No Way

by S. J. Morden

  Slowly but surely, the dirt shifted the blood. He had to stop often to move the soil around, and to check on his progress, but it was a lot quicker than doing it manually.

  He cleaned one panel, shook it free of red soil, and started on another.

  When he’d done two, he was tired. He drank some water from his suit, and sat back for a few minutes with his back against the dish assembly. The sun had climbed higher, a small yellow disk against a pink-blue halo, darkening to a light brown at the horizon.

  His work was carried out in almost perfect silence. Nothing he was doing made enough noise to propagate through Mars’s thin air, although he could feel the vibrations through his hands, and imagined the grinding sounds.

  Which was why he missed the start of the thunder, and only when it was too loud to ignore did he get to his feet and look up.

  Frank scanned the sky, looking for the telltale line of smoke, or the bright dot of a parachute. He couldn’t see it to start with. But he was looking too low, expecting it to be directed over the plain like all the others. Only when he leaned back and craned his neck did he see it.

  The black streak of burned re-entry shield—technically an entry shield, because it wasn’t going anywhere it had been before—was almost zenith-high, angling in over the top of the volcano behind him. He followed its direction, and there were the parachutes along that line, tiny to the naked eye, but in reality vast red-and-white canopies extending far beyond the smudge of metal that pulled them through the thin air.

  It fell, and very slowly detail resolved. The object suspended below the parachutes was ship-like: bullet-shaped and bright. It was difficult to tell how large it was, but it was definitely not the pencil-thin arrow of a cargo delivery.

  And he realized that it was coming straight for him. It wasn’t just close. It was directly above him and it was falling on his head.

  If he’d still had his medical monitor, it would have recorded his breathing and heart rate accelerating away. Two immediate, terrible thoughts.

  That this was NASA, and he was screwed. The base was still full of evidence. Full of it, and no way to hide it.

  And that they were coming in hot. Hard and fast and they were going to hit the base.

  He was paralyzed with indecision. Had he left it too late to get to the buggy and drive off, to save himself for however long his air would last? Or was it simply better to let the fireball take him when the ship hit the Heights?

  Come on, Frank. Think, goddammit. Think.

  It couldn’t be NASA. If it was, they’d be early, and they couldn’t be early, because that wasn’t how space flight worked. Except he didn’t know enough about that to be certain. But this sure as hell looked like a descent ship, and it was growing visibly larger by the second.

  Moment by moment, it swelled. It was coming down so very fast. And so very close.

  Was it going to crash? It wasn’t like that hadn’t happened before. Cargo plowing into the Martian surface. Leaving a crater. Was the speed of this normal? Had he come in like this?

  By now, the parachutes were huge, blotting out the sky, and it was still hurtling downwards. Dangling from the shrouds was a ship. Big enough to be a crew-rated ship. The air trembled. Dust was rising up all around him as if gravity had gone into reverse. If they were here, it was over. Goddammit, he should have got some warning. What was he supposed to do?

  He leaned all the way back. The object had sprouted legs, tiny legs that didn’t look strong enough to support the body’s weight. It was going to be close, so very close.

  Then, from his perspective, the oncoming vessel finally started to slide sideways in the sky. From being dead overhead to a few degrees off, then a few more, then clearly it was coming down to the north. It would just miss the base, and his own descent ship, and it wasn’t going to crush him.

  The parachutes floated free, turning from taut dishes to sky-jellyfish in seconds. Smoke plumed from the base of the falling craft, and bright spears of translucent blue flame stabbed down. The ground shook as the new ship went from freefall to full stop on the Martian surface in bare seconds.

  The rockets cut off, and a wave of dust and exhaust roiled across the Heights. With nothing to stop it, the front blew across the base. The brown fog that had formed during the ship’s descent was cleared away.

  Two miles distant on the Heights, towards the steep drop-off to the crater floor, was a shiny white blunt-headed cone of a structure. He wasn’t ready. He wasn’t ready at all. There was still blood all over the floors and unburied bodies, and—

  Breathe. Hold. Breathe.

  If he was Brack, he would know exactly what this was and when to expect it. XO had told him explicitly that NASA were still three months away. They weren’t going to shit the bed. Look. Look carefully. His own descent ship was still here, and it was supposed to leave before the astronauts arrived.

  OK. OK. It wasn’t the astronauts. What the hell was it? What, in the documentation, had he missed? He was determined that there wouldn’t be any panicked messages back to Earth, nothing that would show he was incompetent.

  He forced himself to walk over to the fully charged-up buggy, and climb up. He didn’t want to go and look. He was scared of what he was going to find. But on the other hand, he knew he had to see what it was. He’d felt like this before, but not for a long time. His own father’s funeral. Dread. Sick to his stomach. And yet, it was something he had to do, a door he had to pass through.

  He drove off across the Heights, heading in the unfamiliar northerly direction, skirting the big, thousand-yard crater that sat slap in the middle of the shelf. As he got closer, the ship slowly resolved in more detail. The legs—sturdy enough for the job, in a third of Earth gravity—just looked spindly, arranged around the circumference of the fatter cone, which sat so low that its base almost touched the ground.

  Frank slowed and stopped, looking up at the structure from a respectful distance away. He could see the NASA logo on the side. There was other writing too, too small to make out from where he was. Sooty streaks ran from dark to light from base to tip, partially obscuring some of the letters. He abruptly realized that he was thinking of it as his Mars, and this new ship was trespassing. That was crazy. Mars was plenty big enough.

  He climbed down from the buggy and approached. His heart was still yammering in his chest, and he was sticky with sweat. The ship was perfectly still, perfectly silent. For now.

  “Hold it together, Frank.”

  “Marcy?”

  The last time he’d seen her, she’d filled up her helmet with vomit. So that’s how it was now. She spoke around the splashes on her faceplate.

  “Take your time, Frank. Do it better.”

  “Right. Better. Got it.” He nodded, and that seemed to satisfy her, because she wasn’t there when he next looked.

  He turned his attention to the drop-off: the ground the ship sat on seemed stable enough. The rocket motors had blasted the dust away, leaving the rocks sitting on a bare, craze-cracked pavement. Mud cracks. They looked like mud cracks.

  He was close enough to make out the smaller words. “Dogwood”. “MAV”.

  MAV. The letters rang a very distant bell.

  He circumnavigated the ship on foot, leaning back to gaze up at its blank, sloping sides. No windows, no external features at all to speak of. There was, however, a covered box fixed to one of the legs. Frank undid the catch, and found three buttons: two green, with arrows pointing up and down, and one central red one. He glanced around. No one was going to stop him from pressing the buttons, because he was the only one there. He thumbed the down arrow and stepped back.

  A hole opened in the side of the ship and a telescopic ladder lowered itself to the ground. At the top of the ladder was a larger door-shaped outline, and a smaller rectangular outline that was probably the door mechanism. He climbed up, hand over hand, and pushed at the spring-loaded cover until it popped open.

  Another two green buttons and one red; this time the arrow
s were pointing into, and out of, boxes. He tapped the in button, and the door pushed out, almost into his face, before sliding aside. Inside was an airlock.

  He had another brief moment when he wondered if he should be doing this, and whether or not he ought to be phoning home to find out what the hell this was all about. Then he climbed up and in, and found the controls to close the airlock door behind him.

  The main cabin—there was just the one compartment—was mostly empty. Three poles that went from floor to ceiling were the only furniture. There were mostly inert controls and panels around the walls—a few lights were awake, but none of the screens—and that was it. There was no one inside, and remarkably little room, given the size of the ship. His own descent ship was of comparable volume, and it went over three decks. He glanced down at his suit controls, and registered what his body had already told him: the ship was in vacuum.

  He climbed out, and down the ladder, and closed everything up behind him. He walked around it again, and had stopped to look out across the drop-off to see where the parachutes had ended up, when something, some slight vibration, made him turn round. Louvered vents had opened up all around the ship’s middle, and two sets of solar panels had unfolded like fans from recesses on opposite sides. The panel arrays glittered blackly, before tilting towards the sunlight. Clearly something was happening, but Frank had no idea what.

  But there were no astronauts. He was still on his own, for a couple more months. And that, suddenly, was OK, because he wasn’t ready. He needed to prepare the base, get everything sorted and squared away, to get used to the idea that he was going to be Lance Brack.

  He was going to have to answer to that name. It was going to be hard.

  There was nothing more to do here. He needed to go back to the base and find out what a MAV was, and then get on. This arrival had at least driven home that the timetable was outside his control.

  Frank drove back to the base, collected the floor panels he’d cleaned off, and stepped into his own airlock.

  He racked his life support, dumped the panels back in Comms, and went to reread Phase three.

  OK, so there it was, buried in the small print, because it didn’t involve people: arrival of MAV, on or around Sol 529. He had to research what MAV was, and found it in another, even more technical document.

  Mars Ascent Vehicle. It was his ride home, or at least off Mars. It was designed to suck Martian air in, and turn it into fuel, a process that would take about one hundred and twenty sols. It would take him and the rest of the astronauts back into Mars orbit, to dock with the transit ship which then would spend two hundred days going home. By which time he’d either be dead or safe.

  It was happening. He had a deadline. Either he’d finish in time, or he wouldn’t.

  7

  [Message file #98943 12/3/2048 1843 MBO Mission Control to MBO Rahe Crater]

  Thanks for giving the MAV a clean bill of health, Frank. It must have been a wonderful sight, watching it come down—it almost makes me wish I was there with you!

  You seem to be making really good progress on Phase 3. I know that this is hard for you, and it’s not what you would have chosen, but I think we’re working well together now. You’ve been diligent in your work, and creative with your solutions to problems that have presented themselves. It’s great to see you take the initiative.

  Remember, wherever in the sol you are, I’m just at the other end of this app. I’ll answer straight away.

  Take care.

  Luisa

  [message ends]

  Frank had increased the power bank by another battery pack, and plugged in another ten kW of collectors. He’d supplemented his larder with an extraordinary array of instant puddings and drinks powders. He now had spare wheels. And extra fuel cells. And hab sections. He had airlocks, and he’d left one, complete with a spare life support and oxygen cylinders, at the top of Long Beach. Just in case he got caught out at some point.

  It should have always been like this. At the start, XO had kept them short. He remembered the early days of not enough power, not enough food, not enough EVA time, of having to make decisions among themselves—no help or guidance from Brack—as to what to prioritize and what could wait. It had been deliberate, and it was one of the reasons he hated them. The second round of launches had shown that they could have supplied everything sooner. He still had to work with XO, though, and had to mute his anger.

  There was more out there still: he was just about ahead of schedule in the base, and he needed a day off from the close-work and monotony of scraping blood out of the ceiling voids. He looked at the tablet, and decided that he really wanted to see what the In-situ Resource Management Device did. It was on the eastern flank of Ceraunius Tholus, by no means the furthest adrift of the deliveries, but still twenty miles out from Long Beach. That made it a seventy-mile round trip. Doable on one pack, just.

  Not to say that Luisa wasn’t nervous about his trips out. She cautioned him to be careful, to repeatedly ask himself if his journey was really necessary. If he died out on the plain, then MBO stayed in exactly the same state as he’d left it. Partially bloody, obviously not constructed by robots.

  Maybe that was why he was doing it? Subconsciously subverting the deal with XO. Not wanting to entirely obliterate the memories of Alice and Marcy, Zeus and Dee, Declan and Zero. They had been here, and now he was colluding with the same murdering bastards that had tried to add him to that tally.

  He kept on seeing them, in and around the base. It wasn’t right, but he was lonely. He’d even taken to reading his way back through Brack’s increasingly wayward interaction with Mission Control, becoming more expansive and flowery as his opioid addiction had grown.

  He’d never seen himself as a people person. Yet he’d worked pretty much every day of his life alongside others. It was the isolation that was getting to him. Despite having the whole of Mars to explore, it was still his prison, and still his solitary. It would be over soon. Another couple of months to keep it together, and the astronauts would be here. Just as long as he didn’t cry when they arrived, he’d be fine. In the meantime, he had Luisa. He couldn’t stop telling her stuff he really ought to keep to himself. But he couldn’t tell anyone else because they were all dead.

  Maybe he was falling apart in the same way Brack had. Maybe this was just a nightmare and he’d wake up to find… what?

  That it was all still true.

  He suited up, and cycled the airlock. There was no getting away from it, no wishful thinking that’d lessen his situation. He was marooned on Mars. He opened the airlock door, and there it was. The vast barren slope of the volcano, the pink sky, the red soil.

  He unplugged the buggy, checked the trailer hitch was still tight, and drove away from the base. The draft in his face was almost convincing as an analog for speed, except it was constant whether he was moving or not.

  To his left was the MAV, tracking the sun with its panels, making fuel. To his right, after a couple of miles, was the descent ship, three black-and-white-shrouded bodies tucked underneath. Then down the slope to the crater floor and onto Sunset. Paradoxically, the sun was just rising, straight into his face. Elsewhere, so he understood—on the Moon, in space—astronauts had tinted visors they could pull down to prevent glare. On Mars, the sun was never more than a luminous disk. It was just about bright enough to cast sharp shadow, but that depended on the dust-load in the sky, and, more often than not, shade was a solid mass, carved from air like a dark slab. Dust. It was always about the dust.

  The same dust that was spinning from his turning wheels: most of it fell in an arc like thrown sand, even though the grains were much smaller. The finest particles, however, invisible and impossible, were carried away like gauze, and they stuck to whatever they touched. Particularly his spacesuit’s faceplate, but pretty much everything and in everything. In the damp atmosphere of the habs, the dust they carried in ended up smeared on the floor, but outside it just clung.

  The ghosts o
n Mars would be made of dust.

  By the time he reached Long Beach, the slope was in full sun. He’d done it in the dark before. It was less fun than advertised. The collapsed crater wall that allowed access to the wider plains beyond was difficult terrain and a relentless climb, fifteen hundred feet at a ten per cent gradient. He squeezed the accelerator paddles and felt himself tip back in his seat.

  The motors growled, and the stones clattered. It was an endurance test, for both him and the machine.

  The buggy crawled over the lip of the crater, and Frank brought it to a halt next to the airlock. He’d piled loose stones against its sides, and finished it off with a cargo strap that went across the top and into the middle of two cairns that kept the anchors in place.

  He did his usual checks—everything was nominal—and opened up the map so that he knew exactly which direction he was heading in. South-east, and up on the lower slopes of the volcano: the lower slopes only, and a good job too, since the summit before the yawning flat-bottomed crater at the top maxed out at twenty thousand feet above the level of the plain.

  He followed his already-made track, heading south. His track, and no one else’s. He never did find what had caused Brack to take such a roundabout route. He’d checked the most recent satellite maps he had, in case he’d missed something, but there was nothing out to the east but more rock and more craters and more dust.

  He could imagine getting lost out on the plain: there were so few landmarks to navigate by, and if the dust blew up, or the tablet was unable to contact, through his suit, the satellites, he’d be in trouble.

  He felt a cold sweat break out across the whole of his body, and his breathing quicken. The planet was so huge, and he was the only one on it. Don’t panic, don’t panic. Breathe. Hold. Breathe.

  The moment passed, but he still wondered if he wasn’t taking too much of a risk, going so far from home when it wasn’t necessary. He almost turned around. Almost. Luisa would have liked that.