by Rob Dircks
“Like try to kill two people on Mars?”
“Right. We should assume the worst. Let’s go. We can operate the crane manually.”
So Aurora drags Larson, in his bag, and I drag Daniels, still unconscious but now hogtied with some line, toward the platform that will take us up into the High Heaven.
I turn to her while we plod along, as fast as we can, the pain in my side begging me to stop. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for? This asshole almost killed you. He may have killed Larson.”
“I… thought… just for a second… not entirely seriously… that it might have been…” I whisper, “you?”
She stops. Drops the bag and poor Larson with a thud, puts her hands on her hips. “You really think I would KILL anyone?! You think I’m a KILLER?! I’m a SINGER, you idiot!”
I just look down.
“God, Paper, really, how many times do I have to prove it to you before you trust me? Before you believe me?” She jabs a finger into my chest, and I almost fall. “I love you, you stupid moron.”
We roll Daniels and Larson on the platform, and I tap the manual controls. The cable begins to retract and we begin our rapid ascent to the bay opening in High Heaven.
Tears stream down my face. “If Zach dies… and Martha’s disconnected… how are we going to…” I’m really sobbing now, panicked.
Aurora pulls my helmet up so our eyes meet. “Hey. Stop. We’re going to be fine. You know how I know? Because I TRUST YOU. You are the smartest person I’ve ever met. You’re like super-solution-woman. See? That’s called trust. You should try it sometime.”
I throw myself at her, nearly knocking us both off the platform, and embrace her, my body shuddering.
She puts her arms around me. “It’s all right. All right. I understand. I wasn’t actually Miss Forthcoming in the beginning of this whole thing either. And it took me a long time to trust you after Stage Two. And you’ve got that mother abandonment thing going on, not to psychoanalyze you too much, but no wonder you’ve got trust issues. And the whole Fill City thing? Jeez, is there anyone from there that isn’t nuts? It’s just like I’ve been sayi-”
“Shut up. Just shut up.”
And she does shut up, finally, and holds me a little tighter. It feels good.
After a few moments, she turns her head, looking down and out across the crater, at the rover way in the distance, now heading our way. “Oh, look who finally decided to join us – Drewlar. Shit, they’re in for a surprise.”
“Drewlar?”
“The name combo thing. Drew plus Skylar equals Drewlar. I’m trying it out.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like you slobbering on me like a freaked-out toddler while we’re trying to save Larson’s life either.”
“Touché.”
72
It’s Over.
I’m in the MedBay, enclosed in the north full-body pod. Martha’s completely offline, as we feared, but the medical systems, like all other systems, are designed to function without her guidance. It’s just a lot more of a pain in the ass. Or in my case, a pain in the kidney.
Actually, I can’t feel a thing from my lower back down, thank God, the pod’s injected me with some kind of spinal epidural, but I can certainly see what’s going on, and I wish I couldn’t – at the moment there’s a damaged kidney dangling an inch above my body, dripping blood. I turn my head and vomit, expecting Martha to say something maternal and slightly annoyed, but the pod simply sucks my waste into an unseen receptacle.
“Why am I awake?!”
The MedBay voice – not Martha’s soothing voice, but the more robotic one I remember from Stage Two – says, “Unable to parse the meaning of this question.”
“I command you to, uh, put patient under general anesthesia.”
“Patient shows risk factors for malignant hyperthermia. General anesthesia discouraged.”
“I don’t care if it’s discouraged! Give patient general anesthesia! Or put patient in Term Sleep!”
The MedBay pod just continues its work in silence, knowing who’s actually boss in this situation. It is going to save my life the correct way, whether I like it or not.
Meanwhile, I can hear Aurora out in the main cabin. She’s yelling. And Daniels. Bound to a chair. He’s crying.
“Listen to you, DanDan. You’re such a fucking baby.”
“It’s over. I’m not talking. It doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t care! I want to know everything! NOW!” She slaps him.
I can’t see them, I can only visualize what’s happening, but I don’t believe Daniels has ever been slapped by a woman, so he’s temporarily shocked into silence and his sobbing halts. “You want to know? You really want to know?! They were going to kill my whole family!”
“The mobsters.”
He nods.
“Continue.”
“No.”
“Listen, you asshole. I know you think it’s over for you. But I’m standing here right in front of you, alive. I am not giving up. It’s not over for me. For the rest of us. So quit it, right now, and tell me everything. Imagine I’m your daughter. Your youngest daughter.”
Damn. Aurora really knows how to get to people. Daniels starts crying again. Through his sobs, he manages to croak out little bits of information. “…the closer Larson got, the more desperate they got… at first, they tried to bribe me to derail this or that system, thinking Larson would eventually just give up. I wouldn’t bite. Then… Stage Two…”
“You. You sabotaged the domes.”
“I didn’t want to do it! But they were done with bribes. Now they were sending me pictures of my kids leaving school. My wife sleeping. From inside my goddamned bedroom!”
Aurora slams something against something else. “So, kill us instead of your family, huh. Seems fair.”
He blubbers some more.
“Stop. Stop. Keep going. So they knew about this element thing?”
“I don’t know the details. They said if I heard or saw anything about a mining discovery, anything unexpected, I had to kill the mission immediately, the whole thing, destroy everything, or else they would…” he’s back to sobbing, “…kill my Janey and my beautiful kids. It’s over. I’ll never see them again.”
Oh, God. His wife’s name is Jane. I didn’t need to hear that.
“How much did you destroy, Dan?”
“It’s over.”
This time it sounds like a punch. I think I hear him spit and a tooth clink onto the floor.
That’s exactly when I hear Drew and Skylar enter the cabin. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Oh. You two back already from your little love junket? Wonderful.”
“What the fuck is going on?!”
“Well, while you two were turning off your coms and doing whatever you were doing, Larson and Paper discovered a new element, apparently some kind of super fuel, then Captain DanDan here decided to kill everyone, but he didn’t get the chance because I knocked him out with a solar panel, which by the way are very lightweight for being so strong, I’m impressed, and now I’m trying to find out just how fucked we are, like are we stranded permanently on Mars fucked? So yeah, you basically missed the good parts.”
I imagine Skylar rushing over and kneeling next to Daniels, she’s pleading. “What is happening, Dan? No! Tell us it isn’t true! It can’t be!”
But his silence gives her a different answer.
She’s freaking out. “Why?! Why?!”
Aurora interrupts. “No, no, no. Been there. I’ll tell you later. I’m currently trying to get to the part where we find out if we die on this dusty, red, piece-of-shit planet. DanDan - how much did you destroy?”
His voice sounds totally resigned now. “Martha’s infected. Gone. I dumped the fuel, the food, and the reserve oxygen. We’re not going back. We’re not staying here. No one will ever know. It’s over.”
Aurora screams in frustration. “Okay, you two start
figuring shit out. Do whatever you have to do with him.” Then I hear shuffling, and suddenly she’s staring down at me. “Hey.” She looks down at my entrails. “Jeez, that’s disgusting. They didn’t put you under for this?”
“No. Apparently I have a marker for malignant hyperther-”
“Later. So I just got Daniels to unload everything, and-”
“I heard.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And what’s your plan?”
“Well, first I was going to see if I live, Aurora.”
“Let’s assume that.”
“Aww. You really do trust me. And then, I was going to start praying like hell Larson lives.”
“Let’s assume that, too.”
“And then I was going to ask Larson what the hell to do.”
We both look over to Larson, in the south MedBay pod. He’s unconscious, and I can see various wands and needles and scalpels and sutures frantically poking and sewing. He still looks so pale, his breathing very shallow. Suddenly he taps the plastic shield and turns to us and I practically jump out of my pod, he looks like he’s come back from the dead, like a Mars zombie from an old movie. Oh God.
Aurora lowers her head, looking grave, and whispers, “You better start praying like hell.”
73
I Have One More Secret.
“I have a story to tell you…”
“No, Zach. That’s what happens right before something really bad happens. You tell a story. I don’t want to hear your story. Tell me when we get home. I’m serious.”
“…Aurora, dear…Can you give us a moment…?”
Aurora reluctantly leaves the MedBay, leaving Larson and I trapped in our individual MedBay pods, looking through plastic at each other. Both our procedures have finished, and I’m feeling astonishingly better, ready to roll almost, but the way Larson looks, I don’t think he could say the same, not even close. His eyes have lost their twinkle, and his skin looks like a dead frog’s. Immediately my eyes begin to well up. “No, Zach.”
“Listen to me, Paper. I am a practical man. The display near my torso is showing something I’d rather not share, so I’d like to get this story out as quickly as possible. Please don’t interrupt.”
I nod, and I feel a wave of sadness pushing up my throat. I swallow hard.
“I have one more secret I haven’t yet shared.”
“Another secret? Why am I not surprised?”
He smiles weakly. “No interruptions. Now, I’ve been rooting for you since the beginning, I think you know that. But it’s not just because you were an underdog, though I sincerely do like an underdog. It’s because…” now he’s choking back tears, he’s having a hard time saying the words, and I can’t explain, but I know the truth before the words leave his mouth:
“I am a Filler, too.”
I gasp, and want to reach out to him, and hold him, a fellow Filler, and strangle him, for never telling me.
“My life was not an easy one. I was alone, and my caretakers… let’s just say my well-being wasn’t their top priority. And so I vowed to escape, and never look back. To disappear. And I did.”
He wipes his eyes.
“I became someone new. My own person. I found Martha, and she took me in, my surrogate mother, my real family, and raised me to be the man I was to become. And true to my word, I never looked back, never…” he points at me, “until you.”
“Why- why didn’t you tell me?”
“I… don’t know.” He laughs, and its costs him – he winces in pain. “I like to think I know everything. When I knew that you were coming, I thought the right thing to do was to hide my secret, protect it even more. But then I met you. That first time, passing the mini MedBay wand over your little cut, that look in your eyes, of amazement, at the unlimited possibilities of a world outside Fill City, combined with your obvious desire to escape – and I was smitten. I had met, for the first time in my new life, someone who truly understood where I began. Strangely, I felt like I was coming home.”
His hands start shaking. “There isn’t much time now. I will get to the point, and you must allow me to be sentimental. I have never had a family of my own, but you have become a surrogate daughter of sorts for these few months, and I am blessed for it. You are a very special woman, Paper. In gratitude, I had arranged before we left, should anything happen to me-”
“Don’t say it. Don’t say it, Zach.”
“That you be granted my shares in all the corporations of my estate. My mother is long gone. You, Paper, are my family.”
“No. I don’t want it.”
“It’s too late. You will go further than I ever did with it. Use it, and this new element we’ve discovered, and I can’t even imagine what you’ll do. My days of… becoming… have come to an end. Yours are just beginning.”
“No! Zach, we’re trapped here! I need you!”
“That’s a nice thought. But really? You never needed me. Not as much as I needed you.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about! We need to get home!” I’m shouting and crying, and slamming my fists against the pod dome.
“Paper. You will get home. I’m sure of it. You have Drew, and Skylar, and Aurora, and yes, even Dan. He’s a good man, caught up in something terrible.”
“No! This isn’t happening! Martha! Aurora! Somebody! Help!”
Larson’s breathing gets shallower still, and he begins to cough. Blood. “…oh… one more thing…”
I can hardly see through my tears, and this stupid plastic dome, but I watch helplessly as his eyes close one last time.
“…if Martha wakes up… tell her I said goodbye…”
Several silent minutes pass.
Then a sound.
Like a beep.
Then a voice, “Zach…”
The voice sounds so full of mourning, beyond sad, but it can’t possibly, because the voice is Martha.
“Martha!”
“Zach Larson is deceased. Time of death oh-four-thirteen hours, GMT Earth time.”
They’re just words. And she’s just a few lines of code. But I can hear her artificial heart breaking.
“Martha. He told me to say goodbye.”
She hesitates for a short eternity. “Thank you for telling me that, Paper.”
“Are you… okay?”
“I am at ninety-three percent normal operating health. I have eradicated the virus Captain Daniels inserted into my code, taking one hour and three minutes longer than the time I had estimated. I am sorry for the delay.”
“Sorry? Holy cow, please don’t be sorry. I’m thrilled to hear your voice!”
“And you are also at ninety-three percent normal operating health. A coincidence. Zach enjoys when I note coincidences. Enjoyed. Would you like me to continue noting coincidences?”
“I prefer silver linings.”
“You will have to teach me what silver linings are.”
“Of course.”
“Until then, I will await your next instructions.”
“Me? Shouldn’t it be… oh… I’m third in command? That doesn’t sound right.”
“It is the protocol defined by Zach, before this mission began. Full leadership belongs to you now, Paper Farris. What would you like to do?”
I look over at Zach. “Let’s bring him home.”
74
Sausage Links
I insisted on packaging up Zach’s body into the cherry red Tesla Roadster convertible. He looks so peaceful there, and I’m positive it’s exactly the way he’d have wanted to leave the mortal plane, riding a kick-ass car through space. I plan on burying him in it, too. I’m also positive that this decision has left my fellow crew members saying to themselves, “Larson put that nut in charge? What could be worse?”
Well, as it turns out, plenty. It turns out Daniels’ little turn-off-all-the-lights-on-the-way-out trick has left us with zero fuel, zero water, no food production capability, no farming equipment or plants, a broken
water-oxygen processor, and only twenty-four hours of reserve oxygen in backup tanks. Even if we could figure out how to retrofit the fuel system to accommodate this new element thing, either 1) we run out of oxygen before we can complete something workable here on Mars, or 2) we run out of oxygen if we leave now and try to make it home. Basically, there is no scenario where we don’t die clutching our throats, gasping for those last few molecules of breathable air. A pleasant thought.
We’re sitting around the dining table with old-school paper and markers, scribbling aimlessly like a kindergarten class without a teacher. I keep drawing the ship’s two fuel tanks and lots of question marks. I glance over to Aurora. She’s drawing a Care Bear.
“That’s helpful.”
“I used to draw them when I was five. It’s soothing. Hey, it’s better than that explosion of kindergarten creativity you’ve got going on. What is that, sausage links?”
“No, dummy. It’s the fuel tan-” Explosion. Did she just say explosion? “Aurora, you’re a genius.”
“What, that I knew you were drawing sausage links? Or my Care Bear?”
“Okay, listen up guys. We’ve got two tanks, the bottom one here reserved for methane and the top one here for oxygen, connected – I suppose – like sausage links. The contents are mixed to create the fuel we used to get here. Now, if we can use the bottom tank for the new fuel, this element – God, we need a name for that – and it doesn’t need to be mixed with anything, we can isolate the top tank to store the water to fuel the backup oxygen electrolysis generator.”
Drew sighs. “To store what water? Daniels dumped everything. We have no water.”
“Not yet. That’s where the bomb comes in.”
Aurora laughs. “Okay, I was on the fence when you strapped Larson into the convertible, but now it’s official: you have space dementia. Somebody lock her in the back cabin with Daniels.”
Drew curls his lip into the beginning of a smile. “No. That large ice patch. North about three miles. Boom. We gather and store the ice in the top fuel tank. Ten points for red team.”
