S Morden - No Way

He could have thought of that a while back, but he was actually pretty pleased to have thought of it at all. He climbed up, stepped carefully across the open tubes and lowered himself into the seat. It took a little careful steering to maneuver the back wheels away from the obstruction, but he still remembered how to do it, and he drove back across the Heights to where the rest of the crew sat waiting for him.

All that knowledge, all that training, and it came down to him. He didn’t feel like bragging, though. He was just glad he was in a position, thanks to XO and their prototype suits, to help.

The others were sitting in the sand, or on the buggy, conserving what was in their tanks. But they stood, one by one, as Frank approached, and walked out to meet him.

Lucy climbed up and touched helmets with him.

“Tell me you did it.”

“I did it. Worked first time.”

“Thank you.” She relayed the message, and suddenly everyone looked much happier. Apart from the two dead astronauts lying face-down in the dirt.

“XO had also vented the CO 2extinguishers, cut the power to the airlocks, and had started depressurizing the habs. If they could have burned the base down, pretty certain they’d have done that.”

“What’s the damage?”

“Didn’t check the greenhouse, so I don’t know about the plants or the fish. Jerry was still alive when I left him, but he was trying to cough up his lungs, so maybe Fan can see to him.”

Lucy broke contact. Fan’s body language changed—treating a man who’d eaten Jim—and Lucy seemed to spend a while in talking him round. In the end, he flapped his arms in surrender, and went to sit at the controls of the second buggy.

“He’ll do it.”

“Because you ordered him to, or because he wants to?”

“Does it matter?”

“I guess not. Though our team doctor had a thing about euthanizing her patients, so I’d probably want to get seen by someone who didn’t think I was better off dead.”

“We’ve all had a difficult few days, Frank. There’s a lot to process, a lot to come to terms with. I’ll keep an eye on him, but I don’t think Fan’s going to deliberately kill someone he’s treating, no matter how much he might like to.” She straightened up for a moment to look at the base. “You want to try this thing out?”

“You going to be the guinea pig?”

“I can’t ask anyone else to do it, can I?”

“Sure you can. But since you’re a decent human being, you’re stepping up to the plate yourself. Sit where I can see you, and put a hand in the air if your suit craps out. I’ll take it slow.”

Frank drove forward. He knew he was going to be safe, but having had his suit stop working on him once, he knew what Lucy had to be thinking. Now? If not then, then now? How about now? Surely close enough now.

Then uncertainty. Then hope. Then… Frank had forgotten about it when he had other, more urgent things to worry about. How odd that such imminent danger of death should become normal, but it had. He’d been on Mars, what, nine, nearly ten months? And every day he’d suited up and walked around one of the most hazardous environments known.

Normal. It was normal.

Once upon a time, he’d been concerned that he’d not been able to feel anything. That he was already in the grave. Still. Silent. Here, he was alive, so fully alive.

Perhaps XO had done him a favor after all.

Lucy’s hand stayed down. He’d done a good thing. He’d done a bad thing before that, a long time ago. The good didn’t cancel out the bad, he knew that, but maybe he’d earned himself some peace.

[Transcript of interview with Benjamin Jonathan Cohen, conducted by [redacted—A#1] and [redacted—A#2]. Also present Stephen Buk, Attorney at Law 3/17/2049 Salt Lake City UT]

A#1: Tell me about Luisa.

BJC: Luisa was all of us.

A#2: All of you, or some of you?

BJC: Whoever was on duty. We were working around eighteen [18] hours solid, but we had to get some sleep sometime. And a Mars sol is thirty-seven [37] minutes longer than an Earth day. After twenty [20] days, the day/night cycle completely reverses. No one person could be Luisa.

A#1: So how did you maintain consistency?

BJC: I guess, same way you get a writers’ room. People would say “that doesn’t sound like Luisa”, or “she’d not use that word”, and the thing would get written pretty quickly. We knew we had to keep him on board. It was the only way we could get anything done.

A#2: Luisa was the good cop?

BJC: I mean, sure. There’s this guy, starved of human contact, starved of female contact. So we kind of did a bit of flirting, make him feel like we were just a bit on his side against the management, that we thought he was getting a bum deal but, you know. Stick with it, champ.

A#2: Champ, or chimp?

SB: You don’t have to answer that.

A#1: Everyone who was Luisa: they were regular Mission Control people.

BJC: We didn’t have a separate Luisa team.

A#1: And you were all in Mission Control for the whole duration.

BJC: [whispered conversation with SB]

SB: My client would like to know what kind of deal might be on offer.

A#1: I’m not certain we need to offer anyone a deal at this stage.

BJC: [whispered conversation with SB]

BJC: Yes.

A#2: The whole duration? From June 2048?

BJC: Yes.

A#1: OK. Let’s have some names.

[transcript ends]

It had all come down to knowing where Earth was, and then encoding its movement in a series of equations that the dish motors could follow, to keep the antenna pointed at the correct portion of the sky.

Yun had explained that the problem wasn’t trivial. That bypassing the dedicated satellites in orbit and calling home directly on the equipment MBO came with, was complicated precisely because no one had thought the situation would ever arise. That turning an entirely digital system into an analog one, without destroying the ability to switch back, was time-consuming and technically difficult.

She had, of course, managed it within a week. From their initial Mayday, to reaching a lo-fi text-only system, had taken another week. Video was out of the question for the time being, but highly compressed voice messages, sent over the Deep Space Network, was something they could now manage.

Messages from home. Messages from family, from friends, from colleagues. It felt like a huge thing, and it was. And every day, as Mars turned away from the Earth, there was silence for twelve hours.

Frank didn’t ignore the event. It just didn’t mean as much to him as it did to the rest of the crew. Luisa had gone. XO no longer had any relevance for him. And Lucy was camped out in Control/Comms, trying to relay as much information as possible regarding what had happened.

Sometimes Frank took her food—it was all he was able to do—while she was in the middle of dictating another lengthy transmission. She’d always pause her recording and make some small talk, but it was clear she wanted to continue as soon as she could. He understood there was pressure from NASA, but he wasn’t privy to the content, nor the context.

Frank was going to have to wear his inflatable arm cast for four months, and not take it off at all for the first two. Fan didn’t have access to an x-ray machine. He didn’t have the surgical plates and screws he probably would have used back on Earth, either. It was going to heal crooked, and it was never going to be as good as before, even if everything else went well.

The cast stretched from wrist to past his elbow. He had to wear a sling with it, which meant it was always present in front of him, and he could see, through the transparent covering, his skin turn yellow, then mottled black. It hurt, mainly at night when he didn’t have anything else to think about.