One Way

11

[Transcript of private phone call between Bruno Tiller and Project Sparta 8/5/2040 1430MT.]

Frank and Marcy were four hours out. They’d walked eleven and a half miles. If they carried on, they were into their safety margin, and either it worked out or they suffocated. One of the two. No one was going to come and rescue them, because there was no one to come and rescue them. Even if Brack had decided, inexplicably, that he might help them, there was nothing he could do anyway.

A line of long, low hills ran down the center of the crater, with rubble-strewn sandy slopes. Further out, the terrain was less broken and the sand was deeper, though there were still craters, difficult to cross and easier to go around. They’d navigated all those: now they were back out on the crater floor, approaching the main wall.

They were close. Three and a half miles away. Their target lay somewhere near the rim, on an eroded part of the wall, which looked almost like a bay between two cliffs.

Frank put his helmet against Marcy’s. “What do you want to do?”

“Why’s this my call?” she asked.

“Because Brack put you in charge. And I don’t want to have to make a decision that might kill you.”

“But you’re good with me killing you?”

“Something like that.”

“Thanks.” She turned to look at the distance they’d already covered, and back at the distance yet to go. “What would you do?”

“Land the ship closer to the buggies. But that doesn’t really help, does it?”

“We have to work with what we got. If we turn back now, where does that leave us? We just have to do all this again tomorrow, and we’re not going to be any faster, and we’re not going to be any further on.”

“We could have brought spare gas. Although, since we have to change out the old tanks in an atmosphere, unless they’ve swapped out the open buggies for some closed-cab ones we’re never going to get the chance.”

“So we go on. We can’t really do anything else.”

“Except if we do, and things aren’t right at the far end, all we can look forward to is a couple more hours in each other’s company. You want to risk that?”

“We’re on Mars, Frank. You’re going to worry now about risk?”

“Before, I was worried about getting canned and put in the Hole. Now I get to worry about staying alive.”

Marcy took a step forward. “I’m going on. Are you coming?”

All or nothing, then. As he watched her walk away, he thought about what someone might have to do to earn the nickname “the Highway Killer”. He was guessing it had something to do with not knowing when to stop. “I’m coming.”

He followed her across the plain, his tool belt shifting with every one of his own strides. His life was measured in breaths: the harder he worked, the fewer he had left.

It was better if they traveled side by side, avoiding each other’s kicked-up dust, and even then, a thin film of pink covered their helmets. It made the already dull day darker. The sun was almost overhead, and the external temperature was a solid plus twenty-three: nothing the Bay Area ever suffered, but almost reasonable. The shadows had shifted so that the color of the land was more brown, and the sky was… not blue, but as blue as it was going to get.

That’s when he saw it, the smudge of other against the different shades of red, a smear of black and white, twisted into a candle and melted against the ground.

He slowed. The suits’ lack of peripheral vision meant that Marcy didn’t see him, and the distance between them widened.

“Marcy? Marcy, hold up.”

When she eventually stopped, it took a while for her to find him. He pointed at the object, at the base of the slope. It was obvious, once pointed out, and it was roughly in the direction they’d been heading anyway—it wasn’t as if they’d been likely to miss it.

“What is that?”

“I think it’s a parachute. That’s the only thing it can be.”

She opened up her map and held it out in front of her. “The cylinder has to be close by.”

Frank took the opportunity to check both the clock and his suit’s reserves. They’d kicked over the five-and-a-half-hour mark, and his tanks were reading just under forty per cent. That was right, wasn’t it? He tried to do the math, and it sounded reasonable. They could actually do this.

They covered the last mile more slowly, not knowing how accurate the map was. It didn’t take long to see the cylinder, though, lying on its side in a slight depression at the base of the slope. Further up, there was a blackened area, and signs that the supplies had touched down there, then rolled. The canopy, patterned with concentric black and white rings, had caught in the wind, dragging its hugely long shrouds behind it before entangling with a boulder.

The cylinder looked intact. The contents weren’t spilled across the crater floor, and neither were they burnt up.

“OK,” said Marcy. “That’s our cargo.”

It was just like they’d trained for. The big white cylinder, the near-vacuum around them, the dust and the sand. The only things that were different were the rocket unit bolted to one end, and the parachute attached by impossibly long lines to the other. Somewhere, miles away, would be a discarded heat shield. They had no way of finding that, even if it was now littering the surface of an otherwise unspoiled planet.

The parachute material, and even the empty cylinder, might be something they could recycle into useful things. The fuel that remained in the rocket motor, too. It had made it all this way, just as they’d done. It’d be stupid to throw it away.

Frank selected the tool from his belt that would open up the hatches, and tried, pointlessly, to blow the settled dust away from the mechanism.

“Did you just do what I thought you did?” asked Marcy.

“Hush. Kittridge to Brack, Kittridge to Brack. We’re at the target. Over.”

“Copy that. Don’t waste your breath on talking to me. Get to it. Over and out.”

Frank flipped the cover of the bolt, and slipped the crank over the head of the wingnut, moving along the closure, one bolt at a time. If it wasn’t the buggies inside, then… it was over before they’d started. No, he wasn’t the praying kind. Maybe they should have woken Zeus after all to intercede for them.

He put the tool back in its loop and tugged at the manual release. A puff of air—actual air, or just an inert gas?—came out, and helped the door open. It rose up partly, and Frank had to lean into it to lock it fully in place. All he could see was packaging that had grown enormously plump.

“What have we got?” Marcy was suddenly beside him, peering in.

“Can’t see yet. Let’s get the other door open.” He pulled the lever and the door swung towards them. He still expected a heavy sound of movement, not the silence with which it shuddered into place.

Marcy immediately reached forward and dug her fingers into the protective material, trying to pull it apart as if it was Christmas morning.

“We need to save this too. As much as we can.”

“Why? It’s just stuff. What would we ever need it for?”

“I don’t know. Just that if we don’t have it, we can’t use it.” Frank pulled out a box-cutter knife that had a spring-loaded retractable cover. He needed both hands to work it, but that was the point: to keep any part of him away from the blade.

He cut through the layers, the air pockets in the insulation wilting as he sliced. He took it slowly, making sure he didn’t hit anything underneath. Each unheard pop reminded him of the air he was breathing and would never get back.

“OK, now.”

Marcy peeled back the insulated covering. “I can see a chassis. It’s the right container. Thank fuck for that.”

“Kittridge to Brack. We’ve hit that home run. Over.”

The reply came back, choppy and indistinct. “Copy. Over.” That was all. Frank thought Brack might be just a bit more enthusiastic about their discovery, and the fact that they might not die after all.

He checked his air. Thirty-five per cent.

“We build one, drive it back, and come and get the other one tomorrow,” he said.

“Not both? Why not both?”

“Because we don’t have time to do that.” He used the knife to cut the latticework chassis free of its ties, and together they lifted it out of the container. Picking a patch of open, not too rocky ground a little way away to work on, they set it down. It was lightweight titanium tubing, and on Mars it weighed even less.

The sealed drums contained a lot of the other important kit. The wheels, great big springy things that doubled as shocks and had a motor in each wheel. The control board, which fixed on to the chassis in front of the driver. The seat, which bolted on to the deck of the frame. And the power pack, the most complicated and critical part of the whole set-up. If that didn’t work, all they had was a giant shopping trolley.

The fuel cell was a black box—literally a black box—with plug-in terminals on the outside. No user-serviceable parts inside, it proclaimed, though it was inevitable that they were going to have to open it up and fix it at some point. It wasn’t as if anyone else was going to do it.

They’d practiced this, though. Frank and Marcy weren’t exactly a well-oiled team, but they had worked well enough together, listening to each other’s grunts and curses, watching each other’s expressions of exasperation or concentration.

Frank did the heavy lifting, holding the chassis up while Marcy rolled a wheel into place. Neither of the pair of nut runners that came with the cargo was charged up: either they’d gone flat over the year in storage, or they’d been shipped in that state. The wheels were going to have to be tightened by hand, and they had one adjustable wrench between them.

That was going to slow them down. A lot.

He checked his air. Twenty per cent. That gave him nominally… OK, that wasn’t a good sign. He should have been able to just come up with the number. He was good with numbers, calculating quantities and part-loads in his head and getting it right. An hour and forty-five.

They were going to be cutting it fine.

“Anything we can leave till next time, we leave,” he said. “Let’s just get this working.”

“I thought I was the one in charge, Frank.” Marcy cranked the last nut on the hub, and handed him the wrench, while she went to collect the second wheel. It was as tall as she was, yet she managed to effortlessly bounce and roll it across the Martian surface. Puffs of dust rose and fell around her. It coated everything.

Frank wiped his faceplate with his free hand. “You are. I’m just keeping you straight.”

“Don’t need keeping straight. Just do the job. I still think we’ve got time to make both buggies.”

“Why don’t we see how long one takes first?”

“Why don’t you lift the chassis and let me get this wheel on?” She turned the tire and held it in position while Frank batted his gloves together—the dust plumed out, and almost immediately dropped to the ground—and pushed at the open strutwork.

“Higher,” she said, and he complied. “Hold it.”

From the satisfyingly solid vibration in his hands, the wheel had slipped into place.

“Wrench.”

He handed it back, and kicked his heels while he watched her work. So that was part of the problem: he didn’t have as much to do as she did, nor enough distraction.

He could test the electrics. The fuel cell assembly was genuinely heavy, and back on Earth it took two of them to lift it. Here, not so much, but it was an awkward length, and difficult to carry. But he could test it where it was, still in its drum, by carrying the control board to it.

The board had read-outs, and a fat, insulated cable running from its back, terminating in a plug that slotted home and locked in place on top of the fuel cell’s black casing. He held the board, minus its steering column, under one arm, and leaned in over the edge of the drum to fix the connector into place.

His suit’s hard torso stopped him from bending over that far. He stood on the drum lid, and tried again, this time just getting the degree of movement he needed to push the plug in and twist the locking ring.

He put the board on the rim of the drum and lifted the cover from the on-switch. His finger hovered over it, and then he wondered what he was waiting for. Either it would power up, or it wouldn’t. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t be a disaster.

Not yet, anyway. There was still another one in the cylinder, meant for the second buggy.

He pressed down, and the board waited for a heart-stopping second before lighting up and going through its boot-up sequence.

“We’re good,” he said. What he wanted to do was wipe the sweat off his face, and he could only let the fans slowly clear that. He drank some water, and watched the read-outs. “We have one hundred per cent capacity. System pressure is stable. Full power. It works.”

“I’m ready for the next wheel.”

Frank put the control board down inside the drum, so it didn’t even remotely run the risk of falling off, and hefted the chassis again. She did that thing of getting the wheel on first time, which was good, because if the usual speed of the buggy was ten miles per hour, it was going to take them an hour and a half to get back. Frank had almost exactly that amount of air left.

If they were driving, they wouldn’t be walking, nor expending that extra energy and using up that oxygen. There was some slack. But they were getting down to the wire. They certainly weren’t going to build another buggy. Not today.

He started dragging everything into place, so that they wouldn’t need to keep going back to the cylinder for components. Power cables for the wheel motors. The bucket seat. The steering column for the control board he could fix in right now, and given that the third wheel was on already, he could at least put it on hand-tight to the frame. The winch and the towbar assemblies would just have to wait. And the lights. And the roll cage. And the cameras.

If they didn’t start back in ten minutes, they weren’t going to make it. Fifteen, maybe. Those weren’t numbers he wanted to bet against.

Fourth wheel.

“You know, if you can do this a bit quicker, that’d be really excellent.”

“You want a wheel to fall off as we go? We do it right, first time, or not at all.”

“We’re running out of options, Marcy. Good enough is good enough.”

“Then start plugging things in, get the cables secure, and put on the seat. The fuel cell can go in last.”

He wrestled the cables out. They were stiff and inflexible due to the cold—as were the cable ties he was supposed to fix them to the tubing with. The connectors were necessarily now behind the wheels. Reaching them was straightforward enough, but pushing them home and securing the lock was harder than it needed to be. Haste simply made it more difficult.

And every time he needed to take a breath and steady himself, it was one breath fewer he had to take.

Marcy was done. She leaped up on the chassis and worked the bolts on the control panel. “Give me the seat.”

He half-passed, half-threw it at her. She slotted it home and laboriously began to tighten the nuts at each corner.

“I’m down to fourteen per cent,” said Frank. “Leave that. Help me with the power pack.”

She reluctantly put down the wrench and jumped down. Even that took too much time.

They heaved the fuel cell out of its drum. Packaging spilled out across the rust-colored sand.

“Seriously. Leave it.”

There was a cage at the front of the chassis, into which the fuel cell slotted, the idea being that there’d be preferential weight on the front wheels, making it easier to drive. It had a solid base, to protect the casing, and open sides for the connectors. There was even an arrow in red, telling them which way needed to point up and forward.

They manhandled it into position, and got the bottom edge inside.

“Slide it home. Nice and straight.”

Marcy fastened the cage opening with a cable tie and Frank plugged in the other ends of the power cables, one, two, three, four. Lock them in place. She finished securing the seat while he connected the controls. Push. Twist. Pull.

She pressed the on-switch, and lit up the console. The steering column looked like a video gamer’s steering wheel. It was only minimally attached. Things like the gas pedal and the brakes were controlled by grips inside the wheel.

Marcy flexed her fingers and took the wheel.

“If you’re coming, climb on. We’ll see if we can do better than ten miles an hour.”

Frank scrambled up behind her, and remembered to pick up the wrench from where she’d left it, balanced across two spars, and put it back in his belt. He threaded his feet through the open frame and leaned forward to grab tight hold of the seat back.

“Any time now would be good,” he said.

She squeezed the accelerator, and the buggy rolled ever so slowly forward. “I got this,” she said.

Marcy drove around in a circle, the wheels spinning up or down dependent on the direction of the turn. When she was pointing back down the crater towards the distant, low mound of the volcano, below which was their ship and their survival, she tightened her hold and they sped away, dust trailing in their wake.