by S. J. Morden
So while XO sorted their shit out, he was going to suit up again, drive out to Long Beach with a trailer and get that airlock. He had enough daylight to manage it, just, and he wasn’t going to leave it out there any longer than he had to. He certainly wasn’t going to be heading out to the plain any time soon.
He was bunkering down. Four weeks. Four weeks to hold out. He could do that, right?
He clipped the tablet to his suit, took the gun and the bullets out of his pockets and put them separately but together in his pouch bag, loaded up a fresh life support, and clambered in through the back hatch.
His spacesuit looked as tired as he felt. How many miles did these things have to have on the clock before they wore out? He could very well ask the same question of himself. Fifty-two. He was fifty-two years old and he was on Mars.
And his son was on Earth. Focus, Frank. Focus.
He cycled the airlock, and wondered if he was being watched, even now.
The first buggy was still recharging. It’d take hours for the electricity to strip the water in the fuel cell back into its component gases. He had two vehicles, though. Was that one advantage he had over the others? Maybe not. If they had one, they probably had their second one too, even if they didn’t have the power to recharge both simultaneously.
He swapped the trailer over, and drove out to the drop-off, pausing to stare into the distance, along the length of Rahe, trying as best he could to see if there was anything moving down there. It always came down to the amount of dust in the air. Currently, visibility was some fifteen or twenty miles, which was good, but still not enough to see detail at the far end of the crater. He could follow the line of Beverly Hills, but they became nothing but shapes carved into the late afternoon, and the crater wall was a hazy, rosy glow, bright and undifferentiated.
Whatever he thought he saw, he still had to get the airlock back. He drove down the drop-off and onto Sunset.
Worst-case scenario: XO had planned another mission, from the start, in case Phase three didn’t work out. They were primed to step in and take over if it went wrong, or something happened to Brack.
That didn’t make much sense, because the whole thing about replacing robots with cons was because cons were cheaper, more reliable and ultimately disposable. Putting a whole other parallel mission in place was a ridiculously expensive piece of overkill. They’d have better spent the money making sure that the base actually got built.
Best-case scenario? Frank struggled with this. He couldn’t think of a good reason for any other XO mission to Mars. Maybe they did it because they could. Maybe it was as badly run and poorly resourced as his own. Maybe it was so far off course that it had landed in the wrong hemisphere, and out of the whole of Mars to aim at, only accidentally landed close by. Maybe it was crewed entirely by decent, competent people who wouldn’t dream of harming a hair on his head, and he really ought to go and help them out with food and equipment.
What was he going to do, if Luisa asked him to do that, to be the good neighbor? That man had looked hungry, so very hungry.
Back to the worst case again—she’d tell him to load up with spare food, go over, and he’d never come back because someone there would know what Brack looked like and would know it wasn’t him.
OK, so he’d thought of something even worse. What if they had standing orders to kill Brack? That would make perfect, awful sense. Hire a stone-cold killer to see Phase two through and then get rid of him, too. Brack, with his addictions and his psychoses, was going to unravel in the company of real people, and the last thing that XO wanted or needed was a madman running amok in a thin-skinned hab full of expensive and popular astronauts. Much better to replace him with someone who was technically competent and not a murderer.
Brack was going to be the last victim. And Frank was now Brack.
10
[Message file #103025 12/10/2048 2206 MBO Rahe Crater to MBO Mission Control]
Luisa, this is my absolute bottom line. XO can take it or leave it.
I know XO planned this. The cargo drops happened in the same area the crew’s ship was supposed to land. XO deliberately put another base right next to MBO. I’ve got my reasons for thinking that’s a bad thing for me.
I don’t trust XO when you tell me that M2 has clear instructions to leave MBO alone, and neither do I think they’re going to lie down quietly and die. They know I’m here, and they know MBO has everything they need.
You say no one can talk to M2 because of the comms issue. But I’m not going to contact them either. I think XO are lying about pretty much everything, and I’m not going to risk my life and my chance of getting back to Earth over this. They put me here in this position. So they have to wear the consequences. If M2 stay their side of the mountain, then fine. I won’t have to say anything to NASA about this “classified mission”. I don’t actually give a shit about who gets to play on Mars, but if XO want it kept secret as a condition of my return, then OK.
But you have to understand that I’ve got about as much control over M2 as you do now. If one of the NASA guys spots them because M2 goes off the reservation, then there’s nothing I can do about that. It’s XO’s problem, not mine. If they bust their cover, no one can blame me.
Like I said. Take it or leave it. NASA are here in just over two months.
[message ends]
He still had to move the bodies into the ship. He hadn’t before. He’d not done it so that he didn’t have to see them every time he took a new batch of stuff over. Though that wasn’t actually true: he did see them every time, because their shrouds were clearly visible under the rocket cone at the base of the descent ship, and they didn’t fall out of sight until he was at the bottom of the steps leading up to the airlock.
Now he’d run out of excuses. They were literally the last item on his list, and he’d ticked off everything else. No, that wasn’t true either, though there was a very good reason for that.
He drove the short distance to the landing spot. It was his eight-month anniversary on Mars—February 6th. Eight months since he’d been woken up by Alice. Eight months since he’d lost both her and Marcy. Then, five months in, Zeus, Dee, Declan, Zero. Finally, Brack.
Almost three months since he thought he was totally alone.
And eight weeks since he’d discovered XO had put another mission on Mars, just over the hill. Strange that it had been at that exact moment that the ghosts of his dead crewmates had stopped appearing to him. No manifestations since. It would probably scare him to death, thinking it was someone from M2, so he’d been saved that at least.
Even so, Frank was ragged. He snatched at sleep and usually missed, and when he did finally catch it, he’d wake up at the slightest sound, real or imagined. It had been bad enough before, with the nightmares and flashbacks. Now it was concretized: the threats he dreamed about were real. The base being invaded. Him being dragged outside. Held down while his suit was opened up. Because they wouldn’t want to damage XO property, would they? On Mars, resources counted more than the people did. Certainly more than a bunch of cons did.
The last few sols had simply blurred together. He no longer knew when he was awake. Nervous energy was the only thing carrying him through. At some point he was going to crash, and crash hard. But not today. He couldn’t do that today.
He climbed down from the buggy, and looked around, checking that no one had interfered with the ship—a strip of parachute material caught carelessly in the outer airlock door was his telltale. It was still there. There were no unexplained tracks, no bootprints that weren’t his. Time and wind had eroded what lay beyond the ship, out towards the drop-off, into broad, dark smudges, like marks of half-scrubbed pencil lines.
Nothing fresh. Nothing to indicate that M2 had been anywhere near him. That was good, and still he worried. Every day. And especially now. He’d done all of the work. MBO was… not spotless, but it was clean. It had a lived-in look. The floor panels were scuffed where he’d scrubbed them, and the sub-floor voids scratched and sh
iny after chipping the dried blood out from the framework and utilities. The med bay was orderly once more, and the consulting room empty of everything including the USMC cap that Brack had brought along.
It had been the only personal item from Earth that had made it onto the surface of Mars. The cons’ effects—including Frank’s few books and letters—had vanished. He had no idea where. And the hat had to go, along with all the other junk—tablets, overalls, spacesuits, hair from the drains and skin in the filters—into the heart of the sun.
His instructions were to just pile it all up inside. He didn’t have to worry about tying it down or stop it from banging into the instrument panels. Those wouldn’t do anything once XO had taken remote command of the vessel.
He was going to put half an hour on a timer. That was as long as he spent at any one time inside the ship. Not quite long enough for the ship to register that he’d activated the airlock, send a message to Earth, and for XO to trap him inside and take him on a one-way trip into space. Of course, they’d already done that once, but being shot into a star would be a qualitatively different trip.
Maybe they wouldn’t do that. Maybe they’d stick to their agreement. But he’d be stupid to bet his life on it, any further than he already had to. When he lay down to sleep, it was clutching a semi-inflated rubber glove, with scuba gear and his spacesuit within touching distance.
And the gun by his side.
He’d decided that he was going to keep it. XO would never know, one way or the other. He’d brought the metal case over along with the rest of Brack’s effects, dumped it in plain sight of the ship-board cameras, but the gun itself was currently in the same pouch at his waist as his suit patches.
He hadn’t thought so far ahead as to what to do with it when the NASA astronauts turned up. Bury it outside, maybe, as keeping it anywhere on the base would mean he’d always be worried it’d be discovered. And trying to explain his possession of a modified automatic pistol would unravel any lie he might come up with.
He looked up at the ship. He wasn’t certain how he’d got there. The buggy was behind him. How else?
Come on, Frank. Keep it together. Just a little longer.
He ducked under the hull of the ship and took hold of the first of the shrouds. He pulled it out, watching how the dust that had accumulated in the folds of the cloth dribbled out into the drag lines. Who was he moving? The twisted package was quite slim, no real bulk to it, and nothing to suggest a spacesuit inside. Zero, then.
He laid him out at the bottom of the steps, and went back for Brack, or Declan. Then again for Declan, or Brack. Both were still in their suits, both with shattered faceplates. Brack’s life support had ended up broken. Ended up: Frank had driven an oxygen cylinder into it, repeatedly, like a battering ram, until he’d rendered it inoperable. Declan’s should be fine. But he really didn’t have the heart to unwrap one, then the other when he inevitably unwrapped the wrong one first, and remove the life support pack.
It was going with the ship, and that was that.
He activated the timer on his tablet, and thumbed the airlock open. He bounced Zero up the steps and inside, then cycled them through. When the inner door opened, he was again confronted by the sheer amount of trash that they’d managed to generate. Brack, specifically, had contributed to much of that, as he slowly but surely lost himself in addiction.
He pulled Zero through the debris, and laid him down near the inactive computer console. He wanted to stand and think about what he was doing, about what he had agreed to do. But the clock was ticking. He turned and went back for the next, and then the next.
Seven bodies. Four upstairs in their sleep tanks, but most definitely dead. Three downstairs, wrapped in their black and white shrouds. His crew.
He thought about sleep. He thought about not having to worry about M2. Not having to worry about being suffocated or stabbed. Not having to worry about every little aspect of the base.
He could finally have some time off. A holiday. He used to look forward to vacations, road trips to various far-flung places, piling into the car and marking their progress on the map. When was the last one? Maybe ten years ago? Twelve? Yellowstone? Sure, that was it. Mike had been fourteen, fifteen, sliding from wonder to cynicism, but the geysers had still taken his breath away.
The alarm on his tablet sounded. Time to stop daydreaming and get the hell out. He cycled the airlock through and bundled himself outside, breathing hard. It was a stupid thing to do, to risk getting caught now. He stumbled as far as the buggy, and leaned against one of the huge wheels to steady himself.
Done it. Escaped. The sun was halfway to the horizon, so it wouldn’t be long now. Everything was finished, and he supposed if XO was going to make its move, it’d be now, when he’d done all the hard work and they could just replace him. Today, tonight, and in the morning. Then the next descent ship would come down, and bring relief.
He was so very tired.
But he drove to the drop-off that overlooked Sunset Boulevard and stared out across the crater. Rahe was as empty and still as ever, a huge, deep oval basin with ramparts of broken rock and a central spine of ragged hills. Later craters pocked the floor like afterthoughts.
No telltale dust clouds coming towards him across the shadowed floor of Rahe. No advancing buggies with astronauts hanging off the sides. He supposed that if they were going to try and get to him, and they were somewhere on the south side of Ceraunius, they’d probably try to come over the top. He’d thought of setting up some kind of early warning, but he had no technical expertise to help him. He wondered about all the things he might do, involving automatic cameras, or vibration sensors, or physical tripwires, and he didn’t know where to even start.
It was just another day when he seemed to have got away with it. Relying on XO’s word was… wearing. Since that moment on the flanks of the volcano, he’d not seen anything of M2. He wondered why. Perhaps they lacked the capacity to get to him after all, with broken buggies or the inability to recharge them. Perhaps they’d already succumbed to hunger, to thirst, to asphyxiation, and their base, what they had of it, what Frank hadn’t taken, was derelict. A tomb.
Perhaps it was just that they didn’t know where he was. Or that they did, and they were biding their time, eking out their resources until the hard work was done.
He drove slowly back to the base via the MAV.
The MAV still seemed to be doing its thing. Extracting carbon dioxide, splitting it up, and sequestering the products in separate tanks. It was largely still: every so often the panels turned a few degrees to better face the weak sun, and he knew that at sunrise and sunset the vents would close and the panels rotate all the way back to their starting positions, ready to pick up the first light of dawn.
The NASA astronauts were already up there, above him. Packing and preparing to fall the last few miles from the transit ship down to Mars. Putting one machine to sleep, and waking up another. Those last few miles that had been described as seven minutes of terror on one of the training videos he’d seen, back on Earth and a lifetime ago.
What if they died on the way? After all that time—awake, for all of it—and all that distance, only to burn up in the atmosphere and then plow into the frozen red ground fast enough to leave nothing but a carbon-black smear. There was nothing Frank could do about that. If they fell too fast or too far away, he wouldn’t be able to help them, only be a witness to what was happening. And then radio home.
The only preparation that was now useful would be to make sure he charged up the buggies and synced his tablet, and be ready. He knew what was required of him. Be Brack.
He craned his head back, and looked towards the zenith. They weren’t going to die. He wasn’t going to die either. They were going to live, and take him home with them, and he wouldn’t have to be scared all the time any more. It was going to be OK. They would call him Lance Brack, and he’d have to wear the cloak of a different murderer for a while—but that was OK too, because Franklin Ki
ttridge knew what that felt like, knew what the weight was around his shoulders, knew how to straighten up his back under the load.
One more sleep. One more attempt at sleep. There were drugs he could use, and never had before. He’d managed to hold back until now: partly through fear—both of what it might do to him, and what could happen while he was under—and partly through an iron rod of stubbornness that ran through him.
He was better than that. Everyone was better than that, he thought. No one needed that shit to help them cope or do normal stuff like sleep. In his more lucid moments, he acknowledged his approach was killing him, but he wasn’t going to give in. Not now.
One more night. One more morning.
The closer it got, the more apprehensive he grew. He wasn’t in control of this, and could never be: all he had was the illusion of control, pretending to set his own agenda and write his job list as if he was the site foreman. He wasn’t the boss. XO were. NASA were. He was just working off their timesheets.
Like now. He drove south across the Heights to the base, looking at the collection of fragile off-white tubes not as something close to a miracle, but as home. He’d made it. He’d built his own houses several times through his life. This was no different, except it was on another planet.
He parked up, facing the descent ship, and checked his air. He had easily a couple of hours left, which was more than enough. He pulled his tablet into his lap—a tablet that had been purged of any incriminating data: no documents, no files, no past messages between here and Earth—opened up the message app, and started typing.
“Phase 3 complete”, he wrote. And it almost wasn’t a lie. He still had the gun, and it wasn’t going anywhere.
He’d said that he’d tell them when he’d done—that illusion-of-control thing again—but they were going to launch anyway, no matter if he’d carried out his oft-repeated threat to string Brack up in a makeshift gibbet on the walls overlooking MBO. It would be up to him to explain that, and he didn’t have the emotional energy to even try. He didn’t have energy left for much at all.
