Like so many others before him, he had ended up engulfed by yet another purge. His Party card, his advantageous position in the apparatus of the State, had done him no good. When they came to find him in his apartment, cozy in the middle of the night, Maxim had understood. The swine. He had barely time to kiss his wife and his son. Natasha and Alex, what are you doing right now? By the time he was brought to an unknown prison, he realised that he had seen them for the last time.
They accused him of deviation. Confessions obtained under torture. His trial was even more expeditious. He didn’t know why, but he’d escaped summary execution and was condemned to deportation in perpetuity. On Mars. But is that better than death? For a long time now, Siberia had gone out of fashion. That region, which had become a zone for the privileged population, had given way to another helclass="underline" the Marslag. The final step for those who disrupted. The asshole from which one never returned. Mars the Pitiless.
To reach this charming corner, the prisoners had to pass two months in the interior of a rotten cabin in the vessel October: a ruined engine that, for three decades, had watered insatiable Mars with new detainees. These miserable ones were stuck there, penned like cattle, packed like sardines, for the long and punishing voyage across the cosmos. They had become damned souls, errant spirits, empty of their human substance. In coming here, we have won a one-way ticket to the abyss.
With a terrible din, the October finally landed on the Martian soil.
Their chains were connected at the feet, as in the time of the tsars. The prison guards barked, violently pushing the slower prisoners. The aggressiveness oozed from every pore of their skins. Cudgels rained down. The guards drove the procession of phantoms to the exit of the spacecraft. With each step, his irons cut his foot, but Maxim said nothing. He knew that it was useless to complain. They were brought along an immense corridor with immaculate walls, connecting the October to the Martian base. Their metal chains rattling, the convicts trudged along the vast corridor. At the mid-point, they passed under a huge, red banner, on which stood out letters of gold:
“ДOБPO ПOЖAЛOBATЬ HA MAPC. 3ДECЬ MЫ CTPOИM COЦИЯЛИCM.”
“Welcome to Mars. Here, we build the new socialism.” Such bullshit….
They arrived, finally, under a vast dome whose walls were totally transparent. There, for the first time, their haggard eyes could contemplate a Martian landscape. Shacks were planted in the middle of a crimson valley on the cracked surface. They noticed immediately that there was no line of barbed wire, no watchtower. The Martian environment was the antidote to any attempt to flee. An unbreathable atmosphere, a sterile world situated millions of kilometers from Earth. This was explained to them, shouted out, by the head of the base, under the guise of a welcoming speech.
A little farther to the left, in the region of one hundred metres, the prisoners could see the cyclopean profiles of the Fathers of the Revolution, which had been carved in the rock of a cliff. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin stared down at the pestiferous unfortunates, which included Maxim. The scene immediately evoked for him an old, dog-eared postcard given to him by his father when he had been only a child. The image, which had risen from his memories like a bubble of air to the surface of the water, represented the American presidents sculpted onto a mountain.
The filthy mass of men was then pushed toward the decontamination rooms. They were washed, dressed, then directed to the refectory.
There, while they ate, slogans to the glory of the empire echoed. Obviously, brainwashing was part of the treatment inflicted in the Marslag….
Then, once they had hed, they were sent to the boarding area. Now, their lives as pariahs could begin.
It remained to exploit the riches that abounded on Mars, and of which the Motherland was fond. As no volunteer was crazy enough to come here, the authorities had decided to create a new paradise from forced labour. The Marslag. The prisoners represented a mass of free and exploitable labour, even if their life expectancy was not very high. Between the beatings by prison guards, the lack of food, and work to the limits of human capacity, the existence of a convict did not weigh very heavily with the authorities.
They brought the prisoners into a locker room with cracked walls, filled with outdated and dirty lockers. There, they put on their spacesuits and then, under the watchful eye of supervisors, they boarded the craft that would lead them to the mine.
Once inside, Maxim stuck to the glass porthole. The desolate land of Mars marched under his wide eyes: stony hills, speckled with brown stones and cutting the horizon out of sight, fields of somber rocks in jagged shapes, a sky reddish and sad. A little farther, cliffs plunged toward an immense, scarlet plain. Immobile and silent.
“Look over there, at the bottom.”
These words emanated from a stony voice. That of an old man, sitting next to Maxim. Dirty-looking, the Ancestor…His face, cracked and weary, reflected the many years abandoned here, but in his grey-green eyes still danced the flame of intelligence. Max did not blink, leaving the stranger to continue:
“That’s Mount Olympus. An altitude of 27 km. The highest summit on Mars. And in the Solar System.”
Max did not know how to respond to the stranger. They always said to remain on guard and say nothing of import to anyone…The Marslag had a reputation as a nest of crabs, each one ready to eat the others. Finally, it was the grandfather who decided to continue:
“We’re braking. We’re arriving at our destination.”
Max opened his eyes wide and what he saw unmanned him:
“Jesus Christ!”
Faced with the immense, open-pit mine, he believed he found himself at the mouth of Hell. The spectacle was enough to shake the strongest of souls. There, resembling an army of insects, worked thousands of men, turning the soil over a surface, and at a depth, that was staggering. Their effort was colossal.
The prisoners were hustled outside. My first steps on Mars….
“You risk having some difficulties in adapting, but you should master your movements pretty rapidly. Here, it’s necessary to move in small steps that are facilitated by the weak gravity. On the Red Planet, you weigh three times less than on Earth.”
Always the same old man. This time, Maxim decided to respond to him.
“Okay, thanks, Comrade.”
“Spare me the ceremony. In Marslag, we are all pariahs. The only goal that drives us is summed up in one word: ‘Survive’. My name is ‘Fyodor’. Welcome to Hell.”
“Mine is Maxim Brahms. Everyone calls me Max.”
The guards gave their orders. As he did not know what to do, Maxim imitated his new companion. There ran, some steps away from the condemned, a four-wheel-drive, diesel robot. Its steel legs methodically searched the red soil and mined ore. The mission for Brahms and his comrades was simple: to transport the ore to cargo containers. They then had to push carts weighing several tons over hundreds of meters. Despite the feeble gravity, it was exhausting work. A grueling task that shriveled the brain and reduced those executing it to the state of a machine. Turning back and forth like hungry wasps, the warders perched on their quads, which functioned on solar energy, keeping a constant eye on their charges and ensuring that the cadences of labour did not decrease.