S Morden - One Way

“’Sup?”

“Checking you’ve got enough kit to be getting on with.”

“I’ve got my NFT trays running, and the drips more or less online. More growing medium would be good. I can flush the perchlorate out, but it’s the texture I need. Granular, like kitty litter, and absorbent. I guess we have to go back to breaking rocks like old-time convicts.”

“Crushed rock. OK. Anything else?”

“More lights?”

“Declan’s not going to be happy about that.”

“Two things I need from him. Light and heat. That’s it. The rest I can do myself.” Zero spun round. “You want to eat? I can’t bring half of my growing space online because he says he can’t afford the power. Five hundred watts, man. Five hundred. That’s like, not even a hairdryer. We’ll have fish, and salads, and roots and beans and peas and groundnuts. Strawberries. We can grow strawberries. I got experimental wheat here, for bread, and that’s not going to happen until he gives me more power.”

“I’m not in charge of that. You can talk to Brack if you want, ask him to order Declan to give it you. But he can’t give you what we don’t have.”

“Can’t he just mend some of those broken panels?”

“Sure. In time, maybe. But for what feels like the hundredth time, we haven’t got a workshop, and I don’t want him burning the hab down. Goddammit, Zero, it’d be easier if you guys talked to each other instead of expecting me to act like some sort of hostage negotiator. You’re both adults. Just do it.”

Zero huffed. “He gets on my fucking nerves. Like, why’s he even here?”

“Because he did bad shit and got sent down for a Buck Rogers like the rest of us.”

“He never says what he did, though. You know?”

“No. Never asked you why you were inside, either.” Frank looked at all the tiny plants and the glowing blue-white lights and tried to imagine it on a scale that would get a grower sent down for life. “I’ve probably guessed. But it doesn’t matter. We have to work together. You know this. Just talk to him, OK? I’ll get you your rock, but you have to talk to him.”

He couldn’t tell whether he’d extracted a promise from Zero, or if the kid had just blown him off. Frank clanged his way back up the ladder to the upper deck, and just about caught his parting words before he left through the airlock.

“I could grow some dank weed in here. Just saying.”

Frank shook his head, and closed the door.

Zeus was working in the ceiling void under the medical bay, fitting lengths of plastic pipe together with push-fit connectors. It was cold, and the rubber seals on the joins were stiff. His breath steamed in the thin air, and his bare, black-inked arms were glossy with sweat as he reached up into the space over his head. He could manage without a stepladder. Or standing on a chair, for that matter. He was the only one who could: Frank’s fingertips just about touched the ceiling panels.

Zeus stopped humming a hymn for long enough to ask: “What’s it doing outside?”

“Sun’s setting. You’re going to have to leave this soon.”

Zeus was holding two ends of pipe to warm them up. “One more length. Can you move the light?”

There was a directional LED lamp on a tripod, down by his feet. Frank picked it up and carried it to Zeus’s other side, angling the beam upwards. “That do?”

“Thank you, brother.”

“I need some help of my own tomorrow.”

Zeus grunted as his fists squeezed the two sections of the pipe together. They resisted even his strength for a few seconds before relenting and pushing home with a hollow click.

“Going for the long one?”

“It’s now or never. We need to put up the last habs, and that’ll mean fixing the airlocks in place. We need to take an airlock with us to swap out the life support during the trip.”

Zeus lowered his arms, and let them hang limply by his sides for a moment, just dangling. Then he pulled his sleeves down and covered his tats.

“We can wait. We haven’t got enough power for the habs we’ve already got.”

“Declan needs the workshop in order to fix the panels. And once we’ve picked up the last of the cylinders we can see what we’re missing, and get Brack to radio home for spares.”

“Spares?”

“Tell me about it. I just don’t understand what XO were thinking.” Frank turned off the portable light, even though it consumed less than five watts. They were left with the emergency lighting of point LEDs. The color made it seem even colder. “You’ll come with me?”

“There’s nothing happening here that can’t wait for a day.” The big man shivered, but didn’t otherwise move. “We could do with the hot water from the RTG.”

He turned his head in the direction of the black-finned device, currently stuck on the sand behind the greenhouse. It was working at full capacity, generating electricity, but all the heat it generated was wasted: more than enough to keep the entire base subtropical.

“Shame we can’t just bring it inside,” he said.

“You’ve seen the figures,” said Frank. “We couldn’t vent the excess heat fast enough.”

“We need to control it. Tame it. We will do.”

“We’ll bring the last two cylinders in whole—drain the hydrazine before we do—so we don’t have to go out as far again.” Frank wrapped his arms around himself. “How can you stand this? It’s freezing in here.”

“Work. I’ve been out on rigs in the Arctic Ocean, where the ice was so thick you could hear the rig creak under the weight of it. This? This is mild weather. Come on, brother. Let’s heat some food through.”

They climbed to the upper deck, where it was fractionally warmer, then through to the crew quarters. Because it was night, they closed the doors behind them, to keep the heat in. The solar panels were offline, and for the next twelve hours they were relying on whatever was stored in the batteries.

The food was in pouches, designed for spaceflight. Dehydrated, and mostly unappetizing. Zero had targeted the herb seeds to grow first, because whatever the freeze-drying process had done to the meals, it had robbed them of any flavor, and rendered them all essentially the same, whatever it said on the outside.

Mixed with hot water—it was technically boiling, but because of the air pressure it only managed hot—the mixture then had to be kneaded for five minutes while it grew even more tepid. It was fuel for the body, nothing more.

“Why didn’t you ask Demetrius to do the trip?” asked Zeus. “Or did you?”

“No, I didn’t.” Frank looked down the corridor from the galley, to see if either Dee or Declan had appeared, but they were still on their own. “The kid’s fine. He does what I tell him. But he’s flaky. And for a trip like this, where we have to squeeze into an airlock that’s not attached to anything, and pressurize it, and get out of our suits and swap life support over? I don’t want someone who might freak out. Two deaths is two too many. A third would…”

His voice trailed off.

“You’re protecting him.”

“From himself. I guess so.”

In the absence of chairs, they sat against the end walls of the galley, feet extended in front of them.

“How are you doing, Frank?”

“Why? You going to offer to pray for me?”

Zeus shrugged. “I pray for all of you anyway. Even Brack. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Though I don’t think of him as my enemy. He’s trapped in the same way we are.”

Frank almost said something about that. The words were on the tip of his tongue, and he had to swallow them back inside. Brack wasn’t trapped. What were they paying him? Surely whatever it was, wasn’t enough.

“People do stuff for all kinds of reasons. Out of love, out of hate, out of greed, out of wanting to just feel alive. I don’t know why Brack signed up for this. I’m sure as hell not going to ask him.”