One Way

by S. J. Morden

  He needed a new project. He’d overseen the building of the modules, done the majority of the driving: dangerous, difficult work. Now that was over, the constant living on the edge fading into memory, the one thing he missed was the sharp sense of feeling alive. Prison was dull, and he didn’t want to slip back into thinking the base was another prison. It wasn’t. Not to him.

  So he would talk to Brack. Not about whatever the hell he was doing with the buggies, but about more building work. About soil ramparts and adobe bricks.

  If Declan wanted to snoop … it was difficult to know how successful he’d be. And what Brack would do about it in return. The atmosphere on the base was OK. They were bumping along, mostly fine, with only the occasional source of friction. Mainly the power. Mainly Declan being Declan.

  There was the drug thing—the possibility of the drug thing. There was a lockable room. Why not put them in there? Why hadn’t Brack put them in there as soon as he’d found the boxes had been tampered with?

  Fuck them. Seriously, fuck them. If everyone was going to go all secret squirrel on him, let them. It wasn’t his job to keep anyone in line. Just as long as he kept his own nose clean, right?

  He finished up by the RTG and went around the back to the workshop hab. It looked slightly different. Slightly wrong. Deflated.

  He quickened his pace, pushed his hand against the end of the hab as soon as he could. There was normally much more resistance.

  “Dee?”

  “Frank. ’Sup?”

  “I’m out by the workshop. You got any alarms from it?”

  “I’ll check.”

  Frank tried to peer through the plastic. The sun was overhead, and he couldn’t make out anything other than vague diffuse shapes.

  “OK, I just remembered there’s a problem with the alarm: we turned it off.”

  “And we did that because?”

  “Because the telltale measures the amount of oxygen in the air, and the air in the workshop is pressurized regular Mars air, and it was doing nothing but triggering false positives.”

  “Where’s Zeus?”

  “Said he was going to the greenhouse to do something or other to the tilapia tanks.”

  “I think we’ve got a leak. I’ll check it out. Can you dump some patches in the cross-hab airlock for me?”

  “Sure.”

  Frank climbed up the steps to the workshop airlock and cycled it through. He twisted the handle, and pushed, and found the door was stuck. He put his shoulder to it, wedging his hard external carapace against the dusty red of the airlock and bracing himself with his feet. If this didn’t work, he’d have to get some tools.

  He shoved hard, and the door gave about six inches. Smoke started to peel around the opening, thick streamers of it, twisting away and vanishing in Mars’s hungry air.

  “Fire,” said Frank. “Fire in the workshop.”

  There was clamor in his ears, alarms sounding and Dee, then other people shouting. After a few seconds’ confusion, Brack shouted for everyone to shut the fuck up.

  “There’s no fire because there’s nothing to burn, dipshit.”

  “Then where the hell is this smoke coming from?” It was still boiling out, up and away, white braids dancing in the wind.

  “It’s not smoke,” said Dee. “It’s not smoke, Frank.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s Zeus.”

  “Fuck no.” Frank hit the door hard with his shoulder, once, twice, three times. Zeus was a big man, heavy, dense, and he’d fallen behind the hinge. Because Frank was in his bulky suit, no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t reach the man. He slammed the door shut again. Too late. It was too late. He knew that. But he still had to try.

  He needed to cut his way through the hab’s skin. He didn’t have a sharp edge. The plastic was thick and hard and he couldn’t tear it and he needed a knife, an actual knife or a saw blade or something and he didn’t have one and he couldn’t do anything.

  He backed away down the steps. There were rocks. He could use rocks. He picked one up and started stabbing at the deflated side of the hab, and succeeded only in scoring the surface rather than cutting through. He kept on going, because Zeus deserved his effort, his perseverance, his sweat.

  “Put it down, Kittridge. Put it down.”

  Frank turned, rock still mashed into his fist. Brack was there, just standing, regarding him.

  “We have to get in there.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “We do. He’s flatlined. No heartbeat. No resps.”

  The implant. It didn’t lie.

  Frank dropped the rock at his feet and looked up at the curved side of the hab.

  “Get back inside, Kittridge.”

  “I need to do … something.”

  “That’s an order. Get back inside.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you go sassing me, boy. I gave you an order, and I expect that you obey me instantly and without question. You are currently dangerous. You are out of control. You are not in your right mind and you will do what I tell you when I tell you to do it. Get your ass inside the base. Now.”

  Frank listened to the sounds of his own breathing. The harshness of it as the air rattled past the knot in his throat. His heart was hammering, as if to make up for the fact that Zeus’s was now still.

  From somewhere deep inside, a growl became a moan became a scream became a roar. It died the other side of his faceplate, stifled.

  Brack was still there when Frank had finished.

  “Get inside. I’ll deal with this.”

  There wasn’t anything else to say. Frank trudged back to the main airlock, and pressed his helmet against the wall while the air cycled through.

  Through the inner door, he dragged himself out of the top half of his suit, and just sat, legs splayed on the floor.

  How had that happened? What possible sequence of events had led to Zeus being in the airlock, both doors closed, without his suit? What was he even doing there? He should have been with Zero, playing around with the fish. Which is what they all did sometimes, moving their bare arms through the tanks full of wriggling baby fry.

  The workshop had sprung a leak. OK, but anyone working there had a tank of oxygen and a scuba mask to strap over their faces, so they wouldn’t have drifted off to sleep. There was also going to be their own spacesuit right there by the airlock door, so that even if they didn’t have time to put it on, they would have been able to drag it in with them. Close the door, open the valve on the oxygen tank to repressurize, use the suit comms to call for help, climb into the suit and seal it.

  He shouldn’t have died. He shouldn’t have been in the lock without his suit.

  Wait. There’d been no sign of Zeus through the little window in the outer door. Of course, Frank would have glanced at it, through it. They all did, unconsciously, as they got to the lock. Checking there was no one in there, or if someone had left the inner door open. He hadn’t seen Zeus, because he’d already been crushed up against the outer door, out of sight.

  But if he’d still been alive, he might have been savable. Frank could have done something different if only he’d realized.

  He looked up. Dee was standing at the hab door.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  “Is he …”

  “Yes.” Frank wanted to throw something, anything, hard. He remembered he was in a pressurized balloon, and though there were lots of objects to hand, he held back. “Yes, he is.”

  “I was hoping …”

  “Well, don’t.”

  Frank stared at the floor, and eventually Dee got the message and left. He wasn’t sure how long he’d sat there. Eventually Zero came out of the greenhouse. They looked at each other for a moment longer than was comfortable, and then both looked away.

  “Sorry, man.”

  Frank acknowledged the comment with a nod.

 
“You thought he was with me.”

  Nod.

  “He said he wanted to work on a pressure valve. Making it out of plastic pipe, or something. Left an hour ago.”

  Nod.

  “I had a kid brother. He was smart and stuff. Too smart to get caught up in my biz. Got shot. Stray bullet from some drive-by, on his way back from school. Hit him in the neck, right here.” Zero touched a place just behind his ear. “That’s what they all said: he didn’t suffer. Doctors, police, people coming to the house to see my mama: they all said he didn’t suffer. I don’t know, Frank. Is that a good thing? That he didn’t suffer?”

  Frank’s head came up, and he tapped the back of his skull against one of the racks. “I depressurized him, Zero. I sucked out what was left of his air, and I opened the door to Mars on him. None of us have any idea whether he suffered or not. Stupid fuck would probably have wanted to suffer.”

  He slammed his head back once, the panel making a boom that startled Zero.

  “I thought we were over this.”

  Zero stayed quiet, and eventually headed for the greenhouse airlock. While the pumps shuffled the air around, he stared at the door.

  “If he’d been able to, he’d have let you know he was in there. He was already gone.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about this. He was gone. Like my brother. You just happened to be there first.”

  Frank let his head fall forward, chin on his chest.

  “Whatever.”

  Then Zero had gone too. The pumps chugged again, and Frank could hear the greenhouse inner door open. He couldn’t just sit there all day. He needed to move.

  He pulled off his shoes and shuffled out of the legs of his suit. He stowed the life support, hung up his suit, put on his overalls and ship slippers. Every action was exhausting, like he’d run a race just moments before. He was spent. Dammit, he was so tired.

  He just happened to be there first, three times now. Marcy, Alice, and now Zeus. That struck him as being long odds. Though if he’d been born lucky, he would never have been on Mars at all.

  He needed to know what had killed Zeus. He needed a shower. Pathetically, the shower won. The other thing was just going to have to wait.

  20

  [transcript of audio file #10126 8/2/2038 0930MT Xenosystems Operations boardroom, 65th floor, Tower of Light, Denver CO]

  BT: I thought I’d get you up to speed, Paul, sir, with the work my team have been doing. With your permission.

  PL: Carry on, Bruno. I’m intrigued. And concerned. We’ve fallen behind where we should be.

  BT: I promise you here and now, that this will catch us up, and even put us ahead of schedule. I think you’ll be pleased with the progress we’ve made, and not a little impressed. We can build on the great strides we’ve already achieved at the Gold Hill facility, and seamlessly integrate that into what I hope you’ll endorse as the way forward.

  PL: OK, Bruno. This all sounds very hopeful. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how we view failure here at Xenosystems. That’s simply a word we don’t recognize. So, please. Continue.

  [Assume a tablet presentation. Haven’t been able to track that down, and believe lost]

  BT: The original plan was utterly revolutionary. A fully automated set-up from cargo pods, with only remote intervention required. Proof-of-concept testing showed that it worked perfectly, when it worked. Which was, as you can see here, only sixty-five [65] per cent of the time. There were multiple failure modes. The cost of rectifying each failure increased exponentially, in time, in weight, in failsafes on the failsafes. The obvious solution was to send a human operator to fix the problems in situ, but the contract we bid for uses only non-man-rated cargo vessels.

  PL: And a man-rated capsule is so very expensive.

  BT: Very, very expensive. And at the time of winning the contract, the only way to get someone to Mars. Two years on, and there’s a potential solution on the horizon.

  PL: Well, don’t keep me in suspense.

  BT: That’s exactly what we’re going to do. Suspended animation. We can literally store a person like cargo, and wake them at the far end. They’ll consume no resources, no food, no air, no water, on the journey. They won’t have to be entertained, they won’t need space to exercise, and they won’t go mad. It’s the perfect synergy between what we want and what we need.

  PL: It’ll require a particular sort of person, of strong moral courage and ingenuity.

  BT: I forbid you to volunteer, Paul. But seriously, we have time to search for exactly the right candidate. They’re going to be on site to fix the robots and any other potential problems we might have. All we require is NASA’s confirmation they’ll bring our man home again. I can’t see there’ll be a problem at all.

  PL: This suspended animation. It’s still experimental, right? The FDA haven’t signed off on it.

  BT: They will by the time we launch in eight years’ time. You have my word on that.

  [End of transcript]

  Frank went back to the workshop. He knew that Brack had finally forced his way in, and taken Zeus away. He knew where they were heading: a buggy was missing, and there was dust over towards the ship. But he didn’t know what Brack was going to do, any more than he knew what he’d done with Marcy and Alice. He should ask, really. He assumed that somewhere out the back of the ship would be a line of graves, shallow scrapes in the ground, covered by rocks. Three cairns. The human conquest of Mars.

  The outer airlock door was closed, and he hesitated with his hand on the handle. What was he going to find?

  He didn’t know that either. He swung the door open, and there were red stains on the floor, spatter marks that crossed the walls.

  There was also a black canister of oxygen, and a soft face mask, abandoned in the middle of it all. The mask was coated on the inside with a film of blood, coughed from lungs too weak to draw a breath.

  He didn’t want to go inside. He’d be standing where Zeus had died. Where Frank had killed him. He looked down at the floor, and eventually took that short step across the threshold. He closed the door, and stooped to pick the gas bottle up. The film in the mask shattered and fell away, crumbling into ever-smaller flakes. Perfectly dry, it was already turning into something indistinguishable from the dust of Mars itself.

  He opened the inner door, walked through, closed it.

  There was no air but outside air. Zeus’s suit was draped over the workbench just the other side of the airlock, the helmet staring blindly at the roof, and the arms and legs limp and lifeless. He placed the cylinder next to it, and draped the hose between the mask and the valve across its chest.

  There were bits and pieces from Zeus’s DIY activities littered across the two long benches: fragments of pipe and cargo drum and rocket motor scattered in between meters and wires and makeshift drills and vices and clamps. They were never going to get a steam engine now, even if it had been possible. That project had died with Zeus. Frank certainly didn’t have the smarts to make one, and he doubted anyone else did either.

  The remains from Declan’s repairing of the solar cells were further down. Shards of crystalline black glass glittered in a discarded pile.

  He couldn’t see a break in the plastic envelope on the top level—though he might be missing it, it wasn’t obvious. He climbed down the ladder to the first floor, and turned on the lights. Empty racking either side of the walkway shivered soundlessly. He slowly walked down to the end, and still couldn’t see anything that was wrong.

  “Declan? I’m going to start the pump, take it up to maybe six psi, and do a pressure test.”

  “Roger that.”

  The pump was against the far wall, taped into its ducting. He flicked the switch and opened up his suit controls, watching the external pressure rise, even as he could feel his suit relax and sag. The walls of the hab slowly stretched out, and sound returned. He could hear the rhythmic putt of the pump now, but no high-pitched whine of air escaping.

>   He walked the lower level again, peering into all the dark corners and pushing against the plastic, searching for the tear. Nothing. He moved the racking, one tower at a time, and got down on his hands and knees, lifting up floor panels and smoothing his hands across the hab cover where it met the thick rubber mat. Still nothing. No rocks had worked their way through.

  He’d spent so long, the hab was up to almost seven psi. He hurried to turn the pump off, and sat there in silence, expecting to see a slow, gradual decrease in the numbers.

  After half an hour, there was no change.

  He stood up again and climbed to the upper level. He waited for another half hour. Still nothing. If there was a leak, it was almost imperceptible. Yes, there were pressure fluctuations with the changing temperature, but they were trained to check the outside pressure before taking their suits off, even if they thought it was safe.

  There wasn’t a leak. Yet the hab had definitely been depressurized.

  Had Zeus done something stupid, and accidentally opened the hab to outside? Was there any way for him to do that? Neither airlock door, on manual, would open against the nearly eight tons of air pressure on the inside. Even Zeus couldn’t manage that. The pressure either side of the door needed to be almost equal. Had the pumps malfunctioned, or been altered to cycle air from the hab into the chamber, and then again to the outside?

  No, because the locks went one way. The pump from the airlock only fed into the hab, pressurized or not.

  There were the connecting feeds that they used to run the cables and pipework through from hab to hab. That was the only other weak point. And as he’d proved so far, there was no leak. But he checked them anyway, inside and out, and they were airtight.

  He’d done enough. He went back inside the workshop, slung the empty oxygen cylinder over his shoulder, and gathered up Zeus’s spacesuit in his arms.

  It dragged on the ground on the way back to the main airlock. He looked into the distance. The dust had settled, and he could see the pale finger of the ship rising from the Heights. How long did it take to bury a body? Clearly, longer than the time he’d spent trying to work out why they had a body to bury in the first place.