S Morden - One Way

Frank synced the tablet to the main computer, getting updated map information and details. Now that, Dee was interested in. He waved for Frank to hand him the device, and he poked around on it while Frank started climbing into his suit.

“Dee, put it down and get ready. We’ve got work to do.”

“Just checking what I’ll be working with, when it’s all up and running.” He handed Frank the tablet and looked to see where Brack was. The man was standing at the main terminal, his back to the pair, and Dee gave Frank an exaggerated wink. Frank had no idea what that meant. Brack was working the controls almost absent-mindedly, concentrating on something on his screen, and saw nothing.

Frank clipped the tablet onto his waist belt, along with one of the now-charged nut runners, before easing the top half of his body into his suit. His head pushed through the neck ring and into the helmet. He was getting used to the muffled, close sound it surrounded him with. He closed up his suit, checked all his numbers and the flow of air around his face, before giving Dee the thumbs up.

Dee finished climbing into his own suit, and closed and sealed his back-hatch. Frank went first into the airlock.

He felt the now familiar filling out around him as the air was pumped away, and was ready for the sudden suck as the outer door opened. He stepped out onto the platform, and looked at his surroundings. There were the buggies. There was the ship. There was the crater wall. There was the hazy sky, pink and blue. The addition of the black RTG—as tall as Frank and as wide as his arm span—didn’t make much of an impact.

Declan and his jigsaw puzzle of solar panels was more obvious. His suit moved among the components, testing and connecting and disassembling. The frames for the circular panels littered the near distance, but none were yet complete.

“Declan. How is it?”

“It could be better. It could be worse. This is supposed to be a fifteen-kilowatt array, for an average load of ten kilowatts. The good news is, both battery packs are intact. The casing’s cracked on one of them, but that’s just cosmetic. The bad news,” he said, gesturing around him, “is that we’ve seven kilowatts of generating power at best. Add it to the three we get as baseload, and that makes about ten. Which is fine for between mid-morning and mid-afternoon. All other times, we get less, and only the three at night if we don’t use some of the daytime juice to charge the batteries.”

“We need more power.”

“Another couple of kilowatts would mean we could heat the habs at night. If,” he added pointedly, “we can’t use the ship’s generator, we’re going to have to try and think of something else.”

“Like?”

“It’s not as if we can go down the wholesaler’s for parts, is it? I’ll have to see what I can come up with. And Demetrius is supposed to be my second. He should be helping me sort out this god-awful mess.”

“Brack decided. You can have him back when someone else volunteers to drive the other buggy.”

With Demetrius out of the airlock, they were now wasting air-time. They unplugged the buggies, checked the fuel cells, and Frank felt the need to tighten the frame and wheel nuts with the nut runner. Most were on tight enough. One or two were worryingly loose, and he didn’t know if that was because they’d been shaken free, or whether they’d not been done up properly in the first place.

“We’re losing daylight,” said Dee.

“I’m saving your life. Again.” Frank went round the trailers too, pressing the bit onto the top of the nuts and giving the trigger a squeeze. “One of these comes off, we’re in trouble that we didn’t have to be in.”

They drove to the drop-off, and because no one was going to stop him, Demetrius called it the Heights, and the crater floor the Valley. The raised ridge that ran the length of the center of the crater became, inevitably, Beverly Hills, and the route they took to the south of them, Sunset Boulevard.

They passed three craters on the way that were too small to have official names, but were large enough to have to drive around. The first was Compton, the second, Vermont, and the third Hollywood. Frank was a San Franciscan native, but Dee had grown up—until he’d got locked up—in LA. Frank didn’t know if the labels were ironic or descriptive: probably both. And none of them had any weight, save what they gave them themselves. Either they’d catch on, or they wouldn’t.

But when they stopped at the bottom of the crater wall, at the point where they’d driven up the day before, Demetrius took the tablet from Frank and somehow entered the names onto the map itself. He named the upslope they were about to tackle Long Beach.

Dee beckoned Frank closer, and opened the suit controls on his chest. He pressed buttons, as he had done on the ship, then did the same for Frank. He leaned their helmets together.

“Can you hear me?”

And Frank could: just not through the speakers inside his suit. Dee’s voice had carried through the touching perspex.

“What did you do?”

“Turned the microphones off. The transmitters are still working, so they won’t flag as a fault, but no one else can overhear.”

“Neat trick. How do I turn it back on?”

“From this menu here: down, down, right, right, down, select. That’s on and off. Pretty certain it’s not supposed to be there, but it is.”

“Privacy. As long as we stand like this.”

“D-did I do good, Frank?”

“You’ve done fine, Dee.”

“We might need it. Maybe. At some point.”

“You never know. We’d better turn them back on, though, in case they notice the drop out.” Frank tried to remember the sequence, and Dee talked him through it again. They separated, and Frank said: “Ready to tackle the wall again?”

“Sure.” Dee went back to his buggy, and climbed on. Frank took the lead, but didn’t know whether driving up the same path was a good thing or a bad thing. The tracks he’d left were smudged but still prominent. At least he knew that there were no terrible surprises on that route, no sudden collapses or sandtraps or impossible gradients, so it was worth trying again. It might not always be that way, and complacency might see him break down or turn the buggy over.

They ought to schedule a visual inspection of what was so far the only way up out of the crater, but that might only become an important factor if they had reason to leave Rahe after they’d collected all the supply drops. Otherwise, it became something for someone else to do.

They reached the top, and were confronted by the same wide open vista, Mars in all its naked, frigid, terrifying glory. Frank pulled over and showed Dee the map.

“The air plant cylinder is twelve miles north-east. The nearest hab unit to that is three miles further on, due east. That gives us a total round trip of about sixty miles. If there are any problems, we abandon one or both cylinders, and the trailers if we have to, and make our priority to get back to the ship.”

“Frank, it’ll be fine. Sixty miles is nothing.”

“It’s two thirds of your air. No one’s going to be calling triple-A for us. Do you remember what it was like when you split your suit, and Alice had to stab you to seal it? Do you remember how scared you were?”

“Sure, but they really weren’t going to let me die, were they?”

Frank jabbed the tablet against Dee’s hard torso. “We’d have got a new guy the same way we got Declan. They didn’t give a shit about you. We didn’t even have suit patches.”

“We’ve got them now, though.”

“We’ve only got them because it’ll cost them a fortune to ship another con to Mars. To them, we’re a resource. To us, we should be more than that.” Frank walked back to his buggy. “No one is going to keep us safe but us. You need to start thinking that way.”