Read an Excerpt From Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Martian Contingency

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from the newest addition to Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series, The Martian Contingency, publishing with Tor Books on March 18^th.

ONE

A NEW ELLINGTON SCORE MARKING THE RETURN TO MARS

Special to The National Times

Fem 50, Mars Year 5, Frisol, 1900 hours—Landing + 0 sols

Do you remember where you were when the stars came out? I was with my husband, on Mars.

So many pivotal moments in my life had involved stargazing before the Meteor. I hadn’t seen a clear night sky from the surface of a planet since it struck Washington, D.C., on March 3, 1952. Twenty-six million dead. Numbers have shape and texture in my head, and this one was dense and pitted and worn smooth from seventeen years of grief.

Seventeen years since the Meteor and here we were on Mars. Above the undulating horizon of Gale Crater, the Martian night twinkled. The stars did not blaze in crystalline perfection the way they did in space. They sparkled through the atmosphere. Blue and red, silver and gold, danced against a deep purple.

The stars that had been our navigational aids on the voyage here drew my eye like old friends.

I wanted to linger on the surface of Mars and stargaze with Nathaniel, not knowing when I’d be suited up and outside at night again. But it was a selfish waste of consumables.

I needed to head into Bradbury Base, where the rest of the team was, but as soon as I did… as soon as I finished that last item on my checklist, I would stop being a pilot and switch to my other role as second-in-command on the mission.

Nathaniel leaned his helmet against mine. “What’s going on?”

“Hm?” I blinked and turned my head to smile brightly at him. We were on Mars! After years of working to get off Earth, we were here as part of the Second Mars Expedition. We were the next step in creating a new permanent home for humanity. I should be happy. I was happy. “Just enjoying the stars.”

“Uh-huh… For the record, how long have we been married?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Twenty years.”

“Twenty years! And none of this gear hides your fretting face.”

“Fretting face?” I rolled my eyes, but I could feel the line between my brows relax. “Fine. I’m fretting because I’m about to have to go inside and be in charge. Why did I let Nicole talk me into this?”

“Well, I mean, she is the president of the United States.” He gave a rueful chuckle. “And very persuasive.”

The bean counters back on Earth had wanted me—no, they’d wanted the famous Lady Astronaut of Mars in a visible command position to lend credibility to the mission. That should have come from the actual mission commander, but Leonard Flannery was Black. He was also eminently more qualified to be mission commander than I was. He’d landed on the planet on the first mission. I hadn’t. But I was very good at being a pretty face for publicity.

Thank God we were past the days where we had to avoid mentioning that I was Jewish. Mostly past.

“All right. Let me finish this checklist and we’ll go in.”

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The Martian Contingency

Mary Robinette Kowal

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The Martian Contingency

Mary Robinette Kowal

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I walked around our landing craft, the Esther, one last time to check the tie-down straps. The landing pad was the same familiar shape as the one on the Moon, but a soft salmon instead of lunar gray. Everything felt different from training. I’d experienced spacesuits and Moon suits, both were stiffer than a Mars suit. Training on Earth, it was heavier. Training on the centrifugal ring of the Goddard, we always fought the Coriolis effect. Training on the Moon, you couldn’t hear the whisper of wind outside your helmet.

Wind. Just wind. Not the sound of a spacesuit failing.

The hours after landing had been a focused series of checklists and supervising the off-loading while other members of the team got the habitat up and running. Then I’d turned to making sure that the Esther was locked down since it would be a month, at best, before I launched again. And Martian months were fifty-five sols long, so beyond the checklists, I wanted to make sure my ship was tucked in snug and secure.

And she was. There was nothing left to do. The last box was checked on my list.

“Elma, come look.” Nathaniel stood between the Esther and the arched doorway into the base. “The Goddard is transiting.” I didn’t run, because that’s a good way to fall and damage your suit. But I looked up as I walked to him. Across the dancing backdrop of the evening sky, the clear bright light of the Goddard, the ship that had brought us here, traced an arc across the heavens.

“Oh—” My breath caught at the sight of an evening star. We weren’t displaced enough in the galactic disc to make a difference, so we had the same stars and the same constellations. Except for one significant difference. “It’s Earth.”

Small and the palest blue, if you thought about the color blue while looking at it, our home planet sat low on the horizon to the west where the sun had set.

Nathaniel was silent as we leaned against each other in an embrace. I could feel his weight against me, but the details of his body were lost to the pressurized surfaces of our suits. He shifted. “Where?”

“See Orion? Follow the belt and then… it’s the one that’s bright like Venus.”

His helmet rested against mine and I could hear the telltale snuffle of an astronaut whose nose is running. You can’t wipe them in a spacesuit. It was good to know that the sheer joy of having made it here—to Mars—was making him cry, too.

When the Goddard passed below the horizon, I sighed and turned to look at Nathaniel. The one exterior light at Bradbury Base cast his face into yellow and gray relief.

My piloting work was truly done for tonight and I could feel the fatigue starting to catch up.

I squeezed Nathaniel’s hands. “How are things inside?”

“Starting to wind down for the night.” He nodded toward the dome, which cast a warm glow up through the bit of translucent curve that peeked above the regolith. “A couple of annoyances but nothing we didn’t plan for.”

“I can’t believe you suited up again to come back out for me.” And not just because putting on a Mars suit was tedious, but because he had voluntarily walked away from ongoing work.

“I wanted to be here when you looked up.”

Holding his hand, I took one last look at the night sky before walking back to the base. I could stare at the stars forever.

Ahead of us, the entrance to Bradbury Base waited to guide us into our new home. The First Mars Expedition landing team had built it in 1963 as part of the long process to create another habitat for humanity. Nathaniel’s engineering team had blueprints and plans for expanding the base, but for now it was comfortably cozy for twenty. Our first order of business would be to build the second dome so that the eighty colonists still aboard the Goddard could start coming down to join us.

I paused at the entrance to check the pressure gauge and then looked through the porthole to confirm that the interior door was shut. I pumped the ratchet handle to open it and Nathaniel followed me in, pulling the hatch shut. I was proud of him as he went through the process of latching it. He’d had training, yes, but this was his first long-duration mission in space.

When the hatch was secured, I activated the suction fans that pulled the worst of the Martian dust off our suits. Our suit techs would get the rest. Suit techs. A luxury we hadn’t had when I’d started going into space.

When the cleaning cycle ended, the airlock automatically began to pressurize.

A part of me had expected Bradbury to be as rustic as the original lunar base, but on the First Expedition, my teammates had spent thirteen months working on the surface and had built this habitat to be ready for shirtsleeve levels of casual living. Assuming that nothing went wrong.

If I knew anything about space, it was that something always went wrong.

The green light lit, and I checked the gauge anyway. Pressure normalized, I released the valve on the side of my suit, feeling the slight pop as the pressure inflating it relaxed and fabric settled against my undergarments. Hands aching from a sol in the suit, I pulled off my gloves and tucked them under my right arm in a way I absolutely could not while it was pressurized. I had my helmet off while Nathaniel was still fidgeting with his left glove.

“Need help?” I reached for the latch to open the interior airlock.

“I can get it.” His words echoed, coming through the comm earpiece and muffled by the glass of his helmet.

Nodding, I inhaled and stopped. A scent of sulfur with a chalky sweet overtone filled the airlock, in a combination unlike anything I’d smelled before. On the Moon, when you came back in, you got a scent of gunpowder and old campfire that was the weird but unmistakable smell of lunar regolith.

This was Mars.

This was what Mars smelled like. I let go of the handle and turned back to Nathaniel, waiting for the moment when he had his helmet off. The second glove was clear. Grinning, I bounded over to him, so that I was directly in front of him when he removed his helmet.

“Breathe in.” I bounced on my toes.

His nose wrinkled. “I know. It smells like rotten eggs.”

“That’s Mars.” I grinned at him. “The folks who got to go

down to the surface during the First Mars Expedition said it smelled like rotten eggs. That’s Mars. We’re smelling Mars.”

“You are very excited about rotten eggs.”

I leaned forward and kissed him. “I am.” I kissed him again. “It’s a whole new planet.”

The door to the airlock gave plenty of warning that it was opening, as the fifteen latches released in their distinctive ripple-bang and Leonard poked his head in. “Are we already going to have to have a conversation about appropriate use of airlocks?”

“We can smell Mars!” I beckoned to our mission commander before remembering that he’d been here before as one of the geologists on the First Mars Expedition. “Oh. I guess… I guess that’s old hat for you.”

Leonard grinned. “True story. When we were back on Earth, my mom cracked an egg that was rotten. Stunk up the house but the first thought that went through my head was, ‘home.’”

A little flush of excited reality went through my body because until I heard him say “home” it hadn’t really sunk in that we were here to stay. Every mission before this had been a stepping stone making sure that humanity wasn’t trapped on a single dying planet. But every mission before this had also been finite. Establishing a permanent colony was why I was here, and also… Earth was still home to me.

I think Leonard must have seen some of that on my face, because he pulled the airlock door wider and stepped back. “You get used to it.”

I squinted at our mission commander. My hands and shoulders ached from being in the suit all sol. I wanted to relish the memory of flying in a red-hot slice through the atmosphere, but also, Leonard shouldn’t be meeting us at the door. I wanted to retreat to the ship so I didn’t have to shift to my administrative duties so fast.

I followed him out of the airlock into the long hallway that connected to the main dome. “Aren’t you scheduled to be in comms now? What’s up?”

“The engineering team needs Nathaniel.” He held up his hands. “Nothing urgent. Everything is under control. It’s just that Reynard has questions about the defaults on the life support.”

Nathaniel looked down at his suit as if he wanted to run straight there. “Be there as soon as I change.”

I raised my eyebrows at Leonard. “I thought you said everything was under control?”

“Wouldn’t be space without contingency planning.” Leonard’s voice was relaxed, but I could see the alertness that straightened his neck.

“What’s going on with life support?”

“It’s stable.” Nathaniel ran his hand through his hair and grimaced. “I mean, stable enough. One of the secondary redundant flow sensors for the scrubbers isn’t coming online the way I’d like, which we’d expected might be the case after being shut down for four years.”

“So it’s nothing outside of mission parameters?”

“Nothing we don’t have contingency plans for.” Nathaniel took a step away from us. “I should really…”

“Go.” Leonard made a shooing motion. As my husband awkwardly bounded toward the donning station, Leonard looked back to me. “I would remind you that you’re scheduled for a rest period but I know you well enough to recognize the urge to stress bake when I see it.”

“Baking is resting.” I stuck my tongue out at him. “And there’s no way the kitchen is set up enough to be able to bake in yet.”

He laughed and that felt good. During the first expedition, I had been a replacement crew member due to political pressures. The rest of the team had resented me. I was part of the crew but also outside of it.

This time, I was here from the start. I was a part of the team.

After I dropped my suit off with our techs and changed into a clean flight suit, I went down the corridor to the airlock that led to the main dome. I’d opened airlocks hundreds of times while living and working on the lunar base but on the other side of this one, the sense of the familiar and strange intertwined.

Just like Artemis Base, Bradbury Base was a broad hemisphere about sixteen meters across, half buried with ten meters of regolith mounded over it save for a large translucent skylight to let in natural light. The “buildings” were large packing containers lining “streets.” The staircase down to the two lower floors curved from the same spot near the outer wall.

Where they had offices, we had a large open area along the north wall that doubled as a recreation area and as a large project assembly area. I imagine this is what Dorothy felt like stepping out the farmhouse door. It’s the familiar door, but strangeness awaits on the other side of the threshold.

Waving at crewmates, who were all following their own checklists, I walked across the dome toward the kitchen area, but my path curved to one of the imprints left by the First Expedition.

Along the north wall, behind the large project assembly area, was a gorgeous mural in sapphires and umbers. I stopped in front of it, staring in wonder at the brilliant color amid all the white and gray and aluminum of the dome. I hadn’t seen anything like it in the other habitats. If Nicole had been here, she would have told me what style it was, but all I knew was that what had at first seemed like abstract shapes resolved into an organic cityscape.

“What are you staring at?” Wilburt Schnöhaus, one of our mechanics, looked up from the case he was unpacking and followed my gaze. His brow creased for a moment.

“The mural. It’s amazing. Who did it?”

The line between his brows vanished and his shoulders relaxed. He opened his mouth, then gave a little head shake as if changing his mind about what he was going to say. “Dawn’s work. The city of tomorrow.”

“I didn’t know she painted.” We’d had two ships on the First Expedition. Dawn and Wilburt had been on the Pinta, so we hadn’t had much interaction until ours was disabled, and then… well, then we were focused on other things.

“Very good, too.” He stood, stretching. “I have a joke about paint drying. It’s a bit boring and takes too long to tell.”

I snorted. “Does it feel good to be back?”

“It does. I had expected that cobwebs and dust would cover all, but everything is flawless as if we had yestersol departed.”

I blinked, looking at everything again. My crewmates on the First Expedition had been on the surface for 380 sols, about 13 months by the Earth calendar, and had left signs of wear but it was as if they had left yestersol. “That is… surprising.”

“This was my thinking as well. Kam took great delight in informing me that most dust in a house comes from human skin. So…” He gestured at the dome. “No inhabitants for four years means no dust. And also there are no spiders to make webs.”

Would there ever be? We were supposed to be making another home for humanity here. Would future generations of Martian children recite “Little Miss Muffet” and be as baffled by spiders as I was by tuffets?

Wilburt’s checklist sat open on the floor next to where he’d been kneeling with only a few items marked off. I was supposed to be in a command role, not distracting him with chitchat. “Well, I’ll let you get back to it.”

He sighed and knelt again as I headed to the kitchen.

At the moment, it was a large rectangular packing module with built-in rehydrator taps and heating units. We’d be stuck with rehydrated food until we got the greenhouse up and running. We wouldn’t get a full kitchen until sometime after that. The moment it was open, I intended to bake a pie.

When I stepped into the kitchen module, two of the newer crew members were stowing supplies. Jaidev Kamal looked up from a checklist. Jaidev had been a chemist working on the lunar colony and jumped at the chance to come to Mars, where he’d oversee the processes that converted in situ resources to consumables. “Oh, good. The inventory, it shows the kitchen shears in cabinet A7, but I cannot find them. Where did you keep them?”

“Um…” I looked around as if I could help out in some way, but I was still in the land of the familiar and strange. The kitchen was the same basic module as the one we had started with on the Moon, but with a decorative border of rusty diamonds painted at the top of the ceiling. That was probably also Dawn’s work, since she’d been down. “I don’t know. This is the first time I’ve been in the module.”

Across from Jaidev, his wife Aahana smiled at me apologetically and rested a hand on his arm. “Elma wasn’t allowed to land because she was too important as a computer on the First Expedition.”

“Sort of…” That made it sound like it had been about me, but it had just been practical. Terrorists from the group Earth First had taken out the Deep Space Network, and that meant we hadn’t been able to rely on Earth for navigation. “Mission Control kept the NavComps aboard. It’s the first time down for me and for Heidi, too, when she lands.”

“But you did the calculations.” They were both from the India contingent, and Aahana had a British accent that was as plummy as the Queen’s. Her specialty was geology and she’d worked on identifying lava tubes that could be used for habitation on the Moon.

“We both did. Redundancies.” My smile felt too tight. She was making it out as if I was something special. NavComps did navigation and computing. Doing that math had been my job. Nothing more. “Do you want me to find Dawn? She might remember where things are.”

“That’s all right.” Jaidev shook his head. “It’s a get-ahead, so I can ask her when I see her. Did you need anything?”

Aahana’s eyes widened. “Oh, I’m sorry. You probably came in for dinner.” She stood and moved away from the water tap. “We’re ahead of schedule but we still don’t have everything unpacked.”

“I actually came in to see if I could be helpful.”

Jaidev consulted his list. “No… no, unless you have a way to improve freeze-dried meals.”

“Beats the astronaut kibble.”

Aahana laughed. “Nicole told us about that in training. I can’t believe that was a real thing.”

“Oh, we never flew with it.” I looked at the bins stacked along one wall. It was so tempting to open one and start unpacking it, but they had a method and me jumping in to help would throw their plan off. “When it got damp, it was like glue.”

“What did it taste like?” Aahana’s eyes were bright with curiosity.

“Meat-flavored cardboard.”

She laughed again just a little too loud and watched me just a little too intently. I’d managed to forget that Aahana had been fourteen when the Meteor struck. She literally went into this field because of me. I know that because she told me when we met. She had shown me a copy of her Lady Astronaut Club membership card.

During training and on the trip out, with a hundred people on the Goddard, her… her interest in my career hadn’t been obvious. It was now. But she was a brilliant geologist who had done good work on the Moon.

She would settle down again. It was just because we were in a new place. I turned my attention to Jaidev, who had probably joined because of Stetson Parker, the First Man in Space. We got paired all the time in people’s minds even though he’d hated me for more than a decade.

“Sol 1 dinners are stacked on the outside wall.” Jaidev consulted his clipboard. “Bin 1632-A.”

Aahana leaned in as if she were confiding a secret. “I knew you would want it—this being Frisol—so I made sure your kosher meals were accessible when we were bringing things in from the ship.”

“Great.” I did not have the energy to explain that keeping Shabbat was not a deciding factor in keeping kosher. “Thanks.”

I extracted myself and went in search of the bin.

On Earth, Nathaniel and I were casually kosher, didn’t mix meat and dairy when I was cooking but did if we were at a friend’s house. But for the first time, I wasn’t the only Jew on the mission, and I’d advocated for others in ways that I wouldn’t have for myself. So there were kosher meals on this mission.

My first Shabbat on Mars. Don’t ask me if I started crying when I pulled those vacuum packs out.

Excerpted from The Martian Contingency, copyright © 2025 by Mary Robinette Kowal.