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    On The Plains of Deception
    On The Plains of Deception
    On The Plains of Deception
    Ebook28 pages25 minutes

    On The Plains of Deception

    By Brendan DuBois

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    About this ebook

    In this moving short story by award-winning author Brendan DuBois, the first astronauts on Mars --- Navy Captain Susan Bryce and Air Force Colonel David Bronson --- are stranded when their landing module's return capsule fails to launch.

    Millions of miles away from home, with no chance of rescue or repair, the first two humans on Mars face their limited choices and mortality with grace, humor and affection, as billions of people on Earth follow their last movements...

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrendan DuBois
    Release dateMar 11, 2013
    ISBN9781301426768
    On The Plains of Deception

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      Book preview

      On The Plains of Deception - Brendan DuBois

      On the Plains of Deception

      Copyright 2013 by Brendan DuBois

      Smashwords Edition

      Cover art by Jeroen ten Berge

      On the Plains of Deception

      by

      Brendan DuBois

      The sun was just a handful of degrees about the horizon when I wrapped up my fifteenth EVA of the mission, standing in front of the lander, sample bag in my gloved left hand and geology kit in my right. I looked around at the deployed science stations, the seismometer, the satellite dishes and the flag. The damn flag had fallen again. I suppose I should go over and put it back up, but what was the point? The damn winds would just knock it over again sometime later when night came. And speaking of points… I looked at my suit arms and legs, which were colored a powdery dark orange. The first couple of EVAs, I had tried to vacuum them clean, tried to get them back to some sort of white pristineness, but alas, that was not to be the case. So I did the best I could, cleaning up the worst of it, but my suit would never be white again.

      Lots of things were turning out to be disappointments this mission.

      I took a breath and then a sip of warm, tasteless water from a tube near my mouth. Before me were the spidery legs of Intrepid, the MLM, or Mars Landing Module. It was small, too damn small, and once again, I felt that little taste of disappointment when I realized just how shoestring this whole damn mission had been. Of course, to many of the bloggers and blogettes and everyone else with a keyboard or microphone or opinion back in the States, this was one gold-plated expensive mission that was a frivolity with all the problems of this century, but to me and everyone else in the

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