S Morden - No Way

“And if you’re right, I have to do yours?”

“If I’m right, neither of us will care about that. But at least I get to use one of my dying breaths to say I told you so.” He spun up the cutting disk and applied it to the curved surface of the cargo door. He could feel the vibration in his hands and through the ground, but the sound was of a softly growling animal.

“I came out here to help you,” she said, belatedly.

“Can you make that cannon you talked about?”

“Probably. With the right fixings.”

“I’ll do this. You do that. I’m not in a talking mood right now.”

She stalked away over to the boneyard, and he kept his head down, working. It actually started to feel good, doing something constructive with his hands, even if it was armoring the buggies for a fight. He could switch off, and just build, and when he’d done, he felt OK. Not great, because he still had the idea that he was going to die along with the rest of the crew, but considering that, OK.

Fan and Lucy were still inside. They had two bodies to deal with there. One outside—he should really ask them what they wanted to do about that—and there was Jerry to feed and take to the can. A cannibal.

Oh, sure, Jerry had used the defense of not wanting to, being forced to. Frank was pretty certain how it had gone down, with the leader of the group, this Justin, making certain that everyone, absolutely everyone ate, taking them all over a line there was no coming back across. He’d bound them to him, like a gang initiation. Blood in, blood out.

Frank had almost spaced Jerry himself when he’d been told. And no one would have blamed him for notching up kill number six. He didn’t know why he’d stopped Fan, either. Except that he had. He’d told Jerry he’d keep him from going under the knife, and he’d kept his word, even if the knife itself was a lie.

This was what happened when he was good: it got complicated. Very complicated. What was Lucy supposed to do with a prisoner, someone who’d eaten one of her colleagues? Not Frank’s decision, not now.

He went over to see how far Isla had got with her project.

Plastic pipework was the best they had. A good straight metal tube would have been better—would certainly take more pressure, be more rigid and would wear less—but they were beggars and they had to scavenge whatever they could.

The longer the pipe, the more accurate it’d be. And the more it’d sag. But there were ways around that.

At the back end, she’d fitted a quarter-turn valve and a cistern as an air reservoir, and added a couple more fixings: a non-return valve and a separate spigot. She’d also had time to make projectiles: Martian rock wound round with parachute canopy.

“Have we any compressed CO 2?”

“If you want to rip the fire-suppression system apart, yes. But nothing portable.”

“Using oxygen seems a waste.”

“Do you want me to get you a tank of what we actually have, or do you want to stand around wishing for something different?”

“You’ve had the time to adjust to what’s going on. I haven’t. So while I can understand why you’re getting pissy with me, I’m also telling you that it’s not helping. Not one little bit.” She didn’t look at him. Just unscrewed the compression fitting at the breach-end of the barrel and pushed one of the cloth-wrapped rocks into it.

“I’ll get Fan to dump a tank in the airlock,” said Frank. He spoke to Comms, got Lucy, and by the time he’d walked to the cross-hab, there was a black cylinder in the already pumped-down chamber. All Frank had to do was pick it up and carry it back to the boneyard.

Isla took it from him, and plugged it into the cistern.

“This may explode,” she said, as she opened the regulator.

From being a cube, the container rounded out rapidly, and well past the point where Frank would have shut the gas off, she kept on going.

“About that exploding thing,” he said.

“I’ve done this before,” was her response. Then she cranked the regulator. “You need to be ballast. I don’t want to risk it breaking.”

“I’m holding on to something that could blow up in my face.”

“Yes, Frank. That’s exactly what you’re doing.”

She waited until Frank had hunkered down and wrapped his arms around the taut-as-a-drum cistern, then crouched next to him with her hand on the quarter-turn tap. The barrel was propped up on a pile of rocks so that it pointed slightly above the horizontal. “Don’t block the return valve. OK: three, two, one.”

Isla twisted the tap in one quick movement, and Frank felt the cistern kick against him. Proper recoil. He looked up to see how far the projectile had gone, and his gaze was drawn through the expanding cloud of mist at the end of the barrel to a fluttering tail of black and white far in the distance: it was still in the air.

“Fuck.”

Its trajectory slowly bent downwards, and when it eventually hit the ground, it bounced and tumbled along for another thirty, forty feet.

Frank stood up and tried to estimate the total distance. Now the rock had stopped moving, it was impossible to see.

“Quarter of a mile?”

“Better than we managed back home. Reduced gravity and no wind resistance. And that’s at least a third, if not a half.” She closed the tap and began unscrewing the breach again. “Overclocked?”

“Depends what we’re trying to do with it. But I can’t see any situation where less bang is better than more.”

“If we had a pressure gauge, and a safety valve… Dad always insisted on those.” She loaded up another rock and laboriously screwed it all together again. “And a bolt action. Yes, I know we don’t have the parts, or the time to manufacture them. And after this, we hopefully will never need to.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry you’ve ended up in the middle of this. I’m sorry that this is the only way out of it. There’s nothing I can do that’ll make what’s happened go away. None of you deserved any of this.”

“We need to mount this on a buggy. Strap it down. Maybe a seat for the loader, too.” Then she stopped and turned back to Frank. “They ate Jim. Why would they even do that?”

“I don’t know.” Frank stooped to unfasten the oxygen cylinder. “I’ve been in prison long enough to know that people don’t make good decisions at the best of times. And I’ve seen what happens when the screws stand back and let the gangs take over, like you’ve got to join one or other of them just to make it through the day. There’s no place for neutrals. So, what Jerry said rings true—the guy in charge does it, it’s taboo but he’s trash-talking the others, says it makes him strong and powerful. It’s then, when it’s many against one, that you need to take a stand, but everyone’s fucking terrified of taking this monster on. Then someone sees how afraid they all are and thinks, ‘I’ll have me some of that,’ and they eat, and suddenly it’s two of them and they’ve got this little club going. These guys are hungry, they’re weak, they’re scared already, and now they’ve got to live with cannibals, work with cannibals, sleep next to cannibals, and it’s just easier to join in than it is to fight them. That’s how it happens.”

“Frank, I understand it. I just don’t want to understand it.”

“I get that.”

“He was my friend.”

“I know. And now we’ve got to try and stop the same thing happening to Yun.”

He hefted the cistern and propped the pipe barrel up against his shoulder. He started to carry it towards the buggy he’d already fitted out for battle.

“How can you be so calm about this?”

“Because I’m already broken, Isla. Your reaction is the normal one. That’s what regular people feel in a situation like this. What’s wrong with me can’t be fixed. So I may as well use it to help you.” Frank slid the length of the air cannon onto the buggy, and dragged it this way and that until he was happy with its position. “You want to pass me some straps?”