S Morden - No Way

There wasn’t a hope in hell that XO would let him anywhere near that ship as Frank Kittridge, murderer. He knew where all XO’s bodies were buried, and the astronaut-scientists? They were going to be asking all kinds of questions that XO weren’t going to want answered.

What if…

He sat up with a gasp. The idea was preposterous. Literally insane. He’d never get away with it.

What if he tried to convince everyone that he was Brack?

Had XO any clue as to what was happening in the base right now? He’d turned the dish off. There was no data leaking out. All they could do was look down from above. What would they see? Three bodies, lying out in the dust. One man in an XO suit, cleaning up shop. Maybe the lights going on or off. If they’d been lucky with when the satellites had been overhead, perhaps a frame or two with him in it. They’d have no clue as to his identity: all their suits were superficially identical.

“Frank, don’t.”

He looked up, and there was Zeus. Smoke streamed from his nose, his eyes, his ears, his skin.

“What else am I going to do? I’ve got to get off this rock somehow.”

“When you start lying to people, you got to remember all those lies. Tell the truth, brother. The truth sets you free.” When he spoke, thick ribbons of boiling water spiraled up from his mouth.

“You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“It’s the only advice I’ve got.” Zeus was huge. His mere presence filled the room. “If you deal with XO, you’re dealing with the devil.”

“They hold all the cards.”

“You got a pretty decent hand yourself, Frank. You just got to play them straight.”

Frank swallowed. “I killed you, Zeus. I opened the door on you and I killed you.”

He was addressing nothing but the space between the desk and the door. It took him a moment to realize that he’d been talking to a ghost. Again.

So what was he going to do? Could he hold out for however long it was, hope that NASA came, hope that he could convince them to take him with them, hope that XO hadn’t already decided to poison the well, knowing there was someone in the base who was deliberately staying out of contact? What did he actually know about the agreement between XO and NASA?

Had, in fact, XO wanted them all dead? What if Brack had lost the plot so spectacularly that he thought he’d been acting under orders, when XO were desperately trying to talk him round? Maybe he’d passed off the earlier deaths to his controllers as accidents in the same way he’d fooled the cons.

XO were never going to implicate themselves. Of course they were going to pile the blame for this on Brack. They were never going to tell him the truth now, just as they’d never told him the truth in the past.

Perhaps it was the shock wearing off, that it had taken him until now to even consider why he’d ever been put in the position of being press-ganged to Mars. He’d asked, at the time of that initial interview in jail, why not just take smart young people, and had been told that smart young people dying would cause a stink.

That was what this was about. The fancy lawyer-type had known it then: dying wasn’t optional. The choice they had was who they were going to kill. Frank couldn’t think of anyone who was more expendable than a bunch of cons that they already owned. And probably, neither could XO.

Perhaps decisions this big ought to be made while wearing pants, but it wasn’t like there was anyone watching.

He leaned over and pulled Brack’s tablet up onto his lap. It was the same as his—standard issue—but with a different- colored cover. He turned it on, and expected to see some fancy password-protection screen. Finger, voice-print, iris scan. He was certain he’d seen Brack do something like that every time he’d accessed the device. Now, there was nothing, not even a pattern key or a text-based code. The lack of security made Frank think that there couldn’t be anything on there worth looking at, and he was about to fold the cover over and drop it back on the desk when he noticed there were icons present that weren’t on his own machine. Things that weren’t on the main computer.

Folders. Folders full of files.

A mail function. A goddamn interplanetary mail function.

He stared at the screen again, not even daring to touch it, in case they disappeared when he tried. But there was no reason for them to do that. So in the end he reached down and dabbed his fingertip against the mail icon and watched while it opened up and out.

Messages that went back months. All of Brack’s traffic with XO, which had presented itself publicly as an uncrackable code that Dee had said wasn’t worth even trying to unscramble. And here it was, rendered into plain text on Brack’s machine.

He scrolled through, letting the headers blur as they sped past. So many. A whole history.

Frank shrank the mail app down and put his hand over his heart. It was banging hard against his ribs. This was it. This was the smoking gun. He was going to have to read everything, just to see how bad it all was.

He tapped one of the folders. Behind the icon were files, and one of the files had his name. His rap sheet? And there was Marcy’s and Zeus’s and Dee’s. They were all there. And there was other information, some named with strings of letters and numbers that didn’t mean anything to him, but others with titles that hinted at deeper mysteries.

What to look at first? Frank scanned the file names on that part of the system. Those could wait, and probably those. This one, this Project Sparta summary. He’d never heard of Sparta, not in this context, anyway. He knew about the Spartans because of that movie, that they were badass soldiers of ancient times, but it didn’t have any real relevance to his situation, did it?

He opened it up. And he read it.

[Image analysis MBO Mission Control, dated 11/11/2048]

Differences in the last sol:

1. Body #1 still in situ but covered (?parachute canopy)

2. Object #2 (?body) next to Body #1 (?parachute canopy)

3. Object #3 (?body) next to Object #2 (?parachute canopy)

4. Rover recharge lead plugged into fuel cell of rover

5. Hatch on supply cylinder #6 was closed, now open.

Conclusion: there is definitely someone (Subject #1) still active at MBO, able to execute EVA and carry out tasks. We can see no external damage to communications equipment, which does not discount other failure modes. Re-establishing contact with MBO remains the priority, but we should discuss our contingency plans in the event of a LOC [Loss of Control] scenario.

[message ends]

Some time later, he found himself on the floor, looking up at the underside of the comms console. He wasn’t certain how he’d got there. He’d been sitting on the chair, which was now, like him, on its back.

He’d fainted. That was it. He’d read something, stood up too suddenly, and folded like a bad poker hand.

Robots. Fucking robots.

For his entire life, he’d been threatened with losing his job through automation. Everyone had. Manufacturing had been first, then driving. Marcy had been one of the last operators of big rigs. Banking, retail, they’d all fired their workers and hired machines. Construction was one of the few places a man could still work with his hands and command a decent paycheck.

The base they’d built, with their own labor and their own lives, was supposed to have been built by robots.

He was here, on Mars, because the robots didn’t work. They broke down. They got sand in their joints. They weren’t smart enough. They were too far away. Easier to send cheap, disposable people in place of expensive, fragile robots.

Even then, that wasn’t the worst of it. XO still wanted it to look like robots had built the base, with just one human supervisor. Killing the set-up crew was part of the package, so of course they had to be expendable. XO got its money, and a foothold on Mars. NASA—who thankfully didn’t appear to know anything about Project Sparta—had a base they could use.