S Morden - One Way

“He does the computers,” said Alice, speaking for him again.

Frank felt irritation prickle across his skin, but he batted the feeling aside. It had been a long time since he’d had to instruct a team, and as long as they did the work, it didn’t matter.

The door opened again, and they all looked round. Frank picked out Marcy straight away, and the thin shape beside her had to be Zero. They waited for them.

“Marcy,” said Marcy. “Transport.”

“Call me Zero,” said Zero. “They put me in charge of your greens.”

“So what did they put you in charge of?” asked Alice of Frank. She tilted her head back so that she could look down her nose at him. “Us?”

He had to work with her, he had no choice. “When we hit the surface of Mars,” he said, “I’m guessing we’ll have nothing. Getting these oversized baggies up will be the first thing we have to do, before Zero can start growing, or Zeus put in the cans, or Declan—wherever he is—string up the lights. The quicker we put these together, the faster we can get out of each other’s faces. We get better food and somewhere to shit. That sound like a plan?”

No one responded.

“I’m not just saying this for my own health,” said Frank. “I’m in charge of exactly squat. You want to sit in a spacesuit for a week and watch a couple of guys bolt one of these together? Be my guest. I’m thinking that it might be more comfortable for us all, in the long run, if we at least pretend to pull together. Now, again: is this a plan or am I just wasting my breath?”

“It’s a plan,” said Marcy. “What do you need me to do?”

“I’m not sitting around, watching other people work.” Zeus hefted one of the nut runners. “I don’t think anyone will.”

“Their choice, big man,” said Alice. But after a few moments’ silence, she relented. “I don’t see I can help much, but why not?”

Assent from Demetrius and Zero came in the form of a single nod. Still no sign of Declan, but it was his job to assist Frank. Hell, it was his job to replace Frank if anything happened to him. His co-operation was a given.

“OK? Marcy, we need to work out what we’ve got. Pretty sure there’s a buggy somewhere at the back of this hangar: there are tire tracks heading that way. Could you take a look?”

“Sure,” she said, and started out across the sand.

“The rest of you, grab one of these, and I’ll show you how to use one. Safely.”

Once he was sure they weren’t going to hold on to the moving parts of the nut runners, he let them loose on one of the completed rings lying on the floor. They unbolted it so that the sections were separated out, exploded like an engineering diagram, then they started bolting it all back together again.

“You’re going to be living in something you’ve helped put together,” he said. “You’ll be relying on it not to leak or fall apart. Chances are, if you cut corners, someone dies.”

A couple of them resented his advice. Zero, and Alice. He’d have to watch their work, give it a proper assessment. Zeus, on the other hand, just got on with the job. He was probably more used to the labor and the setting—an ocean rig was going to have similarities to a spaceship or a Mars base—but the man’s skills were going to be an asset. And a spacesuit was going to hide the swastika on the back of Zeus’s neck.

Frank had never meant his life to be like this. All he’d ever wanted was a quiet existence, unremarkable and uneventful, getting up, going to work, having his family around him. Now he was going to spend the rest of his life on Mars with an ex neo-Nazi for company, not to mention whatever it was the others had done. Murderers, some of them. Murderers like him. As if this world didn’t have enough crazy, they were now exporting it to other planets.

Marcy drove back across the hangar. She’d found a buggy, and was towing a long cylinder on a trailer.

“We’ve got this,” she said. “I’m guessing we have to do something with it.”

Between them, Marcy and Frank got the cylinder off the trailer and onto the ground. She glanced around and pulled him close. “How are they doing?”

“Getting on like a pressure cooker. Zeus is the least of my worries. Least of yours, too. Hell, we’ve all got some corners we can afford to have knocked off.”

The cylinder was closed by releasable bolts recessed into the outer shell and protected by pull-up hatches. Frank pressed on the back of the first hatch so that it lifted proud of the surface, and wedged his fingertips under the leading edge. He pulled, and the spring-loaded mechanism snapped it into the upright position.

Zeus was there, doing the same thing on the next, and Zero beyond him.

The restraining bolts were screw-thread, big wings on the heads, released with a twist and pull. The cavity they extended into was just about large enough to get a hand in. Not Zeus’s hand, but he could help open the other hatches while someone smaller—Marcy, in this case—worked the bolt. A tool for this would be useful, but they didn’t appear to have one; Frank made a mental note to mention it later. To someone. Maybe even Brack.

Beneath the shadow of the cylinder, the cargo bay door popped, under pressure from inside. Zeus and Frank and Marcy heaved at the door, and it opened up fully. The cargo inside was neatly packed into drums. Zeus was already reaching in for the first, and Frank grabbed one of his own, rolling it across the sandy floor and parking it on open ground.

Each drum was a standard size to fit into the standard cylinder, seven feet across, six feet tall. They were big, and heavy. On Mars, gravity was one third of Earth’s. Something that weighed three tons here would weigh just one there.

When all the drums were lined up, Frank went down the row, reading the labels on the outsides to locate the things they’d need first: the end rings and outriggers, and, critically, the airlock, which came in one complete piece and had its own procedure. “OK. This one first.”

The drum opened with simple latches around the circumference of its lid, but it took two crew members to pull the lid off and carry it away. Everything needed to build one section of habitat appeared to be present. It was time to go to work.

“OK,” said Frank. “From the top.”

He laid out what was required for the inner ring, and let the rest of them put it together.

Wrestling the plastic sheeting to the ground was incredibly hard work. The end panel was a flat disc. That was fine. The tube was terrible. He burned a dozen cable ties making sure it didn’t just unfold again before he got it in position. Maybe it’d be easier with no air.

“Don’t walk on the plastic. Don’t cut the plastic,” he warned them. They bolted the outer ring, one section at a time, to the inner ring. Then, awkwardly, trying to make certain that every part of the plastic was caught safely and firmly between the seals.

Zero was lining up the bolts and spinning the nuts onto the thread, accurate and quick with his fingers. Demetrius was less so, and the banter between them had tipped quickly from good-natured to cruel. These were going to be the only people on the planet, at least until NASA turned up, and it wasn’t his job to discipline them. He couldn’t fault Zero’s work, though.

“Demetrius, give me a hand with this,” said Frank, and started to drag out the base mat for the finished module. The kid was good with computers, that was why he was here. They needed him as much as he needed them. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t good at building things. He was young, though: and he acted young. What the hell had he done to have ended up getting drafted into this mission?

The boy took the other side of the roll from Frank and together they dumped it on the floor.