Redd liked the orange flavour of Duracell’s Senile Syrup, which, with options like red wine, burgundy, oat milk, or tonic, might seem to be the choice of a man yet to mature. But Redd was now fifty-five and – along with brown avocados – was ripe. When Redd heard that haunting pop! it fired an instinct, an instinct sanded into his neural cavities from twenty-one years of spaceflying, so he slammed his helmet over the lump on his body that donned his face and cradled his brain not really knowing what impelled the action.

Everyone around him was dead in a few seconds. Veteran nine-to-fivers like Redd stood as the helmeted ones who hadn’t imploded. The spaceport had a safety system for punctures which should seal them swiftly and prevent passenger implosions. Should. Whatever mechanical tinker toy drove the pistons and springs for the security system was wedged well by debris from the storm.

Air was pouring out of the open wound of the spaceport like water from a water balloon. The intercom was saying “Emergency. Breach.” in a monotone loop, unlikely to be personed by anyone alive. Two freight crates full of Duracell’s Senile Syrup came sloshed down the hall in the path of Redd, he huddled into the alcove of a drinking fountain.

“Watch out!” he tried to yell to a hearing impaired nine-to-fiver. He tried shouting, “Two crates full of calming juice!” But the tornado of winds inside the spaceport was throwing his sounds all amok. The nine-to-fiver was crushed bellow a four ton juice box. Redd averted his eyes as he left his alcove. He checked the doors of the number 300 that had pulled up a moment ago, inside passengers had all donned helmets and were barricading doors to lock in their air. Redd knocked on one of the windows and shouted, “Is there a phone?” The other passengers just shook their heads and their hands, they didn’t want to hear him.

Redd thought that calling someone important on the phone might fix the problem. Redd, along with the survivors on the train and the few survivors in the main hall of the spaceport, was experiencing shock, he lacked the mental training to think of better ideas than looking for a phone to call someone important. He started back the way he had come, back towards the landing gate where he had departed. It wasn’t just that debris was thrown across the entire gate or that the walls of the spaceport bubble had been completely stripped to expose the murky sky of Mars, in his mind Redd had no recollection of this spaceport at all. Such is the potency of the orange calming juice.

By now the storm seemed to have been satisfied with its devastation and moved on. The spaceport was a carbon fibre skeleton, arched metal crossbeams hung in the sky like the ribcage of a scavenged carcass. Anything light had been thrown miles away, anything heavy had been thrown a few feet outside, anything gigantic had been toppled over.

The docking gates for the tin cans usually have one door that the passengers move in and out of, where nice attendants scan their tickets and people pretend to smile at each other – pretend to be excited to be shot into the air on one-thousand tons of fuel, flesh, and ferrous parts. Redd wasn’t obeying this door policy right now because the door wasn’t there any more, he walked right through where the door would have been, out onto the red soil.

A sunrise on Mars is said to be worthy of a visit in of itself. Locals to the planet call it the “red raisin” because of how it leaves nothing to the imagination in how it exposes the surface of the sun, makes it look like a hot bubbling raisin. The light rays of the rising of the red raisin have no clouds, no dancing water vapours, no excited gases to try to burst through to smack into the wet retinas of animals below. Dust is the enemy of the red raisin which there is an extraordinary amount of on Mars, dry as a beached water snake that it is. This enemy comes in the forms ranging from dust devils up to dustnadoes which make for less than ideal viewing circumstances for a red raisin sunrise. The commonality of dust makes the red raisin a rare event.

Redd was staring at a red raisin breaching the divide between the horizon and the pink sky. The chanced quiescence between Martian storms happened to coincide with Redd’s escape from the spaceport. Redd was moved by what his wet retinas were seeing and the emotions inside him were sparring with the adrenaline-augmented survival show he’d just partaken in. Redd’s body was still letting that adrenaline drive him like clockwork, freewill was shelved away. Redd reached a hand to his pocket and pulled out a bottle that was about the size of a Duracell D battery, made of a transparent plastic with a tit for a hat, glowing a napalm orange. For purposes such as drinking, Redd’s helmet had a mechanical straw attachment and he brought the bottle up to his helmet and squeezed its contents into the straw. His mouth drank that fluid down like a newborn piglet at its first suckling.

Redd knew where he was, he was watching the display of a wonderful red raisin in the sky. How and why he was here was unkown. He didn’t turn around to look at the debris of the spaceport behind him because he didn’t know it was behind him. Those stranded in the train, the nine-to-fiver smooshed by the crate, the piles of tin cans, all gone. “I suppose,” he said to himself, “I better head to work.” He checked his watch. “I’ll be late.”

He started walking towards the horizon, towards the hot bubbling red raisin.