Waking the Red Guardian

thunder on the red Martian plain:

a low-grav behemoth grazing

Cat ExoP-3 gouges regolith

its onboard lab working 24:39/7

to analyse microbes

drawn from the blackwater ice

those vibrations dredging a giant

from his chamber beneath the crust

and up he comes, trawling for life

in the terraforming pool

telltale ripples captured in a vid

by 3rd shift lamplighters Carl and Esther

hazy at Phobos station

before the beast exploded from what was

a dry ocean bed for a billion years

to eviscerate the Cat

tendrils of fiber optics from torn sheet metal

dripping visions of worlds to come

a phalanx bristling with cast-off sheaves

of Rice Burroughsian ingenuity