S Morden - One Way

Frank made Zeus sit in the driver’s seat and talked him through the controls. They’d not done any of this on Earth, assuming that Marcy and Frank would do what was required. That clearly wasn’t going to stand. They needed to all learn something about what everyone else was doing. Just in case.

Zeus took the wheel, and even though it looked like a child’s toy in his hands, he drove at a very cautious pace over towards the Santa Clara. Dust streamed away from the wheels like thick smoke, blown horizontally by the wind.

The hab was where they’d left it. Seeing it resolve out of the distant haze, first as a long, gray-white blob, and then with the sharp edges of the rings and the plastic stretched between them, was a relief. It looked very much like a building site, piles of materials waiting to be used, cylinders and drums sitting empty, packing material too heavy to shift, but shuddering and twitching in the wind.

The solar array was already tilting itself towards the sun, the black glossy panels turning like flower heads.

“Bring us to a halt next to the hab,” said Frank, and Zeus slotted the buggy between the containers and eased off on the throttle. The sand around them hummed a low bass note when the wheels came to rest. They started unloading. In the distance, the second buggy’s dust trail was growing bigger.

Frank beckoned Zeus over, and they muted their microphones.

“Why’d she do it, Zeus? She didn’t have to.”

“Maybe after a taste of what it’d be like for her here, she decided it wasn’t for her. Maybe she felt like her work was done: she’d got us all up, and that was all she was hanging on for. Maybe she blamed herself over Marcy. Or maybe she couldn’t live with the memory of all those people she killed. Maybe she was just lonely. Maybe she’d just had enough. Don’t hate on her, Frank. Brack says it’s the coward’s way out, but I don’t know. Alice never struck me as the cowardly type, even if her ghosts did catch up with her in the end.”

“Tough being the only woman on Mars. But it would’ve been fine. Wouldn’t it? That wasn’t the reason, was it? No one was going to mess with her.” Frank grimaced as a thought came to him. “What if she killed herself because of the food situation? One less mouth to feed. Giving the rest of us a fighting chance of making it.”

“We’re never going to find out. We can ask all the questions we like, but she’s gone. Those who are left have to deal with that, best we can.”

“This isn’t how I imagined it would be.”

“How did you imagine it to be?”

“Better. Better than this.”

“Frank, I killed someone too. I punched them in the face and they fell down and they died. You? I heard from someone else what you did. And we’re not even getting what we deserve. We should have ended up in Hell, and instead we got Purgatory. We can forge our lives anew on the anvil of this planet. We can redeem ourselves. We can work ourselves righteous, Frank. Remember that.”

He stepped back and restarted his mic, then single-handed lifted the air plant from the trailer and dumped it in the sand. The other buggy cut through the saltating dust, and Declan and Zero climbed down.

“We need to get the greenhouse materials in the hab,” said Zero. “Quicker with people outside handing to people inside. Could do with some steps up to that airlock, too.” Wherever the open-frame steps were, they weren’t in the same cylinder. The airlock module, in the center of the circular end, was some fifteen feet above the ground.

“I’ll check the inventories. See where they are.” Frank leaned back. “Park the buggy under it and pass the stuff up. But we have to be careful about putting things inside the hab. Sharp edges, OK?”

He uncoupled the trailer and moved the buggy under the airlock. Zero leaped up and manually cranked the airlock doors open—there was no power to the telltales, and no pressure against the inward-opening doors either—and jumped down inside. The outer skin of the hab was just about translucent, and they could make out his shadow moving around inside.

“Man, it’s warm in here. Like a, you know, greenhouse. Suit’s reading forty-plus degrees over already. Plants are going to love this.”

Frank followed Zero’s example, and jumped from the back of the buggy up to the airlock, and they spent the next half-hour passing beams and panels and bolts into the hab. And even in reduced gravity, it was hard.

“How are we supposed to get in and out without you here?” asked Declan. “You know, when you take the trailers away and everything?”

There were enough drums lying around to be useful. They’d make big steps, six feet tall, but easier than trying to jump the distance in one go.

“Fill four of them half full with rocks. Stack them three on the base and one on top. If you clear the site of the central module, which goes about here—” Frank indicated on the ground roughly where the base mat would sit, thinking to himself that what he really needed were flags on sticks he could push into the soil “—and here, where the second hab’s going to go, we won’t need to do that tomorrow. OK?”

Declan gave it a thumb up. “Sounds like a plan. Demetrius? We need to set the air plant running. And Frank: we’re all sorry about Alice, but we need to stay focused, right?”

“Focused. Got it.”

He turned away and set his face like the land. Cold. Hard. Unforgiving.

[transcript of audio file #8106 (Engineering team briefing) 3/10/2036 0830MT Xenosystems Operations, Room 35E, Tower of Light, Denver CO]

AC: This is the final preliminary design for the hab before we go for a half-scale proof-of-concept mock-up. The engineering is heavily influenced by the early nineties work on a modular assembly reusable structure, or MARS, by A and M. The design has been simplified somewhat—you know what these architects are like for their little flourishes—and there are further changes we may have to make as topology demands.

Essentially, the problem is this: we need to fit a working habitat, two storeys tall and some thirty feet long, inside a volume that is an eighth of the expanded size, and including the hydraulics and pneumatics that drive that expansion. What we’ve settled on is a system of supporting rings at intervals, with external stanchions, separated by telescoping beams to give the required distance. The rings are made of sections that, in transit, only occupy a fraction of the finished circumference, and the environmental sheath is integrated into the design.

Once deployed on the surface, the hab is inflated in two stages: the first is to drive the rings outwards to their full extent, locking them in place. The second, assisted by the hydraulic rams, is to expand the linear dimension. The whole process is expected to take twenty-four (24) hours, with remote-visual checks by Earth-based personnel taking up a considerable proportion of that time.

Once proof-of-concept has been achieved, we’ll move into full-scale production, and adding those topologically difficult pieces like floors and walls. I’m assured by our mathematicians—especially those with an interest in origami—that this is not just possible, but routine for prefabricated buildings here on Earth.

We may never personally get to Mars, but what we do here will. Remember that people’s lives are going to depend on these structures and our skill in making them. We owe them to do it well.

[end of transcript]

Frank felt the suit around him relax as the air pressure increased. The airlock lights flicked over from red to green, and he could hear the lock safety click. He opened the door—the equalization was perfect, but the seals always required an extra shove—and stepped through. There were already four other suits hanging from hooks on the wall, like empty shells, and the life-support rack was pumping fresh oxygen into the depleted tanks.