by S. J. Morden
He’d decided. He was going to be Brack and get his ride home.
4
[Internal memo: Mars Base One Mission Control to Bruno Tiller 11/12/2048 (transcribed from paper-only copy)]
We have been unable to contact MBO now for fifty-six [56] hours. MBO still appears undamaged, as are all other components. No change in the external environment of MBO or the DV has been recorded since 11/11/2048.
The reason for the communications silence, and the identity of Subject #1, remains entirely speculative. We have insufficient data to reach any conclusions. Activity inside MBO is consistent with the continued function of automatic systems, but does not preclude the presence of one or more personnel. Regrettably, the likelihood of LOC is now high. Full LOC contingency measures should be implemented as a matter of urgency.
[transcript ends]
Outside. The faint sun had just crested the eastern wall of the crater, and the solar panels were catching the first weak rays. It was cold—Frank’s suit was registering an external temperature of minus ninety, and there was white frost covering the ground. As the feeble sun struck it, it smoked and hung low over the rocks as fog that swirled around his ankles as he made his way over from the cross-hab to the satellite dish.
His footsteps were all but silent. He could feel the crunch of frozen soil beneath his boots, but the sound didn’t travel. The only noise was his own breathing, and the faint hum of the circulating fans.
He inspected the satellite dish’s trip switches. He’d flipped them all off to stop Brack from communicating with Earth. It was time for him to turn them back on. He lifted the cover and snapped his thumb against them, one at a time, giving a few seconds between each one to make sure a power surge wasn’t going to take them all down again.
“Nice and easy,” said Declan. He was back in his spacesuit, but his faceplate was still broken, his eye still missing, his cheek still shattered.
“I’m doing it, I’m doing it. It’s my turn to worry about the power now.”
Not that it was the transmitter itself that ate up the watts, but the dish motors used to align it. Two-fifty each: enough to spike the system and turn random shit off.
He flipped the last switch and watched as the dish jerked into life, slowly and silently, and turned from pointing almost due west to face the sky. He admired his work for a moment, looking up at the almost-black zenith and the peanut-shaped moon caught mid-flight, skipping from horizon to horizon like a thrown stone.
In around ten minutes, XO would realize that they had a connection. It was time Frank needed to prepare himself. He’d decided on his tactics, and he retained the right to hit the off button if it looked like they were going to try and kill him.
He went back in through the main airlock, and stowed his suit. He’d spent the last few days walking around the base naked, but for this, he felt he should get dressed. His own blue overalls were still half black with blood: however many times he’d washed them, he couldn’t get the stains out. In the end, he’d decided that it didn’t matter. Brack had spares, and though he was not as tall as Frank, Frank was slighter. He’d tried one on for size: the cuffs were short of both his ankles and his wrists, and though it had been roomy for its previous owner, for him it was a little tight between neck and crotch. But the fit wasn’t as terrible as he’d anticipated, which was good because he’d find the state of his own clothing difficult to explain to NASA. He’d keep them for best, and wear his old ones for now.
He sat at the kitchen table, a scuba mask and oxygen tank in front of him, along with a surgical glove, weakly inflated and knotted at the wrist. That was his early warning sign of decompression, something that XO couldn’t possibly know about, let alone hack. In front of everything was his tablet—Brack’s tablet—OK, it was his tablet now. He read the Phase three summary again, trying to get his mind around what the job genuinely involved. It was a lot of work, and that was without the extra cleaning now needed. His own, old tablet would have to get junked, or wiped at the very least. That would be in the small print somewhere, as this was just an overview.
Three months, though, to do everything before NASA were due. Three months was a tight time-scale, but there wasn’t anything he could do to change that. They were on their way: they were almost here, even, having left six months before in a big transit ship. A proper spaceship, too, no sleep tanks. Too risky to use on real astronauts: they were only suitable for disposable crew like him.
The base computer synced to the orbiting satellite. Messages pinged up on his screen. He was live.
There was the response to Brack’s last message, and then several more: initially at the rate of one every hour or so, dwindling as earlier communications had gone ignored to a routine one every four hours.
He’d prepared his own message, one that XO weren’t going to be expecting. He moved it from the drafts column and read it through again. He’d spent half the night fashioning it, writing and deleting, pecking out new combinations of words with two fingers.
“This is Franklin Kittridge. From the start, let’s get one thing absolutely straight. I will destroy this base and everything in it if you try anything. Any hostile act, anything that looks like sabotage, against me or the base’s systems, and I’ll tear this place apart. No clean-up. Nothing. I’ll just leave it all for the next people to find, and you can explain everything to them.”
That should wake them up.
“I know what you did. I know about the robots. I know about bringing us here in place of them, and I know about killing us all off. If you try and deny any of this, you might just make me mad enough to want to trash the base anyway. So don’t. I’ve got all the Phase 3 docs.”
He hadn’t read them all yet, but he had read enough of them to form an opinion. That wasn’t a lie.
“I’m prepared, despite everything, to cut a deal with you. I have something you want—your multi-billion-dollar base, and your secrets. You have something I want—my freedom and a lift home. I think that’s more than fair, since you’ll be getting more out of this than I will. If this goes south, a lot of you reading this message will end up on death row. And you know it.
“So this is what I’m willing to do for you. I’m willing to carry out your Phase 3. I’ll clean up the base, look after it like you were expecting Brack to, and wait for the NASA people to arrive. When they do, I’ll pretend to be Brack, and keep things running smoothly. I’m not looking to rock the boat.”
That was the bait. Now to extract his price.
“I don’t know what you promised Brack, but I’m guessing it’s a suitcase full of dollar bills and a lifetime of silence. I’ll take that, and a commutation: time served will do. I’m not looking for parole, or early release on license. I want to be done with it. A clean start. Obviously, I get Brack’s place for the flight home. I’ll play along with the deception as long as you do. When I get back to Earth, you give me my money and my paperwork, and that’s it: that’s the only contact I want or need from you. You leave me alone after that.”
All that was left was the boilerplate, because he was certain XO wouldn’t make it this far without figuring out that he was vulnerable in one particular area.
“One last thing. If you threaten, attempt to threaten, or in any way mention, my family in these negotiations, I will burn this base to the ground, without hesitation or thought about myself. I hope that’s really clear, because I’ll do it, and I need you to know that. This deal is between you and me and it doesn’t involve anyone else.”
It was simple—plain, almost—but unambiguous and defiant. It wasn’t going to leave them in any doubt about what he wanted and what he’d do if he didn’t get it.
“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere in a hurry, no thanks to you. But don’t take too long, because I’m not lifting a finger to help you until we come to an agreement we can both stick to.”
That was about as good as it was going to get. He took a deep breath, and pressed send.
XO weren’t g
oing to get it for ten minutes. Then there’d be the time it took for the operators at the other end of the interplanetary phone line to pass the message up the corporate ladder until it reached someone who could actually make a decision.
Part of him wanted to be a fly on the wall for that. And part of him was glad he wouldn’t be there, because if their reaction wasn’t one of begging his forgiveness for the terrible things they’d done, he wasn’t certain what he’d do.
He’d started the process. He wasn’t going to sit around and wait for an answer, because he had chores. He checked the list of things he had to do in the greenhouse: it was long, and it was detailed. He could follow instructions, though, if he could work out what everything was.
After some digging, he’d discovered the main computer had sufficient documentation on the hydroponics: there were even pictures, which were incredibly useful. And it didn’t go into the theory, either: he didn’t need to know about the whys and wherefores of crop management. All he needed was a comprehensive, if simplistic, set of instructions on how to grow stuff to eat on Mars.
Whoever had put this all together had known their shit, even if they were colluding with murdering bastards.
He took the tablet and gave himself another tour of the greenhouse. With care, he could identify the juvenile plants by the shape of their leaves, rather than relying on the obvious fruit they might yield in maturity. He realized that if all the stuff that Zero had planted kept on growing, he’d literally be drowning in food. There were no pests. No diseases. The nutrients delivered to each plant or type of plant were individually tailored to maximize the harvest.
He could literally throw half the greenhouse out of the airlock, and still have too much.
He read further, and discovered that he needed to reserve seeds off some, for growing on. Other plants would fruit continually, and he had to keep them growing, even if he wasn’t going to consume the produce. The cereals: those he could harvest in a conventional manner, resow the seed, and build up stocks of grain—rice and wheat, maize and oats. That’d be especially important for him, since he’d still not been able to kill and eat a fish, though God knows he’d tried.
The paradox was that he was going to have to cull them anyway—the tilapia relied on the nutrient-rich waste water to make what was essentially pond scum, which they then ate. Fewer plants meant less water. He wasn’t looking forward to that moment.
But for balance, if he put half the area he was going to cultivate into cereals, and then kept the other half for salads, herbs, pulses, and soft fruit, then he’d probably do OK. It was subverting the Phase three plan slightly, but he ought to be able to make it work. Even if he’d never looked after so much as a pot plant before. Sure, he’d served his time cutting lawns, but that was purely mechanical. After the hard landscaping, he’d left the planting schemes to the professionals.
He examined the rice carefully. Each individual plant was confined to its own hole in the tray, and water seeped underneath, continually washing the roots in a mineral-rich soup. The minerals had all been brought from Earth in highly concentrated forms, in sealed containers baldly labeled A, B and C. Each batch of plants needed different proportions of each of the three mixed into their water hoppers, and servo-controlled syringes pushed out the concentrate according to timers.
Some of the syringes were nearly empty. He’d taken his eye off the ball for too long. It was time to get serious about survival.
He needed to identify what he could turn off now, and what he needed to keep going. The simplest choices first: the cereals stayed, the groundnuts stayed, the soft fruit—freeze-drying, why the hell hadn’t he thought of that before?—stayed. Start with the salad stuff: half of that could go now, but he needed to make sure that he caught some in all stages of maturity.
Each tray had a valve that controlled the flow of water into the hopper. He turned those he’d identified off, knowing that it’d be some time before the hoppers emptied. He could correct, for a while, any mistakes he made.
Yes, he’d be sad to see the plants shrivel and die. Zero’s hard work, consigned to… he hadn’t given much thought to what he was going to do with it. Stick it in the airlock, let the water boil out, and then bag the remains? There might be something in Phase three about that.
His tablet pinged at him. A response at last. But when he opened the app and looked, he was disappointed.
“Can you confirm the status of Lance Brack.”
Brack had a first name. Of course he did. Probably a middle name too. But was that all they wanted? He supposed that he hadn’t actually said what had happened to the XO man, though surely they must have guessed. Frank sat himself in the greenhouse chair, and considered how candid his response should be. He balanced the tablet on his knees and pecked out:
“He’s dead. He shot me, and some time later, I managed to stab him to death with a scalpel. He bled out on the floor of Comms. I wrapped his body in parachute cloth and I put him outside, along with Zero and Declan, next to the base. If you want photographs I can probably do that, but there doesn’t seem much point: you should be able to see that anyway. If he’d managed to kill me as he was supposed to, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
He tapped send.
He’d read some of the earlier messages, and one word stood out: chimps. Brack had called him—had called them all—that, while he’d been kicking Zero’s body. That was how he referred to them throughout. Chimps. He’d seethed for a while, and then he’d calmed down. He now had a plan. He needed to follow it.
There’d be no response for another half-hour. Chimps. He gritted his teeth and went back to work.
He took out a lot of the salad—there was only so many leaves he could eat, and they weren’t particularly high in calories anyway. The herbs he kept some of, knowing that he could dry what died and use them like that. The gourds and squashes, the zucchini and peppers, were prolific fruiters, and they wouldn’t keep. He left in a couple of those at each stage and wiped out the rest.
The space he’d make could be used for more energy-dense crops. The potatoes in their barrels of de-chlorated Martian gravel seemed to be doing well. That was one thing at least that movie had got right. He could expand the nuts and the cereals, and divert some of the water resources to them. Nut oil. He might be able to make fries. Then again, any oil hot enough to cook a potato was going to be hot enough to set off the fire alarms.
He’d probably done enough for now. What he really wanted to do was try and freeze-dry a strawberry.
He picked one of the reddest ones, put it in a small tray, and slid it into the airlock at the back of the greenhouse. Obviously, he couldn’t be doing this on single fruits often, because he’d run out of electricity to power the air pumps, but this was just an experiment. He looked through the window in the door and started pumping the chamber down.
The berry started to smoke and shrink, and it continued to do so until it was the size of a grape. It sat on the tray, small and red and wrinkled. Frank let the air back in, and retrieved the fruit.
It was like rubber, slightly yielding, like a superball. He licked it, and it tasted of strawberries. He didn’t know why he was surprised by that. He gnawed at it, and got intense strawberry flavors. The middle was still soft and undehydrated. Maybe slice it next time, and let the vacuum reach all the parts. But for a first attempt, it wasn’t bad, and even though he didn’t know how they’d keep inside, he could literally just store them outside in some of the unused cargo drums until he needed them. That might even be better, because it was cold outside, and if he put the drums into the area of shade cast by the curved hab, they wouldn’t heat up during the day either.
The tablet pinged again, and he went to see what XO had to say this time.
“Can you confirm your status? Your medical read-out is offline.”
Well, they weren’t going to win any awards for their bedside manner, that was for certain. They were as bad as Alice had been.
So, how w
as he doing? His arm, where Brack had shot him, seemed to be healing over well enough. The jelly-like plug had solidified into a dark, knotted mass that caused him discomfort only when he used that muscle. He’d cleaned it that morning, wiping away the crusty ooze that leaked from it, and unscientifically sniffing at it to see if it was infected. But the skin around it, though bruised, seemed not to be inflamed or hot to the touch. His chest, where he’d cut out the medical monitor that had been spying on him since he’d been fitted with it, was a bit more weepy, and the edges of the wound were puckered and replete with beads of ruby-red scabs. But it did appear to be healing up too.
It wouldn’t kill him. Not today, at least.
And the howling, existential terror at being all alone on Mars, that manifested itself as a sudden tightness across his ribs, so constricting that he couldn’t breathe, seemed to have lessened now he was actually talking to someone, even if that someone had wanted him dead, and probably still did. Strange how things worked out.
The message header told him it was twelfth of November 2048. Three months, give or take a couple of weeks, was between the beginning and end of February. February 2049. They had reckoned on Brack clearing up in that time, and it wasn’t as if they had spare astronauts up their sleeve.
“I’m well enough to carry out Phase 3 if that’s what you’re asking.”
He tapped the screen to send the message, and went back to work.
He picked the herb leaves until the plants were nothing but stalks, and arranged them on a single tray in separate, loose piles, according to type. He shoved those through the airlock too, and watched them turn dry and brittle.