S Morden - No Way

He started to laugh, because he found the idea funny. He ended up kneeling on the floor, crying, because it was only going to end one way. Eventually, he raised his head, wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand.

What was he going to do?

The only thing he had on his side was time. NASA wouldn’t be here for a while, and he might be able to find out when.

A plan. He needed a plan.

From where he was, hunched over, elbows on his knees, staring out at the dried blood smeared along the floor, he couldn’t see anything he could do. His situation was hopeless. He was alone. Outside wanted to kill him. Inside was fragile and depended on his continued labor to keep it going. One mistake would be the end of it all. No one was going to save him.

“Goddammit.”

He felt shame. He’d been the mark in a con, and he hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t seen it at all, until it was too late. The loaded dice had been rolled, and he’d lost everything. He’d killed Brack, but by that point it had been just to save his own skin, just to save face even. It hadn’t made anything better. He wasn’t going home. He wasn’t going to see his son. He was still going to die on Mars, sooner or later.

What the hell: he’d had a choice, and he’d taken the decision to live.

First things first, then. Make sure the base was still running as it ought to be. He could access the information on his tablet, but that was in the cross-hab, clipped onto his suit’s utility belt. Comms was just through the end of the yard, and the screens were bigger.

He followed the rust-red trail of blood and sat in the Comms chair. This was Dee’s domain, where he’d spent hours just reading the technical documents and looking at the maps. He hadn’t liked going outside so much, and he’d gotten comfortable with his role. Right up to the point where Brack had tripped the fire suppressor system and then held the door shut on him so that he’d suffocated.

On the console was Brack’s tablet, and Brack’s gun. The gun was just a regular automatic, very similar to the one Frank had used to kill his son’s dealer, but with the trigger guard removed, so that a fat spacesuit-gauntleted finger could still fire it. He picked it up, carefully. A stray round would probably register on the fire system as a flash-over, and put a hole in the hab skin to boot. The safety was on, but that didn’t mean it was safe.

He put it on the other side of the desk, behind the monitor, and propped Brack’s tablet against the table legs, on the floor next to his feet.

He clicked the monitor on—they’d all habitually turned any electrical equipment they weren’t using off, to save precious watts—and waited for the screen to bloom into life.

OK. Error messages in the base dialogue box. Comms were offline—that was fine, because Frank had tripped the power breakers on the dish himself, to prevent the automatic systems talking with XO, and XO talking with them, with the ship and the circling satellites. But what about this one: Low Memory?

Dee had told him something about only having room for seven days’ worth of data, and he had no idea what the kid had done to automate the system. Dee probably hadn’t factored in dying, nor for the transmitter to be deliberately taken offline.

Was running out of memory on the computer going to kill him? It could well do if the hab’s telltales couldn’t report back environmental data to the main computer, and things started shutting down. Could he fix this? Could he fix this without doing more damage?

This wasn’t touch-and-swipe stuff. When he’d run his own construction firm, he’d managed his own accounts and hadn’t relied on anyone else to make up his books. But this… Dee would have known what to do. Dee wouldn’t have got to this point in the first place. His son would have known what to do, too.

With that thought, he dabbed at the alert with his finger. He had to learn how to do this if he was going to stay alive.

He was offered a list of options: automatically free up more memory, manually delete files, cancel the alert.

He picked the first, and held his breath while the screen showed the computer doing things. Then it stopped, and the alert just went away. It had been easy in the end.

He checked through the other functions—air, water, power—and they were all well within the green part of their respective graphs. Power generation was cyclic: the batteries charged up during the day, and there was a base load of three kilowatts from the radioactive generator to keep things ticking over during the night. But because Declan hadn’t been wiping the solar panels free of dust, nor turning them every few hours to face the sun, they weren’t working as efficiently as they ought. That was a job that needed doing, then.

As did his tours of the base to make sure that none of the bolts were working loose; and maintaining the buggies, and swapping out the air filters when he needed to, and balancing the atmosphere in the greenhouse, and clearing the muck from the recycling plant, and the plants… he had the whole base to run. Breathe. Breathe again.

He was alone on Mars. But that was OK, because it meant no one was trying to kill him except the planet itself. XO couldn’t reach him. Brack was dead. The habs were intact. And Franklin Kittridge was still alive. He could work something out.

He still needed a plan.

What did he have? He had Mars Base One. It must have cost billions in development and shipping, let alone the cost of getting people here to set it up. He had XO, and, by extension, NASA and the U.S. government by the balls. They’d inadvertently made a murderer the King of Mars.

So that had to be worth something. If he knew anything about rich people, and he’d worked on building projects for them before, it was that they feared a loss of status over pretty much everything else. So you think you built a Mars base? Five minutes with a knife and Frank could render that brag hollow.

It would, of course, kill him. XO would probably figure that he wouldn’t carry out that threat, so he had to give them a credible reason for thinking that trashing the base was an option. What did he want in return?

He wanted to go home. He wanted his freedom. He wanted to be able to hang out with his son again, assuming he could find him. Was that worth a multi-billion dollar hi-tech facility on another planet?

Yes. Sure. Why not?

There was a problem, though. Who the hell was going to give him a ride?

It wasn’t like he was going to build a raft and float home. He technically had a rocket ship, but that had been part of the one-way deal. It wasn’t going anywhere, and he wasn’t a pilot. Scratch that idea. He needed two things, and only two things: a berth on a ship capable of getting back to Earth, and someone to fly it there.

Brack had had that. If Brack had succeeded in killing Frank too, then Brack would get a trip home, be paid off, and live happily ever after. Or as happily as a stone-cold murderer could do.

There was a certain irony there, which wasn’t lost on him. He considered his own guilt again, and wondered how life might have turned out if he hadn’t done what, in hindsight, had been utterly the wrong thing.

So, technically, the two things he needed would be available once NASA arrived, given that Brack wasn’t going to be able to take up the space.

Frank dragged his fingers through his hair and scrubbed at his face. This wasn’t his forte. He was a man who worked with his hands, not his head. But right now, he couldn’t build his way out of his predicament. There had to be a solution here.

How was he going to take Brack’s place on that flight home? Presumably the NASA astronauts were expecting Brack to be here when they arrived. That he’d be around while they completed their mission. That they’d take him with them when they were done. That was all arranged.