S Morden - No Way

Frank pulled his hand away. Slowly, so that it was like the tide receding. “Something like that. Sometimes killing is a purely practical decision. Except when it comes to those stupid fish.” He looked at his fingers, then shook himself. “Then there’s all of you. I kind of like you. You’re good people. Even if I don’t get back home, you deserve to. But this isn’t getting us anywhere. We’ve all got to be prepared to do whatever to get Yun back. Doesn’t matter why or what we feel afterwards.”

“Accepted,” said Lucy. “What have they got?”

“Five people, one can’t walk. Limited air and power. Enough to mount a two-buggy attack across an eighty-mile gap once, but probably not again in a hurry. No central comms, but suit-to-suit communication like you have, which is limited to what? Thirty yards or so.”

“Weapons?”

“No one shot at me, if that’s what you’re asking.” Frank thought about it for a moment. “At least, I don’t think anyone was shooting at me. No one hit me. One guy attacked me with a wrench, and two tried to drive into me with buggies.”

“And we’ve got a gun.”

“We can make other weapons,” said Isla. “We have piping, and compressed gas. A potato cannon is simple enough. Firing rocks, of course, or bolts. Edged weapons using what we have here, and blunt ones from outside. Shields using drum lids. Reach will be important.” She realized the stares she was getting. “I had lots of brothers and cousins, and access to the toolshed.”

“We can’t spend long on this,” said Lucy. “We have to go as soon as we can.”

“If we leave now, it’ll be dark when we get there,” said Isla. “Frank left early morning, and was there at dawn. We can do that too.”

She was fierce. Now she’d got over the shock, determined. She was ready.

It went quiet around the table. Lucy eventually broke the silence.

“So this is our plan? We tool up, drive over, kill anyone who gets in our way and rescue Yun? This is a disaster that’s only going to get worse.” She stood up and looked at them all. “OK. If that’s as good as it gets, then we do it. But what do we do about XO?”

“We keep the plug pulled,” said Frank.

“That isn’t viable in the long run,” said Lucy.

“There is no long run with XO.”

“We’ve got to wait for the MAV to fuel up. And we need to tell Mission Control what’s going on. Let Jim’s and Leland’s folks know they won’t be coming back. And, if we stay—”

“Do you think they’ll let you talk to Mission Control? Knowing what you know? Billions of dollars in fraud? Lying about the robots? Sending seven men and women to their deaths?”

“We can’t be without an earthlink, Franklin. Frank. Once we’ve got back with Yun, we, the surviving members of the mission, will decide what we do next.” She faced him down. “We’ve spent years getting here. Not just the eight months’ travel, but the whole of our careers, earning enough astronaut points to just be considered. And yes, you’re right. None of us are where we wanted to be. This is not a problem I ever thought we’d have to deal with. But there will be an after for us, and I need to prepare for that.”

Frank pushed his hands against the tabletop and levered himself upright. “You saw what they did to my tablet, and the maps. They just reached in and wiped them. You let them in again, and they could do anything.”

“They’re not going to kill us off, Frank.”

“They care more about themselves than you. Of course they’re going to kill us off.”

“I’m still going to have to talk to Mission Control.”

“How? You have to go through XO. You need to talk to Earth, directly. Can you do that?”

Lucy looked down at Fan, who said: “Yun should be able to do something. She’s the expert. Without her?” He pulled a face. “I can’t do it.”

“Then we get Yun,” said Frank. “We don’t talk to XO.”

“I’m in charge, Frank.” Lucy was adamant. “If we have to talk to XO, then that’s what we do. Perhaps we need to let them try and put this mess right.”

“Don’t let them in. That’s all I’m going to say. Don’t do it.”

“Thank you for your advice.”

“Well, shit.” Frank looked down the yard, at the solitary figure still tied to the chair. “While you’re making plans, you should probably figure out what to do with him, too.”

[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 3/9/2049, transcribed from paper-only copy]

Gold Hill has always been special to me, since we first started this project. I commanded it to be built, and it was. I commanded it to be staffed, and it was. I made sure that everyone here was loyal to me. To me, and not XO. So it seems only right that I’m back here now. We still have so much to prepare.

[transcript ends]

It was an hour before dusk. Frank had used a cutting disk to take off the doors of a cargo rocket and had sliced them into sections to make bumpers, sides and rear, for the first buggy, making sure they protruded further out than the wheels did. On the front, which he anticipated being more of a battering ram, he fixed a drum, piercing holes in its base to thread spare hab bolts through and clamp them to the frame with drilled strips of metal.

“Do you want help?”

He turned, nut runner in hand, and saw Isla. He also saw that the satellite dish was swinging over to the east, to pick up a signal.

“Whose bright idea was that?”

“We decided,” she said. “We can’t do without the uplink. Lucy hasn’t told them everything. Just that M2 attacked us.”

“Which part of ‘M2 has to remain secret at all costs’ passed you by?” He leaned into the buggy frame and tightened a bolt. “You’ve made a massive mistake. All you’ll ever get to talk to is a bunch of XO people trying not to end up in the same jail they fished me out of.”

“We can’t survive here otherwise.”

“You’re wrong. That’s all.”

“We decided,” she said again.

“OK, I get it.”

“We have to get help from somewhere, Frank.”

He picked up the drum lid and pushed it into place, then flicked the clasps over to fix it. “Has Lucy actually talked to anyone at NASA yet? Or has it just been XO?”

There was dead air.

“You just can’t quite believe that they did what they did to me and my crew, so you’re going to give them another chance to work yours over. Don’t think that being NASA will save you.”

“They won’t do that,” she said.

Frank rattled the drum and stepped back to admire his handiwork. “I don’t have that much faith in the justice system. I’ve seen too much shit go down to think it’s fair, or even working right. But I do know this: if this ever went in front of a jury, everyone from the CEO down would get serious flat time. They do not want that. Prison isn’t for guys like them. And they will turn every trick in the book to avoid it. If that means offing you, they’ll do that in an eyeblink.”

“Frank. It’s just—” She stopped long enough for Frank to turn round and check she was OK. “We have to do something. We can’t just hide ourselves away for months, not talk to anyone back home.”

“You fucked up, Isla. Lucy is fucking up at this exact moment, talking to XO. Even if she doesn’t tell them about knowing I’m not Brack, she’s telling them she knows about M2. I don’t know how XO want this to go down, whether they want M2 to kill us or they want everyone dead. But we still end up dead.”

“Well, we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

Frank picked up the cutter and headed off for more cargo door. “You want to put a bet on this? A hundred bucks says I’m right.” He was out of the loop. He had no idea if a hundred dollars was still a significant amount in the outside world. “Hell, I’ll do your laundry for a month.”