S Morden - One Way

Frank could find precious little to smile about. Alice wasn’t even certain that they’d been sent enough supplies to cover their asses in the best of circumstances. There were going to be difficult choices ahead, and Frank didn’t have to wonder as to who the person making those choices would be. Quite how Brack was supposed to handle that was anyone’s guess.

But for the rest of them, if he and Marcy failed to get the buggies up and running, there was only going to be one result. The two of them were their first and best shot at saving the mission. Anyone else that Alice would defrost wouldn’t have the right knowledge. They’d be less likely to succeed. They’d make more mistakes.

Marcy used the button in the airlock to tell the outer door to open. The whole structure twitched as the last of the air blew out. It was something that Frank could feel through his feet, but the only thing he could hear was the sound of his own breathing. He peered through the window, and watched Marcy shuffle forward towards the widening gap of rose-red light.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“Control your breathing,” said Alice, “or I’ll do it for you.”

“But it’s so… big.”

“And you have to walk across it, so contain your excitement, child.”

Brack adjusted his headset. “When you’ve stopped playing the tourist, feel free to leave the airlock. Number two is using up what’s in his tank.”

Marcy turned round to face the airlock, gave Frank two thumbs up through the tiny window, and slowly walked backwards down the external ladder, using the integral handrails to guide her. The outer door slid shut, and pumps repressurized the tiny chamber.

“OK, Kittridge. Let’s not hang around. You got your tools, and you know how long you have.”

“Aren’t you going to wish us luck?”

“Let’s just say, ‘failure is not an option’.”

“Failure is always an option,” said Alice. “I’ve treated enough people to know that.”

The inner door hissed open; there was nothing left but for Frank to waddle into the airlock. The door closed behind him, and he flipped open his controls, looking at the green lights and willing them to stay green.

The acoustics of the room changed, the reverberations leaking away with the air. He felt his suit expand around him, the pressure inside fighting the elastic material. Standing there, in a space barely bigger than a cupboard, knowing that on the other side of the metal door was a whole new world just waiting for him to screw up so that it could kill him.

But in a moment of clarity he realized he’d already screwed up to get himself here in the first place. At least on Mars, the rules were clear and the penalties obvious. That door would open onto a simpler, more honest environment. Was he going to die here? Possibly. But not necessarily.

The door mechanism flashed green, and Frank pressed the button to pull it aside. The sudden outrush of the remaining air dragged at the loose outer cover of his suit. Then there was Mars. First a crack, then a sliver, then a widening rectangle of brown-pink. The door pulled back to its stops, and he shuffled forward.

He was on the threshold of the airlock, holding on to the jambs, looking out at an utterly barren wasteland, where fine red dust had drifted around angular blocks of toffee-colored rocks. As his eyes became adjusted to the light, he could see the pale, distant disc of the sun rising into a rosewater pink band of sky over the crater wall. Over to the north was the black line of the horizon, and off to the west, much closer, were a series of raggedly stepped scarps.

It resembled Utah, in some respects. In others, it was completely alien. There was, of course, no sound. This desert was silent, empty and dead.

He turned round on the small platform as Marcy had done, and climbed down to the ground. The last step was a jump of a couple of feet, and he landed squarely into the bootprints that were already there.

Looking up in the suit was difficult. He had to lean back slightly, which unbalanced him. But he wanted to get his first look at the spaceship that had brought them here. It was an unremarkable cylinder, bullet-topped, with four extendable legs sprouting from the sides. Right underneath, where the rocket had lowered them to the ground on a pillar of flame, was nothing but bare rock and scorch marks. The white surface of the ship was already tinged pink, and the XO logo prominently displayed was around a year older than at lift-off.

It looked tiny. It was tiny, compared to the living area they were supposed to create. It was nothing but a fragile can, strangely unimpressive, and it was never going to sustain their existence, let alone allow anything approaching real living.

He couldn’t think about what came later, nor what Brack had said to him about going home. He had to stay alive now, to earn that reward. That they were the only people on Mars was beside the point: they were the only people who they could rely on to do the job.

“It’s empty,” said Marcy. “It’s just nothing. Everything outside of the ship is…” She tried to shrug, but the suit wouldn’t let her. “You know.”

“Not quite everything.” He turned round again and carefully took his first steps on Martian soil. The ground was a hard rock substrate, covered by a thin layer of fine dust that compacted under his weight. It felt solid enough to build on, at least the structures they were contemplating, and it had the advantage of being mostly flat, too. The loose pieces that littered the surface would need to be cleared, and there were more of those than they’d trained for. That part of construction would just have to take longer. No short cuts.

He crouched down—easier said than done—and picked up a fist-sized rock. It seemed too light for its volume, but he realized that was just down to the gravity. It was solid enough, a gritty sandstone. What was more interesting was the little patch of pale frost that was hiding underneath. He watched it smoke away until it was all gone.

He dropped the rock back down, and it fell slowly and silently. His suit was telling him it was minus four Fahrenheit outside. Cold. Freezing cold.

“We’d better get moving,” he said, carefully straightening up.

“The clock is still ticking, boys and girls,” said Brack. His voice was inescapable, and anything they wanted to say to each other would be immediately overheard. “It’s now oh-seven-oh-eight local mean solar time. Your life support will keep you going until sometime before sixteen hundred, but your suits will give you much more of an accurate measurement. Pay attention to them, because otherwise whoever goes out next will be walking past your corpse to complete your mission. Cole, you have the map, and you’re in charge. Over and out.”

Her tablet was in a pouch, carabinered to the belt at her waist. She brought it up to her helmet and pressed at the screen with her fat fingers through the protecting plastic.

“It’s this way,” she said, and started to pick her way across the rock field, placing her feet between the scattered debris. Frank fell in beside her, and faced into the pale sun. The dome of the sky was slowly changing color, from the deep red of dawn to the paler pink of morning.

There were clouds. He hadn’t anticipated clouds, high tails of pearl-white against the blush of the sky. They were running away behind him, fleeing the sun, stretched ragged and vanishing like the frost had in its pale light.

“So,” he said, watching his feet. “Mars.”

“What do you think?”

He looked up, momentarily, but the only way either of them was going to make any progress was if they concentrated on the ground. The rising sun wore a bright crown of light that diffused into the rest of the sky. The distant crater walls were slowly resolving into detail. It was as dim as a winter’s morning.