by S. J. Morden
“I’m going home with him. Just like he promised me.”
“He promised that to everyone, Zero. Remember? Where is he? Where is he right now?”
“Gone to the ship, looking for you. And he’ll be back here soon.”
“We’ve got to stop him. Me and you. He’s been working his way through the crew, and we’re next. Those are his orders, Zero. His orders from XO. He has to get rid of us.”
“That’s not it. That’s not it at all. It’s you we have to get rid of.” Zero, hand starting to tremble, advanced back down the hab. “Then we’ll be safe.”
Frank backed away as far as he could, which was only as far as the airlock behind him. “You don’t understand. We’re not meant to still be here when NASA turns up.”
Zero was close enough to strike again, and he hesitated for too long, shifting his weight from one leg to another, feinting and dodging but never following through. Frank jabbed for Zero’s eyes, trusting the suit to take whatever counter-blow came.
Zero tried to fend off Frank’s first attack, and left himself completely open for the second. Frank’s knee jerked up, caught Zero right in the groin, and Zero started to fold, the air pushed out of him in one short grunt.
Frank doubled down. He crowded Zero, using his weight and the hard surfaces of the suit to keep him moving backwards and off-balance. He finally managed to get his hand around Zero’s wrist and wrenched his arm up.
Something went pop in his biceps and a bright flash of pain blinded him. Zero was able to brace his feet and push, and Frank toppled back onto his life support, Zero on top of him. They were still locked together, neither willing to let go of the other.
The low oxygen was taking its toll on Zero. His face was slick with sweat and blood. It dripped down onto Frank’s faceplate as they both grimaced and groaned, Zero trying to turn the knife towards Frank, Frank straining to keep it away.
“I’m not your enemy,” said Frank. “You’ve got it wrong.”
“He said. He said.”
“He lied. Everything we’ve been told is a lie.”
Frank got his hand between them, and the pain was so intense, so sharp, he thought he was going to cry. He forced himself to push the hand upwards, into Zero’s face, fat, gauntleted fingers probing for the eyes. Zero jerked his head away, but it meant that he wasn’t concentrating on his knife hand for a moment. Frank slammed it into the deck, point-first, once, twice, and the third time it came good.
Zero’s unprotected hand slid down the blade and it cut deep.
He gasped and choked, and tried to grab the handle again but couldn’t because he couldn’t grip any more and everything was slippery with blood.
He twisted his hand, and Frank wouldn’t release him. The wound just opened up more.
There was no way that Frank could get up or roll over. The most he could do was rock side to side on the broad curve of the life support, which was worse than useless. He couldn’t bring his legs up to get his knees between him and Zero. He was left with trying to lever his injured arm up and into Zero’s face.
They were stuck. Neither could do anything to the other.
“You’ve got to believe me, Zero. I don’t want to hurt you. Brack’s the real enemy. Brack and XO.”
“No, no, no. Brack wouldn’t do that. Brack said he’d take me home.” Zero tried to break out of Frank’s grasp again, and squealed with pain. Not just pain. Anguish. Loss.
“You’re doing his dirty work for him. You’ve got to understand that. I don’t want to die here, so I’m only going to let you go if you tell me you believe me, and you’re not going to try and hurt me. We can still work together. We can still beat him.”
Zero’s head slipped away from Frank’s fingers and he brought his forehead down on Frank’s faceplate. Hard.
The blow was shocking, surprising, stunning. It left smears of blood and bubbles across the major portion of Frank’s view.
“Don’t, Zero. Don’t do this.”
He did it again, just as hard. The impact jolted Frank. More blood. Frank was almost blind, his vision coated in a red, liquid film.
Again. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t see anything.
He let go of Zero’s wrist and pushed as hard as he could. The weight on him, on his legs, left abruptly, and he brought his good hand up to scrape five lines through the gore.
Zero was all but unrecognizable. His face, his fine features, were mashed, broken, swollen, bruised. His hand was not just dripping but oozing, a continuous dribble of hot red liquid streaming off his fingertips.
Frank pushed himself to sitting, and awkwardly got a knee under his body.
The knife was on the floor, next to Frank. He saw Zero squint for it, trying to see through slits where it was. Frank reached for it, to push it away behind him, and Zero jumped him, howling.
Then he made a gagging sound. He pawed at Frank’s helmet, patting at it with increasingly gentle taps, before falling still.
Frank heaved him off, and Zero slipped gracelessly to one side, his own knife buried between his ribs.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He laid his hand on Zero’s head. “I’m so sorry. I tried. God knows I tried, but you just wouldn’t listen. I’m sorry.”
And there was still Brack. He couldn’t rest. Brack would know he was still alive. He’d still come for him. He wouldn’t stop.
The inside of the med hab looked like an abattoir. There was blood everywhere. Ceiling, walls, the furnishings, the floor. Especially the floor.
Frank knew what he was going to do. He hated himself. He hated that he couldn’t just curl up and go to sleep for a hundred years, and wake up to find everything was fine again. He hated that he’d been forced into such extremes, and even then it might not be enough.
He opened his suit controls, and opened up the back-hatch. He took his last few breaths of good air, and dipped his head out into the cool thin atmosphere of the base. It smelled of copper. Sharp and sweet and metallic on his tongue.
His left arm came out OK. His right arm stuck, and there was nothing left to do but pull, slowly and surely, until it came free.
It was like tearing something off: that feeling of fear and trepidation as to just how much pain pulling that loose tooth, peeling back that Band-Aid, was going to deliver before the glorious moment that the task was over and it could stop now.
It left him weak and breathing hard. There was blood on his overall sleeve, a hole through it, but there wasn’t as much as he’d anticipated. Perhaps the suit had helped, pressing against his skin, holding it all in.
He touched it, the jelly-like plug of blood in his arm, and he could feel the bullet as a solid mass partway into his muscle. He tried to squeeze around the area, push it out, but the flesh was just too tender and the bullet didn’t seem to want to move.
He pulled his legs free, and he was standing in sticky blood.
He went to the box that he knew contained the sterile packs of medical instruments. He ripped a pack open, and wondered in which order to do things. He knew he didn’t have much time, but neither did he want a bullet left in him.
He used the scissors to cut the cloth over the wound, making access easier. The hole in his arm was indented, like a crater. The skin around it was puffy and hot to the touch. The clot glistened darkly.
He loaded his undexterous left hand with the forceps. He rested his arm on the shelf, braced his other elbow, and pressed the open jaws deep into the wound. He couldn’t not look, and screwed his face up all the same.
Frank pulled, and the plug came sliding out, like the polyp of some sea creature. He felt cold. He couldn’t faint now. He turned his head, swallowed hard, took some highly unsatisfactory breaths, and came back for the second round.
He could see it, metal washed with blood, at the very bottom. He panted. Then he lowered the forceps into his arm until the tip clinked against the bullet. He slowly opened the jaws until they slid around the circumference, and closed them again.
He gave
an exploratory tug. He bit at his own lip until it bled. He panted again, clenched his teeth, and pulled.
It wasn’t so much that it hurt. It was that it was coming from inside of him. He dropped the bullet onto the floor, and laid the forceps back on the shelf.
He felt strangely, inexplicably, good. High. The lack of oxygen, the pain which, perversely, made him feel so incredibly alive and abruptly nauseous. He still had something else to do.
He gagged, swallowed, steadied himself.
Unzipping the front of his overall revealed the shining scar over his sternum, no more than a glossy red circle the size of his little fingernail. The monitor was long and smooth and hard under his skin. He took up the scalpel, and wondered if he should swab before he cut.
No time. No time at all. He flicked off the cover and lined up the blade. He pushed it in, then dragged it along downwards. The monitor wasn’t nearly as far down as the bullet. It almost popped out on its own. He teased it the rest of the way with the flat of the scalpel, and put it in his hand, tightly closed. He put the cover back over the scalpel and pocketed it, then hid the bloodied forceps and the opened pack of instruments back in the box.
He stood astride Zero’s body and pushed his monitor into the boy’s open mouth, pressing it between teeth and cheek.
“Sorry,” he said again.
The wound in his arm and the wound in his chest were bleeding, but not much. Neither was going to kill him. He bundled up his spacesuit and threw it down the ladder to the floor below. Then he lay down next to Zero, turned and turned again until he was caked in blood. He was a little way into the med bay, face down, head away from the connecting corridor, with Zero between him and it. He sprawled his arms out, his legs too, in what he hoped was a natural repose for death.
It was the best he could manage. Now all he could do was wait.
29
[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 1/7/2048, transcribed from paper-only copy]
This is what it must feel like to be God. To be in total control of everything. I can tell people what to do, and they’ll just do it. It’s crazy. They’re not even people any more: they’re pawns on the board. What they want, what they think, just isn’t important. I move them, they move. They don’t have any choice. They can’t move back. They can’t decide for themselves—anything that I choose to do with them, they do.
What makes this so special is that my opponent doesn’t even know they’re playing. They’re blind. They can’t see their pieces, my pieces, or how they’re arranged. They just wonder why they’re losing. And if I decide it’s in my strategic interests to sacrifice someone, then they get no say in that either. Slide them across the squares, and boom.
That is power, and don’t I deserve it? After everything I’ve done for XO? My only regret—and it is my only regret—is that I couldn’t share this with Paul. He was like a father to me. No, that’s wrong. He was my father, my true father, the one I wanted to please and emulate and defend. Not that loser who was simply content with what life gave him. If I’d followed his advice I’d still be cutting lawns. Working for other people. Instead, they work, they live and die—and more—for me.
This company will be mine one day. One day soon. Can you imagine that, Dad? Because I don’t think you can.
It took a long time. Frank drifted in and out of sleep, and every time he woke, he wondered how he could have possibly slept. He was adhered to the floor. The blood had soaked into his overalls, and dried. He was stiff and cold and uncomfortable, and still Brack didn’t come.
A couple of times, he thought he needed to rethink his tactics, to get up and go on the attack, but playing dead was his one advantage: throwing that away because of impatience was stupid. So he stayed where he was, as still as he could, listening out for the telltale creak of the floor panels.
Eventually, he heard them. These weren’t hesitant footsteps, made by a scared young man. These were confident, almost casual. Frank took some deep breaths and then exhaled slowly. Nothing but the shallowest of breathing from now on.
“Well, won’t you look at this?”
The footsteps stopped.
“You boys been having fun?”
Silence.
“You could have died cleaner, that’s for sure. You’ve left me a hell of a job. Should bring you back just so you can tidy up after yourselves.”
Silence.
“That’s not going to happen, though, is it? Deader than roadkill. Looks like I was the only one to bring a gun to a knife fight, so I guess I win. Right?”
The silence was punctuated by the sound of a meaty kick into some part of Zero.
“Ask you a question, boy. Am I right?”
The kicking carried on. Zero was still in no state to answer afterwards.
“Stupid idea, bringing criminals to do real men’s work. Ain’t that right, Frank?”
If Brack started on him, there was no chance of him being able to carry on with his deception. But perhaps the thought of treading more blood around the base put Brack off.
“It’s all over now though, for sure. None of you chimps left. Got to make this place fit for decent human beings, and then I get off this godforsaken rock. You? I got something special planned for you. Just wait and see.”
Zero received another kick.
“Better go tell Control that it’s mission accomplished. Ain’t no sweeter sound than that.”
Brack giggled, and Frank almost surged up from the floor and attempted to strangle him there and then. But there were footsteps, going away again.
Then came back.
“You want to know how we knew what was going on? Do you want to know? We could see and hear everything you did and said. Privacy my ass. I was right there, looking over your shoulder, whenever I wanted. You never realized. Even the pervert didn’t know. You never stood a chance.”
The footsteps went away, and they stayed away this time.
At some point, Brack would be back to dispose of his body. Until then, Frank was presumed dead.
It looked like, despite what they’d all thought, what they’d been told, they’d been spied on, almost continuously. Unless that was exaggeration on Brack’s part. The ten-minute-plus delay on information getting back to Earth was the kicker, and Dee had been certain that there was no continuous delivery of data. He’d packaged everything up, and sent it in chunks.
No hardwired microphones, according to Declan. The cameras only saw infrared, according to Dee. But there was always the medical monitors in their chests. If the devices were close enough to feel them breathing, they were close enough to hear their voices resonate through their bodies. And the cameras in the spacesuits. The cameras in the goddamn spacesuits.
And, of course, the only person who could monitor everything in real time was Brack. That was his job: to watch them, to check they hadn’t got wise to what was really happening, and to kill them when they became expendable. That was what he spent his days and nights doing. Monitoring his charges, popping pills, reheating food.
He wouldn’t be watching them now, though, because he thought they were all dead.
Frank had a narrow window of opportunity in which he could genuinely act without surveillance.
He peeled himself off the floor, and took a moment to try and shake some life back into his limbs. His arm ached with a dull throb, and it felt weak. There was nothing he could do about that, unless—he was, after all, in the med bay. He carefully opened one of the boxes and looked through the strips until he found the dihydrocodeine. He pushed one, then two pills into his hand, because he’d been shot and not just stubbed his toe. He dry-swallowed them down.
Then he tiptoed past the end of the corridor and slid down the ladder to retrieve his spacesuit.
As soon as Brack came back, he’d see what had happened. Or would he? Would he think that Frank had tricked him? Or would he, in his drugged-up, addicted state, think that Frank had risen from the dead and was going to enact his supernatural revenge on his tormen
tor?
He acknowledged that as unlikely. His son had been capable of rational thought: just not rational action. Frank climbed into his suit down on the lower level, powered it up, and climbed swiftly up and into the airlock.
Would pressing the cycle button send an alarm to Comms/Control? Possibly. He opened the hatch and worked the manual lever. The air inside the chamber bled out into the freezing Martian night, and thirty seconds later he was outside with it, on a platform slippery with ice.
Brack had turned off the buggy lights, and the sky was a brighter black than the ground. Stars and planets wheeled, and one of the moons crossed overhead in a swift and silent passage. The habs were undifferentiated blocks against the horizon, and he had to progress slowly, with only memory and touch as his guides.
But they were sure guides. He’d built this base with his own hands, laid it out and ordered its construction. He’d maintained it and modified it. He knew it like the creases in the palm of his hand, and he didn’t stumble once.
The satellite dish was pointing almost straight up. He could see its shape against the stars as it tracked the orbit of the relay station above. He climbed the pylon and felt for the smaller microwave transmitter that connected the base to the ship. He pushed it out of alignment, then climbed down again to open up the little control panel on the side of the dish. The row of green lights burned steady.
He risked a quick dial-up of his suit lights so that he could see what he was attempting to sabotage. They were just trip switches; undoing the damage would take only a moment, but he needed Brack as isolated as he’d been. XO was going to be out of the loop from now on, until he decided what to do. Or he died.
Whichever, XO were going to lose contact with their man, and their Mars base. Their multi-billion dollar investment. Let them worry.
He flicked the switches from green to red, one after another, then closed the panel and killed his lights.
From there, he walked along the side of the yard, past the kitchen and the crew quarters, round the back of the base to the only part of it that was protected by two airlocks: the greenhouse. He manually vented the chamber, entered it and equalized the pressure with the inside.
