It came at the end of a long and difficult voyage. Through the last few days of the Sunflower’s approach to Mars, Wei Binglin had been content for the automated systems to bring his ship home. Why not? Since the accident, most of the Sunflower’smanual controls had been inactive anyhow. And besides, Wei no longer regarded himself as deserving the rank of captain at all; in a ship become a drifting field hospital, he was reduced to the role of caretaker, his only remaining duty to bring those who had survived this, his last flight, into a proper harbour. So, for the first time in his many approaches to the planet, he let Mars swim out of the darkness before him. In the light of a distant sun, it struck him from afar as a malformed, lopsided, murky world, oddly unfinished, like a piece of pottery by an inadequate student. And yet as the ship entered its parking orbit high above the planet and skimmed around the night side, he saw the colourful layers of a thin but tall atmosphere, a scattering of white in the deeper craters – clouds, fog?
