<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>Suiting up room, then moving to the hangar</td></tr><tr><td><strong>With:</strong> </td><td>Mjr Hicks (now we're on duty), others arriving to welcome the second shuttle (if any?)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Doing:</strong> </td><td>Suiting up and supervising the others getting suited.</td></tr></tbody></table><br/><hr/><br/>I arrived with Laura from the control centre (http://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=148917.msg7038170#msg7038170). We were just a little way ahead of the rest of the security team, and quickly suited up. It was good to see that all of them were wearing the new orange and red fatigues that I'd decided would be the uniform of the Martian Military. Part of me wondered what would happen when, in ten years from now, the plan to declare unilateral independence was implemented. Oh, MarsCorp new about it, and had dismissed it as pie-in-the-sky. Everyone had. No-one thought we could do it, but I had actually determined that, if I was still in charge by then, on the first of Gunthum 0010, Martian new Year's day, I would declare Mars to be an independent state. Of course that was ten Martian years, nearer twenty Earth years.<br/><br/>But that was a long way in the future. Our first Native Martians would be nine or ten by then and would be adults. I jerked my mind back to the present. People were arriving. I headed up to the hangar, opened the outer airlock door, and stepped in. Standing orders dictated that no-one, not even the base commander, could be alone on the surface. I waited for someone (hopefully Laura?) to join me, then snapped my helmet on, cycled the lock, waited for the outer door indicator to turn green and stepped out onto Mars (http://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=148806.msg7038275#msg7038275), in a brand new day.