by S. J. Morden
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.
24
[Internal memo: Project Sparta team to Bruno Tiller 6/21/2038 (transcribed from paper-only copy)]
Thank you for your input regarding the earlier memo. We have now exhausted all existing avenues, which leaves us with more choices, but also more problems. It is clear that you see the timescale as unalterable. There are minimum requirements NASA require you to meet in terms of the base: it’s possible that we can finesse the delivery of those requirements, in that you will supply everything the contract states, but not in the contracted manner.
I have a proposal to put to you, and I think it would be best done in person. Perhaps you could suggest ‘neutral ground’ for this conversation.
Brack eventually did his thing of taking the body away. Frank wrapped Dee in parachute cloth, and carried him to the main airlock. What happened to him after that, he didn’t want to see.
The body was still wet. The water would boil out of it as it had done out of Zeus. By the time Brack reached the ship, there’d be a dried husk of a man to bury in the cold Martian soil, lined up next to three others.
How Dee had died was as straightforward as how Zeus had died. Zeus should have been able to get his suit into the airlock with him when he realized that the workshop was depressurizing. Dee should have been able to get out of Comms/Control before suffocating on the CO2 extinguishers. Neither of them had acted in the obvious way that would have saved their lives.
Had they been doped? It was a possibility. Something in the water? Not the communal water, but something individual, like their spacesuits? Not enough to kill, but enough to make someone too weak to escape whatever fatal scenario the killer had constructed. How was he ever going to prove that? He was now at the point of distrusting not just everyone, but everything. Frank was still in his suit. The air in the habs wouldn’t be replenished for another few hours, and it was either his suit, or in the greenhouse with Zero. And he wanted to be alone. Frank had made sure that Zero’s suit was inside with him, already loaded up with a full life-support pack. Declan was somewhere else in the base.
Frank went back to worrying at the problem. He couldn’t sit down in a regular chair, so he leaned against the door of Comms and tried his hardest to look dispassionately around again, walking himself through the last few seconds of Dee’s life. Answer the radio, twist in the seat, tab up the search screen.
Absolutely nothing that would have involved a power surge or a flashover. Frank walked around the console and arrived back at the door.
The fire alarm sounds. Jump up so quickly the chair spins away across the floor. Run to the door.
This was where Frank didn’t get it. The door, the way out, was right there. Why hadn’t Dee taken it? Why had he—
Frank pushed the door shut.
The door had been shut when he’d found it. Goddammit, Zero.
Both he and Declan had been outside. Only Zero had been inside. If he’d tripped the fire alarm—how?—then had held the door shut while Dee had scrabbled at it, only to realize he couldn’t get through. Then listened for the thump as Dee hit the floor. If Dee had shouted at Zero to open the door, he’d have been taking lungfuls of CO2-saturated air. It wouldn’t have taken more than a few seconds.
Then run back to the greenhouse and, with the pressure the same both sides, Zero wouldn’t even have to worry about cycling the airlock. Just open the door, step in, close it. He was home and dry.
Not Declan, then.
And the greenhouse had two airlocks. One into the hab, and one that led directly outside, to the back of the base, where he could come and go as freely and unwatched as he wanted. All Zero had to do was collect his suit, as Frank had just done for him, and then re-rack it. He could have used any number of tools from the greenhouse to hold open the valves in the pump, and simply walked back to the greenhouse.
He knew his drugs. The black market prescription drugs, not just the street ones. Crap. That was it. That was the missing link. He was the only person who could have killed both Dee and Zeus.
But why? What was the point of it all? Frank knew why he’d killed: love, the best, purest motive of all. But Zero? Jealousy? Rage? It couldn’t be money or sex, because there wasn’t any money, and as far as he could tell, any sex either. The walls were thin. They could hear each other breathing at night, let alone anything else going on. That left revenge, but Frank couldn’t see that either.
In order to save the rest of them, he’d have to tell Brack. What Brack was going to do with the information was up to him, even though Frank knew what would happen.
Brack would have to make a decision: if that ended up with Zero being kicked out of an airlock without his suit, it’d be just Frank and Declan running the base. How was that supposed to work? Neither of them knew how the greenhouse functioned. At this point, Zero was keeping them all alive even while he was killing them off.
Frank opened the door again, and Declan was standing right there. Startled, Frank raised his hands to ward off an attack that was never going
to come, and a moment later, with his arms still up defensively, he felt like a fool.
His shoulders sagged and he stepped aside from the door. Declan edged in, and they stared at each other for a while, saying nothing, only searching each other’s expressions for any clue as to what to do next.
Frank turned off his microphone, and waited for Declan to do the same.
“What’s going on, Frank?”
“Trying to work out who killed Dee and Zeus.”
They didn’t need to touch helmets. There was plenty of atmosphere for their voices to carry through. But it was hard to break the habit.
“You think it was Zero,” said Declan.
“It couldn’t have been you. It couldn’t have been me. We don’t have a lot of suspects left after that.”
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he just wants to live alone on Mars, grow his crops, and feed his fish. Makes as much sense as anything else.”
“A couple of things have been bothering me,” said Declan.
“Just a couple?”
“Shut the fuck up, Frank, and listen. Alice.”
“Alice killed herself. Most likely because she could see us starving to death.”
Declan separated contact, and walked around the console, leaning his hands on the desktop. “Did she?”
“There were pills in her hand.”
“Were there any in her mouth?”
“I … I didn’t look. But there were pills, and there was water, and she was dead, Declan. I’m not a cop, but what other answer are you looking for?”
“You found her, right?”
“You were there. I climbed up the ladder in front of you.”
“I was there. I wasn’t there when Marcy died, though.”
“What the fuck, Declan? What the actual fuck? What are you trying to say?”
“Marcy died. You were with her. Alice died. You found her. Zeus died. You opened the airlock door on him. Dee died. First on the scene again. Are you not spotting a pattern here? You think no one else has noticed, Frank? Maybe they haven’t. Maybe Zero’s too stupid, and I’m pretty certain Captain Brack isn’t the sharpest knife in the block, otherwise he wouldn’t be here with us deadbeats. But I’ve noticed. I’ve been watching you for a while now.”