One Way

15

It was the first time that all of them had been awake. All, except Marcy. It chewed at him. Yes, it had been an accident. Her air scrubber had worked perfectly for eight and three quarter hours and then failed. He wasn’t to blame. No one was to blame. They’d both been at the very ends of their life-support systems. It could have been her leaving him to die.

And still it grumbled in his guts, like a bad meal, refusing to quieten down and let him be.

If Frank had thought there might be a change of plan due to where they’d landed, and that they’d be building the base around the ship, he was wrong. Brack asserted that everything had to be constructed on the original site, nearly a mile and a half away, at the bottom end of the valley that had deposited the shelf of material—the Heights—that they’d landed on. That there was a valley, and that it had been formed by running water, enough to wash down the debris from the top of the volcano to the bottom, was strange enough to think about, but the valley itself went all the way to the top of the volcano, some thirty miles continuously uphill, and a climb of nearly fifteen thousand feet.

There’d been a river on Mars, and Dee called it the Santa Clara.

They grumbled about the site, because it was a forty-minute walk away, but it wasn’t anything they could alter. That’s where NASA wanted their base, and apparently that was where it had to be built.

“Can’t we, you know, move the ship closer?” asked Zeus.

Brack made his lips go thin. “You a spaceship pilot?”

“I guess that’s a no. I thought perhaps you might be.”

“Suit up, Number Seven. You got work to do.”

Declan cleared his throat. The dry, reduced atmosphere seemed to have stopped him sweating, but he still habitually rubbed his hands together. A nervous thing, maybe.

“About that,” he said. “I’ve been thinking.”

“You’ve been thinking?” crowed Brack, but uncharacteristically Declan cut him off.

“Someone has to fix the fact that XO plowed our solar farm into the ground and broke it, leaving us terminally short of power. And when I say terminal, I mean we could die if we don’t fix it. So if you’ll do me the kindness of shutting the fuck up and listening, I’ll tell you how we’re going to do just that.”

No one said anything, waiting on Brack’s reaction to the challenge inherent in Declan’s voice. The lowest floor, with seven of them crushed in together, was closer than any of them were comfortable with.

It didn’t come, and some of the tension ebbed away.

“We get three kilowatts of power from the RTG, but that thing is belching out heat like a high school furnace. A hundred kilowatts, according to the specifications. Do I need to explain to anyone what a hundred kilowatts looks like? No? Good. We lose all that because it’s a by-product: it goes straight up the chimney. What I’m proposing is that we use that waste energy to heat the habs.”

“Go on,” said Zeus. He was thinking, too, the tattoos on his forehead crowding together.

“It’s a big-ass lump of fissile material, so let’s treat it as a nuclear pile. We run pipes with cold water around the cooling fins, heat the water, port it around the habs, then back out when it’s cold again. Closed system. No losses. If we’re smart we can make it entirely passive, no moving parts, everything gravity-fed.”

“So we’d heat the habs,” said Zero, “but what about the electrics? What about my lights?”

“A substantial part of the energy budget is earmarked for heating at night, because it gets cold enough to freeze the air. If we can get that energy from another source, we can use what’s left to do the other things we want. It’s not perfect, but it’ll work. There’s only two problems.”

“Pipes,” said Zeus.

“And water,” added Frank, “assuming you mean regular water.”

“We could run it on pressurized liquid CO₂. But water’s better. There are degrees of sophistication, but the more surface area we get in contact with the fins, the hotter the water gets. In an ideal world, we’d submerge the whole damn thing in a tank of water and boil it and make steam and run turbines off it. We’d have so much electricity and hot water it’d be like the swankiest condo ever.”

“This water’s not going to be radioactive, is it?” asked Zero.

“No. Sealed unit.”

“And how long is this going to last us?”

“We’ll all be dead long before it gives out. The specs say eighty years before there’s a noticeable drop in performance. Once the water maker’s up and running, we can get as much of that as we want. Now, it might be all we have to do is stick a big pan of it on top of the RTG. But we need the pipework. Preferably insulated pipework, but we can bury the pipes to whack out most of the diurnal range.”

“The what?”

“Geez, Zero. Difference in the daytime and night-time temperatures.”

“I knew that.”

Declan coughed, wiped his hands. “Pipes, people. Can we take anything from here?”

“No. You cannot,” said Brack.

“First it’s the power, now it’s the pipes. This ship is going nowhere, right? We should be cannibalizing it for parts.” Declan was standing opposite Brack, flanked by Zeus and Zero. Reason dictated that in a fight between the cons and their jailer, there was going to be only one outcome, and Frank really didn’t want to have to stand between them, though he would for his ticket home. But it was Declan who backed down. “Fine. Anyone else?”

“The r-rocket motors,” said Dee. “On the supplies.”

“That’s… not a bad idea. That’ll be good quality shit right there. What do the rockets burn?” When no one offered an answer Declan shrugged. “We can look it up, or talk to Earth. But there’ll be pressure vessels and pumps and valves in all of them. Flush out the fuel, and we’re good to go.”

“How much time is this going to take?” asked Brack. “And what are you going to have to put holes in to make it?”

“I don’t know, and I’m guessing a couple, if we have to. We’re working at five psi, and we’ve got what we need to seal that. If we’ve enough pipework to make a secondary system then we won’t even have to do that. This is going to make the difference between dying and not dying, so we’re just going to have to wear the extra work. There’s going to be some maintenance: if the water freezes, it’ll block the pipes, and we’ll need to build in a pressure valve to the hot-water tank.”

“I can do that. It’s not difficult,” said Zeus. “We’ll draw up some plans, depending on what we’ve got to work with.”

Brack relented. “As long as it doesn’t interfere with the base-building.”

“It’s your ass too,” said Zero.

“My ass comes before all your asses. Don’t forget it, you little punk.”

Frank stepped in. Brack had conceded what they’d needed him to concede. There was no point in riling him.

“We need power to the air plant to inflate the hab. We’ll take what’s left of the solar panels out with the first hab and set it running. It can store the air while we build. We can transport everyone over, but at some point, I’m going to have to go with Dee and get another couple of cylinders. That leaves four of you to put everything together.”

“It could be five if—” started Zero.

“Brack’s got his own work. We’re building the base. That’s our job. If you want to be kicking your heels around here tomorrow, getting in each other’s faces for a full day, then OK. Otherwise, we split up.”

“Airlock order is three, two, seven, five, four, one,” said Brack. “Get to it. Day’s not getting any longer.”

Frank was out second. Declan was already loading the panels into a drum to put onto the trailer.

“This is going to work, right?” asked Frank.

“It’s the best I can do. In the circumstances.” Declan hefted the drum. “Look at that. No longer a ninety pound weakling.” He carried it to the buggy and set it down again. “The circumstances are less than ideal—you get that, right? It’s not going to be perfect.”

“But it’s the best we can hope for.”

“Something like that.”

“I don’t fancy freezing my ass off, and I’m betting the NASA guys won’t either.” Frank tilted back to look at the sky. A bright object, shaped like a peanut, was moving perceptibly in an arc above them, from west to east. One of the moons. He couldn’t quite remember the name of it. “I don’t get,” he continued, then stopped. Like Declan, he wondered why Brack wasn’t more amenable to them using the ship, but the threat and the promise of an eventual trip home was making him hold his tongue. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll bring a rocket motor back with us.”

“Whoa, there, cowboy,” sounded loud in his ears. Brack. “Those motors are a big old can of boom. I’m going to need clearance from Earth, and a copper-bottomed way of making them safe before anyone thinks about moving them around. Tell me you’ve got that, Kittridge.”

“OK. Copy that.”

“Take pictures, then,” said Declan. “Good quality close-ups. Whatever you can.”

Zeus joined them and helped load up. The cylinder containing the hab was still on the back of the other trailer, and Frank gave the job of driving that buggy to Dee, while he took the more sensitive solar panels for a ride. Declan and Zeus sat on the back of his buggy, while Zero and Alice climbed up beside Dee.

Zero tried to persuade Dee to relinquish the driver’s seat.

“You’ve even less experience than he has,” said Frank. “There’s going to be time later for all of us to get some wheel time, under supervision.” He almost added, ‘now that Marcy’s gone’, but he didn’t.

Frank led the way at a pedestrian pace. He spent time with his map, trying to get the location exact, eventually parking up right in the dry throat of the Santa Clara.

“Here. Just here.”

He dismounted and looked around at what would be his home for… years, at least. To the south was the Santa Clara valley, flat-bottomed and steep-sided, and to the north, the Heights and the descent into the crater. The crater walls left and right merged with the valley’s, with sharp-edged scarps marking where the river had burst down from the volcano above and flooded into the deep depression below.

He caught a glimpse of another world, where water rushed in torrents and formed waterfalls and filled low-lying land to form vast circular lakes. But when he blinked, he was left with dusty red soil smeared against his faceplate.

Time to unload the hab. Frank unhooked the hitch, fixed the winch on to the end of the cylinder and dragged it backwards onto the dirt. The soil was similar to that around the ship. There were fewer but bigger rocks, and the land was flatter. He and Dee walked the path where the hab would sit, pushing the blocky boulders aside and into a pile. It didn’t take long before they were stacking the rock into a conical cairn, their first permanent marker on the face of the planet.

The others were lifting the drums out of the cylinder, opening them up, searching through them for the mat. Zeus brought it over, and they rolled it out in a roughly north–south orientation. Ideally, Frank would have a team of surveyors in, with sticks and flags and laser leveling equipment. But as Declan had already said, circumstances were far from ideal. Frank knew enough to get it right, and good enough would do.

He and Dee unloaded the solar farm while the first ring was under construction, and then prepared to head off for another two hab sections. Before they left, though, Alice broke off from the building group and waved Frank down. She opened her suit’s controls, and by the way she pressed the buttons, he guessed she’d been talking to Dee.

He muted his own microphone, and in the shadow of the front wheel of his buggy, they touched helmets.

“What’s up?”

“We’re running out of supplies,” she said. “Food, water, air. I ran some figures yesterday and it’s not even tight. We’re short.”

“How short?”

“We’ve got the air plant, but it can’t be in two places at once. If you don’t get the water maker this time out, we’re going to have to ration water, and even then. With four of us awake, we could have managed, but seven? Even with complete closed-loop recycling, we now have to wait for the machine to filter it for us. And the food: it’s like they didn’t want us to eat.”

“So what are our options?”

“Frank. We don’t have enough. Even if we get the greenhouse working in the next couple of days, I’ll have to put us on starvation rations. If we all eat regularly, we’ll have literally nothing before production kicks in.”

“And the air?”

“The ship can make air, but again, with seven of us doing EVAs every day, we can’t recharge everyone’s life support without eating into the reserves. That’s going to cut down into the rate of work, and it just compounds the problems we already have.”

Frank thought for a moment. “What did Brack say?”

“‘Deal with it’, and then he went back to doing whatever it is he does. Breathing, drinking and eating as if it’s never going to run out.”

“Am I allowed to interpret ‘deal with it’ as an instruction to, you know, actually deal with it?”

Alice hesitated. “You could do.”

“Which is more important? Water, food or air?”

“Food at the bottom. We can stand being hungry. Air at the top: you know how that ends. Water? We should never be in a position to have to choose. The sooner we get all three, the better.”

Frank separated for a moment to see what progress the builders had made, then leaned in again. “We’ve got three hab sections in that can. The greenhouse needs two. So we use this load for that, fill it with air, get the hydroponics kit inside and get it up and running as soon as we can. Talk to Zero about that, maybe without telling him why you’re asking. He’ll need water, and lots of it. So me and Dee will bring back the seeds and the fish eggs and everything he needs, and the water maker. We can store it in the pressurized hab, and once he gets the plants growing, it’ll take the edge off the air issue. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“The plants will help in the long term, but they’re not the solution in the short or medium terms.” She looked up at him. “What are you going to do? You’re in charge of construction.”

“I suppose I am, but the idea that I outrank Brack in any way?”

“It’s your call. But I agree that telling anyone else will just lead to panic. None of us are particularly stable under pressure, are we? Someone’s likely to do something stupid. So let’s not let that happen.”

Frank studied Alice’s face. It had been a long time since he’d been that close to another person—did Demetrius count? Their conversation was nowhere near as long, or meaningful—and this felt oddly, awkwardly, intimate.

“Fuck it. We’ll get the water maker and Zero’s plants. Tomorrow, we’ll get more habs. We’ll have to hammer this hard. We’re all going to be pushed close to the edge, and we’ll have to rely on you to keep us safe.”

“Do it.”

She pulled away and restarted her mic. Frank watched her skip back over to where Zeus and Zero were working away with the nut runners, and Declan assembling enough of the solar panels to get the air plant working.

Dee, sitting on top of his buggy, was looking at Frank, narrowing his eyes at him. Frank stared back.

“Problem?”

“No,” said Dee. “No problem.”

“Good.” Frank climbed up next to him, and opened the map. “These are our targets. We have to get them both, and get them back here. Today.”

Dee looked sideways at the distances involved. “How far is that?”

“We get to Long Beach and we split up.”

“But we’re supposed to—”

“I know what we’re supposed to do, Dee. We can be in radio contact the whole way, and you do just what you did yesterday, without the freaking out at the sand devil thing, and you’ll be fine.” Frank tapped Dee’s waist, where he wore his own tablet. “Turn it on, take a look, plot a route. I’ll meet you back at the crater wall. We’ll be apart for an hour and a half. Two hours tops.”

“I don’t know, Frank. Shouldn’t we—”

“He can hear everything we say. If he wanted to object, he would have done so by now.”

That silenced him, for a few moments at least.

“What’s changed?”

“We’re not tourists, Dee, and we’ve got deadlines.”

Frank swung himself down and mounted his own buggy. He checked his air. It’d be enough. Just.