S Morden - No Way

“Sure.” It looked like the rolling boil of water in a pan, suddenly frozen.

“That could be the top of the magma chamber. Mineral rich. What minerals, I couldn’t say. But quite probably metals. The area needs surveying, and samples taken, assayed.”

“I’ll be coming back here a lot, then.”

“We do have spare hab sections. If we could erect one here, it would mean considerably greater EVA time. It’s a shame the robots have already been sent back to Earth for evaluation.”

Frank squinted into the distance until he’d properly formed his reply. If M2 was out of the picture, then OK: it’d be safe enough to come up here without worrying about bumping into the neighbors. And technically, it wasn’t difficult to put a hab up. The problems came in keeping the atmosphere breathable and the internal temperature stable. Again, if there really wasn’t an M2 to worry about any more, there seemed no good reason for him to block this. He’d have to talk to Luisa.

“I know how to put up a hab,” he said. “I’ve been trained to do it, just in case. If all of us are willing to put in the labor, it’ll take less than a day. Inflate it with bottled oxygen to five psi and, I guess, wonder what he’s going to do for a can. There’s heat and power issues, but if he just wanted it as a daytime lifeboat so he can max out his daylight hours, then that’d be easier.”

“He could store samples and equipment here too.”

“Why not? Someone could drop him, and his buddy, off in the morning, pick them back up last thing, so we always have the two buggies at the bottom of the hill.”

“That’s an excellent suggestion, Lance. I’ll talk to Jim, and he can ask Lucy. We’ll need your input, of course.”

“I didn’t suggest it. Just, you know. It’s not a problem. We’ve got the kit, and there’s no point in it sitting around if you can use it.”

She looked back out over the crater. “Can we make the summit today?”

Frank flipped down his suit controls. “Lucy didn’t want anyone going below forty per cent, right?” His suit read fifty-one per cent.

“What’s the lowest you’ve been down to?”

Fumes, thought Frank. Fumes and nothing more. And Marcy died that day because Brack had needed to sacrifice someone to ease the food crisis. “Less than that.”

Then he did something he used to do with the other cons, turning their mics off so that Brack couldn’t overhear them. Sure, it hadn’t actually worked, because the medical monitors they all had implanted over their sternums contained microphones that could pick up every word resonating through their chests, and broadcast the information over the still-working suit antenna: but these were the good guys, and they weren’t doing that.

The NASA suits were of a very similar design to his: the controls certainly were, and he was able to tab through Yun’s commands to knock her microphone out too. He touched his helmet against hers.

“Can you still hear me?”

“Yes. Lance, why are we doing this?”

“Because if we’re going to talk about breaking the rules, we don’t want to be discussing it over an open channel, which might only have us on it, but might just be overheard by everyone.”

“Are we talking about breaking the rules?”

“We will be if we go for the top. I’m on fifty, you’re on less, and we’re going to have to take the long way round to the south: the map tells me we can’t go around to the north, there’s some big rock ledges in the way. So we’ve got a sixty-mile round trip, which is probably four hours, and then we’ve got another thirty-five back down the Santa Clara. Call that an hour and a half. We’ll be lucky to be on ten per cent by the time we get back to base.”

“Oh.”

“Now, Lucy’s not my boss. She shouts at me, I can tell her to whistle. But you? You’ve been here a week and this is your first long trip out. If you want my advice, I’d play nice, and we can go out again tomorrow, or the next day, to plant the summit.”

“But won’t we have the same distance to travel as we do now?”

“I know a short cut, straight up the north slope. Probably thirty-five miles to the top. We can be there and back in a morning.”

From where they stood, the summit was only ten miles away, straight across the yawning crater. But while Frank was pretty certain he could get down there, he didn’t fancy his chances getting up the other side. It looked formidable, steeper than Long Beach and almost five times taller.

“You want me to drive you around, we’ll do that. We probably won’t get much further before Lucy’s going to be wondering what the hell we’re up to. Or we can head back, which will take us to close to forty per cent, if not past it. It’s your call.”

“No, you’re right. Tomorrow will be soon enough.”

“Good choice.” Frank showed her how to turn on her mic again, then did it for himself. “Let’s get back.”

If M2 had got to the top at any point, they’d have come at it from the south. Their tracks would still be there, and Frank wanted to check that out first, and put some of his own down if he had to. By taking Yun the northern route, he’d avoid any unnecessary complications. He had plenty of those for real.

He waited until she was behind his seat again, and he swung the buggy around in a wide circle. As he faced south, he peered into the distance. Rust-red rock was all he could see, and he was relieved.

The moment went by like a point on the compass, and he was driving back to the entry point to the river bed. This was fine. It could stay like this, and it’d be fine.

[Transcript of private phone call between Diego Ferrar (XO Legal, NYC) and Bruno Tiller 2/18/2049 0951MT]

BT: How much does she want?

DF: That’s the problem. What she wants, is to know where her daughter has gone.

BT: People disappear all the time, Diego. We don’t want her looked for.

DF: This is undoubtedly true. But if you were able to furnish us with evidence, from a PI, or a police report, that your employee had a troubled work or private life, had got involved in drugs, or perhaps was contemplating suicide, we could arrange to pass it on with our sincerest regrets that nothing was known sooner.

BT: Tell me that will work.

DF: Mothers are strange creatures, sir. Very tenacious. I’m sure whatever I receive will be of such compelling quality as to lead her away from our door.

BT: I’ll get someone on it.

[transcript ends]

“Spot for me, Lance.”

Frank stopped on his way through the yard. Jim—James the geologist—was climbing off the exercise bike and wiping down the seat with a microfiber towel. An actual towel, not a torn-up sheet made from parachute canopy.

The weights, a metal bar with a set of semi-rigid water-filled drums, paired into different sizes, were a part of the NASA-specific gear that hadn’t been available to the cons. It meant that Frank, even though he’d assembled all the gym equipment himself, had a strange disregard for everything in the yard. On the one hand, he felt it wasn’t for the likes of him, and he wasn’t good enough to use it. On the other, it only reminded him of both prison and the physical tests XO had put him through at Gold Hill. He’d never used a gym in the free world. His work had kept him mostly fit.

“I got stuff to do,” he said. “A schedule to keep.”

Spotting was a social thing as well as a safety thing. Certainly in prison: it was another way of establishing mutual bonds and determining power structures.

“You’re always running from one thing to another. It’s OK to slack off, kick it into park for five minutes, then pull out into the fast lane again. C’mon. We don’t have to talk.”