An Ocean is a Snowflake, Four Billion Miles Away

This is a short story, or rather a novelette, originally published in Jim Baen's Universe in 2007. I guess you could call it my favorite three everythings plus my favorite kitchen sink; there are kinds of scenes and characters I just really enjoy writing, and I saw a way to put a couple of my favorite kinds of characters into some of my favorite scenes. So there's a self-sufficient loner who is famous for something he no longer cares about, and a mildly histrionic type who's so obsessed with what things mean that she doesn't see what they are, and I've put them into the landscape of a terraforming-in-process Mars, along with some really big explosions, desperate struggle for survival, ironic obligations and forced choices, but mostly some really big storms and explosions and descriptions of an alien landscape. Come on along and have some fun.