Wait For The Wheel (Working Title)

This is the first part of the first chapter of a new long form science fiction story I'm hoping to get written. There's more waiting in the wings - half-written/outlined - so stay tuned.

Mars. Fourth primary satellite from Sol. Desert Planet.

The light is cold - distant. Deserts are supposed to be warm, hot even. Not this one. Not this planet.

You stumble across the sand. Your footing is loose - the ground seeks to give way as you slowly parse through it. 
Like a half-remembered song/Like a memory which is about to fade: it gives way. Too often, your footing falters, and you slip. Your knee buckles and you throw your hand down to support yourself. Close to the sand your position is stable - unyielding. But you cannot move. It is that stability that holds you there, frozen under that cold star. In order to live, you must let go. You must fall:

Each step you have ever taken is a controlled fall, a minor submission to gravity's pull. The only way to move forward is to stop ourselves before it's too late. Before we fall, we must rise again - and again.

You can see the cliffs now. They loom above; Lonely ramparts in this bleak landscape.

The wind: It scours us, it sets about setting us back into the sand. If it had its way, we would still be at the bottom of that ravine - forgotten. But we rose up. Against all odds, we started moving again.

You can still hear that voice - like a half-forgotten song. That sweet melody burns us more than this cold star ever could. It pushes us down more than this planet ever will. It screams,

“Come back.”

“Don’t leave.”

And we whisper:
But we can’t.

But we must.

The wind, it gusts again and we are face down in the sand. Blood-red, they say. They’re wrong. You feel a warm ooze trickling from our nose.

It drips down your face, falling into the faded iron crushed between your fingers. Only now does it take on the tinge of life. Like a parasite, the ground sips the blood from us. But we cannot stop. If you stop - you die.

You kept that lesson close.

An Eternity of walking and sleeping. Waking, Walking, sleeping. You make your way through a repeated succession of valleys, fjords and plains, with only the occasional shrub or brush or vermin to remind me of how this place came to be. The initial terraforming of this landscape. 

That was an incredible time. Truly - You should have been there. The sight of the capital ships of the various conglomerates from orbit was breathtaking. To see the embodiment of millennia of your people’s societal and technological progress - cast in steel and set to float amongst the stars - was a singular experience. Had you been there, had you felt what I felt, what most of us felt, you would understand the path you’re on now. Maybe one day when the connection between us is cemented and I can show you my memories - you will. But you don’t care, do you?

You need to keep moving.

You have no specific destination, but you know how to get where you're going. Down to the equator, then either east or west, it doesn’t matter which. The old domes are all there - drinking in the Sun's rays and harvesting what geothermal energy they can - and the old domes are all that are left.

How long were we in the wilderness before we saw the artificial geometry of that first dome? It couldn’t have been more than six months - the absolute upper limit on your current operational capacity at the outset of our journey. I spent so much of that time hibernating, trying to conserve every joule and calorie of available energy, that I was unable to keep accurate measure of the intervals between my conscious cycles.
Without that ancient exosuit I unearthed, you wouldn’t have made it a tenth of that time. You know that, right?

As its shape becomes more defined and you start discerning its edges of its height and circumference I feel your mind starting to reassert itself. Long dormant sectors of your mind fire up. Exterior entry codes, cultural specificity's of particular habitats, differences and commonalities of architecture, all of it comes flooding back. You know these people. Or at least, you did.

You round the perimeter of the primary structure and find the anterior entrance. The massive plated doors stand one hundred feet tall and more than double that across. They bear a badly worn identifier on the left door plate the first world is unintelligible, but the rest of the calligraphy reads, “Heavy Industries”. You immediately recall a number of habitats founded by the various industrial powerhouses of Mars, but there is no way to tell which one this is at the moment.

You approach the deprecated structure and slowly pace across the right door plate with your hand pressed lightly to the surface, disturbing a layer of sand and grit as you go. Eventually your hand catches on a small latch, which you depress with your middle and index finger. A pneumatic plate pops up and slides aside, revealing an interface which stands at odds with the decrepitude of everything that surrounded it. It's crisp and clean, clearly well protected from the weathering of the elements. Unlike the rest of the surface of the dome, which had become a sandy beige, the metal surrounding the console was a sharp white. You grunt slightly as you flip over an actuator that was meant to resist any unintentional activation from weathering. A monochrome green and a black hologram about the size of your hand sputters to life.

Welcome to Tsunkatse Heavy Industries

Are you a resident?

A prompt appears and you click no.

What is the reason for your visit?

Another prompt appears asking whether your visit is for work, pleasure or both. You stare at it blankly for a time.

Just hit work - I highly doubt we'll have any time for pleasure during our time here.
You comply.

Please present your identification. If you do not possess a form of identification, one will be implanted before clearing customs, courtesy of the Tsunkatse Port Authority.

A small scanner drops from the console. You place your gloved right wrist under the unit and the holographic console flashes momentarily before retracting back into the smooth surface of the panel.

Uex Quel: Your visa is in good standing. Your last visit was: four hundred and sixty three years ago. Please inform customs as to any changes in citizenship, ethnicity or gender since your last visit.  Thank you, and we hope you enjoy your stay.

You close the panel and draw back from the massive door as it slowly groans to life, heaving its mass across the dirt. When it has opened enough, you pass through and into the darkness that lies beyond.