no longer terrans, we leave nothing behind no class undecomposed, no nations for to strive the site of our traumas looks a plaything in the vast the ares rings out with our cries "free at last! free at last!" one hundred egos ten thousand relations lovers, bewilderers shards to forge a nation our nation we know who we have been, still better who we are centurions of a new world partisans for mars * we came to build it, a new world came to learn its ways we had ideas to live for, to give root and people grew and people changed they came, they followed they touched down for fools' gold nothing good, and nothing true and now they fight us they jail us and kill friends to break relations that we built i'll not be a breathless avenger i'll stay calm forget my hate, forget my love then I found your bones in the ashes, my best friend the plains were rent, the mountains fell i turned my face to their outpost above us sign and source of mortal fear strode up the hill a good signal and struck it down the chains of phobos fall away * the crush of terran power forces us side by side clarifies our common goals until quickly we find our cacophonic chorus united to say that mars is not terra qu'il ne sera jamais the break we have made with our flight means nothing if domination follows us here so we shall join one to all and fight let love soothe the ache of our fear the euphoria of this red land the stones and fines upon which we stand speak of to where we belong this is mars this is our home you can never go back. you can never go back. you can never go back.

[ann watches the outbreak at melas chasma] here again laid low by the horror wrought upon what little i love and esteem (a life, a mind, history, meaning, place) that i might feel no more and i have seen their kind before zealots of false ideas slashing, cutting, burning, burying any expression of that truth unknown (too clear to constrain in name) that they might be gods and claim the mantle they made "he in whose image is the world" this crushing torrent, i have felt before this land, my body, my home crushed and buried here again laid low this land, my body, my home * she lay on the floor of the rover and watched the red world recede watching the water turn to ice watching the red world turn grey, and white, and brown the fines laced into the edges of the frozen waves she lay on the floor of the rover and watched the red world retreat rock and stone and regolith buried those things hard and solid and real swept away sometimes when change comes it comes fast she lay on the floor of the rover and watched the red world run watching the canyon become canal, become frozen 'they won't ever know the land i know...' * you imagined a mars, centuries ago sharpened the far-off images with human stories and i love this land for the stories it has to tell not as a canvas for a dream hideous and unfitting mars cries out four billion years of rock and fire and force man tells man of canals and mars drowns in the mythos men shall destroy this land for it tells a story not their own * i am still here. this is still mars. my body come back to me. i shall rise and continue the fight again once more forever * hold that wheel and hold it fast they want us dead they want this red world dead and gone