Glory on Mars by Kate Rauner

of the cargo wherever
there was empty space. Ruby waved Emma to the co-pilot seat.
    If Ruby was trying to make her uncomfortable, she
failed. Emma used a similar system in the limbs of her walkabout
exploration suits. She propelled herself with fingertips along the
ceiling of the cabin to her seat, slipped into the five point
harness, pushed her back against the scales and tightened the
straps. As her hands slid into the control gloves and the seat
sprang to life, conforming to her back and arms. She wiggled her
legs against the scales that ran down the back of her thighs and
calves and curled around her heel to support her feet.
    "Don't worry about your movements," Ruby said. "I've
got the jumper set to accept only my commands."
    Emma pulled her hands loose to seal her helmet in the
shoulder ring, twisting it till it clicked. She gave a little tug
upwards to check and was proud of how well she handled that until
her nose began to twitch.
    "I'm going to sneeze."
    "Oh, hell, woman. Tip your head forward and sneeze
into your chest or you'll splatter the visor."
    Her advice came just in time. Emma half-swallowed the
sneeze, then tilted her head back and sniffed vigorously for a
while.
    Ruby activated her seat - her movements would control
attitude and speed as intuitively as walking. During the high-g
portion of descent the AI would take over and stretch the seats out
to support them, but otherwise it would follow Ruby's lead.
    Ruby undocked and the jumpship floated away from the
transport with a puff of its engines.
    Unlike the transport, the jumpship had windows. The
cabin sat on one side of a square frame big enough to surround a
ship module, with an engine at each corner. The jumpship was a sky
crane.
    "I'm clear," Ruby said over the jumpship channel.
"Ready for disassembly."
    "Jumper One is clear. Go ahead Governor."
    Emma got her last look at S-3 as a spacecraft, a
white cylinder studded with protruding airlocks and skirted with
photon collectors. Puffs of gas jetted out at the module bulkheads
as the frangible nuts detonated, connecting struts folded back, and
the modules drifted apart. The photon collectors uncoupled and
floated away. In a few minutes, the ship was an expanding formation
of individual components.
    "Perfect separation." Luis' voice sounded inside
Emma's helmet. Someone, probably James, was chattering in the
background.
    Ruby couldn't help but smile with satisfaction.
    "It's quite a sight, isn't it?"
    "You grab collectors three and four," Luis said.
"I'll take one and two."
    Ruby unfolded the jumpship's articulated grappling
arms and pulled her hands from the control gloves to let the AI
grab the fragile photon collectors.
    As the jumpships approached the orbiting power
station, Emma had a good view of the satellite that powered Kamp
Kans. It was an elegant solution to the limitations of solar power
on the surface. The orbiting station was always in sunlight, in a
stationary Clarke orbit above Kamp. It beamed energy down to
receivers that converted microwaves to electricity. Settler Three
and every transport ship that followed would add their collectors
to the orbiting station. Kamp Kans was short of many things, but
there was plenty of power.
    From the angle of their approach, Emma couldn't see
the satellite's central generators, but the deeply colored,
iridescent collectors spread out before her. Ruby maneuvered the
jumpship to the end of a long cylindrical strut. A robot crawled
around the strut and into view, one of two long, multi-limbed tool
boxes that maintained the power station. Ruby passed the collectors
one at a time to the bot, and across the shimmering station Luis
was doing the same with his load.
    "There," Ruby said as she relaxed in her seat. "The
bots will weld those collectors into place, wire them up, and we'll
have more power to draw on."
    "You did a great job," Emma said. Ruby snorted
without reply and modified their trajectory. The jumpship caught up
to the S-3 modules in less than an