S Morden - No Way

The rest of the base had a slightly astringent tang on the tongue that he’d got so used to that, after the first few days, he no longer registered it except by its absence. The humidity of the greenhouse seemed to neutralize it, and while this didn’t make the section more Earth-like, it made it just a little less Mars-like.

Some mornings, after a night when he couldn’t sleep, he’d go to the greenhouse. Sometimes Isla would be there too. She’d cordoned off a section of the upper level, enclosed it in plastic, and was deliberately increasing the CO 2around what looked like young maize plants, to see if they grew faster. Except that wasn’t it: she was as interested in them failing as she was seeing them grow tall and strong. She wanted to know what happened—she’d done the exact same experiment on Earth, and was now trying it on Mars. Was the result going to be different? It didn’t matter. It was science. Very different from construction, where the end result was all that mattered.

The greenhouse was big enough that the two of them could be there without it feeling cramped. Without, indeed, seeing much of each other. Isla was a shadow behind the double layer of plastic. Frank was checking the nutrient pumps, topping up those that might run out in the next sol with fresh injections of A, B and C.

The airlock popped, and Yun came in, waving her tablet at Frank.

“I need you,” she said.

Frank frowned. Yun was direct. Sometimes that could come out as rude, and he’d had to learn that this was her, trying to do her best. The best for her, the best for everyone back home. Wherever she went on the base, wherever she went on Mars, she seemed to behave as if she had a crowd of watchers looking over her shoulder, silently judging her for every moment she wasn’t on task.

“Sure.” He found a flag, a piece of stiff wire with some parachute material tied to the top, and pushed it into the gap between the tray and the staging, to mark his place. “What’s the problem?”

“Station seven has stopped sending data.”

“And…”

“I have to go out and either fix it there, or bring it back to the workshop. Today.” She held out the tablet showing the positions of the weather stations, but was moving it too jerkily for Frank to be able to tell which was Station seven, or where it was located.

He took it from her, and put it down on the edge of the tray. OK, so seven was on the far side of the caldera, at about the five o’clock position on Ceraunius. Within range, but not convenient. He tried to remember siting that particular instrument, and maybe he could and maybe he couldn’t. After a while, without anything notable happening, each stop resembled both the previous and the next.

The summit. That had been different. Top of the world.

“So if I take you, who’s staying with Jim?” Jim would have lived up there if he could.

Yun looked momentarily surprised, as if she’d forgotten that other people had tasks scheduled. Then she was forlorn.

“But this needs attention.”

“No one’s saying it doesn’t,” said Frank. Outside, the sun had just crested the crater rim, turning the hab a rosy pink. “But we’ve got time to sort it. Find someone who’ll go with Jim.”

“No one else is up yet.”

“Isla is.”

Frank caught a hesitation before Yun’s reply. No reason why everyone had to be best buddies. Just that they had to agree to work together, like Frank’s crew had. And he could sense, if not see, Isla stiffen behind the cloudy plastic sheeting. Of course she was listening.

“Isla’s got her own work,” said Yun eventually.

“And Jim has his. Look, let’s leave it until after breakfast. Maybe the cold has knocked out the battery, or something. It might come back online when it’s warmed up.”

Frank left the greenhouse and filled a bowl with his usual grains and fruits, and even as he crunched his way through them, he was aware of a hovering, hopeful presence, sometimes behind him, sometimes off to one side. Fan wandered in, and went straight to make coffee. Then he wandered out again, as was his habit, to read and plan for an hour before opening up the med bay for consultations. While doctor–patient confidentiality didn’t extend as far as astronauts on Mars, the veneer of it had.

Fan had also offered his expertise to Frank, but Frank had already been warned off by Luisa: no going to the doctor except in extreme emergencies. His skin was a map, pointing to secrets that XO would rather leave buried.

Then Frank had his answer. Obvious, really: he’d drop Yun and Jim off at the outpost—CU1 as it was officially known—swap out his life support, and drive around the crater on his own to collect the malfunctioning number seven. He could take it back to Yun, who’d make an assessment on the spot, and all without disrupting anyone else’s work pattern.

Sure, Lucy still didn’t like him taking solo trips. She never asked him herself, but she permitted the others to ask. Certainly, she could forbid them, but she hadn’t. It put a little slack into the system, that was all. Frank thought she found it a useful corrective to the otherwise tight operating rules.

Yun had to compromise. But it took her only a couple of seconds to agree, and she left him alone after that.

He had half an hour before leaving, so he went back to the greenhouse to pick up where he’d left off. He pulled the flag out and worked his way down the rest of the row.

“Lance?”

“Yeah?” He didn’t look up from the tray. These bean roots, they were pretty much mature and the nodules on them were starting to restrict the flow of water across them. Maybe he’d got the nutrient mix wrong, because he’d never seen such dense growth before. Raise the plants slightly, and start picking the longest pods, he guessed.

“You don’t have to go along with everything.”

“I know that.” He straightened up. It was Isla. Of course it was. He’d—just for a moment—thought it was Marcy, even though the accent, and the delivery, were all wrong. He showed her the root network and she peered at it, then started pushing the white fibers aside with her fingertips.

She seemed content to let him care for the food crops. Was that trust? It looked a lot like it. He was certain she checked on them when he was elsewhere, so she was going to pick up any problems before they got serious. But she hadn’t said anything yet, and it had been two weeks.

Two weeks and he was trusted. He felt such a fraud.

“Of course you do. Just…” She slotted the beans back into the water flow. “If you feel you’re being taken advantage of, you need to say.”

“I got the talk from Leland,” said Frank. “But I’m supposed to help. It’s in the job description.”

“All the same,” she said.

“It’s fine. I don’t mind.”

She looked down at the plants, and brushed her hand across the top of them, first one way, then the other.

“You’re not our employee,” she said. “You’re crew. However you got here.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean? His stomach suddenly knotted up, and threatened his breakfast.

“You like to keep busy.” But she didn’t press the point, and maybe she most likely meant that he’d got to Mars solo and frozen, eight—nearly nine months now—earlier. But he was never going to be crew. He knew too much, and they knew too little.

“I’ve got to go. Jim and Yun will be waiting.” He put the flag back in the trays, in the new position, and eased himself between Isla and the next set of drip trays. The tightness in his gut slowly started to ease, but it must have shown on his face as he emerged into the cross-hab.

“You OK?” asked Jim, already half into his suit.

“Yeah. I’m going to push some buttons before we go.” Talking about bladders and bowel movements was nothing out of the ordinary. The brief delay produced a fleeting flash of annoyance from Yun, but she kept a lid on it and carried on stacking spare life supports into the outside airlock.