No Way

10

[Message file #103025 12/10/2048 2206 MBO Rahe Crater to MBO Mission Control]

He still had to move the bodies into the ship. He hadn’t before. He’d not done it so that he didn’t have to see them every time he took a new batch of stuff over. Though that wasn’t actually true: he did see them every time, because their shrouds were clearly visible under the rocket cone at the base of the descent ship, and they didn’t fall out of sight until he was at the bottom of the steps leading up to the airlock.

Now he’d run out of excuses. They were literally the last item on his list, and he’d ticked off everything else. No, that wasn’t true either, though there was a very good reason for that.

He drove the short distance to the landing spot. It was his eight-month anniversary on Mars—February 6th. Eight months since he’d been woken up by Alice. Eight months since he’d lost both her and Marcy. Then, five months in, Zeus, Dee, Declan, Zero. Finally, Brack.

Almost three months since he thought he was totally alone.

And eight weeks since he’d discovered XO had put another mission on Mars, just over the hill. Strange that it had been at that exact moment that the ghosts of his dead crewmates had stopped appearing to him. No manifestations since. It would probably scare him to death, thinking it was someone from M2, so he’d been saved that at least.

Even so, Frank was ragged. He snatched at sleep and usually missed, and when he did finally catch it, he’d wake up at the slightest sound, real or imagined. It had been bad enough before, with the nightmares and flashbacks. Now it was concretized: the threats he dreamed about were real. The base being invaded. Him being dragged outside. Held down while his suit was opened up. Because they wouldn’t want to damage XO property, would they? On Mars, resources counted more than the people did. Certainly more than a bunch of cons did.

The last few sols had simply blurred together. He no longer knew when he was awake. Nervous energy was the only thing carrying him through. At some point he was going to crash, and crash hard. But not today. He couldn’t do that today.

He climbed down from the buggy, and looked around, checking that no one had interfered with the ship—a strip of parachute material caught carelessly in the outer airlock door was his telltale. It was still there. There were no unexplained tracks, no bootprints that weren’t his. Time and wind had eroded what lay beyond the ship, out towards the drop-off, into broad, dark smudges, like marks of half-scrubbed pencil lines.

Nothing fresh. Nothing to indicate that M2 had been anywhere near him. That was good, and still he worried. Every day. And especially now. He’d done all of the work. MBO was… not spotless, but it was clean. It had a lived-in look. The floor panels were scuffed where he’d scrubbed them, and the sub-floor voids scratched and shiny after chipping the dried blood out from the framework and utilities. The med bay was orderly once more, and the consulting room empty of everything including the USMC cap that Brack had brought along.

It had been the only personal item from Earth that had made it onto the surface of Mars. The cons’ effects—including Frank’s few books and letters—had vanished. He had no idea where. And the hat had to go, along with all the other junk—tablets, overalls, spacesuits, hair from the drains and skin in the filters—into the heart of the sun.

His instructions were to just pile it all up inside. He didn’t have to worry about tying it down or stop it from banging into the instrument panels. Those wouldn’t do anything once XO had taken remote command of the vessel.

He was going to put half an hour on a timer. That was as long as he spent at any one time inside the ship. Not quite long enough for the ship to register that he’d activated the airlock, send a message to Earth, and for XO to trap him inside and take him on a one-way trip into space. Of course, they’d already done that once, but being shot into a star would be a qualitatively different trip.

Maybe they wouldn’t do that. Maybe they’d stick to their agreement. But he’d be stupid to bet his life on it, any further than he already had to. When he lay down to sleep, it was clutching a semi-inflated rubber glove, with scuba gear and his spacesuit within touching distance.

And the gun by his side.

He’d decided that he was going to keep it. XO would never know, one way or the other. He’d brought the metal case over along with the rest of Brack’s effects, dumped it in plain sight of the ship-board cameras, but the gun itself was currently in the same pouch at his waist as his suit patches.

He hadn’t thought so far ahead as to what to do with it when the NASA astronauts turned up. Bury it outside, maybe, as keeping it anywhere on the base would mean he’d always be worried it’d be discovered. And trying to explain his possession of a modified automatic pistol would unravel any lie he might come up with.

He looked up at the ship. He wasn’t certain how he’d got there. The buggy was behind him. How else?

Come on, Frank. Keep it together. Just a little longer.

He ducked under the hull of the ship and took hold of the first of the shrouds. He pulled it out, watching how the dust that had accumulated in the folds of the cloth dribbled out into the drag lines. Who was he moving? The twisted package was quite slim, no real bulk to it, and nothing to suggest a spacesuit inside. Zero, then.

He laid him out at the bottom of the steps, and went back for Brack, or Declan. Then again for Declan, or Brack. Both were still in their suits, both with shattered faceplates. Brack’s life support had ended up broken. Ended up: Frank had driven an oxygen cylinder into it, repeatedly, like a battering ram, until he’d rendered it inoperable. Declan’s should be fine. But he really didn’t have the heart to unwrap one, then the other when he inevitably unwrapped the wrong one first, and remove the life support pack.

It was going with the ship, and that was that.

He activated the timer on his tablet, and thumbed the airlock open. He bounced Zero up the steps and inside, then cycled them through. When the inner door opened, he was again confronted by the sheer amount of trash that they’d managed to generate. Brack, specifically, had contributed to much of that, as he slowly but surely lost himself in addiction.

He pulled Zero through the debris, and laid him down near the inactive computer console. He wanted to stand and think about what he was doing, about what he had agreed to do. But the clock was ticking. He turned and went back for the next, and then the next.

Seven bodies. Four upstairs in their sleep tanks, but most definitely dead. Three downstairs, wrapped in their black and white shrouds. His crew.

He thought about sleep. He thought about not having to worry about M2. Not having to worry about being suffocated or stabbed. Not having to worry about every little aspect of the base.

He could finally have some time off. A holiday. He used to look forward to vacations, road trips to various far-flung places, piling into the car and marking their progress on the map. When was the last one? Maybe ten years ago? Twelve? Yellowstone? Sure, that was it. Mike had been fourteen, fifteen, sliding from wonder to cynicism, but the geysers had still taken his breath away.

The alarm on his tablet sounded. Time to stop daydreaming and get the hell out. He cycled the airlock through and bundled himself outside, breathing hard. It was a stupid thing to do, to risk getting caught now. He stumbled as far as the buggy, and leaned against one of the huge wheels to steady himself.

Done it. Escaped. The sun was halfway to the horizon, so it wouldn’t be long now. Everything was finished, and he supposed if XO was going to make its move, it’d be now, when he’d done all the hard work and they could just replace him. Today, tonight, and in the morning. Then the next descent ship would come down, and bring relief.

He was so very tired.

But he drove to the drop-off that overlooked Sunset Boulevard and stared out across the crater. Rahe was as empty and still as ever, a huge, deep oval basin with ramparts of broken rock and a central spine of ragged hills. Later craters pocked the floor like afterthoughts.

No telltale dust clouds coming towards him across the shadowed floor of Rahe. No advancing buggies with astronauts hanging off the sides. He supposed that if they were going to try and get to him, and they were somewhere on the south side of Ceraunius, they’d probably try to come over the top. He’d thought of setting up some kind of early warning, but he had no technical expertise to help him. He wondered about all the things he might do, involving automatic cameras, or vibration sensors, or physical tripwires, and he didn’t know where to even start.

It was just another day when he seemed to have got away with it. Relying on XO’s word was… wearing. Since that moment on the flanks of the volcano, he’d not seen anything of M2. He wondered why. Perhaps they lacked the capacity to get to him after all, with broken buggies or the inability to recharge them. Perhaps they’d already succumbed to hunger, to thirst, to asphyxiation, and their base, what they had of it, what Frank hadn’t taken, was derelict. A tomb.

Perhaps it was just that they didn’t know where he was. Or that they did, and they were biding their time, eking out their resources until the hard work was done.

He drove slowly back to the base via the MAV.

The MAV still seemed to be doing its thing. Extracting carbon dioxide, splitting it up, and sequestering the products in separate tanks. It was largely still: every so often the panels turned a few degrees to better face the weak sun, and he knew that at sunrise and sunset the vents would close and the panels rotate all the way back to their starting positions, ready to pick up the first light of dawn.

The NASA astronauts were already up there, above him. Packing and preparing to fall the last few miles from the transit ship down to Mars. Putting one machine to sleep, and waking up another. Those last few miles that had been described as seven minutes of terror on one of the training videos he’d seen, back on Earth and a lifetime ago.

What if they died on the way? After all that time—awake, for all of it—and all that distance, only to burn up in the atmosphere and then plow into the frozen red ground fast enough to leave nothing but a carbon-black smear. There was nothing Frank could do about that. If they fell too fast or too far away, he wouldn’t be able to help them, only be a witness to what was happening. And then radio home.

The only preparation that was now useful would be to make sure he charged up the buggies and synced his tablet, and be ready. He knew what was required of him. Be Brack.

He craned his head back, and looked towards the zenith. They weren’t going to die. He wasn’t going to die either. They were going to live, and take him home with them, and he wouldn’t have to be scared all the time any more. It was going to be OK. They would call him Lance Brack, and he’d have to wear the cloak of a different murderer for a while—but that was OK too, because Franklin Kittridge knew what that felt like, knew what the weight was around his shoulders, knew how to straighten up his back under the load.

One more sleep. One more attempt at sleep. There were drugs he could use, and never had before. He’d managed to hold back until now: partly through fear—both of what it might do to him, and what could happen while he was under—and partly through an iron rod of stubbornness that ran through him.

He was better than that. Everyone was better than that, he thought. No one needed that shit to help them cope or do normal stuff like sleep. In his more lucid moments, he acknowledged his approach was killing him, but he wasn’t going to give in. Not now.

One more night. One more morning.

The closer it got, the more apprehensive he grew. He wasn’t in control of this, and could never be: all he had was the illusion of control, pretending to set his own agenda and write his job list as if he was the site foreman. He wasn’t the boss. XO were. NASA were. He was just working off their timesheets.

Like now. He drove south across the Heights to the base, looking at the collection of fragile off-white tubes not as something close to a miracle, but as home. He’d made it. He’d built his own houses several times through his life. This was no different, except it was on another planet.

He parked up, facing the descent ship, and checked his air. He had easily a couple of hours left, which was more than enough. He pulled his tablet into his lap—a tablet that had been purged of any incriminating data: no documents, no files, no past messages between here and Earth—opened up the message app, and started typing.

“Phase 3 complete”, he wrote. And it almost wasn’t a lie. He still had the gun, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

He’d said that he’d tell them when he’d done—that illusion-of-control thing again—but they were going to launch anyway, no matter if he’d carried out his oft-repeated threat to string Brack up in a makeshift gibbet on the walls overlooking MBO. It would be up to him to explain that, and he didn’t have the emotional energy to even try. He didn’t have energy left for much at all.

He sat on the buggy, and waited. All his work was over. Tomorrow would be the start of Phase four, and he was off the clock until then.

Twenty-eight minutes later, his tablet registered an incoming message.

“You’ve done so very well, Frank. No one else could have coped like you have, done all the work like you have, kept your composure in the way you have. You’re the very best of people, and it breaks my heart that we’ll never meet. We are go for DV launch. Luisa.”

The ship was two miles away across the Heights, a barely thumbnail-sized white cone set against the flaring red of a Martian sunset. The colors were deepening towards black as the sun sank lower, and the shadows cast in the airborne dust growing more solid. There, if anywhere, was the beauty in the bleakness.

He was looking in the direction of the peak of Ceraunius when the ground suddenly shifted under the buggy. His head snapped around, and already a wall of red cloud was rushing towards him. It went through him, and a second, thicker wind was already on its way. But rising above the long-dead world, balanced on a dirty column of churning gray smoke, was the fleck of the ship.

It drove hard and fast, and as the second storm blanketed him, he heard the boom of the rocket’s ignition.

The dust cleared. The air crackled with imperfect combustion. A single incandescent flame continued to climb upwards, all detail of what it was propelling lost already. The sound of distant thunder faded, rolling between land and darkening sky.

Of course, if M2 hadn’t known exactly where MBO was, the ragged smoking finger that pointed downwards in an arc was going to be a big fucking giveaway. It even caught the dying rays of the sun before it slung itself over the horizon, turning for a moment from soot to bronze.

High winds started to tug at the smoke, pulling it apart, and Frank eventually looked down. Twilight had fallen, before the proper night began. He drove over to the recharging point, and plugged in the buggy for a top-up. He had watts to play with now, and he could leave it charging until the fuel cell registered full.

His last-thing routine was shot, but he still circumnavigated the base, even if he couldn’t carry out the gross visual checks, and then he entered the cross-hab airlock, cycling it and exiting with his hand on the gun. He turned left, and right, and could see nothing that had moved, that he hadn’t moved himself. It was, since he started leaving all the internal airlock doors open, the only way in and out of the base. Another precautionary habit that he was going to have to unlearn by tomorrow.

He left the door behind him open, too.

But yes, he was alone, for now, for the moment. He put the gun down on top of the life support rack and checked the external pressure. It read a solid five psi, and none of the oxygen alarms were ringing. He was OK to exit his suit, and he thumbed his way through the flip-down menu on his front until he reached the right command.

He crawled backwards out of his suit, hung it up, racked his life support, and unclipped the tablet, wiping the dust from its screen with his forearm. He probably needed to remember to get dressed at some point, too. In Brack’s overalls. He’d sent up his own blood-stained set on the ship. Zeus’s overalls would have drowned him, and no one else’s were remotely large enough.

But he couldn’t walk around like some kind of bum. He needed to relearn that, too, as well as regaining the power of speech. Part of the reason why he went around just in his long johns most of the time was so that he could get into his suit quickly. With the arrival of the others, he could get back to some kind of normal. Whatever that was. Normal for Mars.

He deliberately pulled on the overalls. They felt tight around the shoulders, and up against his crotch. Maybe the cloth would loosen up with more wearing.

The gun went into a pocket, and he collected the scuba gear and his tablet.

Now, food. Coffee. Everything was in place. All evidence of anyone else on the base had been erased. Except for the gun, and that too would have to go by the morning. He’d bag it, so that the alkaline soil wouldn’t eat it away, and he’d take it outside and bury it. He’d use the cairn that they’d created when they were building the base, moving the loose rocks that might have punctured the sub-floor matting.

It was a pile five, maybe six feet high, and thin in the reduced gravity. He’d do that. Rebuild the cairn over the top. A marker to show he’d finally, finally left all that shit behind. Tomorrow, he’d be safe. Safer. At least there’d be other people to keep watch for him. He’d never really be safe.

And tonight, he’d keep that gun close at hand. Just in case.