One Way

by S. J. Morden

  There should have been a ceremony. The first two deaths had happened when they were at such a breakneck pace there’d been no time to stop. Now, there was space to do something meaningful. And Zeus would probably appreciate that, even though he wasn’t around to see it. In the end, anything they did wouldn’t be for him, but for the living.

  As he climbed the steps to the main hab, Zeus’s boots knocked on each riser.

  “Goddammit, man.”

  “Frank, you good?” asked Dee.

  “Talking to myself. I’m coming in. I could do with a hand, though.”

  He punched the button to cycle the lock, squeezed in, and pressurized the chamber. Each action he made, he watched carefully, trying to work out ways he could inadvertently subvert the safeties. He couldn’t. He couldn’t understand how the workshop had leaked out, when there was no leak.

  Dee opened the door, and took Zeus’s suit from him. Frank put the oxygen cylinder on the floor, and opened up his suit to the hab’s air.

  “Did you find it?”

  Frank scraped his fingers across his head. “Find what?”

  “The leak.”

  “No.” He pushed his suit down to his knees. “No I didn’t.”

  “But …”

  “I don’t know. I’ve left it under pressure. If it goes down, I’ll know I’ve missed something.”

  “What do you mean, if?”

  “Not now, Dee. I’ve been through the whole hab. I’ve checked the seals and everything. You want to go out there and do it all again? Knock yourself out. Just get off my case.”

  “You’re responsible for this shit, Frank. Buildings and maintenance. That’s your bag.”

  “Don’t you think I know that? And you’re responsible for agreeing to turn the fucking alarm off, the one thing that might have saved his life.”

  Dee was slight. The time spent in hibernation, and then on reduced gravity, hadn’t made him any bigger. Frank had been physically active every single day. If they squared up, there was no question as to who was going to win.

  Dee was just a kid. Currently, just a scared kid. Beating up on him wasn’t going to solve anything, and was only going to make it worse.

  “Why don’t we stay out of each other’s way for a while, Dee? Probably best for both of us.” Frank felt the first flush of rage turn into something else. He’d never been one for much introspection. He preferred to keep busy. So why not keep busy doing this, digging into detail of the workshop until he had his answer?

  It was in all their best interests, because whatever had happened could happen again, and if Zeus had been caught out, it could be any of them next time. They wanted him to be responsible? OK: the workshop was out of bounds from now on, until he declared it safe.

  Dee dropped Zeus’s suit where he stood, and left, only to be replaced by Declan.

  “What? You going to smack me down too?”

  “No. Just that I had an idea, and I wanted to show it to you. I’ll be in the medical bay.”

  Frank was alone again. “Well, fuck. If I’m going to burn bridges, may as well burn them all down at once.”

  He hung his suit up and plugged his life support in, and picked up the oxygen canister from the floor. That had to be refilled manually from the air plant, and he wasn’t going to stand over it while it filled, not now. He saw that Zeus’s mask was missing. The hose must have got detached in the workshop. He’d collect it later, when he went back to test the pressure.

  And there was Zeus’s suit. He hefted it by the shoulders, and stared in through the dust-smeared faceplate for long enough to reach the moment where he could imagine Zeus’s broad, tattooed face staring back out at him.

  For an ex-neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang member, he’d been OK. Dependable. Reliable. Kind, even, if a little intense.

  Frank hung up the suit and racked the life support, and went to see what Declan wanted.

  He was sitting on one of the beds—a metal-framed gurney that could be moved higher or lower by a lever—with a box of blue nitrile gloves open by his side.

  “You coping?”

  “It’s pretty shitty, everything considered.”

  “That it is. However.” Declan took one of the gloves, shook it out, and gave it a few preparatory stretches. The white dust coating floated into the air, and danced under the lights. Then he put the sleeve of the glove to his lips and gave a couple of puffs so that the fingers inflated slightly. He pinched the glove at the wrist, twisted it to trap the air, and swiftly knotted it. He tossed the thing that resembled a limp blue octopus at Frank, who caught it and held it up.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Put it in your pocket.” Declan started making another. “Go on.”

  Frank didn’t have the energy to argue. He squashed the glove into one of his pockets. “Now what?”

  Declan tied off the second glove, hopped off the bed, and walked to the airlock at the end of the hab. They weren’t supposed to use it—emergencies only—but it was fully functional. He opened the inner door, tossed the glove on the floor, and closed the door again. He beckoned Frank over, and pointed through the tiny window.

  “Watch.”

  He flipped the switch and the air started pumping out, back into the hab. Frank peered down at the glove, which slowly and inexorably started to plump out. It kept on expanding, bigger and bigger, until the pump stopped and the glove was the size of a party balloon, stretched out to a translucent blue skin with five fat extensions.

  Frank patted his pocket, feeling the small, rubbery mass there.

  “Do you think you’d notice that?” asked Declan.

  “I reckon.”

  “It’s yours to keep.” He cycled the lock back up to pressure, and retrieved the now much deflated glove from the floor. “If, for some reason, the alarms didn’t go off, or they went off too late, it might just save you.”

  “It would’ve saved Zeus.” Frank turned away from the airlock. “I don’t get it. There’s nothing wrong with the hab.”

  “And yet he died because he couldn’t inhale the oxygen that was right in front of his face. Something depressurized the workshop, and by the time he realized—and clearly he did realize, otherwise he wouldn’t have made it into the airlock—he was already dying.”

  “He should have been able to pressurize the airlock with the O2 can he was carrying.”

  “If he was unconscious he couldn’t. And you know that the airlock is only sealed from the hab when you’re pumping it down.”

  Frank stopped his slow walk to the connecting corridor.

  “Even if he opened the valve all the way, the gas would have just blown out back into the hab. He’d have had to manually close the valve by opening up the maintenance panel and isolating it. But as I say, you knew that, right?”

  “Maybe I’d forgotten.” Frank leaned against the door frame. “Why are you here, Declan? What did you do? I mean, I know what I did. I know what I deserve. And Alice, and Marcy, and Zeus. We all killed people. I know Zero got into the supply chain, and Dee got mixed up in some serious cybercrime. You? You just seem so normal.”

  “We all have our demons, Frank. Mine are just a bit more specialized, that’s all.” He blew out a long breath. “You really want to know?”

  “Yes. No. Maybe.”

  “I liked to watch, Frank.” Declan let that sink in, then continued. “In my line of work, at my level, it meant I could watch a hell of a lot of people doing all kinds of things. When you get caught, and you run a couple of hundred nickel sentences together, turns out you end up inside for the better part of a millennium. Which wasn’t quite what I’d bargained for.”

  “So you made a deal?”

  “Same deal you made. Die in prison, or live on Mars.”

  “Yeah. About that.”

  “You weren’t getting ground glass or worse in every meal. Sooner or later, someone would have offed me. I think I had even less to lose than you did.” He shrugged. “Well, there you go. I�
��ve got to check some battery efficiencies, because I’ve a suspicion that the long-term effect of massive temperature fluctuations between day and night is degrading their ability to hold charge. You need to go and do whatever it is you need to do. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you killed Zeus, by anything you did or didn’t do. It’s this fucking planet.”

  He picked up his tablet and brushed past Frank, leaving him alone in the med bay.

  Frank tidied up. He put the gloves back in their box, then back in the packing crate they’d come in. He brushed his hand across the wipe-clean vinyl surface of the bed’s foam pad. Then he went back to the boxes. They’d all been opened. There was more than just high-grade pharma lying around now. Surgical packs. Pre-sterilized, sealed, but right there was a scalpel sharp enough to notch bone, with only a plastic guard and a blister pack in the way.

  Could the reason that Zeus didn’t notice the depressurization be down to narcotics? There were hundreds of foil packets, all stacked up in neat rows. One or two or more missing was going to be difficult to spot.

  Zeus was Alice’s second. In her absence, it would have been his job to count the drugs. There’d been no evidence that he’d checked them against the manifests, but maybe, informally, he had. Alice had killed herself with fentanyl. Now, possibly, Zeus had been at the tablets.

  Perhaps “going to work on the steam engine” was code. The cameras wouldn’t have picked anything up. Popping a pill could be done in an instant. Taking a swig of water afterwards wouldn’t appear anything special. Who was going to take the time to watch him for hours to see he was actually working?

  None of that explained the depressurization. It merely explained why Zeus had been caught out by it. If—a big unanswerable if—he was right.

  Frank closed the boxes, and leaned heavily on his knuckles against the racking. It was no good, he was going to have to talk to Brack about all of this. Get him to secure the drugs. Take them back to the ship, maybe, as the lock on the consulting room door was pretty flimsy. None of them were doctors, and while all of them had had basic first aid training, only Zeus had anything more than that. Getting the more dangerous drugs out of the way wasn’t going to cause them any problems.

  When they were at Gold Hill, “What if one of the crew turns out to be an addict?” hadn’t come up. It should have: they were criminals, and of course unfettered access to a whole pharmacy wasn’t going to be a good idea. It was bad planning. It was a mistake.

  Zero, of course, was the only one with drugs on his rap sheet, unless Alice and her overprescribing counted. If the kid had been helping himself along with Zeus, then he was going to be pissed and develop withdrawal symptoms. Frank knew what that was like. He’d seen it with his own son.

  How much of this was his suspicious mind, fine-tuned to the consequences of drug-taking, reacting viscerally against the mere possibility of it? He had no evidence, and unless he was prepared to account for every single pill in all of the boxes, something going on for a year’s supply for a busy dispensary, he’d never get any.

  And how much of this was deflecting his own guilt, looking for other people to blame? Because that hadn’t been a pattern in his life, had it? There was a fault in the workshop hab. He was going to find it, no matter what.

  21

  [transcript of audio file #7893 2/5/2035 0830MT Xenosystems Operations boardroom, 65th floor, Tower of Light, Denver CO]

  PL: Ladies, gentlemen. Today marks the beginning of a new and exciting direction for XO. Our direction of travel has always been upwards and outwards. From our first satellite, to our first launcher, to our first human-rated module, we’ve been at the forefront of innovation, pushing the limits of what can be done because we can imagine doing it. We have slipped the surly bonds of Earth for the vast, majestic reaches of space. But now is the time to start taking our next step among the stars, not just to explore, but to exploit the abundant resources that lie just beyond our reach. To this end, I can confirm this morning, that our proposal for designing and constructing a permanent settlement on the Martian surface was approved by the House SST committee—fully funded.

  [applause, some yelling and whooping]

  PL: Thank you, thank you. We’ve worked long and hard for this. Our representatives in Washington have been tireless in their efforts to place XO as the lead contractor, and let me tell you, fighting off the bigger, more established competition hasn’t been easy. Or cheap.

  [laughs from around the table]

  PL: We are where we are because we believe in this. We believe in the commercial opportunities that colonization can bring. We believe that these lights in the sky that our ancestors looked up at, named after gods, and populated with monsters, are rough jewels for us to cut and shape and sell. There are riches there to be had by the brave and the bold, and XO will be in the vanguard. We can talk about science and surveying, but we all know that the only reason for doing something is to turn a profit. Marco Polo knew it. Magellan knew it. Columbus knew it.

  BT [? possibly]: Damn right, sir!

  PL: We have a ten-year head start on this. A decade to invest and equip and build, all at the federal government’s expense. And at the end of that decade, it will be our flag, XO’s flag, that’ll be planted on Mars. There’s much to do between then and now, but if I may be permitted, I hope I can persuade you to join me in a brief moment of celebration.

  [doors open, rattling sound of glass on glass. Some speech, but too low/indistinct to be definitive]

  [sound of corks popping]

  Unidentified: You’ve seen the budget, right?

  TD: I have the biggest hard-on ever, just thinking about it.

  PL: If you’d raise your glasses, I’d like to propose a toast. To us. To XO. To the future.

  All: To us. To XO. To the future!

  BT: To Paul, without whom none of this would have been remotely possible. You, sir, are my guide, my inspiration, my leader, and it’s an honor to serve under you.

  [Polite applause]

  Unidentified: Fucking brown-nose.

  PL: Thank you, thank you. Well, drink up, everyone. We deserve this. We’ve come a long way already, and we’ve much further to go. We’ve great works to do. Legendary works. When the history books are being written, we are going to be the ones writing them. We were born to succeed.

  [End of transcript]

  Frank found himself sitting in the workshop and wondering why it was still fully pressurized some eighteen hours later. He kept his spacesuit on, because he didn’t trust his environment, yet it was as they’d built it: an airtight hab.

  So now his mind turned to ways of deliberately depressurizing it, just to see if he could replicate the conditions that Zeus might have found himself in.

  The construction of the airlock was such that the only way to move air outside was that last tiny puff that remained in the chamber before the outer door opened. Otherwise, air simply cycled backwards and forwards from inside the hab. It was idiot-proof, and that had to be a good thing. So, how to manually override the safety features?

  There was a vent that led from the chamber to the hab, that the pump was attached to. There was also another vent that led from the chamber to the outside, in case the pump failed—the inward-opening doors were impossible to use if there was pressure on the inside and none on the outer side. Manually venting the chamber, and letting the air outside, balanced the pressure. The outer door would now open.

  He tried that. It worked.

  There was also a manual override going the other way. If a hab lost power, someone from outside could vent the airlock chamber, enter it, then open another valve to equalize the pressure with the hab.

  Each time this happened, the hab would lose an airlock’s worth of air to Mars.

  But what if … what if he could open both valves at the same time? Leak air from the hab into the airlock, and simultaneously vent to the outside? Under normal circumstances, he’d have to be insane to try that.

  He did it anyway. The v
alves were operated by levers. They could be left open, although the hatches that housed them wouldn’t close with them in that position, so it’d be obvious what state they were in.

  Stuck inside a suit, it was impossible to tell whether it was working or not. He couldn’t hear the air moving, so he got a square of parachute canopy and held it up over the grille. It fluttered weakly. He was now venting the hab. And he could do all of this from the airlock. He didn’t have to set foot inside the hab. The same valve that opened the hab to the chamber could be accessed either side of the inner door.

  He returned the valves to closed. He shut the panels. He cycled the airlock in the normal way, and went back to sitting at the workbench, propping himself up on a high stool.

  Was there another way of dumping the air outside, faster than the trickle that passed through the airlock? The only other possibility was the pump on the first floor.

  He spent half an hour trying to break it, make it run backwards, push things into it so that the double baffle that sealed itself would stay open. He couldn’t do it.

  Then he went outside with a long, thin piece of tubing culled from a rocket motor, a piece that Zeus had been using to help prototype his steam engine. He found the shielded vent on the outside of the hab, lifted the cover off, and pushed the rod in. He pressed up against the first baffle, and, with considerable effort, managed to break the seal behind it.

  Then he pushed again. A brief plume of mist shivered into the Martian air. He bent down and applied as much force as he could manage without bending the pipe. It went in, and stuck. He picked up a handful of dust and trickled it past the outlet. It fell straight down, and then puffed away in a tiny gale.

  Frank started the timer on his suit, re-entered the hab, and watched the external pressure reading. The numbers were already falling. It took fifteen minutes to drop to half pressure, and at that point, anyone would have been struggling to breathe normally. It took another thirty minutes for the air to equalize with outside. Forty-five minutes in total, and all it took was a stick.