by S. J. Morden
“Lance?”
It took him longer than it ought to respond.
“Yes. Yes, that’s…” That’s me. I’m Lance Brack, ex-military, XO employee. Astronaut. Survivor. Murderer. He glanced around to see Isla by the airlock, hesitating, before coming closer.
“Are you OK?” she asked. She touched him lightly on the shoulder, and he shivered. “Lance? Are you ill?”
“I just couldn’t sleep.”
“You should get Fan to check you out. It might be the sign of something else.”
“I don’t need to take up his time,” said Frank. The last thing he needed was Fan seeing his scars. Being kind to him. “It’ll pass.”
“It’s been weeks now.” She walked around him, stood in front of him, hands on hips.
He craned his neck to look at her. “I’m fine.”
“You need to take some time off.”
“I need to keep busy.”
“Talk to Leland.”
“No.” He almost shouted that. No way did he want to talk to Leland. But he’d startled her, and none of this was her fault. XO. Bastard XO. “No,” he repeated, mildly, evenly, in case she thought he was losing it—who was he trying to kid? She was thinking exactly that, and he wasn’t going to blame her one bit.
“I’m worried about you.”
He looked up at her again, looked down.
“No one’s looking after you. You were on your own for eight months. You were injured and alone and that must have been terrifying.”
He could have said something then. He could have told her the truth. He could have told her everything, and let the pieces of his broken life fall where they might.
Frank took a deep breath, and said nothing.
“Lance?”
“It’s just the sleep. You go do whatever it is you got up for. I’m going to check on the tilapia.” That was good. The fish were on the next level down, away from her. She was still standing in front of him, so he exited the chair to the side.
He headed for the ladder, and started climbing.
“We’re going out again tomorrow. We’ve been cleared for EVA back on Ceraunius.”
Halfway down the ladder, he paused. “That’s good, right? Shows there’s nothing to worry about.”
“You said ‘everything’s trying to kill you’. Almost your first words when we got here. Why should this be any different?” She moved in front of him again, even though it was just his head and shoulders above the deck. “The ground just opened up and swallowed Station seven. You should buddy up like the rest of us.”
She wasn’t wrong. Yet it gave him a freedom that he wasn’t ready to give up. Or able, now that the XO suits had dropped the hammer on him. He was pretty much their pawn. If they wanted him to go over to M2, he’d have to. If they wanted him to take one for the team? After all that he’d been through, and done, maybe they knew not to push him that far.
It was brinkmanship. He’d lost this round, but there were going to be other battles. He’d take each one as it happened.
“Lance?”
“I got a lot on my mind,” he said. He was looking at her knees, her shins, her feet. “You got up for a reason. It wasn’t to keep me company.”
Even when he reached the lower level, he was aware of her above him, gazing down the hole in the floor at the top of his head. Then he heard her move away, the flexing of the plastic panels and the creak of the metal beams marking her progress.
He stood by the tilapia tanks, listening to them bubbling away, the aerators and the movement of the fish combining to make the surface seethe.
Isla wasn’t going to die. No one was going to die. Not on his watch. If that was the prize, then the price was worth paying. There. Done. His controllers would be proud of him.
18
[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 3/2/2049, transcribed from paper-only copy]
I refuse to be threatened by a laborer. A common laborer. Beforehand, I don’t think I even remembered his name—it was just a line on a spreadsheet—but now, I see him. And he needs to know that the most terrible thing on two worlds is to come to my personal attention. I will crush him, and being a hundred million miles away will not save him.
[transcript ends]
Frank had three passengers: Jim, Yun, and Leland. Enough so that no one really talked to him, and he got to drive. The trailer was loaded with seismometers—which Frank did understand, coming from California—and other equipment, which he didn’t. He did know that none of it would take kindly to being thrown about, despite having been launched on top of a rocket from Earth, crashed through the atmosphere of Mars, and dropped onto the surface from a height of around thirty feet.
They had, collectively, decided that the disappearance of Station seven was down to natural processes. And that threw Frank, because he was convinced that M2 had stolen it.
But if a bunch of highly trained scientists, backed up by whoever NASA could corral, thought there was an explanation that didn’t involve someone turning the weather station off, and taking it away for parts, then maybe they were right.
In the clear light of day, perhaps he was the one who was wrong, and he’d fucked up. Lack of sleep? Sure. Paranoia? Understandable. PTSD? OK, the list of his neuroses would keep Leland occupied for months.
There was enough doubt in the situation to send a man crazy, and he had little leeway on that score.
What was certain was XO’s threat to him, and to the astronauts. That wasn’t his imagination. That was real, M2 or no M2.
When they got to the outpost, Frank spent some time outside. He told the others that he wanted to check the hab over, tighten things up, make certain there wasn’t any wear. He did that, but he also searched the ground for tracks that he hadn’t made, and bootprints where he hadn’t stood.
Now that it wasn’t just him, it made things more difficult. The usual crew of Jim and Yun walked around the summit quite freely, and sometimes they had a buggy up with them to reach more distant features. The wind tended to erode tracks quickly up on the top, though. Fresh, unexplained marks might tell him that M2 were still active, still looking for things, still probing north.
And maybe they were. Frank couldn’t tell. Tire tracks started and finished in the thin dust almost at will. Scuffs that might be made by boots were everywhere, and when he examined them, nowhere.
Natural. M2 could have had nothing to do with Station seven. He might have jeopardized his trip home over nothing. From now on, he was going to have to tell XO—and tell Luisa—nothing. He was going to bottle it up tight, no matter what, no matter how much he’d come to rely on her. His one prop had been deliberately knocked away, and he was going to have to wear that, because doing anything else was going to get her, and the NASA crew, hurt.
He’d hit the bottom, and he still had to function, still had to put on the Lance Brack show for everyone. He readjusted his face, and came back in through the airlock.
“Everything OK?” asked Leland.
Frank reminded himself that this wasn’t a trick question. He’d been outside to shake the hab down. That was what Leland was inquiring about, not the state of his mind.
“It’s holding up fine. It gets colder up here. More thermal expansion in the day, but the bolts seem to be taking it.”
“If it fails, what will it sound like?”
“Sound like?” Frank frowned. “I’m guessing it wouldn’t sound like anything, because all the air will be too busy escaping to carry sound.”
Leland laughed, and it seemed like such an odd thing to laugh about. “I guess you’re right. I meant before that.”
“Oh. You might pick up the bolt heads shearing off. But that depends.” Frank pushed himself out of his suit into the cold air of the hab. “You’ve done your drills, right?”
“Down to twenty seconds. Of course, that’s practice. They don’t test you under conditions where you might die.”
Frank covered his annoyance by turning his back and disengaging his l
ife support. XO hadn’t treated him half as well. He was disposable. He still was.
Yun and Jim were testing batteries with a meter down on the ground floor, unpacking them and making sure they’d take and store a current before repacking them for the trip out.
Leland’s slow Southern voice was gently coaxing. “So where did you work after serving? JPL? Lockheed? Boeing?”
Kittridge Construction. He was figuring Leland had never heard of it. “You know I can’t answer that.”
“Doesn’t that frustrate you? Us kids getting up in your face with our degrees and doctorates and experience, and you not sitting us all down and schooling us on just what you’ve seen and done?”
“I got my orders, Leland. And that’s that. No point in getting antsy about it. And you’re not ‘kids’, either. You got to be, what, thirty-five? Forty?”
“Thirty-seven. That’s two years younger than Neil Armstrong when he first walked on the Moon. He pulled off a landing like Lucy’s, too. History could have been hella different.” Leland hefted his own life support, and put it against the staging on the upper level. “But you’ve got plenty of years left in you. You’ll get back to Earth and you’ll pick up where you left off. You got a life, right? Kids, maybe. A career for sure. You’re obviously a senior guy, a consultant, a trouble-shooter. You’ll make a good living back Earthside, with XO, or any other company.”
“What’s your point, Leland?” Frank stacked his life support, and grabbed a fresh pack that they’d brought with them.
“This is our pinnacle, the best thing we’ll ever do, and we all signed up knowing this could be the end of us, one way or another. We’re here because we think it’s worth it, despite all the different ways we could die. But you don’t seem to have that same enthusiasm, and I guess I’m trying to work out what you think you’re getting out of this.”
Hell, they’d been ready to just kill him and fire him into the sun. But now, maybe, just maybe, he might get to live and go home. “Talk to me about it when you’ve been here nine months, Leland.”
“That’s fair comment. Well, whatever they’re paying you, I hope it’s enough.”
Frank heaved his new life support pack into place and pushed it home. Making XO pay seemed a pipe dream now, compared with what he’d hoped to extract from them. Having said that, the tables might suddenly turn again and put him on top for a change.
“I’m ready.”
Yun handed up the battery packs, and Jim followed.
“Leland, tell me you remember how the seismograph fits together.”
“I remember just fine.”
“Me and Yun will handle the siting on this side of the volcano. If you and Lance can take the buggy over to the south and west. Meet back here in… four hours?”
South. Why did it have to be south? And why did it have to be Leland? Better than Jim, admittedly, but Yun was good company. He got her, understood her drive, and she didn’t ask him personal questions or dick around.
“What about what happened to Station seven?” asked Frank. “Shouldn’t we be avoiding that area completely?”
“Sure. If you look at the map, the sites are further south and further west. Give where Station seven was a wide berth—five hundred yards for now. I’m still betting on a subsurface collapse, related to the secondary caldera, marked CT-B, at seven o’clock.”
Frank had been there, right there, two days ago. There’d been no sign of a new crater, and he knew it, though he hadn’t labored the point. He was still betting on M2.
“What if the whole area is lousy with holes?”
“That’s kind of what we’re trying to find out. This is a one-off. Just bad timing on our part. And you’ve got a buddy now. Leland will keep you right, won’t you, Leland?”
“I do share Lance’s concerns. But you’re the geologist. You wouldn’t ask us to take any risks you wouldn’t take yourself.” Leland put in his own fresh life support and propped the suit up, prior to climbing in.
“It’ll be fine,” said Jim. “Once we’ve bedded in the network, we get to tour the area with a thumper. Next week sometime.”
“OK.” The others seemed to know what a thumper was. At this point, Frank didn’t mind not knowing. “Let’s get to it then. Back in four hours. That’s,” and he looked at the onboard clock. “Ten past three.”
“Fifteen ten. Got it.”
They left the airlock one at a time, each carrying a quarter of the batteries. Frank and Leland carried theirs to the trailer, and Jim and Yun stacked theirs on the steps. They divided the equipment, and Frank checked his map.
“I’m thinking we drive out to the furthest point, and work our way back. That way we know that if we’re going to run into problems, we’re doing so on a full tank.”
“Copy that,” said Leland. “You driving?”
“Gives me something to do,” said Frank, already climbing up to the driver’s seat.
Once Leland was hanging off the roll cage, Frank set off towards a point about two miles downslope and roughly four o’clock on Ceraunius’s clock face. He had to navigate the bad lands again—formed by the same subsidence that was supposed to have claimed Station seven—and push out onto the broad, blank side of the volcano. Nothing but frozen lava and dust, punctuated by the occasional impact crater and sinuous rille. He could see for miles, and yet could see so very little. The landscape curved in every direction, up and down and around. It made it feel as if the horizon was both far away and close up. Of all the places he’d been on Mars, this was the most alien and the most isolated.
He could drop off the radar up there, just like Station seven had.
Frank wanted to concentrate on driving. Leland wanted to talk about his Huckleberry Finn childhood on the banks of the Mississippi, of the floods and the levee breaches that punctuated his family’s slow-motion migration until even the most ornery of Southern families had ended up in the north.
Inevitably, after the almost confessional nature of Leland’s testimony to a lost and drowned way of life, he asked: “What about you, Lance? What shaped you growing up?”
Frank knew the bare-bones of Brack’s biography. Born. Raised. Educated. Employed.
How many theaters of war he’d served in, both in and out of uniform.
Brack was a mercenary. It was most likely why he was on Mars. His special talents—his apparent lack of compunction when it came to killing people for money—were what led XO to find him and hire him.
And maybe some of that Leland already knew. Maybe he couldn’t quite square the paper Brack with the real-life one, and he was trying to work out why there was such a difference. The explanation probably hadn’t occurred to him so far, and Frank wasn’t going to give him a nudge.
“I don’t have to talk about it, Leland. Stuff happened. I grew older. I ended up on Mars. If you want to tell me more about surfing down Main Street, then I’ll listen, but I’ve got nothing I want to say.”
“Most people want to talk about themselves, Lance.”
“Most people haven’t spent the last nine months on Mars.”
“I get that. I really do get that. But don’t you think it’s healthy to open up now and then?”
Frank thought of XO’s threat, not just to himself, but to the rest of the crew. “I’m good,” he said. “I’m fine the way it is. I’d like to keep it that way.”
There was dead air, then: “You know where I am if you need me.”
“I know. Don’t take offense. I’m like this with everyone.”
When they arrived at the furthest point on the map, they dismounted, and worked amiably together, side by side. Frank knew how to handle a rock drill better than Leland, and he took the first shift while Leland got the other parts together. Even though the ground was lava, rather than soft sediment, the first few inches cut up fine. Then it was lean in and try not to overheat the drill bit. Back on Earth, they’d be sluicing it down with water. Here, that wasn’t an option, so he had to stop frequently and let the machine cool dow
n.
Each hole was supposed to be a foot long. Frank reckoned on making eight inches before having to stop. Below the rime of rust, the rock was hard and gray, flecked with white. A plume of pale dust ascended from the site every time he pulled on the trigger. When he stopped, it had all but fallen away. Just a slight haze in the air. Definitely not like on Earth, where the grinders spewing out clouds of dust were a problem for everyone.
Doing it in near-silence, only feeling the rattle of the drill through his hands. Memories came to him of the huge vacuum chamber back at Gold Hill, where Dee had holed his suit, and Alice had sealed it by cutting the boy and using his blood as a patch.
He hadn’t thought about that for months. He had to pull the drill aside and wait the feels out.
“Lance?”
“Just cooling the drill. Another inch and we’re there.”
Frank returned to the hole and got it to the required depth. He had to assume they had a spare bit somewhere, or some kind of sharpener, because the tip was blunting quickly.
When he’d done, Leland dropped in the anchor and pushed it home with the bolt, then threaded it in through the baseplate and started tightening it up with the crank. The anchor gripped on, and soon enough, the plate was hard against the surface of the rock.
From there on, it was simply a matter of screwing the seismometer onto the plate and activating it. It leveled itself and started sending basic telemetry back to the main computer.
“One down, three to go,” said Leland.
Frank wiped his faceplate with his hand, helped pack up the tools and load them onto the trailer, then strap them down. They checked together that they hadn’t left anything behind but the seismometer, looked at the numbers on their suits, and headed off towards the second point.
They were already edging towards the end of the second hour—drilling the anchor-hole had taken longer than anticipated, and wasn’t that always the way? Whether they could finish today depended on whether the rock in the other locations was as solid as it was in the first. Maybe they’d luck out from now on.
