S Morden - No Way

“Can I ask why?”

“You can ask. I probably won’t answer.”

Frank looked bemused for a moment, then shrugged. “OK.”

Yun slid her tablet across. It had a satellite picture on it.

Frank took it from her, and moved his head back slightly so that it came into proper focus. It was Ceraunius Tholus. He’d seen it often enough. Rahe at the top, the plains to the bottom.

“They gave you back the maps then,” he said.

“Yes,” said Yun. She leaned across and used a finger to recenter the image on the southern slope of the volcano. “Can you show me where you believe this second base is?”

Frank eased the map up slightly, and zoomed in on the trench. “Right there. The ship is at the western end, a couple of hundred feet from the cave.”

Yun expanded the map further, and Frank realized that she’d synced everyone else’s tablet to hers: they were seeing what she was. “This partially collapsed lava tube here?”

“That’s it. The hab is under the overhang. There are panels on the south side of the entrance.”

“You can see that there’s no sign of anything you described.”

“They’ve edited it out. I said they would.”

Yun nodded. “So I went looking for artifacts that might show that there’d been some degree of image manipulation. Cloned textures. Blurring. Artificial junctions. Differences in shadows. All within the single frame.”

“And did you find any?”

“No.” She inclined her head to one side. “However. These images are composites. Built up from strips of images taken when the satellite passes overhead. As you can see here.”

She shifted the whole image eastwards, and showed a brighter grayscale stripe of Mars sandwiched between two darker borders.

“You can also see that each strip is lined in the direction of travel of the camera. This is a feature of the motion of the camera relative to the surface. We see it so often, we just accept it.”

Then she brought it back to the trench, and Frank could see the lines cross from the plain, clearly over the floor of the trench, and continue again on the other side.

“If I make a layer, and match the direction of the lines by marking them…” Yun used a stylus to highlight the northern and southern ends of the lines. “You can see something very interesting. It’s very subtle. But if I fade this layer in and out, look at the underlying lines.”

Frank bent his nose closer. He didn’t get it. Then he did.

“This line here. It’s broken. It doesn’t follow all the way across.”

“No. Although there is a line. This isn’t to say that the original image doesn’t contain errors. But it might indicate that someone has very skillfully dropped a segment of another image into this one. There is no other flaw that I can see. This is only one, or perhaps two, pixels out.”

“But that’s where the ship was.”

“Which is interesting in itself, but not conclusive. There is more.”

“Are you dragging this out on purpose?” asked Frank.

“I’m not dragging anything out,” replied Yun. “I’m explaining what I’m doing.”

“Did you find something or not?”

Yun made a face. “No. I found the absence of something.” She scrolled north, almost all the way to the summit of the crater. She zoomed in, almost all the way, until the pixels were blocks and the image grainy. “You can just about make out Station two from the shadow the panels cast. I can draw it on a layer, like so.”

She outlined the shadow in the shape of the weather station, with its distinctive boom.

“Now, this is where Station eight ought to be.”

Yun zoomed out and in again. There was nothing to see but a bare patch of lava.

“This indicates that XO have sent us a series of replacement images which are not contemporaneous with each other. I know there was an image of Station eight. I saw it myself, when I was checking the latitude and longitude. Now, it might be, in the hurry to reload the deleted files, someone made a mistake, and uploaded an older image. I will ask them to try again, using the most recent images.”

“Let’s not do that for the moment,” said Lucy. She sat back in her chair. “The safety and well-being of everyone on the base is my priority. Right now, I don’t know how to best achieve that. On one hand, I’ve been told that Lance is in the middle of a psychotic episode and poses a genuine risk to us all. On the other, Lance has given a testimony that Leland has determined to be both coherent and internally consistent, but which cannot possibly be true, precisely because it’s so absurdly monstrous.”

“Thanks, Leland,” said Frank.

“You’re welcome.”

“And on the third hand, there are some disturbing inconsistencies cropping up. We have an automatic pistol. The trigger guard has been machined off. Its presence on the planet is inexplicable. I’m aware that early astronauts had survival knives, flares and even handguns in case they came down in hostile territory, and yes, there have been weapons on space stations. But I can’t think of any situation where a gun would be of any use on Mars. It sure as hell isn’t to scare the bears away. Neither was I made aware that MBO had one. And I should have been. And I don’t know why it was buried outside.

“Then there’s everything that Yun’s just told us. Mistake? Probably. Artifacts? Probably. Anything else would be preposterous. The mere idea that there’s another, simultaneous mission on Mars without us knowing about it, is inherently ridiculous. That it’s just over the hill from us is…

“Lance has requested that no final decision be made on his mental capacity until someone’s gone over and eyeballed the trench where M2 is supposed to be. I’ve thought long and hard about it. There’s no reason at all why I should entertain the idea. We’re looking at maps which show precisely nothing. But we still have the possibility—not a real possibility—that Jim might be there. Our missing friend. So I’m going to do that tomorrow, to settle it. I’ll take Isla with me. Lance, this is your last opportunity to tell me I’m wasting my time.”

“You won’t be wasting your time. Just be careful.”

Lucy blinked at him. “You busted up the buggy.”

“They tried to ram me. I rammed them back.”

Then she dropped her head. “I’ve said my piece. This is what we’ll do. Everything else is on hold until we get back. OK?”

Frank couldn’t help himself. “You going to tell Mission Control where you’re going?”

Lucy fixed Frank with a stare. “We got into this situation because we didn’t follow the rules. So we follow the rules.”

“You’re not telling them about the gun, though.”

“I haven’t decided yet. Don’t push it, Lance.”

“I’m done.” He looked at the plate of greens that Leland had edged onto the table by his elbow. He’d missed it until now, so he nudged back his chair and picked up the plate. And the coffee that was next to it. “You don’t need to set a guard or anything. But it’s probably in the rules that you have to.”

He took himself back to the consulting room, and sat on the bench, listening to the sounds of the base around him. He’d built this thing. There was that much to be proud of, at least.

[Internal memo: Mars Base One Mission Control to Bruno Tiller 3/8/2049 (transcribed from paper-only copy)]

If you review the latest transmissions, we have around twelve [12] hours to decide what to do. If we forbid them to travel, they’ll ask questions. If we permit them, they’ll discover M2. The third option of Not Yet is our best, but it isn’t a long-term solution.

Sir, some guidance would be useful at this point?