by S. J. Morden
He kept his eyes firmly on Justin, parried a couple of abortive attempts to get closer, and finally stood part-way up the wall, one foot on the edge of the curling metal and loose insulation wave that had frozen in place. The buckled fuselage was sharp. He’d need to tread carefully.
But every time Frank tried to back out, he had to straighten up and ward Justin off by brandishing his sword, holding him at arm’s length to prevent him from landing a blow. With one damaged arm, it was impossible to escape. But neither did he want to kill again. Justin, however, seemed hellbent on only one of them getting out alive.
Lucy climbed through, and stood next to Frank. It took a little while for him to realize she was there, and a little longer for him to register the gun in her outstretched hand. He looked at her through her faceplate, her thin-lipped expression, her unblinking gaze.
He got the message, even though they couldn’t talk. Justin got the message too. He stood, weight on one leg, hammer held low by his side. He stood up as straight as he could. Frank climbed carefully out, teasing his way through the gap in the side of the prone spaceship, and then stood on the sand, waiting for the flash, waiting for the low, distant pop, waiting for Lucy to come out and tell him it was done.
33
[Transcript of Emergency FLIGHT meeting Ares IV Mission Control JPL Pasadena CA 3/10/2049]
GT: I’ve been up for forty-eight [48] hours straight. Just so you all know. Sound off.
MA: CATO. DSN [Deep Space Network] confirm that signals from the three [3] XO satellites in areostationary orbits are ongoing. ATA confirms this also. No direct communications have been established with MBO.
LS: RIO. It’s out of my hands. The U.S. ambassador to Beijing was summoned to explain the situation, and the Secretary of State has been in touch with his Chinese counterpart. The CNSA [China National Space Agency] liaison here has been sequestered in meetings. This is… about to explode. Sorry.
WM: ODIN. If they have total computer failure, then they may be too busy to communicate. But given that the uplink is a priority, and that I’m estimating a sol to fix everything, even just to patch it together enough to send a lo-fi message… we may be looking at something more serious.
GT: How serious?
WM: Catastrophic hab failure with zero survivability.
PO: ECLSS. I can’t see that. The habs are modular, the systems are robust, the personnel trained. And HiRISE2 tell us the infrastructure appears intact.
GT: They’re burning more fuel trying to stay overhead than they’d spend in years of station-keeping.
TY: OPSPLAN. I’ve still got nothing. Though the rovers have moved. They have definitely moved. There are people on the surface.
GT: XO have refused my request to go to Gold Hill in person.
PO: Seriously?
GT: They said the site is “commercially sensitive”, but I’m hearing rumors that’s not all it is. I have a car out front. Al is meeting me there. Let’s see what they say to our faces.
[transcript ends]
He didn’t remember much after that.
Fan opening the door to the stand-alone airlock, and Yun taking her first unsteady steps wearing Leland’s suit. Her face, livid and puffed, and her eyes… every blood vessel burst.
Frank, arm not just broken, but shattered, and Fan having to heat up a morphine autoinjector in a self-igniting can, to melt the crystals and then inject the contents, almost boiling, into his bloodstream through the already patched arm of his spacesuit.
That had hurt. Hurt a lot: Frank’s yell of pain died the other side of his faceplate, and then it faded, leaving him in an almost dreamlike fugue. The pain—well, it might have been there, but he couldn’t feel it any more. His mouth had gone dry, and he had a problem with Mars turning when it clearly couldn’t do any such thing. He blinked and squinted again. Definitely turning. Slowly, left to right, and then back, in a huge, glacial circle.
He was hauled up onto a buggy, and tied on, much as the M2 prisoners were, except he was on his side, watching the Martian landscape slide by, top to bottom, like he was climbing a cliff that would never end.
It occurred to him that he was actually injured. Properly damaged. Building sites were dangerous places, but he’d always run a tight ship. Everyone knew the score before they started, and workers goofing around with air hoses and heavy machinery got their pink slips. He’d seen some serious shit go down—mangled limbs, staved-in heads, desleeving injuries, crush and puncture wounds—and now it had happened to him. Someone had set about his arm with a hammer. Of course it was broken.
Now everything depended on whether Fan could fix it straight, with what he had. Hell, at least he could trust Fan not to off him. Not like Alice, who’d killed who knew how many with her skewed idea of who should live and who should be helped to die.
That got him remembering them all. Zeus, huge and tattooed and tireless. Marcy, whose enthusiasm eased seamlessly into recklessness. Declan, sarcastic and prissy and smart. Zero, dedicated to his gardening, and still just a kid. Speaking of kids—Dee: he was normal. Out of all of them, he was the one who Frank would have put on a ship back to Earth, had just one space been available. The injustice of it all. Bringing them to Mars, getting them to build the base, then killing them off. Leaving only Brack.
Brack. Did he know what he was getting himself into? Sure he did. He’d signed up for it, all of it, including Phase three. And when he died—when he bled out on the floor of Comms—he’d died with a threat on his lips, “You’ll never see your son again”, which might yet come true. Frank might not even make it back to Earth.
But look at what he had done. He’d built a place for people to live in. He’d thwarted XO’s plans. He’d done his best to help his new crewmates. He’d saved some of them. Not bad for a lifer. Not bad at all.
“Frank?”
He snapped awake without realizing he’d fallen asleep. Fan had his helmet pressed against his. The buggy had stopped moving, and in his eyeline he could see another buggy parked up, and the outpost.
“We need to swap out your life support, and I want to check on your vitals.”
Frank took a breath, and another. His head started to clear. “I’m good. Give me a minute.”
He’d made it this far. He’d make it the rest of the way.
The inside of the outpost was still a mess. It offended Frank. Jerry and the two so far nameless M2 people were going to do the work putting it right. The missing equipment needed to be reinstalled or mended, and hopefully between them there’d be enough skills to do that. Because it was still a long way from Earth.
According to Fan, Frank wasn’t going to die any time soon. That wasn’t the end of the doctor’s concerns, though, and the only place he wanted to see his patient was in the med bay. That was still a couple of hours away, and while Lucy, Isla, Yun and Fan were able to climb out of their suits and scratch the places that itched, Frank was trapped.
His arm might make it out of his sleeve once, but it sure as hell wasn’t going back in again.
But Fan was able to deploy sufficient diagnostic tools through the open back hatch to confirm that Frank’s vitals were stable, and administer enough chemicals to keep them that way.
Fan swapped out Frank’s life support, and patted him on the back before Frank closed up his suit again. One thumb up was all he could manage. He was still feeling like this wasn’t quite his body, and that he was watching everything from one step removed.
Fan boosted him back onto the buggy, checked on the prisoners, and retied Frank onto the roll bars. Then he took the lead down the Santa Clara, with Isla taking over the driving from Lucy. The smoothness of the river bed was a welcome contrast to the rough edges of the volcano. And because there’d been no car chases or derby races, there was enough left in the fuel cell to drive back to MBO, rather than rely on gravity to roll the rest of the way.
One last turn, and they were out of the mouth of the Santa Clara, back onto the Heights, and there was the base, bathed
in the pink afternoon sun slanting in from the west. Frank stirred himself from his torpor, and managed a little more upright than the slumped position he found himself in.
Not that it made him any more comfortable. The morphine was wearing off. He could feel his arm again, and not in a good way. It felt sore and hot, like someone was rubbing sandpaper across his skin. The rest of him was just dog tired. This was it. This was the end of it, and the start of something new.
Out of the valley, he could make and receive transmissions again. The clipped chatter between Lucy and Fan. No, wait, that wasn’t small talk.
“Fan. Fan, talk to me. Fan!”
The base slewed off to the right. And then out of sight, behind him.
“Frank. Frank, can you hear me? Frank, something’s wrong with Fan.”
Frank shook himself, and realized that Fan was asleep at the wheel, making the buggy turn in a wide circle. He struggled against the cargo strap that held him down, reached forward and banged Fan’s shoulder hard. Fan fell further onto his left side, held in position only by the driver’s harness.
His hands fell off the controls. He wasn’t asleep. He was unconscious.
Frank gritted his teeth and screwed up his face. OK, think. Think. Then he noticed that the air in his suit wasn’t blowing in his face any more. He flipped up the control panel on his chest, one-handed. Nothing. No display. No numbers.
His suit had just turned itself off. If the same thing had happened to Fan’s…
Not a coincidence. Surely, not a coincidence.
He had a helmet’s worth of air. Less than that. If his scrubbers had stopped working too, then he was going to choke on his CO2 faster than he’d run out of oxygen. How long did he have? A minute? Seconds?
And Fan was further down that road than he was, because he’d already passed out, was already suffocating, as soon they both would be, rolling slowly to a stop on the Heights.
OK. Stop breathing. Untie yourself by pulling on the right part of the strap. Climb up and over and restart the buggy. Try and ignore the pounding heartbeat in your ears.
He felt his lungs begin to strain. They urged him to take a breath. Just one more. He loosened the strap enough that he could pull himself up and move around on the lattice frame so that he could reach the controls.
It took him a couple of attempts, and they began to head back the way they’d come. Close enough for the others to run over and help? Frank used his dead hand to hit the harness buckle. Once, twice, and it just wasn’t clicking out. He swapped hands, got it first time, but slipped and fell against the chassis, driving what air he had left out of his body.
Fuck.
He had to breathe, and as soon as he did, he needed another. He knew that if he did, he’d not wake up.
He picked Fan up, one-handed, and bundled both of them off the buggy.
They landed together, awkwardly, sprawling in the dust and against the rocks. There wasn’t anything else Frank could do. It wasn’t pain he could fight against, it wasn’t effort that was required: it was the very essence of him craving oxygen and shutting down in its absence. His vision started to gray out. He was mid-faint. He forced himself to his knees, and clawed at Fan’s back unit. His fingers caught the recessed latch, and he pulled.
In there was the hard reset button. He’d used it to try and revive Marcy, all the way back on that first trip out. It was all he could remember. Not the order of the buttons, whether it was the left one or the right one he needed to press. The color—one was red, the other green—would have told him, but he was blind and he was sliding down that long, dark tunnel.
Yes, he was panting. Yes, there was air moving in and out. It wasn’t doing any good. He slapped his hand down—
He was face-down in the dirt, a bead of sweat hanging from the end of his nose. But he could breathe.
Fresh air blew against his skin, making the sweat-bead tremble. His throat hurt. No, everything hurt. He turned his head slightly and fastened his lips around the water spout. Empty. Goddammit.
“Frank?”
Someone kneeling on the ground next to him, their head lowered to the same level as his, looking sideways into his face.
“Yeah?”
“You OK?”
“Isla?”
“You saved Fan.”
His suit had shut down. As they approached the base, his suit, and Fan’s suit, had simply turned themselves off.
“That’s good.”
“The two M2 people… we didn’t get to them in time.”
Frank got his arm underneath his carapace and heaved. Willing hands pulled at him, and got him as far as sitting, leaning against the wheel of a buggy.
There was Fan, and Lucy, and Yun. And Isla. His eyes were sore, and he blinked rapidly. They were back at the entrance to the Santa Clara.
“What the hell happened?” he asked.
“We don’t know. There’s a fault with the suits.”
“A fault? They turned off. We did nothing, and it was like someone just pulled the plug on us.”
Lucy stood with hands on hips, looking behind Frank, across the Heights at the distant base.
“How far from the base were you?”
“Four, five hundred feet.”
“Just about the suit’s wifi range, right?”
“Mine’s less. But yes.” Frank remembered being hunted by Brack, out in the cold, dark night, and the only thing keeping him alive was that he was too far from the base for the implant in his chest to connect with the base’s automatic systems.
“Fan’s suit logged on first. Your suit, a few seconds later. The M2 suits were the same as yours. And the moment they connected with the main computer, they turned themselves off.” Lucy reached up and wiped dust from her faceplate. “Sorry, Frank. Looks like you were right.”
“Oh, OK. That’s nice. I like being right. And Isla has to do my laundry for a month.”
“I thought… I don’t know what I thought. At least we know what the problem is: XO installed a kill switch, injecting the code through the dish before we cut them off, and left it there to take out anyone returning from M2. There has to be a work-around.” She looked at Yun. “Any suggestions?”
Frank took the opportunity to check his suit numbers. Everything seemed OK. Now. OK apart from the dead man and woman they had fastened to the back of the buggy, and the fact that getting within range of the main computer system’s wireless transmitter would kill a suit—and the occupant. “Shame we can’t call Jerry. Or even if we can, he’s tied up.”
“What can we try?” Leland’s suit seemed crumpled with Yun inside it. She had shorter legs, and shorter arms, and even though the torso was a rigid container, her head seemed lower in the helmet. She looked like shit, and her voice sounded like she’d been gargling with razor blades. But she was still trying. “Use a tablet to access the root?”
Fan handed her his, and she tapped at the screen. It became rapidly apparent, from both her expression and the frequency of her finger movements, that she was having problems. “I’m not locked out. But I’ve had all my permissions revoked. There’s another layer of security immediately behind the initial handshake, and I can’t get through it.”
She kept on going, while Isla suggested: “We can drive back up to CU1, disable our transmitter chips, drive back down and hope we have enough air to last us that long. Which we might not.”
“Just turn off your transmitter,” said Frank.
Isla talked over him. “That’s the only way we’re going to get into the base and reset the system.”
“But you can just turn it off from the suit controls,” Frank said.
“Because it’s automatic. It just logs on to the network. So we need a way of stopping that.”
Lucy interrupted Isla. “Say that again, Frank.”
“I can turn off my transmitter.” He opened up his controls and scrolled through the menu. “See?”
He pressed the button and instantly all communication ceased. He thumbed the butt
on again, and it came back.
“We can’t do that,” said Lucy.
“Can’t you?”
“That command just doesn’t exist. Why would we need it?”
“To stop someone fucking your suit over?” Frank dragged himself up and turned himself around so that he could see the base. It was tantalizingly close. “I guess that’s never been a thing until now.”
“It’s sure as hell a thing now. How did XO think they’d get away with this?”
“By making sure you’re not alive to tell anyone.” He needed a drink. Water would do. Beer would be better. But it was obvious what needed to be done, if how to do it remained opaque. “So which wires do I cut?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that, Frank,” said Yun.
“You can’t go, Frank,” said Fan.
“Why the hell not?”
“Because you’re high on morphine, you’ve broken your arm and if something happens to you in there, none of us can come and get you.”
“The morphine wore off a while ago.”
“Trust me: if it had worn off, you’d be begging me for more. You’re hurt, Frank.”
“Don’t make me regret bringing you back.” Frank looked around at the others. “Who else is going to do this? You guys? Or those guys?” He pointed to the back of the buggy.
“We can’t, and those guys are dead, Frank.”
“Looks like I’m the last one standing who can fix his suit so that it won’t kill him.” No one else appeared convinced. “Sure, we can all head back to the outpost, pull your comms circuits out by hand in a way you may never be able to repair again, hope our air lasts long enough that we can fix whatever problem there is. Or you can just tell me what to do, I can go and do it, and then you all come over. I know which sounds like the easy way.”
Lucy grunted. “Yun. Talk him through it.” There were objections, and she shouted them down. “He’s an adult. He can make his own poor choices.”
“He’s not fit for duty,” said Fan. “I’m the medical officer.”
“Technically, you can’t order me around,” said Frank. “We don’t even work for the same company.”
