S Morden - No Way

There was a reply from Luisa. She was always on duty, whatever the cycle of day/night was on Earth, and it was always she who answered him. Should that worry him? He didn’t pretend that he had a “Team Frank” in the heart of the XO machine, but did the relationship he’d built up with her count enough for her to slip him information under the radar?

“We were all devastated to learn of the loss of your colleague. I’m sure you feel that as keenly as the other astronauts, and it’s only human that you’re looking for anything that might mean his death was anyone else’s fault but his own. I’m so very sorry about Jim, but you know deep down that it’s a tragic accident, the result of not following orders. It can’t be anything else, because there was no one else there.

“We’re going to do everything we can to help you locate your missing friend through satellite imagery. That’s the best we can do, but we can do that better than most. We’ve a whole team on stand-by, waiting for the storm to clear.

“Jim’s gone, Frank. Please don’t go making trouble for yourself or the rest of MBO. I don’t think I could bear it, especially after this. You need to stay safe, and come home. Luisa.”

They were fine words, but he couldn’t ignore the tracks he’d seen up on the summit. M2 had been up there, and recently, and if they’d done that, then maybe they knew what had happened to Jim. Every single message Luisa sent him repeated that M2 were no longer a threat, but Frank knew what he’d seen.

And just how good were XO’s satellites? Because he didn’t think the photos he saw every day on his tablet were sharp enough to pick out a suit. In fact, that was something he could test right now.

He went into the files, and after sorting through a few dozen thumbnails, found a picture of the Heights. He loaded it up and drilled down into it until the image had dissolved into gray, incomprehensible blocks.

That was the utter limit of the resolution. Each block was somewhere around three feet across. He wasn’t going to be able to resolve an object twice that size, but he might be able to tell that there was something there, taking up that space and making the ground a different color to its surroundings.

He pulled back out and examined the picture of MBO from orbit.

The habs were obvious—the greenhouse, the crew quarters, the yard, were all sections that were twenty feet wide and sixty feet long. They cast shadows, too: the satellite dish was a black oval cast on the ground.

The buggies? He knew where to look, and yes, he could just about make them out. They weren’t solid objects, though. The terrain underneath showed through the latticework of the chassis. It was the wheels that were more obvious, both in themselves and that they blocked out the light. The tracks the tires made were dark bands on the ground, indistinct and intermittent, except where the road was well traveled.

A guy in a suit? No, that was impossible. Either XO was lying about helping to find Jim, or lying about how good their resolution was.

But if that was what Luisa had told him, then he was going to have to behave as if he believed it all, in order to keep them all alive. That M2 were still out of contact. That they were dead. That they hadn’t picked Jim up.

Frank was still going to have to respond with something, though. He sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them what he was planning on doing. A man was missing. If there was a chance he was still alive in a base whose existence he wasn’t allowed to reveal, then it was up to Frank to thread a way through all the truths and lies.

“Guess we’ll just have to wait on a break in the storm, and see what you can see. I don’t know if Lucy wants to keep looking. She probably will, and that’ll mean going south, closer to M2. But if they’re gone, I suppose that means we won’t have to worry about running into them,” was what he eventually typed. He pressed send, and turned off his screen.

Frank sat in the dark.

The chips could fall where they may. The first opportunity he had, he was going over.

From:Carolina Soledad

To:Miguel Averado

Date:Sun, Mar 7 2049 08:43:41 -0300

Subject:re: Lava tube project

I don’t know what to make of this. I’ve outlined the area in red. Please could you say what you think you see?

Carolina

[image appended HiRISE2 22 39 02 N 97 45 10 W 2/27/2048, annotated]

The sky had cleared. Yun’s forty per cent had lucked out. The storm had contracted and swung south. On the other side of the equator, Mars was still blanketed in airborne ocher dust, and it could still come back. But Frank had been able to plug in the buggy for a full day, without worrying about leaving the base short, and thanks to their surfeit of generating capacity, the battery banks were mostly full.

At some point in the night, he’d dozed. But it wasn’t proper sleep. At least he was already awake for his set-off at 0300. He hadn’t said anything to anyone else. Not to Luisa, not to Lucy.

Not to Isla.

He still didn’t know what that had meant. If anything. If it had happened. If he’d hallucinated it. She’d not mentioned it. Neither had he. It wasn’t as if he could forget it, or wanted to forget it, not like some of the other things. Just that… what was he supposed to do?

It was dark when he stepped outside. He’d made absolutely certain that he hadn’t woken anybody up. He’d secreted two fully charged, spare life support packs in the med bay airlock, and he went round and collected them, strapping them to the back of the buggy he was taking.

He’d be at the outpost in an hour and a half; there, he’d swap out his life support, and carry straight on over to M2. The route wasn’t certain, and he’d be slowed down by the fact that he was working solely on lights.

That would eat into the energy budget, but he’d kill them as soon as the sky got light enough, shortly before dawn. He could be at his destination by, say, 0700. That would give him some poking-around time when he got over there. Unless their buggy was out and in view, M2 were unlikely to see him approach: they were in a cave, in a deep trench. He thought he could scout them out without necessarily revealing he was there. He could decide, based on what he found, what to do afterwards.

Though quite what he could do, he hadn’t worked out. He was going to have to wing it, and that didn’t sit well with him. The decision to go—dangerous, reckless, possibly pointless—was bad enough. All his old fears about M2 and what they could do to him came back with a vengeance.

It was still dark. Frank looked away to the south, towards the hidden summit of Ceraunius Tholus, towards the outpost, and towards M2. His guts tightened, and for a moment he had to swallow hard and breathe slowly. He had to do this. He was the only one who could.

He climbed up on the buggy, powered it up, and waited until his nose was pointing towards the dark bulk of the mountain before bringing the headlights up slowly. The ground glittered with frost, and it was hard, cracking under the wheel plates as they dug in and gripped.

He headed up the Santa Clara, and when he’d gone through the first curve of the river, flipped the lights to full. That was better. There weren’t many obstacles on what was essentially a flat river bed that was now layered with even more dust, but it was the dust itself that made the going heavier than it normally was. He adjusted the responsiveness of the tires accordingly, so that they were broader and less springy.

It reminded him of his trips out away from the pressures of the base when most of the others were still alive. Driving up alone, and just taking in the view from further up: the sky, Rahe crater, the distant bulge of Uranius Tholus. A few minutes of peace, before descending again. The days before he’d known what XO had planned for him.