No Way

5

[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 11/13/2048, transcribed from paper-only copy]

Frank now inhabited the gray area between collaborator and victim. He had his agreement. He’d forced XO’s hand, and in turn they’d forced his. He wasn’t a lawyer, and he’d refused to sign or assent to any kind of contract—they’d got him once before like that, sitting in an interview room in San Quentin—and he wasn’t going to fall for it again. What he had was an understanding, a spit-and-handshake. Old-school trust, even where there was none.

Frank would carry out Phase three. He’d clean up the base. He’d prepare for the NASA mission. He’d answer to the name “Brack”. In return, XO would clear the path for him to return home. They’d get his sentence commuted. They’d give him enough money to start afresh. And they’d keep on paying a sum, every year, to tie them to each other in perpetuity.

It wasn’t enforceable in any way, except that the penalties for defaulting were unthinkable. It was literally their lives on the line. Frank’s for sure. The unwitting NASA astronauts’ too. And if any of this got in front of a grand jury, there’d be a whole bunch of XO people ratting each other out for a deal. It was in everybody’s best interest to see this to the bitter end.

On Frank’s part, he was under no illusion that his troubles would be over when he got back to Earth. A company that could base their entire business model around murder were no better than organized crime, and they could come for him at any point. And even if Frank went to the press, or the Feds, then… it was going to get complicated. He was a convicted murderer with a few new scars and a tin-foil hat story about how he got to Mars. The NASA crew could corroborate some of the details, but nothing of what happened before they arrived on the red planet.

He knew he’d be on the clock. He knew what he wanted to do with that time. Find his boy. Give him a hug. Tell him that he loved him and was proud of him whatever. Apologize to Jacqui for what he’d done. That shit had gone down without her knowledge or her assent. The kid he’d shot’s family? Maybe not. He was sorry, but it was unlikely they’d want to hear from him, let alone see him.

After that? Fuck XO. Let them come. He’d be pretty much done by that point. He knew he was never going to make old bones. Oh, he could lead them on a merry dance, and maybe they’d give up first, and leave him alone, or maybe he’d give up and let them find him. That bridge needed to be crossed at some point.

For now, he had a deal. And that deal started with driving three dead bodies over to the ship.

In their black-and-white parachute shrouds, they’d been stiff like boards. Easy, then, especially now they behaved more like luggage than corpses, to lever them upright and push them onto the open latticework of a trailer, then hitch that up to the back of one of the buggies. Each one went lengthways, and he’d fastened them down with ratchet straps from the cargo cylinders.

He unplugged the fuel cell from the base power supply. The cold had made the cable stiff and unyielding, and it wasn’t going back into its drum container. He dropped the connector inside under the lid and would finish coiling it up when he’d returned and the air was warmer.

Frank set off deliberately slowly across the river delta Dee had christened the Heights. The buggy’s wheel plates would be brittle, and he hadn’t worked out a way to replace any of them yet: repairing a wheel, out in the middle of nowhere, on his own, wasn’t something he wanted to do. He was going to have to be more cautious from now on. No more joy-rides up the Santa Clara.

The journey was barely two miles, but it still took a quarter of an hour. The morning fog had burned off, leaving the cold, hard ground with long shadows from the rough fist-sized rocks that littered the surface. Each shadow twinkled white, a frost-pocket that would soon evaporate away, but dust was now rising from the turning wheels.

The rising sun illuminated the horizon far more brightly than the sky above; the wind blew the dust up into the air where it caught the light. The zenith was still nearly black. Between, the typical pinkish blue was smudged with ribbons of high cloud that seemed to chase towards the night.

It could be called beautiful and perhaps, in the right company, it might be. Right now, though, he knew how lethal Mars could be, even without someone actively trying to kill him. To him, it was a barren wasteland that was indifferent as to whether he lived or died. One mistake, and it’d all be over.

The ship they’d landed in was a bullet-shaped white cone that sat off the Martian surface using four retractable legs. Its off-white color had slowly stained red, and sand, blown by the ephemeral winds, had mounted up against the dinner-plate-shaped feet, burying them completely. It already looked part of the landscape, and Frank was used to seeing it there, either as a small pearl in the distance, or as a landmark as he drove past.

Only once recently had he had cause to stop and go in. That had… ended badly. He’d found the floor swamped with empty painkiller packets and used food containers. He’d found four dead people in the sleep pods. It had been, ironically, his wake-up call that all was not well with Brack.

He let go of the throttle on the little steering wheel mounted on the controls, and the buggy coasted to a halt opposite the steps to the ship’s airlock. He jumped down to the surface. The gravity made it seem like he was flying.

Under the ship was a bare area that had been scoured clean down to the bedrock by the landing rockets. It had only slowly been reclaimed by the dust. Frank pulled the bodies off the trailer one by one, and laid them out beneath the downward-flaring nozzle, then retreated again. He’d put them inside only when it was time for the ship to leave, carrying its cargo of evidence. Because rot and decay, that was still going to happen, right?

He climbed up the steps to the airlock, wondered if it was going to cycle, because it was XO’s ship and they could still probably control it remotely. But the lights changed and the door opened automatically. If XO really did control the ship, what could they do to him? Nothing in the twenty or so minutes it took for a signal to reach Earth and a command to come back. He ought to make that a rule, not to spend any longer than that inside the ship. Though XO probably had other things to worry about right now.

He entered the airlock and cycled it through again. The outer door slid shut, and slowly sound returned.

Inside was as he’d left it. Of course it was. There was no one but him who could have moved anything. And he didn’t really believe there were the ghosts of his dead crewmates walking around: that was just a coping mechanism, along with the dreams of knives and asphyxia and standing naked to the Martian day, screaming as his life’s water boiled out of him. OK, not dreams. Flashbacks. He blinked them away.

The floor was still covered in trash. Brack’s sleeping mat was still stretched out on the storey above, and beyond that, on the third level, the sleep pods containing four corpses. There were lockers he probably needed to check, see what supplies were still usable, but not today. He wasn’t even sure why he’d come inside. Was it to confirm to himself that he really was alone?

Probably.

Lights burned on the consoles, red, amber and green. Blue lights for power. Some were flashing, but he knew better than to touch them. Flipping switches might well cause him more problems than he already had. Why add to them unnecessarily? The base was sufficient for his immediate needs.

There was still something strange—eerie, even—about this abandoned vessel turned into a morgue. It had brought eight people to Mars. One was left. And he didn’t need it any more. It was part of his past, not his future, however that turned out and however long it might be. It was a monument. It might as well be made of granite.

He cycled the airlock and felt his suit grow stiff as the air pumped away. He checked his read-out to make sure he had plenty of air and power. Then he opened the outer door, and there was Mars again. Still cold, still lifeless, still red.

While he was here with the trailer, he might as well collect one of the four cargo containers which had all the NASA equipment inside, that Brack had parked at the bottom of the drop-off. They had to come up sometime, and now was as good a time as any. He could stick them all in the boneyard outside the base and then transfer stuff, a few boxes at a time, each time he went back through the airlock. Otherwise, he’d have a week of nothing but lifting and carrying, and continually running the airlock pumps, which was going to exhaust both him and the base’s batteries. He wasn’t going to be as diligent as Declan at keeping the panels clean; he had enough power for normal circumstances, but repeatedly cycling the airlock? That would quickly leave him in the dark.

It could even kill him. Better not do that.

He hadn’t been down to the crater floor for a while. The last time had been early on in that long night, the one he was trying to forget but couldn’t. He drove the slope carefully, the empty trailer bouncing and slewing around behind him as it slipped unweighted on the loose sand. Ideally, he’d have enough cable on the winch drum to park up at the top and just pull the cylinders towards him, but the drop was a lot more than a hundred and fifty feet.

Marcy had taught him how to reverse the trailer into position. She’d been the first to die. Not an accident, but such was the situation at the time, Frank didn’t know that it would have mattered if he’d been the one with the “faulty” CO₂ scrubber. The others would have carried on without him, just in the same way that they carried on without Marcy. By her dying, there’d been one less mouth to feed, one pair of lungs fewer to breathe the air.

She’d been culled, and Alice after her, so that the rest of them would live long enough to build the base. Goddammit, that was brutal. And these were the people he’d just made a bargain with.

“The devil,” said Zeus. “You did it, Frank. I told you not to.”

Zeus was in his suit, but that didn’t stop the smoke from boiling out of him, swirling in his faceplate like clouds.

“Not now, Zeus. Really, not now.”

Rather than look at him, Frank unhooked Brack’s tablet from his waist loop and opened it up to check the manifests of the cylinders. Maybe when he’d done, Zeus would have gone.

The map popped open, and there were the four white crosses down where he expected them. But what the hell was this? The hinterland, the immediate parts of the Tharsis plain from where he’d retrieved the cylinders to build the MBO, were dotted with crosses too.

OK, it was an older version of the map. Brack hadn’t refreshed it for months. All those cargo drops Frank and the others had collected were still marked in their original positions.

No, that wasn’t right. Those were all there, in the boneyard, a bright crowding of crosses that almost obscured the base itself. He refreshed the map anyway, doing a hard reset. The map cleared, and then the crosses all reappeared, inexorably, one by one.

Where had they come from?

Scratch that. They’d come from Earth. Of course they had.

These were XO deliveries. They showed up on his—Brack’s—system, but not on Frank’s own. He knew that if he touched the cross, it’d give him an overview of the inventory. He touched the nearest one to him, which lay a few miles south of the far end of Rahe.

Solar farm.

“Goddammit. Look at this.” He turned and held the tablet out for Zeus to see, but he’d long since disappeared. Then Frank realized what he’d done, and sheepishly turned back.

Spares. They were his spares, dotted about the plain, even more scattershot than the first set of hab components had been. If the map was accurate, some of those were going to be utterly unreachable by a one-man operation.

How long had they been sitting there on the Martian surface? Frank had no way of knowing, but there’d been plenty of activity in the sky above the base for the last few months. Brack had warned them off “space piracy”, but he’d known they were meant for the base all along, and that he’d be going to get them as part of Phase three.

The NASA kit could wait. He was going for a power up. He was tired of having to squeak by. Even though Declan had been a complete pain in the ass about his precious watts, he’d kept them all alive throughout the build and beyond. These new panels had arrived too late for him to enjoy the sudden abundance, but he could refer to them as the Declan Murray Memorial Solar Farm, and see if XO bit.

He opened up the message function on the tablet, and pecked out with his fat finger: “Luisa. You should probably have mentioned the extra supplies earlier. You know that, right? Because that’s a shit-load of extra work for me to do. Let me make myself clear: you need to tell me everything I need to know, before I need to know it, because from now on, every time I find something out for myself, I’ll think you’ve been deliberately hiding it from me, and that you don’t want me to know about it.

“This is going to work on trust, or not at all. And right now, you’ve got to understand that you’ve fucked up. I’m going to collect the panels, and when I’ve brought them back, I’m going to plug them in and turn all the lights on. The rest of the schedule can wait. Don’t do this to me again.”

He sent the message and closed the app down, then checked out what else was waiting for him.

He tabbed another of the crosses, and there was food. Just food. A whole container—six big drums—full of dehydrated food from Earth. As he checked his way through, there was enough lying out there to almost double the size of the base. Hab sections. Wheels for the buggy. Spare fuel cells. Something—what was an In-situ Resource Management Device? It sounded fancy, and it was now his.

He checked his air, and he checked his batteries. Both were good enough to get out onto the plain and retrieve the panels. As ever, if something went wrong with either his suit or his buggy, he was going to die out there, quickly or slowly. No one was going to come and rescue him, because there was no one. But if he wanted the treasure, he was going to have to take the risk.

He looked up at the sky and, more accurately, the time on the tablet. He’d be coming back at dusk, but he had lights and it wasn’t as if he didn’t know where he was heading: Sunset Boulevard was so well used, it had become a groove. He wondered if it could be seen from space. Yes, why not? Dee had named it, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t enter the official records. The first man-made road on Mars.

Frank set off, dust pluming out behind him as he rattled along at a steady twelve. The driven surface was darker than the surrounding landscape, which was covered with an undisturbed salt rime—the same rime that collected on their helmets and pitted the metal wheels of the buggy. Two hours to drive the length of Rahe, up the collapsed part of the crater wall Dee had called Long Beach. Another hour out on the plain to collect the container, then the two hours back.

With the ridge of Beverly Hills to his left, he traversed the crater floor. It was long, it was boring. Boring on Mars had become a thing: although the landscape was alien, it just wasn’t interesting. It wasn’t Mars’s fault, but it was what he’d grown to expect. Red rock, red dust, ocher sky, pale sun. The only living thing on Mars, barring the greenhouse, was inside his suit. Outside of it was so little atmosphere as to be nothing but imperfect vacuum. Mars was dead and cold and airless, and people still wanted to come here to explore and work. Of their own volition, and not press-ganged like Frank.

The drive out of the crater was better. It was certainly more engaging, but only because it was more dangerous. The slope was steep, the surface loose, the hidden shelves of hard, jagged rock a menace. It had to be taken at a decent pace to allow momentum to carry the buggy over the more inconstant portions, but too quick, and the wheels would lose traction. If they did that, and spent any significant time in the air, then the buggy would slew sideways. Rolling it was a real possibility. And even with the roll cage and being strapped in, he was almost certain to wreck the wheels and leave himself stranded, far out of walking range of both the ship, and the base.

Monotony and fear. Those were his two default states and he seemed to be flipping between them with very little warning.

For ten minutes, twenty, it was continuously uphill, with Frank forced back into his seat and looking at nothing but the slope and the sky. The wheels turned and the plates bit, growling and clattering against the crater wall. He could hear it as well as feel it as he battled to keep the buggy facing forward.

Then, as always, the sudden burst of speed and the shallowing out of the gradient, followed by the explosion of so much Mars against his faceplate. The endless miles of nothing. The volcanoes rising directly from the plain ten thousand feet into a sky that was a dome of bluey-brown. An utterly blank landscape that, save for a few limp parachutes, was painted entirely in shades of red.

He stopped on the first patch of level ground, and hopped off to inspect the wheels and the trailer, and to check again his gas and fuel cell levels. It was second nature now, something he did without thinking.

It was late afternoon—just the right time for dust devils to rise up from the plain—and the sun was low over Uranius Mons, casting a huge, diffuse shadow through the dusty air. He opened up the map to check his direction, and saw there was going to be a problem. Neither his own location, nor the cargo, were marked.

Then he realized. His suit transmitter was still off. He’d turned it off that night, and had had no reason to turn it back on again. Away from both the main base and the ship, the map app had no way of talking to the satellites above. Did he dare risk turning his suit comms on? Did he dare not? If he couldn’t place himself on the map, he might end up traipsing across half of Mars looking for stuff and then not be able to find his way home.

If he was talking to XO, then he guessed he’d already made that decision. He tapped his way through his suit menu until he got to the right tab. He poked it back on, and a few seconds later the map recentered on his position, right at the top of Long Beach, and his targets bloomed on the landscape.

He set off southwards, skirting the edge of the crater, until the cross he was looking for merged with his own pointer. Then he stopped, stood up on the buggy’s frame and steadied himself using the roll cage, scanning the surroundings for any sign of the cylinder or its parachute. The map would only put him in the right area. After that, it was up to him.

And even though it was a plain, almost laser flat, the ground was pocked with craters, large and small, young and sharp-edged, old and barely even hollows. He’d had to retrieve cargo from several, sometimes even running a line over the rim and dragging the damn thing out. For all that they’d traveled a hundred million miles and all but crashed onto another planet, the cylinders really didn’t like lateral stress. He’d bent more than a couple that way.

There, half a mile distant, half hidden in a slight depression. This was going to be sweet. He’d be able to literally leave the lights on all night if he wanted: a full farm, another two big batteries, a full fifteen kilowatts of generating capacity. Of all the things to get excited about, he’d never thought that scavenging items from the surface of Mars would ever figure.

He drove over, dismounted and went to inspect the cylinder, lying slightly point-up and looking like a thirty-foot-long white pencil. The last solar farm had hard-landed, and over a third of the panels had broken on impact: it had only been luck that the batteries had survived, because if it had been the other way around, they’d have frozen to death. This one, barring some scorch-marks up the side, was intact, right down to the XO logo painted on the side.

He used the tool to open one of the pair of side hatches, and he had enough experience to know that the door tended to blow out when released. He was ready for it when it popped—not an audible pop, more something that he could feel through his feet. Then he helped swing the door the rest of the way, and he rummaged through the layers of insulation until he could read what was on the side of one of the drums. Panels: solar. 5x1kW. This was what he’d come for.

He pulled the hatch closed and relocked it, then winched the cylinder onto the trailer, just past the point of balance so that the end cleared the ground. Done. The parachute was gone, somewhere. Sometimes they detached properly, and ended up miles away. Other times they were still hanging from their lines, and the Martian wind wasn’t strong enough to shift them after they’d touched down.

The parachutes were useful all the same. Frank tended to pick up everything he could, and take it with him. It had cost a lot to get the stuff there. There was no point—unless it was actually dangerous—in leaving it. He’d have to leave this one, though, if he couldn’t find it easily.

He stood up on the buggy frame again and looked for the telltale black-and-white against the dun-colored ground, but couldn’t immediately see it. He checked his air, and the light, and decided that he could afford to spend ten minutes circling the drop site to find it. After that, he’d have to head home. He set off, more sedately than before because he was towing, and drove another half-mile south, before turning slowly eastwards. Every so often he’d stop and climb up, hanging off the roll cage, but he couldn’t spot it.

But he did see something. Tire tracks that he couldn’t possibly have made, because he’d never been this way before. He parked up next to them, and climbed down to make certain that these weren’t apparitions like his dead crewmates.

Squatting awkwardly in the dust, he peered at first one, then the other, of the parallel lines. They were real: when he ran his hand through the dirt that carried them, he left lines on the ground, and red on his gloves. They weren’t fresh tracks: in comparison to the ones he was making, the edges of the plate-marks were blurred, and if he looked up and down the track he could see there were places where they’d been obliterated completely, presumably by the passage of a Martian twister. That would make them a couple of weeks old, but not a couple of months.

All tracks made by his wheels had a direction—the central tread was V-shaped. These had the same pattern. They were, in fact, identical, and could only have been made by an XO buggy, heading north. Brack had been this way before, then, presumably on his way back from collecting the NASA equipment. He stood up and stared into the south, past the sloping flanks of Ceraunius and into the haze. There was nothing there, either.

He checked his air again, and the battery level on the buggy. It was time to abandon the parachute to Mars, and he turned the wheels to head back to Long Beach. Something was tickling his mind, giving him a feeling of unease, but there were so many things he was worried about. It was only when he met his outgoing tracks that the thought crystallized.

There were no other tracks leading south.

He stopped. He stood up. He turned around and looked behind him. There was still nothing. He’d driven maybe five miles after turning right at Long Beach, pretty much due south. He’d never driven south before from that point. He’d gone all points of the compass—north, north-east, north-west and west. That had been where all the supplies had landed, out on the Tharsis plain in a roughly triangular area between the three volcanoes. Some of the drops had been beyond the range of one life-support pack, necessitating a dangerous swap-out halfway.

But none had fallen in the south.

Brack may have been south. May. But he would have had to travel east first, then south, then back following the exact same route. Two sides of a triangle, twice, when a shorter direct distance was available. They could literally go straight on Mars, unless there was an impassable geographical feature they had to detour around. The shortest route was always best.

Was it subterfuge on Brack’s part? Tire tracks south might have alerted the crew as to the arrival of fresh deliveries. Then again, none of them had been out as far as Long Beach since they’d picked up the very last of the containers they’d needed for Phase one, which was months ago. And Brack had chosen to stack the NASA equipment at the base of the Heights, which was hardly hidden away. Granted, he hadn’t been making good decisions by that point, but after that he’d still managed to kill three men and had nearly done for Frank, too. So he hadn’t been completely incapable of action.

It simply didn’t make any sense. To go south, anyone would have got to the top of Long Beach—which was itself a lengthy drive—and gone straight to their destination. Unless…

Unless there was something hidden in the distance, out on the plain due east of Rahe, that Brack had called at on his way out, and on his way back. That would make as much sense as anything, but he didn’t have the time, nor the range, to go and look for it today.

Soon, then. The tracks were there. All he had to do was follow them out and see where they led.