No Way

17

[Message file #147146 3/1/2049 0542 MBO Mission Control to MBO Rahe Crater]

Eventually, in the darkness of his bed cubicle, light off, tablet on, he found it on one of the satellite pictures. There was something that looked like a trench, or a spillway, or an entrance to a mine where the trucks enter along a sloping road that slowly sinks below the ground until it disappears beneath it.

It had to be a natural feature: it was some five miles long and over half a mile wide, and if XO could excavate such a thing, they didn’t need NASA, or anyone, let alone him. But there it was, and the trench deepened towards its western end, where it appeared—difficult to tell from a satellite map—to carry on into a tunnel. Certainly the trench didn’t seem to end. Above ground, there were hints of a sagging roof, possible partial collapses, but if the entrance was clear, that was a huge space under cover.

There could have been a solar farm, but it was difficult to tell as it was a few brighter pixels, without definition. He definitely couldn’t see any habs, and guessed they’d be set up underground, out of reach of the cancer-causing radiation that he worked and slept in every day. But the telltale shadow of the descent ship was right in the trench, a few hundred yards from the suspected cave. The time of day that the photo had been taken lent itself to long, deep shadows, cast from the west.

It was a straight-line distance of seventy-nine miles away. It was suspiciously convenient for M2 to be just within traveling distance, and Frank was the suspicious kind. Despite Luisa’s soothing words, he knew Station seven’s disappearance was down to XO’s other base. He knew it in his bones. They were lying to her, and she was passing that lie right on to him.

Reporting back to Yun that her instrument had just… vanished, while keeping a straight face, had been hard. Thank God for radio and being alone—at least at that moment—on the volcano. He’d had the majority of the conversations he’d needed to have before he’d got back to CU1.

The chat with Lucy had been excruciating: more of an interrogation as far as he was concerned. She’d conducted a one-on-one with Yun, then with Jim, and Frank last. He didn’t want to lie to her. He knew he’d had to, and felt wretched for the rest of the evening.

The next day, they were on lock-down. Not quite lock-down. Experiments still happened, maintenance was still scheduled. But the daily jaunt up to CU1 was on hold while Lucy talked to NASA.

If he could spot a ship, surely someone from NASA could? He’d messaged Luisa, and she’d told him that Mars was huge, and redacting individual frames in the public domain was straightforward. Just a smudge here and there, and all trace of a landing—a doomed landing—would be erased. There was nothing to worry about.

Frank wasn’t at all sure. The growing ease he’d felt had evaporated in that moment on the volcano. He found himself wishing that M2 would just die already, and hated himself for doing so. M2 had a face: a gaunt, hungry face with sunken eyes and a wet, fetid smile. He’d had to put up with that in his dreams as well as seeing his former crew, and now it took center-stage. Hungry, so very hungry.

The fear was that Lucy, or anyone, would work it out for themselves. That the only way the weather station could have disappeared was if someone had moved it, and if it wasn’t one of the MBO crew, there was only one logical conclusion.

But as the day wore on, Jim started talking about sink holes and lava tubes, sand-traps, ice lenses, and other geological phenomena, and annoying Yun with the idea that she’d made a major discovery at the expense of one of her instruments. NASA proposed installing the planned seismic net early.

Even if they’d got away with it this time, surely this wasn’t a sustainable strategy from XO. If—when—M2 failed, there’d still be something for someone to discover, at some point, even if they died and fossilized out on the plain. There were going to be questions. This? This was just firefighting, and the whole building was in danger of burning down.

Eighty miles. Fifty miles from CU1. There was a danger that, within the lifetime of the current mission, someone—Jim, probably—would want to go out that far and look at the cave. Was Frank going to be expected to clean up M2 too? How was he supposed to explain his absence to Lucy?

He wasn’t going to be able. He told Luisa his fears, and she provided his only comfort. He couldn’t tell anyone else.

He caught up with his maintenance. He went around the greenhouse. He couldn’t eat, let alone sleep. He shuddered every time his tablet pinged with an incoming message, and he dreaded anyone speaking to him. The few times that Isla had tried to engage him, he’d barely heard a word she said. She gave up, and he just hung on, waiting for the all-clear from Luisa. That M2 had either finally made contact, or that they were definitely dead.

In the end, in the middle of the night, he wrote a message:

“Luisa. If you’re not going to tell them about M2, I’m going to tell them. You want me to keep it secret, but it can’t be a secret any more. I don’t even get why M2 is supposed to be a secret: what are they even supposed to be doing out there? It’s just a matter of time now before NASA find out, and I’m the XO guy here. I can tell them I didn’t know about it, that you hadn’t told me, but Leland will open me up like a can.

“I’m not going to tell anyone about how MBO got made. But this is different. Lucy and the others have a right to know about M2, and the right to decide what happens next. They’re not cons. They’re not chimps. You can’t treat them like that, and neither can I.”

He turned his light off, and tossed and turned on his bed. At some point, the thought that he’d managed to pull it together enough to stand up to XO, that he actually felt good about himself, allowed him to doze for an hour or so.

His tablet pinged, waking him instantly, and in the dark he fumbled for it.

“OK, Frank. This is serious. Your last message has really upset the suits, and I’m just going to copy and paste this. This isn’t from me.

“‘Tell that murdering son-of-a-bitch we own his ass. That we own every drop of water, every breath of air, every ounce of food on that base and we will shut it down if he so much as clears his throat wrong. The lives of those six astronauts he’s got so pally with are his responsibility. If he fucks up now, they’re history. Tell him that. Tell him if he doesn’t play along, they are all toast. Got that? Good.’”

He was bolt upright. He’d done a deal with these guys. A nice, straightforward deal: Frank didn’t shit the bed; they brought him home. What could be simpler? He’d thought he had enough chips on the table to bargain afresh. Turned out he was wrong. When NASA had turned up, XO had got a whole new bunch of hostages. And he hadn’t factored that in at all.

“I don’t understand why this has got them so spooked. But you’ve got to listen to them. I don’t think they’re kidding, Frank. I think they really mean to do this. Don’t say anything. Please. At least, not now, not until I find out why this is so important to them. I’d have quit long ago if it wasn’t for you. Just let me keep you alive, OK? Luisa.”

Goddammit.

What was he going to do?

He padded through the crew quarters and cross-hab, dim with night-time lighting, and cycled through into the greenhouse. This oasis. The lights over some of the trays had dimmed to mimic the day–night cycle on Earth, and others blazed full, but the sound of dripping water was ubiquitous.

To lose this. To lose all of this would be a tragedy. To lose his life, sure. But to see all this wither and die, starved of air and the pumps silenced?

It was ridiculous, but he held on to the thought. XO could probably kill them in half a dozen different ways: all the automatic systems like the power regulators that kept them alive, plus all the others that could be misused to make the base uninhabitable. But wiping out their ability to grow food was a more certain death than most.

He found a chair and sagged into it, elbows on knees.

When could they bail? Seven people, one MAV. May? June? XO would know that. It was just March now. So maybe they’d kill them quicker. Mess with the atmosphere while they were sleeping so that no one woke up. Or they could pick someone off, just to teach Frank a lesson. Hell, just take him out.

But wait: they could have done that at any time after he’d completed Phase three, after NASA had landed even. A message of regret, a request to bag the body, even a suggestion that what Lance Brack really wanted was to be buried on Mars. There were people to carry on the functions of the base and… XO would still get paid.

Maybe they couldn’t get to him. Maybe they couldn’t get to him, but could get to the others. Maybe it was just that they could get to the base as a whole, and not any one person.

He scrubbed at his scalp. This was too hard. He couldn’t make a decision. He’d felt the same in the small dark hours before he’d picked up a gun, driven over to Mike’s dealer’s and shot him. Anything to burst that tension. Anything to simplify matters. Anything to make it stop.

“Lance?”

It took him longer than it ought to respond.

“Yes. Yes, that’s…” That’s me. I’m Lance Brack, ex-military, XO employee. Astronaut. Survivor. Murderer. He glanced around to see Isla by the airlock, hesitating, before coming closer.

“Are you OK?” she asked. She touched him lightly on the shoulder, and he shivered. “Lance? Are you ill?”

“I just couldn’t sleep.”

“You should get Fan to check you out. It might be the sign of something else.”

“I don’t need to take up his time,” said Frank. The last thing he needed was Fan seeing his scars. Being kind to him. “It’ll pass.”

“It’s been weeks now.” She walked around him, stood in front of him, hands on hips.

He craned his neck to look at her. “I’m fine.”

“You need to take some time off.”

“I need to keep busy.”

“Talk to Leland.”

“No.” He almost shouted that. No way did he want to talk to Leland. But he’d startled her, and none of this was her fault. XO. Bastard XO. “No,” he repeated, mildly, evenly, in case she thought he was losing it—who was he trying to kid? She was thinking exactly that, and he wasn’t going to blame her one bit.

“I’m worried about you.”

He looked up at her again, looked down.

“No one’s looking after you. You were on your own for eight months. You were injured and alone and that must have been terrifying.”

He could have said something then. He could have told her the truth. He could have told her everything, and let the pieces of his broken life fall where they might.

Frank took a deep breath, and said nothing.

“Lance?”

“It’s just the sleep. You go do whatever it is you got up for. I’m going to check on the tilapia.” That was good. The fish were on the next level down, away from her. She was still standing in front of him, so he exited the chair to the side.

He headed for the ladder, and started climbing.

“We’re going out again tomorrow. We’ve been cleared for EVA back on Ceraunius.”

Halfway down the ladder, he paused. “That’s good, right? Shows there’s nothing to worry about.”

“You said ‘everything’s trying to kill you’. Almost your first words when we got here. Why should this be any different?” She moved in front of him again, even though it was just his head and shoulders above the deck. “The ground just opened up and swallowed Station seven. You should buddy up like the rest of us.”

She wasn’t wrong. Yet it gave him a freedom that he wasn’t ready to give up. Or able, now that the XO suits had dropped the hammer on him. He was pretty much their pawn. If they wanted him to go over to M2, he’d have to. If they wanted him to take one for the team? After all that he’d been through, and done, maybe they knew not to push him that far.

It was brinkmanship. He’d lost this round, but there were going to be other battles. He’d take each one as it happened.

“Lance?”

“I got a lot on my mind,” he said. He was looking at her knees, her shins, her feet. “You got up for a reason. It wasn’t to keep me company.”

Even when he reached the lower level, he was aware of her above him, gazing down the hole in the floor at the top of his head. Then he heard her move away, the flexing of the plastic panels and the creak of the metal beams marking her progress.

He stood by the tilapia tanks, listening to them bubbling away, the aerators and the movement of the fish combining to make the surface seethe.

Isla wasn’t going to die. No one was going to die. Not on his watch. If that was the prize, then the price was worth paying. There. Done. His controllers would be proud of him.