For reference, fire up Google Earth, select Mars and go to 0°20’30.10"N 79°29’43.71"W and look just a touch east of due south.

You’ve got a solid descriptive set-up, here, if it is a little heavy-handed in places.

Poor woman, though. Has she arrived to find that Mars is already populated by canines, or is this something that haunts her from her past?

I was thinking maybe she was tricked into thinking she had made a voyage to Mars, but it was really just a training mission or something. And they (NASA or whoever) had done it before. Intriguing :)

Genuinely on Mars. You can’t fake low gravity and it’s a bit tricky to fake 4km-high cliffs, too.

dkscully raises some interesting questions and, frankly, I don’t have answers for them. Such is the beauty of ficly.

Solid bit of imagery vs cliff hanger

I liked it a lot, good job

So we don’t know what’s up with the dog? That was my only sticking point, and I wasn’t sure what to make of the skirt. A memento from home, maybe? A gag gift?

Lots of questions, but still very nicely written.

I like skirts, and it occurred to me, writing this piece, that they’d not be very practical in zero-g. It’s possible that Miranda’s friends had a special skirt made for her to celebrate her extraterrestrial adventures. Making planetfall, she’d have been able to wear skirts again, but not in a spacesuit.

Of course, in 38% of Earth’s gravity, a long skirt is going to be very swishy.

The “somewhere, a dog barked” was required by the challenge. I wanted something hugely unlikely, and my mind wandered to Kim Stanley Robinson’s excellent Mars series. Job done.