S Morden - No Way

But he didn’t need indefinitely. It said there, in black and white, when NASA were coming: three months. That was all. Three months to hang on. Could he do that?

He went into the greenhouse, cycling the airlock that kept the higher CO 2inside with the plants, and just stood there on the staging by the door. The bright lights, the constant sound of circulating water, the startling greenness of the plants. It looked… complicated. Zero had managed the whole system, from set-up to harvest. Though if the kid could do it, so could he, he guessed.

Strawberries grew well with hydroponics, as did groundnuts. He collected a bowl of each and took them back through to the kitchen, leaving a pile of broken husks and green stalks on the table.

The act of eating slowed him down. It made him concentrate on what he was doing. He chewed, and looked around him again, but this time he didn’t see what he had before. The base was supposed to be his prison: that was what he’d signed up for, somewhere to spend the rest of his Buck Rogers sentence. That had changed with the false promise of a trip home and a pardon after a few years’ work. That had changed again into a desperate fight for survival against a regime that had been designed to cull him and his colleagues and get them out of the way before anyone knew they’d even been there.

Where he was, was no longer a prison. The warder was dead, the law too far away to do anything to him.

It was a desert island. Like that old movie about the parcel delivery guy. He had everything he needed to survive. Food, water, shelter, heat—if he was careful and made sure everything worked. If he treated it like that then yes, he was marooned at a distance further away than some rock in the middle of the Pacific, but that didn’t change the material facts.

There was a ship coming. He knew that too. A ship that could take him home.

OK, so that was positive. He could look after the base as if it was an island where the sea stretched beyond the far horizon. He could explore, and grow, and mend. That would keep him busy. Better than that, it would keep him engaged. There was hope.

Dee had read all the base’s manuals, and the other technical documents that XO had sent. Whether he should have was irrelevant now. He, like everyone else, was dead. Frank would have to play catch-up on that, which meant he’d need to schedule his time carefully.

He’d need to learn the things he needed to survive, quickly. Yes, he needed to be able to grow food as well as Zero had, but he also needed to maintain the water system as well as Zeus had, keep the power flowing into the batteries and out along the cables, like Declan had. He already knew about the physical structure of the base, and how to maintain the buggies. The computer system was going to be a steeper task, but the straightforward jobs he knew he could do.

And if something went wrong, he’d die.

That was always going to be hanging over his head. Probably best accept it, and move on. Every moment he had now was borrowed. No, not quite that: stolen. He was already a convicted murderer; theft was well within his capacity.

But he was missing something: that he was now in Brack’s position. Brack had been expected to survive between the end of Phase two and the arrival of the NASA mission. Brack had probably been given far more training than Frank had, and was also going to rely on the oversight of XO. It showed, however, that it could be done. That it was not just possible, but that it was part of the plan.

Phase three. That was all of Phase three. The clean-up, the removal of evidence. The wait.

It all hinged on NASA. They were the only people who were going to help him, but they were expecting Brack. And if he couldn’t convince them that he was Brack, all hell would break loose. Hell, on a base that could be controlled by XO, with comms through XO circuits, wasn’t a place he wanted to be. Hell, on a base with no comms at all because he’d sabotaged them to prevent an XO take-over, was still going to be tricky, especially when the NASA guys would make repairing those same circuits an absolute priority.

The idea of them not trying to phone home at some point during their mission was ridiculous. These were people, decent people with families and friends who cared about them, and jobs they needed to do. They weren’t going to be held hostage by Frank any more than they were by XO. So unless he was going to permanently wreck the dish before NASA arrived, cutting off for ever all possibility of communicating with Earth, then he needed to come up with something else.

The first thing—literally the first thing—that any visiting astronaut would see would be the carnage on the cross-hab floor. Then they’d dig further, and everything would unravel: the bodies, the drugs, the gun, the suits, the simple fact he was growing food for more than just himself. He was going to have to work through the entire Phase three plan anyway, just to keep up appearances.

Sure. Why not? That was the easy part. Brack was just a name. NASA were expecting him, or someone like him. Though if they’d already met Brack, then his plan would fall apart at that point.

That was a real problem. He could pretend to be Brack only if they accepted that he was Brack.

There was only one solution. He needed to talk to XO. And given that he had their multi-billion-dollar base by the cojones, and their dirty little secrets, they’d cut a deal with him. They could hardly say no. In fact, they could only say yes. Oh, sure, XO would be looking for ways to double-cross him, but Zeus—the ghost of Zeus—had been wrong. Frank inexplicably held enough cards to be reasonably certain they couldn’t kill him off before he made it off-planet.

He’d decided. He was going to be Brack and get his ride home.

[Internal memo: Mars Base One Mission Control to Bruno Tiller 11/12/2048 (transcribed from paper-only copy)]

We have been unable to contact MBO now for fifty-six [56] hours. MBO still appears undamaged, as are all other components. No change in the external environment of MBO or the DV has been recorded since 11/11/2048.

The reason for the communications silence, and the identity of Subject #1, remains entirely speculative. We have insufficient data to reach any conclusions. Activity inside MBO is consistent with the continued function of automatic systems, but does not preclude the presence of one or more personnel. Regrettably, the likelihood of LOC is now high. Full LOC contingency measures should be implemented as a matter of urgency.

[transcript ends]

Outside. The faint sun had just crested the eastern wall of the crater, and the solar panels were catching the first weak rays. It was cold—Frank’s suit was registering an external temperature of minus ninety, and there was white frost covering the ground. As the feeble sun struck it, it smoked and hung low over the rocks as fog that swirled around his ankles as he made his way over from the cross-hab to the satellite dish.

His footsteps were all but silent. He could feel the crunch of frozen soil beneath his boots, but the sound didn’t travel. The only noise was his own breathing, and the faint hum of the circulating fans.

He inspected the satellite dish’s trip switches. He’d flipped them all off to stop Brack from communicating with Earth. It was time for him to turn them back on. He lifted the cover and snapped his thumb against them, one at a time, giving a few seconds between each one to make sure a power surge wasn’t going to take them all down again.

“Nice and easy,” said Declan. He was back in his spacesuit, but his faceplate was still broken, his eye still missing, his cheek still shattered.

“I’m doing it, I’m doing it. It’s my turn to worry about the power now.”