by S. J. Morden
He opened up the message function on the tablet, and pecked out with his fat finger: “Luisa. You should probably have mentioned the extra supplies earlier. You know that, right? Because that’s a shit-load of extra work for me to do. Let me make myself clear: you need to tell me everything I need to know, before I need to know it, because from now on, every time I find something out for myself, I’ll think you’ve been deliberately hiding it from me, and that you don’t want me to know about it.
“This is going to work on trust, or not at all. And right now, you’ve got to understand that you’ve fucked up. I’m going to collect the panels, and when I’ve brought them back, I’m going to plug them in and turn all the lights on. The rest of the schedule can wait. Don’t do this to me again.”
He sent the message and closed the app down, then checked out what else was waiting for him.
He tabbed another of the crosses, and there was food. Just food. A whole container—six big drums—full of dehydrated food from Earth. As he checked his way through, there was enough lying out there to almost double the size of the base. Hab sections. Wheels for the buggy. Spare fuel cells. Something—what was an In-situ Resource Management Device? It sounded fancy, and it was now his.
He checked his air, and he checked his batteries. Both were good enough to get out onto the plain and retrieve the panels. As ever, if something went wrong with either his suit or his buggy, he was going to die out there, quickly or slowly. No one was going to come and rescue him, because there was no one. But if he wanted the treasure, he was going to have to take the risk.
He looked up at the sky and, more accurately, the time on the tablet. He’d be coming back at dusk, but he had lights and it wasn’t as if he didn’t know where he was heading: Sunset Boulevard was so well used, it had become a groove. He wondered if it could be seen from space. Yes, why not? Dee had named it, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t enter the official records. The first man-made road on Mars.
Frank set off, dust pluming out behind him as he rattled along at a steady twelve. The driven surface was darker than the surrounding landscape, which was covered with an undisturbed salt rime—the same rime that collected on their helmets and pitted the metal wheels of the buggy. Two hours to drive the length of Rahe, up the collapsed part of the crater wall Dee had called Long Beach. Another hour out on the plain to collect the container, then the two hours back.
With the ridge of Beverly Hills to his left, he traversed the crater floor. It was long, it was boring. Boring on Mars had become a thing: although the landscape was alien, it just wasn’t interesting. It wasn’t Mars’s fault, but it was what he’d grown to expect. Red rock, red dust, ocher sky, pale sun. The only living thing on Mars, barring the greenhouse, was inside his suit. Outside of it was so little atmosphere as to be nothing but imperfect vacuum. Mars was dead and cold and airless, and people still wanted to come here to explore and work. Of their own volition, and not press-ganged like Frank.
The drive out of the crater was better. It was certainly more engaging, but only because it was more dangerous. The slope was steep, the surface loose, the hidden shelves of hard, jagged rock a menace. It had to be taken at a decent pace to allow momentum to carry the buggy over the more inconstant portions, but too quick, and the wheels would lose traction. If they did that, and spent any significant time in the air, then the buggy would slew sideways. Rolling it was a real possibility. And even with the roll cage and being strapped in, he was almost certain to wreck the wheels and leave himself stranded, far out of walking range of both the ship, and the base.
Monotony and fear. Those were his two default states and he seemed to be flipping between them with very little warning.
For ten minutes, twenty, it was continuously uphill, with Frank forced back into his seat and looking at nothing but the slope and the sky. The wheels turned and the plates bit, growling and clattering against the crater wall. He could hear it as well as feel it as he battled to keep the buggy facing forward.
Then, as always, the sudden burst of speed and the shallowing out of the gradient, followed by the explosion of so much Mars against his faceplate. The endless miles of nothing. The volcanoes rising directly from the plain ten thousand feet into a sky that was a dome of bluey-brown. An utterly blank landscape that, save for a few limp parachutes, was painted entirely in shades of red.
He stopped on the first patch of level ground, and hopped off to inspect the wheels and the trailer, and to check again his gas and fuel cell levels. It was second nature now, something he did without thinking.
It was late afternoon—just the right time for dust devils to rise up from the plain—and the sun was low over Uranius Mons, casting a huge, diffuse shadow through the dusty air. He opened up the map to check his direction, and saw there was going to be a problem. Neither his own location, nor the cargo, were marked.
Then he realized. His suit transmitter was still off. He’d turned it off that night, and had had no reason to turn it back on again. Away from both the main base and the ship, the map app had no way of talking to the satellites above. Did he dare risk turning his suit comms on? Did he dare not? If he couldn’t place himself on the map, he might end up traipsing across half of Mars looking for stuff and then not be able to find his way home.
If he was talking to XO, then he guessed he’d already made that decision. He tapped his way through his suit menu until he got to the right tab. He poked it back on, and a few seconds later the map recentered on his position, right at the top of Long Beach, and his targets bloomed on the landscape.
He set off southwards, skirting the edge of the crater, until the cross he was looking for merged with his own pointer. Then he stopped, stood up on the buggy’s frame and steadied himself using the roll cage, scanning the surroundings for any sign of the cylinder or its parachute. The map would only put him in the right area. After that, it was up to him.
And even though it was a plain, almost laser flat, the ground was pocked with craters, large and small, young and sharp-edged, old and barely even hollows. He’d had to retrieve cargo from several, sometimes even running a line over the rim and dragging the damn thing out. For all that they’d traveled a hundred million miles and all but crashed onto another planet, the cylinders really didn’t like lateral stress. He’d bent more than a couple that way.
There, half a mile distant, half hidden in a slight depression. This was going to be sweet. He’d be able to literally leave the lights on all night if he wanted: a full farm, another two big batteries, a full fifteen kilowatts of generating capacity. Of all the things to get excited about, he’d never thought that scavenging items from the surface of Mars would ever figure.
He drove over, dismounted and went to inspect the cylinder, lying slightly point-up and looking like a thirty-foot-long white pencil. The last solar farm had hard-landed, and over a third of the panels had broken on impact: it had only been luck that the batteries had survived, because if it had been the other way around, they’d have frozen to death. This one, barring some scorch-marks up the side, was intact, right down to the XO logo painted on the side.
He used the tool to open one of the pair of side hatches, and he had enough experience to know that the door tended to blow out when released. He was ready for it when it popped—not an audible pop, more something that he could feel through his feet. Then he helped swing the door the rest of the way, and he rummaged through the layers of insulation until he could read what was on the side of one of the drums. Panels: solar. 5x1kW. This was what he’d come for.
He pulled the hatch closed and relocked it, then winched the cylinder onto the trailer, just past the point of balance so that the end cleared the ground. Done. The parachute was gone, somewhere. Sometimes they detached properly, and ended up miles away. Other times they were still hanging from their lines, and the Martian wind wasn’t strong enough to shift them after they’d touched down.
The parachutes were useful all the same. Frank tended to pick up everythin
g he could, and take it with him. It had cost a lot to get the stuff there. There was no point—unless it was actually dangerous—in leaving it. He’d have to leave this one, though, if he couldn’t find it easily.
He stood up on the buggy frame again and looked for the telltale black-and-white against the dun-colored ground, but couldn’t immediately see it. He checked his air, and the light, and decided that he could afford to spend ten minutes circling the drop site to find it. After that, he’d have to head home. He set off, more sedately than before because he was towing, and drove another half-mile south, before turning slowly eastwards. Every so often he’d stop and climb up, hanging off the roll cage, but he couldn’t spot it.
But he did see something. Tire tracks that he couldn’t possibly have made, because he’d never been this way before. He parked up next to them, and climbed down to make certain that these weren’t apparitions like his dead crewmates.
Squatting awkwardly in the dust, he peered at first one, then the other, of the parallel lines. They were real: when he ran his hand through the dirt that carried them, he left lines on the ground, and red on his gloves. They weren’t fresh tracks: in comparison to the ones he was making, the edges of the plate-marks were blurred, and if he looked up and down the track he could see there were places where they’d been obliterated completely, presumably by the passage of a Martian twister. That would make them a couple of weeks old, but not a couple of months.
All tracks made by his wheels had a direction—the central tread was V-shaped. These had the same pattern. They were, in fact, identical, and could only have been made by an XO buggy, heading north. Brack had been this way before, then, presumably on his way back from collecting the NASA equipment. He stood up and stared into the south, past the sloping flanks of Ceraunius and into the haze. There was nothing there, either.
He checked his air again, and the battery level on the buggy. It was time to abandon the parachute to Mars, and he turned the wheels to head back to Long Beach. Something was tickling his mind, giving him a feeling of unease, but there were so many things he was worried about. It was only when he met his outgoing tracks that the thought crystallized.
There were no other tracks leading south.
He stopped. He stood up. He turned around and looked behind him. There was still nothing. He’d driven maybe five miles after turning right at Long Beach, pretty much due south. He’d never driven south before from that point. He’d gone all points of the compass—north, north-east, north-west and west. That had been where all the supplies had landed, out on the Tharsis plain in a roughly triangular area between the three volcanoes. Some of the drops had been beyond the range of one life-support pack, necessitating a dangerous swap-out halfway.
But none had fallen in the south.
Brack may have been south. May. But he would have had to travel east first, then south, then back following the exact same route. Two sides of a triangle, twice, when a shorter direct distance was available. They could literally go straight on Mars, unless there was an impassable geographical feature they had to detour around. The shortest route was always best.
Was it subterfuge on Brack’s part? Tire tracks south might have alerted the crew as to the arrival of fresh deliveries. Then again, none of them had been out as far as Long Beach since they’d picked up the very last of the containers they’d needed for Phase one, which was months ago. And Brack had chosen to stack the NASA equipment at the base of the Heights, which was hardly hidden away. Granted, he hadn’t been making good decisions by that point, but after that he’d still managed to kill three men and had nearly done for Frank, too. So he hadn’t been completely incapable of action.
It simply didn’t make any sense. To go south, anyone would have got to the top of Long Beach—which was itself a lengthy drive—and gone straight to their destination. Unless…
Unless there was something hidden in the distance, out on the plain due east of Rahe, that Brack had called at on his way out, and on his way back. That would make as much sense as anything, but he didn’t have the time, nor the range, to go and look for it today.
Soon, then. The tracks were there. All he had to do was follow them out and see where they led.
6
[Message file #87472 11/14/2048 1437 MBO Mission Control to MBO Rahe Crater]
I’m sorry, Frank. This situation is very new to us as well. We’re trying to keep things professional here, and anything that affects that—of course that includes your well-being—is our number one concern. We’ll have to try a little bit harder to communicate that to you, and I can only apologize if you feel we’ve let you down so far.
Good luck, Luisa.
[message ends]
Frank had to go through each hab, upper and lower levels, and make a fingertip search for anything that might indicate that the base had been the home for eight people and not one. Disposing of spacesuits, tablets, overalls, worn sleeping mats, part-used toiletries, scratched crockery and cutlery, everything. Special attention had to be paid to finding telltales like personalized graffiti or notes—written on what was anyone’s guess, as there was no paper. Bodily remains such as hair and skin needed to be removed and disposed of, including a thorough cleaning of the drains.
Then there was all the blood.
Now that the satellite dish was working again, the computer would purge itself automatically of data: the seven-day cycle of information would ensure that. The rest was up to him.
He’d found out the ultimate destination of the descent ship that had brought him and the others to Mars. When they’d had problems early on with power generation and the lack of spares, Brack had told them, point-blank and without explanation, that they weren’t to cannibalize the ship at all. The reason was because the ship was taking off again.
It didn’t have enough fuel to re-enter Earth’s orbit, nor could it re-enter the atmosphere. Its rockets weren’t enough to slow it down, and its heat shield and parachutes had already been used and discarded.
What it was going to do was two-fold. Firstly, it was going to throw up a smokescreen that would cover the lack of robotic base-building machines, under the pretense of returning them to Earth for commercially sensitive evaluation. Secondly, it was going to be used to launch the remains of seven dead people, and all evidence they’d ever come to Mars, into the heart of the Sun.
Frank had blinked roundly at that. He wasn’t a rocket scientist, and didn’t know how much fuel that would take, but he presumed whoever had plotted the course knew their math. It might take a year or two to get all the way in, but as far as getting rid of exhibits that might be used in a trial went, dropping them into a star was pretty final.
They’d literally thought of everything. He wondered how much more effort would have been required to refreeze them all and put them back into Earth-orbit, to be collected by a shuttle doing a round trip, up and down again.
Clearly, too much. The whole thing was just… willfully brutal. The lives of seven people didn’t figure in someone’s spreadsheet, but faking the existence of Mars-graded robots did. Frank, and the rest of them, were just consumables.
Just when he didn’t think he had any anger left inside, it came boiling back up to the surface and threatened to overwhelm him. Why shouldn’t he just raze the base to the ground and tell them what he’d done?
Because that wasn’t going to get him what he wanted. And, dammit, they owed him.
XO’s solution to the blood problem was crude: take the affected floor panels outside and rub them down with sand until they came clean. Frank had been hoping he’d be given the instructions on how to brew up a chemical cleaner—the soil contained chlorate, and that sounded a lot like chlorine, and he knew that chlorine was in bleach. Whatever it was, it was corrosive enough to eat away at the metal plates of the tires.
He’d already levered the panels up in Comms, from the place where Brack had bled out, up to the door that had been held shut while Dee had suffocated. About a dozen in all, and when he�
�d popped them out and carried them to the airlock at the far end of the yard, he’d gone carefully on his hands and knees to see how much of the blood had seeped through the cracks.
Where he’d dragged the body, not at all. Where it had lain for a while, quite a lot. Some had dribbled through into the void between the floor and the ceiling of the lower level, where the pipework and cables ran. That was… unfortunate. He wasn’t going to drain and unplumb the whole system, or even parts of it, just to make certain he’d got rid of every last scab. He was going to have to try and get as much of it off as he could—certainly that which was easily visible—by working from both above and below, taking out the ceiling panels too.
Frank wanted to do a good job, because he wasn’t going to be able to explain any quantity of spilled blood to a bunch of curious scientists. They’d unravel his excuses in a heartbeat, and then… that was when things would get difficult, for everybody. He wanted to spare himself and the astronauts that, even if it meant letting XO off the hook.
It was a decent day outside—he’d been on Mars long enough to be able to tell good weather from bad. The early morning fog had burned off, and the high ice-clouds chased away westwards. The dust-load was less than usual, and the view across to Uranius Mons clear enough to discern the truncated top of the volcano.
There’d be dust devils in the afternoon, after the ground had heated up, and it’d get gradually hazier until the sun started to sink again. A purple dusk was in prospect, and a cold night.
He’d laid out the panels near the satellite dish, their hard plastic surfaces shining in the weak sunlight, and had been using a nut runner and parachute cloth as an improvised flap-wheel. It worked inefficiently, but, if he pressed hard enough, sufficiently well for him to persevere. He had electrical power, and he had a planet-load of grit to use as an abrasive.