Spotlight: Micromium–Clean Energy from Mars By David Gittlin

Micromium–Clean Energy from Mars

By David Gittlin

Genre: Science Fiction

The year is 2038. Earth’s biosphere is on the brink of destruction from the effects of global warming and pollution. The World Energy Council has awarded a lucrative contract to a major US corporation to mine a precious ore discovered by the first manned mission to land on Mars.  One kilo of Micromium can power a large city for a year without environmental side effects.  A few grains of the ore can fuel a car for a year or longer.  Micromium promises to provide clean energy to a thirsty planet far into the future.

When two people die in a mining accident on Mars, the World Energy Council sends Commander Logan Marchant and a crack team of astronaut specialists to investigate.

Confronted with a lack of cooperation from the mining colonists, the investigation is further complicated by Logan’s growing attraction to the team’s beautiful and brainy geologist.  While tensions and tempers rise, Logan and the audit team make one shocking discovery after another, until the investigation leads them into mortal danger, and ultimately, to a surprising conclusion.

Except

Nothing in Logan Marchant’s twenty-nine years of life had prepared him for the loneliness and grandeur of a Martian sunrise.  The planet’s rock and sand surface glittered an angry red.  A thousand yards in the distance, the walls of the massive Siloe Patera crater shrugged off the blanket of night.  The question of the massive crater’s origins lay shrouded in mystery since its discovery.  Many scientists believed Siloe Patera was an extinct volcano, but it could just as easily have been gouged by a huge meteor impact.  The rim of the crater measured some forty by thirty kilometers.  A meteor large enough to create such a crater might have been responsible for the loss of an Earth-like atmosphere on Mars billions of years ago.  Similarly, if Siloe Patera marked the grave of an extinct super-volcano, the amount of gas and dust released into the atmosphere might have literally blown the planet’s life-supporting atmosphere away.  These were some of the questions Logan and his team were tasked with answering.  But they were not the primary questions.

The team had two primary directives.  Their first task involved the investigation of two deaths caused by an industrial accident.  The world and its governments needed closure on the tragic incident.  They wanted enhanced safety precautions to prevent more accidents.  The team’s second task held a higher priority; a status unpublished to the media.  The team needed to audit the efficiency of the subcontractor’s mining operation.

Back home, the sun brought life-sustaining energy and warmth to every living thing.  Without the slightest hint of judgment, the sun made life, in all its diverse forms, possible.  There was evidence that the sun had once nurtured life on Mars to an infinitely greater extent than it did now.  The maps of the planet which Logan had studied depicted ample evidence of plains that might once have been teeming oceans and ravines that might once have been rushing rivers or canals.  Manned and unmanned expeditions to Mars had found microbiological life beneath the planet’s surface.  Scientists speculated that the microbiological evidence represented the vestiges of complex life forms that once thrived on Mars billions of years ago.

While the debate about the history of life on Mars continued, one fact remained: human beings now lived on the planet’s surface.  Martian Mining Interplanetary, a subsidiary of the Courtland Aerospace Corporation, had established a mining colony on Mars after securing a lucrative mining contract sanctioned by the World Energy Council.

Although he dreamed of commanding deep space exploration missions, Logan could not imagine signing up for seven-year tours of duty like the Martian mining colonists had.  Spending years in a state of suspended animation was okay.  Just don’t ask me to stay in one place for too long.  Somehow, he knew that if he didn’t die flying in space, he’d live to an advanced age on Mother Earth, hopefully surrounded by loving family members and fond memories of glorious extra-terrestrial adventures that advanced the cause of his species.

He had a long way to go in the loving family department.  For starters, his relationship with his Air Force Colonel prick of a father was a lost cause.  If the man had any love in him, it was as hard to find as a puddle of water on the arid planet he stared out at through the porthole of his living quarters.  He often wondered if his mother’s highly premature death from a brain tumor had resulted from an unconscious death wish she developed from the certain knowledge that the man she’d married would never make her happy.  The wishy-washy woman his father married after her death, he suspected from early on, hung around only because she had no better place to go.

Logan’s upbringing left him with an empty hole in his soul that nothing filled, no matter how hard he tried.  The deep dark pit of emptiness inside him was too painful to experience for more than a few seconds.  If he stayed too long, it felt like the dark place would drag him down like some dinosaur that suffocated horribly in the La Brea tar pits millions of years ago.

His watch chimed.  The time had arrived for his breakfast briefing with the audit team.  Now began the regrettable business of investigating two tragic deaths and the delicate job of eliciting cooperation from the secretive mining colonists.

 

Author Bio

After a career in marketing communications, I began writing short stories, screenplays and novels.  I thought creative writing would be fun and easy.  I was wrong.  “Micromium” is my third novel and it’s available in eBook and two print versions, one of them in full color.  I’ve also written “Three Days to Darkness” and “Scarlet Ambrosia.”  I’ve put my heart, soul and guts into these books.  I’d like you to read them.

On Amazon: http://amzn.to/2FOfg0y

On B&N: http://bit.ly/2G9H2Ea

On Goodreads: http://bit.ly/2GJoubD

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dgittlin

On Twitter: @DavidGittlin

The author will be giving an ebook copy of Micromium to the first 40 people who contact him with their name and ebook format preference (ePub or Mobi). They can enter here: https://www.davidgittlin.com/contact.