Chapter 594 Big Guns, Bigger Parking Lots


    Mars, ARES main base. Alll latest novels at novelhall.com


    The Sol system’s fourth planet, if seen from a higher orbit, was completely different than it was in the past. Just two years before, it’d only had a population that could be counted on one hand... if you counted unmanned exploration vehicles, or “rovers”, as population, that is.


    Mars had always fascinated humanity ever since the species had first looked to the stars and asked themselves what those lights in the sky were. It was represented in close to a century’s worth of science fiction tales, with greats like Ray Bradbury, Orson Welles, and Edgar Rice Burroughs some of the more recent people to look to the red planet and think, ‘I wonder....’


    So once human technology reached the barest minimum level that would allow them to explore Mars, whether in person or not, they had immediately built exploration drones, strapped rockets to them, and threw them at the planet until one successfully survived the landing. Nobody knew what they would find, though everyone was fairly sure there would be no alien life there; the planet’s atmosphere was too thin and it was too far from the Sun to allow for liquid water on the surface.


    Most people, though, believed that they would find signs that life had once existed there. They stared at blurry pictures of the planet’s surface until they saw shapes that “proved” life had once flourished there. Anything that could potentially be mistaken for right angles or other shapes not often found in nature was regularly trotted out as “evidence” of the existence of ancient aliens. One such person was even made into a lasting internet meme after being heavily featured as an expert guest on a television show about those ancient aliens.


    The defensive guns were a marvel of engineering, and the buildup on Mars was the empire’s first megaproject. One of the first things the atomic printers had done, even before the ARES forces and hordes of engineers had descended upon the red planet, was hollow out the 2000-kilometer-wide solid core at its center and turn it into one giant fusion reactor. In essence, the planetary core had been reignited... but this time as a star, not a blob of molten metal.


    The planet was slowly being renovated to live up to its namesake—Mars, the Greek god of war. In the very near future, it would not only be home to most of the members of ARES (and wasn’t THAT an ironic mishmash of mythological figures; Mars, the Greek god of war, and Ares, the Roman god of war), but also to the men and women of the Martian Proving Ground, where classified imperial military projects would be birthed, built, and tested to failure.


    Even though Aron had introduced the simulation to humanity, it was perhaps a quirk of human beings’ nature that they simply couldn’t trust the accuracy of any kind of program. Not where it involved lives, at any rate. So the people who had taken to Research City like ducks to water had quite happily proposed that, after they developed hardware in the virtual city, they would then bring it into reality for testing in order to verify the projects that they had developed.


    Aron felt that it was more a matter of the lab geeks wanting to play with the toys they built than anything else, but he was quite willing to entertain their fantasy in order to keep them happy... and rather more importantly, productive.


    Overall, the Mars base was shaping up rather nicely and was on track to be completed well under the deadline of three years Aron had given John when the project first broke ground. In fact, over three quarters of the base was currently fully operational, and the rest was more quality of life and window dressing than necessity.


    The only necessity the planet still lacked was a mana-based Planetary Defense Shield.