by S. J. Morden
They stepped out into the cross-hab, and Frank immediately climbed down into the area underneath it. It had seemed as good a place as any for food storage, cool and dry and dark, and away from either the medical equipment or the water reclamation system. The containers he was using weren’t airtight, but since he’d pretty much made them himself out of cargo-cylinder parts, he was pleased with them.
There was more room down there than there was in the airlock, but her proximity still made him nervous and he moved right to the back to let her examine the drums, which had shiny words scratched into the still-extant paintwork. There hadn’t been any paper on the base, and nothing to make labels with.
“Oats, wheat, rye, soy, groundnuts, corn,” she said as she traced the letters. Some of them were, to be fair, hard to make out. She picked up a drum, frowned at its unexpected weight, and carefully opened the lid. “Mercy.”
“What?”
“There’s so much of it.”
The containers, more or less regular sizes, were stacked several deep.
“I got… bored. I suppose. Did I tell you I don’t eat the fish? So I changed my diet a bit, and yeah. That. We still seem to have plenty of the ABC nutrients, and there’s all the organic waste, just sitting there. I haven’t touched that yet. If you want to just take over the greenhouse, that’s fine. Like I said, I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
She looked over her shoulder at him, her plait turning with delayed slow-motion.
“You’ve done pretty well for someone who says that. XO chose you for a reason. We could make bread. Flat bread, at least. For now. I’ve got some dried yeast, but we have to keep it under wraps until we know it won’t damage the base.”
“I don’t have anything to mill flour with. I could have made something, I guess, but—”
“I’ll look into it. See what equipment we have.”
“You know a lot about milling?”
She shrugged. “I’m a farm girl. An astronaut farm girl. You?”
Frank’s own biography—construction worker, murderer, con—didn’t quite fit the expected trajectory for getting onto Mars. The bare-bones of Brack’s background—Frank had been told to keep it deliberately vague to avoid close questioning—didn’t fit Frank.
“Career military,” he said.
“Sure. Which branch?”
“That’s, that’s classified.” It was poor, and he knew it. He didn’t even have to fake embarrassment. “Sorry. Orders.”
“That’s fine. I’m not going to pry. Thank you for showing me this: I think you’ve done something extraordinary here, and I’ve no wish to push you out of the greenhouse. It’s not like I don’t have a whole bunch of experiments to run, and only fifteen months in which to run them, on top of making sure people get fed. If you want, you can just carry on doing what you’ve been doing, as much or as little as you want.” She put the lid back on the container, and eased it back on to its shelf. “It means I get more time to do science. I don’t want to make work for you, but if you’re happy with that, then deal?”
“That sounds fair. As long as we make sure we don’t not do something because we think the other guy’s doing it. OK. Deal.” He held out his hand for a dap. It was instinctive, habitual, and she just stared at it quizzically. He pulled back and headed for the ladder.
There were so many ways he could betray himself, not even with his words, just his actions, just himself. He went to push some buttons, passing some of the others on the way—Leland and Yun—and they all seemed so impossibly perfect. Fit, healthy, engaged, enthusiastic: physically, emotionally and psychologically in balance.
Whereas he, and his crew of cons, were anything but. Disposable chimps who needed only to last as long as the job. Waking up, being sick, hungry, thirsty, argumentative, exploited and abused.
This was how it should have been. It was how it could have been, with a little more care. Goddammit, XO.
He pulled the cubicle curtain closed behind him, and pushed his overalls down to his knees. He rested his elbows on his legs and his face in his hands. Day one of fifteen months. He’d waited so long for this. So long, and now it was here, he didn’t know if he wanted it any more.
“Lance?” It was Leland, just outside.
“Just give me five, OK?” Goddamn it. Declan was always—had always been—doing that: ambushing people in the can, and no one had liked it then.
There was silence, then: “It gets better. That’s all. It gets better.”
Frank heard his footsteps retreat back up the corridor. That was, indeed, all.
Was it? Was it really going to get better? Or was the accumulated weight of everything he’d seen and done and had happen to him going to break him? No: he was, by any measure, pretty much broken as it stood. All it had taken was the presence of people who wanted him for his skills and experience, wanted to be friends with him, who were willing to show him patience and kindness, who didn’t want to kill him, to reveal him as a wreck.
These gods, descended from the heavens, were so far above him, and he didn’t know what to do.
Not cry. Definitely not cry. Deep breaths. Blink away the tears.
He pushed the buttons, and washed his hands and zipped. He was going to do the only thing he could do. Carry on, and hope, like Leland said, that it would get better.
14
[Message file #139697 2/15/2049 1708 MBO Mission Control to MBO Rahe Crater]
The team here are going through all the NASA comms, checking that they don’t suspect you, or the base, and so far, so good! Just remember, you can always choose to hide behind the “commercially sensitive” excuse if you need. The astronauts know the score, and if anyone presses you, you need to take it up with Commander Davison, or tell me, and I will.
I’ve been told that we’ve not seen any activity from M2 in the last week. No movement, no tracks. Still no messages. It looks like they didn’t make it. So you probably don’t need to worry about them any longer. While it’s sad, I’m still angry that we both weren’t told earlier.
You’re doing great, Frank. The pictures and video footage that come from the base with you in it are digitally altered or edited almost in real-time: you don’t need to duck out quite so enthusiastically! I get the raw feed, and I enjoy watching what you’re getting up to and see how you’re doing. It makes me feel connected with you.
Luisa
[transcript ends]
Yun sat next to him as Frank was finishing breakfast, clutching her tablet and looking expectantly at him. Frank took the hint, rested his coffee mug on the table, and without turning to her, said: “Something you want me to do?”
“You know the rules,” she said.
“I know your rules.”
“Everyone else is busy for the next four sols, but I want to get the weather stations set up as soon as I can. The more data I can collect, the more we’ll know.”
“Sure,” said Frank.
“I need to show they work in the field. They are, partly, my own design.”
“Sure. OK. I’m saying yes.” He waggled his mug. “Just let me finish this and go and press some buttons. You’ve cleared this with Lucy?”
“I will.”
She slid her tablet across towards him, and Frank pulled it closer. The annotated photograph showed the volcano, Ceraunius Tholus, and markers marching up the line of the Santa Clara, all the way to, and around, the vast crater at the summit.
Right up on the summit. M2 were down on the far side to the south, but the top of the volcano would be very much within their range. Even if they couldn’t get that far any more—even if they were all dead by now, and Frank didn’t know how to react to that possibility as his emotions were still swinging between rage and fear—then there might be evidence that they had been up there.
Perhaps he should change his mind, and go up on his own to scout it out. But it was too late.
“You think that’s too much?”
Frank circled his finger around the crater. �
�You’ve done the training. You know how much hard work it is just to be in the suit. We can give it a go, but I’m guessing we’ll need to do more than one trip out.”
That might give him time to check out the upper slopes on his own.
“Much is expected of me,” she said.
“It’s expected that you get back in one piece.”
She frowned, as if Frank didn’t understand. “A lot of money was spent getting me here.”
Frank looked around. No one else was within earshot. “We’ll do what we can, but we’re not pushing it, OK? Mars is waiting to kill you.”
She nodded, taking the tablet with her when she left. He watched her go. She had nothing to prove: to him, to her government, to anyone. And yet that, apparently, brought its own pressures.
The rule was—Lucy’s rule, NASA’s rule—no expeditions without a buddy. The immediate area around the base was fine, but someone still needed to sit in Comms and listen, just in case they needed to answer an alarm. That made perfect sense. Proper safety procedures, observed at all times.
Then there was Frank, who didn’t work under that rule. Lucy didn’t like it, but she wasn’t his boss, and she had no authority over him. He could go outside whenever and wherever he wanted. He didn’t even have to tell her, though he did because he didn’t want to shit the bed. And he liked her. She was efficient. She got stuff done. She cared very much about the safety of her crew, and by extension Frank, which frustrated them both but they’d probably work it out eventually.
What she did do was trust him enough to double up with her people. That… that didn’t sit well with him. He was a fraud, an impostor, and he wasn’t telling her things that she really ought to know.
If she did find out, what would she do? Leave him here? It was a certainty. Rather than spend the eight months with a murderer, on a spaceship that wasn’t quite big enough for six, she’d maroon him. Hell, it’s what he would do. It was the only sensible decision.
So he wasn’t going to tell her. Do the job, go home, find Mike. Nothing beyond that. Nothing outside of that. Keep it zipped up, wrapped tight. He finished his coffee, which was more cold than hot, then went to the can.
Yun was already outside, loading up the trailer, by the time he suited up. She was carrying the weather stations—they were more than that, but that was the name she called them—from the supply rocket in the boneyard to the trailer, fifty yards away. They weren’t heavy, but they were bulky, and the longer they spent packing for the journey, the less time they could spend setting up the experiments.
So, Frank backed the trailer up to the rocket. He even managed to make it took easy, which wasn’t his intention at all: it was just practice. Marcy had been a good teacher.
Frank strapped the load down, gave them all a shake and tightened the ratchets one more click. They were good to go, and with one last check with Lucy in Comms, they were heading for the entrance to the Santa Clara.
There was no sea level to take as zero—Yun called it “datum”—but the numbers meant that Ceraunius was close to thirty thousand feet high. Because they were in spacesuits, the altitude didn’t mean anything as such, just wear-and-tear on the batteries. Still, it was the longest journey he’d made since his encounter with the M2 crew member, and he was heading in their direction.
He felt a tightness in his chest. The Santa Clara river bed was sinuous, with broad, sweeping curves and high arching banks that obscured both the way ahead and the view to either side. Every turn that they took, each new vista that opened up, could reveal a figure in a spacesuit, a buggy.
And every time it didn’t happen, Frank would feel a surge of relief that would slowly fade as his anxiety built again. He started to realize exactly what keeping secrets for XO meant. It wasn’t that he couldn’t manage the lying, the misdirection, the pretending to be someone else: it was the sheer physical toll it was going to take on him.
He’d survived worse. He’d just have to grit his teeth and do it.
It helped that Yun liked to talk. That was fine. Frank didn’t mind it so much because she seemed to be in the habit of pointing things out to herself, so she could remember them later, rather than expecting a conversation: there appeared to be no requirement that he listen, let alone respond. If she mentioned his name—Brack’s name—he knew to tune back in.
She described the river bed’s snake-like track up the slope of the volcano, how the sand had collected at the well-defined edges of the valley and especially in the outer bends of its path, and how the material was still traveling downhill under wind-power, as evidenced by the tear-drop shapes around the craters that had subsequently been carved into the dry soil.
If she had noticed the earlier tracks he’d made, she didn’t say: but time had smudged them, showing that the processes that were giving the sand surface ripples were still ongoing.
They kept on climbing. Frank had one eye on the direction of travel, and the other on the battery stats: they’d use less juice coming down, but he still wasn’t going to go under fifty per cent. It was sixty or so miles to the very top, obviously the same going back. Easily doable on paper, but getting them stranded wasn’t such a great idea.
“Lance, can you stop?”
He relaxed his grip on the controls, and the buggy coasted to a halt. Yun extricated herself from the latticework behind him and jumped down onto the ground. She reached for the still camera that was attached to her waist—two cameras side by side, with a supporting frame and a dust-free enclosure that made it deliberately two-handed—and advanced towards the valley wall. She had, inexplicably, gone quiet, and she walked like she was stalking prey.
She raised her camera, framed her shot and took several pictures.
“Have you seen this before, Lance?” She pointed at the ground, at the darker patch of soil that seemed to leak out of the top of the sand bank and spread out downhill.
“I guess I must have done. What is it?” Sure, they were there, most times he’d driven up the valley.
“It’s a recurring slope linea. Can you get the ranging pole from the trailer?”
Frank clambered down and retrieved the telescopic pole, locking the sections together as he walked to her.
“So what causes it?”
“Water,” she said.
“But water boils away.” He turned so he could look into her helmet, at her intent, focused expression.
“When the water is super-saturated with salts, it can exist in liquid form at these temperatures and pressures. The evaporation rate will still be high, but it’s believed that being entrained in a matrix of small grain-sized particles will permit the water to flow subsurface. This is water, Lance, melting from the ground. At night it should refreeze, and the dark patch disappear, but once temperatures rise again during the day, it’ll restart.”
She told him to approach the flow from the side, and lay the striped pole down near, but not on, the stain. Frank did as he was asked. The boundary between light and dark wasn’t distinct, close up, and neither did it appear to be visibly spreading.
Yun took more photographs, moving slowly around its base in an arc, then marked the place on her tablet with a touch and some quick one-fingered typing. “When you collected material for the water maker, what did you use?”
“We—me and the robots, that is—just shoveled soil from near the base into the machine. I suppose I assumed that it cooked the rock and drove out water. Not that there was actual water just below the surface.”
“It’s not everywhere on Mars,” she said. “But this is one reason why MBO is situated where it is. It’s a resource-rich site, one where it doesn’t take much energy to liberate volatiles. Mapping the extent of the resources will help determine the viability of future missions.”
“Colonization, you mean. Living here permanently.”
“Yes. Do you have an opinion on that, Lance?” She picked the ranging pole up herself, and twisted it back down to its transportable size.
“My opinion?” He
clicked his tongue. “I don’t think it’s for me, somehow.”
“You miss Earth?”
“Something like that,” he said.
“You may change your mind.”
“Would you? Seriously? This planet has tried to kill me so often.”
“The Chinese government is enthusiastic about the possibilities for Mars colonization and seeks to establish its own permanent presence before the end of the century,” she said.
It was as if she was reading a script. And he recognized that, because it was exactly like he sounded when he had to parrot the XO line. So he laughed: an involuntary response which he stopped as soon as he saw her expression.
“I’m not being mean,” he said. “But I understand. I really do.”
He climbed back up onto the buggy, and Yun resumed both her position behind him, and her commentary. She pointed out that the further up the volcano they drove, the tighter the turns in the valley became, so that they were almost like overlapping, interlinked C-shapes, with sharp, cliff-like projections into the bed of the river, followed by lazy left- or right-hand turns.
Frank had never been up so high, and they had further to go. At the five thousand meter mark—he had to work out what that actually was, sixteen thousand feet or so—they stopped and carried a box of instruments off the trailer and up the side of the valley, the crate slung between them, each holding one of the straps. The material underfoot was loose, and it was steep. Frank, who was much more used to being outside, plotted the route up to the top of the bank.
They then walked another hundred or so yards away across the stepped volcanic surface, and put the box down. There wasn’t anything left for Frank to do now but admire the view while Yun set up. They were on the north-western flank of Ceraunius, and he could just about make out the wildly broken ground that was, what, sixty miles away due west? Uranius was off to his right. The haze level was, he guessed, about average. Certainly not as fuzzy as he’d seen it before, and some days were unexpectedly clear like glass.
There was little chance of spotting actual features near the base of the volcano: he couldn’t even see where it joined the sand sea. Such was the size of the broad shoulder of rock he was standing on, most of what he could see was just slope, up to his left and down in every other direction. M2, whatever state it was in, was going to stay hidden for now. Just as long as there weren’t any unexplained debris or bodies up on the top, he’d be fine.