June 6th 2002 Sphere
Above Mars

My rag tag armada of scientists, capes, engineers, scientists, and other assorted true friends were in the midst of collecting and trying to organize the supplies that NASA was sending us. My scanners were trained on the red planet below us. I smiled and looked at the others, and pointed to a green dot.

"Enchance visual."

The camera focused on a lone tree growing in the distance.

"Ground control, this is Sphere. Is project World tree a go?"

"Ground control to Sphere. Project World tree is a go, Ironwood informs us that the tree on your end is going to be a lot bigger then the one on our end."

"Is it finished?"

"According to Ironwood the martian node is finished, we have people on our end waiting. Yep, portals open, you got the email?"

"Yeah, we're going in for landing."

We put on our seat belts and endured entry, the ship shook as our small armada landed on Mars. I looked around me, when the process was finished my mouth was dry.

"Is everyone ok?"

"We lost some of the unmanned ships, but we can salvage that Sphere, no one's dead."

Good, we could always get more stuff, but you can't replace people. We suited up and headed outside.

"Fuck it's huge."

I don't know who said that but I had to agree, the tree was massive. I looked around at all of the crews and ships either landing or in the process of doing so. I continued on, directing the flow of traffic. When we had all landed safely we walked towards the large wooden Tree to the sun flower. I pressed the colorful organic buttons and it wooshed open. We walked inside and waited for the room to fill with air. There was a ding and a second door opened. Inside, glowing sunflowers lit the way. I saw wall outlets and the seemingly endless expanse of the Tree.

"We're in."

"Good, follow the map to the portal, well um one of them."

"Mutlitple portals?"

"Some for individual travel, some for trains, and a few for container ships."

"Container ships?"

"We're in talks with the dockworkers union, point is this is just going to be the starting off point, Sphere. This is just the first Tree, ok? Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, we're going to have trees around those worlds too."

I continued walking in the relative gloom.

"Thank god for PBS."

That earned some collective laughter, more of my people came in with many of us milling around or setting up shop inside our new base. I finally got to the room described and opened the door. I stared at a blue glowing portal and saw a team of scientists on the other side smilling at me. One stepped through and shook my hand.

"Welcome to Mars."

The others walked in.

"So, the other end?"

"The Tree on our end is too big to be in the city, so it's in the ocean, we got in by tunnel."

"Oh."

He brought out a bottle of wine, and opened it. Glasses were passed out and we took off our helmets to sip our drinks. When the impromptu drinks were over, we smiled and cheered. I stared at my counterpart.

"So, now what?"

The man shrugged.

"Right now? We're using all the launch capacity we have and are in the process of sending you guys more stuff. When that dries up...then we're going to have to rely on these to get off of Earth."

I thought about it.

"We're going to be building a new colony, a new city, a new world."

"It's just the first of many, Sphere."

"As it should be... Defiant."

The man blinked at me.

"What?"

"The name of the city we're going to build here, Defiant. The Endbringers wanted to steal the stars from us, and yet here we are on Mars, spreading our wings."

"Yeah, it's a good name, lot's of people are going to join you."

"More of the old NASA guys?"

"More, scientists, engineers, Tinkers, Thinkers, from all over Earth, they're coming here. This is going to be a global effort, no an interstellar effort."

The mood was light and triumphant.

"We're fighting back now."

"To victory in space."

There was another round of drinks and then we went back to work, there was an entire world to create and we couldn't afford to waste time.