EPISODE 12: THE BEGINNING ## SEASON FINALE ## PART ONE: BEFORE THE LANDING ### CHAPTER 1: THE MORNING OF DEPARTURE Earth, 2157. The day before. Sarah Chen sat alone in her quarters at the Kennedy Space Center, watching the sunrise through the reinforced windows. In twelve hours, she would board the Erebus with twenty-three other colonists. In seventy-two hours, she would leave Earth forever. She hadn't slept. The mission briefings were finished, the psychological evaluations complete, the tearful goodbyes with her father said. There was nothing left to do but wait. But Sarah had never been good at waiting. She pulled up her tablet, scrolling through the mission parameters one more time. Colony Six—the sixth attempt to establish a permanent human presence on Mars. The previous five had failed. Disease, mechanical failure, psychological breakdown, a catastrophic dust storm. Each failure had taught them something, and the Mars Colonial Authority was confident that this time, the colony would survive. Sarah wasn't so sure. Not because she doubted the technology or the planning. Because she'd read something that didn't fit. Three weeks ago, she'd accessed restricted geological surveys from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Something about the Tharsis region—where Colony Six would be established—had caught her attention. Magnetic anomalies that didn't match any known geological process. Subsurface structures that looked almost... organized....