Chapter 73: Sense of Crisis

“Breaking News: The first generation of nuclear-powered excavators has been successfully designed, thanks to a joint effort by the Tesla Institute and the Advanced AI Laboratory. The prototype is currently in the testing phase. Experts predict that once fully operational, its power and excavation capacity will be over ten times greater than traditional models!”

“Breaking News: The first batch of Martian uranium has been successfully processed. The yield is sufficient to fully power our current nuclear reactors. Next-generation mineral centrifuges are already in the design phase.”

“Industry Updates: The first phase of the Aegis Industrial Complex is over fifty percent complete. Located in the ship’s low-gravity sector, the facility is designed for full automation. Once finished, human operators will only be needed for final inspections and routine maintenance.”

“Community News: Since the founding of the Federation Government, we have welcomed our very first newborn. His parents have named him Felix, a name meaning lucky and successful, hoping he will grow up to be a strong and noble pioneer…”

This was the inaugural issue of The Federation Weekly, recently published by the Federation Government. Priced at just 0.5 credits per copy and printed by the Department of Public Relations, the weekly paper cataloged the major events and updates of the week.

The price was quite reasonable. With thirty-two pages of content, a monthly subscription cost only two credits, an expense almost everyone could easily afford. The Federation introduced the newspaper partly to stimulate the economy and circulate credits back into the system. Furthermore, it served to increase transparency and boost civic engagement.

Everyone aboard the Noah could feel their civilization steadily moving forward. As citizens of the Federation, they naturally felt a deep sense of accomplishment and belonging. It was their own hard work, after all, that kept the wheels of progress turning.

This positive atmosphere was deliberately cultivated by the administration. Entertainment aboard the Noah like movies, television shows, and novels was still in short supply. Exhausted after a long day of work, no one had the energy to create new media, leading to a ship-wide drought of leisure content. For the average person, a life of constant work without play easily leads to burnout and depression. Although morale was currently high, Jason knew he had to prioritize the crew’s mental health as a preventative measure.

As a result, the publication offered more than just news. The back pages featured serialized science fiction and romance stories, jokes, and educational articles about the cosmos. Naturally, all of this content was pulled from the old Earth databases. With their home planet gone, copyright laws were a thing of the past.

Beyond that, Jason was considering implementing a standard six-day workweek, giving everyone one full day off. While it would technically reduce total labor hours, overall efficiency would likely improve. Humans weren’t machines; they needed downtime. Seeing the Department Heads and senior scientists with bloodshot eyes from overwork convinced Jason that more rest was absolutely necessary.

His next goal was to gradually open recreational facilities like cyber cafes, sports arenas, and public parks. Jason jotted these ideas down in his notebook, planning to flesh them out later.

Suddenly, a new report pinged in his inbox.

“Still short on manpower?” he muttered, scanning the document submitted by the floor managers.

The engineering teams were working around the clock to develop new excavators and heavy-duty transport trains to boost their mining output. However, while their excavation rates were climbing, their metal smelting capabilities were lagging far behind.

The smelting foundries were already running twenty-four hours a day on three separate shifts, yet the workers were completely overwhelmed. They could only watch helplessly as raw iron, aluminum, and copper ores piled up into massive mountains. Their frustration was palpable. To an uninformed observer, the backlog might look like the workers were slacking off! And this was just the result of the old-model excavators running at maximum capacity. Once the nuclear-powered models deployed, the ore output would increase tenfold.

The crews were at their wits’ end. It was physically impossible to process that much raw material. Jason understood the underlying message of the report: asking for more personnel was just a polite way of venting their stress. They had given it their all, but the bottleneck was unavoidable.

Jason, however, wasn’t worried. He had a clear view of the bigger picture. Extracting ore was a brute-force operation, but smelting required precision and heavy infrastructure. Even if they wanted to scale up the foundries, the ship simply didn’t have the electrical grid to support it right now.

Still, the mining operations had to continue at full speed. Given the Noah’s colossal cargo capacity, they could store an almost limitless amount of raw ore. Plus, the ship’s internal mass-dampening fields meant the extra weight wouldn’t affect their launch sequence.

“I hear your concerns, but please don’t stress over the backlog,” Jason typed in his reply. “In our current situation, we need as large a mineral reserve as possible. Once it’s securely stored in the Noah’s cargo bays, it’s permanently ours.”

The Noah didn’t operate on a free-market economy, so supply and demand weren’t an issue. Back on Earth, if a major oil-producing nation suddenly increased its output tenfold, the global market would crash. The same applied to the old mining conglomerates; if they flooded the market with iron and copper, their profits would plummet. They had intentionally throttled their extraction capabilities to maintain artificial scarcity and line their pockets.

But the Federation was a purely resource-based system. Everything extracted belonged to the collective. There were no profit margins to protect, they just needed to keep digging.

“…We can’t spare any additional manpower at the moment, but we will look into expanding our smelting infrastructure down the line. For now, just keep piling the raw ore in the overflow storage bays. Thank you all for your incredible hard work.”

Jason hit send, hoping the message would reassure the exhausted crews. Managing morale was half his job these days. He leaned back, resting his chin on his hand as his thoughts drifted.

There was a very specific reason he was pushing the mining teams so hard. Deep down, Jason couldn’t shake a creeping, subtle sense of dread. It came and went, sometimes sharp enough to make him shudder, other times just a faint whisper in the back of his mind. He felt certain that Mars was not a safe harbor, and that leaving the red planet as soon as possible was their best bet. He trusted his instincts; they had saved his life more than once.

But what exactly was the threat? Jason had agonized over the question and still had no answer. He had even sent an agent to quietly interrogate Calvin in the detention block, but the prisoner was clueless. Calvin was always like that, completely useless when it actually mattered.

Jason suspected that something lethal was hidden beneath the Martian surface. If it erupted, the remnants of humanity would be wiped out. Would Mars explode like Earth had? Was it some other cosmic disaster? He had no idea.

The uncertainty was maddening. In truth, he wasn’t the only one feeling it. A large portion of the civilian population and many of the senior scientists shared this underlying anxiety. Heightened intuition wasn’t exclusive to genetically enhanced individuals like Jason; many regular citizens felt it too, just to a lesser degree. Most subconsciously blamed their unease on the lingering threat of the Martian pathogen, deliberately burying their fears to get through the day.

Still, the collective paranoia silently influenced their behavior. If not for that dread, the colony might have settled down to develop steadily on Mars for a few years. Instead, they were strip-mining the planet as fast as humanly possible, desperate to pack up and flee. An unspoken consensus had formed: Mars was not a place to linger. As a result, almost all of their recent technological breakthroughs were heavily focused on rapid resource extraction.

“What exactly is coming for us?” Jason murmured to himself, ultimately shaking his head. He couldn’t see the future. And Calvin, that absolute fraud, was no help at all; he only knew that a vague danger existed.

Regardless of the looming threat, the mining had to continue. The survival of their species depended on those raw materials. Without stripping the planet, they wouldn’t have the resources or the energy to survive the dark void of space.

He held onto a thin sliver of hope. Mars had been sitting here for over 4.6 billion years. Surely, digging into its crust for a few short years wouldn’t trigger the apocalypse. Even if a crisis was inevitable, he prayed they had at least a year or two before the hammer fell.

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