Here's the first submission for Round 2.

Deliverance?

by Hazen Wardle

Damian Willet shuffled through the line, the over-sized pressure suit weighing heavily on his young body. It was only his second day in the Martian ice mines and if he never saw another power-pick again it would be too soon. Last week his father had been working the mine when a wall collapsed. There were fortunately no casualties but he had severely injured his left leg and would be unable to work for at least two months while it healed. Under threat of eviction from the housing bubble 12 year old Damian took it upon himself to be the family’s bread winner until said time when his father could again return to the mines.

Slowly the line inched forward as the workers were allowed to re-enter the communal city bubble through specialized decontamination and re-pressurization chambers. Without proper pressure the bubbles would not only collapse but life would be utterly impossible without the use of the specialized pressure suits. The bubbles themselves held the correct air mixture and temperatures, as well as keeping out the harsh Martian winds.

Upon stepping out of the chamber young Damian was immediately accosted by a kid who could not be more than nine. The boy was filthy from head to toe and looked like he could use a good meal. The kid waved a sheet of paper in Damian’s face. “Take eet! Take eet!” the kid demanded. Damian did as instructed, intent on only ridding himself of this pesky street rat.

As he trudged home he read the sheet of paper. Excited, he took a slight detour.

“You’re an hour late, son!” Damian’s mother yelled across the small habitat bubble they called home. “Where have you been? It’s getting late and the curfew dogs will be out soon. Your father and I have been worried!”

“Look Ma,” Damian declared excitedly as he thrust the flier in his mother’s face. “We can finally get out of here and have a real life!”

Pauline Willet, Damian’s mother, took the flier and scrutinized it. A large photo, an obviously doctored one at that, showed a verdant green prairie with a large rust colored mountain of a rock in the background. A bulbous terraformer hovered over the prairie, dropping an old-time farm house and a tractor down onto the un-inhabited land. It was obviously not the way things happened, but it got the point across. Life is easy and peaceful on Droogina, the caption claimed, in bright, happy letters.

“We can’t afford this!” She exclaimed, shaking the paper.

“Of course we can!” Damian countered, snatching the paper from her. “See? First 100 families free! That’s why I was late. I was the second in line. We’re going to Droogina!”

Damian’s father hobbled over on his crutches and looked at the flier. Tears welled up in his eyes.  “Thank you son,” the older man said, choking on his tearful happiness. “I’ve always dreamed of living in a place like this. My grandparents always used to tell me how wonder of a place Earth used to be, before the governments destroyed it with it regulations and wars. Now I get to live it, albeit on another planet.”

The family hugged, eager and intent on starting a new life.

Hours earlier.

A filthy young boy climbed a pile of refuse and slipped over a tall fence. He wore no shoes and his clothing, once a one piece outfit, now sleeveless and in tatters, torn across the midsection into two pieces. Industrial tape scrounged from discarded packages held the outfit together.

The boy crawled underneath a derelict street sweeper and into a passage hidden under the belly of the thing. Moments later he emerged from behind a spindly, starved for water brush on the edge of a broken down park. Brushing dirt from h is clothing he strode across the abandoned playfield and stared intently at two older boys, sitting in a booth inside a makeshift diner. With big eyes and a hungry stomach he watched as the two stuffed their faces with something hot.

“Hey kid!” The boy did not notice, he was so hungry. “Kid!” the voice repeated. The boy looked in the direction the noise came from, only to see a sleek black hover limo on the opposite side of the pockmarked street. A man in a dark hat was waving to him from behind the lowered window. The boy trotted over, keeping one eye on the boys in the diner.

“You hungry?” the man asked. Wide eyed with anticipation the boy nodded. “I’ll buy you some food if you do me a favor,” the man stated simply, but with a slight smirk on his face. The kid nodded.

The man handed a stack of papers out the window. “Pass these out and you can have whatever you like.” Naturally the boy took the papers and spent the next hour handing them out as workers reentered the habitat bubble.

Days earlier.

The man in the dark hat stepped into his luxurious office. The Governor’s building was the tallest of the city, built only a few years prior under the much newer, glass walled dome abutting the flimsier inflated domes of the older settlement.

“Alton.” Hearing his name made all the hairs on his neck stand on end. He looked to the source, and he knew why. There, in his antique, imported-from-Earth leather chair sat his boss, someone he rarely encountered. She only showed up when she needed something.

“Rowena, how nice to see you.”

“Let’s dispense with the pleasantries. You know why I am here.”

“But, I can’t spare anyone this time.”

“Of course you can. It’s in your contract. Unless you want to go instead. I hear the sulfur mines of Io are quite warm this time of year.”

Alton slumped down into a chair opposite his desk, a position he was not at all comfortable with assuming. “Fine. How many do you need?”

“An even hundred should do it. I presume you can glean some ‘volunteers’ out the poorest of your people. Make it one hundred families and we’ll call it good, for now.”

“How am I going to get people to willingly volunteer to work the Saturnian mines? Everyone knows how deadly they are.”

“You’ll think of something,” Rowena stated coldly as she rose from his chair. She walked calmly to the door and looked back. “You have one week to deliver, or it’ll be you working those mines, my friend.”

She turned and walked calmly out of his office. He could still hear the echo of her heels on the tiled floor long after she had gone.