Thunderbird 7: The Martian Chronicles

Episode One — Red Sands, Broken Sky

The time storm took the color out of everything.

Alan Tracy clenched the grips as Thunderbird 7 bucked through a tunnel of white noise and fractured light. The chronorings around the spindle-hull screamed, each ring a blazing halo trying to keep the centuries from tearing the craft apart.

“—lan… do you… read?” John’s voice bled through the static from Thunderbird 5, centuries away.
“Faint and fizzy, but I’ve got you,” Alan said through gritted teeth. “Where am I putting her down?”

The vortex peeled open like a curtain.

Mars filled the windscreen—vast, rust-red, and shrouded in a serpent wall of storm. Beneath it sprawled a chain of domed cities glinting along a canyon’s rim, their glass like bracelets set in stone. Thin spears of light stabbed upward from landing towers, trying to bite the boiling sky.

“Telemetry!” Alan snapped.

“Year two-two-six-zero,” John replied, the signal stabilizing as the chronosphere locked. “You’re over the Valles District. A class-seven sand supercell is engulfing Colony Ares Prime. Outer dome fracture detected.”

Brains overrode him, breathless. “Alan, the pressure differential across those panes will—will—catastrophically unzip the lattice in under four minutes. If one segment goes, they all go. Oxygen loss will be… terminal.”

“Copy,” Alan said, voice steady. “International Rescue doesn’t interfere with history—” He pushed the throttle, tilting toward the storm. “—except to save lives.”

Thunderbird 7 knifed into the red maelstrom.

Dust roared over the hull in sheets, a constant thunder like surf over steel. The storm’s front towered ahead—kilometers high, black-red, its heart laced with lightning that stitched the sky to the ground. Through that living curtain, the colony loomed: six linked domes, each a small world—parks, housing blocks, water towers, blue with artificial sky. One dome, the largest, wore a glistening spiderweb of cracks that ran from base to apex.

“Seen it,” Alan murmured. “Ares Prime, hold on.”

He dropped the temporal vanes. Curved fins unfolded along the hull and pivoted, feeling for the winds of time as much as the winds of Mars. The chronorings spun, humming down Alan’s bones. On his HUD, the cracked dome glittered with numbers—seconds of integrity left, pressure bleed, stress vectors.

“Drones away,” he ordered.

Thunderbird 7 opened like a clock, and a constellation of silver rescue drones unspooled into the reds and ochres. They flew low and fast, trailing canisters of expanding sealant and patch-foam. On the external channel, Alan broadcast, “Ares Prime, this is International Rescue. Evacuation corridors will be established. Follow the lights. Keep calm.”

Inside the dome, it was a different planet. Families in pressure cloaks sprinted across parkland while the fake sky dimmed and the wind found a new voice—thin, whistling, hungry. A transit car lay canted across a walkway, its passengers hammering at the jammed doors. Beyond them, an entire pane—triangle of the lattice—bowed inward like the skin of a drum.

“Brains, I’m anchoring the pane with a temporal lattice,” Alan said. “Give me a lock on stress nodes.”

“Uploading a nodal overlay… now!” Brains’ voice steadied; a man with a problem to solve. “If you can phase-bind twelve points around the largest fissure, you can hold it for approximately—er—eighty-nine seconds at best.”

“I’ll take them.”

Alan pulled the Chrono-Lever a quarter-stroke forward. The rings flared, and Thunderbird 7 traced an invisible net across the dome, pinning the failing glass in a cage of borrowed seconds. Cracks stilled; the pane looked suddenly carved from ice, light frozen in its fractures.

“Window’s stopped,” Alan breathed. “Go, go, go.”

Drones blitzed the seams with sealant that crawled outward like living metal. Other drones hit the transit car; cutters spat white light, doors bucked, and a rush of terrified faces stumbled into the open, grabbing for the glowing path markers the drones projected to a pressurized tunnel.

“Thunderbird 7, this is Ares Prime Control.” The voice was clipped, strained, and very human. “Whoever you are, our backups are gone. Can you keep that pane up?”

“I can keep it standing long enough to matter,” Alan said. “But you need to move everyone out of the outer ring—now.”

“We’re trying— We’ve never—”

The storm answered for them. A pressure wave slapped the dome so hard the entire city staggered. The lattice screamed. Alan rode the buck, poured more energy into the temporal binds. For a second the cracks brightened as if lit from within; time itself protested.

“Fifty seconds of hold remaining,” Brains warned quietly. “Then… physics.”

“Understood.”

A drone’s feed filled a corner of Alan’s display: a school atrium where a teacher shepherded children through a curtain of steam from a ruptured humidifier. One little boy stared straight into the camera, eyes like coins, and raised two fingers in a salute. Alan swallowed.

The pane bulged again.

“Thirty seconds,” Brains said.

“John, patch me to the colony public channel.”

“You’re live in three… two—”

“People of Ares Prime,” Alan said, “this is International Rescue. You’ve got thirty seconds of miracle left. Run like your lives depend on it—because they do. Follow the lights. Keep low. If you fall, someone will pick you up. Go.”

They went. The path beacons brightened to a fierce blue, a river of light through a storm-dark city. Through the cockpit glass Alan watched them flow, watched them make choices—the brave ones turning back to shoulder those who faltered, strangers becoming a chain.

“Ten seconds,” Brains whispered.

Alan eased the lever back a hair—not enough to drop the lattice, but enough to let the pane tell him the truth of its limits. It groaned, sagged, then cinched as the patch-foam hardened. On every display, the numbers steadied. Not good. But steady.

“Three… two…”

The lattice collapsed.

The pane held.

Alan let out a breath he hadn’t known he was keeping. Cheers crackled over the colony channel, ragged and disbelieving. In Control, someone sobbed. The school atrium was empty now, the camera panning to a lonely red balloon bouncing in the thinning air.

“Stabilization achieved,” Brains said, the smile audible. “Alan—superb work.”

“Don’t put the kettle on yet,” Alan said. “We’re not out of the—”

The storm changed pitch. A bass note rolled through the canyon, so deep it rattled the bones. The red wall split, light pouring through from a place no light should be. On the horizon, a tower of machinery woke: a terraforming array perched along the cliff lip, its petals unfurling like a dark flower. Century-old metal flexed. Magnetohydrodynamic conduits lit. A sun rose inside its throat.

“Identification,” Alan demanded.

John’s voice came back thin and very far away. “AtmosForge-Nine. Terraformer. It’s not scheduled to fire—ever—during a supercell.”

“Someone’s bypassed its safeties,” Brains said, horror creeping in. “If that plasma lance vents into the storm, it’ll flash the CO₂ into a pressure wave—Alan, it will pulverize the colony.”

The array pivoted with the inevitability of a guillotine. Its nozzle lined up not with the sky, but with the cracked dome of Ares Prime.

“Control,” Alan barked, “all hands to shelters, now. John, I need a trajectory.”

“Direct line,” John said, voice gone cold and professional. “Impact in twenty-four seconds.”

Thunderbird 7 surged forward, the vanes trimming, rings spooling up until the cockpit thrummed like a heartbeat. The chronosphere dome filled with moving constellations—future, past, possible—tightening, choosing.

“Brains,” Alan said softly, “if I phase-skew the lance at the moment of ignition—”

“You could bend it. Or vaporize yourself. Or tear a hole in time large enough to—”

“Twenty seconds,” John cut in.

Alan pushed the Chrono-Lever to the detent. The rings roared, spheres of golden light stacking around the hull. He brought Thunderbird 7 between the terraformer’s mouth and the city, a slender spindle standing against a man-made sunrise.

“International Rescue,” Alan whispered, eyes locked on the blaze building in the array’s throat. “We never interfere with history… except to save lives.”

The world turned white as AtmosForge-Nine fired.

—TO BE CONTINUED—