Finally, one man rose above the fray to bring order to the chaos … the only man who could.

Devlin Mabus.

Mabus? Father, was he related to Peter Mabus, the billionaire?

He was his grandson. Devlin’s company, MTI, had financed a third of the Mars Colony. His team had selected more than half of the survivors on our space vehicles. He had already been appointed to the president’s new cabinet as vice president and was easily the highest-ranking Mars official present among us.

More important, Devlin had boarded his private shuttle with two dozen heavily armed bodyguards, all loyal to the influential billionaire and his poisonous mother.

Devlin decided each ship would elect three representatives to serve as liaisons to communicate with the newly formed Council, over which he would preside. This hierarchy worked well enough … until the day one representative openly voiced his disagreement, causing a rift among the leadership. Devlin took it all in stride, then had the dissenter relocated to his own ship so that the two could ‘come to a political resolution on behalf of the colony.’

The dissenter’s opinions changed. Two days later, he went for a ‘stroll.’

The ‘stroll’ was a walk outside the shuttle without an environmental suit.

The ‘stroll’ was suicide.

This Devlin sounds an awful lot like his grandfather.

I have no doubt he was even worse, having met his mother, a woman who could manipulate a small nation with her beauty, and crush them in her evil embrace. She was as alluring and as deadly as a Venus flytrap, and she was Devlin’s best friend and only confidant. The two of them made quite the pair, and yet, as much as I feared them, our colony survived on the virtue of their combined strength.

With each passing day, our situation grew more hopeless. Exploration teams would leave every dawn in search of food and water, but could never venture too far, forced to return before the giant beetles made their nightly appearance.

Traps were set to capture a few specimens. We learned the insects were blind, existing on microbes found within the volcanic rock and moss.

Unfortunately, the alien insects were not edible.

As hope faded, the suicide walks increased. Sometimes it was an individual, sometimes an entire family. Depression spread like the plague. A limited supply of environmental suits kept most civilians confined to their ships, increasing our feelings of isolation.

Still, our colony was blessed with some of the best minds our species had to offer. Using spare parts, engineers were able to upgrade an unmanned aerovehicle one of the children had brought on board. Each morning our drone scout would venture forth like Noah’s dove, searching for salvation.

And then, on the afternoon of our forty-third day on the planet, we found it …

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