S Morden - No Way

Lucy banged on his shoulder, and when he didn’t respond, hammered on it again.

He let go of the controls, frustrated, and pushed himself back in his seat.

She leaned her helmet against his. “It’s not working.”

“You don’t say. Unhitch the tow. We’ll try again.”

“Which leg?”

“Unhitch, and I’ll drive round.”

She climbed down and walk-ran back to the descent ship. There was no element of surprise. Justin could see exactly what they were doing, and there wasn’t anything they could do about that. There wasn’t much Justin could do about it either, or at least, that’s what Frank hoped.

Lucy unclipped the hitch and laid it on the ground. Frank wound it back in and waited for the autostop to shut the cable reel down. Then he turned the buggy around and examined the geometries carefully.

So, not the leg he’d been trying to buckle. The one that was now between him and the airlock. He gestured to Lucy—waving his hands from left to right, as if sweeping the path ahead of him. Then he settled his hands back on the controls and squeezed hard.

The wheels dug in, and he sped across the surface, dust and rock flicking up behind him. Belatedly, Lucy realized what he was about to do. She scrambled out of his way, and Frank slammed the buggy’s cargo-drum battering ram into the side of the landing leg.

He hit it hard. The straps bit down against his hard carapace, and the buggy’s back-end came up. He’d forgotten to clamp his jaw shut, and now his teeth hurt. And his neck. And his shoulder. When the dust of the collision had settled, he backed up. The leg had bent, but it hadn’t buckled. He drove backwards fifty feet, and gave it everything the fuel cell had.

This time, he tensed up. He clenched his jaw. He pushed himself into the back of his seat and prepared for the bang.

It was more brutal than before. He could feel parts inside of him move in ways they were never designed to, and when they stopped, he felt disorientated and sick. He struggled to find the controls, even though they were right in front of him, and had to remind himself how to put the buggy in reverse.

One more time. One more. He’d buckled the whole support, and he needed to hit it again to bring it down.

He pulled back seventy feet. Eighty. Enough? He didn’t know anything beyond the fact that this was going to hurt. He took the column, squeezed the triggers and leaned into the direction of travel.

The impact left him hanging limply over the controls, his harness the only thing stopping him falling out of his seat. He shook his head and blinked hard. He’d felt something tear. At first he thought it was just dust on his faceplate, but maybe it was blood in his eye. Isla was standing up, waving at him, pointing above him.

Frank craned his head backwards. Something went click in his neck, but he didn’t have time to faint or throw up, because there was a spaceship about to topple over, and it didn’t much care where it was going to end up.

Reverse. For the love of God, reverse. For all his bemoaning the lack of cold beer, he was punch-drunk. It took time to find his hands, longer for them to connect with the controls, and he started by trying to go forward again, knocking against the collapsing leg as it twisted into the fold made by repeated blows from the buggy.

That button. That one there. He mashed his palm against it and squeezed the triggers again. He shot backwards in an arc that terminated in a four-wheel drift across the Martian surface. He had no idea what he was doing any more. He sprang his fingers from the controls.

The buggy juddered to a halt, tilting over, and dropping back on its wheels with an emphatic and possibly final bounce. Frank reached up and slapped at his chest, once, twice, three times to release the harness.

The ship was falling, its leg bent beyond use. It tipped, and, in what appeared to be slow-motion, went past the point of no return.

Frank tumbled over the edge of the buggy, hanging on to the frame. He pulled himself upright just as the fuselage hit the ground. It crumpled against rocks and boulders, sending out clouds of dust and waves of sand, all in almost perfect silence. Frank could feel it, though, through the soles of his already unsteady feet. The nose cone dug itself in a yard from where he stood, and he didn’t have the wit to flinch.

The nose rose again, towering over him, and he watched it go, open-mouthed.

It settled, rocking backwards and forwards in ever-decreasing cycles, and Lucy, not realizing just how damaged he was, thrust his shield and sword at him. Frank stood there, staring at these items that he knew meant something but couldn’t work out precisely what.

He took them anyway, and let himself be dragged to one side.

Behind, Isla turned her buggy in a tight circle, and drove directly at the side of the fallen ship.

It tore through the flimsy metal skin and composite core like it was foil. Gas erupted in a white cloud around the front of the buggy, and when Isla reversed out it revealed a rent, a hole punched into the flank, big enough to climb through and access the inside.

And Frank came back to himself with a sudden realization that the clock had started. Thirty seconds to save Yun.

He fumbled his shield onto his arm and dragged his sword point off the ground. Lucy was ahead of him, and he scrambled to catch up. The edges of the ship’s wound were turned inwards. Getting in was just a question of pushing through the gale.

He knew the layout. He remembered it. Sleep tanks at the top. Middle storey with a mesh floor. Bottom layer with storage and controls and the airlock. They were in the middle level, and there was Yun, gasping and gulping as the air streamed out into the insatiable void beyond the circular walls.

He barely had time to register her presence when he saw a spacesuited figure launch itself at him, coming from his right. One of the mesh floor panels came loose and struck him hard on the shoulder, and while the momentum wasn’t enough to knock him down, it was enough to momentarily blindside him.

Frank’s helmet sounded like a gong. He raised his arms, and the second blow accidentally struck his shield. It hurt, but it still gave him a moment to recover and reorient.

Justin was in a spacesuit like his own, and he was attacking him with a hammer. A geology hammer. Jim’s. Justin’s face was… not impassive. Determined. Serious. Intent on killing him, and moving on to the next job. He brought the hammer down again, and Frank interposed his shield, and it hurt again, jarring his arm, making his shoulder burn.

Frank couldn’t see what was happening behind him. He could only assume that Lucy had grabbed Yun and pushed her through the opening to the willing hands beyond, that Yun hadn’t panicked and fought her off, that she hadn’t already died from an embolism, or sheer fright.

The hammer kept on rising and falling, smashing into Frank when he couldn’t get his shield in the way, and into his arm when he could, pushing him back and back towards the ceiling of the middle deck until the only way out was to fight or die. Justin seemed oblivious to his hopeless situation, to the reason he was still attacking Frank, to the whole fact that his ship was now lying on the sands of Mars, gutted and open to the outside.

He just wanted to kill Frank.

And maybe that was OK. Frank had done what he’d come here to do. Goddammit, he was tired of all this shit, and maybe signing off was something he could contemplate. He saw his own derangement mirrored in the eyes of another—it was the same look he’d worn in the rear-view mirror moments before he’d got out of his truck, gun in hand.

He slipped to one knee, shield over his head, the blows against it steady and methodical, like a metronome. His left arm was numb. His shoulder on fire. Justin wasn’t going to stop. He absolutely wasn’t going to stop. Was Frank going to do anything about that?