There is a moment, every Thursday morning aboard ELLE4, that Martal Strand considers his. Not officially – nothing in his job title lays claim to it. But in the hours before the Eastsun ignition lights the habitat’s false dawn, before the Agricultural strip stirs into another working day, Martal initiates the cloud cycle. He watches the moisture gather above the crops. He watches it build. And then, for two hours, it rains.
He made that rain. In a habitat orbiting a dead Earth, where every molecule of atmosphere is accounted for and every weather event is an engineering decision, Martal Strand makes it rain on Thursday mornings. He would be embarrassed to admit how much that means to him.
His official role is Chief Engineer, with responsibility for maintaining ELLE4’s atmosphere – the precise, unforgiving balance of gases, pressures, and temperatures that keeps two hundred thousand people breathing. It is, by any measure, one of the most critical jobs on the habitat. Get it wrong in the wrong direction and people notice immediately. Get it right, every single day, and nobody notices at all.
That invisibility suits him. Martal is not a man who seeks the spotlight anymore. He’s a man who checks his readings twice, fixes things before they break, and takes a quiet satisfaction in systems that run exactly as they should. The atmosphere of ELLE4 has not killed anyone on his watch. He intends to keep it that way.
The Weight He Carries
When Martal was sixteen, something happened. A prank – the kind of thoughtless, not-quite-thinking-it-through decision that sixteen-year-olds make – went wrong. Someone died. A friend.
His father stood by him. Completely.
That act of loyalty shaped Martal in ways he has never fully examined. He loves his father with the particular devotion of someone who believes they owe a debt that can never quite be repaid. It is not a healthy love, exactly – but it is a real one. And it has made Martal, in certain specific ways, unable to see his father clearly.
This is not unusual. Most people have at least one relationship that bends their vision. Martal’s just happens to bend it somewhere consequential.
Jessycka and Kayla
He has a wife, Jessycka, and a daughter, Kayla, who is eight years old.
He is a good father in many of the ways that matter. He is also, with some regularity, an absent one – physically present on ELLE4, but pulled toward his work, toward his systems, toward the quiet demands his father makes on his time and attention. Jessycka understands this, up to a point. That point is somewhere not far ahead.
Why Martal?
It would have been easy to write a protagonist who was obviously heroic – someone who sees clearly from the start, acts decisively, and drives events forward with moral purpose. Martal is not that person. He’s a man doing an important job well, loving the people around him imperfectly, and carrying a debt that has quietly shaped every significant decision of his adult life.
The story that unfolds around him in Judgement will ask him to see things he has been, for years, choosing not to look at. It will ask him to decide what his loyalties actually mean – and who they are actually serving.
I don’t think he’s ready for those questions. I’m not sure any of us are, until we have no choice.
Judgement launches on 15th April. The eBook can be pre-ordered from your local Amazon site.