by S. J. Morden
What would it be like? Would he even notice? There’d been an accident once, with fatalities, early on in his career and before he had his own company. They were demolishing an old gas station, clearing it for the developers to come in and slap some identikit housing on it. A couple of guys had gone into the old underground tanks, and that’s where he’d found them, just slumped at the bottom of the ladder. Heavy gas had settled in the tanks and pushed all the air out, and they’d lowered themselves right into the middle of it. He might have joined them, if older, wiser hands hadn’t restrained him.
They hadn’t suffered. Just gone to sleep.
He wasn’t going to do that. He had a base to build. And he had a promise that he’d make it back home again. But first he had to make it back to the ship, that was still invisible in the distance.
Was Marcy going as fast as she dared? Probably. And faster than that, even. It hurt, and he had to hang on. If he fell off, would she come back for him? Would she even notice? It wasn’t like she could turn her head and look behind her. If he called out, what would she do? She’d probably stop, pick him up again, even if it killed both of them.
He did and didn’t want to know how much margin of error they had left. Ignorance was both bliss and terrifying.
Despite only having been this way once, and from the other direction, he was starting to recognize the terrain. The low, ragged hills down the middle of the crater. The rise of the walls a thousand feet up, completely enclosing the low land. The bulk of the volcano, felt rather than seen, on the southern edge. And the steep rise that was looming ahead of them that they’d had to navigate on the way out.
The one that had loose granular sand all the way up to the top.
Marcy throttled back, and let the buggy roll to a halt. She took a moment to check her suit controls, and after closing it back up, shook her arms out.
“You OK back there?”
“Still here.”
“There’s a trick to getting up dunes. I know it’s not a dune, but it’s like a dune, so I’ll treat it the same. The run-off is pretty smooth, and the slope not too steep, but it’s long and tall. If it looks like I’m going to flip it over or I start going sideways—you’re going to have to jump clear. If you’re still on, you’re going to break your neck.”
“And what about you?”
“I’ll be bailing out too, so don’t sweat about that.” She flexed her fingers and put her hands back on the steering column.
“I’m on five per cent,” said Frank. “You?”
“Same.”
“That’s enough to get us back. Just.” If the suit read-out was accurate. Anything greater than the margin of error would be fine.
He climbed out of the frame and knelt down on top of it, wedging his feet against the crossbars and bracing himself with his hands. It wasn’t the best position, but at least he could try and leap free if he had to.
The buggy sank a little as Marcy dialed down the stiffness of the tires—the ridged plates flexed apart and presented a wider face to the ground—then they were off again, smooth acceleration all the way to the base of the slope.
The wheels kept turning, clawing their way up. They didn’t seem to slow down at all, at least initially. The slope sharpened halfway up, and the sand deepened. The surface started to cut up and spill away. But Marcy had judged it right. She kept them pointing straight up the slope and let the momentum she’d built up carry them over the hump and to the shallower upper reaches.
And he could hear it, a low bass rumble throbbing around him. It had been all but silent for the whole day, and he thought he was imagining it at first, or feeling it through the metal frame he was clinging to. What he was hearing was the four motors straining and the impact of the wheels against the shifting sand.
When the sound began to die away, they were almost at the top: there was just the lip of the rise to breach, a soft edge. Marcy clenched the steering controls and leaned slightly forward, and they chewed their way through. The buggy rocked forwards, then back again, and slowed.
“Do we have to do that every time?” he asked.
She didn’t answer straight away. “Yes,” she said eventually. “There’ll be easier ways up and down. Need to map them out.”
“That was good going.” Frank patted her shoulder, or the hard carapace covering it at least. He felt her shudder, and he took his hand away quickly. He heard her grunt, and suck at her straw. He drew back, settling himself into position again, and waited for her to restiffen the tires and pull away across the rock-strewn plateau.
She didn’t.
“Marcy?”
“Some.” She coughed. “Things. Wrong.”
“OK, hold on. Alice? Alice, Marcy’s got a problem.”
There was a moment of dead air. “Shut the fuck up, Brack. No one cares whether I’m Shepherd or Alice. Is it with her or the suit?”
“Don’t know yet.” He clambered over the top of the buggy’s frame until he was the other side of the controls, facing Marcy. “She’s very dark.”
He reached out and wiped her faceplate. He could see her eyes, red and moist. “Marcy? Marcy.”
She stared at him, uncomprehending. Her mouth was open, and she seemed to be panting.
“I’ve got her diagnostics up. Blood oxygen is good. High breathing rate. High heart rate. Raised blood pressure. Hold on, I need to see an ECG.”
“Marcy?” Frank took hold of her helmet and drummed against it. “You in there? I’m talking to Alice right now.”
“Heart rhythm is ectopic.”
“What?”
“She’s skipping beats. What does her suit say about the amount of CO2? I can find it here, but you’ll be quicker.”
Frank flipped her suit console down, and looked at the upside-down screen. He started to press the buttons to scroll through the menus, when Marcy knocked his hands away.
“What doing?” she slurred.
“I’m trying to help.” He went back for another go, and she pushed him away again. “She’s not letting me.”
“Give me a minute.”
“We haven’t got a minute, Alice.”
“Best guess. Her CO2 scrubber’s failed. She’s breathing too much of it in. Can you take over the driving and get her back here?”
“I’m doing it now.”
He stepped around the console and punched the buckle release. As the crossing straps fell away, he took her arm, one hand under the armpit and the other under the bulge of the life-support system.
“Get up, Marcy. I’m driving the rest of the way.”
She fought him, and the violence of her attack caught him unawares and off-balance. His foot slipped, and he fell backwards. Slowly. But still holding on to her, so that she was dragged out of the bucket seat.
He had time to work out what to do, whether to let go or keep his grip, before he hit the ground. He didn’t want to land on his back, and he didn’t want to land on his face. Shoulder, then, and keep his hands in. He pulled Marcy to him, to try and protect the vital parts of her suit.
They landed, Frank with his arms around her. There were rocks, but nothing punctured. Dust plumed up, and settled down on them. Marcy started spasming. Her eyes rolled up, and vomit splashed against the inside of her helmet.
“She’s … having a fit. Alice, what do I do?”
“Get her on to her face. Open up the hatch on her back. Hard reset her life support.”
“Turn it off?”
“And turn it on again. Do it.”
Marcy wasn’t resisting now. Frank turned her over, his blunt fingers scrabbling at the opening mechanism. He got his fingers in, and pulled. The lid flipped open. He’d been trained to know what he was looking for: the recessed buttons on the top right.
He hit the red one. The lights faded.
“How long?” he asked.
“Ten? Ten seconds?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No. I’m doing my best here.”
He waited until
eight and couldn’t stand it any longer. He pressed the green, and watched the suit power up again.
“Frank?”
“Alice.”
“Her heart’s arrhythmic.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No. Pick her up. Put her on the buggy and get here as quick as you can.”
“She’s been sick again.”
“Then keep her face down.”
“I’ll need to tie her down. I can’t drive holding on to her.”
“Then do it. Jesus, Frank. Just do it.”
He picked Marcy up, and she was like a rag doll, light and loose-limbed, but still awkward to carry. Her legs dragged and her arms flopped, and though the upper part of her body was held in the rigid shell of the suit, it added bulk. There was no way he could get her gently up on top of the buggy, so he threw her up in the air in an imitation of a clean-and-jerk, and then bounced her across the frame.
He had some cable ties left over. He wrapped one around her wrist, tightened it, and threaded another through it to attach her to a strut. He did the same with her ankle. He looked at her face through the mess of the inside of her helmet. Her eyes were closed. She was completely unresponsive.
He didn’t have time to wallow. He needed to get her back, and for Alice to work some kind of magic. Even climbing into the seat took seconds that he didn’t have. He certainly wasn’t going to bother with the driver’s harness. He gripped the steering wheel and squeezed the accelerator. The motors rumbled through the latticework and the tires clawed at the dirt. The buggy rolled forward.
He could see the ship. He could see it, getting larger and more detailed ahead of him. He was bare minutes away. He couldn’t turn to see Marcy. Or even tell if Marcy was still attached. There were rear-facing cameras, but they’d put them in the pile of parts to do later.
There was a familiar feeling rising in his guts. The feeling of powerlessness, of the inability to do anything to change the situation, of being condemned to watch while …
… while someone he’d come to care about, someone he was responsible for, died.
And he couldn’t even fix it by shooting anyone.
The buggy was responding differently than it had done on Earth. It floated over the surface, getting airtime whenever he hit a rise, and each hit on a big rock made that tire lose contact for a moment. Maybe it’d be different if he wasn’t driving so fast. He had to wrestle with the steering, continually adjusting the direction as if he was rally-car racing.
He gritted his teeth and concentrated.
“Alice? I’m close. I’m almost there.”
“As soon as you get here, you get yourself inside. You understand? I’ll deal with Marcy.”
“I can carry her.”
“You have no air left, Frank. And I don’t want two patients and have to decide which I’m going to treat first. I’m the medical officer, and that’s an order.”
“I don’t have to do what you say.”
“You do if you want to live.”
Thirty seconds away. Twenty. Ten.
He parked right outside, and realized that the noises filling his ears were his suit alarms sounding urgent and constant. The airlock was already open, and someone was standing there on the top step, waiting for him.
“Alice? That you?”
“Come on, Frank. Come on in.”
He climbed out of the seat. His hands were numb, and his forearms ached with the vibrations from the uneven terrain. He couldn’t hold on to anything. It was almost impossible to navigate the open latticework of the buggy, and he half-slid, half-fell to the ground.
Alice picked him up, put him on his feet, and with a hand in his back, pushed him up the steps.
“What about Marcy?”
“I said I’d deal with her.” Alice put him in the entrance to the airlock and shoved him hard. He flew, staggering against the far door, and she reached in behind him to press the button. The outer door started to close.
“Marcy?”
She pushed him all the way in again, and stood on the threshold while the door was still wide enough for him to try and leave. When it wasn’t, she stepped back onto the outer platform, and the door closed Frank inside.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m saving your life, you little idiot.”
“But Marcy.”
“She’s dead, Frank. She’s been dead for five minutes. Nothing’s bringing her back.”
“But.”
“There are no buts. I, of all people, should know what dead looks like. She went asystole and stopped breathing. It’ll take me another five minutes to get her back inside, five minutes plus to get her suit off, clear her airways, inject her with adrenaline and start CPR.”
His own suit was still clanging at him, but the quality of the noise changed as the air filled the space around him.
“And you, you’re going anoxic. You’re not thinking straight, so as soon as the pressure equalizes, you’re going to have to open your suit. Got that?”
The inner airlock door slid aside, and Frank stumbled to the floor, at Brack’s feet.
“You heard the doctor. Open your suit.”
Frank, still on all fours, flipped his controls. His vision blurred. He couldn’t see.
“I …”
“Geez, Kittridge. You can’t even do the simplest things.”
Frank blinked. One of the choices was lit. The other wasn’t. He stabbed down with his finger and hoped.
A click, a whirr. The first hint of cold, thin air filtering around his sweat-drenched back and his stinging eyes.
The airlock cycled again, and Alice came in. She hauled Frank to sitting, then stood in front of Brack, an obvious, immediate challenge.
Brack turned away and looked at his screens.
“Patch him up. Get him ready to go out again tomorrow. And defrost another,” he said. “We need to stay on track.”
13
[Internal memo: Project Sparta team to Bruno Tiller 3/7/2039 (transcribed from paper-only copy)]
We suggest that you don’t treat this as a colonization project. More of a practice run. If we consider that everything that you will learn on this mission will be the first time you learn it, we predict crew attrition to be moderate. Mistakes will be made. Equipment will not function. Not everyone will survive. You will therefore be expecting perhaps up to two crew members (twenty-five (25) per cent) to meet with a fatal or incapacitating accident—odds which, were they known, would limit the pool of potential recruits.
Given that we would be losing XO employees in good standing, with friends within the company and families without, and given that the cost of litigation and compensation that would have to be factored in would erode the savings we’ve made—savings which would almost pay for another Mars base—I’m going to suggest a radical solution.
XO bought a security company called Panopticon eighteen (18) months ago. Part of Panopticon’s portfolio includes a contract with the California Department of Corrections to run four of the State’s prison facilities. This presents us with the opportunity to transport—legally and literally—convicts to Mars and use them as labor. I am advised that this is permissible, if we designate the Mars base a correctional facility.
You probably have many questions regarding this proposition. My team have already been working on finding out those answers. I’m going to suggest we meet next week so that I can present you with our full findings.
Frank didn’t know if Dee had ever seen a dead body before, but once Frank had cut through the cable ties, there wasn’t any other option but for them both to lift Marcy down from the back of the buggy. Perhaps it was something in Frank’s body language that managed to translate itself through the bulky suit, but Dee didn’t so much as murmur a complaint or objection. It was something that Frank was grateful for. Neither was strong on conversation, so they worked mostly in silence.
Alice said she’d make good on her promise to “deal” with Marcy. He didn’t know
what that meant. Presumably, there was some sort of protocol for burying the dead: if there was, he didn’t know about it. He didn’t even know if they had shovels. And that was as far as he wanted to think on the subject.
He had the head end, by unspoken agreement, but he kept his eyes elsewhere and they laid her on the ground face-down. Her suit was still plump and pressurized, still as heavy as it was before. Whatever the human soul weighed, it wasn’t so much as to make a difference. He unclipped her tablet from her waist, powered it up to make sure it still worked and had sufficient battery life, and fixed it to his own belt.
“You ready, Dee?”
Dee nodded, his young face slack with awe as his gaze skittered across Frank to the ship and the volcano and the crater wall and the pink sky.
“You have to talk to me, Dee. Tell me you’re OK. You’ve got to stay in touch, let me know if you feel hot or cold or breathless or sleepy or sick or you’ve a headache or one of your alarms has gone off. Got that?”
Dee nodded again before getting a grip on himself and saying: “OK, Frank. Sure.”
“Climb up, thread your legs through the struts and hold on to the back of the seat. I’ll take it easy, stop to check on you—so we can check on each other—and no stupid risks. Got that, Dee?”
“Got it, Frank.”
They had two jobs today: build the second buggy and fit out the trailers, then drive up out of the crater and retrieve the solar panel array. Because if they didn’t, they had no way to recharge the fuel cells. The ship’s own generators and batteries were at full stretch, keeping the ship’s systems going. If the buggies ran out of power then they wouldn’t move. If the ship ran low on power, they were going to have to sit there and freeze, or suffocate, whichever was first.
It struck Frank as another flaw in the mission plan. There were others, most intractable of which was the one supply cylinder that had dropped eighty miles away. That was pretty much out of range, and it might as well have been halfway around the planet for all that it mattered.