by Nick Webb
Ladro eyed him skeptically, but asked the chief engineer, “can he do it? If you guide him over the comm?”
“I don’t see why not. He was the third man on Mars, after all. He should know his shit.”
“Second.”
“Excuse me?” said the engineer.
“Second man on Mars. But the first to die, apparently. What luck!” He laughed a little too loud, and started coughing when no one else joined in. “Well, shit. I guess I better go suit up.”
Two hours later
Frank cranked on the wrench, tightening one last gas fitting into place. “That’s it,” he said into his commlink. “How’s the flow?”
The chief engineer’s voice sounded over the speaker in his helmet. “No flow yet. Still not getting an accurate atmospheric composition over there. You’re either at ten percent methane, ninety percent methane, or, well, there could be no atmosphere at all. What do you read on your suit?”
Frank eyed the analogue pressure gauge on his forearm—luckily it was a pre-Interplanetary Reserve suit, so the damn thing still worked just fine. “I’m reading half an atmosphere. But no idea how much is methane, how much is nitrogen, and how much is hot air escaping from Interplanetary’s CEO’s hairy ass.” He grinned. He knew the conversation was being broadcast throughout the colony, and would be heard on Earth about six minutes later. The CEO would probably bust a gasket, but served the bastard right.
Whatever he did, Frank was minutes away from glory. No matter what happened when the flow turned back on. He’d repeated his little trick on habitation module twelve’s airlock as soon as he passed the threshold, the outer door had sealed, and he was out of sight of the engineering crew. The moment he stepped back into that thing and cycled the air, the inner airlock door would jam, permanently lock, and all the air in both the airlock and half of habitation module twelve would escape out into the near vacuum of Mar’s atmosphere.
“Ok,” said the engineer. “We’re going to start the flow. You’re either about to be able to breathe without your suit, or explode. Godspeed, Mr. Bickham.”
“Roger that.” He raised his voice, knowing that the entire colony was listening. That he was being recorded for history. “And if I don’t make it out of here, I just want every Martian in the sound of my voice to know that... that it was an honor serving with you. These past few months I’ve made wonderful friends, I’ve lived with you, loved you, and if I don’t come back from this, my only hope is that I’ve made your lives a little better. What can any man really hope for when he’s gone? Thank you. Frank out.”
He closed his eyes, waiting for the possible explosion. A minute passed. Two minutes. Then a voice. “Frank? You still there?”
“Yeah.”
“Good news. The air is cycled, and optimal oxygen flow restored, now from the Tycho Dome. Congratulations, sir! You’re not only alive, but saved everyone in Huygens dome.”
He heard a cheer from everyone in the room on the other side of the comm, but all he could think was, Damn, I guess I’ve got to do this the hard way.
“Roger that. Heading to airlock now.” He worked his way from the engineering alcove in habitation module twelve to the airlock, and before initiating the irreversible process that would jam the door and vent the whole module, he sat down to check his messages one last time. He’d sent one final note to his granddaughter, Ramona. Looked like she hadn’t replied yet, so he burned another minute rereading his message to her.
Sweetie,
I’m about to do something very dangerous to help the colony, and if I don’t come out of this I just wanted you to know I love you, and I’m proud of you. You’re a wonderful mom, and an amazing lawyer. Please give Sammy and Ted big kisses from me.
Ramona, you asked me, right before I got my assignment here back in November, what I wanted to be remembered for. I think by asking me that you were trying to get me to change my mind about coming here. You wanted me to stay with you and Sammy and Ted. I wanted that too. But I also wanted something more.
I want to matter. I want my existence to have mattered. For people to remember that I was here, and that I was here for a damn good reason. I want people to say, “Frank was here, and thank God he was.”
Doing this thing that I’m doing now is the best way I can think of to achieve that goal. And if it means I have to be the first man to die on Mars to achieve it, then so be it.
Goodbye, Sweetie.
Love, Grumpy.
He looked up at the airlock controls next to his seat. Everything was ready. If he delayed any longer the engineering team would begin to worry, and possibly suspect something.
History was waiting for him.
A chirp from his handset made him jump. He looked down, expecting to see a message from Ramona, but instead it was a call from someone in the colony.
It was the kid. Wix.
Tentatively, he accepted the call. “Hello?”
“Grumpy? Where are you?”
“I’m, ah... I’m in habitation module twelve, kid. Your old home.”
“You said you’d come back today. Are you still coming?”
“Working on it, kid.”
He thought he heard a little sniffle on the other end. “I miss you, Grumpy. You didn’t come yesterday, either. Doc said you were in the hospital to give me blood, but you left right away without a visit. And then when you didn’t come today, I thought you’d never come back. I... I...” He paused, then lowered his voice. “Grumpy, can I tell you a secret?”
“Shoot, kid.”
He whispered. “It made me cry. Please don’t tell any of the other boys that I cried. It would be catatrophic.”
“Catatrophic? Don’t you mean catastr—”
“Yes, Grumpy. Catatrophic. Promise not to tell?”
Frank bit his lip. He stood up, and fingered the controls to the airlock.
Shit.
His handset beeped again. It was Ramona.
You matter to us, Grumpy. To a lot of people.
We love you very much. Do what you have to do.
Love, Ramona
“Grumpy? Promise?” said Wix.
Frank’s hand trembled over the controls. History was waiting. His destiny was literally at his fingertips.
He would matter.
“I ... I—” he began, before adding, “aw, sh—” He stopped himself.
“Shamwow? I still think you made that up.”
Frank chuckled. “Ok. I admit it. I made it up. I was going to say shit.”
Wixam lowered his voice to a mocking, sarcastic tone. “No shit, Grumpy.”
Frank lost it, convulsing in laughter. “Kid? Are you sure you’re six? Fine. Fine. I promise. No one will ever know you cried when I didn’t come visit you. My lips are sealed. Forever.”
“Forever? Why? Are you dying?”
Frank laughed again. “Not today, kid. Then I wouldn’t be able to visit you. How’s five o’clock sound?”
Two and a half months after that
Frank sipped his coffee, and offered the other cup to the other man as he sat down at the table on Bickam Boulevard. “Will Doc Pratt let you drink it?”
“Do I care what he says?” said Ed Smith, an oxygen tube suspended below his nose.
“Good point.” He turned to his other companion. “How’s that hot chocolate?”
“Tastes like shamwow,” said Wixam Hanuman.
“Well you’re late for school anyway. Get.” Frank waved a hand, shooing the kid away. Wix gulped the rest of it down, stuck out his tongue at Frank, and trotted off down the street.
“Turn it up, will you? I want to hear if everyone made it.” Ed motioned up to the TV, which was playing the CNN feed.
Frank waved a hand and said, “volume up.”
“—and ongoing coverage of the Mars shuttle crash. With me now is the media relations officer for Interplanetary Reserve with an update.” The new anchor on the screen turned to a mousy man in a crisp suit seated next to h
im.
“Thank you, Jim.” The mousy man turned to the camera. “I’m afraid we have bad news to add to the good news I delivered earlier. While it is true that the shuttle made a miraculous crash landing and remained mostly intact, it is with heavy heart that I announce that there was, in fact, one fatality. Jerry H. Su, flight engineer on the shuttle’s voyage, sustained life-threatening injuries during the crash, and, unfortunately, did not make it. I’ve spoken with the American President, and he will posthumously be awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom. The French President will award him the legion of—”
“Well ain’t that something,” said Smith. “Wasn’t he...?”
“Yeah.”
“And now he’s...?”
“Yeah.”
Ed shook his head, incredulously, the oxygen tube wagging back and forth. “The first man to walk on Mars, and now the first man to die on Mars. Funny how things work. He comes all that way, lives a life like that, all to die in a fiery crash for nothing. Poor guy. I guess he’ll be in the history books, or something.”
“Or something,” Frank repeated, glumly.
It seemed Ed was intent on watching the broadcast, but Frank had no such interest. Luckily, he noticed the notebook lying on the table.
“Shit. Wix left his schoolbook. Enjoy your coffee, Ed,” he said, picking the pad up and starting off down Bickam Boulevard, heading towards the school.
He ran into someone carrying a bag of ‘just-add-water’ meals, and they spilled all over the sidewalk.
“Mrs. Doughby! I’m terribly, terribly sorry!” He stooped to pick them up. She joined him.
“Mr. Bickham! Not a problem!” She stuffed a few packages into the bag, and noticed Wix’s notebook. “Heading to school?”
“Yep. Wixam Hanuman left his schoolwork at my table.”
“Then you let me handle this mess. School’s starting in less than a minute—if you don’t get moving you’ll be late.”
Frank glanced at his watch. “Naw. I’ve got all the time in the world.” He lowered his voice. “Plus, just between you and me, his teacher owes me one for that class presentation I gave last week. Nailed it.”
“Well, in that case...” She trailed off, kneeling down to reach for a few that had strayed onto the street.
He stuffed the last package into her bag, and helped her up. “So? How’s work going?”
Q&A with Nick Webb
Where did this story come from?
Someday, someone will be the very first human to die on another planet. I don’t know if that makes me morbid or not, but it’s fascinating to think about. Will they die there on a failed exploration mission? Or will they die there because they live there, and, well, dying is just what regular people *do*. I hope to be able to see that day, when living on another planet is so normal for people, that imagining people dying there feels entirely natural, because then we’ll know we’ve finally arrived as a multi-planetary civilization.
Do you want to die on another planet?
No! I won’t even get in an airplane!
Really?
I hate flying. But if space travel ever gets safe enough, with hundreds of safe launches per day, and as long as I’m over eighty or so and lived a full life, then I’d absolutely like to go to another planet.
So are you Frank Bickham, your protagonist? He’s an old guy who’s lived a full life, and now wants to go live on another planet in retirement....
There might be a little Frank Bickham in me. Not that I’d feel compelled to have to be “the first” at something, like Frank is, but ever since I grew up watching Captain Picard vacation on Riisa, I knew I wanted to get to another world. Someday. When it’s safe. And cheap.
Where can readers find you, and learn more about your books?
My website, for one: nickwebbwrites.com
Or, I’m active on Facebook: facebook.com/authornickwebb
Last Pursuit
by Piers Platt
ONE MORE, DESH thought. Forty-nine kills completed. Just one more, and then you’re out. But no sooner had the thought formed than a mission update notification appeared in his heads-up display, and he felt a pit form in his stomach, cold dread washing over him. Don’t get worked up yet. It could be a routine update. He forced himself to ignore the notification, and instead checked his ship’s arrival time on his datascroll. Five minutes to deceleration.
Desh loathed interstellar travel, from the queasy feeling of the faster-than-light accelerations, to the interminable waiting aboard the transports. In an effort to encourage travel, the spaceliners featured exercise rooms and entertainment centers whose use could be purchased for a nominal fee, but a week or more of traveling through the vacuum of deep space drove most passengers slightly insane regardless of the activities available. For Desh, it just meant more idle time to spend fretting about the mission, worrying the details like a sore tooth. And more time trying to forget the anguished faces of his victims. So he sighed with relief when the arrival announcement flashed on the bulkhead displays, and he quickly made his way to his cabin to finish packing his gear.
At one time in his career, arrival announcements had triggered an adrenaline rush in anticipation of the mission, but all he felt today was exhaustion.
Exhaustion is acceptable, given the circumstances, Desh reasoned. But it’s still a sign of weakness. His target had canceled his business trip, but Desh had already been en route to the man’s intended destination, and he had wasted nearly two weeks traveling to the wrong planet as a result. Two weeks stuck on spaceliners, with nothing to do but watch the mission clock count down.
But that’s not why I’m tired.
He touched the metal bracelet on his right wrist, his finger sliding over the smooth surface, coming to rest on the button in the center. As he pressed it, a three-dimensional hologram appeared over the bracelet, a spinning golden number 1.
My first kill, fresh out of Training. Strangling a loan shark in his office above a laundromat.
As Desh watched, the numbers changed, counting upwards with increasing speed.
Fourteen: poisoning a minor government functionary on Mars.
Thirty-two: faking the suicide of an unfaithful husband.
Each of his targets’ faces clawed up out of his memory in turn, their eyes full of fear, anger, desperation. And then the numbers stopped, and he watched as the ‘49’ spun slowly, and then winked out. Number fifty would soon have a face, too, but for Desh, the number meant only one thing.
Freedom.
Over the long, tense years, the meaning of those numbers had changed so much. Desh had signed his contract with the Guild to vault his way out of poverty and into the privileged class, like most guildsmen. The Guild’s famous “Fifty for Fifty” deal was the same for each of them: if he completed fifty missions, he would be entitled to fifty percent of the commissions he had earned. He couldn’t choose his missions, and he couldn’t fail to complete those he was assigned—success, or death while trying, were the only acceptable outcomes. Guild training was brutally direct on this matter; Desh still remembered the video they had used to illustrate their point, in which several masked men demonstrated just how long a guildsman who tried to break his contract could be made to suffer before dying. Recalling the images, Desh shuddered involuntarily. The sizable fortune that would soon be deposited to his account was of only marginal interest to Desh; what mattered far more was bringing an end to the missions, the ceaseless trips through the void, and the pleading, desperate faces he found waiting for him with each new assignment.
Desh opened his datascroll and accessed the mission brief for the hundredth time, but instead of reading, he watched the ship’s external footage on his cabin’s viewscreen. Silently, the spaceliner coasted through the navigational satellites, whose yellow lights winked to show the path toward Aleppo. His mission brief stated that the planet’s gravity was slightly less than that of Earth, which of course allowed them to excel at the industrial work Aleppo had bec
ome known for. Even a five percent gravity drop could yield significantly higher profit margins, he knew, with less stress on heavy machinery and less fuel to boost the finished products into orbit. Desh shook his head, and forced his gaze away from the viewscreen, concentrating on the mission brief.
His target was an industrial baron who owned several interplanetary conglomerates, and whose draconian employment practices had upset the local unions. The man was wealthy enough that he might have been able to live on Earth, but having been born on Aleppo, he had decided to call it home. Given the barren terrain appearing on his viewscreen, Desh failed to see its appeal entirely. The colonists had begun atmospheric introduction, but they were still decades away from making the atmosphere breathable, and since most of the world’s industrial plants belched out toxic gases anyway, nobody was in a particular hurry. A rocky planet, rich in ore deposits but utterly devoid of indigenous life, Aleppo’s chief terrain feature was a massive canyon nearly encircling the equator, as if a giant claw had torn the planet’s crust. It was in this canyon that the colonists had built their settlements, choosing to remain below ground and inconspicuous in case the planet hid any nasty surprises the early explorers had failed to document. Desh planned to follow their example.
The ship slowed again in final approach, and Desh felt the stabilizers and maneuvering rockets firing. He picked up his backpack and headed for the ship’s docking tubes. The docking process was completed in less than ten minutes, and Desh was one of the first passengers off. Once onto the planet’s orbiting transfer station, he followed the signs for the planetary shuttle terminal.
In the terminal, Desh walked past the mass transit shuttles and found the private shuttle area. Several pilots offered Desh their services, but a slight man kneeling and tightening his boot cords caught Desh’s attention. That’s the signal. One benefit of being in the Guild—though the downsides were many—was that Desh had never been disappointed with the quality of personnel hired to support his missions. The pilot straightened as Desh approached, motioning toward his shuttle and offering to shoulder the bag for him. Desh declined, and the man shrugged.