by S. J. Morden
“I don’t know. Are we supposed to get to know each other, tell each other our life stories?” Marcy looked down into her lap. “I’m not comfortable with that.”
“I don’t think they care about that. But while I’m in here, I’m not running up that Mountain and the medics aren’t draining my blood. I’m good with that.”
“They cut you open?” She gestured to the deeper shadow between her breasts. Frank glanced up long enough to know what she was talking about, and not so long as to make it embarrassing.
“I still feel it, sometimes. At night, mainly. Just a tightness. It’s not so bad.”
They lapsed into silence, broken eventually by Frank.
“Look. I’m not good at this. I never was. Much rather do something with my hands than say something with my mouth. But we’re not going to hurt each other, right? You seem like a nice lady, however it was you got here. That’s done. We’re astronauts now.”
“I killed twenty-six people,” she said. “You?”
“Just the one.”
Twenty-six seemed a lot. Perhaps his expression gave that away.
“It was an accident. I fucked up.” She clicked her tongue. “Seems so long ago now.”
“Which is what I’m saying. No one’s going to look out for us but us. These jokers don’t much care if we stay or crap out: some greener will be along to replace us soon enough. But we have to care, right?”
She pursed her lips and nodded. “Right.”
His earpiece buzzed. Hers too, by her quizzical look.
“Every crew member is required to teach their task to another,” he heard. “Marcy Cole is lead driver. You will be her second. Acknowledge.”
“So who’s my second?” he asked.
“Acknowledge,” repeated the voice. No change of inflection, no emotion at all. Just cold.
Marcy said into the space, “Acknowledged.” She sighed. Her earpiece had been talking to her too.
Frank knew he had to follow suit. “Acknowledged.”
They looked at each other, properly, for the first time. She had a fine face, brown skin with a sowing of darker freckles across her cheekbones and nose. Her hair, like his, had been shaved short. His was a flattened mop of black, but hers was growing out in cotton-wool twists. Age? She had at least a couple of decades on him. And she was strong, otherwise she wouldn’t have got this far.
“We can do this,” he said. “I can learn.”
“Depends whether I can teach.” She looked up at the ceiling, addressing it directly. “So when do we start?”
“Report outside immediately.”
Both of them were so used to obeying, they stood up.
“Remember those times you could just lie in your tray, listen to some music, read a magazine?” Frank put his hands into the small of his back and pushed, waiting for the click before he stopped.
“No. I don’t remember that at all.”
“Me neither.”
Outside, opposite Building Four, was a concrete pad the size of a football field. Probably some structure was going to go on it at some point, but, for now, there was a weird-ass looking vehicle sitting on it, and a stack of orange traffic cones.
And Brack.
“Ah, crap,” muttered Marcy.
“Let’s get this over with,” said Frank, and picked his way over the loose cinders towards the platform. He climbed up, and took a closer look at the thing they were presumably meant to drive around Mars on.
“You break it, you pay for it, Kittridge,” said Brack.
The chassis was rectangular, an open, almost lacy latticework of struts and crossbracing. The wheels were huge balloons, and the seat a simple plastic bucket bolted to the top of the frame. There was a roll bar over the top, which didn’t look particularly sturdy, and a set of controls mounted in front of the seat.
Frank had seen more sophisticated Radio Flyers.
“And this is what we’re taking to Mars?”
“You think you know better? ’cause it’s not bright yellow and there’s no backhoe? You want a ticket? You refusing an order? You want to get canned?” Brack cupped his hand around his ear. “What’s that? Kittridge is on his way to the Hole?” Frank bit down on his lip until he knew he wasn’t going to say anything.
“Don’t care if you don’t love me, Kittridge, as long you stay afraid of me. This is your Mars Rover, boy. You and it need to become intimately acquainted, and yes, if that means you have to take it up the tailpipe, you’ll do just that and hold it close afterwards. You got your fuel cell slung underneath, you got your four-wheel-drive electric motors on the hubs, you got your rear-facing cameras and your one-fifty-foot winch and tow on the trunk. That two-wheeled caboose is your trailer. Lights on the front that’ll turn night into day. Top speed of a mighty twenty miles an hour.” Brack kicked the nearest tire. “Only difference between here and there is that there you’ll be using adaptive metal wheels rather than pneumatics, as I am reliably informed they have the habit of exploding in a vacuum.”
Marcy shook the frame, and crawled underneath to inspect the connections between the fuel cell and the hubs. “What’s the range?”
“Well, that depends. You got one cell, and everything works off that. But under normal conditions, your suits will fail before this runs out of juice. So you’d better get it back to base before then.” He giggled, but it wasn’t funny. “You got your orders. You make this thing dance by the end of the week. By the week after, it’d better be turning backflips. The pair of you got that?”
“I got that,” said Marcy from behind one of the tires.
“Kittridge?”
“Acknowledged,” said Frank. He didn’t mean anything by it, just the bland acceptance of an instruction, but of course Brack had to take it the wrong way.
“You think I’m some kind of computer, boy? Hell, I’ll be the voice in your dreams, not just in your head.” He leaned forward and drilled his finger into Frank’s temple, and there was nothing that Frank could do but take it.
Brack stalked off, and Marcy pulled herself out from under the rover.
“What d’you think?”
“What do I think?” Frank scuffed the ground. “That the world would be a better place without him.”
“Forget about him. I meant the buggy.”
Frank dragged his attention back to the job in hand. “You’re the professional. What do you think?”
“Strong, lightweight. Center of gravity is low enough to add stability, but it’s got a decent enough ground clearance. Let’s take it for a spin and see.”
She climbed up. There wasn’t a ladder, so she just grabbed the lowest strut and hauled herself up. Frank could do that too. They were all now so lean and strong that it was barely an effort. Marcy settled into the seat and for the want of anywhere else to put her feet, braced them on the struts either side of the controls. Almost exactly like a Radio Flyer.
“It’s like a video game. Little steering wheel, gas on-off using triggers. Couple of buttons and a screen for stuff.” She grinned down at him. “Seriously, come on up. We don’t get many moments like this.”
She drove it slowly and conservatively around the pan, finding the buttons that’d put it in reverse, work the lights and the winches. Frank hung off the roll bars behind the seat, mildly disconcerted at the concrete scudding by under his feet.
They swapped over, and Frank drove it forwards, then in reverse. It looked like a toy. It felt like a toy. Somehow far less than something they’d be driving around on another planet.
Then the lessons began. Marcy hopped off, set out some traffic cones around the rear of the buggy, and watched Frank drive forward out of the cordon.
“It came out of that space,” she said. “All you have to do is back it in again.”
Frank crushed three cones. He didn’t hear them crumple, and Marcy let him keep on going until he thought he was back in the starting position. He climbed down and stood next to her to examine the debacle.
“Do I get to say it’s not
bad for a first attempt?”
“I’ve seen worse.” She had her hands on her hips, judging him. “But I’m guessing if we’re on Mars, running over a cone probably means we’re all dead. What did you do, when you weren’t killing people, that is?”
“I ran a construction company,” said Frank. He tapped the big balloon wheel with the toe of his reinforced boot. “I hired people to do this for me.”
“Not any more. It’s me and you, now. Drive it out again, and I’ll set it back up.” Marcy picked up one of the cones and used her fist to take out some of the dings. “Now you know how difficult it is, you might just listen to me when I tell you how to do it.”
“I would have listened to you anyway.” Frank climbed up into the cab and swung himself into the seat. “I’m not going to be that guy, OK?”
Marcy dropped the cone back on the ground. It was more or less straight again. “In my experience, all the guys are that guy. Take it forward, thirty feet, and stop. We’ll keep doing it until you can slot it in blindfold. Then I get to make it difficult for you.”
He knew the basics. He could get it almost in the right place, almost every time. Almost, when he was a million miles away, wasn’t going to cut it. The cameras helped when he was some way away. Less so when he was closer, as the cones had the tendency to disappear from view at exactly the wrong moment. Sure, Marcy could spot for him, but there’d be times when he’d just have to do it on his own: him taking ten attempts to get something into place when one should have done was a sure-fire way of burning off the better part of a shift. And he’d be in a spacesuit.
So this wasn’t anything like the same conditions he’d be working under. But if he couldn’t get it right here and now, he wouldn’t be able to get it right then, when it mattered. A mistake could get them all killed, or stranded, or something else bad. He put his hand on the wheel and dabbed his finger on the gas pedal. Shouldn’t call it the gas pedal if there was no gas, or a pedal.
He drove it forward a couple of lengths, and let go. There was a brake, but he didn’t have to use it, because the motor provided enough resistance to bring the buggy to a stop.
He looked behind him at the space outlined by the cones. He imagined listening to the sound of his own breath loud in his ears, turning his head against the pull of a bulky, padded suit, inflated so that it was like wearing a tire. Marcy was right. He was going to have to be able to do this blind to stand any chance of doing this on Mars. He needed to look at the screens instead. Work out what he should be seeing if it was going right.
She climbed on up and hung off the back of his seat. “OK?”
He nodded.
“You look nervous.”
“There’s a lot riding on this.”
“This is practice, OK? Don’t you go freaking out on me. Slow. Dead slow. Barely moving slow. Faster you go, the less time you got to correct. Even if you got someone shouting at you, you play it cool, you keep it clean. They’re not driving. You are. You get to decide. If you’re not happy, you stop. This rig, this load, whatever it is, is your responsibility. It’s up to you to put it in the right place, not anyone else. You got that?”
“I got that.”
“You sure you got that? Because folk like us are used to following orders, and someone yelling at you to hurry it up, right in your ear, and you can’t turn them off, that’s somewhere between a distraction and a compulsion. You want to make them shut up. You want to show them you can do it faster. Don’t you?”
Frank took another look behind him, past Marcy, at the corral of cones. Then he looked up at her. “No. I do this at my own pace, or not at all.”
She punched her fist into his shoulder. “So let’s show these assholes some skills.”
Physical contact. It was a little more than he could cope with at that moment, and he had to take a breath. She didn’t seem to notice, which was just fine.
“OK,” he said. “Dead slow. Tell me what I’m supposed to be watching.”
There was a knack to it, a counter-intuitive way of turning the wheel and easing the gas that would put the back end right where it was needed. He wasn’t a master at it—Marcy didn’t take the controls once so as not to embarrass him—but with care, he became competent. He could throw the buggy around in loops and turns and still park it up in one maneuver.
By the time their earpieces told them to break it up, he was confident he could back the buggy up without driving through a building.
“I don’t know when the next time is,” said Marcy. “But when it is, we’ll do it with a trailer. That’s a thing.”
“A difficult thing?”
“Enough to make grown men weep.” She put her hand to her ear. “Acknowledged. Got to go.” She kicked at the ground, looked as if she was going to say something more, then decided against it. She glanced once at the buggy and its guard of orange cones, then walked away towards the buildings just down the slope.
Frank waited for his next instruction, which didn’t come. Marcy’s dusty tracks settled, and left him alone, standing in the dry, cold dirt. He looked up at the mountain, at the bright blue sky, at the expanse of glittering salt pan to the east and the next, distant ridge quivering in the haze. That was the free world.
He narrowed his eyes. He had a machine strong enough to break through the double fence and rugged enough to get him over the crystalline desert. And almost subconsciously he brushed his fingers against his sternum, where the scar had nearly healed and the hard lump of the implant lodged against his bone.
They weren’t stupid. Neither was he. The only way out was up.
“Report to Building Two. Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledged.”
5
[Transcript of private phone call between (unidentified XO employee 1) and (unidentified XO employee 2) 4/2/2047 0935MT. Note: one side of conversation redacted.]
XO1: Meyer failed his medical. Something about a hormone imbalance.
XO2: …
XO1: Yeah, I get that.
XO2: …
XO1: Just send him straight to the Hole, no need for him to interact further with anyone else at Gold Hill. I’ll send some guys around to pick him up and take him to Pelican Bay.
XO2: …
XO1: No, they know better than to tell him. What’s he going to do anyway? The chimps don’t really exist, so if one goes missing, it’s no big deal. I’ll bump a replacement up and hope he doesn’t flunk it.
XO2: …
XO1: Sure, later.
[transcript ends]
In his never-ending stream of instructions, he didn’t think he’d ever had one for Building Five. Two, Four, Six, Three, and back again, sure. Five was new, and he wondered what they kept in there. Certainly, the foyer area appeared different—this was no suite of offices and conference rooms: it was clean, almost sterile, like a hospital ward, except that was more a Building Two thing.
White coats. He was in scientist country. Room Fourteen was somewhere on the ground floor, and he looked up at the signage to tell him which way to go. There were big double doors. He pressed his finger to the lock, and pushed with his other hand as the lock snicked back.
Bright. Very bright. There was something in the middle of the room that looked like a suspended, crucified, oversized mannequin which, on first sight, didn’t fill him with confidence. The detail of the rest of the room—straps and tubes and fixing points and harnesses and taps—made him stop, half in, half out the doorway.
His ear told him to strip. Slowly, shapes resolved in white, full clean-suits with head coverings and face masks. They were carrying bulky bags of equipment towards him. “Strip,” repeated the voice. “Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledged.” The door clicked shut behind him and he shucked his clothes. He’d been through this drill often enough in the Blood Bank, and it wasn’t like cavity searches weren’t a thing in the penitentiary. What embarrassment or shame he’d felt had long since dissipated.
He was handed a pair of gray long johns, to
p and bottom. They were a tight fit. Not too tight, because they knew exactly how big he was from all the previous measurements they’d taken from him. But tight enough that he had to sit on the cold floor and smooth the material up his legs until he could say he was wearing them, rather than the other way around.
He put on the thin, almost sheer, socks and gloves. He put on the bathing-cap beanie. They walked him over to the hanging sculpture. There was a hole in the back, a doorway, complete with a door, and it was open, and there was nothing but darkness inside.
He hesitated, and felt the firm pressure of a hand in the small of his back, pushing him on. Someone had placed a low step at the base of the mannequin, though now he could see that it was no mannequin.
He climbed up on the step, and peered over the top of the thing’s shoulder. He was looking down at a clear perspex bubble, and when he looked along the arm, he saw it terminated in a complex glove. It was a spacesuit.
He pointed at the hole in the back of the suit. “In here?”
The technician’s eyes—that was all Frank could see—moved in that direction.
Frank used the hard rim of the hatch to steady himself, and he eased his feet into the interior. He had to point his toes and push hard to get his feet into the boots. Left arm, right arm, then duck down and put his head through the neck ring.
He worked his fingers into the outer gloves. Behind him, the technician hooked something heavy to his back. He could feel the weight settle on him.
“Breathe normally,” said his ear. He hadn’t realized that he wasn’t. He took a breath, held it, and took another. The faceplate inches from his nose misted. It was like wearing a goldfish bowl.
“Look down.”
He could see the broad curve of his suit’s front. But not his feet.
“There’s a control unit on your chest. Open it.”
He found that his arms could move against the complex system of pulleys suspending him from the ceiling. He didn’t have to hold them rigidly in the outstretched position he’d first put them in. He reached down to the box hung just below his ribs. It was attached to a flap of material by the top, so that when he lifted it up, he could prop it in position with one hand. With the other, he flipped open the cover. His gloves were surprisingly dexterous, better than his usual rigger’s gloves.
