S Morden - One Way

He had some cable ties left over. He wrapped one around her wrist, tightened it, and threaded another through it to attach her to a strut. He did the same with her ankle. He looked at her face through the mess of the inside of her helmet. Her eyes were closed. She was completely unresponsive.

He didn’t have time to wallow. He needed to get her back, and for Alice to work some kind of magic. Even climbing into the seat took seconds that he didn’t have. He certainly wasn’t going to bother with the driver’s harness. He gripped the steering wheel and squeezed the accelerator. The motors rumbled through the latticework and the tires clawed at the dirt. The buggy rolled forward.

He could see the ship. He could see it, getting larger and more detailed ahead of him. He was bare minutes away. He couldn’t turn to see Marcy. Or even tell if Marcy was still attached. There were rear-facing cameras, but they’d put them in the pile of parts to do later.

There was a familiar feeling rising in his guts. The feeling of powerlessness, of the inability to do anything to change the situation, of being condemned to watch while…

… while someone he’d come to care about, someone he was responsible for, died.

And he couldn’t even fix it by shooting anyone.

The buggy was responding differently than it had done on Earth. It floated over the surface, getting airtime whenever he hit a rise, and each hit on a big rock made that tire lose contact for a moment. Maybe it’d be different if he wasn’t driving so fast. He had to wrestle with the steering, continually adjusting the direction as if he was rally-car racing.

He gritted his teeth and concentrated.

“Alice? I’m close. I’m almost there.”

“As soon as you get here, you get yourself inside. You understand? I’ll deal with Marcy.”

“I can carry her.”

“You have no air left, Frank. And I don’t want two patients and have to decide which I’m going to treat first. I’m the medical officer, and that’s an order.”

“I don’t have to do what you say.”

“You do if you want to live.”

Thirty seconds away. Twenty. Ten.

He parked right outside, and realized that the noises filling his ears were his suit alarms sounding urgent and constant. The airlock was already open, and someone was standing there on the top step, waiting for him.

“Alice? That you?”

“Come on, Frank. Come on in.”

He climbed out of the seat. His hands were numb, and his forearms ached with the vibrations from the uneven terrain. He couldn’t hold on to anything. It was almost impossible to navigate the open latticework of the buggy, and he half-slid, half-fell to the ground.

Alice picked him up, put him on his feet, and with a hand in his back, pushed him up the steps.

“What about Marcy?”

“I said I’d deal with her.” Alice put him in the entrance to the airlock and shoved him hard. He flew, staggering against the far door, and she reached in behind him to press the button. The outer door started to close.

“Marcy?”

She pushed him all the way in again, and stood on the threshold while the door was still wide enough for him to try and leave. When it wasn’t, she stepped back onto the outer platform, and the door closed Frank inside.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m saving your life, you little idiot.”

“But Marcy.”

“She’s dead, Frank. She’s been dead for five minutes. Nothing’s bringing her back.”

“But.”

“There are no buts. I, of all people, should know what dead looks like. She went asystole and stopped breathing. It’ll take me another five minutes to get her back inside, five minutes plus to get her suit off, clear her airways, inject her with adrenaline and start CPR.”

His own suit was still clanging at him, but the quality of the noise changed as the air filled the space around him.

“And you, you’re going anoxic. You’re not thinking straight, so as soon as the pressure equalizes, you’re going to have to open your suit. Got that?”

The inner airlock door slid aside, and Frank stumbled to the floor, at Brack’s feet.

“You heard the doctor. Open your suit.”

Frank, still on all fours, flipped his controls. His vision blurred. He couldn’t see.

“I…”

“Geez, Kittridge. You can’t even do the simplest things.”

Frank blinked. One of the choices was lit. The other wasn’t. He stabbed down with his finger and hoped.

A click, a whirr. The first hint of cold, thin air filtering around his sweat-drenched back and his stinging eyes.

The airlock cycled again, and Alice came in. She hauled Frank to sitting, then stood in front of Brack, an obvious, immediate challenge.

Brack turned away and looked at his screens.

“Patch him up. Get him ready to go out again tomorrow. And defrost another,” he said. “We need to stay on track.”

[Internal memo: Project Sparta team to Bruno Tiller 3/7/2039 (transcribed from paper-only copy)]

We suggest that you don’t treat this as a colonization project. More of a practice run. If we consider that everything that you will learn on this mission will be the first time you learn it, we predict crew attrition to be moderate. Mistakes will be made. Equipment will not function. Not everyone will survive. You will therefore be expecting perhaps up to two crew members (twenty-five (25) per cent) to meet with a fatal or incapacitating accident—odds which, were they known, would limit the pool of potential recruits.

Given that we would be losing XO employees in good standing, with friends within the company and families without, and given that the cost of litigation and compensation that would have to be factored in would erode the savings we’ve made—savings which would almost pay for another Mars base—I’m going to suggest a radical solution.

XO bought a security company called Panopticon eighteen (18) months ago. Part of Panopticon’s portfolio includes a contract with the California Department of Corrections to run four of the State’s prison facilities. This presents us with the opportunity to transport—legally and literally—convicts to Mars and use them as labor. I am advised that this is permissible, if we designate the Mars base a correctional facility.

You probably have many questions regarding this proposition. My team have already been working on finding out those answers. I’m going to suggest we meet next week so that I can present you with our full findings.

Frank didn’t know if Dee had ever seen a dead body before, but once Frank had cut through the cable ties, there wasn’t any other option but for them both to lift Marcy down from the back of the buggy. Perhaps it was something in Frank’s body language that managed to translate itself through the bulky suit, but Dee didn’t so much as murmur a complaint or objection. It was something that Frank was grateful for. Neither was strong on conversation, so they worked mostly in silence.

Alice said she’d make good on her promise to “deal” with Marcy. He didn’t know what that meant. Presumably, there was some sort of protocol for burying the dead: if there was, he didn’t know about it. He didn’t even know if they had shovels. And that was as far as he wanted to think on the subject.

He had the head end, by unspoken agreement, but he kept his eyes elsewhere and they laid her on the ground face-down. Her suit was still plump and pressurized, still as heavy as it was before. Whatever the human soul weighed, it wasn’t so much as to make a difference. He unclipped her tablet from her waist, powered it up to make sure it still worked and had sufficient battery life, and fixed it to his own belt.

“You ready, Dee?”