S Morden - One Way

She was curled up on her mat, like a baby in the womb, asleep, still. Her face was towards Frank, her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open, and her water bottle in the void between her arms and her body. In her hand was a small blister pack of pills, which Frank reached out and gently pulled from her grip.

He read around the burst silver foil: Fentanyl, 600 mcg buccal tablets.

“What’s fentanyl?” he asked.

Zero’s voice came back: “Man, that’s bad shit. China white.”

“But what is it?”

“Like heroin. But stronger.”

“How much stronger?”

“Pharma-grade. Like a hundred times.”

Frank reached out again, and touched her cheek. It was cold, inelastic. Like touching wax. He counted out the missing drugs. Six pills. And she’d died before she took the seventh that fell through the floor.

“Get Brack,” he said. “Get him up here.”

“What’s happened to her?”

“She’s… checked out.”

“Fuck, man. She was,” Zero paused. “She was our doctor. What the actual fuck?”

“Out of the way. Kittridge? Up or down.”

Frank chose up, and Brack coiled himself next to Alice’s body. He listened for breathing, felt for heartbeat, held her eyelid open, and then rocked back on his heels.

“If anyone knew how to do it, she did.” He grunted as Frank passed him the blister pack. He flipped it over, then threw it back. “Stupid bitch.”

Frank snatched the pills out of the air. He felt the strange, alien rage rising inside again. “Don’t call her that.”

“What would you call her, Kittridge? She was weak, she took the coward’s way out, and she’s left you up a narrow water-filled defile without an effective propulsion device. How’re you going to build the base? Five of you to do seven people’s work? Christ almighty, there’s no chance of you doing it now.”

They squared off across Alice.

“You could help us.”

Frank’s suggestion met with stone-faced rejection. “I keep the show running back here. I keep the systems of this ship working so you fuck-ups can do your jobs. Anyone else want to kill themselves? We got the means right here. Quick and easy, just like your mothers.” Brack stood over Frank. “I’ll deal with this. Get a bite, get suited up, and get out there.”

“Is it true?” Frank balled his fists, then deliberately unclenched each finger in turn. “We don’t have enough supplies.”

“And where did you hear that from?”

Frank nodded down at Alice.

“Her. She said we’re running out of everything.”

“We’ve got enough. Just as long as you jokers stop treating this like a summer camp.” Brack held out his hand for the drugs, and Frank passed them over. “Did everyone hear that? Do I have both your comprehension and your compliance? No more mistakes. No more making free with the medical supplies. Work. That’s all I want and need from you.”

“Brack. She’s dead. Have some respect.”

“Maybe we can get our tame, painted Nazi-boy down there to sing us some kumbaya. Light a couple of candles in our hundred per cent oxygen atmosphere. She screwed you, Kittridge. She screwed all of us. Everything she knew, everything she could do, she took with her. That’s how much respect she had for you, and I’m giving her the same amount of respect back. Yes, she’s dead. And you’re still alive. You want to keep it that way? There’s no cavalry going to ride over the hill on this one. There’s no one else here but you.”

From below, Zeus spoke up. “We’ll do something later. Tonight. Right now, we have to carry on. Come on, Frank. Come on down.”

He felt disgusted with himself, and he couldn’t work out why. When he’d been in the pen, he’d not gone out of his way to make life difficult for his guards, but neither had he snitched on his fellow inmates. What he wanted to do was get rid of Brack. What he was, was compromised. So he climbed down the ladder, and went to the stores and got out some of the bland pulp they ate for breakfast and refilled his water bottle and spent a few minutes in the can recycling all that liquid back through and checking his suit and his life support, and spent no time at all talking to anyone or remembering anything about Alice.

He synced his tablet with the main computer—just a question of pushing a button and letting the software do the job—and selected the targets for the day: Zero’s hydroponics and the water maker were already on site, which represented more than enough labor. They had, just about, a working module. Frank needed to spend some time checking it over, and fixing in the last pieces of cross-bracing. But they could inflate it with the air plant, using the power from the solar cells, and start installing the floors and racks and tanks and heaters. The pipework that would feed water through the trays and drip down into the aquariums, taking nutrients with it, was prodigious, but Zeus had all that in hand. The lights and heaters were Declan’s specialism.

Zeus would do the work of two, work until he dropped, and then get up again and carry on. He worked like he had something to prove. Like it was his penance. It probably was. Maybe a day away from the ship would help, and Frank was in charge of both construction and transport: he could do whatever he wanted. Dee could use spending a day inside a pressurized environment, and Frank could teach Zeus how to handle a buggy, get him to sit down and slow down.

“Dee? I’m taking Zeus out today. You’re working with Declan.” He kept his eyes on the short-term goal. They needed somewhere to sleep where they weren’t going to be falling over each other: there was living accommodation in this drop, seventeen miles north-north-east of Long Beach, and the central connecting module was in a cylinder twenty-two miles north-east. “Anyone got a problem with that?”

He still needed to practice changing his life support mid-journey, because there were two supply drops that were at the edge of or beyond range. One was the communications equipment—the ship had its own set-up, but this was high bandwidth kit for the base—and this was the furthest away. The other was a stand-alone hab for doing dangerous things in: making fuel, soldering, anything that required both pressure and air that wasn’t going to burn in the presence of the tiniest spark.

Both of those could wait for now. They needed the extra space. Tomorrow, they’d all build, and by nightfall they might have done enough to mean they’d actually made an impact on Mars. A Mars that had already taken two of them.

No one had a problem with his itinerary. He hooked up his life support, clambered into his suit, and closed the back hatch. The airlock was the first place he felt alone, and even then it was only until the outer door opened and there was Mars, pink and red and gold in the weak morning sun.

Mars was a thing. A living, breathing thing.

Even though he couldn’t feel it, he could see it and hear it. There was a wind that blew flecks of rust into the air and across the sand, somewhere below knee level, and the low static hiss that ebbed and flowed around him came from outside, not from his earphones. The trampled ground, the tire tracks that crisscrossed the area in front of the ship, the burn marks from the landing rockets, all were blurred and erasing themselves even as he watched.

Weather. They had weather. It was never going to rain, but it was cloudy above, pale streaks like mares’ tails stretching out across the sky.

He felt the steps vibrate, and he shuffled round to see Zeus bearing down on him.

“We need to take the air plant over to Santa Clara,” said Frank. “Dee can cart the others across, and we’ll take it from there.”

The device was the size of one of the drums, and solid. Frank unplugged it from the RTG, and removed the hoses that fed oxygen to the ship, and he and Zeus—mainly Zeus—hefted it onto a trailer. They coiled up the power lead and the hoses, put them in an empty drum, and collected the empty reserve tanks: big, black, lightweight cylinders made of carbon fiber. They stacked everything, tied it all down with ratchet straps, and mounted up.