S Morden - One Way

“You haven’t given me an answer, though.” Zeus tore the top of his meal off and inspected the contents. It didn’t look anywhere near enough, the portion dwarfed by his huge hands.

“How am I? Does it matter?”

“Matters to me. You’re worried about everything. You’re worried about the food, the habs, the power, the buggies, the cargo, about how we’re all getting on. You’re worried about someone else dying, and I’m worried it might be you. Just practically, you know how things work around here, and you keep the peace between Zero and Declan.”

“You noticed?”

“You’re still not answering the question.”

“And I don’t have to give you an answer.” Frank opened his own food pouch. It didn’t smell bad, but it didn’t smell of anything. “Don’t push it.”

“I give up.” Zeus squeezed some of the pulp into his mouth, and chewed, even though the consistency meant he didn’t have to. “It’s not that much different to a rig, this place. Isolated. Hostile environment just looking for ways to kill you. All men. I’m used to this.”

Frank thought about Marcy and Alice, and how it was strange that both women had died. He thought about it, but didn’t know what to feel about it. He extruded his own meal and realized that he was hungry, just not for what he was eating. He choked it down anyway.

“We’ve still got a lot to do. And if just one of those things we rely on breaks down, we’ll have to retreat back to the ship. There should be two of everything, twice as much as we need. We should have it in plenty.” He washed down the pap with some water. “I’m tired because I’m scared all the time. Scared of what can go wrong.”

“You ever think about him, Frank? The man you killed? I think about mine all the time. I don’t even remember how it happened, I was that far gone. Whether he picked a fight with me, or it was the other way round. We already know what can go wrong.”

“I don’t think about him at all. Guess that makes me a bad person, right? We both made our choices sober.” Frank shook his head a little. “But like I said: don’t push it.”

“Here’s something else you might not have thought about: when the greenhouse is up and running, we’re going to produce more oxygen than we need. We’ll have to bleed out what we can’t store. We’ve got enough water and food and air for now. We’ll make more power: I’ve a couple of ideas for a steam turbine. And XO are going to send us more panels for the farm, and until then, we’ll make do.”

“What happens when the NASA guys turn up, and they find we’ve got a steam engine powering the base?” Frank stretched his feet, heard his ankles crack. Old, was what he was: old.

“They’ll know about it long before they get here. None of this is going to be a surprise to them. They’re awake the whole journey, not like us.”

“You mean, they’re valuable, not like us.”

“They’re valuable to more important people, but that doesn’t mean we’re worthless. We have to keep this place going before NASA arrives, and after they leave. That makes us the custodians and janitors, and that’s OK. It’s better than what we had before.”

Frank couldn’t deny that.

Noises in the corridor—door opening, feet on the floor panels, voices—made him look up. Demetrius, then Declan, came single file towards them, rubbing their numb hands and cupping them in front of their mouths to breathe life back into them.

Frank drew his legs in to make room for them. Days had started to take a predictable rhythm, with them all gathering together in the galley to eat, talk, bicker, swap stories and problems. Brack was still camped out in the ship, and showed no sign of coming over. Declan was convinced that they couldn’t be overheard, since they’d put the habs up themselves from scratch. It would have been all but impossible to sneak hidden microphones and cameras past them.

There were going to be cameras, linked to an automated fire-suppression system that could be monitored from what would become the control room. But it was all just a mess of unplugged wires and powerless monitors at the moment. They had freedom, real freedom, but they kept on doing their assigned work anyway because this was their home and no one else was going to do it for them.

The other two selected their meals from the bin and started mashing them with the hot water, grumbling about the cold and the never-ending nature of their task, even though there was clearly an end to it.

Then Zero arrived.

“Hey hey.” He was dangling some foil sachets from his lean fingers, shaking them like tambourines. “Who wants to start the party?”

Declan, with unexpected speed, snatched one away, and peered at the tiny writing on the side.

“Coffee. You found some actual coffee.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘found’, but we are, after all, criminals.”

Zeus looked up. “You stole it?”

“From the ship. What’s Brack going to do? Send us down for life? We’re doing that already.” He threw sachets, one apiece, at each of the men. Frank’s landed in his lap.

How long was it since he’d had a decent cup of joe? At least a year, even though he’d slept through most of that. Months, then.

Frank put his sachet to one side, climbed to his feet, and poured the water in his plastic beaker down the sink. He carefully tore the foil packet open, shook the granules out into the beaker, making sure to get every last one, and slowly poured hot water from the little heater until the cup was half-full. He swirled the contents and leaned over to inhale the steam.

“I will personally bury all evidence of this tomorrow morning. In the meantime,” he said, raising his coffee and saluting each of them in turn. “To us. The best men on Mars.”

[Message file #41303 10/7/2048 0053 MBO Mission Control to MBO Rahe Crater]

MC: Completion of Phase one [1] acknowledged.

Frank stood in the lee of the RTG housing, and rattled the repurposed drums to make sure they were secure. Inside, six feet down—and hadn’t they had the worst job digging out that hole in the hard-packed, frozen alluvial soil of Santa Clara’s run-off?—the reactor belched out heat and, more sparingly, electricity. But the heat: the solution was simple, crude almost, but it worked. A cargo drum, lowered into place over the hole, and filled with water, captured some of the excess energy radiating from the black fins. The hot water rose to the top of the tank, and through a buried pipe—insulated with the material that had been around the cargo—to the unused airlock at the back of the greenhouse. From another tank inside, it was moved around the habs with a simple fifty-watt pump scavenged from a rocket motor.

As the water cooled, it got heavier, and returned to the fish tanks. Filtered water went back outside, returning parallel to the feed, and into the tank halfway up. Zeus had fitted it all up with isolation valves and emergency drains so they could just dump everything if they had to. After a few weeks of running the water maker, they were so good at conserving the resource, they turned it off. If they needed more, they could just turn it on again.

They had hot showers. They had abundance. It had been an extraordinarily hard road. The last, long run out onto the plains to pick up the two most distant cylinders had been the worst, and also inexplicably the best. The mile after relentless mile of red dust was punctuated twice—going out and coming back—by the unique, unsettling experience of climbing into an unattached airlock and swapping out their life support. Frank hadn’t freaked out, because Zeus had been right outside, talking to him. What help Frank had been to Zeus was more difficult to ascertain.