S Morden - One Way

“I can do that. It’s not difficult,” said Zeus. “We’ll draw up some plans, depending on what we’ve got to work with.”

Brack relented. “As long as it doesn’t interfere with the base-building.”

“It’s your ass too,” said Zero.

“My ass comes before all your asses. Don’t forget it, you little punk.”

Frank stepped in. Brack had conceded what they’d needed him to concede. There was no point in riling him.

“We need power to the air plant to inflate the hab. We’ll take what’s left of the solar panels out with the first hab and set it running. It can store the air while we build. We can transport everyone over, but at some point, I’m going to have to go with Dee and get another couple of cylinders. That leaves four of you to put everything together.”

“It could be five if—” started Zero.

“Brack’s got his own work. We’re building the base. That’s our job. If you want to be kicking your heels around here tomorrow, getting in each other’s faces for a full day, then OK. Otherwise, we split up.”

“Airlock order is three, two, seven, five, four, one,” said Brack. “Get to it. Day’s not getting any longer.”

Frank was out second. Declan was already loading the panels into a drum to put onto the trailer.

“This is going to work, right?” asked Frank.

“It’s the best I can do. In the circumstances.” Declan hefted the drum. “Look at that. No longer a ninety pound weakling.” He carried it to the buggy and set it down again. “The circumstances are less than ideal—you get that, right? It’s not going to be perfect.”

“But it’s the best we can hope for.”

“Something like that.”

“I don’t fancy freezing my ass off, and I’m betting the NASA guys won’t either.” Frank tilted back to look at the sky. A bright object, shaped like a peanut, was moving perceptibly in an arc above them, from west to east. One of the moons. He couldn’t quite remember the name of it. “I don’t get,” he continued, then stopped. Like Declan, he wondered why Brack wasn’t more amenable to them using the ship, but the threat and the promise of an eventual trip home was making him hold his tongue. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll bring a rocket motor back with us.”

“Whoa, there, cowboy,” sounded loud in his ears. Brack. “Those motors are a big old can of boom. I’m going to need clearance from Earth, and a copper-bottomed way of making them safe before anyone thinks about moving them around. Tell me you’ve got that, Kittridge.”

“OK. Copy that.”

“Take pictures, then,” said Declan. “Good quality close-ups. Whatever you can.”

Zeus joined them and helped load up. The cylinder containing the hab was still on the back of the other trailer, and Frank gave the job of driving that buggy to Dee, while he took the more sensitive solar panels for a ride. Declan and Zeus sat on the back of his buggy, while Zero and Alice climbed up beside Dee.

Zero tried to persuade Dee to relinquish the driver’s seat.

“You’ve even less experience than he has,” said Frank. “There’s going to be time later for all of us to get some wheel time, under supervision.” He almost added, ‘now that Marcy’s gone’, but he didn’t.

Frank led the way at a pedestrian pace. He spent time with his map, trying to get the location exact, eventually parking up right in the dry throat of the Santa Clara.

“Here. Just here.”

He dismounted and looked around at what would be his home for… years, at least. To the south was the Santa Clara valley, flat-bottomed and steep-sided, and to the north, the Heights and the descent into the crater. The crater walls left and right merged with the valley’s, with sharp-edged scarps marking where the river had burst down from the volcano above and flooded into the deep depression below.

He caught a glimpse of another world, where water rushed in torrents and formed waterfalls and filled low-lying land to form vast circular lakes. But when he blinked, he was left with dusty red soil smeared against his faceplate.

Time to unload the hab. Frank unhooked the hitch, fixed the winch on to the end of the cylinder and dragged it backwards onto the dirt. The soil was similar to that around the ship. There were fewer but bigger rocks, and the land was flatter. He and Dee walked the path where the hab would sit, pushing the blocky boulders aside and into a pile. It didn’t take long before they were stacking the rock into a conical cairn, their first permanent marker on the face of the planet.

The others were lifting the drums out of the cylinder, opening them up, searching through them for the mat. Zeus brought it over, and they rolled it out in a roughly north–south orientation. Ideally, Frank would have a team of surveyors in, with sticks and flags and laser leveling equipment. But as Declan had already said, circumstances were far from ideal. Frank knew enough to get it right, and good enough would do.

He and Dee unloaded the solar farm while the first ring was under construction, and then prepared to head off for another two hab sections. Before they left, though, Alice broke off from the building group and waved Frank down. She opened her suit’s controls, and by the way she pressed the buttons, he guessed she’d been talking to Dee.

He muted his own microphone, and in the shadow of the front wheel of his buggy, they touched helmets.

“What’s up?”

“We’re running out of supplies,” she said. “Food, water, air. I ran some figures yesterday and it’s not even tight. We’re short.”

“How short?”

“We’ve got the air plant, but it can’t be in two places at once. If you don’t get the water maker this time out, we’re going to have to ration water, and even then. With four of us awake, we could have managed, but seven? Even with complete closed-loop recycling, we now have to wait for the machine to filter it for us. And the food: it’s like they didn’t want us to eat.”

“So what are our options?”

“Frank. We don’t have enough. Even if we get the greenhouse working in the next couple of days, I’ll have to put us on starvation rations. If we all eat regularly, we’ll have literally nothing before production kicks in.”

“And the air?”

“The ship can make air, but again, with seven of us doing EVAs every day, we can’t recharge everyone’s life support without eating into the reserves. That’s going to cut down into the rate of work, and it just compounds the problems we already have.”

Frank thought for a moment. “What did Brack say?”

“‘Deal with it’, and then he went back to doing whatever it is he does. Breathing, drinking and eating as if it’s never going to run out.”

“Am I allowed to interpret ‘deal with it’ as an instruction to, you know, actually deal with it?”

Alice hesitated. “You could do.”

“Which is more important? Water, food or air?”

“Food at the bottom. We can stand being hungry. Air at the top: you know how that ends. Water? We should never be in a position to have to choose. The sooner we get all three, the better.”

Frank separated for a moment to see what progress the builders had made, then leaned in again. “We’ve got three hab sections in that can. The greenhouse needs two. So we use this load for that, fill it with air, get the hydroponics kit inside and get it up and running as soon as we can. Talk to Zero about that, maybe without telling him why you’re asking. He’ll need water, and lots of it. So me and Dee will bring back the seeds and the fish eggs and everything he needs, and the water maker. We can store it in the pressurized hab, and once he gets the plants growing, it’ll take the edge off the air issue. That’s right, isn’t it?”