No Way

by S. J. Morden

  He sat on the buggy, and waited. All his work was over. Tomorrow would be the start of Phase four, and he was off the clock until then.

  Twenty-eight minutes later, his tablet registered an incoming message.

  “You’ve done so very well, Frank. No one else could have coped like you have, done all the work like you have, kept your composure in the way you have. You’re the very best of people, and it breaks my heart that we’ll never meet. We are go for DV launch. Luisa.”

  The ship was two miles away across the Heights, a barely thumbnail-sized white cone set against the flaring red of a Martian sunset. The colors were deepening towards black as the sun sank lower, and the shadows cast in the airborne dust growing more solid. There, if anywhere, was the beauty in the bleakness.

  He was looking in the direction of the peak of Ceraunius when the ground suddenly shifted under the buggy. His head snapped around, and already a wall of red cloud was rushing towards him. It went through him, and a second, thicker wind was already on its way. But rising above the long-dead world, balanced on a dirty column of churning gray smoke, was the fleck of the ship.

  It drove hard and fast, and as the second storm blanketed him, he heard the boom of the rocket’s ignition.

  The dust cleared. The air crackled with imperfect combustion. A single incandescent flame continued to climb upwards, all detail of what it was propelling lost already. The sound of distant thunder faded, rolling between land and darkening sky.

  Of course, if M2 hadn’t known exactly where MBO was, the ragged smoking finger that pointed downwards in an arc was going to be a big fucking giveaway. It even caught the dying rays of the sun before it slung itself over the horizon, turning for a moment from soot to bronze.

  High winds started to tug at the smoke, pulling it apart, and Frank eventually looked down. Twilight had fallen, before the proper night began. He drove over to the recharging point, and plugged in the buggy for a top-up. He had watts to play with now, and he could leave it charging until the fuel cell registered full.

  His last-thing routine was shot, but he still circumnavigated the base, even if he couldn’t carry out the gross visual checks, and then he entered the cross-hab airlock, cycling it and exiting with his hand on the gun. He turned left, and right, and could see nothing that had moved, that he hadn’t moved himself. It was, since he started leaving all the internal airlock doors open, the only way in and out of the base. Another precautionary habit that he was going to have to unlearn by tomorrow.

  He left the door behind him open, too.

  But yes, he was alone, for now, for the moment. He put the gun down on top of the life support rack and checked the external pressure. It read a solid five psi, and none of the oxygen alarms were ringing. He was OK to exit his suit, and he thumbed his way through the flip-down menu on his front until he reached the right command.

  He crawled backwards out of his suit, hung it up, racked his life support, and unclipped the tablet, wiping the dust from its screen with his forearm. He probably needed to remember to get dressed at some point, too. In Brack’s overalls. He’d sent up his own blood-stained set on the ship. Zeus’s overalls would have drowned him, and no one else’s were remotely large enough.

  But he couldn’t walk around like some kind of bum. He needed to relearn that, too, as well as regaining the power of speech. Part of the reason why he went around just in his long johns most of the time was so that he could get into his suit quickly. With the arrival of the others, he could get back to some kind of normal. Whatever that was. Normal for Mars.

  He deliberately pulled on the overalls. They felt tight around the shoulders, and up against his crotch. Maybe the cloth would loosen up with more wearing.

  The gun went into a pocket, and he collected the scuba gear and his tablet.

  Now, food. Coffee. Everything was in place. All evidence of anyone else on the base had been erased. Except for the gun, and that too would have to go by the morning. He’d bag it, so that the alkaline soil wouldn’t eat it away, and he’d take it outside and bury it. He’d use the cairn that they’d created when they were building the base, moving the loose rocks that might have punctured the sub-floor matting.

  It was a pile five, maybe six feet high, and thin in the reduced gravity. He’d do that. Rebuild the cairn over the top. A marker to show he’d finally, finally left all that shit behind. Tomorrow, he’d be safe. Safer. At least there’d be other people to keep watch for him. He’d never really be safe.

  And tonight, he’d keep that gun close at hand. Just in case.

  11

  [Message file #274-1058 2/7/2049 1437 CAPCOM Ares IV Mission Control to Ares IV “Prairie Rose” Mars Orbit]

  Hawthorn, all systems nominal. Surface conditions are good, and Mars Base One is down there waiting for you.

  You are go for descent. Godspeed.

  [transcript ends]

  Frank got the call ten minutes before. He suited up, and went outside to watch. Watching was all he could do. Was it all the astronauts could do too? Would they fall and have to trust the automatics, or could they pilot themselves down? Even then, there might be nothing they could do to correct their course: if something went wrong, it would happen so very quickly. Whatever happened, Frank was only ever going to be a witness.

  He clipped his tablet to his waist, and checked he had the pouch of suit patches. Then one last look around. What shouldn’t be there? The blue surgical glove. That wasn’t necessary any more, was it? And he really didn’t have a good excuse for it sitting there, perched on top of the life support rack. He picked it up, and pulled at the knot in the wrist, but undoing knots was about as difficult as it was making them while wearing the spacesuit gauntlets.

  In the end, he stretched the thumb out hard enough to create a tiny hole, and then dug his fingers in to widen it. He didn’t quite know what to do with the broken glove now, so he just pushed it into the pouch at his waist.

  The scuba gear could stay where it was. That was explicable. And he was wearing his one-piece, and Brack’s overalls were sitting on a hanger, waiting for him to change into. Slippers too. He’d showered this morning. He’d eaten. He felt OK. He felt he’d done enough.

  That didn’t mean he’d done it all. Was there something he’d left in plain sight, something he’d grown so accustomed to seeing that he didn’t really see it any more, but that would immediately attract the attention of a newcomer—who’d pick it up and want to know what it was? And Frank would unravel.

  He’d been over this, a dozen, a hundred times. There was nothing. He was anxious, and understandably so. Accept it, move on.

  He stepped out of the airlock into the dull light of a Martian morning. Insertion was due shortly after 0800, enough for the shadows to shorten and the frost to boil off. Nothing outside had moved, and even though he touched his bag, he knew that the gun wasn’t there any more, and never would be again. From now on, he could rely on safety in numbers.

  He could do this and go home, and the nightmares of blood and decompression would quieten and he could live a normal life again.

  He had to stop thinking that, too. That was far in the future, and was too much pressure. He’d been on his own too long, and then threatened with the wrong kind of company.

  He needed to concentrate on the mundane, on unplugging the buggy from the power supply and coiling up the stiff, serpentine lead into its container, and kicking the wheels, shaking the frame to make sure nothing dropped off. Changing the wheels—that was a job for two, and now that he had spares, sent or stolen, he was eager to swap out the pitted, leaf-like tires for fresh-from-the-factory ones. Sure, he could have jury-rigged a jack, but so much easier with another pair of hands.

  The fuel cell lit up the display, reliable as ever, and he buckled himself into the seat to wait. The time on his tablet showed 0803, and one new message. He tabbed the app open, and it was Luisa.

  “Welcome to Phase four, Frank. This is your time, now. It really is all up to you. I know h
ow much you want to come home, and honestly, I’m glad it’s you and not Brack. You’ve become much more than a name on the screen these last few months. I hope I have too. Make it happen, Frank. Come home. Luisa. (I’m going to delete this from the server once I know you’ve seen it, and resend an ‘official’ message. But this is how I feel L x)”

  Luisa was starting to take risks on his behalf, and he didn’t know what to think about that. Did he have an ally at XO? And how far might she be prepared to go for him? Could she get messages out, as well as in? That was something to explore, another day. All he knew was that he’d come to rely on her.

  Right now, though, he had one very big thing to worry about, and it was going to take his full attention.

  0804. Soon. So very soon. He tilted himself back to catch as much of the sky as possible.

  There were clouds, high up and thin, like a gathered veil that stretched in folds from east to west, visibly moving as the ephemeral winds chased them away. The far horizons were blocked by Rahe’s rampart walls and the bulk of the volcano, but straight up was where they’d come from.

  0806. Had they already left the transit ship, fired their rockets and started sliding inexorably towards the ground? They’d had nine months in space just getting here. Had they argued? Had they fought? Were they still a team? He hoped so. His own crew, seven entirely mismatched cons, had got on well enough. They hadn’t turned on each other, except at the very end, and even then that was a matter of life and death. His own, mainly. NASA would have picked these people well. They weren’t XO. These were the good guys, right?

  They were going to take him home with them.

  0807. Come on. His gaze flicked to every aberration in his sight, every floater, every roil of cloud. Nothing. Nothing at all. Maybe he should just close his eyes and pray very hard, but he hadn’t done that since he was a kid and it didn’t seem right to do it now. Selfish. Wanting something, and not prepared to do anything for it in return. And in any event, if there was a God, then Frank had pretty much plowed his own furrow for his entire adult life, not looking for salvation from outside. He hadn’t been turned around or come to any great revelation. He was pretty certain this was it. Zeus would have said otherwise, but he wasn’t here and his body was on its way to the sun.

  0809. Seriously, what were they doing up there? What could be keeping them? Maybe something had gone wrong. Something, a problem with any part of the descent vehicle, would mean they’d have to abort. If they could fix it, they could try again. Otherwise, they were stuck up there and he was stuck down here. With only M2 for company. But he still had the MAV. If they were willing to stick around for a few more months, perhaps he could climb on board and join the transit ship in orbit.

  0810. That hadn’t occurred to him before. He knew how long the MAV needed to fuel up enough to take them all back up to orbit, but if it was just him? The payload would be one-seventh of what it had been designed for. He might be able to go now. Did it run fully automatic, or did he need a pilot? Would the astronauts having to abort their landing be the best solution for him? Now he was in a quandary. He didn’t know what he wanted any more.

  0811. Of course, they’d spent all that time in transit awake, and everything was leading up to this moment. They would have checked and double-checked the ship as part of their routine maintenance. Any problems with it would have been discovered, and fixed, months ago. They were in orbit, and they were coming down. Anything else, and he would have been told. Nothing had been left to chance.

  0812. So where were they? Seven minutes, from first contact with the Martian atmosphere to touchdown. That was all. He’d waited months for this moment, and now that it had finally arrived, he was like a child desperate for Christmas. He knew he wanted it. He hadn’t realized quite how much. His heart was banging in his chest like it wanted out.

  0813. There? Was that it? Could he even see it at this distance? What if they’d over- or under-shot? Hundreds, maybe a thousand miles out, and no way of getting to them. He blinked and wished he could scrub at his eyes. No. Nothing. It was just the fans blowing in his face, drying him out.

  0814. Wait. There was something. A light. A flickering, faint light like a match falling. Pulsing. Was that good? All the other deliveries did that too, so it wasn’t unusual, but he squinted at it, trying to ascertain whether this was a normal descent, or whether parts were burning up and breaking off. The light grew, both in size and in brilliance. Brighter than the sun. Bright enough to hurt. Or was that the tightness in his chest, and his inability to breathe?

  0815. Smoke. There was a trail of smoke. Again, normal, but was this sootier? Was it actually on fire? The first rumble of thunder trembled across the amphitheater of the crater, making the sand dance. The smoke thickened, and the glow changed in quality. No longer blazing, but like a charcoal, a red eye.

  0816. The parachutes strung out behind, one, two, three long candles. Then, boom. They opened, taking a great gulp of air each, shivering and clawing at Mars’s thin air. The ground, the walls, growled and complained, and the cinder of the heat shield fell away, a black disk tumbling and spinning, sliding and twisting away and downwards, heading towards the plain to the west of the volcano.

  0817. It was falling so quickly. He remembered what the MAV looked like, coming down. He remembered the momentary fear that it was going to crash into the base, and it hadn’t, and everything had been fine, and he still felt sick. The parachutes were huge, great saucers of orange and white. Then, unexpectedly, they detached, deflated and wheeled away. The dark speck suspended underneath dropped like a stone.

  0818. And lit up. Spears of bright fire pointed downwards, and suddenly the air was roaring, trembling. A shadow moved across the sky, eclipsing the sun and then out again, falling, falling, slowing, and it was there, a physical thing, white and smooth and efficient, slowing down, down, slipping out of sight over the edge of the Heights, on the way to the crater floor. Dust, smoke, and then silence.

  Frank gasped, dragging in so much air, so quickly, the suit struggled to respond. He deliberately placed his hands on his chestplate and timed his breathing. Slowly out. Hold. Slowly back in. Hold. OK, he wasn’t going to faint, not this very moment. The fans cleared his faceplate, and he took a drink of water from his sippy tube.

  They were here. He was trembling with relief. He’d done it. He’d survived. Despite everything, despite XO, despite Mars. Despite himself.

  The dust cloud was slowly collapsing. The grit pattered down, while the finer material kept on going up and thinning as it went. He’d need to sweep the panels clean after one launch and one descent. How prosaic. He waited until he could trust himself to drive, then reached forward to grip the steering controls.

  He squeezed the throttle, and the buggy rolled forward. Had he forgotten anything? Surely he had. Perhaps he should take one last look around…

  No. He’d already done that. He was good to go. He was Brack now. He was playing that part. Brack was going to drive over to meet the astronauts, cool as you like, and pick them up and bring them back to the base, and he was going to be fine. They’d be good people, and he could finally sleep.

  He headed out to the drop-off, passing the fresh scour mark from his own reascending descent ship, black spokes radiating outwards and fading into smudges. He drove across them, and the tires made two cords through the wheel of soot. At the edge of the drop-off, he stopped, ostensibly to judge his route down, but actually to check that the NASA craft had really, genuinely arrived.

  It had. It was there, well past the foot of the delta, almost halfway to the western edge of Beverly Hills, with a long scour mark of its own as it tracked across the crater floor before settling down on four fold-out legs. It looked smaller than his own ship, which made some kind of sense, since this was just to transport the crew from orbit to the ground, not all the way from Earth. A one-shot taxi, nothing more: a squat, blunt bullet.

  The real deal was up in orbit: a now-silent, slumbering spire of a ship. He’d
get there, one day.

  Frank turned the control column and the buggy angled downwards, traversing the slope that would normally lead onto Sunset. This time, though, he was going to take a left, an unfamiliar direction, and it occurred to him just how little exploring he’d done. The relentless focus on building the base, gearing up for self-sufficiency, then survival…

  But of course. XO hadn’t wanted the pristine landscape scarred by multiple tire tracks. Frank was supposed to be on his own, supervising the phantom robots and definitely not having the time to wander around Mars.

  As it was, it looked just how they wanted it. There was so much of the crater, of the Heights, that he’d never seen up close, and yet it had been where he’d lived, worked, and nearly died, for eight months. He’d never even been to the top of the volcano.

  That seemed a shame. If he was going to have stories to tell, he wanted at least some of them to be good. Everything changed from today, though. He’d have the chance to build up some memories he’d want to keep. Starting from now.

  The buggy drifted slightly on the bottom of the slope—rocket-blown dust, nothing more—and he corrected for it. It gave him a jolt, but he handled it instinctively, knowing which way to turn to get the grip back. No danger at all of rolling it in front of the astronauts. He was going to stay frosty, just like his old crew used to tell each other.

  He was down on the crater floor, rolling across the pavement of loose rock and angled slabs, heading towards the NASA ship. He knew it was NASA, because the letters were visible on the side, even at a mile distant. No XO branding, he noted. No sign of anyone climbing out either. He hoped they were all OK inside. The landing had looked flawless. The ship was intact. They were just waiting for him.

  Shouldn’t he be hearing something in his headphones by now? Maybe they were on a different frequency to him. Maybe they hadn’t switched over yet. That was it.