No Way

3

[Image analysis MBO Mission Control, dated 11/11/2048]

Some time later, he found himself on the floor, looking up at the underside of the comms console. He wasn’t certain how he’d got there. He’d been sitting on the chair, which was now, like him, on its back.

He’d fainted. That was it. He’d read something, stood up too suddenly, and folded like a bad poker hand.

Robots. Fucking robots.

For his entire life, he’d been threatened with losing his job through automation. Everyone had. Manufacturing had been first, then driving. Marcy had been one of the last operators of big rigs. Banking, retail, they’d all fired their workers and hired machines. Construction was one of the few places a man could still work with his hands and command a decent paycheck.

The base they’d built, with their own labor and their own lives, was supposed to have been built by robots.

He was here, on Mars, because the robots didn’t work. They broke down. They got sand in their joints. They weren’t smart enough. They were too far away. Easier to send cheap, disposable people in place of expensive, fragile robots.

Even then, that wasn’t the worst of it. XO still wanted it to look like robots had built the base, with just one human supervisor. Killing the set-up crew was part of the package, so of course they had to be expendable. XO got its money, and a foothold on Mars. NASA—who thankfully didn’t appear to know anything about Project Sparta—had a base they could use.

Brack’s job in the first phase was to make sure the base got built. In the second, he had to make sure everyone else died. And in the third—

That was where he’d fainted. He slid his hand up and felt the side of his face. The hard plastic floor panel was unforgiving, and he’d cracked his cheek hard as he’d gone down. Just bruising, he told himself. One-third gravity meant he’d not fallen quickly enough to do real damage.

He rolled over, pulling faces as he stretched out his skin, and levered himself up using the edge of the desk. He reset the chair on its feet. He sat down again.

Phase three.

Brack had been given three months to get rid of everything that might give the impression that there’d been anyone else on Mars. Bodies. Equipment. Anything that might look worn or used. Data. NASA were expecting a clean base, built by robots, maintained by one man. XO were going to tidy up and pretend Frank had never been there.

He looked over his shoulder at the trail of blood that passed through the doorway and headed out across the yard.

No wonder Brack had been pissed about the state of the med bay. All that work he was going to have to do, cleaning up what had leaked out of Zero. That was what all the storing of the bodies on the ship was about. That was why their personal effects had never arrived. Why all the scientific equipment and NASA-specific material was still in containers at the bottom of the Heights. Why XO had taken the encryption off Brack’s tablet: no cons, no need for secrecy.

Phase three even included plans to scale back the hydroponics and then expand production again in time for the new, legitimate crew. Three months.

Goddammit, how could he have been so stupid, so naive, so trusting?

It was actually worse than he’d thought. They’d been treated like they weren’t even human. Cattle. They’d been treated like cattle. Herded, used, then slaughtered. It was probably a good job that Brack was already dead. Frank felt as if he should go and hang the body from one of the struts. Let the overhead satellites make sense of that.

His cheek was sore, and his eye felt puffy. The skin tightened uncomfortably when he blinked. He pressed his hand against it.

XO were going to bury him for sure. This wasn’t just one man going off the rails because of the stress and isolation. This was no more Brack’s idea than it was his. And it wasn’t the work of a few, either. This was a full-blown conspiracy.

All the people he interacted with at Gold Hill. The medics, the technicians, the drivers even. They knew what the plan XO had sold to NASA meant. Robots. One crew member. They all had to be in on it, to some degree or other. Dozens of otherwise normal people, who were just there to do a job, who’d go home to their families and their children, and maybe take the dog for a walk, or watch a game, or help their elderly neighbor with their groceries, knew the fate of the seven poor schmucks they dumped in the freeze chambers long before the occupants ever did.

Surely, there had to be someone within XO who’d been just a little bit uncomfortable about the whole “let’s kill seven people” thing? Someone who’d say something to their wife, their husband, their mother or their father, and be encouraged to go to the authorities?

Yet here Frank was, knowing that all those opportunities, all those people who had to have been on the inside, had done absolutely nothing. If they had spoken out, he wouldn’t have been there.

All that effort. Just to cover up what had been… he didn’t know what to call it. XO had agreed to deliver a Mars base a certain way, and found they couldn’t do it. Rather than putting their hands up and saying sorry, they decided that the only solution was to fake it. Sure, they’d have to kill some people in the process, but no one would miss them.

It was monstrous. Like he’d blundered onto the set of a snuff movie and then had to watch as, one by one, his fellow actors got struck down. If he’d been stuck on a studio back-lot in downtown Burbank, he could have walked home. But no: they decided to fake it a hundred million miles away where there was no atmosphere and no human being belonged.

He had no way out of this. He might as well trash the place now and have done with it. It would be a shame that he wasn’t going to be around to hear XO’s explanation for NASA as to why their lovely base turned into so much scrap metal and flapping plastic, but that would be the price of his revenge. Though he had really wanted to see his boy again.

He got up, slowly this time, and hesitated for just a little too long.

What if the NASA people needed the base to be intact, in order to get home again? Anything he did here would be condemning them before they even got to Mars. He couldn’t talk to them, either, and warn them off. They’d come crashing through the atmosphere and land, expecting to be picked up and taken to safety. Could he do that to them? He’d never met any of them, but they didn’t deserve to die on Mars any more than he did.

He couldn’t talk to them: he could only talk to XO, and they had nothing to say to him that he wanted to hear. He imagined the conversation that would ensue, trading threats and recriminations across a twenty-minute delay. Even then, the temptation to tell them exactly what he thought of them was tempered by the fact that they’d be trying to work out how much of the base they could control remotely and how they could use that to kill him. Every tablet had access to the deep and vital functions that kept the habs viable. Only Brack had had the motivation to use them to kill.

Frank righted the chair again, and slumped into it, crouching forward and staring at the Project Sparta summary. There were links in it, which would open other files. Details. Carefully drawn-up, terrible details.

What the hell was he going to do?

He shrank the file and sat there for a moment, tapping the side of the tablet with his fingernail, thinking about the nuclear option of suiting up, running through the base with a scalpel, overturning the trays of plants and barrels of fish, smashing the satellite dish and the solar panels, then driving the buggy out into the desert and finding a chasm to hurtle into.

If it was the only way to do damage to XO, then that’s what he’d do. Suicide, taking a multi-billion-dollar investment with him, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. He wondered what they were thinking right now, with days of non-contact, their precious base uncommunicative and for all they knew… What did they know from their orbital cameras? That someone was alive. And that three people were dead.

The last message they’d received from Brack was on—Frank checked—the ninth. Phase two complete. That was it. That was what Brack had sent straight after finding both Frank and Zero in the med bay and thinking them both dead. The dish had been offline since, so XO’s reply was somewhere in a queue over his head. Along, presumably, with increasingly urgent queries as to why he wasn’t responding.

Yes, he could trash the base. But that wasn’t going to get him back to Earth, to freedom, to Mike. And maybe his ex-wife, though depending on whether she’d moved on or not, that might be awkward. No, scratch that: of course she’d moved on. Mike, then. Concentrate on his son. Concentrate on the idea of his son, who, in Frank’s imagination, had turned his life around and gone to college and was starting out poor but happy in his chosen career. Frank needed to be alive for that. He needed NASA for that.

Just how long did he think he could survive here?

Indefinitely? Not that long. Something would break down that he couldn’t fix. If he got the hydroponics wrong, he could go from feast to famine in a matter of weeks. If he couldn’t eat the fish, and couldn’t replace the protein, then he was going to get sick.

But he didn’t need indefinitely. It said there, in black and white, when NASA were coming: three months. That was all. Three months to hang on. Could he do that?

He went into the greenhouse, cycling the airlock that kept the higher CO₂ inside with the plants, and just stood there on the staging by the door. The bright lights, the constant sound of circulating water, the startling greenness of the plants. It looked… complicated. Zero had managed the whole system, from set-up to harvest. Though if the kid could do it, so could he, he guessed.

Strawberries grew well with hydroponics, as did groundnuts. He collected a bowl of each and took them back through to the kitchen, leaving a pile of broken husks and green stalks on the table.

The act of eating slowed him down. It made him concentrate on what he was doing. He chewed, and looked around him again, but this time he didn’t see what he had before. The base was supposed to be his prison: that was what he’d signed up for, somewhere to spend the rest of his Buck Rogers sentence. That had changed with the false promise of a trip home and a pardon after a few years’ work. That had changed again into a desperate fight for survival against a regime that had been designed to cull him and his colleagues and get them out of the way before anyone knew they’d even been there.

Where he was, was no longer a prison. The warder was dead, the law too far away to do anything to him.

It was a desert island. Like that old movie about the parcel delivery guy. He had everything he needed to survive. Food, water, shelter, heat—if he was careful and made sure everything worked. If he treated it like that then yes, he was marooned at a distance further away than some rock in the middle of the Pacific, but that didn’t change the material facts.

There was a ship coming. He knew that too. A ship that could take him home.

OK, so that was positive. He could look after the base as if it was an island where the sea stretched beyond the far horizon. He could explore, and grow, and mend. That would keep him busy. Better than that, it would keep him engaged. There was hope.

Dee had read all the base’s manuals, and the other technical documents that XO had sent. Whether he should have was irrelevant now. He, like everyone else, was dead. Frank would have to play catch-up on that, which meant he’d need to schedule his time carefully.

He’d need to learn the things he needed to survive, quickly. Yes, he needed to be able to grow food as well as Zero had, but he also needed to maintain the water system as well as Zeus had, keep the power flowing into the batteries and out along the cables, like Declan had. He already knew about the physical structure of the base, and how to maintain the buggies. The computer system was going to be a steeper task, but the straightforward jobs he knew he could do.

And if something went wrong, he’d die.

That was always going to be hanging over his head. Probably best accept it, and move on. Every moment he had now was borrowed. No, not quite that: stolen. He was already a convicted murderer; theft was well within his capacity.

But he was missing something: that he was now in Brack’s position. Brack had been expected to survive between the end of Phase two and the arrival of the NASA mission. Brack had probably been given far more training than Frank had, and was also going to rely on the oversight of XO. It showed, however, that it could be done. That it was not just possible, but that it was part of the plan.

Phase three. That was all of Phase three. The clean-up, the removal of evidence. The wait.

It all hinged on NASA. They were the only people who were going to help him, but they were expecting Brack. And if he couldn’t convince them that he was Brack, all hell would break loose. Hell, on a base that could be controlled by XO, with comms through XO circuits, wasn’t a place he wanted to be. Hell, on a base with no comms at all because he’d sabotaged them to prevent an XO take-over, was still going to be tricky, especially when the NASA guys would make repairing those same circuits an absolute priority.

The idea of them not trying to phone home at some point during their mission was ridiculous. These were people, decent people with families and friends who cared about them, and jobs they needed to do. They weren’t going to be held hostage by Frank any more than they were by XO. So unless he was going to permanently wreck the dish before NASA arrived, cutting off for ever all possibility of communicating with Earth, then he needed to come up with something else.

The first thing—literally the first thing—that any visiting astronaut would see would be the carnage on the cross-hab floor. Then they’d dig further, and everything would unravel: the bodies, the drugs, the gun, the suits, the simple fact he was growing food for more than just himself. He was going to have to work through the entire Phase three plan anyway, just to keep up appearances.

Sure. Why not? That was the easy part. Brack was just a name. NASA were expecting him, or someone like him. Though if they’d already met Brack, then his plan would fall apart at that point.

That was a real problem. He could pretend to be Brack only if they accepted that he was Brack.

There was only one solution. He needed to talk to XO. And given that he had their multi-billion-dollar base by the cojones, and their dirty little secrets, they’d cut a deal with him. They could hardly say no. In fact, they could only say yes. Oh, sure, XO would be looking for ways to double-cross him, but Zeus—the ghost of Zeus—had been wrong. Frank inexplicably held enough cards to be reasonably certain they couldn’t kill him off before he made it off-planet.

He’d decided. He was going to be Brack and get his ride home.