S Morden - No Way

“It’ll be fine,” said Jim. “Once we’ve bedded in the network, we get to tour the area with a thumper. Next week sometime.”

“OK.” The others seemed to know what a thumper was. At this point, Frank didn’t mind not knowing. “Let’s get to it then. Back in four hours. That’s,” and he looked at the onboard clock. “Ten past three.”

“Fifteen ten. Got it.”

They left the airlock one at a time, each carrying a quarter of the batteries. Frank and Leland carried theirs to the trailer, and Jim and Yun stacked theirs on the steps. They divided the equipment, and Frank checked his map.

“I’m thinking we drive out to the furthest point, and work our way back. That way we know that if we’re going to run into problems, we’re doing so on a full tank.”

“Copy that,” said Leland. “You driving?”

“Gives me something to do,” said Frank, already climbing up to the driver’s seat.

Once Leland was hanging off the roll cage, Frank set off towards a point about two miles downslope and roughly four o’clock on Ceraunius’s clock face. He had to navigate the bad lands again—formed by the same subsidence that was supposed to have claimed Station seven—and push out onto the broad, blank side of the volcano. Nothing but frozen lava and dust, punctuated by the occasional impact crater and sinuous rille. He could see for miles, and yet could see so very little. The landscape curved in every direction, up and down and around. It made it feel as if the horizon was both far away and close up. Of all the places he’d been on Mars, this was the most alien and the most isolated.

He could drop off the radar up there, just like Station seven had.

Frank wanted to concentrate on driving. Leland wanted to talk about his Huckleberry Finn childhood on the banks of the Mississippi, of the floods and the levee breaches that punctuated his family’s slow-motion migration until even the most ornery of Southern families had ended up in the north.

Inevitably, after the almost confessional nature of Leland’s testimony to a lost and drowned way of life, he asked: “What about you, Lance? What shaped you growing up?”

Frank knew the bare-bones of Brack’s biography. Born. Raised. Educated. Employed.

How many theaters of war he’d served in, both in and out of uniform.

Brack was a mercenary. It was most likely why he was on Mars. His special talents—his apparent lack of compunction when it came to killing people for money—were what led XO to find him and hire him.

And maybe some of that Leland already knew. Maybe he couldn’t quite square the paper Brack with the real-life one, and he was trying to work out why there was such a difference. The explanation probably hadn’t occurred to him so far, and Frank wasn’t going to give him a nudge.

“I don’t have to talk about it, Leland. Stuff happened. I grew older. I ended up on Mars. If you want to tell me more about surfing down Main Street, then I’ll listen, but I’ve got nothing I want to say.”

“Most people want to talk about themselves, Lance.”

“Most people haven’t spent the last nine months on Mars.”

“I get that. I really do get that. But don’t you think it’s healthy to open up now and then?”

Frank thought of XO’s threat, not just to himself, but to the rest of the crew. “I’m good,” he said. “I’m fine the way it is. I’d like to keep it that way.”

There was dead air, then: “You know where I am if you need me.”

“I know. Don’t take offense. I’m like this with everyone.”

When they arrived at the furthest point on the map, they dismounted, and worked amiably together, side by side. Frank knew how to handle a rock drill better than Leland, and he took the first shift while Leland got the other parts together. Even though the ground was lava, rather than soft sediment, the first few inches cut up fine. Then it was lean in and try not to overheat the drill bit. Back on Earth, they’d be sluicing it down with water. Here, that wasn’t an option, so he had to stop frequently and let the machine cool down.

Each hole was supposed to be a foot long. Frank reckoned on making eight inches before having to stop. Below the rime of rust, the rock was hard and gray, flecked with white. A plume of pale dust ascended from the site every time he pulled on the trigger. When he stopped, it had all but fallen away. Just a slight haze in the air. Definitely not like on Earth, where the grinders spewing out clouds of dust were a problem for everyone.

Doing it in near-silence, only feeling the rattle of the drill through his hands. Memories came to him of the huge vacuum chamber back at Gold Hill, where Dee had holed his suit, and Alice had sealed it by cutting the boy and using his blood as a patch.

He hadn’t thought about that for months. He had to pull the drill aside and wait the feels out.

“Lance?”

“Just cooling the drill. Another inch and we’re there.”

Frank returned to the hole and got it to the required depth. He had to assume they had a spare bit somewhere, or some kind of sharpener, because the tip was blunting quickly.

When he’d done, Leland dropped in the anchor and pushed it home with the bolt, then threaded it in through the baseplate and started tightening it up with the crank. The anchor gripped on, and soon enough, the plate was hard against the surface of the rock.

From there on, it was simply a matter of screwing the seismometer onto the plate and activating it. It leveled itself and started sending basic telemetry back to the main computer.

“One down, three to go,” said Leland.

Frank wiped his faceplate with his hand, helped pack up the tools and load them onto the trailer, then strap them down. They checked together that they hadn’t left anything behind but the seismometer, looked at the numbers on their suits, and headed off towards the second point.

They were already edging towards the end of the second hour—drilling the anchor-hole had taken longer than anticipated, and wasn’t that always the way? Whether they could finish today depended on whether the rock in the other locations was as solid as it was in the first. Maybe they’d luck out from now on.

“Yun here.”

“Copy that,” said Leland.

“Jim’s got a suit malfunction. Heading back to CU1.”

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Frank. He was too far away to be any help. Even if he was close by, he still might not be able to help. Like the last time. With Marcy.

“Comms failure,” said Yun.

It was just comms. It wasn’t life support. It wasn’t a rip in the suit. Jim was fine.

“OK. Abort,” said Leland. “We’ll abort too. Keep a close eye on him.”

“Will do.”

“We’ll be back in around fifty minutes. Over and out.”

Frank drove on, and then said: “Just a comms issue.” To get it out of his system. To confirm that he’d heard right.

But Leland thought he was saying something different. “It’s SOP. Something’s wrong with the suit, get in to a pressurized environment. You were taught that, right?”

“I was taught I could use my discretion…”

“This is how we work, Lance. Something’s wrong, we get to safety. Then worry about what the problem is.”

“I get that.”

“This is protocol. We signed up to it.”

“Look, I’m heading back. I’m not even arguing with you.” He wasn’t. He was actually relieved. So what if he didn’t get on that well with Jim? That wasn’t the point. The point was that they were all going to live, right? “Let’s make it in forty-five.”

From:Miguel Averado

To:Mark Bernaberg

cc:Carolina Soledad