by S. J. Morden
MA: XO are reporting complete failure of the main antenna. They say that they’re trying to reroute, but that both the HG [High Gain] and LG [Low Gain] are offline. No carrier signal. Nothing.
GT: OPSPLAN [Operations Planner]?
TY: Both OPSPLAN and EVA [Extravehicular Activity Officer] registered that the last authorized external activity was on Sol 622, where five [5] crew and the XO operative took two [2] rovers to the summit of Ceraunius Tholus to search for James Zamudio. All personnel and equipment returned to MBO. Other than that, nothing.
GT: RIO [Remote Interface Officer]?
LS: I’ve informed the Chinese government of the situation. I’ll inform them again after this meeting. They are, so far, not lighting a fire under my ass, so I’m grateful for that.
GT: ECLSS [Environmental Control and Life Support System]?
PO: The onboard LSS of MBO is dependent on the maintenance of the main computer by ODIN [Onboard Data Interfaces and Networks]. Likewise PHALCON [Power, Heating, Articulation, Lighting Control Officer] functions. If there’s a fault with the main box, then they can run MBO LSS and PHALCON functions manually.
GT: ODIN?
WM: I’ve been through the logs. There’s been no hint of any errors or hardware failures in any of them. If anything, the system has overperformed. I can’t rule out a catastrophic failure of critical systems, but neither can I rule it in.
GT: So we wait for them to fix it. In the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, the director of HiRISE2 has sent me this, with his compliments.
PO: Is that what I think it is?
GT: Why don’t you tell me what you think it is, and we can take the discussion from there.
[transcript ends]
Frank and the rest of the crew sat back down around the kitchen table. Their prisoner had been put, without his suit, in a chair at the far end of the yard, and retied by a frighteningly efficient Isla—something to do with wrangling livestock on her parents’ farm.
The bodies, that of Leland and his unnamed assailant, still lay in the med bay. The other man whose faceplate Frank had cracked was left where he’d died, on the steps down from the yard. The living had priority for now.
On the table were some of Frank’s freeze-dried berries. He’d shaken some out into bowls and put them within reach. No one had eaten for a while. Not that they were going to feel like eating much when Frank relayed what Jerry had told him.
He leaned over to grab a handful of strawberry slices, and chained them until they were all gone. Then he sat back up and blew out air.
“Can we get Yun back?” asked Lucy.
Frank thought about it, given what he knew. “Maybe. I hope so. If we don’t dick around.”
Fan reached out for a strawberry, and toyed with it before nibbling off the tiniest corner of it. “What about Jim?”
“Yeah. About that.” Frank felt his guts tighten. “That’s not going to be happening.”
“I came here with five crew members,” growled Lucy. She looked down the yard at their prisoner. “I’m down to two. Two.”
“What happened to Jim, Franklin?” said Isla.
“You know what? He can tell you himself. I’m fed up of being XO’s messenger boy.”
“Who is he? What’s he even doing here?”
“OK.” Frank squeezed his forehead. “OK. So he says his name’s Jerry. That may or may not be true, but that’s not really important. They landed mid-November, 2048. Three months before you did. They used the same sleep tanks as we did. Landing was fine, all on automatic, put them exactly where they were supposed to be, which is more than happened with us. But when they woke up, they found that their ship wasn’t working right. The comms were down. Fried completely. They couldn’t get a message in or out. They couldn’t talk to XO, and XO couldn’t talk to them.”
Isla frowned. “But what about their cargo drops?”
“It was the same problem we had, in spades. Some of theirs were on target. But a lot more of them ended up scattered over the southern and eastern plains. They got their RTG early on, which saved their asses, but it just meant they lived long enough to realize just how screwed they were. They’ve two habs, but not enough power to run them both. No water maker: they had to make a crude one out of parts. No greenhouse. No comms. No batteries. Between me first seeing the guy out on the plain, and now, they managed to find one food drop. I’d already taken one other. I could see the locators, and they couldn’t, and XO deliberately hadn’t clued me in. So yeah. I took their stuff. And there’s other kit that’s still lying out there: something that makes bricks out of the soil, and a three-d factory, but that’s not the… they had food, but no way to grow any more. They’ve been on starvation rations for the better part of three months. They don’t have enough water or air or power.”
“And XO?”
“Had no idea what state they were in, above what they could see from space, and what I told them.”
Lucy pressed the back of her hand against her lips, head bowed, thinking.
“Why, though? We’re here for the science. What are they here for?”
“Colonization. A land grab. Boots on the ground. Call it what you want. Hell, you paid for it.”
“We did what?”
“You paid for it. For what NASA spent on MBO, XO were able to put two bases on Mars. That we know about. I don’t know all the details.”
“Is that why they didn’t just come and ask you for help? They knew you were here, yes?”
“Sure they knew. When the one guy met me out on the plain, he even called me Brack. But in one of those weird strokes of luck, their comms outage meant they didn’t even know what sol it was. I told them you were already here, and he bought it. He was clearly XO, and I thought they were here to replace me as Brack—that was why I was such a mess when you arrived. I’d slept with a gun for two months, thinking they were going to swarm in and toss me out the airlock.”
“But—”
“You were never supposed to know about M2. They couldn’t just sail over any more, even if they wanted to. And the MBO crew was now six fit, well-fed astronauts, and me: Brack, the ex-military guy who’d just seen off seven cons because he’d been told to do it. They didn’t have the numbers. And they were so short of both air and watts, they needed to prioritize their supply drops. Searching Mars, manually.”
“What were XO doing all this time? Didn’t they ask you to go over?”
“I told them to go fuck themselves.”
“But they didn’t insist.”
“No.”
“But that means XO were willing to see M2 fail,” said Lucy, “and everybody there die.”
“Look, if you want to know what XO were thinking, then ask them yourself. Turns out my lie was the best thing I could have done in the circumstances.”
Fan rumbled: “What do you mean?”
“They’ve…” Frank pushed the bowl of strawberries away from him. “They’ve gone rogue. Worse. It’s like the ding wing over there.”
“Ding wing?”
“Nut house.”
“They’ve got mental issues?”
“Some of them. Their commander for sure. They fight each other to work out who does the jobs and who gets the food. The weakest do all the work and eat last, if at all. They’ve been like this since they realized they were never going to get a viable base going. They took Station seven, tried to use it to talk to the satellite. Apparently they kind of got halfway, but they just couldn’t figure out how to send a message. That was the final straw. The boss guy, Justin, finally worked out that if they, if he, was going to live, they were going to have to take MBO for themselves. And fuck the people who are already here.”
“When did we have the solar storm?” said Fan to Lucy.
“November seventh. We spent ten hours in an insulated cage in the middle of the ship,” she added for Frank’s benefit.
“Enough to interfere with ship systems. Disable their communications. Maybe something happened to their hibe
rnation tanks at the same time.” Fan, still holding the dried slice of strawberry, looked at it like he’d never seen it before. He dropped it back in the bowl. “It’s very experimental. NASA wouldn’t let us travel that way.”
“While XO didn’t give a shit about how experimental it was with us.”
“I wasn’t party to that decision,” he said, and Frank realized he was aiming his anger at the wrong person.
“OK. So, for them, it was now or never. They’ve run out of food. Their systems aren’t enough to maintain life. They figured I’d spill the beans about them. And we were a man down. I don’t know whether Jim talked before—” Frank looked over to where Jerry sat, bound, isolated, alone. “Go talk to him yourself. I’m done here.”
Lucy pushed her chair back, and Fan and Isla followed her. They stood in front of Jerry. Lucy, hands on hips, Fan, arms folded, Isla, pressing all of her fingers against her upper lip, not trusting herself to speak.
Frank kicked his own chair aside and stood at the back, where he could see everything that went on.
“Jerry, right?” said Lucy.
“Yes.”
“I’m Commander Lucy Davison. I want you to tell me what happened to Jim Zamudio.”
“He…” Jerry nodded at Frank, because that was pretty much the only part of him he could move, “said he’d fix things for me.”
“Whatever he promised you, he can’t deliver. Jim Zamudio.”
“Tell her what you told me,” said Frank.
Jerry weighed up his options, and realized he had none. “We. We were out on the volcano. We were looking to see if we could grab some more of your equipment. That was all. That was all we were up there for. Nothing else. We’d almost got the comms working. We needed more parts. That’s right. More parts.”
“And Jim?”
“He was suddenly there. We came around the corner, and there he was, back to us. Head right down over the rock, looking at it close. He didn’t see us at all. I wanted to back up, but Jen. She lost it. She saw him, drove at him. Hit him hard. Crushed him against the cliff. Knocked him down. Knocked him out cold.”
“It wasn’t you who did that?”
“It wasn’t!” Jerry licked his lips, flexed his arms against the ropes. “She wanted to strip his suit, leave him behind, but I stood up for him. We couldn’t leave him behind, could we? Could we?”
“You took him back to M2.”
“Sure. We took him back to M2. I thought we’d just keep him for a while, then take him back. Swap him for stuff we needed. But Justin…”
“Your commander.”
“He’s,” and Jerry hesitated. Frank eyeballed him, and he continued. “Scary. He’s really scary. We do what he says, because otherwise, it’s just not worth saying no to him, OK?”
Fan leaned in. “What happened to Jim?”
Jerry didn’t answer. Not straight away. “He’s gone,” he said eventually. “He’s dead. He’s definitely dead. He’s not coming back.”
“He was alive when you took him. How did he end up dead?”
“It was Justin. It was Justin’s idea. He made us. He made all of us.”
“Tell me. Tell me now, or I’m throwing you out of the airlock, Hippocratic oath be damned. What did he make you do?”
“Eat him.”
There was absolute silence. Not even a breath as the words sank in.
Then Fan lunged forward, and Frank, who’d been ready, managed to wrestle the doctor away and held him, hugged him, until he instead sagged onto Frank’s shoulders, weeping.
It was poor comfort, from a man who’d now killed five men. Frank didn’t feel capable of offering Fan any solace at all. Jim was dead, Yun was about to suffer the same fate, they were down to three of the original six crew, and even if they wanted to bail, the MAV wouldn’t be ready for months. It would feel like all hope was lost. And maybe it was.
He could see Lucy and Isla over Fan’s shoulder. Both of them looked hollowed out. He remembered that look from that one night when he and Declan and Zero had gathered to talk it out.
“I know that this isn’t what you expected. You were supposed to come here, do your science, discover all kinds of new shit, work out how to live on Mars, and then go home to tell everyone how to do it. I know what that feels like. I was supposed to come here, build a base for you all, look after it and serve the rest of my sentence knowing that I was finally doing something good with my life, and maybe, just maybe, making my boy proud of his old man again. I knew I was going to die here, and that was OK, because I thought it’d be in ten, fifteen years’ time. I didn’t know they were planning to off me within six months. You didn’t know that they’d put a bunch of bugs on Mars who’d fight you for every scrap you had. None of us got a choice about what we’re facing. But we’ve got to deal with it all the same.”
Lucy took Fan from Frank, and guided him gently back to his seat over at the table. She stood behind him, hands on his shoulders, kneading his flesh, while Isla and Frank stood the other side.
“Frank, we’ve got fucking space cannibals.” She grimaced. “Training didn’t cover this.”
“So let’s work out a way to get Yun back and, I don’t know what you’d say, neutralize the threat.”
“The way you neutralized yours?”
Frank blinked. “Jesus. Lady. What did you expect me to do? Lie down and die? Goddammit, you were a fast jet pilot, right? In the Stans? How many people did you kill then? Did you lose count, or don’t you know?”
“That’s enough, Frank,” said Isla.
“At least I looked my victims in the eye, which is something you can’t do from twenty thousand feet.”
“That is enough!” Isla came to stand in Frank’s eyeline, so that he had to look at her, and not Lucy. “You’re right, but you’re being a dick about it.”
She let that sink in, and then she turned on her heel.
“Lucy. He’s right. We have to get Yun. We have to stop them coming back again. Either that, or we sit here and wait for them to take the rest of us. This is not what we wanted. But this is what we have.”
After a minute or two, Lucy slumped into Frank’s discarded seat and dragged it back to the table. “So what have we got?”
Isla retook her place, and kicked the chair next to her. Frank sat.
“The four of us,” said Frank.
Lucy looked bleak.
“Three of those four are supposed to be really smart. Maybe we could use that to our advantage.”
She didn’t look any less bleak, but she did at least grunt in acknowledgment.
“We’ve got two buggies. Power to burn. We’ve got suits, we’ve got spare life supports to take with us. We know where they are. We know how many of them there are.”
“Do we?”
“They had a crew of eight. Two are dead. We’ve got a prisoner. Five of them left. One of them won’t be in a fit state to fight, because I probably broke his ankle while I was over there.”
“Franklin.”
“He was trying to kill me, and hey: I’m a convicted murderer. What did you expect me to do? Play patty cake?” He waited for any further objections, then continued. “We know the layout of their base. We know they’re weak. They blew everything on taking MBO. All their reserves. They’ve got nothing left. We know they’re in one hab, and their descent ship. Yun must be in one or other of them.”
“If she’s still alive.”
“Lucy.” Frank’s turn.
“OK, OK. Fan, can she get back to, whatever we’re calling it—”
“M2,” said Frank.
“—M2 without running out of air?”
“Yes. It’s only four, four and a half hours away. If she manages to regulate her breathing, she can make it. Whether, in the circumstances, that’s a good thing—”
“Fanuel. We’re trying to get a plan together here.” Frank played with his burned fingertips. “Her suit’s still working. We can get a fresh life support into it.”
“And what if s
omeone else is wearing it?”
“Then we make them take it off.” He glanced around the table. “If any of you are squeamish, now would be a good time to say. Because Yun’s relying on us to get her out of there, and we need to know we’ve got each other’s backs on this.”
“You’re asking me to kill people, Franklin,” said Fan.
“I stopped you from strangling Jerry.”
“Thinking about it is one thing. Doing it is another.”
“You were doing it,” said Frank.
“I was angry.”
“If I’d lost half my crew and I wasn’t angry, there’d be something wrong with me.”
Isla put her hand on top of Frank’s, and he stopped talking and was still.
“You’re not angry, though, are you?” she said. “You never get angry. You just decide what needs to be done, and then you do it. And right now, you’ve decided that M2 has to go. We can’t co-exist, and you’d rather you lived than you died.”
Frank pulled his hand away. Slowly, so that it was like the tide receding. “Something like that. Sometimes killing is a purely practical decision. Except when it comes to those stupid fish.” He looked at his fingers, then shook himself. “Then there’s all of you. I kind of like you. You’re good people. Even if I don’t get back home, you deserve to. But this isn’t getting us anywhere. We’ve all got to be prepared to do whatever to get Yun back. Doesn’t matter why or what we feel afterwards.”
“Accepted,” said Lucy. “What have they got?”
“Five people, one can’t walk. Limited air and power. Enough to mount a two-buggy attack across an eighty-mile gap once, but probably not again in a hurry. No central comms, but suit-to-suit communication like you have, which is limited to what? Thirty yards or so.”
“Weapons?”
“No one shot at me, if that’s what you’re asking.” Frank thought about it for a moment. “At least, I don’t think anyone was shooting at me. No one hit me. One guy attacked me with a wrench, and two tried to drive into me with buggies.”
“And we’ve got a gun.”
“We can make other weapons,” said Isla. “We have piping, and compressed gas. A potato cannon is simple enough. Firing rocks, of course, or bolts. Edged weapons using what we have here, and blunt ones from outside. Shields using drum lids. Reach will be important.” She realized the stares she was getting. “I had lots of brothers and cousins, and access to the toolshed.”
