by S. J. Morden
But if Jim had been picked up by M2, what did they want in return? Food? Shelter? OK, he could probably provide that. He could even put up an extra hab, and extend the greenhouse. It wasn’t impossible to imagine, if the M2 crew were decent people who’d play ball. Whatever reason XO had had for putting them there in the first place, they’d abandoned them now, and they’d ordered Frank to abandon them too. M2 would be grateful. However many of them were left. More than zero.
Somehow he was going to have to square that circle.
He rested his fists on the side of the solar farm and side-eyed the sun. Any kind of rescue mission he might throw together wasn’t going to happen any time soon, was it? Not unless he drained the batteries and left the base short. And he’d probably need two spare life support packs too, one for him, and one for Jim. One for the possibility of Jim.
He didn’t need to explain what he was doing. He’d covered enough silences with the “commercially sensitive” excuse that it had become a joke. The base, the buggy, the power in the batteries, were all XO-owned. It might eat into the trust he’d earned, taking a buggy for a full day, not telling anyone where he was going, but Lucy couldn’t stop him if she didn’t know.
When he got back, he could just put it down to company business, and that was that. Sure, she’d chew him out. She was as much on edge as he was. But as long as he didn’t do anything to jeopardize the safety of the NASA personnel, he was in the clear. He’d take her yelling at him and not say a word in complaint if that’s what it took to keep them all safe.
He knew where the base was. He didn’t know what condition they were in.
If M2 were dead, he didn’t have to reveal anything about them.
If they weren’t, and didn’t have Jim, then… could he just leave them there to rot? Would they be content to stay there and dwindle away and die, knowing there was salvation just over the hill? Would Frank? Would anyone? No, of course not. That was ridiculous.
If they did have Jim? If he could bring him back with him? Lucy would probably forgive him everything. Even if he brought the M2 survivors too.
Would XO, though? Not on current form.
What he ought to do, what would get him a straighter line back to Earth, was to simply shrug his shoulders and carry on with life at MBO. Jim hadn’t followed the rules. He’d gone missing. He was presumed dead. Tough on everyone, but he’d been an idiot and he’d fucked up. Mars had taken him. Move on.
Frank needed to keep his head down, and spend the next thirteen months hoping that M2 didn’t turn up again.
Put like that, it wasn’t going to work, was it?
Maybe he could go over and take a look, from a distance, try and see what state they were in. If there was no obvious movement, he could get closer, poke around. If they were dead, then that was that. He could leave them with a clear conscience.
Frank frowned at himself. That word. He was going to do this, wasn’t he? Of course he was.
He toured the outside of the base, making sure that the outriggers were still firmly attached to the rock, that the balloon-taut coverings weren’t degrading, that the bolts that held everything together hadn’t sheared or worked loose. It was his job. And still, after the initial bedding-down phase, it was remarkably robust. The structures, once up, were going to last for… what? Years? What was next? How were they going to make this permanent?
And then, joining the dots—M2 was next. And then, maybe M3. Each base building on the experience of the previous one. More rugged. More sustainable.
Was that what this was about? A land grab? On Mars? For Mars?
They had to be kidding, right? There wasn’t any way they could get away with that. But then Yun’s parroted words came back to him in a rush. If the Chinese government was enthusiastic about the possibilities for Mars colonization, and sought to establish their own permanent presence before the end of the century, why not XO? Perhaps they wanted to get all the best sites first.
And perhaps NASA had inadvertently paid for them to get their plan off the ground with not just one base, but two. Goddammit. No wonder XO wanted M2 kept secret.
There was nothing he could do or say about that, but maybe he could give hints to Luisa that he might have finally worked it out. In the meantime, he had his chores.
He was round by the RTG pit. Sand had piled behind the hot-water tank cover, and he didn’t know whether that was a good thing, adding to the insulation, or a bad thing, putting corrosive soil directly into contact with the container. He went around the windward side, and ran his hand over the white-painted cover, which had been fashioned from a supply-rocket casing. The paint came off, dusting his gauntlet like talc, revealing bare metal underneath. He knew enough about shot-blasting to know what he was seeing.
It had been abraded by the dust-storm. Which meant that the most exposed parts of the habs would also have suffered.
He kept on going around, checking. It was the hard surfaces that had suffered most. The thick plastic envelope they relied on for keeping their air in, and Mars out, hardly at all. He should still report it, both to Lucy and to XO.
The satellite dish didn’t look quite right any more. There was nothing he could do about that, unless it involved taking a hammer to it. Which he was more than willing to do, if he could be certain he wouldn’t be putting in more dents than he was taking out.
He’d circled the base. There wasn’t anything more he could do outside, so he re-entered via the cross-hab, first shaking the dust off his feet and batting down the parts of him he could reach. Pink clouds drifted from him, rising up, and falling down, adding to the steady drizzle of material from above. Like snow. Like ash.
Inside, the base was running on night-time lights.
He went to find Lucy, who was sitting in Comms, staring at the one screen she’d turned on, looking at the power levels slowly draining away on one window, the latest weather reports on the other.
“How are we doing?”
She didn’t turn around, as if it was her attention that was the only thing stopping them from descending into the freezing dark.
“We might catch a break in the next sol or two.” She pulled the satellite picture forward, colored for wind speed. “Yun has been talking to Earth non-stop. We have a forty per cent chance of the storm going back over the equator by zero hours tomorrow, and sixty per cent by the next. But there’s also a twenty per cent chance we get this all week, and after that it’s just guessing. Not even educated guessing.”
“If you’re asking me what I’d do…”
“I know what I have to do. I’m putting off doing it because shutting everything down except core services and the greenhouse is going to put us in a positive energy budget. Which is the good news. We won’t have to abandon the base.” She screwed up her face. “But we can’t restart a full scientific schedule. Not that we could. Not that we’d want to at the moment, either.”
“I’m sorry,” said Frank. For what felt like the hundredth time. It wasn’t his fault, yet it still might be, and he wanted to fix it, and yet he couldn’t.
Lucy carried on, unaware. “It’s a question of how much to keep in the reserves. I’m calculating what we need: an hour a sol of dish time, tablet recharges, lights, heat, replenishment of resources, even recreation. When I’ve done that, then I’ll tell everyone.”
He told her about the abrasion. She told him it had done similar things to the suits. The fogging on the faceplates wasn’t just dust. The top layer of the clear sandwich would need replacing, for everyone, which was Fan’s job.
He hadn’t noticed the vision problem. He’d just gotten used to it, putting it down to the dust he couldn’t be bothered to wipe off any longer.
“I’m going to take some sack time,” he said. “Base is sound, for now. I’ll go out again later and clean the panels, turn them.”
“Thanks, Lance.” She did look over her shoulder, and smiled. Forlornly.
One man down. Science all but shut down. No vehicles. Confined to ba
se. It wasn’t a great start for her.
“It’s going to get better,” he said.
“Not going to bring Jim back.” She faced the screens again. “I’m getting turbulence from Mission Control.”
“The fuckers weren’t here.”
“No. No, they weren’t.” She leaned on her elbows. “You lost anyone you were responsible for?”
“Yes,” said Frank. “Yes I have.”
She turned round again, looked him in the eye. “And it’s at that point we’re our own worst enemies, right?”
“Pretty much.”
She pressed her lips together, then said: “Talk to Leland. It’s what he’s here for.”
“I’m not really the talking type.” He shrugged. “Much rather do stuff.”
“Point taken. Go hit the sack. If anything happens that you need to know about, I’ll call you.”
She went back to staring at the numbers and the bars, and Frank walked through the yard into the crew quarters. He pulled the curtain of his cubicle closed behind him and saved the base a couple of watts by not hitting the light switch.
He wiped his tablet screen and nudged it back to life, turning the brightness down so that it didn’t glare at him.
There was a reply from Luisa. She was always on duty, whatever the cycle of day/night was on Earth, and it was always she who answered him. Should that worry him? He didn’t pretend that he had a “Team Frank” in the heart of the XO machine, but did the relationship he’d built up with her count enough for her to slip him information under the radar?
“We were all devastated to learn of the loss of your colleague. I’m sure you feel that as keenly as the other astronauts, and it’s only human that you’re looking for anything that might mean his death was anyone else’s fault but his own. I’m so very sorry about Jim, but you know deep down that it’s a tragic accident, the result of not following orders. It can’t be anything else, because there was no one else there.
“We’re going to do everything we can to help you locate your missing friend through satellite imagery. That’s the best we can do, but we can do that better than most. We’ve a whole team on stand-by, waiting for the storm to clear.
“Jim’s gone, Frank. Please don’t go making trouble for yourself or the rest of MBO. I don’t think I could bear it, especially after this. You need to stay safe, and come home. Luisa.”
They were fine words, but he couldn’t ignore the tracks he’d seen up on the summit. M2 had been up there, and recently, and if they’d done that, then maybe they knew what had happened to Jim. Every single message Luisa sent him repeated that M2 were no longer a threat, but Frank knew what he’d seen.
And just how good were XO’s satellites? Because he didn’t think the photos he saw every day on his tablet were sharp enough to pick out a suit. In fact, that was something he could test right now.
He went into the files, and after sorting through a few dozen thumbnails, found a picture of the Heights. He loaded it up and drilled down into it until the image had dissolved into gray, incomprehensible blocks.
That was the utter limit of the resolution. Each block was somewhere around three feet across. He wasn’t going to be able to resolve an object twice that size, but he might be able to tell that there was something there, taking up that space and making the ground a different color to its surroundings.
He pulled back out and examined the picture of MBO from orbit.
The habs were obvious—the greenhouse, the crew quarters, the yard, were all sections that were twenty feet wide and sixty feet long. They cast shadows, too: the satellite dish was a black oval cast on the ground.
The buggies? He knew where to look, and yes, he could just about make them out. They weren’t solid objects, though. The terrain underneath showed through the latticework of the chassis. It was the wheels that were more obvious, both in themselves and that they blocked out the light. The tracks the tires made were dark bands on the ground, indistinct and intermittent, except where the road was well traveled.
A guy in a suit? No, that was impossible. Either XO was lying about helping to find Jim, or lying about how good their resolution was.
But if that was what Luisa had told him, then he was going to have to behave as if he believed it all, in order to keep them all alive. That M2 were still out of contact. That they were dead. That they hadn’t picked Jim up.
Frank was still going to have to respond with something, though. He sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them what he was planning on doing. A man was missing. If there was a chance he was still alive in a base whose existence he wasn’t allowed to reveal, then it was up to Frank to thread a way through all the truths and lies.
“Guess we’ll just have to wait on a break in the storm, and see what you can see. I don’t know if Lucy wants to keep looking. She probably will, and that’ll mean going south, closer to M2. But if they’re gone, I suppose that means we won’t have to worry about running into them,” was what he eventually typed. He pressed send, and turned off his screen.
Frank sat in the dark.
The chips could fall where they may. The first opportunity he had, he was going over.
23
From: Carolina Soledad
To: Miguel Averado
Date: Sun, Mar 7 2049 08:43:41 -0300
Subject: re: Lava tube project
I don’t know what to make of this. I’ve outlined the area in red. Please could you say what you think you see?
Carolina
[image appended HiRISE2 22 39 02 N 97 45 10 W 2/27/2048, annotated]
The sky had cleared. Yun’s forty per cent had lucked out. The storm had contracted and swung south. On the other side of the equator, Mars was still blanketed in airborne ocher dust, and it could still come back. But Frank had been able to plug in the buggy for a full day, without worrying about leaving the base short, and thanks to their surfeit of generating capacity, the battery banks were mostly full.
At some point in the night, he’d dozed. But it wasn’t proper sleep. At least he was already awake for his set-off at 0300. He hadn’t said anything to anyone else. Not to Luisa, not to Lucy.
Not to Isla.
He still didn’t know what that had meant. If anything. If it had happened. If he’d hallucinated it. She’d not mentioned it. Neither had he. It wasn’t as if he could forget it, or wanted to forget it, not like some of the other things. Just that… what was he supposed to do?
It was dark when he stepped outside. He’d made absolutely certain that he hadn’t woken anybody up. He’d secreted two fully charged, spare life support packs in the med bay airlock, and he went round and collected them, strapping them to the back of the buggy he was taking.
He’d be at the outpost in an hour and a half; there, he’d swap out his life support, and carry straight on over to M2. The route wasn’t certain, and he’d be slowed down by the fact that he was working solely on lights.
That would eat into the energy budget, but he’d kill them as soon as the sky got light enough, shortly before dawn. He could be at his destination by, say, 0700. That would give him some poking-around time when he got over there. Unless their buggy was out and in view, M2 were unlikely to see him approach: they were in a cave, in a deep trench. He thought he could scout them out without necessarily revealing he was there. He could decide, based on what he found, what to do afterwards.
Though quite what he could do, he hadn’t worked out. He was going to have to wing it, and that didn’t sit well with him. The decision to go—dangerous, reckless, possibly pointless—was bad enough. All his old fears about M2 and what they could do to him came back with a vengeance.
It was still dark. Frank looked away to the south, towards the hidden summit of Ceraunius Tholus, towards the outpost, and towards M2. His guts tightened, and for a moment he had to swallow hard and breathe slowly. He had to do this. He was the only one who could.
He climbed up on the buggy, powered it up, and
waited until his nose was pointing towards the dark bulk of the mountain before bringing the headlights up slowly. The ground glittered with frost, and it was hard, cracking under the wheel plates as they dug in and gripped.
He headed up the Santa Clara, and when he’d gone through the first curve of the river, flipped the lights to full. That was better. There weren’t many obstacles on what was essentially a flat river bed that was now layered with even more dust, but it was the dust itself that made the going heavier than it normally was. He adjusted the responsiveness of the tires accordingly, so that they were broader and less springy.
It reminded him of his trips out away from the pressures of the base when most of the others were still alive. Driving up alone, and just taking in the view from further up: the sky, Rahe crater, the distant bulge of Uranius Tholus. A few minutes of peace, before descending again. The days before he’d known what XO had planned for him.
Eventually, he worked his way out onto the summit plain, and there, despite his expectations, was the outpost, apparently intact and unharmed. Though he knew with his head that the wind couldn’t really exert any pressure, his experience of the storm had been overwhelming. If all he’d encountered was a few shreds of plastic clinging to twisted metal, he wouldn’t have been surprised—but a quick tour of the outside told him that it was still bolted down, still under pressure, still functioning. The air was clear—not rain-washed, but scoured—and the cold probably helped to settle what was left of the dust that might have otherwise been blowing around. He checked the temperature, and it had dropped over a hundred degrees from yesterday.
The leeward side of the hab was higher than the windward. Dust and sand had dropped there, and now had frozen into place. The other side was blasted clean down to the bedrock. All traces of tracks and footprints had been erased, wherever they’d lain.
