S Morden - No Way

“I’m Commander Lucy Davison. I want you to tell me what happened to Jim Zamudio.”

“He…” Jerry nodded at Frank, because that was pretty much the only part of him he could move, “said he’d fix things for me.”

“Whatever he promised you, he can’t deliver. Jim Zamudio.”

“Tell her what you told me,” said Frank.

Jerry weighed up his options, and realized he had none. “We. We were out on the volcano. We were looking to see if we could grab some more of your equipment. That was all. That was all we were up there for. Nothing else. We’d almost got the comms working. We needed more parts. That’s right. More parts.”

“And Jim?”

“He was suddenly there. We came around the corner, and there he was, back to us. Head right down over the rock, looking at it close. He didn’t see us at all. I wanted to back up, but Jen. She lost it. She saw him, drove at him. Hit him hard. Crushed him against the cliff. Knocked him down. Knocked him out cold.”

“It wasn’t you who did that?”

“It wasn’t!” Jerry licked his lips, flexed his arms against the ropes. “She wanted to strip his suit, leave him behind, but I stood up for him. We couldn’t leave him behind, could we? Could we?”

“You took him back to M2.”

“Sure. We took him back to M2. I thought we’d just keep him for a while, then take him back. Swap him for stuff we needed. But Justin…”

“Your commander.”

“He’s,” and Jerry hesitated. Frank eyeballed him, and he continued. “Scary. He’s really scary. We do what he says, because otherwise, it’s just not worth saying no to him, OK?”

Fan leaned in. “What happened to Jim?”

Jerry didn’t answer. Not straight away. “He’s gone,” he said eventually. “He’s dead. He’s definitely dead. He’s not coming back.”

“He was alive when you took him. How did he end up dead?”

“It was Justin. It was Justin’s idea. He made us. He made all of us.”

“Tell me. Tell me now, or I’m throwing you out of the airlock, Hippocratic oath be damned. What did he make you do?”

“Eat him.”

There was absolute silence. Not even a breath as the words sank in.

Then Fan lunged forward, and Frank, who’d been ready, managed to wrestle the doctor away and held him, hugged him, until he instead sagged onto Frank’s shoulders, weeping.

It was poor comfort, from a man who’d now killed five men. Frank didn’t feel capable of offering Fan any solace at all. Jim was dead, Yun was about to suffer the same fate, they were down to three of the original six crew, and even if they wanted to bail, the MAV wouldn’t be ready for months. It would feel like all hope was lost. And maybe it was.

He could see Lucy and Isla over Fan’s shoulder. Both of them looked hollowed out. He remembered that look from that one night when he and Declan and Zero had gathered to talk it out.

“I know that this isn’t what you expected. You were supposed to come here, do your science, discover all kinds of new shit, work out how to live on Mars, and then go home to tell everyone how to do it. I know what that feels like. I was supposed to come here, build a base for you all, look after it and serve the rest of my sentence knowing that I was finally doing something good with my life, and maybe, just maybe, making my boy proud of his old man again. I knew I was going to die here, and that was OK, because I thought it’d be in ten, fifteen years’ time. I didn’t know they were planning to off me within six months. You didn’t know that they’d put a bunch of bugs on Mars who’d fight you for every scrap you had. None of us got a choice about what we’re facing. But we’ve got to deal with it all the same.”

Lucy took Fan from Frank, and guided him gently back to his seat over at the table. She stood behind him, hands on his shoulders, kneading his flesh, while Isla and Frank stood the other side.

“Frank, we’ve got fucking space cannibals.” She grimaced. “Training didn’t cover this.”

“So let’s work out a way to get Yun back and, I don’t know what you’d say, neutralize the threat.”

“The way you neutralized yours?”

Frank blinked. “Jesus. Lady. What did you expect me to do? Lie down and die? Goddammit, you were a fast jet pilot, right? In the Stans? How many people did you kill then? Did you lose count, or don’t you know?”

“That’s enough, Frank,” said Isla.

“At least I looked my victims in the eye, which is something you can’t do from twenty thousand feet.”

“That is enough!” Isla came to stand in Frank’s eyeline, so that he had to look at her, and not Lucy. “You’re right, but you’re being a dick about it.”

She let that sink in, and then she turned on her heel.

“Lucy. He’s right. We have to get Yun. We have to stop them coming back again. Either that, or we sit here and wait for them to take the rest of us. This is not what we wanted. But this is what we have.”

After a minute or two, Lucy slumped into Frank’s discarded seat and dragged it back to the table. “So what have we got?”

Isla retook her place, and kicked the chair next to her. Frank sat.

“The four of us,” said Frank.

Lucy looked bleak.

“Three of those four are supposed to be really smart. Maybe we could use that to our advantage.”

She didn’t look any less bleak, but she did at least grunt in acknowledgment.

“We’ve got two buggies. Power to burn. We’ve got suits, we’ve got spare life supports to take with us. We know where they are. We know how many of them there are.”

“Do we?”

“They had a crew of eight. Two are dead. We’ve got a prisoner. Five of them left. One of them won’t be in a fit state to fight, because I probably broke his ankle while I was over there.”

“Franklin.”

“He was trying to kill me, and hey: I’m a convicted murderer. What did you expect me to do? Play patty cake?” He waited for any further objections, then continued. “We know the layout of their base. We know they’re weak. They blew everything on taking MBO. All their reserves. They’ve got nothing left. We know they’re in one hab, and their descent ship. Yun must be in one or other of them.”

“If she’s still alive.”

“Lucy.” Frank’s turn.

“OK, OK. Fan, can she get back to, whatever we’re calling it—”

“M2,” said Frank.

“—M2 without running out of air?”

“Yes. It’s only four, four and a half hours away. If she manages to regulate her breathing, she can make it. Whether, in the circumstances, that’s a good thing—”

“Fanuel. We’re trying to get a plan together here.” Frank played with his burned fingertips. “Her suit’s still working. We can get a fresh life support into it.”

“And what if someone else is wearing it?”

“Then we make them take it off.” He glanced around the table. “If any of you are squeamish, now would be a good time to say. Because Yun’s relying on us to get her out of there, and we need to know we’ve got each other’s backs on this.”

“You’re asking me to kill people, Franklin,” said Fan.

“I stopped you from strangling Jerry.”

“Thinking about it is one thing. Doing it is another.”

“You were doing it,” said Frank.

“I was angry.”

“If I’d lost half my crew and I wasn’t angry, there’d be something wrong with me.”

Isla put her hand on top of Frank’s, and he stopped talking and was still.

“You’re not angry, though, are you?” she said. “You never get angry. You just decide what needs to be done, and then you do it. And right now, you’ve decided that M2 has to go. We can’t co-exist, and you’d rather you lived than you died.”