As I mentioned in the last installment, this one is a bit harder as there is no main character, per se. That means I cannot use first-person thought without headhopping, a bad early habit of mine from some years ago.

I’m realizing now that what that does do is make me describe things more. That’s a net positive as this is a new world in the process of terraforming. So I suppose part three was meant to be this way.

We step ahead about ten years here. Saras is married, one son, a daughter pending. Back on Mars, which we saw she considers her home, she and her little boy anxiously wait for his father, her husband, to get back from Earth.

Enjoy my content? Buy me a beer!

“Looking at the picture again, Anton?” Saras asked, as her son stared at the image from her wedding, five years ago.

“Is it true that you two had to get married?” the boy with short, dark blonde hair blurted out.

“Ah, you already were a month along, but if you mean the Empress?  Your great-grandmother?  Also, yes.” She gave him a smile.  “All of her family are tools to her, and it was her decision to have a tie to the Mexican Republic, now that Texas is, by-and-large, a part of the imperium.”

Bright for his age, but not demi-human, she thought he got all of that.

“So when father gets back in two days, he’ll have to play Ambassador, again?  That’s so boring!  I want to go exploring with him, too!” Anton sulked.

With her husband’s occasional calls to return to Earth, Saras always made sure to make time for her first.  A hand onto her just showing rounded stomach and a thought to her second, Alicia, who shared her nature, assured her all was well.

“I know you need adventures with your dad, Anton,” she said, walking to the window to look down from the third floor at the small town square under the residential dome of the recently founded colony tucked away in Isidis Cove, open north to the Utopia Sea, a part of the Great Northern Ocean.  Her work, similar to her dear friend, Kira, Midwife to the world, was plant and animal development.  Some seagulls just then flew past the window, proving her point.

Back on Earth after their three years on Mars, she had been sent to San Diego two years later, just over five years ago.  Saras was told by Faustina that her husband was already picked.  By her.  “I get no say in this?” she had demanded.  “No.”

On the brief flight on an S-3, she had been relieved to see images of the man:  aristocratic Spanish features, not indigenous.  Anton Alvarez IV, from a line of generals and diplomats going back to before the Change.  A captain in the reserves of their army and already a junior bureaucrat in their Foreign Ministry, he literally charmed the pants off of her and, to his credit, married her three weeks later once finding out she was pregnant.

She had been fifteen and he twenty-three.  His appointment as that nation’s first ambassador to Mars caused quite the stir in their government.  Even the title was ambiguous as there were still no legal territorial distinctions.

“But that is changing,” she murmured.  “And one of the reasons he had to go back.”

“What’s that, Mom?” Anton Alvarez V asked, rooting in the refrigerator for something to snack on.

“Just thinking about how politics are creeping into this new world.  Our home,” she replied, moving to make sure he didn’t pick something so large as to ruin his appetite for later.

“I know I was born on Earth… what was the city’s name?” he asked, getting an already opened can of peaches.

“San Francisco, the northwest anchor of Special Region of Mexico.  It was in the cathedral there, in the picture, that the archbishop married your father and I.”

“I don’t recall a thing,” he said, not bothering with a bowl and just pulling some out with his fingers.

“Don’t you dare leave sticky little prints around my clean house, young man!” she chided.

“Mooom!” he rolled his eyes.  “I don’t really remember our first home, out by the Canyon.  Here, Neo-Yokohama is everything to me.”

Saras had learned of that unofficial name when they prepped to move just over three years ago.  No one, not Aqua or the Russians, had objected, so it seemed to stick.  As it was going to become a seaside city with a fantastic natural harbor, and that a plurality of the population were Japanese, with a smattering of Russians and imperials – and now her family – it made sense.

“I’m glad you’ve a place like that, Anton.” Now her smile broke.  “Not everyone does.”

“Because you’re different?” The peaches were gone and he drank the juice at the bottom of the can.

“It’s a reason, sure,” she said, pulling a tissue from a pocket and dabbing at her bright eyes, “but you will be a pawn of the Empress’, too, someday.”

“Oh, Mom,” he sighed, rinsing his hands, “you’re getting weepy.  Father is home day-after-tomorrow.  Let go buy something for him.”

“Yes, you are exactly right, young heir, let’s!”