S Morden - No Way

He knew where the base was. He didn’t know what condition they were in.

If M2 were dead, he didn’t have to reveal anything about them.

If they weren’t, and didn’t have Jim, then… could he just leave them there to rot? Would they be content to stay there and dwindle away and die, knowing there was salvation just over the hill? Would Frank? Would anyone? No, of course not. That was ridiculous.

If they did have Jim? If he could bring him back with him? Lucy would probably forgive him everything. Even if he brought the M2 survivors too.

Would XO, though? Not on current form.

What he ought to do, what would get him a straighter line back to Earth, was to simply shrug his shoulders and carry on with life at MBO. Jim hadn’t followed the rules. He’d gone missing. He was presumed dead. Tough on everyone, but he’d been an idiot and he’d fucked up. Mars had taken him. Move on.

Frank needed to keep his head down, and spend the next thirteen months hoping that M2 didn’t turn up again.

Put like that, it wasn’t going to work, was it?

Maybe he could go over and take a look, from a distance, try and see what state they were in. If there was no obvious movement, he could get closer, poke around. If they were dead, then that was that. He could leave them with a clear conscience.

Frank frowned at himself. That word. He was going to do this, wasn’t he? Of course he was.

He toured the outside of the base, making sure that the outriggers were still firmly attached to the rock, that the balloon-taut coverings weren’t degrading, that the bolts that held everything together hadn’t sheared or worked loose. It was his job. And still, after the initial bedding-down phase, it was remarkably robust. The structures, once up, were going to last for… what? Years? What was next? How were they going to make this permanent?

And then, joining the dots—M2 was next. And then, maybe M3. Each base building on the experience of the previous one. More rugged. More sustainable.

Was that what this was about? A land grab? On Mars? For Mars?

They had to be kidding, right? There wasn’t any way they could get away with that. But then Yun’s parroted words came back to him in a rush. If the Chinese government was enthusiastic about the possibilities for Mars colonization, and sought to establish their own permanent presence before the end of the century, why not XO? Perhaps they wanted to get all the best sites first.

And perhaps NASA had inadvertently paid for them to get their plan off the ground with not just one base, but two. Goddammit. No wonder XO wanted M2 kept secret.

There was nothing he could do or say about that, but maybe he could give hints to Luisa that he might have finally worked it out. In the meantime, he had his chores.

He was round by the RTG pit. Sand had piled behind the hot-water tank cover, and he didn’t know whether that was a good thing, adding to the insulation, or a bad thing, putting corrosive soil directly into contact with the container. He went around the windward side, and ran his hand over the white-painted cover, which had been fashioned from a supply-rocket casing. The paint came off, dusting his gauntlet like talc, revealing bare metal underneath. He knew enough about shot-blasting to know what he was seeing.

It had been abraded by the dust-storm. Which meant that the most exposed parts of the habs would also have suffered.

He kept on going around, checking. It was the hard surfaces that had suffered most. The thick plastic envelope they relied on for keeping their air in, and Mars out, hardly at all. He should still report it, both to Lucy and to XO.

The satellite dish didn’t look quite right any more. There was nothing he could do about that, unless it involved taking a hammer to it. Which he was more than willing to do, if he could be certain he wouldn’t be putting in more dents than he was taking out.

He’d circled the base. There wasn’t anything more he could do outside, so he re-entered via the cross-hab, first shaking the dust off his feet and batting down the parts of him he could reach. Pink clouds drifted from him, rising up, and falling down, adding to the steady drizzle of material from above. Like snow. Like ash.

Inside, the base was running on night-time lights.

He went to find Lucy, who was sitting in Comms, staring at the one screen she’d turned on, looking at the power levels slowly draining away on one window, the latest weather reports on the other.

“How are we doing?”

She didn’t turn around, as if it was her attention that was the only thing stopping them from descending into the freezing dark.

“We might catch a break in the next sol or two.” She pulled the satellite picture forward, colored for wind speed. “Yun has been talking to Earth non-stop. We have a forty per cent chance of the storm going back over the equator by zero hours tomorrow, and sixty per cent by the next. But there’s also a twenty per cent chance we get this all week, and after that it’s just guessing. Not even educated guessing.”

“If you’re asking me what I’d do…”

“I know what I have to do. I’m putting off doing it because shutting everything down except core services and the greenhouse is going to put us in a positive energy budget. Which is the good news. We won’t have to abandon the base.” She screwed up her face. “But we can’t restart a full scientific schedule. Not that we could. Not that we’d want to at the moment, either.”

“I’m sorry,” said Frank. For what felt like the hundredth time. It wasn’t his fault, yet it still might be, and he wanted to fix it, and yet he couldn’t.

Lucy carried on, unaware. “It’s a question of how much to keep in the reserves. I’m calculating what we need: an hour a sol of dish time, tablet recharges, lights, heat, replenishment of resources, even recreation. When I’ve done that, then I’ll tell everyone.”

He told her about the abrasion. She told him it had done similar things to the suits. The fogging on the faceplates wasn’t just dust. The top layer of the clear sandwich would need replacing, for everyone, which was Fan’s job.

He hadn’t noticed the vision problem. He’d just gotten used to it, putting it down to the dust he couldn’t be bothered to wipe off any longer.

“I’m going to take some sack time,” he said. “Base is sound, for now. I’ll go out again later and clean the panels, turn them.”

“Thanks, Lance.” She did look over her shoulder, and smiled. Forlornly.

One man down. Science all but shut down. No vehicles. Confined to base. It wasn’t a great start for her.

“It’s going to get better,” he said.

“Not going to bring Jim back.” She faced the screens again. “I’m getting turbulence from Mission Control.”

“The fuckers weren’t here.”

“No. No, they weren’t.” She leaned on her elbows. “You lost anyone you were responsible for?”

“Yes,” said Frank. “Yes I have.”

She turned round again, looked him in the eye. “And it’s at that point we’re our own worst enemies, right?”

“Pretty much.”

She pressed her lips together, then said: “Talk to Leland. It’s what he’s here for.”

“I’m not really the talking type.” He shrugged. “Much rather do stuff.”

“Point taken. Go hit the sack. If anything happens that you need to know about, I’ll call you.”

She went back to staring at the numbers and the bars, and Frank walked through the yard into the crew quarters. He pulled the curtain of his cubicle closed behind him and saved the base a couple of watts by not hitting the light switch.

He wiped his tablet screen and nudged it back to life, turning the brightness down so that it didn’t glare at him.