One Way

25

[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 9/2/2041, transcribed from paper-only copy]

Frank hadn’t been back inside the ship since they’d inflated the crew quarters. The internal layout hadn’t changed—how had he ever thought it possible that it could?—but it had become extraordinarily dirty. The first floor was strewn with used food packets, torn foil, empty bags and dust. So much dust.

He propped up the spare life support against the airlock door and opened up his suit. There was an obvious, odd smell to the ship. When it had been eight of them in close quarters, the filters had managed to keep the odors at bay; it looked like they’d been finally overwhelmed. He pushed his head out into the thin, cold air. That smell really wasn’t good. Sort of a teenager’s bedroom smell. His own teenager’s, for that matter.

He slipped out of the rest of the suit, and shuffled through the debris. What didn’t get kicked aside, crunched underfoot. Every surface was coated with a thick film of red, oddly both oily and gritty to the touch. He ran his finger across one of the screens, and sniffed at the residue. It was sharp and sweet at the same time.

Something caught his eye in among the litter, and he crouched down. It was a blister pack. He picked it up. Every tiny blister was empty and crushed. He turned it over and read the contents: oxycodone hydrochloride, thirty milligrams.

That wasn’t a good sign.

He dropped it back onto the floor, and swept his foot around. There were several more he could see, and probably more that he couldn’t.

He climbed up to the next level. Brack’s bedroll was there, and his sleeping bag, unzipped and rucked up, lay mostly on top of it. He’d thought that Brack slept in the base, in the examination room off the med bay. He probably did, but it looked like he slept in the ship too. There was more litter around the sleeping bag: more food pouches, more pill packs, other trash Frank couldn’t readily identify.

The place was… a garbage dump. There wasn’t any other way to put it. Brack was living in what could only be described as squalor.

Frank slowly turned, taking in the whole scene, and knew he was missing something.

Apart from the first few days, Brack had been pretty hands-off. He’d come over to inspect the works, making sure they—minus Alice and Marcy—were getting on with it. Then he’d go away again. And they had got on with it. They’d built the habs, fitted them out, powered them up, installed the comms, and even come up with new solutions to overcome the shortages XO had imposed on them. They’d worked relentlessly, as long as their suits had allowed them, and then when the jobs had moved inside, they’d worked until they’d dropped. Rinse and repeat. Sol after sol.

They hadn’t needed Brack at all. They all knew what had needed to be done. They’d done it, by themselves, for themselves, because otherwise they would have starved to death. The ship-brought supplies would have run out before they’d finished building the base: that’s what Alice had told him, and he had no reason to doubt her, even now.

They’d even made a priority of setting up the greenhouse because there’d been nowhere near enough calories to feed them. Zero, whatever else he might be, had taken to hydroponics like a pro. And yes, fish for protein and all those greens was starting to get monotonous, but the cereals were beginning to ripen, as were the beans and groundnuts and roots. They already had an abundance: an abundance that Brack hadn’t so much as touched, not even a single leaf.

He gathered up a handful of empty sachets, reading the typed names on the outside of each one, and letting them fall to the ground afterwards. The same meals, over and over again. At some point, Brack was going to run out.

Frank started rummaging through the storage bins, trying to work out exactly how many days’ food was left. There wasn’t much: maybe a dozen packets, a few energy bars. Probably no more than a week’s worth. There was a drawer in the kitchen area of the crew hab that had sachets of instant porridge they kept for emergencies, when they needed a quick hit of carbs, but there weren’t many of those, either. Call it two weeks on short rations.

Then what?

Then Brack would have no choice but to eat produce grown in the greenhouse, even if he was going to prepare it himself. And as limited as the menu was, Frank had to concede that not only was it fresh and of good quality, it actually tasted of something, which he couldn’t say of prison food which was mainly salty slurry. No wonder life expectancy in jail was so low: if the other cons didn’t kill you, the diet eventually would.

So what did Brack expect to happen in just over a week that’d make it safe for him to suddenly start eating the greenhouse produce? Had he thought that far ahead? Frank forced himself to look at all the empty foil packs, really look at them. It was the detritus of an addict.

Brack wasn’t thinking about much beyond the next pill.

What a mess. What a goddamn mess. He had two people at the base, at least one of whom was going to try to kill him, if he hadn’t already tried and Frank had just not noticed because the attempt had been unsuccessful. And the man who was supposed to be the one who kept order, the one who was supposed to be on hand to sort this all out—the one he was relying on to get him back home—was reduced to this. Eating pap and scarfing down opiates.

Did XO know? Had they realized that their man had gone rogue? That the fate of Mars Base One was out of their hands, and had fallen, by virtue of being the last sane one standing, to Franklin Kittridge, construction worker and murderer?

He had to talk to Brack. Brack remained Frank’s only hope of seeing his son again. So of course, he was going to have to do something. After all, he was really very good at that, wasn’t he? All his previous attempts at intervention had led, failure by abject failure, to shooting his son’s dealer dead in front of a crowd of witnesses.

Goddammit, Alice. She would have been able to do this. She had the right and the duty to intervene and overrule in medical matters. Instead, she was dead.

He looked up through the floor towards the top of the ship. Then he put his hands on the ladder and climbed up to where the sleep tanks were, arranged in pairs against the walls.

Four were open. Four were closed, and their controls were glowing.

He stood in front of the tank with the number one decal. Alice had been One. Dee had been Five. Marcy and Zeus, Six and Seven. Those were the tanks that were closed, and active.

He knew he shouldn’t be opening them. He knew he shouldn’t, but he knew he was going to try anyway, and he might as well get on with it. He knelt awkwardly down and looked at the controls. There didn’t seem to be anything to press, though, and he realized they were probably all controlled by the ship’s computer.

He fetched his tablet, and it automatically logged on to the ship’s network. It had before, when he was looking for the cylinder containing the buggies, so why not now? He worked his way through various menus until he thought he might have found the right one, and then drilled down into it. Eventually, a schematic of eight boxes appeared, each with a status bar above it. It was the same: one, five, six and seven were working, while two through four—and eight—were offline.

He pressed box one. The information presented to him was confusing—he didn’t know what much of it meant, but he could make out that the temperature inside the tank was just above freezing, and it was in something called preserve mode.

He took it out of preserve, and the drop-down gave him the option to open.

He needed to see it with his own eyes. He dabbed at Open, and immediately the lights on the tank began to blink. They blinked for a while, and then there was an audible click through the thin air of the ship.

He opened the lid, enough that he could be sure, and then pushed it down again.

He tried not to think about anything before returning the tank to preserve mode, and the lights returned to steady.

Alice was in the tank, white-skinned, cold.

He’d thought that Brack had buried her. Buried them all. Why had he thought that? Had Brack actually told them that, or had he just let them think it? Marcy, choked and smeared with her own vomit, Zeus—whatever state he was in, with ruptured lungs and eyes and ears, skin purple with bruising and desiccated as the water had simultaneously boiled and frozen inside him, Dee, scarlet and asphyxiated.

They were all there, back in their tanks, as if this was a morgue. So who the hell chose to sleep in a morgue?

Frank wiped his tablet screen and climbed back down to the first floor.

He’d talk to Brack, try and get him to stop. If that didn’t work, he’d have to talk to XO: explain the situation, and get some help. Some advice at least, because help was a hundred million miles away and the distance still didn’t seem real.

Wherever Brack was, though, he wasn’t coming back in a hurry. Maybe he was just driving around in the crater, trying to avoid spending time in the ship.

If there was a locator on Brack’s suit, all he had to do was tab up the map and find it. Which he did.

Nothing. If there was a signal, he was blocked from seeing it. Brack could literally be anywhere. Untrackable, untraceable. Almost… as if this was deliberate.

He closed up his tablet and with a last, almost embarrassed, look around, he swapped out his life support and climbed back into his suit. Once outside, he decided that the best he could do was drive to the edge of the Heights so he could look down into the crater, and see if he could spot Brack.

The view hadn’t changed for, Frank was guessing, thousands of years. Then in a few short months, humans had put their marks all over it. Tire tracks, repeatedly driven routes that subtly altered the landscape and made a track, a path, and eventually a road across the pristine wilderness.

There was such a road down from the Heights to Sunset Boulevard below, a worn, compacted trail down the red ocher slope. And at the bottom, three white cargo cylinders that had no right to be there at all.

For a moment, he thought that they might be the same ones that he’d hauled to the vicinity of the ship, with Dee, what felt like a lifetime ago. But he’d just seen those. These were new: ones that had been missed from earlier.

But Frank hadn’t missed any from earlier. He’d collected—with enormous difficulty and considerable risk—every last one that had been marked on his map. If they weren’t on his map, though, if they had damaged transponders, he’d never have found them on the plains. It had been hard enough finding the ones he did have co-ordinates for.

His letters. His books. They might be down there. Why hadn’t Brack said anything, though? And if these weren’t part of their consignment, whose were they? Having warned them off “space piracy”, had Brack done exactly that? Except the cylinders, pale and pink in the evening light, looked just like XO deliveries.

There was no sign of the second buggy, no telltale ground-level cloud of dust. Frank had the time to go and check the cylinders for himself. Part of him still feared discovery. He felt he had to be good, to earn his jailer’s trust and confidence, to prove himself worthy of that seat home.

But the feral part of his mind, the part that was stirred up and buzzing with wild, incoherent thoughts, was still telling him he was going to die here. Maybe not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but one day. He would die on Mars and that would be that. No homecoming. No parole board. No feeling the raw, unfiltered sun on his face and the warmth in his bones. No tentative walk up an unfamiliar driveway to a screen door and a hesitant press of the bell push.

He pointed the buggy down the slope and drove all the way to the bottom, parking up next to the nearest of the three cylinders. He ran his hand over the casing, checking to see how much dust had accumulated on the white, plasticky paint. Some, but not much. It didn’t appear to have been sitting out in the desert for that long. The XO logo was still clearly visible on the side.

He undid the hatches manually, the tool for that being back at the base. It was awkward for one person to do it, but he did it in stages, and managed to pop one half of it open. He had to fight through the usual layers of insulation and packaging to get to the drums inside, but he was eventually able to see what the labels said.

NASA. Each one was stickered and sealed with vinyl labels with the NASA logo, a QR code, several serial numbers and a brief description of the contents. Science Experiment (Biology) 4B Part 2 of 7. Technical Equipment (Geology) 2F Part 1 of 3. Environmental Equipment (Atmosphere) 36G Part 1 of 1.

This was a regular delivery. At least some of the descents he’d seen, and heard, had been these. So why hadn’t he been dispatched to bring it back? Was it because it was deemed he was too busy working on the base, or because Brack was bored?

Brack had contributed nothing to the building or the running of the base. Why start now? Why go out, on his own, three—four, because that was surely what he was doing now—times, to collect cargo drops that weren’t logged on the system?

Because the cons weren’t supposed to know about them? Why would that be? There was nothing in the delivery Frank had opened to indicate any sort of contraband or dangerous chemicals or equipment that they might use to turn on each other. Certainly no more dangerous than the well-stocked pharmacy they already had.

Frank’s hand went to the pouch of patches, where the surgical instruments he’d taken sat. He patted them.

If XO were sending NASA packages, it could only mean that the astronauts were coming soon. Highly trained scientists and explorers and pilots would be stepping into an environment where there was almost certainly a murderer, and potentially two. Was that why Brack hadn’t told them, why Brack had kept all this secret? Why he was taking pills and sleeping in the ship? He didn’t know which of them was the killer. He’d seen his crew whittled down from seven to three, and XO were going to be riding his tail, demanding he take charge and find the culprits out.

They had billions of dollars riding on being able to provide a safe working environment for the NASA people. That had to bring its own, almost unimaginable, pressures.

Frank pushed the insulation back into place, and hauled down on the hatch to close it. He retightened the restraining bolts, and as an afterthought threw a double-handful of dust high over the cylinder to obscure his hand-marks. He wasn’t quite sure why he did that. He wasn’t really snooping: he was helping.

He drove back up to the Heights still not knowing what to do. If Declan and Zero had conspired together, or even if they hadn’t and were acting independently of each other, then they both needed to be stopped.

Stopped. There was only one way to stop them. Brack knew that, and it was about time Frank accepted it too. His buggy passed the ship, and began to close the distance to the base. Brack was still nowhere to be seen, but sunset was due in about two hours. There was going to be a confrontation, whatever time he showed up. Would Declan try and blame Zero, and vice versa, or would they gang up on Frank and pin everything on him?

Frank was pretty sure of his ground—he knew he wasn’t responsible—and he couldn’t have played any part in the deaths of either Zeus or Dee. Or Marcy or Alice, no matter what Declan said. Those were nothing to do with him. He didn’t want any of them dead. Even if that was what was going to happen in the end.

He saw the base in the distance, the white habs reflecting a paler pink from the red ground. Someone was outside, suit lights visible as glowing colored bars where the suit itself merged into the background.

Frank slowed to a stop, and took out the surgical pack from the pouch.

It was designed to be ripped open by fingers in latex gloves, not spacesuit gloves, but the clear plastic covering over the sterile instruments could be pierced by the pointier of the tools. He used the forceps to break a hole in the package, and widened it by flexing them back and forth until it had torn through half the width.

He pushed the scalpel, still with its plastic guard, along the backing foil and into his hand.

It had a tiny blade, no more than an inch long, but it was wickedly sharp. The handle was slim and ridged, but designed for downward pressure, not for stabbing. He took a slap-patch from the pouch and held it up against the knife. It would do. He carefully tore off the backing—something that was purposely made to be handled with spacesuit gloves—and adhered the handle to one end of the patch.

He rolled it up tightly, making a fat, flexible grip which wouldn’t slip through his hand, but which left the blade naked. It’d get blunt quickly, but he only needed it, if he did actually need it, to stay keen for a short while. He knew how to work a shank, in and out, fast and repeatedly, like a sewing machine needle.

The other two would have access to the kitchen knives and the medical supplies as well as the gardening snips and shears. He supposed that by now they were both armed. They’d probably guess he was too.

He made sure the blade guard was clipped on before he returned his knife to the bag. The rest of the surgical tools went in tucked underneath it, so he could just reach in and grab it.

He wasn’t a killer. He kept on telling himself that. He was just defending himself. He just wanted to stay alive long enough to go home.

Frank tabbed his suit controls and reactivated his microphone.

“Declan? Zero? I’m coming in. I think we need to talk.”