No Way

27

Frank woke up to an almighty crash from outside, like the racking collapsing and spilling its contents on the floor. Disorientated, with no idea how much time had passed, he screwed his eyes up and called out, “Hey, you OK out there?”

When there was no immediate call of “I’m fine”, he slipped off the examination table and put his ear to the door.

There was… something.

Then the door bowed. Frank threw himself aside as it came off its hinges, flying into the wall hard enough to dent it. Fan followed it, arms and legs flailing. He hit the broken door, upended the examination table, and slid downwards.

Someone in an XO spacesuit walked in, arm raised, a length of stanchion in their hand, ready to beat down on a prone Fan.

“The fuck you will.” Frank pushed himself off the floor and into the figure, catching them under the shoulder, wrapping his arms around them. They fell together, tangled up, half on Fan’s legs.

Frank snatched at the stanchion, got both hands around it and twisted it hard. Wrists weren’t meant to rotate that far, and he broke the hold. Now he had a weapon, and goddammit, he was going to use it. He brought it down hard and fast on the helmet, not caring much about damage, but he was going to make it loud in there. He could see through the faceplate. Not the guy from before, and he’d be surprised if that one could walk any time soon. Different man, same desperate, wolf-like features.

The spacesuit tried to get up, rocking side to side on the curve of the life support to get some purchase on the floor. Frank knew that keeping him down was the thing.

Fan managed to pull himself out of the ruck: winded, he was in no position to help, but Frank already knew how to deal with someone in a semi-rigid suit, and that wasn’t by going toe-to-toe with them.

With one final swing at the helmet, Frank switched his attention to the control panel, which was right in front of him. He turned the pipe end on and drove it down hard. The man beneath him saw it coming and twisted onto his side, letting the carapace take the blow. Frank helped him over the rest of the way, and now the other guy found himself face-down, getting smacked around the head with the piece of metal pipe he’d brought himself.

Fan sat up, wheezing, and Frank tossed him the stanchion. He needed both hands free for this. He dug his fingers into the back panel on the suit, heaved the cover aside, and hit the manual off switch on the life support. Then he held the man down while he suffocated, slapping uselessly at the plastic tiles on the floor, clawing his fingers, kicking out. It took longer than Frank thought it would.

“You OK, Fan?” he asked, when the struggling had finally stopped.

Fan, clutching his chest, sipping at the air, nodded.

“He won’t be alone.”

He shoved the body to one side so he could get out the doorway. Leland—he was on the floor, boxes and crates and the things they contained around him, on top of him, and there was a hell of a lot of blood pooling behind his head. Frank couldn’t see anyone else, and ducked back into the examination room.

“Leland’s down. Do what you do: I’m going to find the others.”

Fan held out the stanchion again, and Frank shook his head. If there was a moment of comprehension, it was then. Fan knew. Fan understood.

Frank crept out, peered around the corner to the cross-hab, and could see shapes framed in the doorway to the crew section—chairs, people, stuff—in motion, chaotic and noisy. There was no one in between. No one standing guard. How many attackers? He didn’t know. Neither did he care. He would take them all on if necessary.

He grabbed an oxygen cylinder as he passed, because he knew that it was heavy and made more of an impact against the suits. Though there was now a gun in play. What had she done with it? There wasn’t any time to think about that. He charged.

They were all armed with makeshift weapons. Most usefully, Lucy had managed to get one of the kitchen knives. Isla had a chair, which she was about to throw. The three opposing them all had better. One, a wrench, one, part of a parachute filled with rocks, and one a makeshift spear, plastic tubing cut diagonally at the end to make a point. That could go through the hab wall if it was allowed to.

Lucy and Isla were backed up against the kitchen units, more or less surrounded, but the one with the wrench had slashes across his arm.

“Get out, get out, get out!” Lucy was shouting, when Frank barreled in behind and used his momentum to skittle two of them over.

He jumped up, swung his cylinder to meet the sack of rocks coming down, and reeled back as the spear end jabbed forward. Then it was just a free-for-all. At least he knew who he was supposed to be fighting. Lucy carved the air in front of her, Isla fended off the wrench, and Frank managed to get inside the spear length and bring the blunt end of the carbon-fiber cylinder up into the man’s faceplate, with the guy still hanging on to his length of tubing and trying to bring the point to bear on Frank.

It took three good hits to crack the clear plastic, each time stepping forward to keep within range. The fracture went right across, right to left. The suit’s occupant stared at it, rather than Frank, who took the opportunity to smack the hell out of the spear and force it from his grasp.

Disarmed, suit integrity compromised, they pushed Frank away, and ran for the airlock. They were about to find out the hard way whether they had a leak or not.

Then it was three against two, and the odds had shifted back. Rather than being on the defensive, Isla jabbed forward, inviting retaliation, until the rock-filled sleeve wrapped itself uselessly around one of the chair legs. Then she let go, and bundled the suit over while they were still trying to get untangled. Frank brought the cylinder down again, hard, like he had before, hitting the helmet, breaking it, sending shards of sharp plastic spinning away.

Lucy’s opponent turned and ran, and, not giving up, she gave chase. They beat her to the cross-hab airlock and started to cycle it.

“Lance, suit up,” she shouted. “Suit up. Get outside and find Yun.”

“Yun’s outside?”

She was right. Suit up.

“Tie them up,” said Frank to Isla. “Fan’s with Leland in the med hab. You OK?”

Isla nodded. Just the once. She was bleeding from several cuts. “Go.”

Frank hefted his cylinder again, and headed for his spacesuit.

Lucy was quick. Frank was quicker still, but when he powered his suit up, all he could hear was Yun calling for help, right in his ear. A mixture of English and what he had to assume was Mandarin. She was fighting them. She was fighting them hard.

Frank and Lucy cycled the lock together. They bundled outside, the usual suit checks not so much forgotten as ignored, and ran towards the open space beyond the Comms/Control hab. There was a buggy driving away in the direction of the Santa Clara; there were figures on the back of it, but the dust, the distance, made it impossible to tell what was going on. Was Yun with them? There was another buggy, with at least two—no, it was just two—people on it, circling round in front of the workshop. Someone was unplugging the charger from one of the base’s own transports.

The thing about radio was that it didn’t matter how close or how far away it was broadcast from. The distance to the receiver’s ears was a constant. Yun’s howls of rage, her demanding her release, her eventual begging for mercy, he was there. Right there, next to her. He wanted her to keep resisting and he wanted her to stop. But M2 were trying to steal one of their buggies. That, he could do something about.

He picked up a rock and threw it, not particularly aiming to hit the other guy, but to alert him to the fact he’d been spotted. Frank didn’t want to fight him so much as he wanted to scare him away from the buggy.

The rock sailed into the tire plates, and bounced against the man’s life support. The man stood up, saw Frank crouching over in that Mars-efficient running stance, and dropped the power cable. He dithered. Climb up and try and get the buggy going, or flee? Neither. He was frozen on the spot as Frank dug his boots into the friable Martian soil and ate up the distance between them. Only at the last moment did the other man try and escape.

Frank struck him from behind, and sent him flying, properly flying, feet off the ground, turning in the air, arms and legs wide. Frank skidded to a halt on his shoulder, and started to pick himself up. The circling M2 buggy came around and drove straight at him.

But slowly enough that he could jump backwards out of the way, sliding along on his life support. The buggy slowed right down for the interloper to climb up, and then it was off again, dust spurting from the wheels, showering Frank in grit before it was out of range, following its companion in the direction of the river valley. Yun was still calling. Still right in his ears.

“Lance. Status?”

Frank lay on his back, and flipped out his suit controls. Green lights all the way down. “Intact. Yun? Yun, we’re coming to get you. Just hold on.”

“Yun?” said Lucy. “You have my word on this: we will bring you back home. Back here.”

“There were too many of them! There are at least six of them here. I tried. I’m sorry. Please hurry. Please.”

Frank stood up, staring at the shrinking dust plumes. “Lucy, if we’re going, we need to go now.”

She ignored him. “Yun. Listen to me. The more you struggle, the more oxygen you’ll use. You have to let them take you. We will come for you. We’ll secure the base. We’ll call home for help. You will be released. We will bring you back.”

“They’re getting away!” said Frank.

“There’s nothing we can do! We are unprepared for this. So woefully unprepared. And that—that is on you, Lance. Franklin. Whatever your name is.”

“XO would have worked their way through your entire crew to get to me if I’d told you everything from the start. I told you as soon as I could. And you chose not to believe me.” Frank retrieved the gas cylinder from where it lay on the dusty ground. “Goddammit, sorry, Yun.”

“Come and get me. Please. Please, I’m frightened.”

“We will,” said Lucy. “I promise. Soon, Yun. Be strong.”

“If they open up her fucking suit it won’t matter how strong she is!”

“That is enough. I’ll finish up out here. You go inside.” Lucy was standing over by the satellite dish. “Go. Before you say anything else you regret. Over an open channel.”

“You’re not in charge of me.”

“Right now, you are either part of my crew, or you’re something I have to worry about. You can choose which it’s going to be. But you go off on that buggy, you’ve made your choice, because you are going to put Yun in more danger than she is even right now. Maybe, ‘Franklin’, we can come to some kind of accommodation here that doesn’t involve anyone else dying. What do you think?” She obviously and deliberately started flicking the fuses on the dish to off, working her way down the line. “You want to help Yun? Or do you want to do the other thing?”

Frank could barely see the two buggies climbing the side of the volcano, hidden within the curves of the valley. A faint haze of dust. Nothing else.

“Yun?” he said. “We’ll get you out of this. If Jim’s there, tell him we’re coming for him too.” Frank turned his transmitter off. He couldn’t bear it a single second more. Whether or not Lucy had anything else to say to him, he didn’t care. He plugged the buggy back in and stalked over to the cross-hab.

He racked his suit. He allowed himself a moment where he could just rest his forehead against the cool, humming machinery of the oxygenator, then went to make sure the base was secure.

The M2 guy subdued by him and Isla was hogtied—literally, hogtied, wrists and ankles bound together with cable ties—on the floor of the yard, away from any of the exercise equipment. The guy twisted his head as Frank passed by, and they stared at each other.

The man peered out through his broken faceplate. A fragment of plastic clattered to the deck. Gaunt. Ragged. Yellow-eyed and gray-skinned.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Fuck you,” said Frank. He took a knife from the kitchen and checked all of the crew quarters, upstairs and down, including the airlock. He peered inside, saw it was clear, and on leaving, left the inner door ajar. Just like he had done when he was alone.

He re-emerged in the yard, did the same to that airlock, then scouted out Comms, and below it, Control. There were flashing lights on some of the telltales. He’d let Lucy deal with those.

Back through the yard.

“Look, I was made to do this.”

“Shut the fuck up. Now.”

He went through the greenhouse, top and bottom, making absolutely certain there was no one hiding between the racking or behind the tall green plants. He fixed the outside airlock, and even plunged his arm into the tilapia tanks, just to make certain no one was hiding in them.

Fish squirmed against him, but there was nothing more substantial than that.

He checked the below-deck in the cross-hab, then the part he’d been dreading: going back into the med bay.

Fan was leaning, heavy-knuckled, against one of the gurneys. Isla was next to him, arms around him. There was a shape, a body, covered, shrouded by a green medical sheet. Frank looked around for Leland. Where he’d fallen and lain buried under the staging was rearranged but no less chaotic, but Leland had been retrieved, evidenced by bloody marks that once again stained the med hab floor.

“Fuck.”

Frank wheeled away in time to catch Lucy coming back in through the airlock. She cracked the seal on her suit, and crawled out of it onto the floor.

“You didn’t pull your punches,” she said.

“I’ve got—”

“The one you hit, who ran out through the gym’s airlock?”

“That’s not import—”

“Faceplate blew out. He’s dead.”

“Lucy, just…”

“What?”

“Leland. He. Just go through to the med bay. Just go through.” He gestured to her abandoned suit. “I’ll deal with this.”

She halfstumbled, half ran, and while he racked her life support and spacesuit, he could hear her cry of pain and loss echo down the corridor towards him. Then she was back, marching through to the kitchen area, and he stood in her way.

“You’re going to let me pass.”

“No, no I’m not.”

“I want some answers.”

“You’ll get them. Not this way, though. He’ll tell you anything you want to hear. But if you want the truth, you’ll have to wait.” Frank held his arms wide, and backed up until he blocked the through-passage completely.

“Franklin. That is your name, isn’t it? Franklin? Until I can work out exactly what to do with you, and what your status is regarding this mission, I’m simply not going to listen to anything you have to say.”

“What are you going to do? Fight me too?”

“If I have to. Whatever it takes to ensure the safety of my crew.”

“Like turning the dish off. Blocking XO from the main computer. I watched you do it.”

She balled her fists. “Get out of the way.”

“No, ma’am.”

“You shouldn’t even be here!”

Frank blinked away the sudden pain. “Don’t you think I know that? I tell myself that every single day. They killed my crew. Now they’re killing yours. You, me, we’re on the same fucking side. We always were. I tried—goddammit I tried so hard—to protect you from them, but they fucked it up. They fucked it up, and us with it.”

He stood aside, indicated she could go through. She did nothing, just stood there, breathing hard.

“Go on. Get what you can. Slap him around. Torture him if you want. All you’ll get is a pile of horseshit that means nothing. Seen that all before. When you toss him out the airlock, everything he knows will go with him, and you’ll have no clue as to whether he told you the truth or not.” Again, he pointed through to the kitchen. “Whatever it takes, right?”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

“I can get him to tell me the truth.”

“Will it get me Yun back? Will it get me Jim?”

“I don’t know. If I screw this up, you’ll still get your chance at him.” He wandered over to the greenhouse airlock, and peered through. The sight of the plants calmed him. Made him less terrified. Less angry. “You were a combat pilot.”

“The Stans.”

“You do the interrogation technique thing?”

“I survived it, if nothing else.”

“Did it work on you? Did you tell?”

“Name. Rank. Number,” she said.

“So give an old lag some credit for knowing that I can get more out of a stoolie with kindness than you will with threats.”

Lucy stepped away from the now-open corridor. “How long were you in jail for?”

“Eight years in. Out of a hundred and twenty, without parole.”

“What did you do?”

“He was a nineteen-year-old kid and I shot him at point-blank range.” Frank shrugged. “If you’ve got any sympathy, save it for his parents. I don’t want it, I don’t need it. I sure as hell don’t deserve it. I did a bad thing and I can’t put it right. Give me ten, fifteen minutes. I’ll sit where I can give you the sign that it’s working, where he can’t see you. And I’ll need Fan to do something, even though he won’t want to. But he’s the only one who can.”

He told her what, and such were the circumstances that she nodded and went to pass on the message.

Frank picked up the kitchen knife from the top of the life support rack and held it loosely as he walked through into the crew hab. He squatted down next to the tied man, and rolled him onto his side. More of his faceplate fell out, and Frank brushed the shards aside.

The man was wide-eyed and ashen. What did he think Frank was going to do to him? What had he been prepared to do to Frank, that he was imagining the same treatment?

“Do you know who I am?”

The man shook his head. More plastic clattered out.

“What’s your name?”

“Jerry.”

“Is that Jerry with a G or a J?”

“J.”

“Jerry. Jeremiah.” Frank stood up and found himself a chair. He set it on its feet and sat backwards on it. “I’m Frank, Jerry. And you tried to kill my colleagues.”

“We had no choice.”

“I’m going to stop you there, Jerry, because that’s not true, and I’m only interested in what’s true right now. No time for bullshit, no time for games. When you say ‘we had no choice’ what you really mean is ‘we didn’t expect you to fight back’. Am I right?”

“You don’t understand what it’s been like.”

“I don’t? That sounds like an invitation for me to listen to some more BS. I’m not going to feel sorry for you, whatever you tell me. We’re currently missing a geologist, an atmosphere scientist and there’s a dead shrink over in the med bay. Pretty much out of fucks to give.”

“But you’re the XO man, though. Aren’t you?”

“Oh, Jerry. Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. The XO man is dead. I killed him. I’m one of the chimps. That’s who I am. I’m the disposable crew who didn’t lie down and die.” Frank watched Jerry—if that was his real name, and Frank didn’t hold out much hope—carefully. The flare of recognition, the recoil away, as much as a man bound hands to feet could manage, told him that M2 knew all about Phase three. “If you think I’m an XO man, I’d think again.”

“What do you want from me?”

“What do I want? I wanted what I was promised by XO. That you would leave us alone. That I’d get my lift home. That was what I wanted, and now? I don’t know what I really want any more. You’ve taken Jim, you’ve taken Yun, you’ve killed Leland. Perhaps I just want you gone.”

“How can I change your mind?”

“I don’t know if—”

A scream. More of a yell that tailed off into a whimper. Frank acted surprised, but actually it was pretty convincing.

“What was that?” asked Jerry.

“That’s the sound of our doctor operating without anesthetic. You weren’t the only person we caught.”

Jerry gagged. “You can’t be serious,” he managed eventually.

“I don’t think it’s a joke. Do you?”

“What’s he doing to him?”

“Despite all the shit that’s gone down, I’m not going over there to ask.” Frank stretched out and put the knife on the table. “Looks like I won’t need that.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants to know what happened. Why you’re here on Mars. Whether or not XO told you that home invasion was OK. What happened to Jim. What’s going to happen to Yun. Stuff like that.”

Right on cue, another scream. That one sounded a little over-egged to Frank, but Jerry wasn’t in a discriminating frame of mind.

“I can tell you. I can tell you now.”

“I don’t think it’s going to make much difference to what he’s going to do to you. He’s one pissed sawbones right now.”

“I will tell you everything.”

“I don’t want to hear everything. Waste of good O₂.”

“Then just ask me questions. And quickly.”

“Like I said,” said Frank. “I don’t know if it’ll make any difference. I don’t carry that much influence around here. Not any more.”

“Oh God, you have to try.”

And again, this time cut short with a bubbling choke. Better. Definitely better.

Frank affected a bemused look. “I guess, if it doesn’t tally with the other guy, then it’s not like we’ve lost any time or anything. OK, I’ll try. I don’t know how long we’ve got. Depends on how long it’ll take them in there.”

“Just ask me something. Anything. Please.”

Was that easy, or was that difficult? Did he feel clean, or dirty? Frank was beyond such considerations now.

“Sure. Let’s talk about why you’re on Mars, and why you’re just over the hill from here.”