her it was well below freezing. Working fast, she shoved her legs through the walk-out suit designed to protect her from the harsh environment outside. A quick seal up the front, feet into warmed boots, helmet secured, and she was ready to go.

No one had questioned her when she put in the requisition for a planet-hopper yesterday. First Lieutenant LaFontaine, whom everyone called Lobster because of his red beard and hair, liked Jess and let her take a vehicle overnight when she asked.

It was just an old settler's superstition about polar ice being lucky, but a gift of ice would give her mother at least a week's reprieve from pain. A sufferer of dry-lung, Jessamyn's mother found relief from breathing humidified air—a practice abandoned a generation ago when the Mars Mandate had been adopted.

Closing the airlock behind her, Jess crossed the permafrozen ground and climbed aboard the tiny craft. Within seconds, she was airborne.

Lobster hadn't asked what Jess wanted a planet-hopper for, and Jess hadn't told. It was both illegal and dangerous to visit the polar caps. Marsian ice only melted when some external heat was applied, such as the heat from a descending planet-hopper. No matter how carefully you flew, hoppers came down hot. And if you came in hot, the ice melted and refroze, holding your craft so that it tended to become a permanent feature of the icescape. A handful of abandoned vehicles littered the northern polar cap.

But Jessamyn was a good pilot. An exceptional pilot, like her mom had been before her accident. When Jess reached the northern pole, she teased the thrusters on and off a handful of times, bouncing the craft up and down until the surface cooled the landing gear to where Jess could sense the ice losing interest in seizing her craft. It was a method she'd invented before she'd turned ten. Her father had tried (unsuccessfully) to have the unusual landing introduced into the pilot curriculum at the Academy. Jess had received a polite vid-mail from the academic dean thanking her for her inventive spirit, but explaining that her method taxed several parts of the landing gear beyond what they were designed to support.

"In other words, Mars Colonial doesn't want citizens running to the poles whenever their refiltration system needs water," Jessamyn's mom had said. Jess's father had scratched his head and agreed with the dean's point that the landing method was likely to damage certain models of planet-hoppers. Jessamyn's brother hadn't said anything aloud, but by that afternoon, he'd sent a set of modified ship designs to the Academy which would allow for safer Jess-style landings. These, the Academy implemented in hopcraft design going forward; Ethan's genius had been apparent to them from early on.

Jess hadn't bothered requesting one of the newer modified ships, which required approval by Lobster's commanding officer. Consequently, her borrowed planet-hopper objected to her several land-and-release bounces by groaning and emitting a series of red-flashing blips and beeps. She disregarded these; the hopper was fine. She knew this craft as well as she knew her own brother. Perhaps better, even. Ethan was the less predictable of the two in many ways.

After double-checking the systems that were essential for ignition, Jessamyn began to power down the craft. Standard protocol required leaving a vehicle idling when stopping at a remote locale such as a polar cap. Standard protocol also specified that the correct number of persons in a craft visiting the poles was two and not one. Jess didn't think much of standard protocol. Besides, if she turned the engines off, she could imagine herself as an early settler, living when Mars hadn't held enough air pressure for sound to travel far on the surface.

[POSSIBLE BREAK IF MY SAMPLE RUNS TOO LONG, LOL!]

Jess felt a quiver of happiness run through her as the small craft quieted. She heaved the seal-door open and stepped out onto the planet's frozen crust. There it was: the absolute silence of the red planet. Jess smiled and glanced briefly at the sky—still some stars out—before turning her attention to the land below. Before her lay Mars's true wealth. The discovery of tellurium deposits—rare on Earth—had created a frenzy of excitement once, but since the No Contact Accords had ended all legal trade with Earth fifty orbits ago, it had become clear that water, and not tellurium, provided Mars's true hope for a future. As such, water was highly regulated, and even the wealthiest citizens conserved to hurry the dream of a terraformed Mars into reality.

Overhead, the sky was shifting from inky darkness to a warm purple. Jess allowed herself a few minutes to gaze upward. Even the Terran satellites, circling in their deadly orbits, looked beautiful in the pre-dawn sky. She identified her favorite spring constellations before they blinked out—the Apple Tree, the Three Tilapia, and the Horn of Plenty. In the pause before dawn, the stars seemed especially close, as if Jess could reach up and pluck one from the sky for her mother's birthday gift. She smiled, imagining her mother's response. Oh, Jessamyn. Where am I going to keep this? There's no room! It was her mother's favorite complaint in spite of the fact that their family had a larger dwelling to accommodate Ethan's alter-abilities.

Low in the sky, Jess identified the warm glow of Earth. Terra, the home world of her human forebears, was about to set, dipping below the horizon line. A swelling rush filled her ears, made her fingertips tingle.

Earth.

Terran-Mars relations might be non-existent (dwellers on the red planet went so far as to refuse to be called by the Earth-name Martian, insisting upon Marsian), but Jessamyn still ached to see vast Terran oceans, to soar through clouds, to catch snow on her tongue. All these things—and many more—her pirate granddad had spoken of. Jess's earliest memories were filled with his tales. She would never have traded her life on Mars for a life on Earth as a filthy body-swapper, but she ached to visit, to see the wonders of the blue-green planet with her own eyes. In fact, Jessamyn had enrolled in pilot training for one purpose: so that she could qualify as a Mars Raider, piloting as her grandfather had done, as her mother might have done.

The thought of her mother brought Jess back to the task at hand, and sighing, she pulled her gaze from the heavens. Before her spread a wide expanse of late-spring ice. Today, it was covered in dull, gritty dirt, evidence of a recent storm. Her work was simple enough. It was only a matter of finding a section of cuttable ice, working quickly, and getting away without succumbing to the desire for the riches that a larger and then a larger cut of ice would yield in certain back streets of New Houston. But the acquiring of wealth wasn't a real temptation to Jess. The things she wanted most weren't things at all.

When Jess switched her headlamp on, a stunning transformation rendered the dull surface into a symphony of reds, tans, and dark browns struck through with glistening points of ice. She moved her headlamp from side to side, watching ice crystals wink on and off. She imagined this would be what fireflies (something she'd only read of) looked like. The gutter-and-spark so beguiled her that she forgot for several minutes the task that had brought her to the polar cap. But at last, twinkling made her think of birthday candles which reminded her of her purpose.

The sun, breaching the horizon, seemed to be telling her to hurry along, now, as well. Squatting, she sliced her heat knife through a layer of frozen dirt. As she shifted the outer layer to one side, her breath caught anew. The ice hidden below the surface glittered, having formed a tiny, crystalline cavern into which her lamplight now flashed. She stared for a moment, awestruck, gazing until her eyes ached from brightness which gleamed like a small mine of diamonds.

Blinking, she bagged her frozen prize and turned back to the planet-hopper. Her mom's birthday had fallen on the same day as the Festival of Singing Ice this annum, and Jess would be hard pressed to finish her academy flight hours if she didn't hurry home now. And she couldn't wait to see her mother's lined face soften as she opened the gift. Lillian would scold her daughter for cutting ice, of course, but her eyes would also kindle with a delight that had grown rarer with each passing orbit.

From her mother, Jessamyn had inherited both her red hair and an uncanny ability to fly. Any craft, under any conditions. To some, it looked as if the ships simply acknowledged Jess's inherent right to pilot them. The truth was that Jess understood ships, which perhaps boiled down to the same thing.