S Morden - No Way

“It’s. It’s OK. Yes. Some warning.” He steadied himself. “OK. You can do it now.”

She—initially wary—finished beating the dust away from his soft fabric coverings, then presented herself for reciprocal treatment. They’d learned this in training. Standard Operating Procedure. It was normal for them in high-dust situations. No one meant anything by it, it was just a way of extending the life of the suits, and keeping dirt out of the base.

They cycled in the airlock together, and racked their life support along with the others. Frank hung up his suit on the hanger, and picked up his overalls.

Everyone else seemed to have dispersed, doing chores, turning off equipment, checking systems. Some of those things would have been Frank’s job. But they were doing it for him. Instead of him. Who was he kidding? They could run the base without him, even with a man down.

“If, if you don’t need me for anything, I’m going to grab a shower.”

“Lance? I made the wrong call. I didn’t follow the book. None of us did. The others should have pulled me up on it. You dug us out of a hole. And I’m grateful.”

She stood there, in her one-piece long johns, and she looked broken. He had nothing to offer her.

“That’s… fine,” he said. “I mean, what else am I supposed to do? This is all we’ve got, right? We’ve got to look after each other.”

She nodded. “You’re a good man, Lance Brack.”

No. No, really, he wasn’t. He wasn’t even Lance Brack.

“Sure.” He turned on his heel before a confession came to his lips.

He headed through to the crew hab and grabbed his towel, then pulled the folding door shut behind him in the shower. He rested his forehead against the cool of the partition and closed his eyes. Dust. All he could see was dust.

He hit the valves, turning the water on as hot as he dared, and stripped in the tiny cubicle before stepping into the scalding stream. Heat. Light. Water. He’d had his fill of Mars for the moment. Maybe it would be better in the morning. Maybe he was broken too. Maybe they all were.

He’d had worse days than this. After witnessing, and being a party to, all of that death, he’d somehow managed to hold it together, alone, on Mars. He was still here. He had no idea where that strength had come from, but he knew damn straight that he was now running on empty.

Thoughts of going home, seeing his son again. Thoughts of sticking it to XO. Notions of hope, or revenge, of simply getting off this rock. They’d gone. Everything gone.

The folding door to the cubicle flapped open.

“Goddammit. Give me a minute.”

It closed again, but he was suddenly aware that there was someone in there, the other side of the curtain. Then in with him, under the water, pressed against him, arms around him, head against his shoulder.

He had no idea what to do. He probably had known once. He’d unlearned it. Like so many things.

She held him tight, and slowly, slowly he allowed himself to put his own arms around her, his fingertips pressing into her wet, so very pale, skin.

How long they stood like that, he didn’t know. Just that when Isla had gone again, slipping out behind the curtain as silently as she’d slipped in, he couldn’t work out if it had been real, or just a dream.

[Message file #149438 3/5/2049 0334 MBO Rahe Crater to MBO Mission Control]

Luisa, you know about Jim going missing. What you don’t know is that there were tracks up on the volcano. Tracks made by an XO buggy, that were recent, and not made by me. You keep on telling me that M2 are gone, they’re history, but I’m not buying XO’s line on it. Not with Station seven, and now Jim. Is there anything, anything at all, you can tell me that they don’t want me to know?

Goddammit, Luisa, if there’s any chance that Jim’s still alive, I need some answers soon.

[transcript ends]

Twelve hours later, Frank was able to get a message out to XO.

The dish had survived. Yun checked it out, and while the shape of it was slightly warped, the digital signal from base to orbit and back was strong enough to cover for that. It could have been worse. The dust-load could have ripped the dish from its mountings, and that would have left them almost voiceless. The DV had a low-gain antenna. It could have been retuned from the transit vehicle to the relay satellite. But it would still have been a problem.

Frank typed his message out, sent it encrypted, and waited for a reply. While he waited, he went outside—even that, cycling the airlock, charging the life support, had to be budgeted for. It was almost like the old days when he didn’t have watts to burn.

The power… Declan would have either loved it or hated it. They had just enough to run the greenhouse. If it hadn’t been for the hot water coming from the RTG, and the unnatural rise in the temperature outside, they’d have been sleeping in the greenhouse too. Running the scrubbers, powering the computer, keeping the dish pointed in the right direction, wasn’t even break even. The battery banks had plenty of charge, but they didn’t know how long the storm would sit over them. As long as usage was greater than generation, then they were simply borrowing from tomorrow for what they needed today.

He cleaned the solar panels. He turned them manually to face the east, because the electricity they consumed turning themselves was almost as much as they were generating. It should have been somewhere near fifteen kilowatts. The colored bars on his tablet showed them getting less than one.

Add that to the base load, and that was less than four kilowatts during the day. It wasn’t enough. It certainly wasn’t enough to recharge one buggy, let alone two, and that meant they were stuck at the bottom of the volcano until the situation changed.

The weather: looking up, all he could see was dust. The blue-pink of the sky had been replaced with a dirty brown shroud, and the sun was dim enough that he could look straight at it and not even have to blink. To the south, over the hidden summit, the sky was darker still, illuminated by lightning and growling like a distant monster.

XO had specifically threatened him and the NASA mission if he revealed anything about M2 at all. And the niggling worry remained that M2 was specifically there to make sure that Brack didn’t survive Phase three. Was that him being paranoid? Possibly, but it wasn’t as if XO weren’t out to get him.

But if Jim had been picked up by M2, what did they want in return? Food? Shelter? OK, he could probably provide that. He could even put up an extra hab, and extend the greenhouse. It wasn’t impossible to imagine, if the M2 crew were decent people who’d play ball. Whatever reason XO had had for putting them there in the first place, they’d abandoned them now, and they’d ordered Frank to abandon them too. M2 would be grateful. However many of them were left. More than zero.

Somehow he was going to have to square that circle.

He rested his fists on the side of the solar farm and side-eyed the sun. Any kind of rescue mission he might throw together wasn’t going to happen any time soon, was it? Not unless he drained the batteries and left the base short. And he’d probably need two spare life support packs too, one for him, and one for Jim. One for the possibility of Jim.

He didn’t need to explain what he was doing. He’d covered enough silences with the “commercially sensitive” excuse that it had become a joke. The base, the buggy, the power in the batteries, were all XO-owned. It might eat into the trust he’d earned, taking a buggy for a full day, not telling anyone where he was going, but Lucy couldn’t stop him if she didn’t know.

When he got back, he could just put it down to company business, and that was that. Sure, she’d chew him out. She was as much on edge as he was. But as long as he didn’t do anything to jeopardize the safety of the NASA personnel, he was in the clear. He’d take her yelling at him and not say a word in complaint if that’s what it took to keep them all safe.