One Way

by S. J. Morden

  “So you don’t actually need to be here.”

  Dee blew out his cheeks. “If something went wrong, you’d need me. Otherwise, I guess not. I just come in here to goof off. Don’t tell Brack. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “So what do you do all day?”

  Dee returned the screen to the top of the menu tree, so that the XO logo was staring out at them. “I just … read. Manuals. Tech stuff. Geological reports. Maps. I like that kind of stuff.” He pressed his hands together and looked down at the floor.

  “It’s OK. It’s fine.” Frank risked tapping his fist against Dee’s shoulder. “You can keep doing that. I’m not in charge of you, or anything.”

  “I just want to be useful to the NASA guys when they get here. Knowing things that they might not about the base, about the local area, that’s going to be good, right? They’ll need someone to carry their kit and lend them a hand. I want them to think … good thoughts about me. Include me. Come to rely on me. You know.”

  Frank knew. “I get that. I know this is going to be a stupid question, but do you need a password to access any of this stuff?”

  “Why would you need that? It’s not like we’re vulnerable to hackers, or unauthorized users. We’re all authorized. Everybody who comes to the base is.”

  “I don’t know: I just thought that maybe Brack—”

  “Brack always calls home from the ship. It gets routed through the main dish for ease, but it doesn’t pass through this computer.” Dee tapped some keys. “This is the uplink log for the last seven days. It’s just automatically generated reports, like I said.”

  “Declan told me he was going to ask you to hack XO’s responses to Brack. I’m kind of hoping you didn’t, because I think that’d be a very bad idea.”

  “He hasn’t. Why would he do that?”

  Frank ignored the question. “If he does, turn him down.”

  “They’re encrypted.” Dee shrugged. “I can’t crack them.”

  “You tried already?”

  “I was just seeing if I could. They’re working off of some public-private key thing, so I can get the message block, I just can’t tell what the text says. Brack will have the key in the ship, and, well, whatever: I’ll just tell Declan what I’ve told you.”

  “And there’s no way you could crack the code?”

  “No,” said Dee. “This is a key of twenty or so random characters that work in an algorithm to scramble the data. I could write a script to try every possible combination, and I’d be old a hundred times over before it got even close to working. Unless I have the key, it’s not going to happen. Just forget about it.”

  “Forgotten,” said Frank, holding his hands up. “Thanks for showing me around. I feel like I learned something.”

  “No problem.”

  Frank turned to leave.

  “Why did Zeus die?” asked Dee.

  Frank stopped. “I don’t know yet,” he lied. Mostly lied, at least. Why he died was different from how he died. “If someone comes by and asks you to do something you’re not comfortable with, or throws questions at you, or just does something you don’t expect, you could let me know.”

  Dee looked down at the screen, then back up. “Frank, what’s going on?”

  “I haven’t worked it out yet. But stay frosty, OK?” Frank went back to the crew quarters to push the button. He ended up sitting there for longer than he needed to, thinking about things. Water reclamation was below the yard, and was little more than a machine that exposed their waste to vacuum and caught the water as it boiled off. The dry solids were sterilized, turned into bricks, and handed straight over to Zero. All of that had been Zeus’s job.

  It, along with Dee’s comment that the computer system didn’t really need him until it really did, got him to wondering just how many people were actually required to run the base? What was their minimum crew?

  Marcy had been their driver. But they could all drive now. Alice had been their doctor. But since she’d dragged them from their long hibernations, they hadn’t needed her expertise. Zeus was plumbing, but since it had all been put in place and water pulled from Mars’s freezing soil, they were a closed loop. If they needed more water, a couple of shovelfuls of fresh dirt in the machine would make it for them. He was construction, and everything had been built, in this phase of building at least. Thermal expansion happened, but after the first few weeks, the bolts pretty much held everything together. Dee had set up Comms and Control so that neither needed intervention from him or anyone. Declan? How much did he do over cleaning the panels by hand and stalking the corridors to find people to shout at? Brack? He didn’t do anything related to the upkeep of the base.

  Zero: he was the exception to the rule. They wouldn’t eat without his efforts. A lot of his work was monitoring the growth of his beloved plants, analyzing the mix of the nutrients being fed into the hydroponic reservoirs, and adjusting the flow rates. He harvested and replanted. How much, or how little, would carry on without him, was something Frank was going to have to look into. But out of all of them, Zero worked the hardest and complained the least.

  So to answer his own question: a couple. Zero could probably manage on his own for months, maybe even years, until something broke down that he couldn’t fix. For all his smarts, he couldn’t know everything and he didn’t seem to want to, either. He was content, and Frank had to admit that perhaps he was a little bit jealous of that. But maybe even Zero needed someone else, running around behind the scenes, keeping all the systems fine-tuned.

  Given all that, which one of them could have decided that Zeus was surplus to requirements? Was it even that calculating? Did Zeus die simply because someone thought they could get away with killing him?

  He didn’t want to agree with Brack, but kept circling the same conclusion. If—and there still might be something that he’d missed that made Zeus’s death accidental and not deliberate—Zeus had been killed, neither Dee nor Zero seemed at all likely to have done it. Neither of them had had any beef with the man while he’d been in training or on Mars. Zeus’s Aryan Brotherhood tats could have unnerved Zero or Dee, as they did Frank, but there’d been no evidence of animosity.

  Declan. It came back to Declan every time.

  So what was Frank going to do about that? He didn’t have proof, and neither did he have any way of getting that proof, save trying to beat a confession out of Declan. Which, if he was right or wrong, wasn’t going to make anyone happy at sharing a confined space with him.

  How was he supposed to do this without turning himself into a pariah? Was that even possible? He’d promised to help Brack in exchange for a ride home. With a possible murder on the base, Brack had called that promise in. How much did Frank want to go home?

  Frank didn’t love Mars that much. He found it fascinating, beautiful, stark, lethal. But it wasn’t his home, and it wasn’t where his son was. OK, so he wanted to go back to Earth more than anything, in order to see his son. What was he going to do about that?

  He was going to make some assumptions. Firstly, that Declan had done one of the two things to the workshop—either fix the airlock valves or open up the pump vent—that had ended up killing Zeus. Maybe he’d incapacitated Zeus beforehand by slipping him something. Or Zeus had done it to himself, and Declan had got pissed with him and wanted to teach him a lesson. Secondly, that having killed one of them and got away with it, he’d be much more likely to try and kill someone else when they pissed him off too.

  Zero was too important to lose, at least at this point. So next, it was either Frank, or Dee, or Brack. If Brack died, there’d be no trip home. If he died, he wouldn’t need one. Dee? Dee was just a kid who no more deserved to be on Mars than he deserved to be serving life. There were more than enough tech companies in California for one of them to have hired the boy and kept him out of jail.

  The best way to off someone and get away with it was to make it look like an accident, and to keep the base intact as much as possible while doing it.

>   Where was he most vulnerable, then? Outside, in his suit, or driving? His suit was his own suit, identifiable, but the life support was a random pick from the rack. The buggies? Both he and Brack drove, and Declan hardly ever did. Neither did Dee or Zero. Declan spent a long time outside, unsupervised, unwatched. If he wanted to do something to a buggy, then he could.

  Frank decided that he’d ask Dee to pull the full manual on the buggies. His training had been almost all practical: how to identify and solve problems. Not included were those catastrophic errors that would have meant he wouldn’t be around to solve the problem at all. Was it possible to fix the fuel cell so that it exploded? There were compressed gases and lots of energy stored inside, and the driver sat almost directly over it. Shards of fast-moving fractured casing would slice a spacesuit into shreds.

  So much to think about. So much of it depressing. He didn’t want to spend his time on Mars doing this—playing detective. Definitely playing. He had no idea where to start.

  He pushed the button and pulled the levers, zipped up and washed his hands and face. Part of the training. A stomach bug would pass around the crew like wildfire, and there’d be no hiding place.

  There was Zero in the kitchen, and Frank walked up the corridor to see what he was doing.

  “So I’ve never done this before,” said Zero, pointing at a fish in the bucket between his feet. “I was told how to defrost the eggs and grow them on in tanks, how big they have to be before we start chowing down on them. Not how to get one ready to cook.”

  “Last time I saw them they were no bigger than my finger.” Frank got down on his hands and knees and peered in. “Look at the size of them. Longer than my hand, some of them.”

  “They gain weight fast, just chewing algae. I figured we could do with cheering up, so I picked out four of the fattest, but man, I’ve no idea what to do now.”

  “You’ve got to clean them.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  Frank dipped his hands into the lukewarm water and scooped up one of the tilapia. It was strong, trying to wriggle out of his grasp, and slimy too, its slippery mucus layer making it difficult to hold.

  “I need a knife. Sharpest we have. And a plastic tray.”

  Zero picked a knife up from the bench. It didn’t have a point, but the blade was keen enough. Frank pinned the fish inside the tray and with one swift slice took its head clean off.

  “Jesus, Frank!”

  “It’s a fish, Zero. They barely have enough brains to register pain.” He turned the fish in his palm and sliced down the belly. He put the knife in the tray and scooped out the guts with a pull of his two fingers. “And that’s how you clean a fish.”

  Zero had gone visibly pale, and his eyes were as round as saucers.

  “Why don’t you go make us a salad?” suggested Frank. “I’ll deal with the rest.”

  “Sure. OK. Whatever you say, man.”

  Frank dispatched the three remaining fish and tossed the waste down the john. Almost perfect recycling. The plants would feed off the detritus, and the water flow ended up in the fish tanks. He washed his hands and caught sight of loose silvery scales circling the plug as he rinsed, shining like tiny planets.

  He watched them spin in ever tighter circles, then vanish into the drain.

  How to cook them? They had two options: microwave, or steam. Steam them, then. See what herbs they had, stuff them in the cavity and give them five minutes. Long enough to round everyone up and get them sitting down together. How long was it since they’d done that? Normally they just smashed and grabbed an evening meal when they felt like it. Why not make this an occasion?

  Except he was already thinking about turning any conversation to his advantage, whether there were any off-guard comments that he might use to catch someone out. Everything from now on had to be about finding out who killed Zeus, and every opportunity had to be turned to that purpose.

  23

  [Internal memo: Project Sparta team to Bruno Tiller 6/4/2038 (transcribed from paper-only copy)]

  Mr Tiller: we will be working through these various scenarios and producing SWOT analyses for each in the next two weeks. If you or other XO board members have comments, then please append.

  1. Specifications as agreed. Timescale as agreed

  2. Specifications as agreed. Timescale lengthened by 5–10 years

  3. Renegotiate specifications. Timescale as agreed

  4. Renegotiate specifications. Timescale lengthened by 5–10 years

  5. Renegotiate entire contract

  6. Cancel contract

  It was different without Zeus. It had been different without Marcy and Alice, but they’d died at the beginning of the mission, when everything was new and nothing was routine. The base hadn’t been started, let alone completed, and the remaining five cons had spent difficult hours and days helping each other, shouting at each other, deliberately ignoring each other and ultimately deciding they still had to work together, whatever their feelings about each other. That cycle had gone on more times than any of them cared to remember.

  Now there was a hole. Zeus was gone, and his duties had to be picked up by Zero, who really didn’t want them, but since the state of the plumbing was so intimately tied to that of the greenhouse, he didn’t have much choice.

  That next morning, Frank went round with him to try and learn how all the pipes moved fresh water from the storage tank to the habs, and the waste back to the recycler. There were manuals for that. Not so for the hot water system which Zeus had more or less single-handedly cobbled together. The few scribbled drawings that he’d left on the computer system were simply inadequate. The notes he’d made for NASA did make more sense, but there were times when the two of them were reduced to chasing tubing through the underfloor panels, trying to work out where it went next.

  But Frank still had his own jobs: maintain the fabric of the habs, and keep the buggies running. After a morning with Zero, he had to go outside to carry out his inspections. There was a feeling of unreality to everything. Zeus was dead, murdered. The list of suspects was tiny. And still he had to go round checking something as mundane as nuts and bolts, because someone deliberately spacing him wasn’t the only way he could die.

  The habs were holding up well. The pressurized skin didn’t seem to be degrading at all. It had all the appearance of lasting for years.

  The buggies—buggy, since Brack had taken one back to the ship, presumably to talk to XO about how their cheap convict crew had been worth every cent they’d spent on them—had fared less well. The fuel cells, save for a few dings in the bottom of the casing, were still operating at one hundred per cent capacity. The frames were scratched, but the damage was superficial. For ease of construction, the wheels came in a single piece, motor, actuators and tires, and damn but those things were heavy. The drive motors needed dismounting and opening up at some point, to see if the seals were still good or whether there was a build-up of dust.

  The tires, though, were the most immediate worry. The metal plates that provided the grip were degrading, whether through the mechanical wear of driving over a surface that was littered with little rocks, or whether the perchlorate in the soil was actively eating away at the material: it didn’t much matter which. With less than a thousand miles on the clock, they could already do with a swap-over.

  They had no spares. Frank wondered if he could make replacement plates out of drum material, or even cylinder casing, because there was no alternative. One broken tire would mean one buggy completely out of action. They’d start cannibalizing it, and the inevitable end was that they’d eventually run out of parts. Whereas if they could fabricate a good enough replacement, then it might be they’d never run out. Tires were consumables: he couldn’t quite believe he’d been reduced to this.

  Today, the sky was particularly pink, high dust turning the weak sun even weaker—even a smudged entry trail angling down towards the surface looked pale. Declan was fretting about power regulation yet again. He wa
s outside with Frank, cleaning the black glassy surfaces with a piece of parachute material. Actually, yes: Frank had noticed a build-up of dust on the buggy controls, and perhaps there was a big storm to the south that was pushing dirty air over the equator.

  Rahe didn’t seem to generate the dust devils that happened out on the plain, but they still had weather all the same. The base didn’t have a meteorological station, which seemed odd. Perhaps it was in the same shipment that their personal effects had been in, now circling in deep space or smeared black against the red of Mars.

  They didn’t get any weather reports either. They didn’t get anything at all. No news from Earth. No messages. Nothing. As if it had ceased to exist, and there were just the five of them left, hundreds of millions of miles away in a tiny, ignorant bubble.

  But Brack was in communication with XO, and Dee was getting information from somewhere. Earth was still there, and Frank wanted to go back to it.

  “What you doing, Frank?” Declan looked up from buffing the panels.

  “Looking for the buggy manuals.” Frank poked around on his tablet, but his fat, gauntleted fingers kept on making mistakes, despite the software being configured for use with a spacesuit. “If we can’t repair the tires somehow, then we’re going to have to make some calls home. Our NASA guests won’t be happy having to walk everywhere.”

  “We haven’t got the power for making anything. We haven’t even got the power to run all their experiments.” Declan shook the cloth out, and he gestured at the dust puffing away in ephemeral pink clouds. “We were down fifteen per cent at midday. Stuff’s going on standby if it doesn’t pick up.”