One Way

29

[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 1/7/2048, transcribed from paper-only copy]

It took a long time. Frank drifted in and out of sleep, and every time he woke, he wondered how he could have possibly slept. He was adhered to the floor. The blood had soaked into his overalls, and dried. He was stiff and cold and uncomfortable, and still Brack didn’t come.

A couple of times, he thought he needed to rethink his tactics, to get up and go on the attack, but playing dead was his one advantage: throwing that away because of impatience was stupid. So he stayed where he was, as still as he could, listening out for the telltale creak of the floor panels.

Eventually, he heard them. These weren’t hesitant footsteps, made by a scared young man. These were confident, almost casual. Frank took some deep breaths and then exhaled slowly. Nothing but the shallowest of breathing from now on.

“Well, won’t you look at this?”

The footsteps stopped.

“You boys been having fun?”

Silence.

“You could have died cleaner, that’s for sure. You’ve left me a hell of a job. Should bring you back just so you can tidy up after yourselves.”

Silence.

“That’s not going to happen, though, is it? Deader than roadkill. Looks like I was the only one to bring a gun to a knife fight, so I guess I win. Right?”

The silence was punctuated by the sound of a meaty kick into some part of Zero.

“Ask you a question, boy. Am I right?”

The kicking carried on. Zero was still in no state to answer afterwards.

“Stupid idea, bringing criminals to do real men’s work. Ain’t that right, Frank?”

If Brack started on him, there was no chance of him being able to carry on with his deception. But perhaps the thought of treading more blood around the base put Brack off.

“It’s all over now though, for sure. None of you chimps left. Got to make this place fit for decent human beings, and then I get off this godforsaken rock. You? I got something special planned for you. Just wait and see.”

Zero received another kick.

“Better go tell Control that it’s mission accomplished. Ain’t no sweeter sound than that.”

Brack giggled, and Frank almost surged up from the floor and attempted to strangle him there and then. But there were footsteps, going away again.

Then came back.

“You want to know how we knew what was going on? Do you want to know? We could see and hear everything you did and said. Privacy my ass. I was right there, looking over your shoulder, whenever I wanted. You never realized. Even the pervert didn’t know. You never stood a chance.”

The footsteps went away, and they stayed away this time.

At some point, Brack would be back to dispose of his body. Until then, Frank was presumed dead.

It looked like, despite what they’d all thought, what they’d been told, they’d been spied on, almost continuously. Unless that was exaggeration on Brack’s part. The ten-minute-plus delay on information getting back to Earth was the kicker, and Dee had been certain that there was no continuous delivery of data. He’d packaged everything up, and sent it in chunks.

No hardwired microphones, according to Declan. The cameras only saw infrared, according to Dee. But there was always the medical monitors in their chests. If the devices were close enough to feel them breathing, they were close enough to hear their voices resonate through their bodies. And the cameras in the spacesuits. The cameras in the goddamn spacesuits.

And, of course, the only person who could monitor everything in real time was Brack. That was his job: to watch them, to check they hadn’t got wise to what was really happening, and to kill them when they became expendable. That was what he spent his days and nights doing. Monitoring his charges, popping pills, reheating food.

He wouldn’t be watching them now, though, because he thought they were all dead.

Frank had a narrow window of opportunity in which he could genuinely act without surveillance.

He peeled himself off the floor, and took a moment to try and shake some life back into his limbs. His arm ached with a dull throb, and it felt weak. There was nothing he could do about that, unless—he was, after all, in the med bay. He carefully opened one of the boxes and looked through the strips until he found the dihydrocodeine. He pushed one, then two pills into his hand, because he’d been shot and not just stubbed his toe. He dry-swallowed them down.

Then he tiptoed past the end of the corridor and slid down the ladder to retrieve his spacesuit.

As soon as Brack came back, he’d see what had happened. Or would he? Would he think that Frank had tricked him? Or would he, in his drugged-up, addicted state, think that Frank had risen from the dead and was going to enact his supernatural revenge on his tormentor?

He acknowledged that as unlikely. His son had been capable of rational thought: just not rational action. Frank climbed into his suit down on the lower level, powered it up, and climbed swiftly up and into the airlock.

Would pressing the cycle button send an alarm to Comms/Control? Possibly. He opened the hatch and worked the manual lever. The air inside the chamber bled out into the freezing Martian night, and thirty seconds later he was outside with it, on a platform slippery with ice.

Brack had turned off the buggy lights, and the sky was a brighter black than the ground. Stars and planets wheeled, and one of the moons crossed overhead in a swift and silent passage. The habs were undifferentiated blocks against the horizon, and he had to progress slowly, with only memory and touch as his guides.

But they were sure guides. He’d built this base with his own hands, laid it out and ordered its construction. He’d maintained it and modified it. He knew it like the creases in the palm of his hand, and he didn’t stumble once.

The satellite dish was pointing almost straight up. He could see its shape against the stars as it tracked the orbit of the relay station above. He climbed the pylon and felt for the smaller microwave transmitter that connected the base to the ship. He pushed it out of alignment, then climbed down again to open up the little control panel on the side of the dish. The row of green lights burned steady.

He risked a quick dial-up of his suit lights so that he could see what he was attempting to sabotage. They were just trip switches; undoing the damage would take only a moment, but he needed Brack as isolated as he’d been. XO was going to be out of the loop from now on, until he decided what to do. Or he died.

Whichever, XO were going to lose contact with their man, and their Mars base. Their multi-billion dollar investment. Let them worry.

He flicked the switches from green to red, one after another, then closed the panel and killed his lights.

From there, he walked along the side of the yard, past the kitchen and the crew quarters, round the back of the base to the only part of it that was protected by two airlocks: the greenhouse. He manually vented the chamber, entered it and equalized the pressure with the inside.

The bright lights and the sound of running water, the banks of green leaves and the smell of freshness, of organic life, was a welcome change over the reek of stale sweat and dried blood. Zero would never see this again. Frank guessed it would be up to whoever lived to keep it running from now on.

He exited his suit, and splashed some of the nutrient-rich water dripping off the end of the trays onto his face and across the back of his neck. It was lukewarm, and it still felt cold on his skin. Everything was hyperreal, the lights stronger, the noises louder, the scents more pungent. It was like when he was being put to sleep in Building Two: it might be the last time he ever felt anything.

He knew he was never going to beat Brack in a straight-up fist fight. Especially not now he was injured and exhausted. Brack? He was well-rested, and even without the gun could whop his ass six ways to Sunday. He had to be military-trained, probably Special Forces at some point, and no one, least of all Frank, was expecting him to fight fair.

So he’d probably only get one chance, and he had to take it without hesitating. No mercy, which was as much mercy as he’d been shown. He’d killed two people now. This was surely the point where it got easier.

He needed a weapon. All he had was a scalpel covered in his own blood, but there wasn’t really anything else. The gardening tools were all small: snips and shears and dibbers, as befitted a high-tech hydroponic set-up. No shovels or long-handled rakes, which would have been so very useful.

The scalpel would have to do.

He looked through the little airlock window into the cross-hab area. There was movement, and he ducked back. If he’d been seen, it’d be over. But it was unlikely, and he risked another glance.

That pale shape bobbing around in his eyeline had to be the back of Brack’s spacesuit. He was going out to see what was wrong with the transmitter.

It would mean he’d be deaf and blind to everything happening behind him. Frank knew what that was like. Now. Do it now. He vented the inner chamber into the greenhouse, and opened the door. He kept his eye on what was happening through the window. Brack was also cycling the airlock, but it took longer to pump down than using the manual releases. He’d beat him to it. Beat him to the punch.

Frank closed the door behind him, vented the main hab air into the chamber. Mere seconds later the outer door was free, since the pressure was already almost identical. He opened the door just as Brack stepped forward into the open airlock in front of him.

He was fifteen feet away. Enough distance to pick up some speed. Frank slammed into Brack’s back and catapulted him through the open door and down the length of the airlock, into the door at the far end. He hit it hard and the confined space boomed. Before he could turn, before he could do anything, Frank was in with him, grabbing his ankles and jerking them backwards.

Brack went down, face-first, sprawling, and Frank went to work with the scalpel. He’d seen it done before, several times, and had subconsciously absorbed the how.

Remembering to keep his thumb on the top of the short handle, he stabbed down, hard, repeatedly, into the back of Brack’s thighs, puncturing the cloth and the airtight membrane and the skin and muscle beneath, not wasting time slicing, just in-out, in-out. The shock, the pain, the speed of the attack, was deliberately excessive, disorientating, vicious, and savage. Both legs, up and down between knee and buttock.

He could hear Brack roaring. He could see him try to reach up and slap the airlock cycle button in order to free the outer door and the only possible direction of escape, but since the inner door was still open, it wouldn’t function.

Frank clenched the bloody handle between his teeth and, taking Brack’s ankles again, pulled him half-into the cross-hab. His legs and lower torso were outside the airlock. His shoulders and head were still inside. He still had no idea who or what was attacking him.

Frank cut into Brack’s calves with the same rapid movement, pressing hard to force the blade deeper. Brack’s only response was to slap the floor and flail his arms and scream in a high-pitched keening wail. His legs would only twitch and spasm. He seemed to have lost control of them completely.

Had Frank done enough? His hands were slick with sweat and blood, and he was panting in the rarefied atmosphere. But the iron rule of prison fighting was to put the other guy down and make sure he stayed down. If you let him up, you lost.

The life-support rack was behind him. The spare oxygen cylinders were plugged in next to them. Frank snatched one up and went back to slam it repeatedly into Brack’s back and shoulders. The casing to the rear hatch starred, then broke. He drove the cylinder against the crack and kept on going like he was piledriving a fence post. Now that was honest, solid labor, not this butcher’s work.

He could hear the alarms sounding inside Brack’s suit as he pounded away. He was destroying the life support, damaging the control systems, crushing the filters and the valves. Brack was still trying to rise on his hands, and every blow knocked him back down. At least the screaming had stopped, and had been replaced by a grunt each time the cylinder descended.

Brack went limp. Now he’d done enough.

Frank pulled Brack all the way out into the cross-hab and heaved him over onto his back. Perhaps he was dead. Frank knew better than to trust that.

He smashed the faceplate in with repeated blows, and knocked the edges of the plastic away. As the fresh air blew in, Brack’s face twisted into a grimace.

So, not dead yet.

Frank took him by the ankles again and pulled him through the habs: the kitchen, the yard, and into Comms. There was the gun, resting next to the console.

Frank sat in the chair and picked it up. It had been modified so that it didn’t have a trigger guard, so that Brack could fire it while wearing a spacesuit. It also made it laughably simple to accidentally discharge.

He aimed the gun downwards at the floor, between his knees, and kept his fingers well away from the mechanism. It was strange, after so long, to be holding the reason why he was even on Mars. A gun. They made killing so easy. Not like knives. You really had to mean it with knives. Just look at how much effort he’d put into killing Zero, and now Brack.

And he was tired, too. Even more than before. The thin, cold air was taking its toll. Better end this now, then, and get some rest.

He stretched his leg out and kicked the sole of Brack’s boot.

“Hey. Hey, Brack. Wake up. It’s over.”

Was it over? Not really. It never would be. But this part of it was.

Brack blinked and stared at the ceiling. The top half of him hadn’t really suffered at all. Asphyxiation, severe bruising, but nothing was broken, nothing was ruined. Not like his legs. The heroic quantities of opioids in his system were probably keeping him alive as well as dulling the pain, too, just like they were for Frank at a lesser degree.

Brack fumbled for his suit controls, but when he tried to open the back hatch, nothing would move.

“It’s not going to happen, Brack. You’re stuck in that suit. I could get some tools from the workshop and try and cut you out. But I’m not going to risk the spark.”

Brack let his hands fall to his sides.

“You.”

“Me. Good old Frank. Frank the murderer. Three times over now. It looks like, in all this, neither of us quite realized how much I wanted to live, how much I wanted to go home, and the things I’d do to make that happen. I surprised myself. Sure as hell surprised you. Maybe you should have killed me first, instead of Marcy.”

“They’ll get you.”

“Will they? Will they really? It’s a very long way to come, just for one old lag.”

“Your wife. Your son.”

Frank looked at the gun in his hand, tested the weight of it. Because it was Mars, it was less heavy than it ought to be. How was it that something so light could cause so much damage?

Of course, he was never going to fire it inside the hab. Not only would the fire extinguishers trigger, he’d end up putting a round through the wall. It felt right to be holding it, though. The most powerful man in the room needed to be holding the gun.

“Now that’s a difficult one, isn’t it? What do you suggest? What’s the best way of protecting them now, given that all the promises you gave me about going home in return for watching your back were just bullshit. You made the same promise to every single one of us, didn’t you? It kept us all in line. It kept us from challenging you. It kept us hoping. That’s the bit that really sucks, especially when you, and XO, had planned to kill us off all along.”

“You can save me.”

“Alice could have saved you. But you killed her.” Frank scratched at his chin. “Me? I’m pretty certain I can’t. You didn’t train me for that. Didn’t train me for a lot of things. Just enough to be useful, not enough to realize how vulnerable we were.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “One thing I have learned: I’ve been denying that I’m a killer for ten years. There’s not been a day that’s passed when I haven’t said that to myself. ‘Frank, you’re not a killer.’ Turns out that I was wrong. I’ve got something inside me that says it’s OK to kill if I have to. That puts me much closer to you than I’m comfortable with, because I really don’t want to be like you.”

“I’ll tell XO to…”

Brack stopped mid-sentence with a gasp, and Frank kicked his foot again.

“What? What will you tell XO to do? Come and rescue us? Not kill my ex-wife and my kid? Do you think they care about anyone but themselves? Look at us. Goddammit, Brack, just look at the state of us. Look what they’ve done to us. This is what happens when you fuck up as badly as we have. We are in Hell.”

Brack shook his head, as if trying to shake something from his ears. Perhaps he was just trying to dislodge fragments of broken faceplate. He rallied.

“You can still go home. Just keep me alive.”

“You have to understand something. You were right. The others. They weren’t my friends. I wasn’t theirs. We got on, and that’s the best I can say about it. You gave us a job, and we did it, and we did it well, despite everything. Despite the crappy planning and the missing supplies and whatever happened to our personal effects. So we did everything you asked us to.” Frank looked at the gun in his hands. “And this is how you were always going to repay us. You were always going to kill us. Maybe you were leaving me till last because you knew I actually trusted you and believed you when you told me you were going to take me home, no matter how badly you’d treated me in the meantime: but you were going to kill me in the end. I don’t understand why. I don’t understand why XO would have done any of this. But they have. And you agreed to it all.”

Brack was reduced to panting, and Frank carefully put the gun back down on the console. He got up out of his chair, walked around the spreading pool of blood, and knelt down beside Brack’s head.

“The others didn’t deserve this. But I do. I know you brought me here to kill me. But I allowed myself to be brought. I am my own worst enemy. I get it now. I finally get it.”

Brack stared up at him, past him, his eyes unable to focus and skittering about in their orbits.

“You’ll never see your son again.”

“Fine words,” said Frank. He patted Brack’s shoulder. “Words to remember you by. All your hate and bitterness and poison, summed up in one sentence. You’re probably right: I never will. But I’m still not going to let you die alone, because no one deserves that. Not even you.”

He forced his hand into Brack’s, and felt a grip tighten against his. For a while, it was just the sound of their breathing. Frank’s, patient and steady. Brack’s, shallow and with increasing spaces between each exhale.

Then Frank found himself listening for a breath that never came. He gave Brack’s hand one last squeeze, and extricated his fingers. He went to sit back in the chair, and waited, in silence, alone.