13

Kosmo chuckles to himself. "That's just about true enough for me to pretend to be flattered. If I wasn't paying for my ride, I'd absolutely be a burden," he says. He turns down the volume on his vocalizer and leans in, taking his feet off the slab. "You know, I fancy our odds better this time around. I wouldn't want this to be another Mars."

The Mars colony had been a disaster on every level and set back the space settlement movement two decades. The planet is still littered with depressurized domes and frozen bodies.