by S. J. Morden
Yun and Jim were already on the buggy: trailer hitched, life support packs strapped down. Frank kicked the wheels and shook the tow bar, but they’d done the job just fine. Jim was in the driving seat, which bugged Frank: that was his seat, even though Jim had done plenty of driving and there was no reason why he shouldn’t today.
Frank didn’t like being a passenger. It reminded him too much of sitting behind Marcy. It also gave him too much time to think about it. He guessed he’d have to wear it today.
Jim didn’t dick around behind the wheel. He was perfectly safe. He didn’t treat the Santa Clara as a racetrack, he didn’t try to drive along the banked slopes. He didn’t try and bust the top speed. Maybe he did with Yun, but with Frank on board, he was on his best behavior.
It was still a grind to get to the outpost. There was nothing they could do to make the route shorter or faster. The views were only ever going to be of worn rock walls and the trickling dust sliding into the river channel in tiny, slow-motion dribbles.
Lucy wanted waymarkers in the channel, showing the direction and distance of both CU1 and MBO. Frank hadn’t got around to that yet. He’d cut out the signage from cargo-rocket fuselage, and made a scriber to write on the information, but installation would take longer.
But despite that, Frank knew when he was getting towards the top: he’d passed that way often enough to know the small tells in the landscape, and without turning round to look back down the valley.
With a final spin of the wheels, the buggy clawed its way up out onto the upper slopes of the volcano. Jim drove the remaining fifteen hundred yards to the outpost and parked up outside.
“OK. Let’s unload, and Lance can go and poke Station seven.”
Yun climbed down and went immediately to the trailer, eager to get Frank on his way.
“Bring it back here,” she said. “Don’t try to fix it.”
“Even if it’s obvious the battery’s become disconnected, or the solar panels have gotten clogged?”
“Yes. I need to know why those things have happened, and how to stop them happening in the future.”
“OK. If that’s what you want.” Frank stared out across the crater. “You want to check again, see if it’s recovered?”
“I’ll still need to take a look at it, find out why it failed in the first place.”
“Station seven it is, then.” He synced his map with Yun’s and checked his air. “I’m going to swap out. It’s another twenty miles on from here.”
Frank picked up a life support from the trailer and climbed the stairs to the airlock. He cycled it while the others were collecting the rest of the equipment, and stepped inside.
He hadn’t been into the outpost for a while: after it was built, and he’d shaken it down, he’d not had a need to. His journeys had been to drop off astronauts or cargo, and they’d often done that themselves.
The hab had got kind of messy, and he didn’t like that. Lucy wouldn’t like that either. It had unpleasant echoes of stepping into the descent ship and finding the detritus that Brack had created as he slowly, inexorably, lost it.
It wasn’t his call, but messy meant sloppy. The one thing that needed to be avoided at all costs was a mistake. He had to work with these people, and snitching on them to Lucy wasn’t his style, but he was going to have to say something. He went through his telltales to check that the atmosphere was breathable and warm enough, then thumbed his suit open.
As he went through the rigmarole of climbing out, swapping the pack over, and climbing back in again, Yun and Jim came in separately, stacking the life supports by the door, and unsuiting into the cold dry air.
“You got to clean this shit up,” said Frank. “Lucy sees this, she’ll blow.”
“I don’t remember it being this bad,” said Jim. “But yes. It could stand a tidy-up.”
“Just bag it and I’ll take it back down the hill. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Three tops.” Frank closed his suit, and if either of them replied, he didn’t hear what it was.
The suit tightened around him in the airlock, and he stepped back outside, twenty thousand feet up near the top of an extinct volcano on another planet. And it was ordinary. As was the simple fact that almost instant death was just the other side of his faceplate.
He stood there on the steps, looking out at the gentle curve of the land in almost every direction except towards the crater. Nothing but dust, rock and hazy sky.
Once, a long time ago, there had been a flood, cascading down from the mountaintop. How did that even work? Had there been ice up there, or had the water just fountained out of the ground and spilled down the broad flanks of Ceraunius? It had filled Rahe. A lake. The water was still there, underground. He’d washed in it, drank it, used it to grow plants.
He was using air. He should get on.
He climbed back up onto the buggy, checked that the fuel cell was good for both the forty miles to Station seven and back, and the trip down the hill: not that that needed many watts, as in extremis it could coast most of the way.
He aimed the nose of the vehicle south. He hadn’t given that direction much thought recently. M2 had receded from his list of concerns as XO had pronounced them dead, or at least incapable of travel. Luisa had said she’d nixed the idea of him going over to check, at least for now. There was no point in unnecessary trips to prove what they already knew.
But when he did think about it, he still felt uncertain about what he did do, and what he could have done. He was the only person in a position to have helped them, and yet he hadn’t, because of the risk that they would have just taken his stuff and killed him.
For him, the decision had been one of personal safety. For XO, it had been a lot more complicated than that. They’d been willing to see one base thrive, and one base die, rather than face the possibility of having both go wrong. Add several layers of secrecy, the company’s reputation, and a whole sack of cash, and XO’s reasoning got real murky, real quick.
Frank had been put in impossible positions so often, he now just stuck to the simple metric that whatever kept him alive and on track to go home was the best. He hated feeling compromised, and yet everything that XO got him to agree to dug him further into that pit.
It sucked to be M2. But he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
He passed Station six, perched on the south-west rim of the crater between the ridge to the east and the “bad lands” caused by subsurface collapse. It hadn’t been easy navigating the undulating terrain the first time: craters acting as sand-traps and broken ground all around. The second time, he looked for his tracks, but the wind had already eroded them away, and he had to pick a fresh path through the area.
It took valuable time to work his way through, but there was clear ground from then on, just regular, avoidable craters and rugged, sand-free lava. Station seven was another six miles on.
Station seven wasn’t there.
Frank studied his map, and he was definitely in the right area. He knew the locators were only accurate to a hundred yards, so that merely gave him an idea of where he should be looking, but there were no obscuring features, no fresh craters, no debris, nothing. When Yun had planted the equipment, it had been a quarter of a mile from the caldera edge: there’d been no landslides or collapses that could have carried it off.
It had just gone.
He instinctively wheeled south. The ground was open, more or less all the way down to the plain, and then beyond. The dust-load on the rock was light, and moving even as he watched. Any tracks that might have been laid down had gone, along with Station seven.
The wind wasn’t strong enough to blow anything over, though, let alone carry it away, and he should be able to see it. He’d seen all the others. If he drove over to Station eight, then he’d spot it long before he got to it. It was the only artificial object in an entirely natural landscape.
Could there be any other explanation for this? Jim dicking around, maybe? But he wouldn’t interfere with science,
and neither would anyone else. It made no sense.
M2 were supposed to be in the past. History. And with this one discovery, they came roaring back.
Goddammit.
17
[Message file #147146 3/1/2049 0542 MBO Mission Control to MBO Rahe Crater]
I’m so sorry you’ve had such a scare. We’re working on it. There’s going to be a natural explanation for this, and we’re exploring what that might be with our NASA colleagues. We’re still certain that M2 has failed, but in the highly unlikely event that even one person has survived, it’s probable that they’re only trying to fix their comms with scavenged parts from the weather station. There’s no threat to you or the rest of MBO.
The only thing you can do is tell the truth: you don’t know what happened. You don’t know how it could have happened. Because you don’t. We don’t either. All of our models show that M2 is either dead or dying. If there is anyone left, they can’t survive much longer. I know that sounds terrible, and that your instincts are to try and help them, but you can’t. You mustn’t. And say nothing about M2. You’d jeopardize everything you and me have worked together for, and you’d risk your trip home.
Just hang on. We’ll clear this up, and things will get back to normal soon enough.
Luisa
[transcript ends]
Eventually, in the darkness of his bed cubicle, light off, tablet on, he found it on one of the satellite pictures. There was something that looked like a trench, or a spillway, or an entrance to a mine where the trucks enter along a sloping road that slowly sinks below the ground until it disappears beneath it.
It had to be a natural feature: it was some five miles long and over half a mile wide, and if XO could excavate such a thing, they didn’t need NASA, or anyone, let alone him. But there it was, and the trench deepened towards its western end, where it appeared—difficult to tell from a satellite map—to carry on into a tunnel. Certainly the trench didn’t seem to end. Above ground, there were hints of a sagging roof, possible partial collapses, but if the entrance was clear, that was a huge space under cover.
There could have been a solar farm, but it was difficult to tell as it was a few brighter pixels, without definition. He definitely couldn’t see any habs, and guessed they’d be set up underground, out of reach of the cancer-causing radiation that he worked and slept in every day. But the telltale shadow of the descent ship was right in the trench, a few hundred yards from the suspected cave. The time of day that the photo had been taken lent itself to long, deep shadows, cast from the west.
It was a straight-line distance of seventy-nine miles away. It was suspiciously convenient for M2 to be just within traveling distance, and Frank was the suspicious kind. Despite Luisa’s soothing words, he knew Station seven’s disappearance was down to XO’s other base. He knew it in his bones. They were lying to her, and she was passing that lie right on to him.
Reporting back to Yun that her instrument had just… vanished, while keeping a straight face, had been hard. Thank God for radio and being alone—at least at that moment—on the volcano. He’d had the majority of the conversations he’d needed to have before he’d got back to CU1.
The chat with Lucy had been excruciating: more of an interrogation as far as he was concerned. She’d conducted a one-on-one with Yun, then with Jim, and Frank last. He didn’t want to lie to her. He knew he’d had to, and felt wretched for the rest of the evening.
The next day, they were on lock-down. Not quite lock-down. Experiments still happened, maintenance was still scheduled. But the daily jaunt up to CU1 was on hold while Lucy talked to NASA.
If he could spot a ship, surely someone from NASA could? He’d messaged Luisa, and she’d told him that Mars was huge, and redacting individual frames in the public domain was straightforward. Just a smudge here and there, and all trace of a landing—a doomed landing—would be erased. There was nothing to worry about.
Frank wasn’t at all sure. The growing ease he’d felt had evaporated in that moment on the volcano. He found himself wishing that M2 would just die already, and hated himself for doing so. M2 had a face: a gaunt, hungry face with sunken eyes and a wet, fetid smile. He’d had to put up with that in his dreams as well as seeing his former crew, and now it took center-stage. Hungry, so very hungry.
The fear was that Lucy, or anyone, would work it out for themselves. That the only way the weather station could have disappeared was if someone had moved it, and if it wasn’t one of the MBO crew, there was only one logical conclusion.
But as the day wore on, Jim started talking about sink holes and lava tubes, sand-traps, ice lenses, and other geological phenomena, and annoying Yun with the idea that she’d made a major discovery at the expense of one of her instruments. NASA proposed installing the planned seismic net early.
Even if they’d got away with it this time, surely this wasn’t a sustainable strategy from XO. If—when—M2 failed, there’d still be something for someone to discover, at some point, even if they died and fossilized out on the plain. There were going to be questions. This? This was just firefighting, and the whole building was in danger of burning down.
Eighty miles. Fifty miles from CU1. There was a danger that, within the lifetime of the current mission, someone—Jim, probably—would want to go out that far and look at the cave. Was Frank going to be expected to clean up M2 too? How was he supposed to explain his absence to Lucy?
He wasn’t going to be able. He told Luisa his fears, and she provided his only comfort. He couldn’t tell anyone else.
He caught up with his maintenance. He went around the greenhouse. He couldn’t eat, let alone sleep. He shuddered every time his tablet pinged with an incoming message, and he dreaded anyone speaking to him. The few times that Isla had tried to engage him, he’d barely heard a word she said. She gave up, and he just hung on, waiting for the all-clear from Luisa. That M2 had either finally made contact, or that they were definitely dead.
In the end, in the middle of the night, he wrote a message:
“Luisa. If you’re not going to tell them about M2, I’m going to tell them. You want me to keep it secret, but it can’t be a secret any more. I don’t even get why M2 is supposed to be a secret: what are they even supposed to be doing out there? It’s just a matter of time now before NASA find out, and I’m the XO guy here. I can tell them I didn’t know about it, that you hadn’t told me, but Leland will open me up like a can.
“I’m not going to tell anyone about how MBO got made. But this is different. Lucy and the others have a right to know about M2, and the right to decide what happens next. They’re not cons. They’re not chimps. You can’t treat them like that, and neither can I.”
He turned his light off, and tossed and turned on his bed. At some point, the thought that he’d managed to pull it together enough to stand up to XO, that he actually felt good about himself, allowed him to doze for an hour or so.
His tablet pinged, waking him instantly, and in the dark he fumbled for it.
“OK, Frank. This is serious. Your last message has really upset the suits, and I’m just going to copy and paste this. This isn’t from me.
“‘Tell that murdering son-of-a-bitch we own his ass. That we own every drop of water, every breath of air, every ounce of food on that base and we will shut it down if he so much as clears his throat wrong. The lives of those six astronauts he’s got so pally with are his responsibility. If he fucks up now, they’re history. Tell him that. Tell him if he doesn’t play along, they are all toast. Got that? Good.’”
He was bolt upright. He’d done a deal with these guys. A nice, straightforward deal: Frank didn’t shit the bed; they brought him home. What could be simpler? He’d thought he had enough chips on the table to bargain afresh. Turned out he was wrong. When NASA had turned up, XO had got a whole new bunch of hostages. And he hadn’t factored that in at all.
“I don’t understand why this has got them so spooked. But you’ve got to listen to them. I don’t think they
’re kidding, Frank. I think they really mean to do this. Don’t say anything. Please. At least, not now, not until I find out why this is so important to them. I’d have quit long ago if it wasn’t for you. Just let me keep you alive, OK? Luisa.”
Goddammit.
What was he going to do?
He padded through the crew quarters and cross-hab, dim with night-time lighting, and cycled through into the greenhouse. This oasis. The lights over some of the trays had dimmed to mimic the day–night cycle on Earth, and others blazed full, but the sound of dripping water was ubiquitous.
To lose this. To lose all of this would be a tragedy. To lose his life, sure. But to see all this wither and die, starved of air and the pumps silenced?
It was ridiculous, but he held on to the thought. XO could probably kill them in half a dozen different ways: all the automatic systems like the power regulators that kept them alive, plus all the others that could be misused to make the base uninhabitable. But wiping out their ability to grow food was a more certain death than most.
He found a chair and sagged into it, elbows on knees.
When could they bail? Seven people, one MAV. May? June? XO would know that. It was just March now. So maybe they’d kill them quicker. Mess with the atmosphere while they were sleeping so that no one woke up. Or they could pick someone off, just to teach Frank a lesson. Hell, just take him out.
But wait: they could have done that at any time after he’d completed Phase three, after NASA had landed even. A message of regret, a request to bag the body, even a suggestion that what Lance Brack really wanted was to be buried on Mars. There were people to carry on the functions of the base and… XO would still get paid.
Maybe they couldn’t get to him. Maybe they couldn’t get to him, but could get to the others. Maybe it was just that they could get to the base as a whole, and not any one person.
He scrubbed at his scalp. This was too hard. He couldn’t make a decision. He’d felt the same in the small dark hours before he’d picked up a gun, driven over to Mike’s dealer’s and shot him. Anything to burst that tension. Anything to simplify matters. Anything to make it stop.
