No Way

9

[Message file #101862 12/8/2048 0845 MBO Rahe Crater to MBO Mission Control]

His journey back was arduous, crossing unfamiliar and difficult terrain, and he had to rely on his map to guide him. But he thought the risk of breaking a wheel was necessary: he’d been able to travel a significant distance over the lower slopes of the volcano, all frozen lava steps and very little dust. What there had been was thin, and seemed often-blown. The tracks he had made would be resurfaced in a few days. Certainly, it seemed windier on the exposed slopes than it did on the plains.

Praying for a storm that would wipe everything was pointless: either it happened or it didn’t. In its absence, he had to make plans.

He’d need to remove the airlock at the top of Long Beach, bring it back, along with all the spare air he’d left with it. It could so very easily be used against him.

What else? He needed to know where the other XO mission had come down, and when. He needed to be able to work out for himself whether or not they could reach him. He also needed to know what they were supposed to be doing there.

He guessed they were, yes, south of him. But how far? Did their ranges barely overlap, or was there the possibility of travel between their descent ship and MBO? He needed to get a map out in front of him, when he wasn’t being shaken around on the rock-hard lava. He knew his buggies well enough to know what kind of distances they could manage, depending on the terrain, whether he was towing, whether he needed the lights on, and whether he could take it easy—going fast used disproportionately more watts. If he called it two hundred miles, generously, then that would cover a surprising amount of Mars.

Of course, if it was a round trip, then it’d be half that. And even then, the buggies weren’t the limiting factor. Unless the infrastructure was in place to swap out the life support, then somewhere between hours eight and nine a spacesuit would run out of oxygen. Even if the buggy was doing its top speed of twenty, and that was only possible on perfectly flat concrete, that brought the range from base down to eighty-ninety miles.

If the second base was beyond that, he might be OK. Possibly. Closer, and the potential for more interaction was significantly higher. Frank didn’t want to interact with these newcomers. He wanted nothing at all to do with them. They frightened him.

Perhaps he should have offed the guy while he had the chance. He clenched his jaw and pulled back his cracking lips. Perhaps. He hadn’t. He’d let him go. For all sorts of reasons. And some of those reasons were the same as why he’d held the dying Brack’s hand, even though it was Frank who’d killed him.

He was running low on air, and watts. That would normally be a cause for huge concern, and he was never comfortable with letting the reserves get as thin as he had. But it was a good sign right now. The narrower the margin, the less likely that the other guy—the other guys, and he really ought to have tried to find out how many of them there were—could reach MBO.

He’d just about squeak it. He’d traveled the southern edge of the crater, up on the volcanic ledges, and he’d reached the Santa Clara. The map didn’t give that many clues as to whether he’d find a route down into it, or whether he’d need to leave the buggy where it was, and hoof the couple of miles across the Heights to MBO. The resolution was decent enough, but in close-up the pictures got granular.

In the end, it wasn’t anywhere near as difficult as he’d feared. There was some slumping of material—a landslide maybe, a cliff that had fallen inwards onto the Heights—that let him slither down from the volcano and onto the flat plain that now housed MBO, the MAV and his descent ship.

He eked out his watts to get him to the base, and the first thing he did, even though he was at less than ten per cent air and well within the margin of error that meant his pack could give out any minute, was to scan the horizon to see if anything was coming.

No plumes of dust. No moving shapes. It was like it had always been since before he’d arrived. Still. Desolate. Dead.

Then he plugged the buggy back into the battery, and entered the cross-hab airlock.

His hand went to his nut runner again. Could someone have slipped inside while he’d been away? Of course. There was no way of locking the doors completely—though there was a way once he was inside, he realized. But there wasn’t any way of protecting the hab structures themselves. They were composed of a flexible plastic skin, held rigid by a metal frame, screwed together by bolts. Anyone who wanted to wreck it, could. It was what he’d threatened XO with, and now it was threatened against him.

Goddammit, what a mess. He’d allowed himself hope, that he could outwit the company and get one over on them. How could he have been so stupid? Trusting XO? That was never going to happen again.

The airlock cycled. He checked the atmosphere before taking his suit off, and made certain he clipped the scuba mask and O₂ tank onto his belt before he did a thorough search of the habs, upper and lower levels. He’d thought he was done with this. Clearly, he was wrong.

As he went, he opened the inner door of every airlock. Such was their design that the outer, Mars-facing door couldn’t now be opened automatically, and not manually until the pressure either side had equalized. And that would give Frank more than enough time to get into his suit and figure out what to do.

His last call was to the Comms/Control hab.

The gun was still tucked in behind the monitor. His hand hovered over it, then he carefully picked it up, painfully aware that a gun very similar to this one was the reason he was on Mars in the first place. It still felt unnaturally light. A gun should have heft, a weight to its purpose, and not feel like a plastic toy.

He pulled the magazine free, and, placing the gun on the desk in front of the keyboard, he clicked the rounds out one by one into his hand. Fifteen. He pushed them back in, and put the magazine in his left pocket. The gun went in his right.

Sitting in the chair, scrubbing at his scalp, he felt… he didn’t know what he felt. Like this was the last thing he wanted to do, and at the same time, the only thing he could. No, he knew exactly what he felt. He felt vulnerable. He’d been backed into a corner, and his instinct had told him to pick up a gun and get ready to use it.

It was what, four weeks now until NASA arrived? Until then, he was on his own. No, that wasn’t right. He wasn’t on his own, he’d only thought he was. This was worse. This was far, far worse.

His tablet was still on his spacesuit. Time to call home. Time to demand some answers.

He typed it out. Oh, he was angry. Angry and scared and just about holding it together. Send. He was going to have to wait to see what Luisa and her team at Mission Control were going to say. In the meantime, he had some maps to stare at.

The question—the million-dollar question—was simply this: could they reach him?

He’d been at the absolute limit of his endurance, both in terms of what his spacesuit could manage, and his buggy. The other guy? Well, he didn’t look so good, but he still had a working buggy, and therefore had to have a way of charging it up. Maybe from the descent ship, but maybe they’d got lucky and found the RTG for a bit of base load. They sure as hell didn’t have the solar panels that were currently plugged in outside MBO. Had they a second set? Maybe XO had suddenly got a lot more generous.

The guy had said south, and at the time he’d been roughly fifty miles south-east of MBO. The open container was a few miles short of that—the cross showed exactly where that had been. Frank was going to guess that the tracks he’d found out on the plain, the ones that seemed to come from, and go to, the south, were also made by the second crew. Call that the very extreme of its range, because he hadn’t found any north of that.

So, if he had two points that he thought were as far out as they could reach, could he calculate roughly where they’d started from?

Ninety miles south was smack out in the middle of the plain, at the far end of the huge cracks in the ground the map called the Uranius Fossae. But realistically, they could be anywhere on an arc going south-east to south-west, from the southern slopes of Ceraunius Tholus to out in the middle of nowhere.

If they were to the south or south-west, they could only get to him by over-reaching. It’d have to be a one-way journey, in the hope that they could recharge and swap out at MBO. And if they were at the south-west end, it was almost inconceivable that anyone would dare make the trip. Frank would be safe.

If it was to the south-east, though, on the southern flanks of the volcano… that would put them just within ninety miles of MBO. They’d have to drive up and over fifteen thousand feet of mountain, and Frank didn’t know whether that was feasible. He spent a little longer looking at pixels, measuring distances, then pushed the tablet away.

If he was designing a network of colonies on Mars, then isolating them from each other didn’t make any sense—separate enough that they were self-sufficient, that they didn’t overuse whatever resources were nearby, sure. But close enough that they could be used as staging posts to the next base, if there were problems. Say if something broke down that someone couldn’t fix on site, but a guy in the next base could. What was the betting that XO had deliberately put them within range of a there-and-back journey? When he thought about it, it was obvious. They were evil, not stupid.

What he couldn’t get out of his mind was how hungry that other astronaut had looked.

How long had they been out there, on the other side of the volcano? Things had been falling from the sky for months, and only gone quiet in the last few weeks. Certainly, they’d been there long enough to have scoped out MBO already. If they already knew where he was, and that he was alone, and that he’d killed Brack and was holding XO to ransom, why hadn’t they moved against him already?

The only conclusion was that they hadn’t been able.

The man he’d met didn’t have comms. He didn’t have comms out on the volcano, and if he wasn’t able to pick up the locator beacons for the supply drops, he didn’t have comms, period. Frank’s own descent ship had come with all those functions, and the second mission had clearly made it to the surface…

But if the ship was broken, and they had no downlink? They had no way of calling home, and no way of home calling them.

That would explain everything.

It also meant that while they knew where he was, in the sense that they might remember where the MBO was supposed to be situated, they had no maps, and only the sun to navigate by. Compasses didn’t work on Mars, either.

So if—a huge if—they couldn’t talk to XO and XO couldn’t talk to them, they were effectively isolated from everything. From Earth, from MBO, from all their supply drops. All they had was what they’d brought with them or could scavenge, and if Frank thought that his own initiation to the Martian surface had been a hardscrabble, then those guys had to be having it so much worse.

In other circumstances, he’d feel sorry for them.

Frank checked the tablet to see if Luisa had responded. If she didn’t reply soon, he was probably going to have to decide what to do about that, too. But it chimed as he was holding it.

She simply said: “Frank, please stay calm. I don’t understand what you mean by ‘another base’. Don’t do anything to jeopardize your safety, please. Can you tell me exactly what’s happened, so I know what questions to ask?”

Yes, he could. In no uncertain terms.

“I met another astronaut, wearing an XO suit and driving an XO buggy, out on the eastern side of Ceraunius. There is only one way he could have got there, and that’s if XO put him there. The hour I gave you for giving me answers is close to up, and I meant what I said.” Send.

Just when he’d got to a level of complexity that he could actually cope with, something else came over the horizon—literally in this case—and pissed all over his parade.

Sitting there, at the comms desk, he was warm, clean, well fed. He had water and air, and the prospect of getting home again. Just over the hill was a bunch of people who had very little and would probably kill him. Should he have struck first? Sabotaged the other buggy? No. Maybe. Just as long as they left him alone.

There was no guarantee of that, though, and if Frank was right, then there could never be a guarantee of that.

Had he made a mistake of showing surprise when he saw the other man? Was that the clue that he’d dropped the ball? A Brack who’d known about the second base wouldn’t have done such a thing. Maybe he’d messed it up. But he’d been called Brack by the XO man.

If they knew who Brack was, and what his function was, then that might give them cause to hold back.

Amid all his guesswork, he knew one thing for certain: only he had his own interests at heart. Only he was going to keep him safe.

So while XO sorted their shit out, he was going to suit up again, drive out to Long Beach with a trailer and get that airlock. He had enough daylight to manage it, just, and he wasn’t going to leave it out there any longer than he had to. He certainly wasn’t going to be heading out to the plain any time soon.

He was bunkering down. Four weeks. Four weeks to hold out. He could do that, right?

He clipped the tablet to his suit, took the gun and the bullets out of his pockets and put them separately but together in his pouch bag, loaded up a fresh life support, and clambered in through the back hatch.

His spacesuit looked as tired as he felt. How many miles did these things have to have on the clock before they wore out? He could very well ask the same question of himself. Fifty-two. He was fifty-two years old and he was on Mars.

And his son was on Earth. Focus, Frank. Focus.

He cycled the airlock, and wondered if he was being watched, even now.

The first buggy was still recharging. It’d take hours for the electricity to strip the water in the fuel cell back into its component gases. He had two vehicles, though. Was that one advantage he had over the others? Maybe not. If they had one, they probably had their second one too, even if they didn’t have the power to recharge both simultaneously.

He swapped the trailer over, and drove out to the drop-off, pausing to stare into the distance, along the length of Rahe, trying as best he could to see if there was anything moving down there. It always came down to the amount of dust in the air. Currently, visibility was some fifteen or twenty miles, which was good, but still not enough to see detail at the far end of the crater. He could follow the line of Beverly Hills, but they became nothing but shapes carved into the late afternoon, and the crater wall was a hazy, rosy glow, bright and undifferentiated.

Whatever he thought he saw, he still had to get the airlock back. He drove down the drop-off and onto Sunset.

Worst-case scenario: XO had planned another mission, from the start, in case Phase three didn’t work out. They were primed to step in and take over if it went wrong, or something happened to Brack.

That didn’t make much sense, because the whole thing about replacing robots with cons was because cons were cheaper, more reliable and ultimately disposable. Putting a whole other parallel mission in place was a ridiculously expensive piece of overkill. They’d have better spent the money making sure that the base actually got built.

Best-case scenario? Frank struggled with this. He couldn’t think of a good reason for any other XO mission to Mars. Maybe they did it because they could. Maybe it was as badly run and poorly resourced as his own. Maybe it was so far off course that it had landed in the wrong hemisphere, and out of the whole of Mars to aim at, only accidentally landed close by. Maybe it was crewed entirely by decent, competent people who wouldn’t dream of harming a hair on his head, and he really ought to go and help them out with food and equipment.

What was he going to do, if Luisa asked him to do that, to be the good neighbor? That man had looked hungry, so very hungry.

Back to the worst case again—she’d tell him to load up with spare food, go over, and he’d never come back because someone there would know what Brack looked like and would know it wasn’t him.

OK, so he’d thought of something even worse. What if they had standing orders to kill Brack? That would make perfect, awful sense. Hire a stone-cold killer to see Phase two through and then get rid of him, too. Brack, with his addictions and his psychoses, was going to unravel in the company of real people, and the last thing that XO wanted or needed was a madman running amok in a thin-skinned hab full of expensive and popular astronauts. Much better to replace him with someone who was technically competent and not a murderer.

Brack was going to be the last victim. And Frank was now Brack.