No Way

24

Even though Frank had been sent to prison for murder, not carjacking, he was still going to give outrunning his pursuers his best shot, because what choice did he have otherwise? Suffer the same fate as Jim? Whatever that was.

He pointed himself in the direction of the summit of Ceraunius and tightened the suspension. This was going to get difficult. The vibrations in the frame—constant, with frequent big hits as he clattered against a rock—made it all but impossible to see out of the rear-facing cameras. He managed fleeting glimpses of something, but unless he slowed down, he wouldn’t know where the M2 buggies were. He couldn’t turn around in his seat. He wasn’t going to swerve the buggy to give him a view beyond his ten-to-two. He was never going to hear them behind him either.

He’d just have to hang on and hope that it was enough.

His front wheels skimmed a ridge, and he was airborne. Torque control slowed the motors, and when he landed, he landed hard. It took him moments he probably didn’t have to get up to speed again, until the next time it happened. And the next. Would he be going faster if he actually slowed down? Less airtime meant more wheels-in-the-dirt time. He didn’t know. He couldn’t judge. Marcy would know. Marcy would be able to get him out of trouble because she was a pro, and not a rank amateur like he was.

The plain. Better. Deeper dust, fewer rocks.

The nose of the buggy dipped down, chewed up a plume of red soil, and then dug itself out of the hole it had made.

Frank acknowledged that for all his time on Mars, getting into what amounted to a car chase was something that he hadn’t prepared for. No streets, no buildings, no other traffic. He was just being driven down.

He looked at the shaky picture from the rear-facing cameras. Nothing. He could see only the distant horizon. Did that mean they’d given up, that he was sweating bullets running from people who weren’t chasing him any more? Did he dare swing left, swing right, to check? Not just yet.

He wondered at which point were they going to give up. When Frank reached the volcano? Halfway up? All the way to the top? If it depended on when their fuel cells or their gas reached fifty per cent, that was nothing he could control. They could chase him all the way home, come to that, except they’d be pretty much out of air. They were all hammering their buggies hard, driving in such a way that wasn’t efficient use of the stored energy. Their ranges were decreasing faster than the miles they covered.

Crap. He was going to have to do something, wasn’t he?

So, laying it out. He was on his way home. The only thing he needed to worry about was whether he had enough watts and tanked air to make it back to MBO. They were on their outward leg, so they needed to keep enough in store to make it back, and the further they went, the more they’d need. Also, Frank only had to stay ahead, while they had to stop him. That meant cutting him off. Boxing him in at least. They didn’t have comms, but maybe they could talk to each other like the NASA suits could, when they got close enough. That meant they could coordinate their attack.

Frank had a pretty good idea of what was at stake for him here if he lost this. His hard-won, if limited, freedom. His future trip back to Earth. Possibly his life. And just possibly the lives of all the NASA astronauts. He still didn’t know whether to count Jim among the living or the dead.

Just how much skin did his pursuers have in the game? What did they want from him? His suit? His buggy? Him? He didn’t know, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to make it easy for them.

He caught movement in the corner of his eye. He turned his head, and just saw more of the inside of his helmet. He straightened back up again, and shifted his hips slightly so he could turn his shoulders.

Goddammit. One of them had drawn level with him, fifty feet off his left-hand side. He checked the right, and as far as he could see, there was nothing there. He glanced down at the camera screen.

Right behind. Right. Behind. He swung left, and right, and it was there, just off his rear wheel.

“OK, I have no idea how this works, but screw you anyway.”

He flexed his fingers momentarily, letting go of the paddles, and the other buggy zipped by. He clenched them again, and now it was him who was behind.

Dust was streaming off the tires like spray, and he was in it. He couldn’t see. He nudged the wheel over, and then he was in the clear air between the tracks. Their buggies had no lights. No winch. No cameras. To the guy in front, he’d effectively disappeared.

Which meant he was about to turn and try and pick him up again.

Frank eased off again, letting the distance between them increase by ten feet, twenty feet. The buggy to his left was turning in a wide arc, still ahead, but easing rightwards. The one he was tailing would be told where Frank was, but he wouldn’t know. The driver would have to make that turn soon. Left, or right?

Left. It heeled over, and the buggy threatened to tip. It slowed hard as it tried to make the curve, and the wheels came up, spinning fast and useless on the side facing Frank. Who squeezed hard and thanked his good sense to strap in.

He rammed the buggy, his nose against their rear wheel, his own tires away from the collision point. The plates clattered hard against the lattice framework, and one sheared off, spinning high into the air, sharp and fast. Frank felt the impact, the juddering as the tire ground against the metalwork, could hear the rattle and the whine of the motor.

He dug in, spreading his own plates wide for maximum traction. And shoved. The other buggy tilted and tipped. He was almost under it now, and they were still moving. If he twisted the steering column left, he’d have most of a buggy on top of him. He’d be a sitting target for the second one. So turn it right.

Higher. Higher still. Now. He pulled the column over as far as he dared, and the M2 buggy was on its side, careering across the dust, wheels a blur, and—it must have hit a rock—took off. It sailed up, tumbling, and came down hard before flipping again, rolling like it was in a barrel. It came to a rest upside down, the driver hanging from their harness, arms extended limply towards the ground.

Frank had no time to check for damage. The other buggy was barreling round ahead of him, and heading back in his direction.

He steered around the wreck and wondered how he should handle this. There was one obvious way. If he got it wrong, they might all die out here. If he called it right, then he could still make it home.

Home. Was that what MBO was? No time to unpack that just now. He looked at the dust plume ahead of him as it turned from something he saw side-on to seeing it head-on.

How brave was he? Honestly, he wasn’t brave at all. He’d proved that again and again, taking the path of least resistance at each moment until all he was left with was the extremes. He’d only killed Brack because that was the only thing he could do apart from be killed himself. It had been all very matter-of-fact. He could fight for others. But not for himself.

The M2 buggy stopped. So did Frank. There was no one behind, or to the sides. They were alone out there. No one was going to stand as a witness to this, except maybe a satellite and God, and Frank didn’t believe in God. He checked his fuel and air. Tight. Even the air. He’d done lots of hard breathing, and he’d used up more than he’d expected. He had enough to get himself to the outpost. He still had one full life support pack strapped to the back of the buggy, but he needed an atmosphere to change it in. Not really something he could do while being chased.

He started forward. Gradually, he built up speed until he hit about fifteen. The other buggy was half a mile away across the plain, standing between him and the volcano’s lower slopes. It started moving too, dust rising up behind it, falling down again like water.

Frank wondered if the other driver had worked out which game they were playing yet.

They were closing on each other, both at quite modest speeds. That wasn’t the way to do it. This had to be all or nothing. A cataclysmic crash, or one of them bailed. That was it. Of course, they could both steer away at the last second, but there was no guarantee of survival if they still hit each other.

Forty, fifty miles an hour wasn’t really that fast. They’d both probably live through the crash. But their transports wouldn’t. They’d be left to suffocate together, out of reach of help. That was the kicker.

There were so many different ways to die on Mars.

Closer. Frank could see the driver’s pale spacesuit now. The other guy would be able to see his. There was nowhere to hide. Time to go all out. He squeezed down hard, felt his buggy respond, and he dialed back the suspension until it was taut once more. The ground rattled his bones, and the wheels skipped from crest to crest.

The speedo crept up. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.

They were getting close. He saw the driver hunched over the controls, faceless, almost immobile, just like he was, crouched, tense. Waiting for the smash.

Then, barely before it had started, it was over.

The other guy blinked first. He wheeled away, sliding sideways through the soft sand to a halt, and Frank was tearing by, heading for the lava flows as they swept down to the plain.

He was drenched with sweat, but he was laughing. Goddammit, he’d gotten away with it. Chicken. In a spacesuit. On Mars.

He eased off as he reached the volcano, and swung round to take in a view of the southern plain before he pointed himself back north for his ascent.

There, in the distance, were the two buggies, one just arriving at the place where the other had come to rest. Frank didn’t think he’d killed the guy: the roll cage would have taken the impact, but it would have hurt all the same. Loosened some fillings at least. He might have damaged the buggy more. He didn’t know how much rough-housing one would take, but being flipped over and bounced several times wasn’t going to do it any favors. There wasn’t much to go wrong, but if he’d bent one of the hubs, that might not even be fixable.

They weren’t in a position to chase him now. They’d have to go back to M2. What they’d do after that was anyone’s guess.

But the question as to whether he could now tell Lucy about them had been settled. He was going to tell her everything. And by everything, he meant everything. He had Jim’s mission patch—proof that M2 had been up on the mountain that day. Proof they’d found him. Beyond that, Frank wasn’t prepared to say. But Jim could be alive inside the M2 hab. There wasn’t any real wriggle room in that. Oh, he could lose the patch, pretend, but… he’d changed. He didn’t know if that meant something else was broken, or that something else had been fixed: he just wasn’t the same Franklin Kittridge who’d got himself sent to Mars.

He owed Lucy. He owed them all. And Jim was one of them.

XO weren’t going to like that. Maybe he could shut the dish off, like he had before when he wanted to stop Brack from phoning home, while he made his confession. Give everyone the chance to work out what to do, what to say.

He wasn’t expecting the news of his and XO’s deception to be greeted with enthusiasm. Lucy would be well within her rights to cuff him and kick him out of the airlock. He was guessing she wouldn’t, because they were all decent people—better than he was, for certain—and maybe they’d realize he was victim in all of this too.

Or maybe that wouldn’t matter. Lucy’s role was to make sure her team was safe. She’d know, because Frank would tell her, that she had a killer on the base. Loose. Living among them.

Perhaps this wouldn’t be so straightforward after all.

But at least he could use his own name again, and not that of the man who tried to kill him. He wouldn’t have to pretend any more to be something he wasn’t. Not an intrepid resourceful pioneer on the cutting edge of human endeavor, but a convicted murderer, a liar, a survivor.

When he’d handed himself in to the police, he’d known what to expect. Arrest. Questioning. Arraignment. Trial. Sentence. Jail. Divorce. Death. That path had been mapped out for him the moment he’d pulled the trigger and put that bullet in Mike’s dealer. Someone who had only a few years on Mike.

Goddammit, Frank. You really fucked up there.

He was going to leave it to Lucy. He was just sitting there, using air. He needed to get back, whatever the outcome. He turned the buggy up the volcano, and headed for the top. The climb ate hard into the fuel cell, even at a reduced speed, and by the time he’d finally reached the summit, he was nursing the watts. He reckoned he had just enough to get down the other side, without having to get off and push. Probably. There was a mode where he could disengage the hub motors and let the wheels run free, specifically designed to make it possible to retrieve a dead buggy with a live one using a tow unit: he could use that to coast downhill. But if he had to get off and walk, he would. The other buggy would be charged up. Recovery would be easy.

He was going to swap out his life support again, though. The one he’d left at the outpost had around six hours left in it; the one he was wearing had less than two.

“Lance. Lance Brack. Come in. Over.”

He was in range of the repeater at the outpost. The signal was choppy, squashed to hell and back, but he could just about make out the words. Deep breath then.

“I’m here. Voice isn’t great. Over.”

“—hell have you been? Over.”

“OK. If I’m going to say anything, I’m going to call it ‘commercially sensitive’ and leave it at that. I’ve been doing XO business. Over.”

“—told us. You should have told—”

“Who is this? Over.”

“—cy.”

“OK. Lucy. I’m hearing half of what you say. I had XO business.” He was conscious that anything he broadcast now would go into the databank and XO could just lift the information right out of it. He was going to tell them in person, or not at all. Certainly not like this. “I’m going to be back at MBO in an hour and a half. I’ll see you when I get in.”

“—just wander——where you’re going. Over.”

Frank had had a hard day already, and it was barely past noon. The signal was crappy, because of storm damage to the repeater, or low battery power, or something like that, and he just didn’t have the energy to argue about this shit.

“If you don’t like the arrangement, you know who to complain to. Over and out.”

He considered turning off his suit’s transmitter, but the airwaves remained silent. He looked down to his right, and could see into the caldera: almost at the outpost, then.

He followed the edge at a respectful distance, and crossed the open ground before angling north-west towards the lone hab. It looked entirely different again to what it had seemed in the dark, and what it resembled in the middle of a storm. Just a hab, wind-blown, abraded, pinker than usual due to the dust that had filled the microscopic indentations in the plastic covering. The solar panels—just a kilowatt array, aimed upwards—had either been blown or knocked over, and lay face-down in the dirt.

He parked up next to the array, and on dismounting picked it up and shook it clean, setting it back on its legs again. He made sure the cable was still attached, as he did for the telescopic antenna that served the repeater station. He’d have to come up again, give the hab a full check, over-pressure it and make sure nothing was going to give suddenly. That could be as early as tomorrow, if he was ever allowed to leave the base again. He’d have to have that argument too.

Before heading into the airlock—and he was supposing that it would be a manual vent—he turned round and looked at his buggy. The life support pack strapped behind the driver’s seat told him he’d failed. He’d gone out to find Jim, and bring him back to his friends. Even dead.

But he hadn’t even managed that. All that way, all that danger, and all he had to show for it was a torn mission patch.