Valles Marineris Readies Its Fifth District as the Fourth Fills Fast

VALLES MARINERIS (dispatch delayed nine minutes) — The colony strung along the great Martian rift has begun cutting the anchor galleries for a fifth pressurized district, administrators announced in a bulletin that crossed the gulf this morning, even as the fourth district's newest wings were still curing their sealant. The settlement passed fifty thousand permanent residents last month and has not paused for breath; migration from the orbital transfer stations now runs ahead of the schedule the planners drew two years ago. "We used to build a district and wait for it to fill," the colony administrator wrote. "Now we build the next one because the last is already full." The fifth district will add hydroponic decks, a second medical bay, and pressurized housing for four thousand — numbers that would have described the entire colony a decade ago. Growth on Mars is no longer a milestone to be celebrated so much as a logistics problem to be managed, which is, the administrator noted drily, its own kind of arrival. Earth read the news twelve hours after Mars lived it.