The exercise was to be titled "A Sudden Change." My entry was a barely altered excerpt from "M-A-R-C: The Martian Armed Resistance Corp."

More from the Columbus House of Scribes. Enjoy.

A Sudden Change . . .

1,139 words | By D. R. Spires

On the run he retraced his path to the shuttle bay, stopping at an outer access hatch to space side. At the airlock Jon Tash found a storage nook with several bright red pressure suits hung along the wall and he smiled, seeing that with the suits was a collection of diaphanous interworld parafoils. Made from Tash Industries’ new thylinium polyalloy mesh the parafoils were designed for light stratospheric drops through various atmospheres and gravities, including Mars. The packs were lightweight and about half a meter cubed, capable of deploying a three-tiered balloon cell canopy with each tier spreading a 9,750-square-meter pneumatic sheet.

Tash quickly suited up and strapped on two of the chute packs. He activated the airlock hatch. As he had hoped, the alarm had been disconnected to allow for tactical use. He was on the planetward side of the ship and, standing at the open outer hatch he paused, gazing down at the vast yellow-brown planet suspended in the never-ending void of the universe.

He recalled the time he had taken a free-fall jump from the Hyperion Way during his flight home from Sky-One, thus ending his tour as commander of the space platform with a flourish. That had been 33 years ago when he had four chutes to break him through Earth’s atmosphere. Here he was, 77-years-old and about to perform the stupidest feat of his life for a second time. He wondered if the two inflatable parafoils would be enough.

Tash looked upon the sweeping arc of the planet so incredibly far below. DM-L1 was zipping leisurely along, pacing tiny Deimos on its journey at just over 396,000 km/h. Blinking to the high, thin cloudbanks he swallowed hard. Earth’s moon had an orbital speed of 3,650 km/h. At just over 100 times this rate he could actually see the planet’s surface slowly pass beneath him. The slightest miscalculation would land him thousands of kilometers from where he wanted to be and far from any breathable habitat.

He had a good target though. The giant dome of Olympus Mons was in sight, as was the vast three-point crown of the Tharsis Ridge. Between these two monstrous landmarks, regions visible even through earthbound telescopes, lay over 98 percent of the Martian population. He would only have the one shot.

Staring down at the planet he waited for his window, bolstering his personal reserves for the feat at hand. To his right he could see the retreating western tip of the grand Valles Marineris canyon, an icy, foggy trench that dwarfed Earth’s Grand Canyon with a rift over 4,000 kilometers long. This mighty seven-kilometer-deep gash in the planet’s crust ran east and west, pointing him to the desired region of the Tharsis Ridge and the communal hub for a future Martian democracy.

Through the frame of the open hatch he could feel the vibration of the engines thundering to life, signaling to all aboard that launch would take place in just a few seconds. He wrapped a hull-mounted strap around his wrist and swung out the hatch in a graceful, practiced arc. The door automatically slid shut behind him and, like a spider clinging to the side of a floater he waited, hugging the pack of his forward chute close.

The drive from Lagrange One should be slight, he logically reasoned. …Probably not more than two gravities.

These, though, were troopers of Namericorp’s 1st Special Forces Operations Detachment Group, not the crew of a celebrity cruise liner, and slight was not the way they did business. With a jolt that nearly wrenched the man’s arm from its socket, Delta-One shot out from Deimos LaGrange-1 with five gravities of thrust and arced planetward away from the racing moon.

As they quickly lost altitude, the summit of Olympus Mons began to sink behind the horizon of Mars. Seeing this, Tash started working his hand loose from the wrist strap. The bulging arc of the planet expanded below him, showing that the UFS Intrepid (AKA, Delta-One) was continuing to accelerate on its descent to the surface. Held within the secure null of the surrounding bow shock he could see the sparks begin to fly as the shielded nose of the ship rubbed against the outer levels of the fourth planet’s meager atmosphere.

He brought his feet up against the hull of the vessel and pushed himself away, hard, allowing his hand to slip free of the strap. The UFS Intrepid pulled quickly away, and as he tumbled through the edge of the flaming envelope he was met with a loud roaring noise, feeling the abrupt tug of wind beating against his suit.

Head over heels he tumbled away from Delta-One and through the barrier of the bow shock, himself transforming to a blazing meteor, the upper air scorching against his hurtling form. He lay out flat, stopping his somersault and extended his arms, allowing the thermal resistant material to neutralize the searing heat and aiming himself out toward the western horizon, while the vessel pulled ahead, away and down.

Far below and creeping toward him a rise could be discerned in the Martian terrain. This was the enormous caldera of Pavonis Mons, the central volcano of the Tharsis Ridge, bracketed north and south by Ascraeus Mons and Arsia Mons. In the saddle between Pavonis and Ascraeus he could make out the distant peak of mighty Olympus, hulking its immensity almost 27.5 kilometers into the heavens. Nestled between these four summits would be his goal, Mars Base-Alpha and its many outlying settlements.

Tash triggered his rear canopy to deploy, praying these parafoils would function properly. Nearly twice the area of a football field, the micro-thin 130 x 75-meter double-tiered, diaphanous sheet of helium-inflating tungsten mesh unfurled, sparking a brilliant blue-white flame and jerking him to a shocking reduction in speed, falling rapidly from just over 10,000 km/h to a barely manageable 6,000 km/h.

The drawback, however, was the pressure he had to endure with the braking. The straps dug into him, even through the pressure suit’s armor, and at 10.8 gravities of deceleration he lost consciousness, taking him out of commission for a little under six minutes while he continued to slow. When he recovered, it was to a world of agony with aching joints and a pounding head, and he could make out the several rends in the deflated, fluttering canopy above his head, knowing what remained of it could not last much longer.

He checked the air pressure and took a quick look about for his bearings. Far below was what appeared to be a pipeline running from the depths of the Valles Marineris canyon, now far behind him, snaking its way up ahead and through the Pavonis-Ascraeus saddle.

“So far . . . so good . . . 0.05 millibars . . .” he said to himself, gasping.

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