S Morden - One Way

Dee opened the door, and took Zeus’s suit from him. Frank put the oxygen cylinder on the floor, and opened up his suit to the hab’s air.

“Did you find it?”

Frank scraped his fingers across his head. “Find what?”

“The leak.”

“No.” He pushed his suit down to his knees. “No I didn’t.”

“But…”

“I don’t know. I’ve left it under pressure. If it goes down, I’ll know I’ve missed something.”

“What do you mean, if?”

“Not now, Dee. I’ve been through the whole hab. I’ve checked the seals and everything. You want to go out there and do it all again? Knock yourself out. Just get off my case.”

“You’re responsible for this shit, Frank. Buildings and maintenance. That’s your bag.”

“Don’t you think I know that? And you’re responsible for agreeing to turn the fucking alarm off, the one thing that might have saved his life.”

Dee was slight. The time spent in hibernation, and then on reduced gravity, hadn’t made him any bigger. Frank had been physically active every single day. If they squared up, there was no question as to who was going to win.

Dee was just a kid. Currently, just a scared kid. Beating up on him wasn’t going to solve anything, and was only going to make it worse.

“Why don’t we stay out of each other’s way for a while, Dee? Probably best for both of us.” Frank felt the first flush of rage turn into something else. He’d never been one for much introspection. He preferred to keep busy. So why not keep busy doing this, digging into detail of the workshop until he had his answer?

It was in all their best interests, because whatever had happened could happen again, and if Zeus had been caught out, it could be any of them next time. They wanted him to be responsible? OK: the workshop was out of bounds from now on, until he declared it safe.

Dee dropped Zeus’s suit where he stood, and left, only to be replaced by Declan.

“What? You going to smack me down too?”

“No. Just that I had an idea, and I wanted to show it to you. I’ll be in the medical bay.”

Frank was alone again. “Well, fuck. If I’m going to burn bridges, may as well burn them all down at once.”

He hung his suit up and plugged his life support in, and picked up the oxygen canister from the floor. That had to be refilled manually from the air plant, and he wasn’t going to stand over it while it filled, not now. He saw that Zeus’s mask was missing. The hose must have got detached in the workshop. He’d collect it later, when he went back to test the pressure.

And there was Zeus’s suit. He hefted it by the shoulders, and stared in through the dust-smeared faceplate for long enough to reach the moment where he could imagine Zeus’s broad, tattooed face staring back out at him.

For an ex-neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang member, he’d been OK. Dependable. Reliable. Kind, even, if a little intense.

Frank hung up the suit and racked the life support, and went to see what Declan wanted.

He was sitting on one of the beds—a metal-framed gurney that could be moved higher or lower by a lever—with a box of blue nitrile gloves open by his side.

“You coping?”

“It’s pretty shitty, everything considered.”

“That it is. However.” Declan took one of the gloves, shook it out, and gave it a few preparatory stretches. The white dust coating floated into the air, and danced under the lights. Then he put the sleeve of the glove to his lips and gave a couple of puffs so that the fingers inflated slightly. He pinched the glove at the wrist, twisted it to trap the air, and swiftly knotted it. He tossed the thing that resembled a limp blue octopus at Frank, who caught it and held it up.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Put it in your pocket.” Declan started making another. “Go on.”

Frank didn’t have the energy to argue. He squashed the glove into one of his pockets. “Now what?”

Declan tied off the second glove, hopped off the bed, and walked to the airlock at the end of the hab. They weren’t supposed to use it—emergencies only—but it was fully functional. He opened the inner door, tossed the glove on the floor, and closed the door again. He beckoned Frank over, and pointed through the tiny window.

“Watch.”

He flipped the switch and the air started pumping out, back into the hab. Frank peered down at the glove, which slowly and inexorably started to plump out. It kept on expanding, bigger and bigger, until the pump stopped and the glove was the size of a party balloon, stretched out to a translucent blue skin with five fat extensions.

Frank patted his pocket, feeling the small, rubbery mass there.

“Do you think you’d notice that?” asked Declan.

“I reckon.”

“It’s yours to keep.” He cycled the lock back up to pressure, and retrieved the now much deflated glove from the floor. “If, for some reason, the alarms didn’t go off, or they went off too late, it might just save you.”

“It would’ve saved Zeus.” Frank turned away from the airlock. “I don’t get it. There’s nothing wrong with the hab.”

“And yet he died because he couldn’t inhale the oxygen that was right in front of his face. Something depressurized the workshop, and by the time he realized—and clearly he did realize, otherwise he wouldn’t have made it into the airlock—he was already dying.”

“He should have been able to pressurize the airlock with the O 2can he was carrying.”

“If he was unconscious he couldn’t. And you know that the airlock is only sealed from the hab when you’re pumping it down.”

Frank stopped his slow walk to the connecting corridor.

“Even if he opened the valve all the way, the gas would have just blown out back into the hab. He’d have had to manually close the valve by opening up the maintenance panel and isolating it. But as I say, you knew that, right?”

“Maybe I’d forgotten.” Frank leaned against the door frame. “Why are you here, Declan? What did you do? I mean, I know what I did. I know what I deserve. And Alice, and Marcy, and Zeus. We all killed people. I know Zero got into the supply chain, and Dee got mixed up in some serious cybercrime. You? You just seem so normal.”

“We all have our demons, Frank. Mine are just a bit more specialized, that’s all.” He blew out a long breath. “You really want to know?”

“Yes. No. Maybe.”

“I liked to watch, Frank.” Declan let that sink in, then continued. “In my line of work, at my level, it meant I could watch a hell of a lot of people doing all kinds of things. When you get caught, and you run a couple of hundred nickel sentences together, turns out you end up inside for the better part of a millennium. Which wasn’t quite what I’d bargained for.”

“So you made a deal?”

“Same deal you made. Die in prison, or live on Mars.”

“Yeah. About that.”

“You weren’t getting ground glass or worse in every meal. Sooner or later, someone would have offed me. I think I had even less to lose than you did.” He shrugged. “Well, there you go. I’ve got to check some battery efficiencies, because I’ve a suspicion that the long-term effect of massive temperature fluctuations between day and night is degrading their ability to hold charge. You need to go and do whatever it is you need to do. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you killed Zeus, by anything you did or didn’t do. It’s this fucking planet.”

He picked up his tablet and brushed past Frank, leaving him alone in the med bay.

Frank tidied up. He put the gloves back in their box, then back in the packing crate they’d come in. He brushed his hand across the wipe-clean vinyl surface of the bed’s foam pad. Then he went back to the boxes. They’d all been opened. There was more than just high-grade pharma lying around now. Surgical packs. Pre-sterilized, sealed, but right there was a scalpel sharp enough to notch bone, with only a plastic guard and a blister pack in the way.