By the time everyone had landed and walked across the stony plain (stopping, stumbling, running, staring off at the horizon, spinning slowly, walking again), and had entered into the three functioning habitats, and gotten out of their EVA suits, and put them away, and checked out the habitats, and eaten a bit, talking it all over the whole while, night had fallen.  They continued working on the habitats and talking through most of that night, too excited to fall asleep; then most of them slept in snatches until dawn, when they woke and suited up and went out again, looking around and checking manifests and running machines through checks.  Eventually they noticed they were famished, and went back in to jam down a quick meal; and then it was night again!

And that was what it was like, for several days; a wild swirl of time passing.  Nadia would wake to the bip of her wrist console, and eat a quick breakfast looking out the habitat's little east window:  dawn stained the sky rich berry colors for a few minutes, before shifting rapidly through a series of rosy tones to the thick pink-orange of daytime.  All over the floor of the habitat her companions slept, on mattresses that would fold up against the wall during the day. The walls were beige, tinted orange by the dawn.   The kitchen and living room were tiny, the four toilet rooms no more than closets.  Ann would stir as the room lightened, and go to one of the four toilets.  John was already in the kitchen, moving around quietly.  Conditions were so much more crowded and public than they had been on the Ares that some of them were having trouble adjusting; every night Maya complained she couldn't sleep in such a crowd, but there she was, mouth open girlishly.  She would be the last to rise, snoozing through the noise and bustle of the others' morning routines.

Then the sun would crack the horizon, and Nadia would be done with her cereal and milk, the milk made of powder mixed with water mined from the atmosphere (it tasted just the same); and it was time to get into her walker, and out to work.

The walkers were designed for the martian surface, and were not pressurized like spacesuits, but were rather made of an elastic mesh, which held in the body at about the same pressure that the terran atmosphere would have.  This prevented the severe expansion bruising that would result if skin were exposed to Mars's minimal atmosphere, but it gave the wearer a lot more freedom of movement than a pressurized spacesuit would have.  Walkers also had the very significant advantage of being fail-operational; only the hard helmet was airtight, so if you ripped a hole at knee or elbow you would have a badly bruised and frozen patch of skin, but would not suffocate and die within minutes.