No Way

8

He couldn’t tell how long he’d sat there, just staring. Only that when he finally shook himself, he’d dropped a couple of points of stored O₂.

It was still there. It hadn’t vanished like all his other imaginings. A buggy. Parked? Or abandoned? There was no way of telling if it had been there for two minutes or two weeks. A moving buggy created dust, and the frames, wheels, controls, were always covered in a film of the stuff. Six weeks. Six months. Longer than that?

Frank eased forward a hundred feet or so. There was no sign of anyone. No reason for there to be. Because he was the only person on Mars, right?

He rolled closer. If this had happened a few months ago, Alice would be in his ears, asking him what the hell was wrong with him and threatening to alter his breathing mix to calm him down.

But she wasn’t. She was absent. She was dead. Marcy was dead, Zeus and Dee and Declan and Zero were all dead. Brack was dead. He was the last one alive. So what the hell was this buggy doing all the way out here?

He drove up to it, stopped twenty, thirty feet away. He climbed down, and walked slowly and deliberately around it.

It had accumulated dust. It hadn’t drifted, though. If the wheels had been in the same position for any time, the dust would have collected against one side or the other. This… had been driven here. Recently.

Frank reached out. He hesitated, then dabbed his fingers on the frame. He felt solid metal, and jerked his hand away as if burned.

This was ridiculous. But he was terrified. This shouldn’t be here. He sipped some water to slake his dry mouth, and clambered up the chassis so he could see the seat. The plastic chair bolted to the frame was identical to his own, except this one was cracked and then fixed with a line of sticky hab-repair patches. It was clear of dust. As if swept. And there: someone had put their hand on the read-outs and wiped them clean. He could see the marks made by four gloved fingers.

He lowered himself down again, and checked the ground. There were faint scuff marks leading up the nearest channel.

Someone was looking back at him from a rock step up on the promontory.

They wore an XO suit. Hard body, integral helmet, back bulge of life support and entry hatch. Light-emitting areas front and top. It was difficult to interpret body language. The bulk of the insulation layer hid a lot of tells. But the way Frank felt he was being stared at made it feel like he wasn’t exactly expected, either.

It probably only lasted a few seconds, but it felt like forever.

Then they turned and walked out of sight. Were they climbing back down into the channel and coming to meet him? If they were as real as the buggy was real, possibly.

What was he going to do? He had moments to decide. He could simply drive off into the distance. He’d leave tracks for the other person to follow, just as he’d followed theirs. He could… disable their buggy—he knew how these things worked, and a few solid blows to the instrument panel would strand the driver out on the plain and condemn them to certain death. He could attack the other astronaut and kill them, then take their buggy—he had an empty trailer, after all.

He took another sip of water and stayed rooted to the spot. He still couldn’t quite believe what was happening. His hand had fallen automatically to the nut runner on his belt. It was weighted wrong as a cosh, but it was partly metal and he could get a decent swing behind it. He might actually be better off with an actual rock, given he could lift three times the weight he could on Earth. But being greeted by someone with a huge boulder held over his head wasn’t going to start friendly relations any time soon.

Geez, Frank. You can’t gut a fish and yet you’re still thinking about bashing another guy’s brains in. You don’t have to kill everyone just because you’re scared. You don’t know who this is. You don’t know why they’re here. You don’t know anything about them. You can just talk to them instead.

Then the time for equivocation was over. The spacesuited figure emerged from the wind of the canyon and walked towards him. Slowly. With their hands obviously empty. They reached up and tapped the side of their helmet, twice. No comms. Frank had been taught the same hand signal.

The face behind the glass became apparent. A man. Beard, long and patchy. Lean like Frank. Leaner even. Gaunt, almost. Eyes recessed but wide and pale. He didn’t seem… well? Frank hadn’t looked in a mirror for months. There might be more similarities between them than he was allowing for.

This was the first time the other man had the opportunity to see him properly, too. He took his time studying Frank, his gaze skittering between face and suit and buggy and trailer and back. He seemed to be going through the same mental gymnastics as Frank.

Frank could still turn and run: gun his motors and drive away, try and obscure his route home by finding some rock to break up his tracks. He didn’t do that, even though he thought about doing it right up until the moment they met, halfway between the bluff and the buggy.

Frank looked at the contents of the man’s utility belt, and he had almost no equipment hanging off the carabiners. Not a nut runner, not a tablet, just a cloth pouch that probably held some patches, and some looped cargo straps. There was something off here. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but Frank instinctively took a step back.

The man used his index finger to indicate “you-me-touch-helmets”. It was Frank’s last chance to bolt.

He could also get his strike in first, especially if the man had no comms—but what if it was a trick, to get Frank within blade range? That was prison-him talking, but prison-him had kept him alive this far. Maybe he should listen to that guy a little bit more, and judge him a little less.

OK, let’s calm the fuck down. This guy isn’t going to try and shank me. He might even be another con from a Panopticon jail. Someone like Frank, shanghaied in another XO game.

To test that hypothesis, Frank held his fist out, a little to one side. The man frowned at it, and then at Frank. Not a con. A dap would have been second nature. Could this man, whatever he was, whoever he was, be actual XO?

XO. On Mars. This could go very, very badly for Frank.

The man held out his hand, for an actual handshake, between equals. Frank stared at it, then took it hesitantly. The man was real. Not a ghost.

What was he going to do? Play it by ear. See what the score was. The guy had no comms. Frank could afford to try and find out what was going on before deciding anything.

As they leaned forward and touched helmets, Frank put his hand on his nut runner and unclipped it, keeping it down and unseen by his side.

“Hey,” said the man. “You Brack?”

What was Frank supposed to say here? The other man clearly knew about him, about MBO, about everything, while Frank didn’t even know what this man was doing on Mars.

“I’m Brack, yes.”

“Sweet. You got everything set up over there? Everything working fine?”

“We’re good,” said Frank. Then added spontaneously, “All of us.”

“All of you?” There was a telling pause. “OK. Lost track of which sol it was. I’m just picking up gear. That’s what you’re doing, right?”

Of course, Frank’s buggy had a trailer. This man’s didn’t. If he was picking up gear, where was his?

“Stuff didn’t land where it was supposed to,” said Frank. “Missing a drop for the NASA guys. Said I’d go and check out a possible from the satellite.”

That was plausible, right? If the locator beacon was offline, then it was the only way they could do it.

The man seemed to accept that without a problem. “Tell me about it. Strewn around like fucken’ confetti.”

“Something like that.” Was that useful information? Yes. There was another XO mission on Mars, suffering the same problems as his had. Frank suddenly realized what he’d just thought, and he clammed up. Another XO mission. Fuck.

“You got everything in the end, though?” asked the man. “You got everything you needed?”

All that extra cargo: they weren’t spares, replacements for missing or destroyed deliveries. They weren’t for MBO at all. He’d stolen this other guy’s kit. Other guy: it was a whole other crew at a whole other base. Habs. Panels. Wheels and fuel cells. Food. He’d beggared them.

“You OK?”

This questioning, this real-time questioning, was hard. Frank was used to some thinking time, and then a delay between answer and next message.

“Yeah, fine. Fine.” Goddammit, XO. They’d known what he was doing. He’d reported back the manifest of each drop as he brought it in. They could have said stop, at any time. They hadn’t.

“And you got everything working?”

That was the second time he’d been asked that. “Eventually.”

“Greenhouse? Comms?”

Now Frank’s whole skin was itching. “Like I said, we’re good.”

“Sweet,” said the other man again.

All the traffic had been entirely one-way so far. The man, this stranger on Frank’s Mars, had told him precisely nothing. Except his mere presence, which spoke volumes.

“So, uh, you got comms problems?” Frank asked.

“Us?” The XO man swallowed. He was really gaunt, behind that beard. Hollow-cheeked as well as hollow-eyed. Starving. And Frank had stolen at least some of their food. “Set-up problems. Nothing we can’t fix. There’s nothing we can’t fix.”

“Just that I noticed that you’re out here, on your own, without a map. That’s making a tough job tougher.”

“Set-up problems,” repeated the man. “Just set-up problems.”

Frank knew when he was being stonewalled. This wasn’t a set-up problem. This was an existential crisis. If they didn’t have any comms, they couldn’t talk to XO, and neither could they find their cylinders. If they couldn’t find their cylinders, they were relying on dumb luck as to what parts of their base they could put together. If they had that little, then they were all going to die. Sooner or later.

And Frank had food, heat, light, power, air, water, and space. He had everything.

He almost said something: an invitation to come on over, share what he had, pool resources. But these men, this crew, were XO. And XO had deliberately not told him about this other base, all the while knowing about them, and what circumstances they found themselves in. XO had told Frank precisely nothing, because XO were a bunch of lying, murdering, kidnapping bastards who valued human life even lower than he did. Than he had.

And currently Frank was on his own. This man could replace him as Brack, if he let him. Even if he didn’t let him. They could just take him out. He couldn’t resist them. The only thing protecting him was their comms failure. XO hadn’t been able to tell them that he wasn’t Brack. If they got their downlink working again, he was toast.

Frank dissembled. “I hope you get it sorted out real soon,” he said. “Comms problems are a pain in the ass. But I got to be heading back. Got my airtime to think about.”

“You seen any of our kit while you’re out?”

“Nothing to the north of here,” said Frank. Well, there wasn’t any more, because he’d picked it all up already. “I’d concentrate on the south-side. You spotted anything with a NASA flag on it?”

“NASA? No, nothing like that.” He could have been lying. Frank certainly was. “So, the MBO: you can get to it from here? That’s where you started from, right?”

“I used a staging post, and even then I’m at the limit of my range. Guessing you are too,” said Frank. “Where’d you come down?”

“South,” said the man. He’d hesitated. Definitely hesitated. “To the south.”

“OK. Good luck. Lance, by the way.”

“Good to meet you, Lance.” The man separated for a moment, not offering his own name, then touched helmets again. “Looks like you been in the wars.”

For a moment, Frank didn’t know what he meant, but the patched arm of his spacesuit was more visible to someone else than it was to him. It wasn’t obviously a bullet hole: his work with the scalpel on his outer covering had seen to that.

He went for broke.

“One of the chimps. Nothing I couldn’t handle.” He watched the man’s reaction very closely, and his guts tightened as he realized his bald declaration of murder got no more than a nod. “Still, got to go. Airtime, and I’ve got to radio the NASA guys. They keep me busy, you know?”

Frank’s fingers flexed around his nut runner. He could do it. He could sucker-punch the guy and beat him while he was down. No one would intervene. No one would ever know. His fourth murder. Saving his own skin.

“Busy. Sure. I know all about that. Be seeing you.” And it sounded more of a threat than anything Frank had ever heard before. The other astronaut pulled away, and gave him a look: they both knew. Their body language betrayed them both.

Frank backed up to his buggy. No way was he turning round and blind-siding himself. At the same time, the other, nameless astronaut stood tense, rocking from side to side on the balls of his feet.

At the last moment, after he’d put some distance between them, Frank reached up and pulled himself up and onto the seat of his buggy. The man watched him. Watching where he was going. Watching him put down a track.

Frank drove in a tight circle and, the best he could, started along the tire marks that had already been pressed into the dust. He tabbed his rear-facing cameras on, and could see the man still standing, still watching, until he disappeared behind the finger of rock that jutted into the sand sea.