No Way

7

[Message file #98943 12/3/2048 1843 MBO Mission Control to MBO Rahe Crater]

Frank had increased the power bank by another battery pack, and plugged in another ten kW of collectors. He’d supplemented his larder with an extraordinary array of instant puddings and drinks powders. He now had spare wheels. And extra fuel cells. And hab sections. He had airlocks, and he’d left one, complete with a spare life support and oxygen cylinders, at the top of Long Beach. Just in case he got caught out at some point.

It should have always been like this. At the start, XO had kept them short. He remembered the early days of not enough power, not enough food, not enough EVA time, of having to make decisions among themselves—no help or guidance from Brack—as to what to prioritize and what could wait. It had been deliberate, and it was one of the reasons he hated them. The second round of launches had shown that they could have supplied everything sooner. He still had to work with XO, though, and had to mute his anger.

There was more out there still: he was just about ahead of schedule in the base, and he needed a day off from the close-work and monotony of scraping blood out of the ceiling voids. He looked at the tablet, and decided that he really wanted to see what the In-situ Resource Management Device did. It was on the eastern flank of Ceraunius Tholus, by no means the furthest adrift of the deliveries, but still twenty miles out from Long Beach. That made it a seventy-mile round trip. Doable on one pack, just.

Not to say that Luisa wasn’t nervous about his trips out. She cautioned him to be careful, to repeatedly ask himself if his journey was really necessary. If he died out on the plain, then MBO stayed in exactly the same state as he’d left it. Partially bloody, obviously not constructed by robots.

Maybe that was why he was doing it? Subconsciously subverting the deal with XO. Not wanting to entirely obliterate the memories of Alice and Marcy, Zeus and Dee, Declan and Zero. They had been here, and now he was colluding with the same murdering bastards that had tried to add him to that tally.

He kept on seeing them, in and around the base. It wasn’t right, but he was lonely. He’d even taken to reading his way back through Brack’s increasingly wayward interaction with Mission Control, becoming more expansive and flowery as his opioid addiction had grown.

He’d never seen himself as a people person. Yet he’d worked pretty much every day of his life alongside others. It was the isolation that was getting to him. Despite having the whole of Mars to explore, it was still his prison, and still his solitary. It would be over soon. Another couple of months to keep it together, and the astronauts would be here. Just as long as he didn’t cry when they arrived, he’d be fine. In the meantime, he had Luisa. He couldn’t stop telling her stuff he really ought to keep to himself. But he couldn’t tell anyone else because they were all dead.

Maybe he was falling apart in the same way Brack had. Maybe this was just a nightmare and he’d wake up to find… what?

That it was all still true.

He suited up, and cycled the airlock. There was no getting away from it, no wishful thinking that’d lessen his situation. He was marooned on Mars. He opened the airlock door, and there it was. The vast barren slope of the volcano, the pink sky, the red soil.

He unplugged the buggy, checked the trailer hitch was still tight, and drove away from the base. The draft in his face was almost convincing as an analog for speed, except it was constant whether he was moving or not.

To his left was the MAV, tracking the sun with its panels, making fuel. To his right, after a couple of miles, was the descent ship, three black-and-white-shrouded bodies tucked underneath. Then down the slope to the crater floor and onto Sunset. Paradoxically, the sun was just rising, straight into his face. Elsewhere, so he understood—on the Moon, in space—astronauts had tinted visors they could pull down to prevent glare. On Mars, the sun was never more than a luminous disk. It was just about bright enough to cast sharp shadow, but that depended on the dust-load in the sky, and, more often than not, shade was a solid mass, carved from air like a dark slab. Dust. It was always about the dust.

The same dust that was spinning from his turning wheels: most of it fell in an arc like thrown sand, even though the grains were much smaller. The finest particles, however, invisible and impossible, were carried away like gauze, and they stuck to whatever they touched. Particularly his spacesuit’s faceplate, but pretty much everything and in everything. In the damp atmosphere of the habs, the dust they carried in ended up smeared on the floor, but outside it just clung.

The ghosts on Mars would be made of dust.

By the time he reached Long Beach, the slope was in full sun. He’d done it in the dark before. It was less fun than advertised. The collapsed crater wall that allowed access to the wider plains beyond was difficult terrain and a relentless climb, fifteen hundred feet at a ten per cent gradient. He squeezed the accelerator paddles and felt himself tip back in his seat.

The motors growled, and the stones clattered. It was an endurance test, for both him and the machine.

The buggy crawled over the lip of the crater, and Frank brought it to a halt next to the airlock. He’d piled loose stones against its sides, and finished it off with a cargo strap that went across the top and into the middle of two cairns that kept the anchors in place.

He did his usual checks—everything was nominal—and opened up the map so that he knew exactly which direction he was heading in. South-east, and up on the lower slopes of the volcano: the lower slopes only, and a good job too, since the summit before the yawning flat-bottomed crater at the top maxed out at twenty thousand feet above the level of the plain.

He followed his already-made track, heading south. His track, and no one else’s. He never did find what had caused Brack to take such a roundabout route. He’d checked the most recent satellite maps he had, in case he’d missed something, but there was nothing out to the east but more rock and more craters and more dust.

He could imagine getting lost out on the plain: there were so few landmarks to navigate by, and if the dust blew up, or the tablet was unable to contact, through his suit, the satellites, he’d be in trouble.

He felt a cold sweat break out across the whole of his body, and his breathing quicken. The planet was so huge, and he was the only one on it. Don’t panic, don’t panic. Breathe. Hold. Breathe.

The moment passed, but he still wondered if he wasn’t taking too much of a risk, going so far from home when it wasn’t necessary. He almost turned around. Almost. Luisa would have liked that.

But others were coming soon. It would be fine. Everything was fine.

He consulted his map again and angled the nose of the buggy back towards the volcanic slopes. The quality of the ground slowly changed again: fewer craters, and more exposed rock. Rilles and runnels snaking downwards, like smaller versions of the Santa Clara, almost as if a dusty, crater-pocked sea lapped up against a continent, flowing up its rivers and retreating from its promontories.

He had to be getting close, but how to get to where he wanted to be through what was rapidly becoming a labyrinth of channels? He glanced at the map again, and saw that he was losing his signal. Blocked by the intervening higher ground, his suit was struggling to stay connected.

He could retreat. He could also, looking at the last iteration of his map, go higher still. If he drove up and out of the valley he was in, he’d find himself on the clear slopes above. He eased forward, crossing the unfamiliar terrain until his view opened up again, and he was on one of a staircase of rock steps that seemed to climb, irregularly and imperfectly, all the way to the very top.

Frank had his signal again, and the cross that marked his target was centered on his position. Somewhere, within a couple of hundred yards of where he was, was what he was seeking, but damned if he could see it. He parked up and walked up to the next rock step. Though the riser was blunt, he found out just how difficult it would be to climb in his spacesuit. His knees creaked with the effort, and he used his hands as much as his feet.

He pulled himself upright, and stared out across the lower slopes, looking for a splash of color or scorch-marks from the landing rockets. Right down on the plain, momentarily, he saw a figure in a spacesuit, walking out from behind one bluff and into the shadow of another. From the size of them, it could have been Marcy again, or Alice, or Declan. Definitely not Zeus. He raised his hand, but that was stupid, and he dropped it again quickly. They’d gone, anyway, and they were never really there in the first place.

He was still on the clock, and he had to get on with his search, or abandon it. Where could the cargo drop be hiding?

There was a channel nearby, one with steep, almost cliff-like banks. Wary of going too close to the broken edge, but having to peer down inside it all the same, he shuffled up to it and let his eyes adjust to the dark. There. The parachute had wrapped itself around the cylinder, covering it almost completely, which was a new one on him. And when he looked again, the parachute seemed lumpy. It didn’t bode well for the state of the cargo inside, but he was going to see for himself whether there was anything he could salvage.

The best way in was to drive down from the top of the channel. The buggy made heavy weather of the steps, just like he had, and he had to dial the plates to their maximum surface area to get enough grip, even at the slowest speed. The trailer grounded, and he had to drag it, vibrating, until the wheels met the rock again and slowly rolled around the step.

He had to do that twice more, scraping the underside of the trailer frame along hard volcanic rock before it cleared. But then he was able to swing round and into the channel. The banks rose around him, but the valley floor was flat enough. It curved left and right, and finally he was able to park up next to the cylinder.

It looked at first sight as if it had landed safely on the top of the bank, and then fallen the fifty feet or so into the ravine. The cargo doors had burst open, and then the parachute had descended on it, covering it up.

Frank pulled at the fabric, heaving great handfuls towards him as if it was a giant sheet. He was right: the doors were both open, and there were obvious dents and dints in the casing, gouges where the metal underneath had been exposed and shone dully silver.

Half the drums inside were missing, and he turned around, expecting to see the debris scattered down the channel. It wasn’t there. He went back to the cylinder and peered inside. Definitely, three of the six drums weren’t present. The insulation around them had gone. The straps that secured them in place had gone. The drums themselves had gone.

And yet of those that remained, everything was intact. That… made no sense.

He checked the catches on the doors, the ones he usually used the tool that hung on his belt to turn. The doors hadn’t burst. They’d been opened. The parachute: the parachute hadn’t fallen on the cargo. It had been placed there, deliberately, to keep the dust out.

His feet. The channel bed was bedrock, with a fine covering of weathered sand and wind-blown dust. Bootprints, identical to his, in places where he hadn’t walked. And there, twenty feet away, tire tracks that showed that a buggy had come up the valley, and then three-point-turned back down it.

Brack?

It couldn’t be Brack. Brack would have had a trailer, like he had a trailer. He’d have winched the whole cylinder on and carried it away.

Was it… him? Was this Frank? Was he suffering some kind of psychosis?

He put his hand on the side of the rocket. It was real. As real as the boots and the buggy.

In a daze, he left everything as it was and climbed back into his buggy’s seat. He clicked the harness on, unconsciously testing the clasp had locked by leaning forward because he could never hear it fasten.

He looked at the tracks in the ground ahead of him, and started to drive slowly, following them down the channel. There were two tracks, overlain. One that went towards him, one that went away. There was no mistake here: an XO rover, driven by someone in an XO suit, had been out this way in the last couple of months, and maybe it was Brack, and maybe it was him.

Frank remembered conversations he’d had with Declan, when they thought that someone had been using the buggies on unauthorized jaunts at night. They’d concluded that all those journeys had been to the descent ship and back, not this far out. But Brack had definitely been out on the plain, picking up the NASA equipment. Declan would have spotted the discrepancies in the power levels a mile off, and a fully drained battery wasn’t something anyone could hide from him. So Brack must have recharged the fuel cell from the ship before returning it, masking what he was doing from the surviving cons.

It had to be Brack, and yet… the tracks, once out of the channel, turned resolutely and inexorably south-east, skirting the ragged volcanic rock and following the edge of the dust sea. The buggy had come from the south, and it was returning that way.

There was nothing south of him. Nothing but red desert.

Finally, he came to his senses, and stopped. He was past halfway through his air, and nearly seventy miles on the clock. He hadn’t hammered it, but he’d either have to drive quicker to get home, or avail himself of the spare life support at the top of Long Beach. That was now thirty miles away as the crow flew, if there’d ever be such a thing on Mars. Add the fifteen-twenty along Sunset and up the Heights… the range of the buggy was somewhere between one fifty and two hundred miles.

He was no longer safe, even by his standard. And he was towing, which despite being empty added an extra strain on the fuel cells.

And still the incontrovertible evidence of his eyes was that the tracks he was following led south. They originated in the south, and were using their outward-bound journey to guide their way back.

Back to where?

Frank looked at his map, zoomed into the highest detail allowed. It didn’t show individual tracks, because the resolution at that scale was too low. Disappointingly, it didn’t even show Sunset Boulevard, which had to be the best-delineated and most-used road on Mars. He checked for other features it might show. Not the MAV, which was a recent addition and perhaps the satellite photography hadn’t caught up with it. But there was the ship, and the MBO was a clear artifact in pale pink and white.

He searched back south, scooting the map up and down, left and right with his fingers. If there was something there, the map didn’t show it.

Those tracks, though. He wasn’t imagining them. Something—someone—had been at the cylinder. Someone in XO gear. Someone that came from, and disappeared back into, the wasteland that was south of the volcano. It couldn’t be Brack. He was certain it wasn’t him.

He stood up on his seat and hung off the roll bars, just looking across the plain until he couldn’t see any more. He blinked, hard, and held up the map in front of him, trying to match it to the landscape.

Even standing there, breathing, was pushing his luck. His judgment, his sanity, was flawed. He should turn around and never come this far out again. Stick by the base. Wait for the NASA mission. Stay safe. Survive. Go home.

He hung his tablet back on his belt and strapped himself in again.

Just a little further. Follow the tracks. He rounded a headland, and in the next bay, in the distance, he saw what looked like a buggy, parked up at the end of a channel.

He rolled to a stop. A buggy. A buggy just like his. It was the last thing he’d expected to see. Literally, the last thing.

How was this possible?