One Way

by S. J. Morden

  “Because that’s what you do, right?”

  “Nothing wrong with turning a vice into a virtue. You haven’t got away with this. Just because we’re on Mars doesn’t mean you can just kill people and walk away.”

  Frank looked around. “Walk away? Walk away? There’s nowhere to walk to. Look, I’ve not killed anyone.”

  “Well, that’s not true, is it?” Declan started for the door, and Frank blocked him.

  “I’ve not killed anyone here.”

  “And that’s supposed to be OK, is it?”

  “He was dealing drugs to my son.”

  “Most people would have just called the cops.”

  “He was the cops. The sheriff’s son.”

  Declan moved closer and touched helmets. “All I see is a whole lot of bad parenting going on. Now get out of my way.”

  Frank pushed him back. “I’m not a killer.”

  “Of all the people in this room, hands up who hasn’t killed anyone.” Declan raised his arm. “Anyone else? Anyone?”

  “This is serious, Declan.”

  “Don’t you think I know that? I’m trapped on Mars with a psycho. And at the moment, the only thing that’d make this whole scenario better would be being trapped on Mars without a psycho.” He wheeled away, and took up his position behind the console again. “I liked you. I actually liked you. I thought we could get on, at least. You seemed to want to treat me like a human being and not some rapo scum-of-the-earth. And Dee looked up to you. He was just a kid. And Zeus: he was easy in your company. Alice? She was difficult to like, but you could respect her. And Marcy was fun, and she was dead before I even got defrosted. Why, Frank? Why? What possible advantage do you think you’re going to get?”

  “But I haven’t done anything. It was Zero.”

  “Zero wasn’t even out of bed when Marcy died, Frank.”

  “Marcy died because her scrubber failed. She died in my arms. I did everything I could to save her, and it wasn’t enough.”

  “So you say.”

  “And Alice took pills. She checked herself out.”

  “That was what it was made to look like, sure.”

  They resumed staring at each other across the room.

  “Fighting in a spacesuit is a really stupid idea,” said Frank.

  “That’s something we can agree on.”

  “I didn’t kill Marcy, I didn’t kill Alice. That’s just crazy talk. We know how they died, and it was no one’s fault. No one living’s fault. But Zeus was murdered. Someone deliberately depressurized the workshop.”

  “And Dee?”

  “They shut him in here. There’s no way he couldn’t make it out the door in time. But if you hold the door closed, he’s got nowhere left to go and nothing else to breathe.”

  Declan scanned the console, the hab’s softly glowing walls, the strings of LEDs he’d put up himself. “Do you know what tripped the alarm?”

  “No, I don’t know enough about the system. It works off heat, but there’s no evidence of a fire. I just don’t understand how it could have gone off without an actual flame.”

  “What is it about you that makes you so incurious?” Declan risked stepping around the desk and used his gloved finger to work his way down through the system’s menus until he could access the fire-response mechanisms. “There. See?”

  Frank looked over his shoulder. There was a schematic of the hab, and on-off tabs that could work the cameras. Status bars that indicated the fill level of the CO2 extinguishers. A manual purge button for each.

  “It’s the backup. You can hit the switch and activate the extinguishers if they don’t go off automatically. Probably too late by then—a hab breach will kill a fire stone dead, assuming there’s no oxidizer. You can do this through your tablet. No special controls.”

  “Why the hell didn’t XO tell us stuff like this?” Frank stared at the screen.

  “Because we’re just the monkeys. We’re not meant to mess with this; this is for the real astronauts who know what they’re doing, and aren’t likely to use the deep controls to try and kill each other.” Declan shuffled around, and was face to face with Frank. “You know, I want to believe you. We knew it was risky. I want to believe that four people dying in a matter of a couple of months is just one of those things. But we both know that it’s not. I’m just going to let Brack handle this. That’s his job, right?”

  “You’ve got a problem with that, Declan: I was outside, with you, when Dee died. I couldn’t have held the door shut. You’re my alibi.”

  Declan aimed a finger at Frank’s chest. “And you’re mine.”

  Frank blinked and turned away, heading out through the door. What if there wasn’t one killer, but two, working together? And they were framing him for everything, deliberate and accidental? The base, where he was, was now literally the worst place he could be. He could feel his heart rate spike, and his skin go cold. He had to get out, the only problem being that the base was it, the single place on Mars that he could live. He’d have to come back at some point.

  But he could go to the ship. He could go to the ship and find Brack, and tell him he’d found his evidence. It was his last chance. And he had to do it now, before anyone tried to stop him.

  He grabbed a fresh pack from the life-support rack. Then he hesitated. Unless he wanted to wrestle it all to the ground inside the airlock, the only place he could swap packs would be the greenhouse. Zero was in there.

  What kind of accident would Frank die in? Would his suit fail him? Would his air fail him? Or had it gone beyond that pretense now? Was it going to come down to shivs and shanks, or a sock full of rocks?

  He could just carry it with him, swap it when he got to the relative safety of the ship. Brack had one buggy. He’d have the other. Even if they wanted to chase him, they’d be the better part of an hour behind.

  “Hey,” said Zero, a faint disembodied voice. “Who’s that in the cross-hab?”

  “Frank,” said Frank. He turned round and saw Zero’s face at the greenhouse airlock window.

  “What you doing?”

  “Thinking about swapping my life support out.”

  “You not got enough?”

  “I’m not taking the chance. That OK?”

  “Whatever, man. You don’t need my permission.” Zero turned his head so he could peer partway down the connecting corridors. “You going outside?”

  “Despite everything, I’ve still got chores to do.”

  “Chill. Do it tomorrow. Base isn’t going to fall down because you’ve skipped a day.”

  “Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.” Frank started to back towards the airlock that led outside. He had the spare life support cradled in his arms. What else did he have? A nut runner and his tablet hung from his external belt. A pouch of slap-on patches for immediate hab repair. Not anything good in a fight, though the nut runner would make a impromptu blackjack. He needed to tool up. He couldn’t head for the kitchen, because Declan was in that direction.

  “You’re not coming in to swap over? I’ll clear the way for you.” Zero’s face disappeared, and Frank darted towards the med bay instead. The boxes of drugs and equipment were still sitting on the shelves. He put the bulky life support down, looked at the labels, then opened one particular box, took out a sealed pack of surgical instruments and slipped them into the same pouch as the patches.

  He hoisted the life support again, and rather than go back to the main airlock, left the base through the little-used one in the med bay itself. He felt his suit tighten around him as the air pumped down. He ought to be used to the feeling, but now it felt as it had done at the beginning: claustrophobic and constricting. He waited out the surge of panic, remembering his breathing, closing his eyes and going to his calm place: a brightly lit back-yard, warm from the summer sun, brittle grass underfoot, and the sound of an excited boy splashing around in the new pool. Drops of water glittered in the air, arcing gracefully up, stretching and breaking and shattering on the stone surround.r />
  He was OK. He could do this.

  He trotted down the steps, down and across the red sand to the remaining buggy. He slid the life support ahead of him and climbed up, wedging the box between his legs and the seat. He started the fuel cell. No sign of Declan. That was fine. Neither he nor Zero needed to know where Frank was going.

  The buggy pulled away, and Frank pointed the front wheels at the distant spire of the ship, just about visible through the surface haze. A trail of dust plumed up behind him, and the wind dragged out what didn’t settle.

  It took only a few minutes to cover the distance that would otherwise take an hour to walk.

  He pulled to a halt outside the ship. There were empty cylinders, from the things they’d towed there and unpacked right at the start of the mission. But there was no second buggy. Brack wasn’t at the base. He wasn’t at the ship. Frank stood up on the seat and searched the distance for the telltale ribbon of pale dust, but there was nothing.

  He got down and walked around the ship, expecting to find the raised cairns of his dead colleagues at any moment, but again, there was no sign. If there was anything that was going to be obvious on the flat landscape of the Heights, it was going to be a cemetery. Maybe, for some reason, it was further away.

  He went back for the life support, and climbed the stairs to the ship’s airlock. He’d wait for Brack inside.

  25

  [Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 9/2/2041, transcribed from paper-only copy]

  Sometimes I wonder how we got to this point. We are so far below our budget, we’ve had to set up shell companies to bid us for non-existent work, just so that I can keep the numbers up.

  Project Sparta are right: we can build another Mars base for what we’ve saved. An XO Mars base. This is an extraordinary achievement. Paul is going to be so proud of me.

  Frank hadn’t been back inside the ship since they’d inflated the crew quarters. The internal layout hadn’t changed—how had he ever thought it possible that it could?—but it had become extraordinarily dirty. The first floor was strewn with used food packets, torn foil, empty bags and dust. So much dust.

  He propped up the spare life support against the airlock door and opened up his suit. There was an obvious, odd smell to the ship. When it had been eight of them in close quarters, the filters had managed to keep the odors at bay; it looked like they’d been finally overwhelmed. He pushed his head out into the thin, cold air. That smell really wasn’t good. Sort of a teenager’s bedroom smell. His own teenager’s, for that matter.

  He slipped out of the rest of the suit, and shuffled through the debris. What didn’t get kicked aside, crunched underfoot. Every surface was coated with a thick film of red, oddly both oily and gritty to the touch. He ran his finger across one of the screens, and sniffed at the residue. It was sharp and sweet at the same time.

  Something caught his eye in among the litter, and he crouched down. It was a blister pack. He picked it up. Every tiny blister was empty and crushed. He turned it over and read the contents: oxycodone hydrochloride, thirty milligrams.

  That wasn’t a good sign.

  He dropped it back onto the floor, and swept his foot around. There were several more he could see, and probably more that he couldn’t.

  He climbed up to the next level. Brack’s bedroll was there, and his sleeping bag, unzipped and rucked up, lay mostly on top of it. He’d thought that Brack slept in the base, in the examination room off the med bay. He probably did, but it looked like he slept in the ship too. There was more litter around the sleeping bag: more food pouches, more pill packs, other trash Frank couldn’t readily identify.

  The place was … a garbage dump. There wasn’t any other way to put it. Brack was living in what could only be described as squalor.

  Frank slowly turned, taking in the whole scene, and knew he was missing something.

  Apart from the first few days, Brack had been pretty hands-off. He’d come over to inspect the works, making sure they—minus Alice and Marcy—were getting on with it. Then he’d go away again. And they had got on with it. They’d built the habs, fitted them out, powered them up, installed the comms, and even come up with new solutions to overcome the shortages XO had imposed on them. They’d worked relentlessly, as long as their suits had allowed them, and then when the jobs had moved inside, they’d worked until they’d dropped. Rinse and repeat. Sol after sol.

  They hadn’t needed Brack at all. They all knew what had needed to be done. They’d done it, by themselves, for themselves, because otherwise they would have starved to death. The ship-brought supplies would have run out before they’d finished building the base: that’s what Alice had told him, and he had no reason to doubt her, even now.

  They’d even made a priority of setting up the greenhouse because there’d been nowhere near enough calories to feed them. Zero, whatever else he might be, had taken to hydroponics like a pro. And yes, fish for protein and all those greens was starting to get monotonous, but the cereals were beginning to ripen, as were the beans and groundnuts and roots. They already had an abundance: an abundance that Brack hadn’t so much as touched, not even a single leaf.

  He gathered up a handful of empty sachets, reading the typed names on the outside of each one, and letting them fall to the ground afterwards. The same meals, over and over again. At some point, Brack was going to run out.

  Frank started rummaging through the storage bins, trying to work out exactly how many days’ food was left. There wasn’t much: maybe a dozen packets, a few energy bars. Probably no more than a week’s worth. There was a drawer in the kitchen area of the crew hab that had sachets of instant porridge they kept for emergencies, when they needed a quick hit of carbs, but there weren’t many of those, either. Call it two weeks on short rations.

  Then what?

  Then Brack would have no choice but to eat produce grown in the greenhouse, even if he was going to prepare it himself. And as limited as the menu was, Frank had to concede that not only was it fresh and of good quality, it actually tasted of something, which he couldn’t say of prison food which was mainly salty slurry. No wonder life expectancy in jail was so low: if the other cons didn’t kill you, the diet eventually would.

  So what did Brack expect to happen in just over a week that’d make it safe for him to suddenly start eating the greenhouse produce? Had he thought that far ahead? Frank forced himself to look at all the empty foil packs, really look at them. It was the detritus of an addict.

  Brack wasn’t thinking about much beyond the next pill.

  What a mess. What a goddamn mess. He had two people at the base, at least one of whom was going to try to kill him, if he hadn’t already tried and Frank had just not noticed because the attempt had been unsuccessful. And the man who was supposed to be the one who kept order, the one who was supposed to be on hand to sort this all out—the one he was relying on to get him back home—was reduced to this. Eating pap and scarfing down opiates.

  Did XO know? Had they realized that their man had gone rogue? That the fate of Mars Base One was out of their hands, and had fallen, by virtue of being the last sane one standing, to Franklin Kittridge, construction worker and murderer?

  He had to talk to Brack. Brack remained Frank’s only hope of seeing his son again. So of course, he was going to have to do something. After all, he was really very good at that, wasn’t he? All his previous attempts at intervention had led, failure by abject failure, to shooting his son’s dealer dead in front of a crowd of witnesses.

  Goddammit, Alice. She would have been able to do this. She had the right and the duty to intervene and overrule in medical matters. Instead, she was dead.

  He looked up through the floor towards the top of the ship. Then he put his hands on the ladder and climbed up to where the sleep tanks were, arranged in pairs against the walls.

  Four were open. Four were closed, and their controls were glowing.

  He stood in front of the tank with the number one decal. Alice had be
en One. Dee had been Five. Marcy and Zeus, Six and Seven. Those were the tanks that were closed, and active.

  He knew he shouldn’t be opening them. He knew he shouldn’t, but he knew he was going to try anyway, and he might as well get on with it. He knelt awkwardly down and looked at the controls. There didn’t seem to be anything to press, though, and he realized they were probably all controlled by the ship’s computer.

  He fetched his tablet, and it automatically logged on to the ship’s network. It had before, when he was looking for the cylinder containing the buggies, so why not now? He worked his way through various menus until he thought he might have found the right one, and then drilled down into it. Eventually, a schematic of eight boxes appeared, each with a status bar above it. It was the same: one, five, six and seven were working, while two through four—and eight—were offline.

  He pressed box one. The information presented to him was confusing—he didn’t know what much of it meant, but he could make out that the temperature inside the tank was just above freezing, and it was in something called preserve mode.

  He took it out of preserve, and the drop-down gave him the option to open.

  He needed to see it with his own eyes. He dabbed at Open, and immediately the lights on the tank began to blink. They blinked for a while, and then there was an audible click through the thin air of the ship.

  He opened the lid, enough that he could be sure, and then pushed it down again.

  He tried not to think about anything before returning the tank to preserve mode, and the lights returned to steady.

  Alice was in the tank, white-skinned, cold.

  He’d thought that Brack had buried her. Buried them all. Why had he thought that? Had Brack actually told them that, or had he just let them think it? Marcy, choked and smeared with her own vomit, Zeus—whatever state he was in, with ruptured lungs and eyes and ears, skin purple with bruising and desiccated as the water had simultaneously boiled and frozen inside him, Dee, scarlet and asphyxiated.