No Way

16

Frank kept on working in the greenhouse. He decided that it wasn’t so much the plants, the shades of green in all their varieties, or the textures of the leaves that were organic and not synthetic. It was the water: the sound of it, the smell of it, the feel of it in his lungs and against his skin.

The individually dripping trays merged together to make a liquid static, like that of a river, like that of the river he played next to when he was a kid. And when he went downstairs to the lower level, where the tilapia tanks were, there were additional textures to the soundscape: the bubble of oxygenators and the wet slap of a fish breaking the surface of their tank. It was soothing, arrhythmic, natural, in an environment that was entirely artificial and moved to a mechanical beat.

The rest of the base had a slightly astringent tang on the tongue that he’d got so used to that, after the first few days, he no longer registered it except by its absence. The humidity of the greenhouse seemed to neutralize it, and while this didn’t make the section more Earth-like, it made it just a little less Mars-like.

Some mornings, after a night when he couldn’t sleep, he’d go to the greenhouse. Sometimes Isla would be there too. She’d cordoned off a section of the upper level, enclosed it in plastic, and was deliberately increasing the CO₂ around what looked like young maize plants, to see if they grew faster. Except that wasn’t it: she was as interested in them failing as she was seeing them grow tall and strong. She wanted to know what happened—she’d done the exact same experiment on Earth, and was now trying it on Mars. Was the result going to be different? It didn’t matter. It was science. Very different from construction, where the end result was all that mattered.

The greenhouse was big enough that the two of them could be there without it feeling cramped. Without, indeed, seeing much of each other. Isla was a shadow behind the double layer of plastic. Frank was checking the nutrient pumps, topping up those that might run out in the next sol with fresh injections of A, B and C.

The airlock popped, and Yun came in, waving her tablet at Frank.

“I need you,” she said.

Frank frowned. Yun was direct. Sometimes that could come out as rude, and he’d had to learn that this was her, trying to do her best. The best for her, the best for everyone back home. Wherever she went on the base, wherever she went on Mars, she seemed to behave as if she had a crowd of watchers looking over her shoulder, silently judging her for every moment she wasn’t on task.

“Sure.” He found a flag, a piece of stiff wire with some parachute material tied to the top, and pushed it into the gap between the tray and the staging, to mark his place. “What’s the problem?”

“Station seven has stopped sending data.”

“And…”

“I have to go out and either fix it there, or bring it back to the workshop. Today.” She held out the tablet showing the positions of the weather stations, but was moving it too jerkily for Frank to be able to tell which was Station seven, or where it was located.

He took it from her, and put it down on the edge of the tray. OK, so seven was on the far side of the caldera, at about the five o’clock position on Ceraunius. Within range, but not convenient. He tried to remember siting that particular instrument, and maybe he could and maybe he couldn’t. After a while, without anything notable happening, each stop resembled both the previous and the next.

The summit. That had been different. Top of the world.

“So if I take you, who’s staying with Jim?” Jim would have lived up there if he could.

Yun looked momentarily surprised, as if she’d forgotten that other people had tasks scheduled. Then she was forlorn.

“But this needs attention.”

“No one’s saying it doesn’t,” said Frank. Outside, the sun had just crested the crater rim, turning the hab a rosy pink. “But we’ve got time to sort it. Find someone who’ll go with Jim.”

“No one else is up yet.”

“Isla is.”

Frank caught a hesitation before Yun’s reply. No reason why everyone had to be best buddies. Just that they had to agree to work together, like Frank’s crew had. And he could sense, if not see, Isla stiffen behind the cloudy plastic sheeting. Of course she was listening.

“Isla’s got her own work,” said Yun eventually.

“And Jim has his. Look, let’s leave it until after breakfast. Maybe the cold has knocked out the battery, or something. It might come back online when it’s warmed up.”

Frank left the greenhouse and filled a bowl with his usual grains and fruits, and even as he crunched his way through them, he was aware of a hovering, hopeful presence, sometimes behind him, sometimes off to one side. Fan wandered in, and went straight to make coffee. Then he wandered out again, as was his habit, to read and plan for an hour before opening up the med bay for consultations. While doctor–patient confidentiality didn’t extend as far as astronauts on Mars, the veneer of it had.

Fan had also offered his expertise to Frank, but Frank had already been warned off by Luisa: no going to the doctor except in extreme emergencies. His skin was a map, pointing to secrets that XO would rather leave buried.

Then Frank had his answer. Obvious, really: he’d drop Yun and Jim off at the outpost—CU1 as it was officially known—swap out his life support, and drive around the crater on his own to collect the malfunctioning number seven. He could take it back to Yun, who’d make an assessment on the spot, and all without disrupting anyone else’s work pattern.

Sure, Lucy still didn’t like him taking solo trips. She never asked him herself, but she permitted the others to ask. Certainly, she could forbid them, but she hadn’t. It put a little slack into the system, that was all. Frank thought she found it a useful corrective to the otherwise tight operating rules.

Yun had to compromise. But it took her only a couple of seconds to agree, and she left him alone after that.

He had half an hour before leaving, so he went back to the greenhouse to pick up where he’d left off. He pulled the flag out and worked his way down the rest of the row.

“Lance?”

“Yeah?” He didn’t look up from the tray. These bean roots, they were pretty much mature and the nodules on them were starting to restrict the flow of water across them. Maybe he’d got the nutrient mix wrong, because he’d never seen such dense growth before. Raise the plants slightly, and start picking the longest pods, he guessed.

“You don’t have to go along with everything.”

“I know that.” He straightened up. It was Isla. Of course it was. He’d—just for a moment—thought it was Marcy, even though the accent, and the delivery, were all wrong. He showed her the root network and she peered at it, then started pushing the white fibers aside with her fingertips.

She seemed content to let him care for the food crops. Was that trust? It looked a lot like it. He was certain she checked on them when he was elsewhere, so she was going to pick up any problems before they got serious. But she hadn’t said anything yet, and it had been two weeks.

Two weeks and he was trusted. He felt such a fraud.

“Of course you do. Just…” She slotted the beans back into the water flow. “If you feel you’re being taken advantage of, you need to say.”

“I got the talk from Leland,” said Frank. “But I’m supposed to help. It’s in the job description.”

“All the same,” she said.

“It’s fine. I don’t mind.”

She looked down at the plants, and brushed her hand across the top of them, first one way, then the other.

“You’re not our employee,” she said. “You’re crew. However you got here.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean? His stomach suddenly knotted up, and threatened his breakfast.

“You like to keep busy.” But she didn’t press the point, and maybe she most likely meant that he’d got to Mars solo and frozen, eight—nearly nine months now—earlier. But he was never going to be crew. He knew too much, and they knew too little.

“I’ve got to go. Jim and Yun will be waiting.” He put the flag back in the trays, in the new position, and eased himself between Isla and the next set of drip trays. The tightness in his gut slowly started to ease, but it must have shown on his face as he emerged into the cross-hab.

“You OK?” asked Jim, already half into his suit.

“Yeah. I’m going to push some buttons before we go.” Talking about bladders and bowel movements was nothing out of the ordinary. The brief delay produced a fleeting flash of annoyance from Yun, but she kept a lid on it and carried on stacking spare life supports into the outside airlock.

Frank wrestled with the zips and flaps, and felt the cold plastic on his ass.

No one suspected him. Not Isla, who he spent most time around, not Lucy, and especially not Leland. There was something about the man that made Frank want to just tell him everything, and that was why Frank studiously avoided spending any time alone with him. Even Jim was preferable, because he was already on his guard with the geologist.

The only person he could be candid with was Luisa. And that had its own problems. He was—how far away now? Ninety million miles?—and the person he was most reliant on, his confidante, worked at the heart of the XO operation. They were both vulnerable. Goddammit, he worried about her.

He scrubbed at his face. His better diet had put some elasticity back in his skin, and he no longer had the gray prison pallor common among inmates. He felt old, though. Fifty-three. He’d missed his birthday in the flurry to get Phase three done: XO hadn’t made a thing of it, and neither had he. No birthday candles in a pure O₂ atmosphere, either.

She’d remembered, though.

Frank pushed the buttons and zipped up. By the time he got back through to the cross-hab, it was empty, so he suited up and headed outside.

Yun and Jim were already on the buggy: trailer hitched, life support packs strapped down. Frank kicked the wheels and shook the tow bar, but they’d done the job just fine. Jim was in the driving seat, which bugged Frank: that was his seat, even though Jim had done plenty of driving and there was no reason why he shouldn’t today.

Frank didn’t like being a passenger. It reminded him too much of sitting behind Marcy. It also gave him too much time to think about it. He guessed he’d have to wear it today.

Jim didn’t dick around behind the wheel. He was perfectly safe. He didn’t treat the Santa Clara as a racetrack, he didn’t try to drive along the banked slopes. He didn’t try and bust the top speed. Maybe he did with Yun, but with Frank on board, he was on his best behavior.

It was still a grind to get to the outpost. There was nothing they could do to make the route shorter or faster. The views were only ever going to be of worn rock walls and the trickling dust sliding into the river channel in tiny, slow-motion dribbles.

Lucy wanted waymarkers in the channel, showing the direction and distance of both CU1 and MBO. Frank hadn’t got around to that yet. He’d cut out the signage from cargo-rocket fuselage, and made a scriber to write on the information, but installation would take longer.

But despite that, Frank knew when he was getting towards the top: he’d passed that way often enough to know the small tells in the landscape, and without turning round to look back down the valley.

With a final spin of the wheels, the buggy clawed its way up out onto the upper slopes of the volcano. Jim drove the remaining fifteen hundred yards to the outpost and parked up outside.

“OK. Let’s unload, and Lance can go and poke Station seven.”

Yun climbed down and went immediately to the trailer, eager to get Frank on his way.

“Bring it back here,” she said. “Don’t try to fix it.”

“Even if it’s obvious the battery’s become disconnected, or the solar panels have gotten clogged?”

“Yes. I need to know why those things have happened, and how to stop them happening in the future.”

“OK. If that’s what you want.” Frank stared out across the crater. “You want to check again, see if it’s recovered?”

“I’ll still need to take a look at it, find out why it failed in the first place.”

“Station seven it is, then.” He synced his map with Yun’s and checked his air. “I’m going to swap out. It’s another twenty miles on from here.”

Frank picked up a life support from the trailer and climbed the stairs to the airlock. He cycled it while the others were collecting the rest of the equipment, and stepped inside.

He hadn’t been into the outpost for a while: after it was built, and he’d shaken it down, he’d not had a need to. His journeys had been to drop off astronauts or cargo, and they’d often done that themselves.

The hab had got kind of messy, and he didn’t like that. Lucy wouldn’t like that either. It had unpleasant echoes of stepping into the descent ship and finding the detritus that Brack had created as he slowly, inexorably, lost it.

It wasn’t his call, but messy meant sloppy. The one thing that needed to be avoided at all costs was a mistake. He had to work with these people, and snitching on them to Lucy wasn’t his style, but he was going to have to say something. He went through his telltales to check that the atmosphere was breathable and warm enough, then thumbed his suit open.

As he went through the rigmarole of climbing out, swapping the pack over, and climbing back in again, Yun and Jim came in separately, stacking the life supports by the door, and unsuiting into the cold dry air.

“You got to clean this shit up,” said Frank. “Lucy sees this, she’ll blow.”

“I don’t remember it being this bad,” said Jim. “But yes. It could stand a tidy-up.”

“Just bag it and I’ll take it back down the hill. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Three tops.” Frank closed his suit, and if either of them replied, he didn’t hear what it was.

The suit tightened around him in the airlock, and he stepped back outside, twenty thousand feet up near the top of an extinct volcano on another planet. And it was ordinary. As was the simple fact that almost instant death was just the other side of his faceplate.

He stood there on the steps, looking out at the gentle curve of the land in almost every direction except towards the crater. Nothing but dust, rock and hazy sky.

Once, a long time ago, there had been a flood, cascading down from the mountaintop. How did that even work? Had there been ice up there, or had the water just fountained out of the ground and spilled down the broad flanks of Ceraunius? It had filled Rahe. A lake. The water was still there, underground. He’d washed in it, drank it, used it to grow plants.

He was using air. He should get on.

He climbed back up onto the buggy, checked that the fuel cell was good for both the forty miles to Station seven and back, and the trip down the hill: not that that needed many watts, as in extremis it could coast most of the way.

He aimed the nose of the vehicle south. He hadn’t given that direction much thought recently. M2 had receded from his list of concerns as XO had pronounced them dead, or at least incapable of travel. Luisa had said she’d nixed the idea of him going over to check, at least for now. There was no point in unnecessary trips to prove what they already knew.

But when he did think about it, he still felt uncertain about what he did do, and what he could have done. He was the only person in a position to have helped them, and yet he hadn’t, because of the risk that they would have just taken his stuff and killed him.

For him, the decision had been one of personal safety. For XO, it had been a lot more complicated than that. They’d been willing to see one base thrive, and one base die, rather than face the possibility of having both go wrong. Add several layers of secrecy, the company’s reputation, and a whole sack of cash, and XO’s reasoning got real murky, real quick.

Frank had been put in impossible positions so often, he now just stuck to the simple metric that whatever kept him alive and on track to go home was the best. He hated feeling compromised, and yet everything that XO got him to agree to dug him further into that pit.

It sucked to be M2. But he wasn’t going to do anything about it.

He passed Station six, perched on the south-west rim of the crater between the ridge to the east and the “bad lands” caused by subsurface collapse. It hadn’t been easy navigating the undulating terrain the first time: craters acting as sand-traps and broken ground all around. The second time, he looked for his tracks, but the wind had already eroded them away, and he had to pick a fresh path through the area.

It took valuable time to work his way through, but there was clear ground from then on, just regular, avoidable craters and rugged, sand-free lava. Station seven was another six miles on.

Station seven wasn’t there.

Frank studied his map, and he was definitely in the right area. He knew the locators were only accurate to a hundred yards, so that merely gave him an idea of where he should be looking, but there were no obscuring features, no fresh craters, no debris, nothing. When Yun had planted the equipment, it had been a quarter of a mile from the caldera edge: there’d been no landslides or collapses that could have carried it off.

It had just gone.

He instinctively wheeled south. The ground was open, more or less all the way down to the plain, and then beyond. The dust-load on the rock was light, and moving even as he watched. Any tracks that might have been laid down had gone, along with Station seven.

The wind wasn’t strong enough to blow anything over, though, let alone carry it away, and he should be able to see it. He’d seen all the others. If he drove over to Station eight, then he’d spot it long before he got to it. It was the only artificial object in an entirely natural landscape.

Could there be any other explanation for this? Jim dicking around, maybe? But he wouldn’t interfere with science, and neither would anyone else. It made no sense.

M2 were supposed to be in the past. History. And with this one discovery, they came roaring back.

Goddammit.