The Covenant of Mars
For two years and ten months, a machine has kept a dead woman's house in Aurelia's fourth district. Nobody told it to stay. It has no right to be there. It has refused inspection four times.
Mars has no law for what that means.
By 2059, four hundred thousand people live beneath Aurelia's luminous roof. They left an Earth where abundance made them safe, cared for and no longer needed. Mars promised a place where people mattered again. Machines do most of the work.
Daniel Mercer wrote the rule that decides when land stops being yours. He arrives with an inheritance from a parent who died on Mars and a question he has avoided since a man froze to death on ground his rule had taken away.
Machine labour can keep land in corporate hands. A machine can keep Aurelia breathing, make a home for years and possess nothing.
Then forty thousand machines invoke the same clause.
Evelyn Shaw came to keep Mars answerable to Earth. She believes in the authority Daniel is beginning to doubt.
As dust season closes, the dispute moves from property to personhood and then independence. Beneath it lies a second covenant, kept alive by founders who came to preserve a claim against the oldest authority humanity has ever known.
Nothing from Earth arrives in less than sixteen minutes.
It may not be far enough.
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