One Way

23

It was different without Zeus. It had been different without Marcy and Alice, but they’d died at the beginning of the mission, when everything was new and nothing was routine. The base hadn’t been started, let alone completed, and the remaining five cons had spent difficult hours and days helping each other, shouting at each other, deliberately ignoring each other and ultimately deciding they still had to work together, whatever their feelings about each other. That cycle had gone on more times than any of them cared to remember.

Now there was a hole. Zeus was gone, and his duties had to be picked up by Zero, who really didn’t want them, but since the state of the plumbing was so intimately tied to that of the greenhouse, he didn’t have much choice.

That next morning, Frank went round with him to try and learn how all the pipes moved fresh water from the storage tank to the habs, and the waste back to the recycler. There were manuals for that. Not so for the hot water system which Zeus had more or less single-handedly cobbled together. The few scribbled drawings that he’d left on the computer system were simply inadequate. The notes he’d made for NASA did make more sense, but there were times when the two of them were reduced to chasing tubing through the underfloor panels, trying to work out where it went next.

But Frank still had his own jobs: maintain the fabric of the habs, and keep the buggies running. After a morning with Zero, he had to go outside to carry out his inspections. There was a feeling of unreality to everything. Zeus was dead, murdered. The list of suspects was tiny. And still he had to go round checking something as mundane as nuts and bolts, because someone deliberately spacing him wasn’t the only way he could die.

The habs were holding up well. The pressurized skin didn’t seem to be degrading at all. It had all the appearance of lasting for years.

The buggies—buggy, since Brack had taken one back to the ship, presumably to talk to XO about how their cheap convict crew had been worth every cent they’d spent on them—had fared less well. The fuel cells, save for a few dings in the bottom of the casing, were still operating at one hundred per cent capacity. The frames were scratched, but the damage was superficial. For ease of construction, the wheels came in a single piece, motor, actuators and tires, and damn but those things were heavy. The drive motors needed dismounting and opening up at some point, to see if the seals were still good or whether there was a build-up of dust.

The tires, though, were the most immediate worry. The metal plates that provided the grip were degrading, whether through the mechanical wear of driving over a surface that was littered with little rocks, or whether the perchlorate in the soil was actively eating away at the material: it didn’t much matter which. With less than a thousand miles on the clock, they could already do with a swap-over.

They had no spares. Frank wondered if he could make replacement plates out of drum material, or even cylinder casing, because there was no alternative. One broken tire would mean one buggy completely out of action. They’d start cannibalizing it, and the inevitable end was that they’d eventually run out of parts. Whereas if they could fabricate a good enough replacement, then it might be they’d never run out. Tires were consumables: he couldn’t quite believe he’d been reduced to this.

Today, the sky was particularly pink, high dust turning the weak sun even weaker—even a smudged entry trail angling down towards the surface looked pale. Declan was fretting about power regulation yet again. He was outside with Frank, cleaning the black glassy surfaces with a piece of parachute material. Actually, yes: Frank had noticed a build-up of dust on the buggy controls, and perhaps there was a big storm to the south that was pushing dirty air over the equator.

Rahe didn’t seem to generate the dust devils that happened out on the plain, but they still had weather all the same. The base didn’t have a meteorological station, which seemed odd. Perhaps it was in the same shipment that their personal effects had been in, now circling in deep space or smeared black against the red of Mars.

They didn’t get any weather reports either. They didn’t get anything at all. No news from Earth. No messages. Nothing. As if it had ceased to exist, and there were just the five of them left, hundreds of millions of miles away in a tiny, ignorant bubble.

But Brack was in communication with XO, and Dee was getting information from somewhere. Earth was still there, and Frank wanted to go back to it.

“What you doing, Frank?” Declan looked up from buffing the panels.

“Looking for the buggy manuals.” Frank poked around on his tablet, but his fat, gauntleted fingers kept on making mistakes, despite the software being configured for use with a spacesuit. “If we can’t repair the tires somehow, then we’re going to have to make some calls home. Our NASA guests won’t be happy having to walk everywhere.”

“We haven’t got the power for making anything. We haven’t even got the power to run all their experiments.” Declan shook the cloth out, and he gestured at the dust puffing away in ephemeral pink clouds. “We were down fifteen per cent at midday. Stuff’s going on standby if it doesn’t pick up.”

Of course it was. It always was. But somehow they managed the balancing act with watts to spare, and no one took him seriously any more. Declan complained, and the rest of them just got on with it.

“I guess I’ll just have to talk to Brack,” said Frank, and even though he couldn’t see Declan’s face clearly, he could tell his expression had soured. He didn’t like the idea of being overruled. None of them did, because it reminded them that they had responsibility without authority, and that they were still cons who had an overseer. But it really rankled with Declan.

“I’ll take a look at the figures. Work out a budget,” he said after a moment of dead air.

“Appreciate it.”

The Boy who cried Brownout had had his bluff called again.

“Dee, you there?”

“Hi, Frank. What’s up?”

“Have we got the buggy manuals on the downlink yet?”

“Probably. I’ll take a look. You got a part nu—”

The noise in Frank’s ears, before the headphones cut out through overload, made him temporarily deaf. He staggered against the buggy and braced himself on the chassis while he recovered. Declan, over by the panels, reeled away, ineffectually clutching the sides of his helmet.

“Dee? Dee?”

No answer.

Frank started running, skipping, across the rocky Martian surface towards the airlock.

“Zero? Can you hear me?”

If he could, he couldn’t make himself heard over the alarm blaring in the background. The fire alarm.

“Zero. Stay where you are.” Frank knew full well that Zero’s suit was racked in the cross-hab, and with the alarms sounding, the temptation would be to rush to suit up. But the greenhouse had its own airlock, and was pretty well isolated. Frank could be there faster, and already in his suit.

He took the steps three at a time, and punched the airlock cycler. Declan was making his way over too, but Frank wasn’t waiting. He pushed the door in, kicked it shut behind him, and cycled the hab air into the chamber. It took only a few seconds, and it seemed like an eternity.

He opened the inner door to the cross-hab, not knowing what he’d find.

It was as he’d left it. No sign of fire. No smoke, no damage. He moved quickly down the corridor to the crew quarters, and it was the same. Normal.

“Dee?”

His voice carried, muffled, into the hab, where it lost its way, battered by the still shouting alarm.

“You found him yet?” asked Zero in his ear.

“No.”

“Hurry it up, man.”

Frank took the turn to Comms. The door to the module was shut: he threw it open, and there was Dee, slumped on the floor. There were tendrils of white vapor in the air, but no fire, nothing to tell Frank the reason for the alarm.

He crouched down and turned Dee over. The boy flopped like one of the fish, his skin a livid red. He wasn’t breathing, and Frank didn’t have time to check the computer for his vital signs.

“Zero, clear the greenhouse airlock. I’m bringing him in to you.”

Declan was suddenly behind him, and startled Frank enough for him to slip to one side. All Declan did was jump over Dee and take hold of his ankles. Frank scooped his hands under Dee’s armpits and together they carried him to the greenhouse airlock.

There wouldn’t be room for all three of them, so Frank said: “Kill the alarm. I can’t hear myself think,” then dragged Dee over the threshold of the airlock.

Declan reached in and pulled the door closed, and Frank elbowed the cycler without letting go.

Zero opened the door on his side, and Frank pulled Dee through, laying him out on the gridwork just the other side.

“What happened to him?”

“Gassed with CO₂. Start CPR. I’ll get out of the suit.” Frank thumbed his control panel.

Zero just looked at Dee, scarlet and unresponsive.

“You’ve got to do it, Zero.”

“Jeez. He’s gone, Frank. He’s gone.”

The suit’s rear hatch was opening with glacial slowness. “Do it, Zero. Just fucking do it.”

“Hey, OK, OK.” Zero knelt down, folded his hands together over Dee’s sternum, and started rhythmically pushing.

Frank’s suit gave him the green light and he scrambled out backwards. The alarm finally cut off, and the silence—save for Zero’s grunts, and the bubbling of flowing water—was profound. Frank leaned over Dee’s face, pinched his nose, tilted his head and huffed into his lungs.

They worked for a minute, two minutes, three minutes.

Then Zero rocked back on his haunches. “We need to stop, Frank. We’re not doing anything.”

Frank carried on, making Dee’s chest rise and fall. “We can’t give up on him.”

“Listen, Frank. If we bring him back, what are we going to do with him? We’ve no doctor, no idea what to do next, anything. Even if he lives, he’s going to be gone. You know what I’m saying, right? We need to just let him go, before we do something worse to him.”

Frank breathed into Dee again, then sat back, his hands clenched into fists.

“Goddammit,” he said. “How could this happen?”

“There was a fire—”

“There wasn’t a fire. There was no fire at all.”

“The alarm.”

“I was in there, Zero. No fire. None.”

“Then… something went wrong. I don’t know.” Zero pulled himself upright using some of the staging. “Maybe the fire got put out, and you missed it. Maybe it worked like it was supposed to.”

“It wasn’t supposed to kill Dee. It should have given him time to get out.”

“He fucked up. He forgot his drills. He took a deep breath and he passed out. He kept on breathing that shit in and it killed him.”

“It was a couple of minutes, tops. He should still be alive. Why isn’t he still alive?”

“I’m sorry, Frank. There was nothing we could do.” Zero walked to the end of the greenhouse and stared out at Mars through the tiny windows in the airlock there.

Frank reached out and pushed Dee’s eyelids down, one, then the other. His skin was already growing cool. How could this possibly be an accident? No one group of people could possibly be this unlucky.

He left Dee there, scarlet, dead, on the upper floor of the greenhouse. He climbed into his suit again, and thumbed the hatch closed behind him.

“Declan? Where are you?”

“I’m in Control, trying to find the seat of the fire. Did Dee make it?”

“No. No he didn’t.” Frank cycled through the greenhouse airlock. “Hook up the air plant and get the scrubbers on. We need to reoxygenate the air.”

“When I’m done.”

“It’s going to take hours and we don’t have that much daylight left. Either the air plant goes on now, or we’ll be sleeping in the greenhouse tonight.”

“Who put you in charge?”

“Goddammit, Declan, just do it. Just—do it without picking some pissy argument with me. We can’t breathe the air in here and that’s kind of a big thing. I’ll look for what set the alarm off, because that’s supposed to be my goddamn job, not yours.” Neither did he want Declan in the hab while Frank wasn’t there. If there was evidence—if he was hiding evidence—Frank needed to get him out.

They passed each other in the corridor, and they banged against each other, hard torso against hard torso. Declan was lighter, and maybe not expecting the contact, so he rebounded against the wall of the connector too.

Neither said anything to the other, and neither was going to forget the slight either.

Where the hell was Brack? Back at the ship, yes, but with his comms off? Not that there was anything he could say at that moment: everyone already knew what they had to do to get the base running again. Frank stood in the doorway to Comms/Control and wondered what he was looking for.

Something had caused the fire alarm to trip. Some spark, some incandescent heat source, had caught the eye of the cameras, and had been ruthlessly suppressed by the compressed CO₂ cylinders which instantly diluted and displaced the five psi oxygen atmosphere. The alarm was supposed to sound fractionally before the air was rendered unbreathable. Deep breath, and run. Close the doors behind you.

They’d all trained for this. Dee should still be alive. And he had been, up to the point the alarm went off. He’d been at the console, speaking into the microphone, checking the files for the ones that Frank had wanted.

Frank put himself in Dee’s position, literally, standing where he would have sat. His finger touched the screen, and it bloomed into life. There was the last thing that Dee had been looking at, the search screen for the system. He’d been asking Frank for the part number.

Then something had gone wrong. There’d been intense heat in this part of the hab—the two floors had separate fire suppression systems—and somehow, Dee had forgotten everything and breathed in. He would have started to feel faint almost immediately, but he would still have had time to get out of the hab. It was three, four steps to the door. Once that was closed, the CO₂ would have been contained, and the air on the right side of the door would have had enough oxygen in to revive him, even if he’d been near collapse.

What had Dee been doing in the minutes beforehand? Frank went to check in the crew hab, around the cans, in the bedrooms, but there was no evidence he could find that Dee had done something that would mean he couldn’t react normally.

Drugs? Again? He should have searched Dee’s pockets, because it wasn’t like they could do any forensic work, what with their doctor being dead already, months ago. But like Zeus, being under the influence shouldn’t have meant a death sentence. And Dee had sounded perfectly normal in the moments before the alarm had gone off.

Where had everyone been? Frank, outside by the buggy. Declan, over by the solar farm. They’d been in sight of each other. Brack was two whole miles away in the ship. That left Zero and Dee as the only ones inside. Could Zero have done something in the time between the alarm going off and Frank reaching the airlock? Twenty, thirty seconds? It took nearly the same length of time again to cycle it through.

His estimate of a couple of minutes had been good. Then turning him over, he and Declan carrying him to the greenhouse, getting him through the airlock and starting CPR.

Four, maybe five minutes. Dee’s chances of survival were nosediving by that point. But he should still have been savable. Shouldn’t he? Breathing almost pure CO₂ for that length of time? He didn’t know enough to say one way or the other.

But none of that would have mattered if Dee had just done what he’d been told to do: hold his breath, run, slam doors. And before then, too: what had set off the fire alarm in the first place?

Frank didn’t know, and he couldn’t tell. The chair that usually sat in front of the console was halfway across the room, and on its side. He picked it up, and set it down in front of the screen.

Four. Four of them left. It didn’t seem fair.