<div class="floatleft">(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/f/fa/Mars_test.jpg)</div><table class="bbc_table"><tbody><tr><td><strong>Character name:</strong></td><td>Lt Colonel Louise Cotter</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Location:</strong> </td><td>Outside</td></tr><tr><td><strong>With:</strong> </td><td>Everyone welcoming the new arrivals</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Doing:</strong> </td><td>Welcoming the new arrivals and helping unload.</td></tr></tbody></table><br/><hr/><br/>I returned the salutes of the security personnel who reported to me, then pointed to Hicks with my left hand.  "Welcome to Mars. Major Hicks is your security chief, you report to her for your assignments. Glad to have you with us..." I glanced around, following the gaze of the new arrivals. "Awesome isn't it. If you could help unload, as the Major suggested, then we'll get you in and settled. None of us have had breakfast yet."<br/><br/>I followed the team to the cargo ramp, and watched as T-rex drove one of the rovers out of the hanger towing a flat-bed trailer behind it. "Great idea, Bollam", I complemented him. Of course, when  we'd come down none of the vehicles had been charged, but since we'd had the reactor on-line, most of them had at least enough for a few trips out of the hanger and back. I helped the others load the crates and boxes and bundles and bags and cases onto the trailer.<br/><br/>"Remember", I warned, "Just because something weighs one third of what it does on earth, doesn't change it's<em>mass</em>. Drop something heavy, it takes three times as long to hit the ground but if you try and catch it, you will still be catching something heavy. You have three times as long to get your feet out from under it is all! If it lands on your foot it will still break your bones!"<br/><br/>It was going well. We now had fifty four people on the surface, although two of them would be returning to orbit with Tyr. There were twenty five left on the Mother ship, still in hibernation. So far the revival process had worked just fine. The first ship to leave Earth for the Red Planet had reported a fatality on the way, Lt Jake Remmington, who died peacefully in his sleep due to a fault in the cryopod's revival system. That death was not attributed to Mars, was considered no-one's fault, and thus had not aborted the mission. If it had, we might none of us have been here, now.<br/><br/>I looked East, towards the steadily climbing Sun that would run around to the North - Anti-clockwise the same as in the Southern hemisphere on Earth. Sure enough, there were wisps of cloud - whether carbon-dioxide condensing into dry ice or whether they were trails of dust blown high into the atmosphere by the hundred kph winds? It was hard to tell. Mars was notorious for it's global dust storms which usually last three months or so and happened on average once a Martian year, with several major exceptions... That was Mr Armstrong's job, though. Weather data was his purview.<br/><br/>"Okay people, lets move, let's get this bird back in the black where she belongs!"