by S. J. Morden
His voice trailed off.
“You’re protecting him.”
“From himself. I guess so.”
In the absence of chairs, they sat against the end walls of the galley, feet extended in front of them.
“How are you doing, Frank?”
“Why? You going to offer to pray for me?”
Zeus shrugged. “I pray for all of you anyway. Even Brack. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Though I don’t think of him as my enemy. He’s trapped in the same way we are.”
Frank almost said something about that. The words were on the tip of his tongue, and he had to swallow them back inside. Brack wasn’t trapped. What were they paying him? Surely whatever it was, wasn’t enough.
“People do stuff for all kinds of reasons. Out of love, out of hate, out of greed, out of wanting to just feel alive. I don’t know why Brack signed up for this. I’m sure as hell not going to ask him.”
“You haven’t given me an answer, though.” Zeus tore the top of his meal off and inspected the contents. It didn’t look anywhere near enough, the portion dwarfed by his huge hands.
“How am I? Does it matter?”
“Matters to me. You’re worried about everything. You’re worried about the food, the habs, the power, the buggies, the cargo, about how we’re all getting on. You’re worried about someone else dying, and I’m worried it might be you. Just practically, you know how things work around here, and you keep the peace between Zero and Declan.”
“You noticed?”
“You’re still not answering the question.”
“And I don’t have to give you an answer.” Frank opened his own food pouch. It didn’t smell bad, but it didn’t smell of anything. “Don’t push it.”
“I give up.” Zeus squeezed some of the pulp into his mouth, and chewed, even though the consistency meant he didn’t have to. “It’s not that much different to a rig, this place. Isolated. Hostile environment just looking for ways to kill you. All men. I’m used to this.”
Frank thought about Marcy and Alice, and how it was strange that both women had died. He thought about it, but didn’t know what to feel about it. He extruded his own meal and realized that he was hungry, just not for what he was eating. He choked it down anyway.
“We’ve still got a lot to do. And if just one of those things we rely on breaks down, we’ll have to retreat back to the ship. There should be two of everything, twice as much as we need. We should have it in plenty.” He washed down the pap with some water. “I’m tired because I’m scared all the time. Scared of what can go wrong.”
“You ever think about him, Frank? The man you killed? I think about mine all the time. I don’t even remember how it happened, I was that far gone. Whether he picked a fight with me, or it was the other way round. We already know what can go wrong.”
“I don’t think about him at all. Guess that makes me a bad person, right? We both made our choices sober.” Frank shook his head a little. “But like I said: don’t push it.”
“Here’s something else you might not have thought about: when the greenhouse is up and running, we’re going to produce more oxygen than we need. We’ll have to bleed out what we can’t store. We’ve got enough water and food and air for now. We’ll make more power: I’ve a couple of ideas for a steam turbine. And XO are going to send us more panels for the farm, and until then, we’ll make do.”
“What happens when the NASA guys turn up, and they find we’ve got a steam engine powering the base?” Frank stretched his feet, heard his ankles crack. Old, was what he was: old.
“They’ll know about it long before they get here. None of this is going to be a surprise to them. They’re awake the whole journey, not like us.”
“You mean, they’re valuable, not like us.”
“They’re valuable to more important people, but that doesn’t mean we’re worthless. We have to keep this place going before NASA arrives, and after they leave. That makes us the custodians and janitors, and that’s OK. It’s better than what we had before.”
Frank couldn’t deny that.
Noises in the corridor—door opening, feet on the floor panels, voices—made him look up. Demetrius, then Declan, came single file towards them, rubbing their numb hands and cupping them in front of their mouths to breathe life back into them.
Frank drew his legs in to make room for them. Days had started to take a predictable rhythm, with them all gathering together in the galley to eat, talk, bicker, swap stories and problems. Brack was still camped out in the ship, and showed no sign of coming over. Declan was convinced that they couldn’t be overheard, since they’d put the habs up themselves from scratch. It would have been all but impossible to sneak hidden microphones and cameras past them.
There were going to be cameras, linked to an automated fire-suppression system that could be monitored from what would become the control room. But it was all just a mess of unplugged wires and powerless monitors at the moment. They had freedom, real freedom, but they kept on doing their assigned work anyway because this was their home and no one else was going to do it for them.
The other two selected their meals from the bin and started mashing them with the hot water, grumbling about the cold and the never-ending nature of their task, even though there was clearly an end to it.
Then Zero arrived.
“Hey hey.” He was dangling some foil sachets from his lean fingers, shaking them like tambourines. “Who wants to start the party?”
Declan, with unexpected speed, snatched one away, and peered at the tiny writing on the side.
“Coffee. You found some actual coffee.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘found’, but we are, after all, criminals.”
Zeus looked up. “You stole it?”
“From the ship. What’s Brack going to do? Send us down for life? We’re doing that already.” He threw sachets, one apiece, at each of the men. Frank’s landed in his lap.
How long was it since he’d had a decent cup of joe? At least a year, even though he’d slept through most of that. Months, then.
Frank put his sachet to one side, climbed to his feet, and poured the water in his plastic beaker down the sink. He carefully tore the foil packet open, shook the granules out into the beaker, making sure to get every last one, and slowly poured hot water from the little heater until the cup was half-full. He swirled the contents and leaned over to inhale the steam.
“I will personally bury all evidence of this tomorrow morning. In the meantime,” he said, raising his coffee and saluting each of them in turn. “To us. The best men on Mars.”
18
[Message file #41303 10/7/2048 0053 MBO Mission Control to MBO Rahe Crater]
MC: Completion of Phase one [1] acknowledged.
Frank stood in the lee of the RTG housing, and rattled the repurposed drums to make sure they were secure. Inside, six feet down—and hadn’t they had the worst job digging out that hole in the hard-packed, frozen alluvial soil of Santa Clara’s run-off?—the reactor belched out heat and, more sparingly, electricity. But the heat: the solution was simple, crude almost, but it worked. A cargo drum, lowered into place over the hole, and filled with water, captured some of the excess energy radiating from the black fins. The hot water rose to the top of the tank, and through a buried pipe—insulated with the material that had been around the cargo—to the unused airlock at the back of the greenhouse. From another tank inside, it was moved around the habs with a simple fifty-watt pump scavenged from a rocket motor.
As the water cooled, it got heavier, and returned to the fish tanks. Filtered water went back outside, returning parallel to the feed, and into the tank halfway up. Zeus had fitted it all up with isolation valves and emergency drains so they could just dump everything if they had to. After a few weeks of running the water maker, they were so good at conserving the resource, they turned it off. If they needed more, they could just turn it on again.
They had hot showers. They had abundance
. It had been an extraordinarily hard road. The last, long run out onto the plains to pick up the two most distant cylinders had been the worst, and also inexplicably the best. The mile after relentless mile of red dust was punctuated twice—going out and coming back—by the unique, unsettling experience of climbing into an unattached airlock and swapping out their life support. Frank hadn’t freaked out, because Zeus had been right outside, talking to him. What help Frank had been to Zeus was more difficult to ascertain.
They’d done it. All the way out to the lower slopes of Uranius Mons. Loaded up and brought them home. They hadn’t killed themselves or each other. It was a triumph. A record-breaking journey, even. Afterwards, they didn’t have any reason to do anything like that again, and their lives had shrunk back and now revolved around the base.
But they had food and air and heat and light and water and clean clothes and space to move around in and jobs to do. It almost didn’t feel like a prison, even though it still was.
The hot water tank was surrounded by another upturned drum, packed with more insulation to protect it from the weather. It was warm too, but nothing like the fierce heat of the vanes underneath. He checked the ventilation was free of windblown dust, scraping out what had accumulated with the edge of an improvised shovel—an access panel bolted on to a support strut.
The prevailing wind blew from a definite direction, west to east, so they knew where to park the buggies and set up the workshop. The solar farm was on the east side, to best catch the rising sun. It was someone’s job—usually Declan’s—to manually dust the panels three times during the day in order to maximize the power generation.
They had enough. Just. If they remembered to turn things off they weren’t using, and with the heat coming from the RTG, they could run the control panels and safety systems, the cameras and the air compressors. The big antenna outside didn’t take much to broadcast, but the tracking motors were two two-fifty watt beasts and powering them up needed advance warning.
They still tripped the circuit breakers from time to time. It wasn’t quite the scramble to get everything back on that it had been before.
Zeus was working on his steam engine. It still sounded ridiculous, but he was convinced he could get it to work. He had a big pile of parts, and time on his hands, when he wasn’t unblocking drains. Dee had more work, cataloging data and using the uplink to pass details of their ad hoc modifications back to XO. Declan spent his waking hours prowling the corridors, looking for things that consumed power and trying to sync the lights into a day-night cycle without affecting anything that happened in the greenhouse, which was where Zero lived, emerging only to eat, sleep and shit.
Frank’s work had settled into a series of tours, inside and outside. His constant companion was the nut runner, because the range of temperatures between midday and just before dawn was so extreme, the bolts they used to hold almost everything together had a tendency to slacken. That problem hadn’t been immediately apparent. Fixings that were rock-solid by day were barely finger-tight when the temperatures crept down to minus one hundred and fifty.
He maintained the buggies, too, every day making sure they worked, and using some of that time to go a little further afield than he might normally do. He knew he could be tracked, and he was consuming resources in the form of watts, and wear and tear on the tires. But no one—Brack, mainly—had told him he couldn’t.
Their overseer commuted backwards and forwards from the ship. The first time he’d done it, he’d walked the couple of miles to Santa Clara with only the most perfunctory of warnings, carrying only a locked metal case with him. He installed himself, not in the crew quarters, where there was plenty of room, but over in the medical bay, in what was purposed to be a private consulting room.
It had the only lockable door in the whole base. Frank wondered if that was by accident or design. Brack spent most of his time on the base either in the comms room with Dee, or one floor down in Control, doing something or other. Most of the time, the cons could forget about him—Declan assured them the cameras were there for fire detection, not keeping tabs on them. Frank wasn’t so sure.
But on occasions when they wanted to let off steam and bitch about Brack, and there was nowhere they could safely do that, they resorted to whispered side-by-side conversations while they were working. It was the best they could do. Otherwise, they’d have to all suit up, step outside and turn their microphones off. Which wouldn’t look suspicious at all.
It was why Frank liked driving up the Santa Clara. The sides of the lower valley were steep enough that he couldn’t exit onto the broad slopes of the volcano, and he couldn’t get those same panoramic views as he had done on the top of Long Beach. But if he climbed uphill for a couple of miles, the space to the south did open up, and he could see beyond the walls of the crater.
The base looked tiny, a small pale collection of rectangles, no bigger than those ranch-style houses he’d built out towards San Fernando, and covering less ground than the boneyard of empty cylinders and drums that they’d stacked, more or less together, the far side of the workshop. The ship was out of sight, across the Heights to the east, but there on the horizon was another volcano, rising from the plain like a pimple. He’d look at it some days, and believe it was further away than the twenty miles it was. Its height was almost the same as the peaks in the Sierras, but there it was, just popping out of the ground without foothills.
And sometimes the sky was almost blue. It made it—only for a moment—almost like home. But the thin, ice-white clouds, the fast-moving moons tearing overhead, the redness all around, soon broke into his daydreaming. He’d remember he was in a spacesuit, on Mars.
Other times, if he was lucky, he’d have a ringside seat on a delivery. Some ship would throw a package at the planet, and he’d catch sight of a bright spark halfway between the sand and the sun.
It would burn and flicker, pulsing like a firework, and soot and smoke would trail out behind, blown ragged by the high winds. There’d be a low booming noise, the sound of distant thunder, rolling across the landscape. Mostly, that would be all he’d hear and see. But twice he’d spotted the dark smudge of a parachute moments before it passed from sight. Still moving almost as fast as an object in freefall, but that was what it was: a huge, extended canopy, very far away.
The first time it had happened, he’d got excited. He’d thought that it had meant a delivery for them. A cargo rocket, either one of XO’s, or one of NASA’s.
But the times didn’t add up. The incoming ships would have left Earth before Frank and his crew had even arrived on Mars.
And on getting back to base, he found that they didn’t have a signal from it anyway. Someone else’s, then, descending onto the broad Tharsis plain. Brack had nixed space piracy, and eventually they’d just got used to it happening every week or so. Mars was a busy place all of a sudden.
Frank drove back down the valley and resumed his tasks. He parked up near the workshop, and before he plugged the fuel cell into the grid to recharge, he checked with Declan they had enough spare capacity to do that.
“How long does it need?”
Frank interrogated the console. “Couple of hours?”
“We’re not up to full batteries yet. I can give you an hour now, and an hour in the morning.”
“OK.” It wasn’t worth arguing about the when, as long as it was done. He climbed down and took the cable end out of the drum it was stored in—it was buried for most of its length, and came out through a hole in the bottom of the container—and slotted the end home. Lights changed on the console, telling him it was accepting charge, and he checked the clock to know what time he had to disconnect it. Not that Declan would let him forget. He recorded everything like that on his tablet, and set an alarm ahead of time.
He walked to the main airlock, now partially obscured from view by the combined Comms/Control hab, and knocked the dust from his feet against the metal steps. He went through the whole suit ritual, noting how dirty the floo
r of the connecting module was getting, and how the red, on contact with the moist air, turned from a coating of dust to a smeary layer of dirty grease.
Someone was supposed to deal with this, and he couldn’t remember who it was. Alice? Did they really have the doctor on cleaning duty? Maybe they did, assuming that doctoring wasn’t going to take up too much time. They’d have to rota this unpopular chore between them. Did they even have any specific cleaning materials? They didn’t even have toothpaste. Perhaps they needed to root around in the unopened crates that were stacked on the lower level of the medical hab.
He went to use the can, always preferring to sit and think for a minute than use the collector in his suit. Wearing overalls made it more difficult, having to shrug out of the top half before pushing them down to his ankles. The air in the crew quarters was warm now, thanks to the plumbing, though the seat was still chilly on first contact.
“Frank?” It was Declan.
“Goddammit, Declan. A moment, OK?”
“Relax, I’m not coming in or anything. Just wanted to know something.”
“Can’t this wait? A couple of minutes maybe?” No, of course not. Declan was just being his usual dickish self.
“Straightforward yes or no: did you check the fuel cell level on the buggy before you took it for a drive?”
Frank sighed. “I checked that it had enough juice.”
“Did you check the actual gas levels and log them?”
“No.”
“Can you do that in future?”
“Seriously?”
“Completely seriously.” Then Declan lowered his voice and pressed his head up against the screen. “Someone’s been using it other than you.”
“Brack comes and goes.”