No Way

2

[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 11/11/2048, transcribed from paper-only copy]

Frank cleaned up, the best he could. The fish, both dead, went into the waste system, and he levered up the floor tiles one by one and rinsed them off in the sink.

Declan was right. OK, Declan was dead, but that didn’t stop him from being right.

He found his overalls where he’d abandoned them, next to the shower stall. They’d dried stiff, and he had to peel the cloth apart. He’d been wearing them inside his spacesuit when he’d got shot, so there was a corresponding ragged-edged hole high up on the sleeve. But he put them in the washing machine and spent half an hour manually cranking the drum around. He had plenty of watts to play with—it was just that the tub was designed for manual use. When the overalls came out, the black patches weren’t visibly lighter. They were more pliable, though. The garment would be wearable, even if it would carry its marks for ever.

He draped it over a chair in the kitchen to dry, then picked it up again and followed the blood trail through the yard to the airlock at the far end. It wasn’t one they used—the traffic went through the cross-hab connector—but it was there because the base was designed to be modular and extendable.

He dropped his overalls on the airlock floor, closed the door, and pumped the air inside back into the hab. As the pressure dropped, the water boiled out from the cloth. Just like it did with people. He waited for the fog to clear, then bled the air back into the airlock chamber. Once the pressure had equalized, he could retrieve his clothes.

They were cold, cold enough to now attract condensation, but nowhere near as wet as they were before. OK, it was a grievous waste of water, but he was one man living in a base built for eight. He had resources to burn, which was ironic since they’d been short of everything at the beginning. If he needed more water, he was literally sitting on a reservoir of almost limitless supply, and all he needed to do was fire up the water maker and shovel some dirt into it.

Frank slung his overalls back over a chair, then slumped into it himself. He still felt so very tired.

He was, he guessed, around a hundred million miles from Earth. The distance meant nothing, as he’d been asleep the whole journey. He hadn’t any feeling of having traveled such a vast distance, just experience of an edit: fall unconscious on Earth, wake up on Mars. But he thought he knew what Earth looked like in the night sky, and if that bright dot was really what he was searching for, then of everyone who had ever lived, he was the most alone human being in the whole of history.

Somewhere between him and Earth was supposed to be a spaceship with some NASA astronauts. He didn’t know when they were going to arrive, nor what they expected to find when they did. It was likely they weren’t expecting to find a con who’d now killed three people.

What was he going to say to them? How would he know they were here? He might see their fiery entry. He might catch their sonic boom. The astronauts were expecting to be picked up, though if they were too far away, and either he didn’t try to, or couldn’t, find them, then what would they do? There’d been so many rockets descending recently, it’d been difficult for him to tell who or what was coming down. What they were, he didn’t know—Brack had pointed out that XO didn’t own Mars. If they’d been supplies meant for MBO, Brack would have collected them at the bottom of the crater, together with the NASA kit.

OK, NASA: if they were all in this together with XO, perhaps getting stranded miles from help or hope would be justice of sorts. But how likely was that collusion? They were the ones who were smart, idealistic explorers. They’d trained for this mission for years—unlike Frank, who’d barely got six months.

Sure, someone had to have signed off on this. Someone high up had to know that Frank and his fellow cons had been sent on a one-way trip as disposable labor. If not the astronauts themselves, then their bosses, or their bosses’ bosses, but if it came to a fight, he knew how this would pan out. He’d seen it on the screen often enough, a war between planets, where humans and aliens would duke it out until, inevitably, the good guys would win. He—Frank Kittridge—was the Martians. All of them. And he knew he wasn’t one of the good guys.

He started to laugh, because he found the idea funny. He ended up kneeling on the floor, crying, because it was only going to end one way. Eventually, he raised his head, wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand.

What was he going to do?

The only thing he had on his side was time. NASA wouldn’t be here for a while, and he might be able to find out when.

A plan. He needed a plan.

From where he was, hunched over, elbows on his knees, staring out at the dried blood smeared along the floor, he couldn’t see anything he could do. His situation was hopeless. He was alone. Outside wanted to kill him. Inside was fragile and depended on his continued labor to keep it going. One mistake would be the end of it all. No one was going to save him.

“Goddammit.”

He felt shame. He’d been the mark in a con, and he hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t seen it at all, until it was too late. The loaded dice had been rolled, and he’d lost everything. He’d killed Brack, but by that point it had been just to save his own skin, just to save face even. It hadn’t made anything better. He wasn’t going home. He wasn’t going to see his son. He was still going to die on Mars, sooner or later.

What the hell: he’d had a choice, and he’d taken the decision to live.

First things first, then. Make sure the base was still running as it ought to be. He could access the information on his tablet, but that was in the cross-hab, clipped onto his suit’s utility belt. Comms was just through the end of the yard, and the screens were bigger.

He followed the rust-red trail of blood and sat in the Comms chair. This was Dee’s domain, where he’d spent hours just reading the technical documents and looking at the maps. He hadn’t liked going outside so much, and he’d gotten comfortable with his role. Right up to the point where Brack had tripped the fire suppressor system and then held the door shut on him so that he’d suffocated.

On the console was Brack’s tablet, and Brack’s gun. The gun was just a regular automatic, very similar to the one Frank had used to kill his son’s dealer, but with the trigger guard removed, so that a fat spacesuit-gauntleted finger could still fire it. He picked it up, carefully. A stray round would probably register on the fire system as a flash-over, and put a hole in the hab skin to boot. The safety was on, but that didn’t mean it was safe.

He put it on the other side of the desk, behind the monitor, and propped Brack’s tablet against the table legs, on the floor next to his feet.

He clicked the monitor on—they’d all habitually turned any electrical equipment they weren’t using off, to save precious watts—and waited for the screen to bloom into life.

OK. Error messages in the base dialogue box. Comms were offline—that was fine, because Frank had tripped the power breakers on the dish himself, to prevent the automatic systems talking with XO, and XO talking with them, with the ship and the circling satellites. But what about this one: Low Memory?

Dee had told him something about only having room for seven days’ worth of data, and he had no idea what the kid had done to automate the system. Dee probably hadn’t factored in dying, nor for the transmitter to be deliberately taken offline.

Was running out of memory on the computer going to kill him? It could well do if the hab’s telltales couldn’t report back environmental data to the main computer, and things started shutting down. Could he fix this? Could he fix this without doing more damage?

This wasn’t touch-and-swipe stuff. When he’d run his own construction firm, he’d managed his own accounts and hadn’t relied on anyone else to make up his books. But this… Dee would have known what to do. Dee wouldn’t have got to this point in the first place. His son would have known what to do, too.

With that thought, he dabbed at the alert with his finger. He had to learn how to do this if he was going to stay alive.

He was offered a list of options: automatically free up more memory, manually delete files, cancel the alert.

He picked the first, and held his breath while the screen showed the computer doing things. Then it stopped, and the alert just went away. It had been easy in the end.

He checked through the other functions—air, water, power—and they were all well within the green part of their respective graphs. Power generation was cyclic: the batteries charged up during the day, and there was a base load of three kilowatts from the radioactive generator to keep things ticking over during the night. But because Declan hadn’t been wiping the solar panels free of dust, nor turning them every few hours to face the sun, they weren’t working as efficiently as they ought. That was a job that needed doing, then.

As did his tours of the base to make sure that none of the bolts were working loose; and maintaining the buggies, and swapping out the air filters when he needed to, and balancing the atmosphere in the greenhouse, and clearing the muck from the recycling plant, and the plants… he had the whole base to run. Breathe. Breathe again.

He was alone on Mars. But that was OK, because it meant no one was trying to kill him except the planet itself. XO couldn’t reach him. Brack was dead. The habs were intact. And Franklin Kittridge was still alive. He could work something out.

He still needed a plan.

What did he have? He had Mars Base One. It must have cost billions in development and shipping, let alone the cost of getting people here to set it up. He had XO, and, by extension, NASA and the U.S. government by the balls. They’d inadvertently made a murderer the King of Mars.

So that had to be worth something. If he knew anything about rich people, and he’d worked on building projects for them before, it was that they feared a loss of status over pretty much everything else. So you think you built a Mars base? Five minutes with a knife and Frank could render that brag hollow.

It would, of course, kill him. XO would probably figure that he wouldn’t carry out that threat, so he had to give them a credible reason for thinking that trashing the base was an option. What did he want in return?

He wanted to go home. He wanted his freedom. He wanted to be able to hang out with his son again, assuming he could find him. Was that worth a multi-billion dollar hi-tech facility on another planet?

Yes. Sure. Why not?

There was a problem, though. Who the hell was going to give him a ride?

It wasn’t like he was going to build a raft and float home. He technically had a rocket ship, but that had been part of the one-way deal. It wasn’t going anywhere, and he wasn’t a pilot. Scratch that idea. He needed two things, and only two things: a berth on a ship capable of getting back to Earth, and someone to fly it there.

Brack had had that. If Brack had succeeded in killing Frank too, then Brack would get a trip home, be paid off, and live happily ever after. Or as happily as a stone-cold murderer could do.

There was a certain irony there, which wasn’t lost on him. He considered his own guilt again, and wondered how life might have turned out if he hadn’t done what, in hindsight, had been utterly the wrong thing.

So, technically, the two things he needed would be available once NASA arrived, given that Brack wasn’t going to be able to take up the space.

Frank dragged his fingers through his hair and scrubbed at his face. This wasn’t his forte. He was a man who worked with his hands, not his head. But right now, he couldn’t build his way out of his predicament. There had to be a solution here.

How was he going to take Brack’s place on that flight home? Presumably the NASA astronauts were expecting Brack to be here when they arrived. That he’d be around while they completed their mission. That they’d take him with them when they were done. That was all arranged.

There wasn’t a hope in hell that XO would let him anywhere near that ship as Frank Kittridge, murderer. He knew where all XO’s bodies were buried, and the astronaut-scientists? They were going to be asking all kinds of questions that XO weren’t going to want answered.

What if…

He sat up with a gasp. The idea was preposterous. Literally insane. He’d never get away with it.

What if he tried to convince everyone that he was Brack?

Had XO any clue as to what was happening in the base right now? He’d turned the dish off. There was no data leaking out. All they could do was look down from above. What would they see? Three bodies, lying out in the dust. One man in an XO suit, cleaning up shop. Maybe the lights going on or off. If they’d been lucky with when the satellites had been overhead, perhaps a frame or two with him in it. They’d have no clue as to his identity: all their suits were superficially identical.

“Frank, don’t.”

He looked up, and there was Zeus. Smoke streamed from his nose, his eyes, his ears, his skin.

“What else am I going to do? I’ve got to get off this rock somehow.”

“When you start lying to people, you got to remember all those lies. Tell the truth, brother. The truth sets you free.” When he spoke, thick ribbons of boiling water spiraled up from his mouth.

“You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“It’s the only advice I’ve got.” Zeus was huge. His mere presence filled the room. “If you deal with XO, you’re dealing with the devil.”

“They hold all the cards.”

“You got a pretty decent hand yourself, Frank. You just got to play them straight.”

Frank swallowed. “I killed you, Zeus. I opened the door on you and I killed you.”

He was addressing nothing but the space between the desk and the door. It took him a moment to realize that he’d been talking to a ghost. Again.

So what was he going to do? Could he hold out for however long it was, hope that NASA came, hope that he could convince them to take him with them, hope that XO hadn’t already decided to poison the well, knowing there was someone in the base who was deliberately staying out of contact? What did he actually know about the agreement between XO and NASA?

Had, in fact, XO wanted them all dead? What if Brack had lost the plot so spectacularly that he thought he’d been acting under orders, when XO were desperately trying to talk him round? Maybe he’d passed off the earlier deaths to his controllers as accidents in the same way he’d fooled the cons.

XO were never going to implicate themselves. Of course they were going to pile the blame for this on Brack. They were never going to tell him the truth now, just as they’d never told him the truth in the past.

Perhaps it was the shock wearing off, that it had taken him until now to even consider why he’d ever been put in the position of being press-ganged to Mars. He’d asked, at the time of that initial interview in jail, why not just take smart young people, and had been told that smart young people dying would cause a stink.

That was what this was about. The fancy lawyer-type had known it then: dying wasn’t optional. The choice they had was who they were going to kill. Frank couldn’t think of anyone who was more expendable than a bunch of cons that they already owned. And probably, neither could XO.

Perhaps decisions this big ought to be made while wearing pants, but it wasn’t like there was anyone watching.

He leaned over and pulled Brack’s tablet up onto his lap. It was the same as his—standard issue—but with a different- colored cover. He turned it on, and expected to see some fancy password-protection screen. Finger, voice-print, iris scan. He was certain he’d seen Brack do something like that every time he’d accessed the device. Now, there was nothing, not even a pattern key or a text-based code. The lack of security made Frank think that there couldn’t be anything on there worth looking at, and he was about to fold the cover over and drop it back on the desk when he noticed there were icons present that weren’t on his own machine. Things that weren’t on the main computer.

Folders. Folders full of files.

A mail function. A goddamn interplanetary mail function.

He stared at the screen again, not even daring to touch it, in case they disappeared when he tried. But there was no reason for them to do that. So in the end he reached down and dabbed his fingertip against the mail icon and watched while it opened up and out.

Messages that went back months. All of Brack’s traffic with XO, which had presented itself publicly as an uncrackable code that Dee had said wasn’t worth even trying to unscramble. And here it was, rendered into plain text on Brack’s machine.

He scrolled through, letting the headers blur as they sped past. So many. A whole history.

Frank shrank the mail app down and put his hand over his heart. It was banging hard against his ribs. This was it. This was the smoking gun. He was going to have to read everything, just to see how bad it all was.

He tapped one of the folders. Behind the icon were files, and one of the files had his name. His rap sheet? And there was Marcy’s and Zeus’s and Dee’s. They were all there. And there was other information, some named with strings of letters and numbers that didn’t mean anything to him, but others with titles that hinted at deeper mysteries.

What to look at first? Frank scanned the file names on that part of the system. Those could wait, and probably those. This one, this Project Sparta summary. He’d never heard of Sparta, not in this context, anyway. He knew about the Spartans because of that movie, that they were badass soldiers of ancient times, but it didn’t have any real relevance to his situation, did it?

He opened it up. And he read it.