by S. J. Morden
It felt good to be doing something. To be planning for the future. To be even thinking that he might have a future. Dried herbs. He sniffed his fingers and caught the complex aromas the bruised leaves gave off.
He flooded the chamber with air again, and examined the contents of the tray. When he held up a basil leaf to the sharp LED lighting that hung low over the plants, he could see the individual veins. He crumbled it between his fingers. It shattered like thin glass and turned into fragments, almost dust. Possibly a bit too small: again, some preparation might have been necessary, chopping the leaves before drying them out. But he could just save the leaves whole, bag them up and use them that way.
Franklin Kittridge, gourmet chef.
It was almost as if he’d forgotten for a moment how much trouble he was in. He allowed himself a tight smile, and went through the racks again, turning the lights off he didn’t need, the pumps, the syringe drivers, to give his power budget a boost. He checked his tablet, and saw that he’d saved over a quarter of a kilowatt. That wasn’t bad at all.
He went back around and looked at the cereals. He didn’t know how to tell whether they were ripe or not, so he hit the books again.
“Grains should be firm, but not brittle.” He crouched beside what he’d previously identified as rice. The short stems were heavy with blunt heads, curved over between the yellow-green blade-like leaves. “Eighty to eighty-five per cent of the grains should be yellow-colored.” OK, they were pretty much all a light brown. That was promising. He teased one of the grains out and into his hand.
He rubbed it between his palms to dehusk it, and lightly blew away the chaff. It looked like a grain of rice. Again, the surprise was real, and he frowned at his own ignorance. Of course it did. Where the hell did he think rice came from if not from an actual rice plant?
No point in beating himself up about that, or anything else. He had expertise in other areas, and he got his groceries from the store like everyone else. Most people wouldn’t know how a cinder block got made, either.
He collected another empty tray, and plucked—there should be some snippers around, but Zero appeared to have hidden those—the seed heads one by one until he’d got them all. There were a lot. Enough to eat. Enough to eat and still have plenty over to replant.
The how-to told him he now had to thresh the rice, to separate all the grains from the husks, and do this as soon after harvest as possible. Threshing. He hoped that he’d have instructions for that too, because peeling each grain individually was going to take a while.
And maybe he should have read that section first, because it turned out he should have picked the rice at the bottom of the stem, not the top. It was a rookie error, not one he was likely to make twice, but now he had nothing to hold on to to beat the seed head against anything. Some sort of sealable container with a lid would probably have to do, shake it until… something happened. It wasn’t magic. People had been doing this for thousands of years.
He’d just be the first person doing it on another planet.
Ping.
He’d left the tablet on the chair. He picked it up and saw what they’d written this time.
“Franklin. OK, to be honest, we’re a little surprised here, and we’d like some time to work out what to do. We don’t have the authority to make these kinds of decisions on our own, so we need to go and talk to some people who can help us on a way forward. It’s probably going to take a few hours to get everyone together in the same room, and a few more hours after that to be able to discuss your situation and get back to you.
“Nothing is going to happen, good or bad, in that time. You’ve probably wondered if we can remotely operate some of the basic systems at the base, on a considerable time lag. We can, but you can always override that locally. In any event, no one will be interfering with the base systems at all, and you have my word on that. Please don’t do anything that would jeopardize the integrity of the base, or your personal safety. If anything happens to either, it’ll mean that any offer we might be able to make to you based on current circumstances will be null and void, and we’ll all have to go back to the drawing board. Hold tight, and expect something in maybe four-five hours time, but definitely by the end of the sol. Luisa, XO MBO Mission Control.”
He read it, and read it again. It seemed… refreshingly honest. He had no idea who this Luisa was, whether he’d met her.
Whatever, she was right—there wasn’t anything they could do to him at this distance that didn’t give him enough time to destroy the base before he succumbed. There was a measure of realism in her comments that indicated that at least someone was taking him seriously. Whether the suits would, was a different matter entirely, but even they had to know he meant business.
Frank felt in his pocket for the tied-off rubber glove. It wasn’t inflating, and it was fine. He wondered if he should always have the scuba gear nearby in case they tried something sneaky like alter the gas mix. He needed to remember that the XO people at the other end of his message stream had been surprised he was still alive, and that he should on no account trust them.
He’d get a response by the end of the day. He could only imagine the flurry of activity, the panic and argument that would blow up as his message reverberated up and down the XO command structure.
In the end, they’d deal. They’d try to weasel out later on, but they’d deal for now, and Frank would just have to stay a step ahead.
5
[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 11/13/2048, transcribed from paper-only copy]
I don’t often get emotional, because emotions have no place in business. But I admit today to feeling anger, at being so badly let down. Everything is in the balance. Everything. I’m heading down there now, to personally chair the meeting. There will be no reputational damage to either XO, or myself. None.
Any other outcome is unacceptable.
[transcript ends]
Frank now inhabited the gray area between collaborator and victim. He had his agreement. He’d forced XO’s hand, and in turn they’d forced his. He wasn’t a lawyer, and he’d refused to sign or assent to any kind of contract—they’d got him once before like that, sitting in an interview room in San Quentin—and he wasn’t going to fall for it again. What he had was an understanding, a spit-and-handshake. Old-school trust, even where there was none.
Frank would carry out Phase three. He’d clean up the base. He’d prepare for the NASA mission. He’d answer to the name “Brack”. In return, XO would clear the path for him to return home. They’d get his sentence commuted. They’d give him enough money to start afresh. And they’d keep on paying a sum, every year, to tie them to each other in perpetuity.
It wasn’t enforceable in any way, except that the penalties for defaulting were unthinkable. It was literally their lives on the line. Frank’s for sure. The unwitting NASA astronauts’ too. And if any of this got in front of a grand jury, there’d be a whole bunch of XO people ratting each other out for a deal. It was in everybody’s best interest to see this to the bitter end.
On Frank’s part, he was under no illusion that his troubles would be over when he got back to Earth. A company that could base their entire business model around murder were no better than organized crime, and they could come for him at any point. And even if Frank went to the press, or the Feds, then… it was going to get complicated. He was a convicted murderer with a few new scars and a tin-foil hat story about how he got to Mars. The NASA crew could corroborate some of the details, but nothing of what happened before they arrived on the red planet.
He knew he’d be on the clock. He knew what he wanted to do with that time. Find his boy. Give him a hug. Tell him that he loved him and was proud of him whatever. Apologize to Jacqui for what he’d done. That shit had gone down without her knowledge or her assent. The kid he’d shot’s family? Maybe not. He was sorry, but it was unlikely they’d want to hear from him, let alone see him.
After that? Fuck XO. Let them come. He’d be
pretty much done by that point. He knew he was never going to make old bones. Oh, he could lead them on a merry dance, and maybe they’d give up first, and leave him alone, or maybe he’d give up and let them find him. That bridge needed to be crossed at some point.
For now, he had a deal. And that deal started with driving three dead bodies over to the ship.
In their black-and-white parachute shrouds, they’d been stiff like boards. Easy, then, especially now they behaved more like luggage than corpses, to lever them upright and push them onto the open latticework of a trailer, then hitch that up to the back of one of the buggies. Each one went lengthways, and he’d fastened them down with ratchet straps from the cargo cylinders.
He unplugged the fuel cell from the base power supply. The cold had made the cable stiff and unyielding, and it wasn’t going back into its drum container. He dropped the connector inside under the lid and would finish coiling it up when he’d returned and the air was warmer.
Frank set off deliberately slowly across the river delta Dee had christened the Heights. The buggy’s wheel plates would be brittle, and he hadn’t worked out a way to replace any of them yet: repairing a wheel, out in the middle of nowhere, on his own, wasn’t something he wanted to do. He was going to have to be more cautious from now on. No more joy-rides up the Santa Clara.
The journey was barely two miles, but it still took a quarter of an hour. The morning fog had burned off, leaving the cold, hard ground with long shadows from the rough fist-sized rocks that littered the surface. Each shadow twinkled white, a frost-pocket that would soon evaporate away, but dust was now rising from the turning wheels.
The rising sun illuminated the horizon far more brightly than the sky above; the wind blew the dust up into the air where it caught the light. The zenith was still nearly black. Between, the typical pinkish blue was smudged with ribbons of high cloud that seemed to chase towards the night.
It could be called beautiful and perhaps, in the right company, it might be. Right now, though, he knew how lethal Mars could be, even without someone actively trying to kill him. To him, it was a barren wasteland that was indifferent as to whether he lived or died. One mistake, and it’d all be over.
The ship they’d landed in was a bullet-shaped white cone that sat off the Martian surface using four retractable legs. Its off-white color had slowly stained red, and sand, blown by the ephemeral winds, had mounted up against the dinner-plate-shaped feet, burying them completely. It already looked part of the landscape, and Frank was used to seeing it there, either as a small pearl in the distance, or as a landmark as he drove past.
Only once recently had he had cause to stop and go in. That had… ended badly. He’d found the floor swamped with empty painkiller packets and used food containers. He’d found four dead people in the sleep pods. It had been, ironically, his wake-up call that all was not well with Brack.
He let go of the throttle on the little steering wheel mounted on the controls, and the buggy coasted to a halt opposite the steps to the ship’s airlock. He jumped down to the surface. The gravity made it seem like he was flying.
Under the ship was a bare area that had been scoured clean down to the bedrock by the landing rockets. It had only slowly been reclaimed by the dust. Frank pulled the bodies off the trailer one by one, and laid them out beneath the downward-flaring nozzle, then retreated again. He’d put them inside only when it was time for the ship to leave, carrying its cargo of evidence. Because rot and decay, that was still going to happen, right?
He climbed up the steps to the airlock, wondered if it was going to cycle, because it was XO’s ship and they could still probably control it remotely. But the lights changed and the door opened automatically. If XO really did control the ship, what could they do to him? Nothing in the twenty or so minutes it took for a signal to reach Earth and a command to come back. He ought to make that a rule, not to spend any longer than that inside the ship. Though XO probably had other things to worry about right now.
He entered the airlock and cycled it through again. The outer door slid shut, and slowly sound returned.
Inside was as he’d left it. Of course it was. There was no one but him who could have moved anything. And he didn’t really believe there were the ghosts of his dead crewmates walking around: that was just a coping mechanism, along with the dreams of knives and asphyxia and standing naked to the Martian day, screaming as his life’s water boiled out of him. OK, not dreams. Flashbacks. He blinked them away.
The floor was still covered in trash. Brack’s sleeping mat was still stretched out on the storey above, and beyond that, on the third level, the sleep pods containing four corpses. There were lockers he probably needed to check, see what supplies were still usable, but not today. He wasn’t even sure why he’d come inside. Was it to confirm to himself that he really was alone?
Probably.
Lights burned on the consoles, red, amber and green. Blue lights for power. Some were flashing, but he knew better than to touch them. Flipping switches might well cause him more problems than he already had. Why add to them unnecessarily? The base was sufficient for his immediate needs.
There was still something strange—eerie, even—about this abandoned vessel turned into a morgue. It had brought eight people to Mars. One was left. And he didn’t need it any more. It was part of his past, not his future, however that turned out and however long it might be. It was a monument. It might as well be made of granite.
He cycled the airlock and felt his suit grow stiff as the air pumped away. He checked his read-out to make sure he had plenty of air and power. Then he opened the outer door, and there was Mars again. Still cold, still lifeless, still red.
While he was here with the trailer, he might as well collect one of the four cargo containers which had all the NASA equipment inside, that Brack had parked at the bottom of the drop-off. They had to come up sometime, and now was as good a time as any. He could stick them all in the boneyard outside the base and then transfer stuff, a few boxes at a time, each time he went back through the airlock. Otherwise, he’d have a week of nothing but lifting and carrying, and continually running the airlock pumps, which was going to exhaust both him and the base’s batteries. He wasn’t going to be as diligent as Declan at keeping the panels clean; he had enough power for normal circumstances, but repeatedly cycling the airlock? That would quickly leave him in the dark.
It could even kill him. Better not do that.
He hadn’t been down to the crater floor for a while. The last time had been early on in that long night, the one he was trying to forget but couldn’t. He drove the slope carefully, the empty trailer bouncing and slewing around behind him as it slipped unweighted on the loose sand. Ideally, he’d have enough cable on the winch drum to park up at the top and just pull the cylinders towards him, but the drop was a lot more than a hundred and fifty feet.
Marcy had taught him how to reverse the trailer into position. She’d been the first to die. Not an accident, but such was the situation at the time, Frank didn’t know that it would have mattered if he’d been the one with the “faulty” CO2 scrubber. The others would have carried on without him, just in the same way that they carried on without Marcy. By her dying, there’d been one less mouth to feed, one pair of lungs fewer to breathe the air.
She’d been culled, and Alice after her, so that the rest of them would live long enough to build the base. Goddammit, that was brutal. And these were the people he’d just made a bargain with.
“The devil,” said Zeus. “You did it, Frank. I told you not to.”
Zeus was in his suit, but that didn’t stop the smoke from boiling out of him, swirling in his faceplate like clouds.
“Not now, Zeus. Really, not now.”
Rather than look at him, Frank unhooked Brack’s tablet from his waist loop and opened it up to check the manifests of the cylinders. Maybe when he’d done, Zeus would have gone.
The map popped open, and there were the four white crosses down wher
e he expected them. But what the hell was this? The hinterland, the immediate parts of the Tharsis plain from where he’d retrieved the cylinders to build the MBO, were dotted with crosses too.
OK, it was an older version of the map. Brack hadn’t refreshed it for months. All those cargo drops Frank and the others had collected were still marked in their original positions.
No, that wasn’t right. Those were all there, in the boneyard, a bright crowding of crosses that almost obscured the base itself. He refreshed the map anyway, doing a hard reset. The map cleared, and then the crosses all reappeared, inexorably, one by one.
Where had they come from?
Scratch that. They’d come from Earth. Of course they had.
These were XO deliveries. They showed up on his—Brack’s—system, but not on Frank’s own. He knew that if he touched the cross, it’d give him an overview of the inventory. He touched the nearest one to him, which lay a few miles south of the far end of Rahe.
Solar farm.
“Goddammit. Look at this.” He turned and held the tablet out for Zeus to see, but he’d long since disappeared. Then Frank realized what he’d done, and sheepishly turned back.
Spares. They were his spares, dotted about the plain, even more scattershot than the first set of hab components had been. If the map was accurate, some of those were going to be utterly unreachable by a one-man operation.
How long had they been sitting there on the Martian surface? Frank had no way of knowing, but there’d been plenty of activity in the sky above the base for the last few months. Brack had warned them off “space piracy”, but he’d known they were meant for the base all along, and that he’d be going to get them as part of Phase three.
The NASA kit could wait. He was going for a power up. He was tired of having to squeak by. Even though Declan had been a complete pain in the ass about his precious watts, he’d kept them all alive throughout the build and beyond. These new panels had arrived too late for him to enjoy the sudden abundance, but he could refer to them as the Declan Murray Memorial Solar Farm, and see if XO bit.
