Red Dawn

By Delilah Devlin

A colonist living on a lonely Martian plain receives her new mate, a man culled from among the newly transported convicts...

 

NOTE: This 7600-word erotic, sci-fi short story was originally published in The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance, but has since been revised and expanded.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Delilah Devlin
• Release date: Jun 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781498986588

Delilah Devlin

Always a risk taker, Delilah Devlin lived in the Saudi Peninsula during the Gulf War, thwarted an attempted abduction by white slave traders, and survived her children’s juvenile delinquency. In addition to Saudi Arabia, she has lived in Germany and Ireland, but calls Arkansas home for now.

Book preview

Red Dawn

Planet: Mars

Farming Tract: 782

Year: 2213

Mary stood alone in the middle of a vast golden field, only her small house in the distance to break up the view of her large tract. No signs of civilization, other than her well-ordered crops. She feathered a finger across the tip of the wheat stalk she held. Stiff, but not brittle. The harvest was still a month away.

Loneliness nagged. She hadn’t thought it would bother her. The interminable days of chores and nightly reporting should have kept her too busy to notice she was alone, without another human being to talk to, other than the dispatcher who’d confirmed that on this day, her first resupply shipment would arrive.

Tension rode her shoulders, boiled in her belly. Today, her life would change. Again.

Among the first who’d stepped outside the dome without a breathing device, she’d taken the chance the air was truly safe—that alien toxins wouldn’t accumulate in her blood or that the newly manufactured atmosphere wouldn’t smother her.

She’d had no fear. Only a sense of wonder and fierce pride that she, Mary Bledsoe from the Americas Sector, was among the first colonists of Mars.

Fifty years of terraforming the barren planet had, at last, produced a habitable world to replace the one they’d ruined. The Mars-Tech Company owned exclusive rights to the project and had released oxygen trapped in the northern icecap to form an atmosphere to mimic the former success of Earth’s natural greenhouse to normalize the temperatures. They introduced animals, insects, bacteria—everything necessary to ensure the soil would be ready for the first crops. They dug canals to deliver the water beginning to melt from the icecap to the plains where crops were sown by huge industrial machines—all in preparation for the colonists who would assume responsibility for the first harvests, and thereafter all future plantings.

Mars would feed Earth. Animals bred from the first herds shipped from the home planet had been raised in cramped stalls inside the domes. Now, they would be turned over to the farmers and ranchers, further nurturing the classic model of pastoral life that was almost extinct on her own overcrowded planet.

The environmental lessons scientists learned from the mistakes humans made in the past, along with strict adherence to new social rules and an ordered reclamation of Martian resources, became a