S Morden - No Way

Frank wrestled with the zips and flaps, and felt the cold plastic on his ass.

No one suspected him. Not Isla, who he spent most time around, not Lucy, and especially not Leland. There was something about the man that made Frank want to just tell him everything, and that was why Frank studiously avoided spending any time alone with him. Even Jim was preferable, because he was already on his guard with the geologist.

The only person he could be candid with was Luisa. And that had its own problems. He was—how far away now? Ninety million miles?—and the person he was most reliant on, his confidante, worked at the heart of the XO operation. They were both vulnerable. Goddammit, he worried about her.

He scrubbed at his face. His better diet had put some elasticity back in his skin, and he no longer had the gray prison pallor common among inmates. He felt old, though. Fifty-three. He’d missed his birthday in the flurry to get Phase three done: XO hadn’t made a thing of it, and neither had he. No birthday candles in a pure O 2atmosphere, either.

She’d remembered, though.

Frank pushed the buttons and zipped up. By the time he got back through to the cross-hab, it was empty, so he suited up and headed outside.

Yun and Jim were already on the buggy: trailer hitched, life support packs strapped down. Frank kicked the wheels and shook the tow bar, but they’d done the job just fine. Jim was in the driving seat, which bugged Frank: that was his seat, even though Jim had done plenty of driving and there was no reason why he shouldn’t today.

Frank didn’t like being a passenger. It reminded him too much of sitting behind Marcy. It also gave him too much time to think about it. He guessed he’d have to wear it today.

Jim didn’t dick around behind the wheel. He was perfectly safe. He didn’t treat the Santa Clara as a racetrack, he didn’t try to drive along the banked slopes. He didn’t try and bust the top speed. Maybe he did with Yun, but with Frank on board, he was on his best behavior.

It was still a grind to get to the outpost. There was nothing they could do to make the route shorter or faster. The views were only ever going to be of worn rock walls and the trickling dust sliding into the river channel in tiny, slow-motion dribbles.

Lucy wanted waymarkers in the channel, showing the direction and distance of both CU1 and MBO. Frank hadn’t got around to that yet. He’d cut out the signage from cargo-rocket fuselage, and made a scriber to write on the information, but installation would take longer.

But despite that, Frank knew when he was getting towards the top: he’d passed that way often enough to know the small tells in the landscape, and without turning round to look back down the valley.

With a final spin of the wheels, the buggy clawed its way up out onto the upper slopes of the volcano. Jim drove the remaining fifteen hundred yards to the outpost and parked up outside.

“OK. Let’s unload, and Lance can go and poke Station seven.”

Yun climbed down and went immediately to the trailer, eager to get Frank on his way.

“Bring it back here,” she said. “Don’t try to fix it.”

“Even if it’s obvious the battery’s become disconnected, or the solar panels have gotten clogged?”

“Yes. I need to know why those things have happened, and how to stop them happening in the future.”

“OK. If that’s what you want.” Frank stared out across the crater. “You want to check again, see if it’s recovered?”

“I’ll still need to take a look at it, find out why it failed in the first place.”

“Station seven it is, then.” He synced his map with Yun’s and checked his air. “I’m going to swap out. It’s another twenty miles on from here.”

Frank picked up a life support from the trailer and climbed the stairs to the airlock. He cycled it while the others were collecting the rest of the equipment, and stepped inside.

He hadn’t been into the outpost for a while: after it was built, and he’d shaken it down, he’d not had a need to. His journeys had been to drop off astronauts or cargo, and they’d often done that themselves.

The hab had got kind of messy, and he didn’t like that. Lucy wouldn’t like that either. It had unpleasant echoes of stepping into the descent ship and finding the detritus that Brack had created as he slowly, inexorably, lost it.

It wasn’t his call, but messy meant sloppy. The one thing that needed to be avoided at all costs was a mistake. He had to work with these people, and snitching on them to Lucy wasn’t his style, but he was going to have to say something. He went through his telltales to check that the atmosphere was breathable and warm enough, then thumbed his suit open.

As he went through the rigmarole of climbing out, swapping the pack over, and climbing back in again, Yun and Jim came in separately, stacking the life supports by the door, and unsuiting into the cold dry air.

“You got to clean this shit up,” said Frank. “Lucy sees this, she’ll blow.”

“I don’t remember it being this bad,” said Jim. “But yes. It could stand a tidy-up.”

“Just bag it and I’ll take it back down the hill. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Three tops.” Frank closed his suit, and if either of them replied, he didn’t hear what it was.

The suit tightened around him in the airlock, and he stepped back outside, twenty thousand feet up near the top of an extinct volcano on another planet. And it was ordinary. As was the simple fact that almost instant death was just the other side of his faceplate.

He stood there on the steps, looking out at the gentle curve of the land in almost every direction except towards the crater. Nothing but dust, rock and hazy sky.

Once, a long time ago, there had been a flood, cascading down from the mountaintop. How did that even work? Had there been ice up there, or had the water just fountained out of the ground and spilled down the broad flanks of Ceraunius? It had filled Rahe. A lake. The water was still there, underground. He’d washed in it, drank it, used it to grow plants.

He was using air. He should get on.

He climbed back up onto the buggy, checked that the fuel cell was good for both the forty miles to Station seven and back, and the trip down the hill: not that that needed many watts, as in extremis it could coast most of the way.

He aimed the nose of the vehicle south. He hadn’t given that direction much thought recently. M2 had receded from his list of concerns as XO had pronounced them dead, or at least incapable of travel. Luisa had said she’d nixed the idea of him going over to check, at least for now. There was no point in unnecessary trips to prove what they already knew.

But when he did think about it, he still felt uncertain about what he did do, and what he could have done. He was the only person in a position to have helped them, and yet he hadn’t, because of the risk that they would have just taken his stuff and killed him.

For him, the decision had been one of personal safety. For XO, it had been a lot more complicated than that. They’d been willing to see one base thrive, and one base die, rather than face the possibility of having both go wrong. Add several layers of secrecy, the company’s reputation, and a whole sack of cash, and XO’s reasoning got real murky, real quick.

Frank had been put in impossible positions so often, he now just stuck to the simple metric that whatever kept him alive and on track to go home was the best. He hated feeling compromised, and yet everything that XO got him to agree to dug him further into that pit.

It sucked to be M2. But he wasn’t going to do anything about it.

He passed Station six, perched on the south-west rim of the crater between the ridge to the east and the “bad lands” caused by subsurface collapse. It hadn’t been easy navigating the undulating terrain the first time: craters acting as sand-traps and broken ground all around. The second time, he looked for his tracks, but the wind had already eroded them away, and he had to pick a fresh path through the area.