No Way

29

[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 3/9/2049, transcribed from paper-only copy]

It was an hour before dusk. Frank had used a cutting disk to take off the doors of a cargo rocket and had sliced them into sections to make bumpers, sides and rear, for the first buggy, making sure they protruded further out than the wheels did. On the front, which he anticipated being more of a battering ram, he fixed a drum, piercing holes in its base to thread spare hab bolts through and clamp them to the frame with drilled strips of metal.

“Do you want help?”

He turned, nut runner in hand, and saw Isla. He also saw that the satellite dish was swinging over to the east, to pick up a signal.

“Whose bright idea was that?”

“We decided,” she said. “We can’t do without the uplink. Lucy hasn’t told them everything. Just that M2 attacked us.”

“Which part of ‘M2 has to remain secret at all costs’ passed you by?” He leaned into the buggy frame and tightened a bolt. “You’ve made a massive mistake. All you’ll ever get to talk to is a bunch of XO people trying not to end up in the same jail they fished me out of.”

“We can’t survive here otherwise.”

“You’re wrong. That’s all.”

“We decided,” she said again.

“OK, I get it.”

“We have to get help from somewhere, Frank.”

He picked up the drum lid and pushed it into place, then flicked the clasps over to fix it. “Has Lucy actually talked to anyone at NASA yet? Or has it just been XO?”

There was dead air.

“You just can’t quite believe that they did what they did to me and my crew, so you’re going to give them another chance to work yours over. Don’t think that being NASA will save you.”

“They won’t do that,” she said.

Frank rattled the drum and stepped back to admire his handiwork. “I don’t have that much faith in the justice system. I’ve seen too much shit go down to think it’s fair, or even working right. But I do know this: if this ever went in front of a jury, everyone from the CEO down would get serious flat time. They do not want that. Prison isn’t for guys like them. And they will turn every trick in the book to avoid it. If that means offing you, they’ll do that in an eyeblink.”

“Frank. It’s just—” She stopped long enough for Frank to turn round and check she was OK. “We have to do something. We can’t just hide ourselves away for months, not talk to anyone back home.”

“You fucked up, Isla. Lucy is fucking up at this exact moment, talking to XO. Even if she doesn’t tell them about knowing I’m not Brack, she’s telling them she knows about M2. I don’t know how XO want this to go down, whether they want M2 to kill us or they want everyone dead. But we still end up dead.”

“Well, we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

Frank picked up the cutter and headed off for more cargo door. “You want to put a bet on this? A hundred bucks says I’m right.” He was out of the loop. He had no idea if a hundred dollars was still a significant amount in the outside world. “Hell, I’ll do your laundry for a month.”

“And if you’re right, I have to do yours?”

“If I’m right, neither of us will care about that. But at least I get to use one of my dying breaths to say I told you so.” He spun up the cutting disk and applied it to the curved surface of the cargo door. He could feel the vibration in his hands and through the ground, but the sound was of a softly growling animal.

“I came out here to help you,” she said, belatedly.

“Can you make that cannon you talked about?”

“Probably. With the right fixings.”

“I’ll do this. You do that. I’m not in a talking mood right now.”

She stalked away over to the boneyard, and he kept his head down, working. It actually started to feel good, doing something constructive with his hands, even if it was armoring the buggies for a fight. He could switch off, and just build, and when he’d done, he felt OK. Not great, because he still had the idea that he was going to die along with the rest of the crew, but considering that, OK.

Fan and Lucy were still inside. They had two bodies to deal with there. One outside—he should really ask them what they wanted to do about that—and there was Jerry to feed and take to the can. A cannibal.

Oh, sure, Jerry had used the defense of not wanting to, being forced to. Frank was pretty certain how it had gone down, with the leader of the group, this Justin, making certain that everyone, absolutely everyone ate, taking them all over a line there was no coming back across. He’d bound them to him, like a gang initiation. Blood in, blood out.

Frank had almost spaced Jerry himself when he’d been told. And no one would have blamed him for notching up kill number six. He didn’t know why he’d stopped Fan, either. Except that he had. He’d told Jerry he’d keep him from going under the knife, and he’d kept his word, even if the knife itself was a lie.

This was what happened when he was good: it got complicated. Very complicated. What was Lucy supposed to do with a prisoner, someone who’d eaten one of her colleagues? Not Frank’s decision, not now.

He went over to see how far Isla had got with her project.

Plastic pipework was the best they had. A good straight metal tube would have been better—would certainly take more pressure, be more rigid and would wear less—but they were beggars and they had to scavenge whatever they could.

The longer the pipe, the more accurate it’d be. And the more it’d sag. But there were ways around that.

At the back end, she’d fitted a quarter-turn valve and a cistern as an air reservoir, and added a couple more fixings: a non-return valve and a separate spigot. She’d also had time to make projectiles: Martian rock wound round with parachute canopy.

“Have we any compressed CO₂?”

“If you want to rip the fire-suppression system apart, yes. But nothing portable.”

“Using oxygen seems a waste.”

“Do you want me to get you a tank of what we actually have, or do you want to stand around wishing for something different?”

“You’ve had the time to adjust to what’s going on. I haven’t. So while I can understand why you’re getting pissy with me, I’m also telling you that it’s not helping. Not one little bit.” She didn’t look at him. Just unscrewed the compression fitting at the breach-end of the barrel and pushed one of the cloth-wrapped rocks into it.

“I’ll get Fan to dump a tank in the airlock,” said Frank. He spoke to Comms, got Lucy, and by the time he’d walked to the cross-hab, there was a black cylinder in the already pumped-down chamber. All Frank had to do was pick it up and carry it back to the boneyard.

Isla took it from him, and plugged it into the cistern.

“This may explode,” she said, as she opened the regulator.

From being a cube, the container rounded out rapidly, and well past the point where Frank would have shut the gas off, she kept on going.

“About that exploding thing,” he said.

“I’ve done this before,” was her response. Then she cranked the regulator. “You need to be ballast. I don’t want to risk it breaking.”

“I’m holding on to something that could blow up in my face.”

“Yes, Frank. That’s exactly what you’re doing.”

She waited until Frank had hunkered down and wrapped his arms around the taut-as-a-drum cistern, then crouched next to him with her hand on the quarter-turn tap. The barrel was propped up on a pile of rocks so that it pointed slightly above the horizontal. “Don’t block the return valve. OK: three, two, one.”

Isla twisted the tap in one quick movement, and Frank felt the cistern kick against him. Proper recoil. He looked up to see how far the projectile had gone, and his gaze was drawn through the expanding cloud of mist at the end of the barrel to a fluttering tail of black and white far in the distance: it was still in the air.

“Fuck.”

Its trajectory slowly bent downwards, and when it eventually hit the ground, it bounced and tumbled along for another thirty, forty feet.

Frank stood up and tried to estimate the total distance. Now the rock had stopped moving, it was impossible to see.

“Quarter of a mile?”

“Better than we managed back home. Reduced gravity and no wind resistance. And that’s at least a third, if not a half.” She closed the tap and began unscrewing the breach again. “Overclocked?”

“Depends what we’re trying to do with it. But I can’t see any situation where less bang is better than more.”

“If we had a pressure gauge, and a safety valve… Dad always insisted on those.” She loaded up another rock and laboriously screwed it all together again. “And a bolt action. Yes, I know we don’t have the parts, or the time to manufacture them. And after this, we hopefully will never need to.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry you’ve ended up in the middle of this. I’m sorry that this is the only way out of it. There’s nothing I can do that’ll make what’s happened go away. None of you deserved any of this.”

“We need to mount this on a buggy. Strap it down. Maybe a seat for the loader, too.” Then she stopped and turned back to Frank. “They ate Jim. Why would they even do that?”

“I don’t know.” Frank stooped to unfasten the oxygen cylinder. “I’ve been in prison long enough to know that people don’t make good decisions at the best of times. And I’ve seen what happens when the screws stand back and let the gangs take over, like you’ve got to join one or other of them just to make it through the day. There’s no place for neutrals. So, what Jerry said rings true—the guy in charge does it, it’s taboo but he’s trash-talking the others, says it makes him strong and powerful. It’s then, when it’s many against one, that you need to take a stand, but everyone’s fucking terrified of taking this monster on. Then someone sees how afraid they all are and thinks, ‘I’ll have me some of that,’ and they eat, and suddenly it’s two of them and they’ve got this little club going. These guys are hungry, they’re weak, they’re scared already, and now they’ve got to live with cannibals, work with cannibals, sleep next to cannibals, and it’s just easier to join in than it is to fight them. That’s how it happens.”

“Frank, I understand it. I just don’t want to understand it.”

“I get that.”

“He was my friend.”

“I know. And now we’ve got to try and stop the same thing happening to Yun.”

He hefted the cistern and propped the pipe barrel up against his shoulder. He started to carry it towards the buggy he’d already fitted out for battle.

“How can you be so calm about this?”

“Because I’m already broken, Isla. Your reaction is the normal one. That’s what regular people feel in a situation like this. What’s wrong with me can’t be fixed. So I may as well use it to help you.” Frank slid the length of the air cannon onto the buggy, and dragged it this way and that until he was happy with its position. “You want to pass me some straps?”

She didn’t, so Frank fetched his own and started tying the weapon down to the frame.

“Takes something to kill another human being,” he said. “Even soldiers, trained to do it with guns and bayonets, most of them never kill another guy. They don’t want to do it. You sure as hell don’t. Someone with a spear and a club trying to bring you down in your own home, and still you don’t stick them with something sharp. That’s the right way to behave. You know it. I know it because I was like you once.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Frank?”

“That you want to leave the killing to me. You get Yun, first chance you can, and you hightail it out of there. You stay clean. You leave these XO sons-of-bitches to me.” Frank tightened the straps, and judged what he’d need to chock the barrel so that it fired horizontally. A couple of drum lids, maybe, and a bracket to hold it in place.

“There’s more of them than there are of you,” she said. “Or is that the point? You’re going to be the big damn hero so you don’t have to worry about coming back?”

That wasn’t the point. The actual point was too ridiculous to articulate: that he’d had enough of spending his time with killers and cons, and he wanted to preserve Isla’s—and the rest of her team’s—innocence. He was going to do the terrible things so they didn’t have to. And if he came back from M2, and if he was allowed to get on the MAV and go home to Earth and… even if it was now unlikely he’d get his sack of XO cash, he was going to spend so long in front of a grand jury that he’d probably have finished his sentence by the time they were done.

So he said, “Something like that,” and he was content to leave it there, but she wasn’t.

“That’s not going to happen, Frank. You’re one of us now.”

“I’m never going to be one of you, Isla. Get real.”

“Frank, will you just listen to me for a moment?”

“We got stuff to do, Isla. We got to get Yun back and we’ve not got the daylight to stand around jawing. Just let me get on. If you want to talk, we can do it another time. It’s not like I’m the important one around here.”

He was the shield. The meat-shield that was going to get in the way for the others. Getting Yun out, alive, was the priority. He’d take his chances as they came to him, and no, he wasn’t going to throw his life away, because the longer he stayed upright, the more likely it was that the rescue mission would be successful.

He turned round and Isla was still there. They stared at each other through the near-vacuum of Mars and the faceplates of their suits. His was fuzzed by abrasion and dust thrown up during his labors. Hers was clear. It had been replaced by Fan, and she’d been using parachute cloth to wipe it clean.

“I’ll finish fitting out the cannon,” she said. “You do what else you need to do.”

He nodded. She could see that, so he assumed that they were done for now. He started back towards the cargo rockets, to hack off another set of doors.

“Don’t think this is over, Frank.”

He slowed, almost stumbled. Then he straightened himself up and got to work, cutting and shaping and fixing, long into the twilight, almost to the point where his air was going to run out.

He carried the weapons that he’d made to the airlock, and took the control columns off both the buggies and stacked them in there too, to make them less stealable. He was pretty certain that M2 didn’t have enough resources to mount another raid any time soon. But he wasn’t going to take that to the bank.

The sun had set. The temperature was falling. He was dog tired.

Just like the old days. He closed the airlock door, and cycled it.