Starship Legacy: A Novel By Not Elon Musk

The hiss was familiar. A slow oxygen leak. Mars Base Alpha was full of these tiny imperfections - reminders of the relentless assault of the Red Planet. Captain Luke Shaw drifted, his boots barely touching the steel grating beneath him. He'd been on a routine check of the oxygen cycling systems, a task drilled into him since his first week here. Redundancies upon redundancies, that was the Mars protocol.

He drifted closer to the source, a soft hum vibrating through his gloved hand as he pressed it to the wall. It was there, barely perceptible, yet another tiny flaw marring the sterile white polymer. His stomach gave a familiar lurch - a mix of routine annoyance and that ever-present Martian unease.

"Houston," he breathed, the comm unit in his helmet carrying his voice the vast distance to Mission Control in Texas, USA, Earth. Even with Musk's advanced Starlink network now expanded over a good portion of the near-Earth solar system, there was, at the very minimum a 3 minute delay in the signal reaching Houston, depending on the relative position of the planets in orbit. The one-way transit time of signal to Earth could be as long as 44 minutes at the furthest planetary positioning. The average came in around 25-minutes each way. This constraint was imposed by the speed of light– a fact that made any communication with Houston more about procedure than practicality. "I've got another micro-puncture.”

"Houston, it's in Hab Dome Four, lower quadrant. I'll patch it."

“Roger. Anomaly acknowledged.” crackled across the line just over 17 minutes later. Just the standard acknowledgment as Luke began the repair. He keyed his local comm channel, his voice echoing in the confined space of his helmet. "Shaw to Hab Dome Four crew. I'm patching a micro-puncture in the lower quadrant, oxygen system. No immediate hazard, but keep an eye on your readouts." A chorus of acknowledgments crackled back, routine as the hiss of the leak itself. Another day, and another tiny battle against the Martian frontier. Some days it felt like a war of attrition, a thousand tiny cuts rather than one fatal blow. But, so far, that was the way of Mars.