S Morden - No Way

He was hauled up onto a buggy, and tied on, much as the M2 prisoners were, except he was on his side, watching the Martian landscape slide by, top to bottom, like he was climbing a cliff that would never end.

It occurred to him that he was actually injured. Properly damaged. Building sites were dangerous places, but he’d always run a tight ship. Everyone knew the score before they started, and workers goofing around with air hoses and heavy machinery got their pink slips. He’d seen some serious shit go down—mangled limbs, staved-in heads, desleeving injuries, crush and puncture wounds—and now it had happened to him. Someone had set about his arm with a hammer. Of course it was broken.

Now everything depended on whether Fan could fix it straight, with what he had. Hell, at least he could trust Fan not to off him. Not like Alice, who’d killed who knew how many with her skewed idea of who should live and who should be helped to die.

That got him remembering them all. Zeus, huge and tattooed and tireless. Marcy, whose enthusiasm eased seamlessly into recklessness. Declan, sarcastic and prissy and smart. Zero, dedicated to his gardening, and still just a kid. Speaking of kids—Dee: he was normal. Out of all of them, he was the one who Frank would have put on a ship back to Earth, had just one space been available. The injustice of it all. Bringing them to Mars, getting them to build the base, then killing them off. Leaving only Brack.

Brack. Did he know what he was getting himself into? Sure he did. He’d signed up for it, all of it, including Phase three. And when he died—when he bled out on the floor of Comms—he’d died with a threat on his lips, “You’ll never see your son again”, which might yet come true. Frank might not even make it back to Earth.

But look at what he had done. He’d built a place for people to live in. He’d thwarted XO’s plans. He’d done his best to help his new crewmates. He’d saved some of them. Not bad for a lifer. Not bad at all.

“Frank?”

He snapped awake without realizing he’d fallen asleep. Fan had his helmet pressed against his. The buggy had stopped moving, and in his eyeline he could see another buggy parked up, and the outpost.

“We need to swap out your life support, and I want to check on your vitals.”

Frank took a breath, and another. His head started to clear. “I’m good. Give me a minute.”

He’d made it this far. He’d make it the rest of the way.

The inside of the outpost was still a mess. It offended Frank. Jerry and the two so far nameless M2 people were going to do the work putting it right. The missing equipment needed to be reinstalled or mended, and hopefully between them there’d be enough skills to do that. Because it was still a long way from Earth.

According to Fan, Frank wasn’t going to die any time soon. That wasn’t the end of the doctor’s concerns, though, and the only place he wanted to see his patient was in the med bay. That was still a couple of hours away, and while Lucy, Isla, Yun and Fan were able to climb out of their suits and scratch the places that itched, Frank was trapped.

His arm might make it out of his sleeve once, but it sure as hell wasn’t going back in again.

But Fan was able to deploy sufficient diagnostic tools through the open back hatch to confirm that Frank’s vitals were stable, and administer enough chemicals to keep them that way.

Fan swapped out Frank’s life support, and patted him on the back before Frank closed up his suit again. One thumb up was all he could manage. He was still feeling like this wasn’t quite his body, and that he was watching everything from one step removed.

Fan boosted him back onto the buggy, checked on the prisoners, and retied Frank onto the roll bars. Then he took the lead down the Santa Clara, with Isla taking over the driving from Lucy. The smoothness of the river bed was a welcome contrast to the rough edges of the volcano. And because there’d been no car chases or derby races, there was enough left in the fuel cell to drive back to MBO, rather than rely on gravity to roll the rest of the way.

One last turn, and they were out of the mouth of the Santa Clara, back onto the Heights, and there was the base, bathed in the pink afternoon sun slanting in from the west. Frank stirred himself from his torpor, and managed a little more upright than the slumped position he found himself in.

Not that it made him any more comfortable. The morphine was wearing off. He could feel his arm again, and not in a good way. It felt sore and hot, like someone was rubbing sandpaper across his skin. The rest of him was just dog tired. This was it. This was the end of it, and the start of something new.

Out of the valley, he could make and receive transmissions again. The clipped chatter between Lucy and Fan. No, wait, that wasn’t small talk.

“Fan. Fan, talk to me. Fan!”

The base slewed off to the right. And then out of sight, behind him.

“Frank. Frank, can you hear me? Frank, something’s wrong with Fan.”

Frank shook himself, and realized that Fan was asleep at the wheel, making the buggy turn in a wide circle. He struggled against the cargo strap that held him down, reached forward and banged Fan’s shoulder hard. Fan fell further onto his left side, held in position only by the driver’s harness.

His hands fell off the controls. He wasn’t asleep. He was unconscious.

Frank gritted his teeth and screwed up his face. OK, think. Think. Then he noticed that the air in his suit wasn’t blowing in his face any more. He flipped up the control panel on his chest, one-handed. Nothing. No display. No numbers.

His suit had just turned itself off. If the same thing had happened to Fan’s…

Not a coincidence. Surely, not a coincidence.

He had a helmet’s worth of air. Less than that. If his scrubbers had stopped working too, then he was going to choke on his CO 2faster than he’d run out of oxygen. How long did he have? A minute? Seconds?

And Fan was further down that road than he was, because he’d already passed out, was already suffocating, as soon they both would be, rolling slowly to a stop on the Heights.

OK. Stop breathing. Untie yourself by pulling on the right part of the strap. Climb up and over and restart the buggy. Try and ignore the pounding heartbeat in your ears.

He felt his lungs begin to strain. They urged him to take a breath. Just one more. He loosened the strap enough that he could pull himself up and move around on the lattice frame so that he could reach the controls.

It took him a couple of attempts, and they began to head back the way they’d come. Close enough for the others to run over and help? Frank used his dead hand to hit the harness buckle. Once, twice, and it just wasn’t clicking out. He swapped hands, got it first time, but slipped and fell against the chassis, driving what air he had left out of his body.

Fuck.

He had to breathe, and as soon as he did, he needed another. He knew that if he did, he’d not wake up.

He picked Fan up, one-handed, and bundled both of them off the buggy.

They landed together, awkwardly, sprawling in the dust and against the rocks. There wasn’t anything else Frank could do. It wasn’t pain he could fight against, it wasn’t effort that was required: it was the very essence of him craving oxygen and shutting down in its absence. His vision started to gray out. He was mid-faint. He forced himself to his knees, and clawed at Fan’s back unit. His fingers caught the recessed latch, and he pulled.

In there was the hard reset button. He’d used it to try and revive Marcy, all the way back on that first trip out. It was all he could remember. Not the order of the buttons, whether it was the left one or the right one he needed to press. The color—one was red, the other green—would have told him, but he was blind and he was sliding down that long, dark tunnel.