S Morden - No Way

He’d blown all that out of the airlock. He’d fucked up. He hadn’t thought it through. Jim going missing hadn’t been his fault—it had been Jim’s fault. And rather than accepting that Jim take responsibility for that, Frank had decided to try and fix it. History was repeating itself. He’d wanted to fix his son’s drug habit, and that had ended with Frank in prison for life. This bad decision might end up with him the wrong side of an airlock door without a spacesuit on.

Was he going to fight that? Or was he just too tired? He didn’t know.

“Are you OK with me giving you a physical?” Fan asked.

“Am I going to try and bust you up, and break out of here? I built this place. If I wanted out, I know exactly how little force I need to use to get through the door.” Frank sat up and swung his legs out over the floor, and started to unzip his overalls. “Knock yourself out.”

“That doesn’t fit too well, does it? Have you grown some? Or has it shrunk?”

“It’s not even mine.” Frank eased himself up and pushed the garment down to his ankles, then kicked it off onto the floor. He started on his long johns.

“Not even yours,” repeated Leland. “Whose is it then?”

“You know that story I’ve made up, about me being a prisoner called Franklin Kittridge?” The examination table was cold, and he shivered slightly. “I don’t know how to break it to you, but that’s pretty much the bones of it.”

“So this is all Franklin’s stuff.”

“No, this is all Brack’s. I’m Franklin. Frank.” He watched for the reaction. “Don’t raise your eyebrows at me like that, Leland.”

He was naked, and he saw Fan frown.

“What’s that on your chest?”

“That’s where I cut out my monitor. Measured heart rate, breathing. Also, it turned out, worked as locator and microphone, so Brack could hear what we were all saying, even when we thought we were private.”

“We?” Leland leaned in next to Fan to take a look.

“I was part of a team. Seven convicts. One guard, Brack.”

“Eight of you,” said Leland. “Seven… convicts?”

“Let’s just stick to the physical for now.” Fan snapped on a pair of nitrile gloves, the white dust from them hovering in the air. “You cut out this monitor yourself?”

The steristrip had long since come off, but he still had a raw scar over his sternum. Fan used a head torch as extra light, and pushed aside the hair on Frank’s chest to examine the wound.

“You’ve got two scars.”

“Where it went in, and where it came out. I was in kind of a hurry for the second one, so I just cut.”

“It should really have been stitched.”

“I’d have been sewing my own skin closed. I know people have done worse, but I didn’t feel up to that. I’ve got no training, over some really basic first aid.”

Fan’s frown deepened. He let Leland take a good close look. “First scar is the pale one. It’s a couple of years old.”

“I wanted to make Brack think I’d died in the knife fight with Zero. So I had to cut it out. And the bullet.” These were just names. More embellishments for his delusion.

Fan moved over to Frank’s arm. That scar? That scar was ugly. Puckered at the edges, indented in the middle, still ruby red and angry.

“This was where you got hit by the pylon, right?”

“No, but that’s what I had to tell you. Brack shot me.”

“Brack shot you. With a…”

“Gun. Automatic. Modified.” Goddammit. The gun. It was still under the rocks outside the hab. The one part of Phase three he bucked. Actual physical evidence that he might not be mad after all.

Fan spent a long time probing the scar, pushing at the skin, watching how it moved and changed color. “What did you do with the bullet?”

“Pulled it out with forceps.”

“And after that?”

“It went in the descent ship with all the other crap. Brack was supposed to clean up after he’d disposed of all of us.”

“If I’m telling Leland not to do that now, I don’t want you doing that now either. This is the physical, OK? I do bodies.” He grunted, and lifted Frank’s arm up and down, backwards and forwards.

“Well, it certainly looks like a bullet wound,” he said eventually.

“Seen many?”

“Worked the ER for five years in Miami. Can I take a look at the rest of you while I’m here?”

“You asked nicer than the XO doctors ever did.”

Fan got the rest of the tools of his trade and spent a good long while listening to Frank’s heart and lungs, and palpating parts of him. Lights in his eyes, down his ears, his throat. When he’d done, he pulled his gloves off and slapped them in the medical waste bin. Leland stood in the corner, arms folded, observing.

“How old are you?” asked Fan.

Frank squinted at the ceiling. “Fifty-three?”

“And your birth date?”

“January twentieth. Ninety-six.”

“Almost a millennial.”

“I guess so.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say this was your first time in space, right?”

Frank frowned. “Well, yes.”

“We’re all in our thirties. You’d have been what, late forties, when you started your training?”

“I barely got six months of that. I’d just turned fifty-one when some suit came to the Q. Fan, you got to understand: all they needed to know was, one, whether or not I’d survive the sleep tanks, and two, whether I’d live long enough to do the job. Me, and the rest of the crew, we were disposable. You know what they called us?”

“What did they call you?” asked Leland.

“Chimps. That’s what they called us. Not to our faces, as that might have given us a clue what was going to happen to us. But behind our backs. Chimps.”

“You’re angry about that, aren’t you?”

“Look. I know I made some pretty shitty life decisions. Shooting some drug-dealer being the worst. Maybe this is some kind of justice for the life I took. But the others? Especially Dee. He was just a kid himself. They didn’t deserve this.”

Again, just a name. They didn’t believe him. Why was he even bothering?

“Maybe you’ve heard of Alice,” he said. “Dr. Alice Shepherd.”

Fan pursed his lips. “Name’s ringing some kind of bell. Leland?”

“Involuntary euthanasia. Made a splash at the time.”

“That’s her,” said Frank. “She was here, on Mars, with us. She was our doctor.”

“She’s in jail.”

“If you look, so am I. Or I might have recently died.”

Fan took a step back. “You’re physically fit. Considering your age, you’re actually in pretty good shape. It’s too late to really do anything about that cut. There’s some cream, for that and the… hole in your arm. What’s happening up top is a different matter.” He hesitated, looked at Leland, and back at Frank. “Lance, what’s going on here? There’s something that doesn’t sit right.”

Leland intervened. “Why don’t I take over now?”

But Fan hushed him. “I know. I know. I’m not saying anything out of turn. I just, I’ve got a feeling. It’s nothing, right?”

The door opened, and it was Isla.

She saw Frank, naked, sitting on the bench. Frank didn’t move, didn’t try to cover himself. In prison, he hadn’t had any privacy, and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen it all before. She blinked and looked at the floor. “Fan, Lucy wants to talk to you.” Then she left, leaving the door open.

“Leland?” he said. “You’re up. I’ll be right back.”

As he left, he narrowed his eyes at Frank, and Frank knew. There was doubt there. Good doubt. He could work with that.

“Why don’t you get dressed, Lance?” said Leland. “Then we can make a start.”