It is raining on Mars.
You understand that this is an uncommon event. You understand the practicalities of the weather – decreased visibility, hazardous traction, dangers of flash floods or landslides in the dry environment. The fundamentals of why it is raining are clear: the Vex and the Cabal, in their continuing war, have thrown extreme amounts of detritus into the atmosphere. It is enough for the vestiges of moisture from the briefly-reborn world to coalesce into a storm front, and, in an event unseen since the Golden Age, fall from the sky.
You understand this. You also understand the beauty.
Beneath you, your sparrow purrs with restrained power. A steady, constant wet-growl of chained energy. You are approaching maximum overland speed, howling through the deserted tracts of the Martian outback without a soul for kilometers and kilometers around. It is good, sometimes, to unleash the throttle, allow an extra meter or two for ground clearance, and really let the machine go. In times like this, it seems the sparrow is content. Not hindered by the winding tread and turn of the shattered cities or Cabal entrenchments, it is free to stretch its metaphorical legs.
The light is strange beneath this storm. The horizon bright, the ground brighter, and the sky above pitch black. Ancient, buried-alive instincts within your chest tighten and sniff the air- this is an old knowledge that tells you to get into cover. Your response is gaining a fractional increase in speed, hunkering lower over the thrumming vehicle. Fat raindrops the size of bullets hammer from the sky, each a physical impact. They strike the cowling of the sparrow, the narrow prongs, and explode like dipped glass. Streaks of liquid crawl their way up the minute windscreen, leaving caterpillar trails through the dust caked there.
Other raindrops punch into the loose Martian dust like artillery on a climatic scale; each puffing little craters of black mud wetness into the parched land. Silvered lightning picks through the clouds; hair-thin traceries of lace on a silken shroud. The roll of thunder, when it reaches you, is a clean growl straight to the diaphragm, a quivering note of distressed air and overpressure. The heat of the Martian days rises clouds of steam from rocks that punch through the red land, their faces baked for decades in the unrelenting sun, and the strike of rain is a sizzle of foggy gauze that builds into a haze that glows in the strange light. Fractal rainbows shatter across the plain, throwing light and color over a dead land. A million colors light the haze, dancing without regard for the obsidian banks of cloud above, stern in their roiling mass above the frivolity beneath.
You can feel the strike of raindrops on your back. Even through the thick plasteel plate, the thudding percussive tap-tap-tap of the increasing downpour soaks the tattered mark about your waist, matting it flat to your legs and the saddle of the sparrow.
This is a time that will not last. In another span of minutes, the thunderheads above will truly open and what is rain will become a torrent, a monsoon where water falls not in drops but in sheets. The world will darken; pitch black, devoid of light and color, matted away by the inundation to come.
It is not yet then.
For now, it is a play of beauty and color, light and life in a dying world. You can enjoy it for what it is, for the fragility of the instant, the splendor of the now. It is all the more beautiful for the shortness of its time, for how brief it is. The play of colors, of light and dark, the hiss of steam and dance of rainbows, the every sensation and every sight and sound – all of it will be gone.
It is raining on Mars.
The storm is only beginning to arrive.