S Morden - No Way

“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.

It felt good to be doing something. To be planning for the future. To be even thinking that he might have a future. Dried herbs. He sniffed his fingers and caught the complex aromas the bruised leaves gave off.

He flooded the chamber with air again, and examined the contents of the tray. When he held up a basil leaf to the sharp LED lighting that hung low over the plants, he could see the individual veins. He crumbled it between his fingers. It shattered like thin glass and turned into fragments, almost dust. Possibly a bit too small: again, some preparation might have been necessary, chopping the leaves before drying them out. But he could just save the leaves whole, bag them up and use them that way.

Franklin Kittridge, gourmet chef.

It was almost as if he’d forgotten for a moment how much trouble he was in. He allowed himself a tight smile, and went through the racks again, turning the lights off he didn’t need, the pumps, the syringe drivers, to give his power budget a boost. He checked his tablet, and saw that he’d saved over a quarter of a kilowatt. That wasn’t bad at all.

He went back around and looked at the cereals. He didn’t know how to tell whether they were ripe or not, so he hit the books again.

“Grains should be firm, but not brittle.” He crouched beside what he’d previously identified as rice. The short stems were heavy with blunt heads, curved over between the yellow-green blade-like leaves. “Eighty to eighty-five per cent of the grains should be yellow-colored.” OK, they were pretty much all a light brown. That was promising. He teased one of the grains out and into his hand.

He rubbed it between his palms to dehusk it, and lightly blew away the chaff. It looked like a grain of rice. Again, the surprise was real, and he frowned at his own ignorance. Of course it did. Where the hell did he think rice came from if not from an actual rice plant?

No point in beating himself up about that, or anything else. He had expertise in other areas, and he got his groceries from the store like everyone else. Most people wouldn’t know how a cinder block got made, either.

He collected another empty tray, and plucked—there should be some snippers around, but Zero appeared to have hidden those—the seed heads one by one until he’d got them all. There were a lot. Enough to eat. Enough to eat and still have plenty over to replant.

The how-to told him he now had to thresh the rice, to separate all the grains from the husks, and do this as soon after harvest as possible. Threshing. He hoped that he’d have instructions for that too, because peeling each grain individually was going to take a while.

And maybe he should have read that section first, because it turned out he should have picked the rice at the bottom of the stem, not the top. It was a rookie error, not one he was likely to make twice, but now he had nothing to hold on to to beat the seed head against anything. Some sort of sealable container with a lid would probably have to do, shake it until… something happened. It wasn’t magic. People had been doing this for thousands of years.

He’d just be the first person doing it on another planet.

Ping.

He’d left the tablet on the chair. He picked it up and saw what they’d written this time.

“Franklin. OK, to be honest, we’re a little surprised here, and we’d like some time to work out what to do. We don’t have the authority to make these kinds of decisions on our own, so we need to go and talk to some people who can help us on a way forward. It’s probably going to take a few hours to get everyone together in the same room, and a few more hours after that to be able to discuss your situation and get back to you.

“Nothing is going to happen, good or bad, in that time. You’ve probably wondered if we can remotely operate some of the basic systems at the base, on a considerable time lag. We can, but you can always override that locally. In any event, no one will be interfering with the base systems at all, and you have my word on that. Please don’t do anything that would jeopardize the integrity of the base, or your personal safety. If anything happens to either, it’ll mean that any offer we might be able to make to you based on current circumstances will be null and void, and we’ll all have to go back to the drawing board. Hold tight, and expect something in maybe four-five hours time, but definitely by the end of the sol. Luisa, XO MBO Mission Control.”

He read it, and read it again. It seemed… refreshingly honest. He had no idea who this Luisa was, whether he’d met her.

Whatever, she was right—there wasn’t anything they could do to him at this distance that didn’t give him enough time to destroy the base before he succumbed. There was a measure of realism in her comments that indicated that at least someone was taking him seriously. Whether the suits would, was a different matter entirely, but even they had to know he meant business.

Frank felt in his pocket for the tied-off rubber glove. It wasn’t inflating, and it was fine. He wondered if he should always have the scuba gear nearby in case they tried something sneaky like alter the gas mix. He needed to remember that the XO people at the other end of his message stream had been surprised he was still alive, and that he should on no account trust them.

He’d get a response by the end of the day. He could only imagine the flurry of activity, the panic and argument that would blow up as his message reverberated up and down the XO command structure.

In the end, they’d deal. They’d try to weasel out later on, but they’d deal for now, and Frank would just have to stay a step ahead.

[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 11/13/2048, transcribed from paper-only copy]

I don’t often get emotional, because emotions have no place in business. But I admit today to feeling anger, at being so badly let down. Everything is in the balance. Everything. I’m heading down there now, to personally chair the meeting. There will be no reputational damage to either XO, or myself. None.

Any other outcome is unacceptable.

[transcript ends]

Frank now inhabited the gray area between collaborator and victim. He had his agreement. He’d forced XO’s hand, and in turn they’d forced his. He wasn’t a lawyer, and he’d refused to sign or assent to any kind of contract—they’d got him once before like that, sitting in an interview room in San Quentin—and he wasn’t going to fall for it again. What he had was an understanding, a spit-and-handshake. Old-school trust, even where there was none.

Frank would carry out Phase three. He’d clean up the base. He’d prepare for the NASA mission. He’d answer to the name “Brack”. In return, XO would clear the path for him to return home. They’d get his sentence commuted. They’d give him enough money to start afresh. And they’d keep on paying a sum, every year, to tie them to each other in perpetuity.

It wasn’t enforceable in any way, except that the penalties for defaulting were unthinkable. It was literally their lives on the line. Frank’s for sure. The unwitting NASA astronauts’ too. And if any of this got in front of a grand jury, there’d be a whole bunch of XO people ratting each other out for a deal. It was in everybody’s best interest to see this to the bitter end.

On Frank’s part, he was under no illusion that his troubles would be over when he got back to Earth. A company that could base their entire business model around murder were no better than organized crime, and they could come for him at any point. And even if Frank went to the press, or the Feds, then… it was going to get complicated. He was a convicted murderer with a few new scars and a tin-foil hat story about how he got to Mars. The NASA crew could corroborate some of the details, but nothing of what happened before they arrived on the red planet.