No Way

19

They parked outside the outpost, and Frank lowered himself to the ground. He’d driven hard, and his bones ached. He wondered if they were thinning. They probably were. He wondered how much further they’d go and how debilitating that would be back on Earth. Exercise. Actual weight-bearing exercise. He should do some.

Leland went through the airlock first, and then Frank.

He realized that everything wasn’t quite right the moment he stepped inside the hab.

There was Yun, out of her suit. And Leland, opening up his own. No Jim. Frank almost blurted out something, but he caught the position of Yun’s finger, pressed against her lips. Don’t say anything. No comms.

Frank tabbed his suit controls to open, and crawled out backwards.

“Someone mind telling me why we’ve gone all Secret Squirrel?”

Leland, cold at altitude, in an unheated hab, dressed only in his thin long johns, batted his arms around himself. Then he spotted a spare insulated jacket, and he struggled into it. “Jim’s missing.”

Frank looked around the hab, at Yun, at the equipment. “What? But you were with him.”

Yun’s face contorted. “He said he was going to be ten minutes. Something he’d seen. An outcrop. I said I’d finish off the drilling. After half an hour I called him, in a way that wouldn’t tell Lucy he’d gone off on his own. I got no answer.”

“Did you go and look for him?”

“Of course I went to look for him! I looked for an hour, and he wasn’t there. So… I called you.”

Leland was silent. His mouth moved, but he couldn’t find the words.

“The suit thing,” said Frank. “You made that up.”

“I kept on looking for him.”

“Goddammit, Yun. You’re all supposed to be fucking geniuses and you pull shit like this.”

She looked down at the ground.

“It’s not the first time you guys have done this, is it?” Leland had finally found his voice. “You did it once, and it felt wrong, but no one caught you, so now it’s become a habit. Lance, or whoever, disappears down the hill, and you split up. All you have to do is make sure you’re both back in time for the pick-up.”

Frank started climbing into his suit again. “Stay here. What you tell Lucy and when is up to you. But I’m going back out to find him.”

“We should all come,” said Yun.

“No. You two stay here. Which way did he go?”

“South from the second point, a kilometer or two. There’s a ridge he thought might be a late-stage intrusion.”

The second sentence didn’t mean anything to him, but the first part? One k was barely any distance at all. “When I find him, I’ll call you.” When. When. Jim went south, dammit.

He thumbed his suit closed, and he went back to the airlock. It cycled, and he was once again outside on the hard red rock. There was some dust-drift going on. Maybe afternoon heating, maybe a storm brewing, but his distance vision fuzzed slightly, then cleared, as a band of airborne dust blew past. Upwind of the hab, the rock was bare pavement, with a surface like hammered metal, but downwind, there was some settling.

Being very careful not to swear, even under his breath, he climbed into the driver’s seat and set off across the plateau.

Every few seconds, he wanted to spot Jim walking back, carrying a big bag of rocks over his shoulder. But he didn’t. He reached the seismometer site after a few minutes. Tools were lying where they’d been dropped, and, almost without thinking, he climbed down and burned some air collecting them together and stowing them on the trailer.

He dialed both his suit lights and his buggy lights up, and stood up on top, holding the roll cage, assuming that being lit up like a Christmas tree would attract Jim’s attention. If he was out there. Frank couldn’t see him, and evidently couldn’t be seen either. But he could see Jim’s target, even though it was sometimes partly obscured by the haze: a nondescript line of rock rising ragged from the otherwise ubiquitous lava.

Strap in, go and take a look.

The ridge was barely a hundred feet high. He drove along its base. Unless there were overhangs or caves, Jim wasn’t there—he could see down the entire length of the outcrop—but he was also looking to see if there was anything to show Jim had been there: freshly broken rock, tools, bags, markers of any kind.

Nothing.

People don’t just disappear. Weather stations don’t just disappear either.

M2. M2. Please don’t let it be M2.

Then, he thought, maybe he’d gone into that river bed, the one that started about nine o’clock and forked part-way down before spilling its contents onto the plain. The sides were steep at the top, and he might be in the radio-shadow the cliff cast.

He was at the head of the channel. It was sinuous and he couldn’t see far down it, but there was no evidence of Jim having gone that way. Not that there was any evidence at all. No footprints, no dust to have footprints in. He’d have to drive into the channel to check.

Frank had been gone, what? Fifteen, twenty minutes. No need to worry. He looked at the maps on his tablet, and saw that if he drove around the western end of the ridge, he could get to the top of it. He was pretty much there already. He carried on, then around, then up. He headed back eastwards, until he couldn’t go any further. The gaping maw of the caldera blocked his path, and while he might make it down that wall in the buggy, he was pretty certain he wasn’t going to make it back up.

And if Jim had fallen in there? How solid was the slope?

He dismounted and got as close as he dared. The edge was pretty well defined, but he decided he wasn’t going to take stupid risks. He paid out fifty foot of cable and threaded the hitch through his belt, before clipping it back on itself. He ran the cable through both hands and approached the drop-off.

That… was a long way down. A thousand feet? Something like that, and approaching a one-in-one slope in places. Blocky and stepped, all the way. Reduced gravity or not, he’d break either himself or his suit if he fell. He tightened his grip on the cable and walked forward as much as he dared.

He got himself in a position where he could see all the caldera floor, left and right of where he was dangling. No sign of Jim. The place was empty, from one side to the other. He turned himself around—carefully—and hauled himself back onto level ground.

Frank’s question still stood: where was Jim?

He certainly wasn’t where he should be. He wasn’t at the bluff, and he wasn’t on his way back to the outpost. Frank looked in that direction. He couldn’t see it from where he was. He was struck again by the immensity of the planet, the inhospitableness of it. That he was just a fly landing on a vast red face, that he didn’t belong there, and in a moment he’d be swatted away.

Goddammit, if Jim was hiding from him, engaging in some practical joke, he’d… let Lucy deal with him. He was pretty certain that whatever he could do or say, what she could unleash would strip paint. Dicking around on Mars was going to get someone injured. Or worse. And he needed to get himself, Yun and Leland back to MBO before they ran out of options.

But there could be other, more terrible reasons for Jim’s absence than him being a jerk.

Jim wasn’t calling for help. Perhaps his radio was malfunctioning after all. Perhaps he was trapped somewhere. Perhaps the ground had indeed swallowed him up.

Frank reeled the cable back onto the spool and drove slowly along the ridge line. He was getting spooked now. At some point—some point soon?—Jim was going to tip over from having more air than not, to having less than he’d need. He and Yun had walked, and that took more air than just driving. Then they’d put in two seismometers. But they’d had fresh tanks. Calculating how long someone might have to live was something he was used to now, but this felt different.

Jim had maybe four or five hours of air left. He had a part-used spare in the outpost that would see him back to base.

Frank steered the buggy down into the west-facing dry river bed. It was much like the Santa Clara, twisting its way down the flanks of Ceraunius in tight C-shaped curves, between steep walls that seemed to bleed brine.

It was dustier there, on the flat floor of the gully. He drove down a way, and got off to stand in front of the buggy, the lights in his face, staring at the ground and seeing only his bootprints. Jim hadn’t come this way.

Had the geologist decided on a whim to go somewhere else, having told Yun that he was going to the bluff? Or had Frank somehow missed him on the wide-open landscape? Sure, there were craters, both big and small, but there weren’t any significant obstructions on the route between the bluff and the outpost. If there was a problem with his comms, he might have difficulty navigating. But then again, all Frank would do would be to head upslope until he was in sight of the caldera, and then turn left. He could find the outpost that way.

And if Jim was already back with Leland and Yun, he’d be tempted to take a swing at him. Definitely tempted now. He hadn’t had a call, though, cryptic or otherwise.

He backed the buggy up to do a three-point turn, and emerged from the valley, hoping that there’d be a speck in the distance, a figure in a spacesuit, trudging in the direction of the outpost.

Goddammit.

“Leland. Yun.”

“Leland here.”

“I’m calling it. I’ll stay out here as long as I can, but you can be the one to phone this in. And use a different channel. I need to concentrate.”

There was a long, long pause, enough for Frank to think that his message hadn’t got through.

“Do you copy?”

“Copy that. Good luck.”

Frank thought back to the number of times he, and any of the others, had been outside, on their own, maybe miles from the base, and they hadn’t got themselves lost, or injured, or incapacitated. They’d inadvertently made XO’s job that much harder by managing, against the odds, to stay alive. It had taken someone actively trying to kill them to take them down.

If this involved M2, what the hell was he going to do?

The dust was blowing up thicker, and he didn’t know whether that was likely to get worse or not. He’d not been out in a proper sandstorm yet—most of them happened a long way to the south, and they only occasionally got the spill-over—but this one looked like it was threatening to come over the equator. But anything that impeded his vision now was serious: even nebulous clouds of dust blowing past might mean he missed the obvious, and an increased wind speed would erase any potential tracks.

Where would a geologist have gone to, if he hadn’t gone to where he said he was going? Frank stood up on the buggy and used its height to scan the bare rock for anything that might catch his eye.

The most obvious feature was the scarp slope to the north, that marked the start of the broken ground at the head of the Santa Clara, where it almost seemed that the water flowing down the flanks was looking for the easiest path down before settling on the one. The cliff was tall, maybe five, six hundred feet from top to bottom, and it was catching the afternoon sun and glowing a bright, almost white, pink.

But that was north. Jim had gone south. South towards where M2 was. Had been. Might still be. And Frank had never warned them to avoid that area, because he didn’t feel like he could, because of his deal with XO, and just look where that had got him.

He headed south and east again, going over the same ground that he’d already scoured, looking for anything he might have missed. If Jim’d gone far enough, then maybe, just maybe he was out of radio range.

“Jim. Can you hear me? It’s Lance. I’m a mile south of the outpost. Flash your suit lights. Over.”

He repeated the message, again and again, driving a little way, stopping, standing up.

No tracks. No buggy wheels. No boot marks.

He stopped, eventually, when his own tank was telling him he had to. He parked up on the top of a ridge, and watched the dust drapes blow by like chiffon curtains.

“Leland? Yun? Do you copy?”

Leland answered. The signal was choppy, and breaking up. “Go ahead.”

“I’m coming back in. I’m running out of gas, and I just can’t find him.”

There was silence. No static, only the occasional chirruping of data, like crickets, or birds.

Then: “We got it. You had to try.”

“I had to try.”

“Come on in, Lance. We have to go back to MBO. Orders.”

“I could spend another ten minutes out here, maybe.”

“Lance,” said Leland. “I know. But you’ve got to come in now. We’re relying on you to get us down.”

If he stopped now, Jim was dead. If he wasn’t already dead. But he’d sure as hell be dead by morning, if he couldn’t make it back to the outpost by himself. And even then, it’d get damn cold overnight.

And if Frank didn’t turn back now, he might well kill himself. And the people he was responsible for.

“Jim, you goddamn fuck-up,” he said. “We weren’t supposed to lose anyone. We just weren’t. If you can hear this, then: I’m sorry. I’m leaving you here. I’ve run out of time. I can’t put their lives in danger to try and save you. I did what I could. I looked everywhere for you. But what I did wasn’t enough. Because I didn’t find you. Now you get to stay here, while we go back. And there’s not a damn thing I can do about that. I hope that, whatever it was you were doing, it was worth it.”

He took the steering column and resisted the urge to rip it clean off. He didn’t know if this was an accident, stupidity, or deliberate. The uncertainty burned in him, and made him shake in fear, in rage, in helplessness.

Goddammit.