S Morden - No Way

Frank had a sudden urge to start screaming the truth to her. To yell at her, “That’s not how it was!” He had had a team, and XO had killed them all. So strong was the feeling that he had to close his eyes and swallow hard and breathe slowly.

“You want the extra hab up on the volcano?” he said eventually.

“Yes. Please.”

“When do you want it by?”

“How long will it take for you to train us?”

Frank had a bunch of cons doing it competently within a couple of sessions. “How quick are your crew?”

She laughed. Not unkindly, just surprised by the question. “I guess they’re OK.”

“If you want to schedule a couple of hours tomorrow, I can walk you all through it, see how you are at the end of it. Then we can head up the Santa Clara whenever you like. Three hours to build it, then it needs inflating and fitting out. It doesn’t have to be done in a day: once it’s up, you can take your time.”

“You put in a lot of suit time, Lance.”

“It’s how things get done.”

“So you don’t think about how dangerous it is?”

Of course he didn’t. If he did, he wouldn’t put himself in the position where the only thing between him and certain, almost instant, death was the thickness of a faceplate.

“I’ve got other things to think about.”

She approved of that answer. She was, after all, the pilot that landed the ship when it looked certain it was going to crash.

“I’ll schedule two hours of dirtside training from ten hundred tomorrow. If you think we’re ready to go after that, then I’ll clear a day later in the week. Otherwise, I’ll put us in for more training. You’re OK with ordering us around?”

“If you do what I tell you, sure.”

“We will. You have my guarantee.”

Lucy reminded him a little of Alice: competent, direct, emotionless, honest. Just a lot less murdery. He could certainly work with her. He turned to leave, then turned back. Something had been bothering him for a while. He’d caught the tail-ends of conversations and veiled references, but he’d never got the full story. And he’d worried about its implications ever since.

“Can I ask you a question?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Just how close were you all to crashing?”

She hesitated, and that told Frank all he needed to know.

“You’re OK. You don’t have to answer.” The corner of his mouth twisted briefly upwards. “Commercially sensitive, right?”

Lucy pressed her hands together until her joints went white. “You can, technically, control the MAV from Mission Control. It’s not like they don’t know the position of the Prairie Rose—that’s our transit ship—at any given moment, and though it might take a few more orbits for them to coordinate the docking procedure due to the time delay on the telemetry, they’re good at what they do. They’d have got you home.”

“Even if you’d all died?”

“There’s another crew in training, due to launch mid 2049, arrive nine months later. You’d be over two years alone by that point. You’d be practically a Martian by then.”

“The King of Mars,” he said.

“You’ve thought about all of this before. Of course you have.” She sprung her hands wide. “Not much else to think about but what can go wrong. The facts are, the training kicked in, I did manage to land the ship, we didn’t die. Give me one of a hundred different scenarios and I’d still have landed the ship. Because I’d trained for them all. All I’ve done for five years is train for those seven minutes. They’ll let me fly the MAV, but as previously explained, they don’t need me to fly the MAV.”

“OK.”

“This isn’t false modesty. There’d be no point in me being here, being on this crew, if I couldn’t get the Hawthorn down. And if you ask me when we leave Mars whether or not it was worth hauling my ass across the solar system for those seven minutes, I’m going to point to all the science we’ve done, and all the discoveries we’ve made. I’ve been a pilot since I was fifteen, and I’ve never been lucky once. All I did was my job.”

“So you don’t take compliments?”

“That has been noted before.” She gave a rueful smile. “What’s more important? That I did a good job, or that someone noticed I did a good job?”

“You wouldn’t be here if no one had noticed.”

“Same for you.”

It was Frank’s turn to semi-grimace. “Our routes here were… different.”

“But you’re on Mars. The best of the best. And if you don’t mind me saying, older than I anticipated. You must have beaten a whole bunch of people younger than you to get here.”

That wasn’t a lie. The Supermax had to be full of cons who’d flunked out of the program, for one reason or another. And then there were seven bodies on their way to the sun, with only Alice being older than him when she died.

“Something like that.”

“You can’t talk about XO’s selection process, and I’m not going there,” she said. “But none of us are here because we’re making up the numbers. Including you. Including me. Including even Jim.”

“I get it.” Compared with his own team of farm horses ready for the glue factory, these guys were all pure-blood thoroughbreds, highly strung and valuable. The difference was stark, and Frank was only just beginning to appreciate what it meant. “Thanks for your time.”

“Thank you for yours. You asked, and I wanted to explain. I didn’t do anything special, and I don’t want anyone to feel grateful.”

“You can’t stop them, though, can you?”

“No. I suppose I can’t.” She nodded down at his waistband. “What do you call those?”

Frank, puzzled, looked down at the items on his belt. He finally held up the nut runner. “This?”

“Yes, that. The electric torque wrench,” she said, giving it its proper name.

“A nut runner.”

“And that’s not the only one.”

“I got eight.”

“Why’ve you got eight?”

What would be a good answer here? Why indeed, if he was the only person on Mars, would he have eight of anything?

“For times like this,” he said, and thinking, damn, that’s not bad.

Lucy seemed to accept that. Why shouldn’t she? It made perfect sense, and she seemed more embarrassed at not coming to that conclusion herself than she’d ever shown when stating baldly how brilliant a pilot she was.

“Of course. Evening meal at nineteen thirty, if you want to join us and you’re always welcome to. Otherwise, ten hundred hours tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there.” But it wasn’t like he could be anywhere else.

From:Miguel Averado

To:Mark Bernaberg

Date:Sun, Feb 21 2049 10:15:59 -0300

Subject:HiRISE2

Hola, Mark.

Just the usual request for HiRISE2 images, this time showing 22 39 59 N, 97 41 25 W. If there’s any chance of swinging over that area in the next week or so, I’d be very grateful. There seems to be some recent, if not ongoing, geologic activity.

I’ll follow this up with a formal submission: it’s the weekend but I know you’re working! Raw data will be fine.

Mig

Frank kept on working in the greenhouse. He decided that it wasn’t so much the plants, the shades of green in all their varieties, or the textures of the leaves that were organic and not synthetic. It was the water: the sound of it, the smell of it, the feel of it in his lungs and against his skin.

The individually dripping trays merged together to make a liquid static, like that of a river, like that of the river he played next to when he was a kid. And when he went downstairs to the lower level, where the tilapia tanks were, there were additional textures to the soundscape: the bubble of oxygenators and the wet slap of a fish breaking the surface of their tank. It was soothing, arrhythmic, natural, in an environment that was entirely artificial and moved to a mechanical beat.