The Marineris Hotel

Holidays on the moon? The wretched ambitions of the space visionary. 

Cigart manoeuvred the service pod to a gentle landing. He put it as close as the safety protocols would allow, to the ragged precipice of the solar system’s grandest canyon, Valles Marineris, on Mars. 

Powering down the systems and stepping out onto the dusty red surface of the planet, he turned and looked back down the slope he’d just ascended, to where his life’s work sprawled magnificently in the slade of an alien world. 

The Marineris Resort. The first hotel on Mars.

It was an incredible testament to human ambition. Its main central domed structure dominated the alien barrenness and was connected to surrounding buildings by tubular moving walkways. Beneath another dome, an artificial beach, complete with wave machine, and within another a huge green park, lush and vibrant, defiant against the brutally inhospitable Martian landscape. 

By any standards, it was a remarkable feat of ingenuity, engineering and imagination. It had secured its place in history and record books as the first human hotel on an extraterrestrial planet, the first tourist resort on Mars, the first, and… Actually the list was endless, packed with technical and geophysical firsts. 

To Cigart, it was more than any of that; it was an obsession, his magnum opus, a monument to his existence in time. Any man in his position would be justified in staring down at the resort and swelling up with pride, grinning childishly at the sheer delight of a boyhood fantasy made real.

Yet, as Cigart stood there, he was glowering. 

SORRY!!! This story is no longer available on this page as it’s now part of my collection of short stories:
“Quantum Races: Lessons from the Finish Line – Where Automotive Action meets Science Fiction”
Available on Amazon https://amzn.eu/d/0gLZzeE3

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