Martian Dictator

by Øyvind Harding

  “Roger, you don’t understand. You saw what happened last night, what we all did. We did it so that we could survive, and to survive I need to know when we can expect a harvest. But I need the new figures from you now so that I can calculate how much, or rather how little food each of us can be expected to live on until the crops are ready. You have two days; can you do it?” She slowed as they approached the door to the staging room. She stopped altogether a few paces before she reached it and seemed to steel herself.

  “Yeah, I can get you the numbers. I just want them to be as accurate as possible before I turn them over to you.” Or rather, he’d have some numbers. He was good at imagining things, and she would never know if he just did a rough estimate. He could always claim that the resowing had claimed a greater portion of the crop than he had first thought. His special crop consumed a small portion of nutrition and water that he could not account for, and he would fight for those babies with his life if he had to. He had to protect his most valued plants, after all. He smiled as he imagined a freshly brewed cup of coffee and a premium joint in his hand. His smile died as he realized where they were and why they were there. “Is this where they keep, you know, him?”

  Anna swallowed and hunched her shoulders. “Yes, this is where they keep our unfortunate captain. Although after yesterday I find it harder and harder to think of him as a person, even a dead one. It’s almost as if my mind blanks out the reality of it.”

  The door opened and Nadia poked her head out. “There you are, come on in, we’re just about ready.”

  Anna and Roger looked at each other, seemed to reach an unspoken agreement, and entered the room.

  ◆◆◆

  I put the cleaver down just as Anna and Roger entered the room. It had been messy work; my arms and shoulders ached, and I was covered from top to bottom in spatters of blood. The captain, or what remained of him, was stacked neatly on one side of the table, cut into manageable chunks. His intestines were in a large bag beside the table with the heart, kidney, liver, and brain in separate bowls adjoining the heap of meat. All in all, I had never in my life seen a more macabre sight, and yet it was a promise of better times. All that was needed was the will to do the things necessary to reach those greener pastures.

  “Anna and Roger, I need you to find a couple of guys from the crew that you can trust, and cut all the meat from the bones. Separate it all in piles of pure meat, bones, leftovers, and waste. Be sure that you don’t waste a single protein while doing it. Anna, you are the only one I trust to do this right and to take care of all the details. When you’re done, take it all to airlock number three, pump out the atmosphere and let it freeze. Put up an alert on the com system that that airlock is now converted into a freezer, put a lock on it, and mark the door so that nobody inadvertently uses it.” I handed Anna my knife, handle first, and began unzipping my blood-soaked sweater.

  “Where are you going to be while we’re doing all of this, then?” Anna looked quizzically at me while trying on the weight of my knife.

  “I’ll be boiling soup from my clothes.”

  Roger fainted.

  19. The Greenery

  The small plant was twenty-three inches tall. The leaves were long, serrated, and grew on short green branches that sprouted from the central stump and held one hand of leaves each. At the top of the plant were a series of small lumps, barely formed, growing on thin stalks. It was the most beautiful sight Roger had ever seen, only rivalled by the smaller plant right beside it which already sported small green berries hugging tightly to the tiny branches. He had managed to salvage three of the cannabis plants and six of the coffee plants along with nearly all of the seedlings for the rest of the greenhouse, and paradise was growing merrily in his little garden.

  He bent down, put his nose right in between the tiny berries and inhaled deeply. And promptly nearly choked with disgust as the odor from the soil permeated his brain. The stench of manure was bad, but he found that the more time he spent in here, the less he noticed it. The rest of the crew certainly noticed it of course, especially those who were not on the roster for gardening and dung shipping. Luckily nearly all of the crew had to spend at least a couple of hours in here several times a week, so he was not entirely ostracized by the lingering smell his job carried with it. He heard the reason for the smell rumbling towards him from a few rows over and hurriedly pulled back and drew the ranks of tomato plants in front of his hidden treasure. Robbie Johanson turned the corner, his wheelbarrow riding heavily in front of him, laden with a huge pile of human waste.

  “Lunch is served! Today we’re having BLTs for starters, served with a light lager, and we’re topping the meal off with chicken à la Reinholts. Of course, it’s all fucking recycled, so you’ll just have to hold your nose and pretend you’re at the Ritz.” Robbie slammed a metal shovel into the pile of dung and grinned at Roger. The man irritated Roger to no end. He cursed vehemently at the strangest of times, had a bad sense of humor, and seemed to have taken a likening to gardening. Which was Roger’s job. Damned if he would let somebody else trespass on his territory, he had worked too hard to make it just the way he wanted it to be to let somebody else intrude.

  “Very funny Robbie, just get it over here so that I can properly distribute it.” Roger didn’t move, he didn’t want Robbie to catch even a hint of something amiss in the waist-high bushes behind him.

  “Shovel this huge pile of shit, you mean?” Robbie’s grin turned even wider.

  Roger felt his anger rise even though he knew the other man was just goading him on. “That’s enough, Johanson, that pile of shit that you so casually ferry around is the basis of our survival. Just leave it here and get back outside and fetch some more soil, we need at least three more layers of waste and dust before the plants reach eighty inches.”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” Robbie snapped up at attention, gave a mock salute, turned on his heel and marched off holding one arm stiff down his side and the other swinging nearly to the roof in perfect tandem with his straight-legged gait. Roger ground his teeth and watched him go. Sure, he was a pain in the ass, but he did pull his weight around the farm. Roger hated going outside, he always felt that the dust and the cold permeated his suit the second he left the airlocks. Thank god for the underground tunnel linking the habitat with the greenhouse. Roger rarely ventured outside these days, leaving the gathering of more soil to diggers such as Robbie. He really didn’t mind “shoveling shit” as Robbie so succinctly put it.

  Besides, every time he saw somebody wearing a pressure suit he had vivid visions of the captain twitching on the ground, feebly grasping at his torn shoulder before disappearing from view. He shuddered, buried the memory deep inside, and grabbed the shovel. Time to shovel some shit.

  ◆◆◆

  Anna finished packing the last of the five-pound bags of meat in the airlock, shut the door and turned the wheel beside it to close it all the way up. There was plenty of available space inside the room still, but at the moment the neatly stacked remains of the captain were all it contained. It had been surprisingly easy to rinse the bones. The half-frozen meat had come off cleanly and in huge chunks, and what she hadn’t been able to deal with herself, Johanson had helped her with. Roger had been utterly useless, having fainted before the work even started. She suspected that he had woken halfway through, but had feigned unconsciousness to avoid having to participate in the butchering. He took off for the greenhouse as soon as he was up and running again, barely taking the time to apologize for not helping out.

  She sighed and started to unbutton her coveralls. She had hoped that Roger could be an ally in the power struggle that was in the makings, but it seemed as though her initial impression had been correct. He would at best be a useful, but unknowing, member of her cadre. She balled up her outer clothes and packed them in the bag she had brought for the occasion. The Billionaire might have some disturbing notions about how to survive, but some of his ideas were at least worth following up on. She would boil soup from h
er clothes later on.

  Well then! Time to get to work. She turned from the newly designated deep freezer and started off down the corridor. The hallway she was walking down was very familiar to her. In fact, she had both been walking it for the past five months and free-floating through it during the nine months before that. She walked past a couple of scorch marks on the wall and remembered the electrical fire she had put out on that particular wall while still on the Wayfinder. While walking, she marveled at the simplicity of it all: two globes on the ship containing sleeping quarters for the crew, dropped down to the surface, cut in half and plopped down on the ground like an orange sliced by a cleaver. The only thing that annoyed her was how the outer rooms were effectively also cut in half since the walls slanted inwards at a steep angle. It would be better once their only salvaged digger finally managed to burrow deep enough so that the habitats could be pulled into ditches and buried.

  It was slow going with just the one digger operational, and so far, they only had a single dome safely under the soil. The crew took turns sleeping in that one, hopefully limiting the amount of radiation they soaked up while traipsing around the rest of their little village. They had nine domes in total: four that contained housing and offices; two that contained showers, toilets, and sinks; one that housed their greenhouse; two that held their gyms; and another fifteen small ones that were not yet a part of their little society. The contents of those fifteen last ones were still being catalogued, and the work was both dangerous and tedious. They were in various states of disrepair, some having bounce chutes that had failed to open properly and were thus broken or destroyed, some too far off to be of any use at the moment, and some were twisted piles of sharp metal that had poked holes in three suits so far.

  Luckily nobody had been killed while exploring these globes, but it had been touch-and-go with the last engineer who had a pressure leak and had been too far off to effectively evacuate. She was still in the designated pressure chamber, an airlock that had been fitted with enough emergency rations and oxygen flasks to last its occupants for weeks. So far, she had been there for five days, and she had two more to go before she could be let out. Anna checked on her several times a day through the peeping window in the door, and she seemed okay. Sudoku seemed to be a lifesaver on par with the rations.

  She turned the last corner and stood facing the airlock closest to the greenery. An archway about one and a half yards at the top, exactly the same in width. She knew that opposite the dome she was currently standing in was another half circle exactly like this one jutting out from the next globe over. The old access tubes between the globes. They were a nuisance now, being too small to traverse comfortably even in the low Martian gravity. But they were the quickest to cycle, had the best fail-safes, and were thus the default exit point for anybody who needed to enter or exit the domes. Anna sighed and picked one of the blue pressure suits hanging in neat rows by the door. They were relatively easy to don, but since she was alone she would have to wait for somebody to happen by before she could enter the airlock. Procedure demanded that her seals and seams be checked by a second person before she could enter, and that person had to be logged as well before the computer would let her cycle the lock.

  Too bad that the tunnels connecting the domes were unfinished; so far only one of the living quarters was connected to the farm. She zipped up the double seal, latched the helmet in place and fired up the environmental diagnostics on her wrist pad. When she got the all-clear, she powered down, and then ran the diagnostics again. And again. She knew she was being irrational, but irrationality in irrational circumstances was not irrationality, it was logic. Her obsessiveness had become her best friend and her best chance of survival. The light above the airlock suddenly switched from green to red, indicating that somebody had entered from the outside. Not a moment too soon, she hated wasting time, and she would have had to go off in search of somebody to double-check her if not for this encounter.

  She stepped back and waited for the airlock to cycle, and after thirty seconds of blinking red lights and little action, the double door slid up along the curve of the wall and disappeared. The feet appeared first, then the legs, then a pair of hands reached out, grabbed a handhold on either side, and Robbie Johansen pulled himself out and to his feet. She caught a hint of a grin as he twisted his helmet to remove it, and she smiled back. Robbie was more than okay in her book, a bit hard on some of the crew sometimes, using profanity, rudeness, and obtrusiveness to obscure a caring and gentle soul underneath. But they all coped with isolation in different ways, and his way did nothing to reduce his effectiveness. If anything, it improved, since he constantly had to back up his boisterous talk or be caught as being nothing more than the rest of them: scared shitless and way out of their depths. And speaking of shitless, by the look of his clothes she had a fair idea what his chore of the day had been.

  “Hey Robbie, anything happening?” This was the opening of their standing joke for the month.

  “Oh, you know, some shit caught fire, some shit sprang a leak and some shit just happened.” Robbie grinned in anticipation. Small pleasures had to be treasured, sometimes they were all you had.

  “Shit just happened? That doesn’t seem right, since. . .”

  “Shit does not just happen! Shit takes time, shit takes effort!” They chorused the line together and laughed at the absurdity of quoting movies they would never watch again.

  “Good to see you Robbie, I need somebody to check my seals.” She did a little turn and raised her arms, the spitting image of a ballerina in a space suit.

  “What, do you have seals spirited away in here? Where? In your quarters? I’ll club those buggers but good!”

  She lowered her arms and grinned at him through the faceplate. “Wouldn’t that be something, though? Seals, swimming lazily through an underground network, easily avoiding the club-wielding scuba divers chasing them.”

  “Yeah, and springing underwater rock traps, sealing, heh, the murdering maniacs in their little pockets of air, waiting for their suffering doom to descend upon them. Come here, let me check those mammals for you.”

  He grinned and deftly checked the zips and seals of her suit, finally giving her a thumbs-up. “You’re good to go, but go easy in the greenery when you get there. I just finished the daily shit run, and Roger might be in a foul mood.”

  “What did you do to him this time? Ruffle his tomatoes? Make booze out of the potatoes?” She smiled disarmingly, even though she knew for a fact that he did indeed have nefarious plans for the potatoes, if they ever had a surplus. And maybe even before that. She would have to keep an eye on Robbie come harvest time. Alcohol was well and good, but hardly a substitute for a full stomach.

  “Nah, I did nothing to his precious vegetables. I did, however, take a dump on the floor in the third aisle. If he follows his usual pattern, he won’t see it as he comes around the corner. Just be careful and mind your step if you’re in the vicinity before he gets there.” He gave her a quick grin and a wink and strolled off down the corridor.

  She smiled and shook her head as she got down on her knees, turned around, and put her back on the metallic skateboard-on-tracks that was ready for her. Silently she thanked the engineer that had designed the tubes; he, she or they had anticipated that nobody wanted to crawl on their hands and knees for fifteen yards before wrestling with a manual cycling wheel. She pulled herself in, turned the wheel on the wall, then slid open the next door to let herself into the midpoint of the tube. If there had been hard vacuum at any point in the tube, the doors would only have allowed her to travel inwards, and only if the computer greenlighted all of the seals on the doors. Two screens were lit on the wall next to her at the midpoint, one blinking red and reading “Cycle for hard vacuum,’ the other a steady green reading “Habitat 4.” She pressed her gloved hand flat on the red screen and held it there for five seconds.

  The blinking increased and the screen shifted to “You are about to enter hard vacuum. Please pres
s the green screen to enter habitat number 4, or press the red screen to unlock the outer hatch.” She pressed the red screen again and wondered what it would take to override the computer and get the whole process done in less time. If she had wanted to kill herself it didn’t really matter if she had to spend thirty seconds to cycle the airlock, but for everybody else it was time saved. Nobody would be in here unless they meant business, one way or the other. A thirty second wait would not change the mind of a suicidal person, but it might eventually make a rather substantial part of the crew feel the same way.

  She slid forward again, cycled the wheel, and entered the final lock. With another few twists of the wheels and a pop of released air she could pull herself out of the tube and on to her feet. On Mars. She was actually standing on Mars. Even after three months on the surface she still had to catch her breath when taking that first step out of the airlock. The view was mesmerizing: the red dust shifting under her feet, the rusty blue sky, so familiar and yet so alien. And the weirdest of all: the horizon that always seemed to be close enough to touch.

  She lifted her hand and peered through her fingers, trying to catch the last rays of the sun as it vanished beyond the horizon. There was precious little warmth to be had these days, both literally and figuratively. The captain’s death had hit them hard, all of them, and they needed something to boost their collective morale. Resolutely, she turned and headed over in the direction of the greenhouse. It was a swift five-minute walk, and she soon found herself in another world. A green world, remnants of a world they had left behind, and she would put up with every conceivable smell in the universe to get her daily fix of photosynthesis. From floor to ceiling in metal scaffolding, in neat rows with barely enough space to walk in between, were rows and rows of vegetables, fruits, and roots. It was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen, and it never ceased to take her breath away.