No Way

6

[Message file #87472 11/14/2048 1437 MBO Mission Control to MBO Rahe Crater]

Frank had to go through each hab, upper and lower levels, and make a fingertip search for anything that might indicate that the base had been the home for eight people and not one. Disposing of spacesuits, tablets, overalls, worn sleeping mats, part-used toiletries, scratched crockery and cutlery, everything. Special attention had to be paid to finding telltales like personalized graffiti or notes—written on what was anyone’s guess, as there was no paper. Bodily remains such as hair and skin needed to be removed and disposed of, including a thorough cleaning of the drains.

Then there was all the blood.

Now that the satellite dish was working again, the computer would purge itself automatically of data: the seven-day cycle of information would ensure that. The rest was up to him.

He’d found out the ultimate destination of the descent ship that had brought him and the others to Mars. When they’d had problems early on with power generation and the lack of spares, Brack had told them, point-blank and without explanation, that they weren’t to cannibalize the ship at all. The reason was because the ship was taking off again.

It didn’t have enough fuel to re-enter Earth’s orbit, nor could it re-enter the atmosphere. Its rockets weren’t enough to slow it down, and its heat shield and parachutes had already been used and discarded.

What it was going to do was two-fold. Firstly, it was going to throw up a smokescreen that would cover the lack of robotic base-building machines, under the pretense of returning them to Earth for commercially sensitive evaluation. Secondly, it was going to be used to launch the remains of seven dead people, and all evidence they’d ever come to Mars, into the heart of the Sun.

Frank had blinked roundly at that. He wasn’t a rocket scientist, and didn’t know how much fuel that would take, but he presumed whoever had plotted the course knew their math. It might take a year or two to get all the way in, but as far as getting rid of exhibits that might be used in a trial went, dropping them into a star was pretty final.

They’d literally thought of everything. He wondered how much more effort would have been required to refreeze them all and put them back into Earth-orbit, to be collected by a shuttle doing a round trip, up and down again.

Clearly, too much. The whole thing was just… willfully brutal. The lives of seven people didn’t figure in someone’s spreadsheet, but faking the existence of Mars-graded robots did. Frank, and the rest of them, were just consumables.

Just when he didn’t think he had any anger left inside, it came boiling back up to the surface and threatened to overwhelm him. Why shouldn’t he just raze the base to the ground and tell them what he’d done?

Because that wasn’t going to get him what he wanted. And, dammit, they owed him.

XO’s solution to the blood problem was crude: take the affected floor panels outside and rub them down with sand until they came clean. Frank had been hoping he’d be given the instructions on how to brew up a chemical cleaner—the soil contained chlorate, and that sounded a lot like chlorine, and he knew that chlorine was in bleach. Whatever it was, it was corrosive enough to eat away at the metal plates of the tires.

He’d already levered the panels up in Comms, from the place where Brack had bled out, up to the door that had been held shut while Dee had suffocated. About a dozen in all, and when he’d popped them out and carried them to the airlock at the far end of the yard, he’d gone carefully on his hands and knees to see how much of the blood had seeped through the cracks.

Where he’d dragged the body, not at all. Where it had lain for a while, quite a lot. Some had dribbled through into the void between the floor and the ceiling of the lower level, where the pipework and cables ran. That was… unfortunate. He wasn’t going to drain and unplumb the whole system, or even parts of it, just to make certain he’d got rid of every last scab. He was going to have to try and get as much of it off as he could—certainly that which was easily visible—by working from both above and below, taking out the ceiling panels too.

Frank wanted to do a good job, because he wasn’t going to be able to explain any quantity of spilled blood to a bunch of curious scientists. They’d unravel his excuses in a heartbeat, and then… that was when things would get difficult, for everybody. He wanted to spare himself and the astronauts that, even if it meant letting XO off the hook.

It was a decent day outside—he’d been on Mars long enough to be able to tell good weather from bad. The early morning fog had burned off, and the high ice-clouds chased away westwards. The dust-load was less than usual, and the view across to Uranius Mons clear enough to discern the truncated top of the volcano.

There’d be dust devils in the afternoon, after the ground had heated up, and it’d get gradually hazier until the sun started to sink again. A purple dusk was in prospect, and a cold night.

He’d laid out the panels near the satellite dish, their hard plastic surfaces shining in the weak sunlight, and had been using a nut runner and parachute cloth as an improvised flap-wheel. It worked inefficiently, but, if he pressed hard enough, sufficiently well for him to persevere. He had electrical power, and he had a planet-load of grit to use as an abrasive.

Slowly but surely, the dirt shifted the blood. He had to stop often to move the soil around, and to check on his progress, but it was a lot quicker than doing it manually.

He cleaned one panel, shook it free of red soil, and started on another.

When he’d done two, he was tired. He drank some water from his suit, and sat back for a few minutes with his back against the dish assembly. The sun had climbed higher, a small yellow disk against a pink-blue halo, darkening to a light brown at the horizon.

His work was carried out in almost perfect silence. Nothing he was doing made enough noise to propagate through Mars’s thin air, although he could feel the vibrations through his hands, and imagined the grinding sounds.

Which was why he missed the start of the thunder, and only when it was too loud to ignore did he get to his feet and look up.

Frank scanned the sky, looking for the telltale line of smoke, or the bright dot of a parachute. He couldn’t see it to start with. But he was looking too low, expecting it to be directed over the plain like all the others. Only when he leaned back and craned his neck did he see it.

The black streak of burned re-entry shield—technically an entry shield, because it wasn’t going anywhere it had been before—was almost zenith-high, angling in over the top of the volcano behind him. He followed its direction, and there were the parachutes along that line, tiny to the naked eye, but in reality vast red-and-white canopies extending far beyond the smudge of metal that pulled them through the thin air.

It fell, and very slowly detail resolved. The object suspended below the parachutes was ship-like: bullet-shaped and bright. It was difficult to tell how large it was, but it was definitely not the pencil-thin arrow of a cargo delivery.

And he realized that it was coming straight for him. It wasn’t just close. It was directly above him and it was falling on his head.

If he’d still had his medical monitor, it would have recorded his breathing and heart rate accelerating away. Two immediate, terrible thoughts.

That this was NASA, and he was screwed. The base was still full of evidence. Full of it, and no way to hide it.

And that they were coming in hot. Hard and fast and they were going to hit the base.

He was paralyzed with indecision. Had he left it too late to get to the buggy and drive off, to save himself for however long his air would last? Or was it simply better to let the fireball take him when the ship hit the Heights?

Come on, Frank. Think, goddammit. Think.

It couldn’t be NASA. If it was, they’d be early, and they couldn’t be early, because that wasn’t how space flight worked. Except he didn’t know enough about that to be certain. But this sure as hell looked like a descent ship, and it was growing visibly larger by the second.

Moment by moment, it swelled. It was coming down so very fast. And so very close.

Was it going to crash? It wasn’t like that hadn’t happened before. Cargo plowing into the Martian surface. Leaving a crater. Was the speed of this normal? Had he come in like this?

By now, the parachutes were huge, blotting out the sky, and it was still hurtling downwards. Dangling from the shrouds was a ship. Big enough to be a crew-rated ship. The air trembled. Dust was rising up all around him as if gravity had gone into reverse. If they were here, it was over. Goddammit, he should have got some warning. What was he supposed to do?

He leaned all the way back. The object had sprouted legs, tiny legs that didn’t look strong enough to support the body’s weight. It was going to be close, so very close.

Then, from his perspective, the oncoming vessel finally started to slide sideways in the sky. From being dead overhead to a few degrees off, then a few more, then clearly it was coming down to the north. It would just miss the base, and his own descent ship, and it wasn’t going to crush him.

The parachutes floated free, turning from taut dishes to sky-jellyfish in seconds. Smoke plumed from the base of the falling craft, and bright spears of translucent blue flame stabbed down. The ground shook as the new ship went from freefall to full stop on the Martian surface in bare seconds.

The rockets cut off, and a wave of dust and exhaust roiled across the Heights. With nothing to stop it, the front blew across the base. The brown fog that had formed during the ship’s descent was cleared away.

Two miles distant on the Heights, towards the steep drop-off to the crater floor, was a shiny white blunt-headed cone of a structure. He wasn’t ready. He wasn’t ready at all. There was still blood all over the floors and unburied bodies, and—

Breathe. Hold. Breathe.

If he was Brack, he would know exactly what this was and when to expect it. XO had told him explicitly that NASA were still three months away. They weren’t going to shit the bed. Look. Look carefully. His own descent ship was still here, and it was supposed to leave before the astronauts arrived.

OK. OK. It wasn’t the astronauts. What the hell was it? What, in the documentation, had he missed? He was determined that there wouldn’t be any panicked messages back to Earth, nothing that would show he was incompetent.

He forced himself to walk over to the fully charged-up buggy, and climb up. He didn’t want to go and look. He was scared of what he was going to find. But on the other hand, he knew he had to see what it was. He’d felt like this before, but not for a long time. His own father’s funeral. Dread. Sick to his stomach. And yet, it was something he had to do, a door he had to pass through.

He drove off across the Heights, heading in the unfamiliar northerly direction, skirting the big, thousand-yard crater that sat slap in the middle of the shelf. As he got closer, the ship slowly resolved in more detail. The legs—sturdy enough for the job, in a third of Earth gravity—just looked spindly, arranged around the circumference of the fatter cone, which sat so low that its base almost touched the ground.

Frank slowed and stopped, looking up at the structure from a respectful distance away. He could see the NASA logo on the side. There was other writing too, too small to make out from where he was. Sooty streaks ran from dark to light from base to tip, partially obscuring some of the letters. He abruptly realized that he was thinking of it as his Mars, and this new ship was trespassing. That was crazy. Mars was plenty big enough.

He climbed down from the buggy and approached. His heart was still yammering in his chest, and he was sticky with sweat. The ship was perfectly still, perfectly silent. For now.

“Hold it together, Frank.”

“Marcy?”

The last time he’d seen her, she’d filled up her helmet with vomit. So that’s how it was now. She spoke around the splashes on her faceplate.

“Take your time, Frank. Do it better.”

“Right. Better. Got it.” He nodded, and that seemed to satisfy her, because she wasn’t there when he next looked.

He turned his attention to the drop-off: the ground the ship sat on seemed stable enough. The rocket motors had blasted the dust away, leaving the rocks sitting on a bare, craze-cracked pavement. Mud cracks. They looked like mud cracks.

He was close enough to make out the smaller words. “Dogwood”. “MAV”.

MAV. The letters rang a very distant bell.

He circumnavigated the ship on foot, leaning back to gaze up at its blank, sloping sides. No windows, no external features at all to speak of. There was, however, a covered box fixed to one of the legs. Frank undid the catch, and found three buttons: two green, with arrows pointing up and down, and one central red one. He glanced around. No one was going to stop him from pressing the buttons, because he was the only one there. He thumbed the down arrow and stepped back.

A hole opened in the side of the ship and a telescopic ladder lowered itself to the ground. At the top of the ladder was a larger door-shaped outline, and a smaller rectangular outline that was probably the door mechanism. He climbed up, hand over hand, and pushed at the spring-loaded cover until it popped open.

Another two green buttons and one red; this time the arrows were pointing into, and out of, boxes. He tapped the in button, and the door pushed out, almost into his face, before sliding aside. Inside was an airlock.

He had another brief moment when he wondered if he should be doing this, and whether or not he ought to be phoning home to find out what the hell this was all about. Then he climbed up and in, and found the controls to close the airlock door behind him.

The main cabin—there was just the one compartment—was mostly empty. Three poles that went from floor to ceiling were the only furniture. There were mostly inert controls and panels around the walls—a few lights were awake, but none of the screens—and that was it. There was no one inside, and remarkably little room, given the size of the ship. His own descent ship was of comparable volume, and it went over three decks. He glanced down at his suit controls, and registered what his body had already told him: the ship was in vacuum.

He climbed out, and down the ladder, and closed everything up behind him. He walked around it again, and had stopped to look out across the drop-off to see where the parachutes had ended up, when something, some slight vibration, made him turn round. Louvered vents had opened up all around the ship’s middle, and two sets of solar panels had unfolded like fans from recesses on opposite sides. The panel arrays glittered blackly, before tilting towards the sunlight. Clearly something was happening, but Frank had no idea what.

But there were no astronauts. He was still on his own, for a couple more months. And that, suddenly, was OK, because he wasn’t ready. He needed to prepare the base, get everything sorted and squared away, to get used to the idea that he was going to be Lance Brack.

He was going to have to answer to that name. It was going to be hard.

There was nothing more to do here. He needed to go back to the base and find out what a MAV was, and then get on. This arrival had at least driven home that the timetable was outside his control.

Frank drove back to the base, collected the floor panels he’d cleaned off, and stepped into his own airlock.

He racked his life support, dumped the panels back in Comms, and went to reread Phase three.

OK, so there it was, buried in the small print, because it didn’t involve people: arrival of MAV, on or around Sol 529. He had to research what MAV was, and found it in another, even more technical document.

Mars Ascent Vehicle. It was his ride home, or at least off Mars. It was designed to suck Martian air in, and turn it into fuel, a process that would take about one hundred and twenty sols. It would take him and the rest of the astronauts back into Mars orbit, to dock with the transit ship which then would spend two hundred days going home. By which time he’d either be dead or safe.

It was happening. He had a deadline. Either he’d finish in time, or he wouldn’t.