S Morden - No Way

GT: So we wait for them to fix it. In the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, the director of HiRISE2 has sent me this, with his compliments.

PO: Is that what I think it is?

GT: Why don’t you tell me what you think it is, and we can take the discussion from there.

[transcript ends]

Frank and the rest of the crew sat back down around the kitchen table. Their prisoner had been put, without his suit, in a chair at the far end of the yard, and retied by a frighteningly efficient Isla—something to do with wrangling livestock on her parents’ farm.

The bodies, that of Leland and his unnamed assailant, still lay in the med bay. The other man whose faceplate Frank had cracked was left where he’d died, on the steps down from the yard. The living had priority for now.

On the table were some of Frank’s freeze-dried berries. He’d shaken some out into bowls and put them within reach. No one had eaten for a while. Not that they were going to feel like eating much when Frank relayed what Jerry had told him.

He leaned over to grab a handful of strawberry slices, and chained them until they were all gone. Then he sat back up and blew out air.

“Can we get Yun back?” asked Lucy.

Frank thought about it, given what he knew. “Maybe. I hope so. If we don’t dick around.”

Fan reached out for a strawberry, and toyed with it before nibbling off the tiniest corner of it. “What about Jim?”

“Yeah. About that.” Frank felt his guts tighten. “That’s not going to be happening.”

“I came here with five crew members,” growled Lucy. She looked down the yard at their prisoner. “I’m down to two. Two.”

“What happened to Jim, Franklin?” said Isla.

“You know what? He can tell you himself. I’m fed up of being XO’s messenger boy.”

“Who is he? What’s he even doing here?”

“OK.” Frank squeezed his forehead. “OK. So he says his name’s Jerry. That may or may not be true, but that’s not really important. They landed mid-November, 2048. Three months before you did. They used the same sleep tanks as we did. Landing was fine, all on automatic, put them exactly where they were supposed to be, which is more than happened with us. But when they woke up, they found that their ship wasn’t working right. The comms were down. Fried completely. They couldn’t get a message in or out. They couldn’t talk to XO, and XO couldn’t talk to them.”

Isla frowned. “But what about their cargo drops?”

“It was the same problem we had, in spades. Some of theirs were on target. But a lot more of them ended up scattered over the southern and eastern plains. They got their RTG early on, which saved their asses, but it just meant they lived long enough to realize just how screwed they were. They’ve two habs, but not enough power to run them both. No water maker: they had to make a crude one out of parts. No greenhouse. No comms. No batteries. Between me first seeing the guy out on the plain, and now, they managed to find one food drop. I’d already taken one other. I could see the locators, and they couldn’t, and XO deliberately hadn’t clued me in. So yeah. I took their stuff. And there’s other kit that’s still lying out there: something that makes bricks out of the soil, and a three-d factory, but that’s not the… they had food, but no way to grow any more. They’ve been on starvation rations for the better part of three months. They don’t have enough water or air or power.”

“And XO?”

“Had no idea what state they were in, above what they could see from space, and what I told them.”

Lucy pressed the back of her hand against her lips, head bowed, thinking.

“Why, though? We’re here for the science. What are they here for?”

“Colonization. A land grab. Boots on the ground. Call it what you want. Hell, you paid for it.”

“We did what?”

“You paid for it. For what NASA spent on MBO, XO were able to put two bases on Mars. That we know about. I don’t know all the details.”

“Is that why they didn’t just come and ask you for help? They knew you were here, yes?”

“Sure they knew. When the one guy met me out on the plain, he even called me Brack. But in one of those weird strokes of luck, their comms outage meant they didn’t even know what sol it was. I told them you were already here, and he bought it. He was clearly XO, and I thought they were here to replace me as Brack—that was why I was such a mess when you arrived. I’d slept with a gun for two months, thinking they were going to swarm in and toss me out the airlock.”

“But—”

“You were never supposed to know about M2. They couldn’t just sail over any more, even if they wanted to. And the MBO crew was now six fit, well-fed astronauts, and me: Brack, the ex-military guy who’d just seen off seven cons because he’d been told to do it. They didn’t have the numbers. And they were so short of both air and watts, they needed to prioritize their supply drops. Searching Mars, manually.”

“What were XO doing all this time? Didn’t they ask you to go over?”

“I told them to go fuck themselves.”

“But they didn’t insist.”

“No.”

“But that means XO were willing to see M2 fail,” said Lucy, “and everybody there die.”

“Look, if you want to know what XO were thinking, then ask them yourself. Turns out my lie was the best thing I could have done in the circumstances.”

Fan rumbled: “What do you mean?”

“They’ve…” Frank pushed the bowl of strawberries away from him. “They’ve gone rogue. Worse. It’s like the ding wing over there.”

“Ding wing?”

“Nut house.”

“They’ve got mental issues?”

“Some of them. Their commander for sure. They fight each other to work out who does the jobs and who gets the food. The weakest do all the work and eat last, if at all. They’ve been like this since they realized they were never going to get a viable base going. They took Station seven, tried to use it to talk to the satellite. Apparently they kind of got halfway, but they just couldn’t figure out how to send a message. That was the final straw. The boss guy, Justin, finally worked out that if they, if he, was going to live, they were going to have to take MBO for themselves. And fuck the people who are already here.”

“When did we have the solar storm?” said Fan to Lucy.

“November seventh. We spent ten hours in an insulated cage in the middle of the ship,” she added for Frank’s benefit.

“Enough to interfere with ship systems. Disable their communications. Maybe something happened to their hibernation tanks at the same time.” Fan, still holding the dried slice of strawberry, looked at it like he’d never seen it before. He dropped it back in the bowl. “It’s very experimental. NASA wouldn’t let us travel that way.”

“While XO didn’t give a shit about how experimental it was with us.”

“I wasn’t party to that decision,” he said, and Frank realized he was aiming his anger at the wrong person.

“OK. So, for them, it was now or never. They’ve run out of food. Their systems aren’t enough to maintain life. They figured I’d spill the beans about them. And we were a man down. I don’t know whether Jim talked before—” Frank looked over to where Jerry sat, bound, isolated, alone. “Go talk to him yourself. I’m done here.”

Lucy pushed her chair back, and Fan and Isla followed her. They stood in front of Jerry. Lucy, hands on hips, Fan, arms folded, Isla, pressing all of her fingers against her upper lip, not trusting herself to speak.

Frank kicked his own chair aside and stood at the back, where he could see everything that went on.

“Jerry, right?” said Lucy.

“Yes.”