by S. J. Morden
“You’re right,” said Jim. He threw his hands into the air. “I am a jerk. I’m going to make myself scarce, have a shower, and do some planning.”
He gathered up his towel, gave the bench seat a perfunctory wipe-down, and headed in the direction of the cans.
Frank watched him go, and shook his head. “That was…”
“Weird?” offered Lucy. “I need to explain. When they were balancing out the crews, human factors decided what we really needed was a social disruptor. Someone who’s not just smart in their own field and dedicated to the overall success of the mission—we’re all that—but a joker in the pack. The grit in the oyster. Whichever metaphor you want to choose. It means that Jim can be a monumental pain in the ass, but we actually do need him to behave like that to function normally as a community. Yes, he has a point about how someone who’s able to work in almost total isolation for eight months is not necessarily going to easily integrate into a team, but we all knew that and wanted you to move at your own pace, what you felt comfortable with. You’re a loner. We get that.”
Frank had a sudden urge to start screaming the truth to her. To yell at her, “That’s not how it was!” He had had a team, and XO had killed them all. So strong was the feeling that he had to close his eyes and swallow hard and breathe slowly.
“You want the extra hab up on the volcano?” he said eventually.
“Yes. Please.”
“When do you want it by?”
“How long will it take for you to train us?”
Frank had a bunch of cons doing it competently within a couple of sessions. “How quick are your crew?”
She laughed. Not unkindly, just surprised by the question. “I guess they’re OK.”
“If you want to schedule a couple of hours tomorrow, I can walk you all through it, see how you are at the end of it. Then we can head up the Santa Clara whenever you like. Three hours to build it, then it needs inflating and fitting out. It doesn’t have to be done in a day: once it’s up, you can take your time.”
“You put in a lot of suit time, Lance.”
“It’s how things get done.”
“So you don’t think about how dangerous it is?”
Of course he didn’t. If he did, he wouldn’t put himself in the position where the only thing between him and certain, almost instant, death was the thickness of a faceplate.
“I’ve got other things to think about.”
She approved of that answer. She was, after all, the pilot that landed the ship when it looked certain it was going to crash.
“I’ll schedule two hours of dirtside training from ten hundred tomorrow. If you think we’re ready to go after that, then I’ll clear a day later in the week. Otherwise, I’ll put us in for more training. You’re OK with ordering us around?”
“If you do what I tell you, sure.”
“We will. You have my guarantee.”
Lucy reminded him a little of Alice: competent, direct, emotionless, honest. Just a lot less murdery. He could certainly work with her. He turned to leave, then turned back. Something had been bothering him for a while. He’d caught the tail-ends of conversations and veiled references, but he’d never got the full story. And he’d worried about its implications ever since.
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Just how close were you all to crashing?”
She hesitated, and that told Frank all he needed to know.
“You’re OK. You don’t have to answer.” The corner of his mouth twisted briefly upwards. “Commercially sensitive, right?”
Lucy pressed her hands together until her joints went white. “You can, technically, control the MAV from Mission Control. It’s not like they don’t know the position of the Prairie Rose—that’s our transit ship—at any given moment, and though it might take a few more orbits for them to coordinate the docking procedure due to the time delay on the telemetry, they’re good at what they do. They’d have got you home.”
“Even if you’d all died?”
“There’s another crew in training, due to launch mid 2049, arrive nine months later. You’d be over two years alone by that point. You’d be practically a Martian by then.”
“The King of Mars,” he said.
“You’ve thought about all of this before. Of course you have.” She sprung her hands wide. “Not much else to think about but what can go wrong. The facts are, the training kicked in, I did manage to land the ship, we didn’t die. Give me one of a hundred different scenarios and I’d still have landed the ship. Because I’d trained for them all. All I’ve done for five years is train for those seven minutes. They’ll let me fly the MAV, but as previously explained, they don’t need me to fly the MAV.”
“OK.”
“This isn’t false modesty. There’d be no point in me being here, being on this crew, if I couldn’t get the Hawthorn down. And if you ask me when we leave Mars whether or not it was worth hauling my ass across the solar system for those seven minutes, I’m going to point to all the science we’ve done, and all the discoveries we’ve made. I’ve been a pilot since I was fifteen, and I’ve never been lucky once. All I did was my job.”
“So you don’t take compliments?”
“That has been noted before.” She gave a rueful smile. “What’s more important? That I did a good job, or that someone noticed I did a good job?”
“You wouldn’t be here if no one had noticed.”
“Same for you.”
It was Frank’s turn to semi-grimace. “Our routes here were… different.”
“But you’re on Mars. The best of the best. And if you don’t mind me saying, older than I anticipated. You must have beaten a whole bunch of people younger than you to get here.”
That wasn’t a lie. The Supermax had to be full of cons who’d flunked out of the program, for one reason or another. And then there were seven bodies on their way to the sun, with only Alice being older than him when she died.
“Something like that.”
“You can’t talk about XO’s selection process, and I’m not going there,” she said. “But none of us are here because we’re making up the numbers. Including you. Including me. Including even Jim.”
“I get it.” Compared with his own team of farm horses ready for the glue factory, these guys were all pure-blood thoroughbreds, highly strung and valuable. The difference was stark, and Frank was only just beginning to appreciate what it meant. “Thanks for your time.”
“Thank you for yours. You asked, and I wanted to explain. I didn’t do anything special, and I don’t want anyone to feel grateful.”
“You can’t stop them, though, can you?”
“No. I suppose I can’t.” She nodded down at his waistband. “What do you call those?”
Frank, puzzled, looked down at the items on his belt. He finally held up the nut runner. “This?”
“Yes, that. The electric torque wrench,” she said, giving it its proper name.
“A nut runner.”
“And that’s not the only one.”
“I got eight.”
“Why’ve you got eight?”
What would be a good answer here? Why indeed, if he was the only person on Mars, would he have eight of anything?
“For times like this,” he said, and thinking, damn, that’s not bad.
Lucy seemed to accept that. Why shouldn’t she? It made perfect sense, and she seemed more embarrassed at not coming to that conclusion herself than she’d ever shown when stating baldly how brilliant a pilot she was.
“Of course. Evening meal at nineteen thirty, if you want to join us and you’re always welcome to. Otherwise, ten hundred hours tomorrow.”
“I’ll be there.” But it wasn’t like he could be anywhere else.
16
From: Miguel Averado
To: Mark Bernaberg
Date: Sun, Feb 21 2049 10:15:59 -0300
Subject: HiRISE2
Hola, Mark.
Just the usual request for HiRISE2 images, this time showing 22 39 59 N, 97 41 25 W. If there’s any chance of swinging over that area in the next week or so, I’d be very grateful. There seems to be some recent, if not ongoing, geologic activity.
I’ll follow this up with a formal submission: it’s the weekend but I know you’re working! Raw data will be fine.
Mig
Frank kept on working in the greenhouse. He decided that it wasn’t so much the plants, the shades of green in all their varieties, or the textures of the leaves that were organic and not synthetic. It was the water: the sound of it, the smell of it, the feel of it in his lungs and against his skin.
The individually dripping trays merged together to make a liquid static, like that of a river, like that of the river he played next to when he was a kid. And when he went downstairs to the lower level, where the tilapia tanks were, there were additional textures to the soundscape: the bubble of oxygenators and the wet slap of a fish breaking the surface of their tank. It was soothing, arrhythmic, natural, in an environment that was entirely artificial and moved to a mechanical beat.
The rest of the base had a slightly astringent tang on the tongue that he’d got so used to that, after the first few days, he no longer registered it except by its absence. The humidity of the greenhouse seemed to neutralize it, and while this didn’t make the section more Earth-like, it made it just a little less Mars-like.
Some mornings, after a night when he couldn’t sleep, he’d go to the greenhouse. Sometimes Isla would be there too. She’d cordoned off a section of the upper level, enclosed it in plastic, and was deliberately increasing the CO2 around what looked like young maize plants, to see if they grew faster. Except that wasn’t it: she was as interested in them failing as she was seeing them grow tall and strong. She wanted to know what happened—she’d done the exact same experiment on Earth, and was now trying it on Mars. Was the result going to be different? It didn’t matter. It was science. Very different from construction, where the end result was all that mattered.
The greenhouse was big enough that the two of them could be there without it feeling cramped. Without, indeed, seeing much of each other. Isla was a shadow behind the double layer of plastic. Frank was checking the nutrient pumps, topping up those that might run out in the next sol with fresh injections of A, B and C.
The airlock popped, and Yun came in, waving her tablet at Frank.
“I need you,” she said.
Frank frowned. Yun was direct. Sometimes that could come out as rude, and he’d had to learn that this was her, trying to do her best. The best for her, the best for everyone back home. Wherever she went on the base, wherever she went on Mars, she seemed to behave as if she had a crowd of watchers looking over her shoulder, silently judging her for every moment she wasn’t on task.
“Sure.” He found a flag, a piece of stiff wire with some parachute material tied to the top, and pushed it into the gap between the tray and the staging, to mark his place. “What’s the problem?”
“Station seven has stopped sending data.”
“And…”
“I have to go out and either fix it there, or bring it back to the workshop. Today.” She held out the tablet showing the positions of the weather stations, but was moving it too jerkily for Frank to be able to tell which was Station seven, or where it was located.
He took it from her, and put it down on the edge of the tray. OK, so seven was on the far side of the caldera, at about the five o’clock position on Ceraunius. Within range, but not convenient. He tried to remember siting that particular instrument, and maybe he could and maybe he couldn’t. After a while, without anything notable happening, each stop resembled both the previous and the next.
The summit. That had been different. Top of the world.
“So if I take you, who’s staying with Jim?” Jim would have lived up there if he could.
Yun looked momentarily surprised, as if she’d forgotten that other people had tasks scheduled. Then she was forlorn.
“But this needs attention.”
“No one’s saying it doesn’t,” said Frank. Outside, the sun had just crested the crater rim, turning the hab a rosy pink. “But we’ve got time to sort it. Find someone who’ll go with Jim.”
“No one else is up yet.”
“Isla is.”
Frank caught a hesitation before Yun’s reply. No reason why everyone had to be best buddies. Just that they had to agree to work together, like Frank’s crew had. And he could sense, if not see, Isla stiffen behind the cloudy plastic sheeting. Of course she was listening.
“Isla’s got her own work,” said Yun eventually.
“And Jim has his. Look, let’s leave it until after breakfast. Maybe the cold has knocked out the battery, or something. It might come back online when it’s warmed up.”
Frank left the greenhouse and filled a bowl with his usual grains and fruits, and even as he crunched his way through them, he was aware of a hovering, hopeful presence, sometimes behind him, sometimes off to one side. Fan wandered in, and went straight to make coffee. Then he wandered out again, as was his habit, to read and plan for an hour before opening up the med bay for consultations. While doctor–patient confidentiality didn’t extend as far as astronauts on Mars, the veneer of it had.
Fan had also offered his expertise to Frank, but Frank had already been warned off by Luisa: no going to the doctor except in extreme emergencies. His skin was a map, pointing to secrets that XO would rather leave buried.
Then Frank had his answer. Obvious, really: he’d drop Yun and Jim off at the outpost—CU1 as it was officially known—swap out his life support, and drive around the crater on his own to collect the malfunctioning number seven. He could take it back to Yun, who’d make an assessment on the spot, and all without disrupting anyone else’s work pattern.
Sure, Lucy still didn’t like him taking solo trips. She never asked him herself, but she permitted the others to ask. Certainly, she could forbid them, but she hadn’t. It put a little slack into the system, that was all. Frank thought she found it a useful corrective to the otherwise tight operating rules.
Yun had to compromise. But it took her only a couple of seconds to agree, and she left him alone after that.
He had half an hour before leaving, so he went back to the greenhouse to pick up where he’d left off. He pulled the flag out and worked his way down the rest of the row.
“Lance?”
“Yeah?” He didn’t look up from the tray. These bean roots, they were pretty much mature and the nodules on them were starting to restrict the flow of water across them. Maybe he’d got the nutrient mix wrong, because he’d never seen such dense growth before. Raise the plants slightly, and start picking the longest pods, he guessed.
“You don’t have to go along with everything.”
“I know that.” He straightened up. It was Isla. Of course it was. He’d—just for a moment—thought it was Marcy, even though the accent, and the delivery, were all wrong. He showed her the root network and she peered at it, then started pushing the white fibers aside with her fingertips.
She seemed content to let him care for the food crops. Was that trust? It looked a lot like it. He was certain she checked on them when he was elsewhere, so she was going to pick up any problems before they got serious. But she hadn’t said anything yet, and it had been two weeks.
Two weeks and he was trusted. He felt such a fraud.
“Of course you do. Just…” She slotted the beans back into the water flow. “If you feel you’re being taken advantage of, you need to say.”
“I got the talk from Leland,” said Frank. “But I’m supposed to help. It’s in the job description.”
“All the same,” she said.
“It’s fine. I don’t mind.”
She looked down at the plants, and brushed her hand across the top of them, first one way, then the other.
“You’
re not our employee,” she said. “You’re crew. However you got here.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? His stomach suddenly knotted up, and threatened his breakfast.
“You like to keep busy.” But she didn’t press the point, and maybe she most likely meant that he’d got to Mars solo and frozen, eight—nearly nine months now—earlier. But he was never going to be crew. He knew too much, and they knew too little.
“I’ve got to go. Jim and Yun will be waiting.” He put the flag back in the trays, in the new position, and eased himself between Isla and the next set of drip trays. The tightness in his gut slowly started to ease, but it must have shown on his face as he emerged into the cross-hab.
“You OK?” asked Jim, already half into his suit.
“Yeah. I’m going to push some buttons before we go.” Talking about bladders and bowel movements was nothing out of the ordinary. The brief delay produced a fleeting flash of annoyance from Yun, but she kept a lid on it and carried on stacking spare life supports into the outside airlock.
Frank wrestled with the zips and flaps, and felt the cold plastic on his ass.
No one suspected him. Not Isla, who he spent most time around, not Lucy, and especially not Leland. There was something about the man that made Frank want to just tell him everything, and that was why Frank studiously avoided spending any time alone with him. Even Jim was preferable, because he was already on his guard with the geologist.
The only person he could be candid with was Luisa. And that had its own problems. He was—how far away now? Ninety million miles?—and the person he was most reliant on, his confidante, worked at the heart of the XO operation. They were both vulnerable. Goddammit, he worried about her.
He scrubbed at his face. His better diet had put some elasticity back in his skin, and he no longer had the gray prison pallor common among inmates. He felt old, though. Fifty-three. He’d missed his birthday in the flurry to get Phase three done: XO hadn’t made a thing of it, and neither had he. No birthday candles in a pure O2 atmosphere, either.
She’d remembered, though.
Frank pushed the buttons and zipped up. By the time he got back through to the cross-hab, it was empty, so he suited up and headed outside.
