S Morden - No Way

[Internal memo: Mars Base One Mission Control to Bruno Tiller 11/10/2048 (transcribed from paper-only copy)]

We have been unable to contact MBO for twenty-four [24] hours. MBO appears undamaged. The hi-gain antenna appears undamaged, but the carrier signal is absent. The DV [Descent Vehicle] is also undamaged, and does emit a carrier wave. We have attempted to contact MBO routing through the DV, but the link is non-responsive. There is one [1] body, in an EVA suit, visible nine [9] feet west of one of the surface transports. There is no sign of additional activity visible to our orbital cameras.

At this stage, we can neither confirm nor deny whether the XO asset within MBO is still active.

[transcript ends]

It was mid-morning. The early frost had burned off, and the sky was its usual shade of hazy pink. Frank was outside, dragging a body through the red dust. He’d wrapped Zero in a square of parachute canopy, and was using the crudely knotted end—because knots were really difficult to tie in spacesuit gauntlets—to pull him over to where Declan was, by the buggy. Declan was also dead, shot by Brack through his spacesuit’s faceplate. Frank was pretty certain that Declan had died when the bullet had gone through his eye, rather than afterwards when his air had escaped, or after that when his bodily fluids had boiled out.

But Brack was dead too. Frank had stabbed him with a scalpel. He’d stabbed Zero as well, with a short gardening knife from the greenhouse.

Frank struggled with remembering the chain of events, but the details? Those were burned into him. It had taken him two days to recall what he’d done with his spacesuit, and the base wasn’t that big. Two days in which he’d wandered the corridors naked, scrubbed his skin raw under the shower, and slept only to wake up more exhausted than he had been before.

Two days to come to terms with the realization that he was the only man left on Mars.

Marcy had been the first to go, when her suit’s scrubber had failed and Frank hadn’t been able to get her back to the ship in time. That had hurt, and it still hurt when he thought about it. Then Alice, from an overdose of opioid that she had access to because she was their doctor. Zeus had died when Frank had accidentally opened the airlock door on him—something that shouldn’t have been possible—and Dee had been killed when the fire suppressor system flooded the Comms room with CO 2.

Then Declan, then Zero.

Declan lay on the cold ground, spreadeagled among the fist-sized red rocks, lying on his back, arms out wide. Behind the broken faceplate, the blood had dried, as had the skin and his one good eye. A wizened face, marred by a stretched-out entry wound on the shattered right cheek, stared out into the dull Martian day.

There was a glint of mirrored light on the ground close by. Frank dropped his handful of parachute, and he knelt down—his semi-rigid spacesuit didn’t really allow for bending at the waist—and picked it up. It was a scalpel, the one he’d lost out in the night after he’d cut away the excess cloth from the hole in his own suit, better to apply a sticky patch to seal it. Brack had shot him too, but Frank had survived.

He held the scalpel carefully, remembering not to try to blow the dust off it, or worse, wipe it with his gloved fingers. It was still going to be extraordinarily sharp, and he needed to find a safe place for it. He inspected the blade, holding it up to his faceplate, and noticed the white pitting on the metal surface: there was something in the soil that had corroded the stainless steel.

He carried it into the workshop’s airlock. He was standing exactly where Zeus had died. Frank had thought he’d been responsible for that. Frank had been allowed to think that, in the same way he’d been allowed to think that Marcy’s suit had failed, Alice had committed suicide, that Dee had been gassed by a malfunction.

The inside of the hab was pumped up with pressurized Mars air, so that it was somewhere that sparks could be made without risking instant immolation. People could work in there, with just scuba gear, and use their ungloved hands. The benches were still littered with parts for the putative steam turbine Zeus had been constructing, and further down, pieces of black glass where Declan had tried to fix the broken solar panels.

For a moment, he saw the other two men crouched over their work, then realized he was never going to see them alive again.

“Sorry,” he said. “We didn’t… do very well, did we? I mean, we did OK. We did OK, but we didn’t look after each other like we should have. We should have worked out what Brack was doing sooner, and stopped him. Would have been easier with more of us, too. Then I wouldn’t be stuck here, on my own, wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do next.”

Brack had killed everyone. He would have killed Frank too, but Frank had found that he had something worth living for, worth fighting for. Even worth faking his own death for, so he could strike Brack when he least expected. Worth killing for.

Frank had a son, Mike, back on Earth. Frank hadn’t seen his boy for what, ten years now? For eight of those ten years he’d been in San Quentin, serving a cool one-twenty for second-degree murder. The last two had been spent training and traveling and building.

Jacqui, his mother, had taken him away after the trial, moved to the east coast, and vanished along with him: Frank had killed a cop’s son, and the blowback had been hard. The only contact he’d had with them since were divorce papers. He’d been content with the exchange, until XO had come calling. He’d been sent to Mars by a corporation that just happened to own both a prison and an aerospace outfit, in the company of a bunch of cons—murderers and narcos and perverts—and an overseer. Frank had believed he’d been promised a lift home if he toed the line, built Mars Base One, and looked after it. He’d kept his end of the bargain. There was a fully functioning set of pressurized habs, with a greenhouse, med bay, crew quarters, kitchen, stores, power, light, water, air… what there wasn’t any more was a team of caretakers. Or that ticket home.

He cycled the workshop airlock, feeling his suit stretch around him as the CO 2was pumped back inside.

He opened the door, and there was Mars. The first time he’d seen it, he’d been speechless. Now, it was just where he worked. He climbed down the steps and pulled Zero in line with Declan, and then went back for Brack.

Brack had worked his way through the cons. Carefully at first, always making it look like there was another explanation. Which had been easy enough, because they weren’t the most stable of people, and Mars punished inattention with almost instant death. But Brack had tripped up with Zeus. He could only have been murdered. Sure, Brack had convinced Frank that it had been one of the others, and Frank had been only too ready to take that on trust, what with his trip home dependent on Brack’s good report.

Frank took hold of Brack’s parachute-shroud and bounced him down the cross-hab steps. All the malevolence and malice in that wiry body had gone. It was just an empty husk now: whatever had made Brack kill and kill again had flowed out with the blood on the base’s floor and the fluids evaporated away in Mars’s thin air.

He pulled him all the way to the other two, and tucked the ends of the shroud in around Brack’s body. Mars had weather. The parachutes might catch the feeble wind. He collected a third piece of parachute and fitted Declan into it. The spread arms were a challenge. Frank may have broken them or dislocated them pushing them down to the sides again, but sound didn’t really travel, and he was able to pretend otherwise.