S Morden - No Way

Frank reeled the cable back onto the spool and drove slowly along the ridge line. He was getting spooked now. At some point—some point soon?—Jim was going to tip over from having more air than not, to having less than he’d need. He and Yun had walked, and that took more air than just driving. Then they’d put in two seismometers. But they’d had fresh tanks. Calculating how long someone might have to live was something he was used to now, but this felt different.

Jim had maybe four or five hours of air left. He had a part-used spare in the outpost that would see him back to base.

Frank steered the buggy down into the west-facing dry river bed. It was much like the Santa Clara, twisting its way down the flanks of Ceraunius in tight C-shaped curves, between steep walls that seemed to bleed brine.

It was dustier there, on the flat floor of the gully. He drove down a way, and got off to stand in front of the buggy, the lights in his face, staring at the ground and seeing only his bootprints. Jim hadn’t come this way.

Had the geologist decided on a whim to go somewhere else, having told Yun that he was going to the bluff? Or had Frank somehow missed him on the wide-open landscape? Sure, there were craters, both big and small, but there weren’t any significant obstructions on the route between the bluff and the outpost. If there was a problem with his comms, he might have difficulty navigating. But then again, all Frank would do would be to head upslope until he was in sight of the caldera, and then turn left. He could find the outpost that way.

And if Jim was already back with Leland and Yun, he’d be tempted to take a swing at him. Definitely tempted now. He hadn’t had a call, though, cryptic or otherwise.

He backed the buggy up to do a three-point turn, and emerged from the valley, hoping that there’d be a speck in the distance, a figure in a spacesuit, trudging in the direction of the outpost.

Goddammit.

“Leland. Yun.”

“Leland here.”

“I’m calling it. I’ll stay out here as long as I can, but you can be the one to phone this in. And use a different channel. I need to concentrate.”

There was a long, long pause, enough for Frank to think that his message hadn’t got through.

“Do you copy?”

“Copy that. Good luck.”

Frank thought back to the number of times he, and any of the others, had been outside, on their own, maybe miles from the base, and they hadn’t got themselves lost, or injured, or incapacitated. They’d inadvertently made XO’s job that much harder by managing, against the odds, to stay alive. It had taken someone actively trying to kill them to take them down.

If this involved M2, what the hell was he going to do?

The dust was blowing up thicker, and he didn’t know whether that was likely to get worse or not. He’d not been out in a proper sandstorm yet—most of them happened a long way to the south, and they only occasionally got the spill-over—but this one looked like it was threatening to come over the equator. But anything that impeded his vision now was serious: even nebulous clouds of dust blowing past might mean he missed the obvious, and an increased wind speed would erase any potential tracks.

Where would a geologist have gone to, if he hadn’t gone to where he said he was going? Frank stood up on the buggy and used its height to scan the bare rock for anything that might catch his eye.

The most obvious feature was the scarp slope to the north, that marked the start of the broken ground at the head of the Santa Clara, where it almost seemed that the water flowing down the flanks was looking for the easiest path down before settling on the one. The cliff was tall, maybe five, six hundred feet from top to bottom, and it was catching the afternoon sun and glowing a bright, almost white, pink.

But that was north. Jim had gone south. South towards where M2 was. Had been. Might still be. And Frank had never warned them to avoid that area, because he didn’t feel like he could, because of his deal with XO, and just look where that had got him.

He headed south and east again, going over the same ground that he’d already scoured, looking for anything he might have missed. If Jim’d gone far enough, then maybe, just maybe he was out of radio range.

“Jim. Can you hear me? It’s Lance. I’m a mile south of the outpost. Flash your suit lights. Over.”

He repeated the message, again and again, driving a little way, stopping, standing up.

No tracks. No buggy wheels. No boot marks.

He stopped, eventually, when his own tank was telling him he had to. He parked up on the top of a ridge, and watched the dust drapes blow by like chiffon curtains.

“Leland? Yun? Do you copy?”

Leland answered. The signal was choppy, and breaking up. “Go ahead.”

“I’m coming back in. I’m running out of gas, and I just can’t find him.”

There was silence. No static, only the occasional chirruping of data, like crickets, or birds.

Then: “We got it. You had to try.”

“I had to try.”

“Come on in, Lance. We have to go back to MBO. Orders.”

“I could spend another ten minutes out here, maybe.”

“Lance,” said Leland. “I know. But you’ve got to come in now. We’re relying on you to get us down.”

If he stopped now, Jim was dead. If he wasn’t already dead. But he’d sure as hell be dead by morning, if he couldn’t make it back to the outpost by himself. And even then, it’d get damn cold overnight.

And if Frank didn’t turn back now, he might well kill himself. And the people he was responsible for.

“Jim, you goddamn fuck-up,” he said. “We weren’t supposed to lose anyone. We just weren’t. If you can hear this, then: I’m sorry. I’m leaving you here. I’ve run out of time. I can’t put their lives in danger to try and save you. I did what I could. I looked everywhere for you. But what I did wasn’t enough. Because I didn’t find you. Now you get to stay here, while we go back. And there’s not a damn thing I can do about that. I hope that, whatever it was you were doing, it was worth it.”

He took the steering column and resisted the urge to rip it clean off. He didn’t know if this was an accident, stupidity, or deliberate. The uncertainty burned in him, and made him shake in fear, in rage, in helplessness.

Goddammit.

[Internal memo: Mars Base One Mission Control to Bruno Tiller 3/4/2049 (transcribed from paper-only copy)]

Sir, we need to talk. Securely. Urgently.

[transcript ends]

The next day, they all went out—the remaining six of them—to look for Jim. Two buggies. Three people apiece, and the highest-resolution satellite maps downloaded onto their tablets. Frank had shown Lucy where he’d searched, and she’d thanked him for his efforts in such clipped tones, she thanked him again straight after, in case he hadn’t realized she was actually thanking him.

He knew what it was like to lose someone. He kept wondering if he might have missed something on his search. Maybe the others wondered that too. That if it had been them, they would have found him. It gnawed at him, at his bones, like a feral beast.

Luisa couldn’t help. Her hands were as tied as his. She made all the right sounds, for sure. Conciliatory. Concerned. But she was having to follow the party line at this point, insisting that M2 were gone, were history, dead, incapacitated, dying, couldn’t possibly have taken Jim. Station seven had fallen into a hole, and maybe Jim had gone the same way. Mars was an unknown, unpredictable place, full of danger. Who knew? They could have been right, but he sure as hell didn’t trust XO to tell her anything like the truth.

In Frank’s experience, it wasn’t Mars that was the problem. It was people—XO people—who were the problem.