The Pressure Manifest

Inspector Kowalski found the thirty-seventh “accidental” airlock death in Sector 7. Same pattern: override codes entered, suits deliberately left behind, logs wiped.

“Suicide?” Deputy Morrison suggested.

“Murder.” Kowalski pulled up the manifest. “All thirty-seven were terraforming engineers. Someone’s killing the people trying to give Mars an atmosphere.”

The investigation led to New Olympus’s underground—literally. Pressurized tunnels beneath the official colony, where the Mars Purists gathered. They called themselves the Red Ghosts, dedicated to keeping Mars dead.

“You don’t understand,” their leader, Dr. Vance, explained calmly. “Mars is perfect in its sterility. No life, no chaos, no suffering. We’re infecting it with Earth’s disease.”

“So you murder engineers?”

“We liberate them. And Mars.” Vance gestured to the dozens gathered in the tunnel. “Every one of us has disabled our habitat’s atmospheric processors. We breathe bottled air, contribute nothing to terraforming.”

Kowalski checked the population records. Thousands of colonists, consuming resources, producing nothing. A cancer in the terraforming timeline.

“The company will stop you.”

“The company can’t even stop the dust storms. How will they stop human nature?” Vance smiled. “Some of us came here specifically because Mars was dead. A clean world. No biology, no ecosystem, no messy life. Just beautiful desolation.”

The next day, three more engineers were found outside, unsuited. The day after, five. The Purists weren’t hiding anymore.

Kowalski filed his report, knowing it would be buried. The truth was too damaging: a significant percentage of Mars colonists were actively working against the colony’s survival.

Mars would live or die based on a war between those who wanted to create and those who worshipped the void.