S Morden - No Way

He was going to slowly, surely, get battered to the ground and have his faceplate cracked open, and all the air in his lungs and liquid in his body boil out through the wounds. His testimony, his witness, his crew’s story, lost for ever. Unless he used the sword in his right hand.

For them, then. For them.

Frank lifted the shield higher and swung at Justin’s legs. He hit. Not hard enough. He pulled back, suffered another literal hammer-blow to his upraised arm that almost tore it from its socket, and swung again.

This time he got the right knee. Justin’s leg buckled like the ship’s landing leg had done. He caught himself before he collapsed, hopped backwards and tested his weight.

Frank pushed himself up, slowly and painfully. There was nothing left to fight over. Yun had gone, M2 was in ruins, and still they were going to duke it out. A proxy war between XO and Frank’s crewmates. Nothing at stake but pride.

He couldn’t lift his left arm any longer. If he had time, perhaps he could strap it across his chest to protect his suit controls, but he didn’t, and he let it hang limp. Instead, he raised his makeshift sword out in front of him, to give him a sense of the space between them.

Justin knocked the end of the sword with a swing of Jim’s hammer and Frank made the effort to bring the point back around again. He’d never done this before today, unless kids playing with fallen sticks, pretending to be Jedi knights, counted, which he guessed not. But he could at least turn sideways on, lead with his sword hand, keep his suit and his left arm out of the way of the hammer. Awkward, though: he couldn’t see through the side of his helmet, and he returned to a face-on stance when he realized it wasn’t going to work.

“We going to do this, then?” he said. “We going to finish this now?”

There was no way Justin could hear him. All the same, the man’s eyes seemed to narrow. He knew it was over, too. He knew. He swung the hammer again, connecting with the end of the sword, knocking it aside, and tried to jump forward to hit Frank on the return, but his leg wouldn’t take it. He stumbled, and he hastily pushed back, trying to recover his balance.

Frank lunged, the sword point skittering across Justin’s carapace just above the controls, heading for his armpit, but he was out of range, and it was Frank’s turn to go on the back foot. They were testing each other, seeing what the other could and couldn’t bring to the fight.

Clearly, Frank had the reach, and he started to circle, always keeping the sword between him and Justin. Circling meant walking up the slope of the wall, and back down to the mid-line, and it was obvious from his opponent’s painful hopping that Frank had the advantage of maneuverability, too. He could get in and out of range far more easily, just as long as he didn’t make a mistake.

Frank could feel the feral part of his brain take over again, sliding between him and conscious decision, turning him into something with just animal instinct; predator and prey.

Was that what he wanted? Was that what he really wanted? Justin’s blood on his blade? Revenge, justice, whatever he called it, he was going to kill yet another man, and he didn’t have to. No one was forcing him. He could leave it. He could just leave it. Walk away. Let nature take its course.

He was panting with the effort of making a choice. He wasn’t at war with Justin. He was at war with himself, and it was time to declare a truce. He wasn’t alone any more. He could, conceivably, still go home after this. He’d survived everything, the worst that both Mars and XO could throw at him.

And he could just as easily throw all that away by giving Justin a chance to get inside his guard.

OK. Deep breath. Circle round again. Back to the breach.

He kept his eyes firmly on Justin, parried a couple of abortive attempts to get closer, and finally stood part-way up the wall, one foot on the edge of the curling metal and loose insulation wave that had frozen in place. The buckled fuselage was sharp. He’d need to tread carefully.

But every time Frank tried to back out, he had to straighten up and ward Justin off by brandishing his sword, holding him at arm’s length to prevent him from landing a blow. With one damaged arm, it was impossible to escape. But neither did he want to kill again. Justin, however, seemed hellbent on only one of them getting out alive.

Lucy climbed through, and stood next to Frank. It took a little while for him to realize she was there, and a little longer for him to register the gun in her outstretched hand. He looked at her through her faceplate, her thin-lipped expression, her unblinking gaze.

He got the message, even though they couldn’t talk. Justin got the message too. He stood, weight on one leg, hammer held low by his side. He stood up as straight as he could. Frank climbed carefully out, teasing his way through the gap in the side of the prone spaceship, and then stood on the sand, waiting for the flash, waiting for the low, distant pop, waiting for Lucy to come out and tell him it was done.

[Transcript of Emergency FLIGHT meeting Ares IV Mission Control JPL Pasadena CA 3/10/2049]

GT: I’ve been up for forty-eight [48] hours straight. Just so you all know. Sound off.

MA: CATO. DSN [Deep Space Network] confirm that signals from the three [3] XO satellites in areostationary orbits are ongoing. ATA confirms this also. No direct communications have been established with MBO.

LS: RIO. It’s out of my hands. The U.S. ambassador to Beijing was summoned to explain the situation, and the Secretary of State has been in touch with his Chinese counterpart. The CNSA [China National Space Agency] liaison here has been sequestered in meetings. This is… about to explode. Sorry.

WM: ODIN. If they have total computer failure, then they may be too busy to communicate. But given that the uplink is a priority, and that I’m estimating a sol to fix everything, even just to patch it together enough to send a lo-fi message… we may be looking at something more serious.

GT: How serious?

WM: Catastrophic hab failure with zero survivability.

PO: ECLSS. I can’t see that. The habs are modular, the systems are robust, the personnel trained. And HiRISE2 tell us the infrastructure appears intact.

GT: They’re burning more fuel trying to stay overhead than they’d spend in years of station-keeping.

TY: OPSPLAN. I’ve still got nothing. Though the rovers have moved. They have definitely moved. There are people on the surface.

GT: XO have refused my request to go to Gold Hill in person.

PO: Seriously?

GT: They said the site is “commercially sensitive”, but I’m hearing rumors that’s not all it is. I have a car out front. Al is meeting me there. Let’s see what they say to our faces.

[transcript ends]

He didn’t remember much after that.

Fan opening the door to the stand-alone airlock, and Yun taking her first unsteady steps wearing Leland’s suit. Her face, livid and puffed, and her eyes… every blood vessel burst.

Frank, arm not just broken, but shattered, and Fan having to heat up a morphine autoinjector in a self-igniting can, to melt the crystals and then inject the contents, almost boiling, into his bloodstream through the already patched arm of his spacesuit.

That had hurt. Hurt a lot: Frank’s yell of pain died the other side of his faceplate, and then it faded, leaving him in an almost dreamlike fugue. The pain—well, it might have been there, but he couldn’t feel it any more. His mouth had gone dry, and he had a problem with Mars turning when it clearly couldn’t do any such thing. He blinked and squinted again. Definitely turning. Slowly, left to right, and then back, in a huge, glacial circle.