027: Burrows and Blue Skies

 

Chapter 27: Burrows and Blue Skies Excerpt from the Parchment Memoirs of Orion Voss-7

As I set down with my fountain pen once more upon this parchment...

Ninety-two days after first touchdown, the contrast between the old worlds and the new one became beautifully clear.

The Martian-born among us — roughly half the crew — settled into the growing network of vaults and lava-tube chambers as though they had come home at last. To them, living beneath the surface was not a compromise. It was simply right.

Chief Navigator Patel, third-generation Martian, stood in the finished Hobbiton Vault gallery with arms spread wide, a broad grin on his face. “Feels like Phobos Base when I was a boy,” he laughed. “Same curved walls, same steady temperature, same sense that the planet itself is holding you safe. Only this time the roof is alive and violet instead of dead rock.”

His daughter Sofia sprinted past, chasing a small drone-butterfly, her laughter echoing down the smooth tunnels. For the ship-born Rubyborn children, the burrows felt completely natural. They pressed their palms to the warm composite walls, felt the gentle heartbeat resonators Virginia had insisted on installing, and declared it “just like the torch, only bigger.”

Even Commander Elias J. Voss, who had grown up under the domes and tunnels of Mars, walked the new passages with visible ease. The low, protective ceilings and rounded architecture seemed to ease something deep in his shoulders — the same shoulders that had carried Jupiter’s radiation and twenty-one years of command.

“This is how we were meant to live on new worlds,” he told me quietly one cycle. “Tucked gently inside them. The Martians always understood that better than Earth.”

The Earth-born Adjustment

For the Earth-born crew, the transition was gentler but slower.

Dr. Amara Patel (born in the restored hills of New Kashmir) still sometimes paused at the round doorway of her quarters, gazing upward as if expecting open sky. One evening she admitted, half laughing, half wistful, “I keep dreaming of blue. Wide blue sky and wind moving through real grass. Down here everything is beautiful… but it still feels like we’re hiding.”

Master Chief Elena Petrova, the tough old Earth naval veteran, took the longest. For the first week she slept with a small holo-projection of Earth’s open steppe running on her wall. She would stand in the main gallery, arms folded, studying the vaulted ceiling as though calculating how many meters of regolith lay between her and the sky.

Virginia Dare Ruiz became the gentle bridge, just as she had so many times before.

One rest cycle she found Petrova sitting alone in the small observation alcove — a chamber with a sealed periscope shaft that looked up through the Carpet. Virginia sat beside her and offered a fresh strawberry from the underground beds.

“It felt strange to me too at first,” Virginia said softly. “But then I remembered the Long Burn. We lived inside a metal tube for twenty-one years and still made it home. This isn’t a tube. This is a world holding us. The Carpet is right above us, breathing. We’re not trapped. We’re… protected.”

Petrova took the strawberry, chewed it slowly, then gave a reluctant grunt. “Feels like we’re moles who made friends with the grass.”

Virginia smiled. “Hobbit-moles. With strawberries.”

Over the following weeks the Earth-born began to soften. They painted murals of lost blue skies on certain walls, planted Earth wildflower seeds in window boxes under ruby lamps, and hung soft fabric “skies” dyed in gentle gradients above the children’s sleeping alcoves.

Yet even they started to admit the advantages: radiation levels were laughably low, temperatures never varied, and when surface storms passed overhead the vaults remained peaceful and dry. Best of all, the Carpet stayed calm — occasionally sending friendly violet pulses down the ventilation shafts whenever the children sang.

One People, One Home

On the hundredth day after touchdown, Commander Voss called everyone into the largest completed gallery — now modestly named Voss Hall.

He stood beneath the gently curved ceiling, warm ruby light bathing every face.

“We are becoming something new,” he told the fifty-eight. “Not purely Martian, not purely Earth-born. We are the Rubyborn. We carry the open-sky dreams of Earth and the burrow-wise soul of Mars. And here, beneath the Carpet, those two hearts are learning to beat as one.”

He gestured upward.

“Above us the Carpet tends the surface. Below us we tend our homes and our children. We visit the surface with respect. We harm nothing. And in return this world is letting us stay.”

Virginia Dare Ruiz stepped forward, holding the antique fountain pen that had once belonged to Dr. Elias K. Voss. She placed it gently on the central table where everyone could see it.

“Grandfather dreamed of expansion,” she said, voice clear and strong. “Not of repeating old mistakes. We have taken the Low Road, like the Tuatha. We have built burrows like the Hobbits and the Martians. And we are still here — welcomed.”

Later that night, as the ruby sun set above, a wide, slow wave of bioluminescence rolled across the Carpet directly over Voss Hall. It lingered for several minutes — the strongest, warmest response we had yet received.

Down in the comfortable glow of the vaults, Earth-born and Martian-born laughed together. Children chased drone-butterflies down curving tunnels. The heartbeat of the old torch still thrummed gently through the walls.

We were no longer visitors. We were neighbors. We were Rubyborn — living gently beneath the grass, under a ruby sun, finally home.

 



 


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The Great Fleet: Voyage to TRAPPIST-1
V 3.0

NOTE: this is a unfinished Draft of a in progress work.  © Curtis Neil, May 2026

ARTISTS COPYRIGHT, Curtis Neil May 2026 

Curtis Anthony Neil/Grok 4.0/ LibreOffice. MAY 03rd. 2026 AD. MAY 08th.2026

Bakersfield, California, USA, North America, Planet Earth (Terra), the third planet from the Sun (Sol), Solar System, Orion Arm, Milky Way Galaxy



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