America One: War of the Worlds (49 page)

Some people even say that The Martian Club Retreat was the secret headquarters for “ASS”, the largest illegal contraband company in the entire solar system, but that must have been just hearsay.

Mattville

Max Von Braun officially became Mayor of Mattville on the first delivery of supplies from Earth two years after the war ended. A decree from Ryan Richmond and a vote of confidence by the inhabitants gave him his first four-year term as mayor.

Dave Black returned with the first supply ship as Astermine’s new Head of Security to return with the first load of valuable ingots back to earth.

With the mother ship’s first arrival came 50 new permanent residents and dozens of new robots of all sorts.

A year later, the first and semi-destroyed landing cavern “Welcome Station” was nearing completion for shuttle flight arrivals and departures. It had an eight-foot thick wall of gold around the walls that was so smooth that a space pioneer could see one’s face in its gold’s reflection.

The mining robots had worked for 12 solid months and over 48 tons of gold had been smelted to pretty up the one and only official Astermine entrance to Mars. Many visitors mentioned that it could one day be the most valuable spaceport in the whole solar system.

The large and newly laid cavern door above was being crafted from the stocks of Rare Earth metals, and one of Astermine’s cargo shuttles could land in the cavern through the blue shield, and the cavern door close over it. They had copied the design from the still-working
Matt
door on Ceres.

America Two
in orbit 90 miles above the red planet was unloaded and re-loaded by the old, and refurbished mining ships
Astermine I
and
II,
the work ships she had returned with. Exactly 6,400 one–foot cubed ingots, the equivalent of 400 Earth tons of metal of all types were loaded into her cargo bays.

“Welcome Station” as it was now called was the first area of civilization on Mars visitors would see when they landed, and was designed by the inhabitants to be far prettier than any airport or subway station on Earth.

“Welcome Station” also became the beginning of the “Martian Line” two years later.

The new track wound around the flight apron and one could disembark from the arriving shuttle from one of Astermine’s mother ships, go through customs, enter the Subway station, and then travel with their baggage to any of the other three stops on the line—Mattville I, II, and III.

Dr. Smidt had brought the original Martian Subway System on the earlier supply visit. The equipment included new titanium track, and a high-speed railcar that could complete the 3.5-mile distance to Mattville III’s own turn-around system in ten minutes without stops. With stops it took 30 minutes each way, and ran robotically.

The train itself was comprised of twelve individual two-seat compartments called bubbles where customers travelled in comfort without needing a spacesuit, and in a first class seat for the short ride. Behind the 12 bubbles was a larger caboose bubble for cargo, suitcases and pet cages.

Spacesuits were a thing of the past, apart from rental walking excursions outside the base for tourists.

Mattville I would soon become the vacation resort for the rich and famous of the solar system. The newly arrived robotic miners opened new areas, and everything was brought in by Dr. Smidt and his team to allow the base to grow and flourish.

Ruler Roo was the base’s
Matt
President, and worked closely with the base’s mayor to build a successful and vibrant society. Roo had his wife’s experience from her Washington days to back him up. The Roo’s even got their own antique Oval Office furniture, a gift from the new U.S. President, a man for the first time for many years.

The largest new system of transportation
America Two
brought with her on her first voyage was a barge. It arrived in a thousand pieces, and with a floating dock it was to be pieced together on the lake below the base.

Before it could be begun, another system arrived on the same delivery, from the company, Otis in the U.S. This was the first cargo elevator on Mars, and it took a year for the robots to dig a hole in the lava wall and the ever-growing build crew to install the massive 20 feet by 10 feet elevator to head down the one level to the lake.

They worked inside a blue shield while large amounts of air was pressurized into the underground cavern by a dozen new air-production systems also brought from earth in that cargo load.

On
America Two’s
next visit two years later, she carried 100 new permanent residents and the first 20 filthy rich tourists to Mattville. The barge was nearly ready and a few days later while the loading of another 6,400 ingots was underway, a team of four wearing the latest five-hour spacesuits headed out with GPS and across the vast underground lake.

During the first two years of air production by the machines the size of mini-vans on the level above, the air and pressure was only a quarter of what was needed for humans to breathe.

Radio contact was maintained and massive search lights swept the water as the 50-foot barge slowly crossed the Martian Sea for the first time. Max and Roo were both aboard, and Joanne had been left to run the planet incase they were eaten by space sharks.

Within an hour after crossing two miles of open water, they reached what looked like a beach. There were no waves, apart for the water ripples from the ship, and Ruler Roo was brave enough to be the first to be helped off the side of the barge, and stand on his new territory.

The gently rising beach was pure sand, a flamingo pink color in the searchlights from the barge, and the frontier crew walked across the fine sand a hundred feet before they reached a higher plateau about twenty feet above the water line. The cavern roof was still about fifty feet above their head as they stood on the flat plateau which was about a hundred yards at its widest point.

The crew walked the entire plateau, which seemed crescent moon shaped and they walked close to a half a mile before reaching either end, which connected the plateau to the beach below. The beach also ended here, and disappeared into the clear waters of the lake.

Then the boat then headed along the wall of the cavern taking four miles of travel before they arrived back at the floating platform, much to their relief.

The next day, and with more sightseers on board, including women and children, they encompassed the entire lake in four hours. The cavern was massive, and it would take at least eight more years, and more machinery to give a breathable atmosphere to the beautiful lava-sealed hole inside the Martian mountain.

Roo and Max gave their reports, and two dozen larger air machines arrived on the third visit as well as a thousand large tanks of air from earth.

The crew could do little until the air pressure rose, so they worked on Mattville II and III for those years.

Each base had its own power and air systems, and backups were added from the mother ship’s cargo bays.

The two old and still space-worthy Astermine mining ships were now based here in the second cavern, Astermine’s Space Headquarters where the remains of
SB-III
had long been cleared.

On Vitalily’s suggestion years earlier, Max and crew had looked for any tunnels where the Matt spaceships could have been stored, and only found one hangar after days of searching. The spacecraft hangar was nearly 100 yards long and, opening the door wearing spacesuits, they found a fully operational
Matt
ship inside, right at the rear of the tunnel that could have stored at least 30 craft.

America Two
also arrived on her third visit with another 100 new residents and 200 extremely wealthy tourists who would stay in the comfortable base until the mother ship returned to take them home in 18 months. A much older-looking Martin Brusk and his entire family finally made it to Mars, in style.

Mattville III became the health oasis of the solar system. Again it was rumored that the third section of the underground base had been purchased for one U.S. dollar.

Here tourists and crew alike could be given medical wellbeing in beautiful disgustingly luxurious conditions. Patients were pampered, every luxury and need catered for. Even the center’s focal point “The Fruit and Salad Bar” made of old redwood from Earth was a bar counter as long as the Retreat’s external unit.

As
America Two
visited every couple of years, equipment by the ton was shipped in. New shuttles arrived and docked onto the mother ship which helped carry the equipment down, and the ingots up.

Max Von Braun served 12 years as mayor before he died peacefully in his sleep. He was actually overnighting at the Martian Club Retreat with President Roo for a weekend’s “ASS” member’s only, poker game and had just been shuttled in by the Retreat’s limousine shuttle service when he passed away.

Thanks to Mayor Max von Braun, Mattville had become a vibrant town of 3,500 permanent inhabitants, 300 scientists, and enough accommodations to look after 1,500 wealthy tourists at a time for their 18-month vacations.

With the help of many crews who had come and gone, there were large areas of underground farms, and much of the unused facilities the
Matts
had kept spacecraft and supplies in, were now private businesses including beer and wine production, rare earth metal, gold statues and artwork, clothing manufactures and many luxury products found on Earth as well.

What Max didn’t live long enough to see, was the fourth station of the Martian subway station finally completed. That took another year before it came on line extending the subway system another three miles ending at the Martian Lake’s beach and vacation accommodations.

Ruler Roo called the subway station “Station Max” after the mayor, and once it was completed growth erupted around the lake’s beach area. Here Martian tourism grew faster than in Las Vegas, was prettier, and within two decades of man living on Mars, was the one place to see the really rich and famous at play.

Unfortunately the water was far too cold to swim in, but pools of hot water graced the beaches and the public could hit the hot water pools first, then freeze themselves in the clear fresh waters of the Martian Sea.

Max Von Braun joined others, happily buried at the Martian Club Retreat Cemetery. He never returned to be given his medal from an appreciative American President, but it somehow appeared next to his gravestone less than a year after his passing.

Ceres Base

Vitalily and his crew spent the first year repairing and bringing the Ceres
Matt
supply base back online. With constant communications, all the crews of Astermine worked together to better their bases.

Money wasn’t a problem once
America Two
returned to Earth with its first cargo from Mattville.

America Three
arrived twice in the first 30 months with 800 tons of equipment for Ceres Base. With her came a new crew of fifty builders on her first visit who would take over from Vitalily and his team while they vacationed back on Earth for a year.

Included in the cargo manifest were tons of the latest asteroid mining tools, systems, and supplies, and dozens of robots. Eight new cold fusion plants and eight new air-production plants arrived as well, and the larger crew, with designs from Astermine in Nevada, began to turn the small mining supply base into the Mining Mecca of the Asteroid Belt as it is known today.

America Three
could do an out and return flight to Ceres every 14 months, due to the dwarf planet’s weird orbit, and where Mattville grew in beauty, Base Ceres grew in ugliness.

A mining base didn’t need to be pretty, but it did need to have the basic requirements of a center for miners and workers, for work and for play.

Eight new large spaceship caverns, with roof doors, were mined out. These didn’t have solid gold walls, but had the pretty pastel-colored Ceres rock walls much like the rest of the
Matt
supply base. Each of these caverns was to be rented out to a mining company, or a country wanting to base themselves on the dwarf planet.

It was a weird design but each of the caverns had been designed like a spider with eight legs and the legs were half mile-long tunnels which led to the central base the Nobles had captured during the Battle of Ceres.

These eight new caverns had their own spaceport cavern, crew accommodations including apartments, barracks, kitchens, and mining storage warehouses. But whatever the company needed from central storage shipped in by
America Three’s
shuttles, had to be walked through “The Ceres Bar and Grill” and its famous 70-foot long Redwood bar counter to get down to the supply rooms, shops, leasing agents, and the planet’s command center beneath the large establishment.

Again there was a holograph of a famous astronaut nobody, apart from the initial crew and a few others had ever heard of, behind the bar. The bar and grill was the focal point for fun and relaxation after a hardworking year or more out on an asteroid somewhere.

Vitalily and his guys didn’t like their vacation on Earth very much, the gravity was too hard on their old bones and gave them aches and pains, so they returned to Ceres. The aging Russian returned to run the Astermine part of the operations leasing out equipment and robots, as well as running the “The Ceres Bar and Grill” and living a life of luxury as an original “ASS” member.

It took a couple of visits by
America Three
before the whole base was full of international miners. Over 15,000 mining crews from eight companies and or countries were based on Ceres and worked hard using Astermine-leased small shuttles to head out to neighboring asteroids.

A year or two after the base was full,
America Three
wasn’t the only spaceship plying these routes. The first Chinese mining ship arrived with the Chinese Premier’s teenage son as Bridge Commander. A second ship, a Russian mining ship arrived a month later following
America Three
. Onboard were two of Astermine’s third-generation Astronauts commanding the large vessel.