S Morden - One Way

Could the reason that Zeus didn’t notice the depressurization be down to narcotics? There were hundreds of foil packets, all stacked up in neat rows. One or two or more missing was going to be difficult to spot.

Zeus was Alice’s second. In her absence, it would have been his job to count the drugs. There’d been no evidence that he’d checked them against the manifests, but maybe, informally, he had. Alice had killed herself with fentanyl. Now, possibly, Zeus had been at the tablets.

Perhaps “going to work on the steam engine” was code. The cameras wouldn’t have picked anything up. Popping a pill could be done in an instant. Taking a swig of water afterwards wouldn’t appear anything special. Who was going to take the time to watch him for hours to see he was actually working?

None of that explained the depressurization. It merely explained why Zeus had been caught out by it. If—a big unanswerable if—he was right.

Frank closed the boxes, and leaned heavily on his knuckles against the racking. It was no good, he was going to have to talk to Brack about all of this. Get him to secure the drugs. Take them back to the ship, maybe, as the lock on the consulting room door was pretty flimsy. None of them were doctors, and while all of them had had basic first aid training, only Zeus had anything more than that. Getting the more dangerous drugs out of the way wasn’t going to cause them any problems.

When they were at Gold Hill, “What if one of the crew turns out to be an addict?” hadn’t come up. It should have: they were criminals, and of course unfettered access to a whole pharmacy wasn’t going to be a good idea. It was bad planning. It was a mistake.

Zero, of course, was the only one with drugs on his rap sheet, unless Alice and her overprescribing counted. If the kid had been helping himself along with Zeus, then he was going to be pissed and develop withdrawal symptoms. Frank knew what that was like. He’d seen it with his own son.

How much of this was his suspicious mind, fine-tuned to the consequences of drug-taking, reacting viscerally against the mere possibility of it? He had no evidence, and unless he was prepared to account for every single pill in all of the boxes, something going on for a year’s supply for a busy dispensary, he’d never get any.

And how much of this was deflecting his own guilt, looking for other people to blame? Because that hadn’t been a pattern in his life, had it? There was a fault in the workshop hab. He was going to find it, no matter what.

[transcript of audio file #7893 2/5/2035 0830MT Xenosystems Operations boardroom, 65th floor, Tower of Light, Denver CO]

PL: Ladies, gentlemen. Today marks the beginning of a new and exciting direction for XO. Our direction of travel has always been upwards and outwards. From our first satellite, to our first launcher, to our first human-rated module, we’ve been at the forefront of innovation, pushing the limits of what can be done because we can imagine doing it. We have slipped the surly bonds of Earth for the vast, majestic reaches of space. But now is the time to start taking our next step among the stars, not just to explore, but to exploit the abundant resources that lie just beyond our reach. To this end, I can confirm this morning, that our proposal for designing and constructing a permanent settlement on the Martian surface was approved by the House SST committee—fully funded.

[applause, some yelling and whooping]

PL: Thank you, thank you. We’ve worked long and hard for this. Our representatives in Washington have been tireless in their efforts to place XO as the lead contractor, and let me tell you, fighting off the bigger, more established competition hasn’t been easy. Or cheap.

[laughs from around the table]

PL: We are where we are because we believe in this. We believe in the commercial opportunities that colonization can bring. We believe that these lights in the sky that our ancestors looked up at, named after gods, and populated with monsters, are rough jewels for us to cut and shape and sell. There are riches there to be had by the brave and the bold, and XO will be in the vanguard. We can talk about science and surveying, but we all know that the only reason for doing something is to turn a profit. Marco Polo knew it. Magellan knew it. Columbus knew it.

BT [? possibly]: Damn right, sir!

PL: We have a ten-year head start on this. A decade to invest and equip and build, all at the federal government’s expense. And at the end of that decade, it will be our flag, XO’s flag, that’ll be planted on Mars. There’s much to do between then and now, but if I may be permitted, I hope I can persuade you to join me in a brief moment of celebration.

[doors open, rattling sound of glass on glass. Some speech, but too low/indistinct to be definitive]

[sound of corks popping]

Unidentified: You’ve seen the budget, right?

TD: I have the biggest hard-on ever, just thinking about it.

PL: If you’d raise your glasses, I’d like to propose a toast. To us. To XO. To the future.

All: To us. To XO. To the future!

BT: To Paul, without whom none of this would have been remotely possible. You, sir, are my guide, my inspiration, my leader, and it’s an honor to serve under you.

[Polite applause]

Unidentified: Fucking brown-nose.

PL: Thank you, thank you. Well, drink up, everyone. We deserve this. We’ve come a long way already, and we’ve much further to go. We’ve great works to do. Legendary works. When the history books are being written, we are going to be the ones writing them. We were born to succeed.

[End of transcript]

Frank found himself sitting in the workshop and wondering why it was still fully pressurized some eighteen hours later. He kept his spacesuit on, because he didn’t trust his environment, yet it was as they’d built it: an airtight hab.

So now his mind turned to ways of deliberately depressurizing it, just to see if he could replicate the conditions that Zeus might have found himself in.

The construction of the airlock was such that the only way to move air outside was that last tiny puff that remained in the chamber before the outer door opened. Otherwise, air simply cycled backwards and forwards from inside the hab. It was idiot-proof, and that had to be a good thing. So, how to manually override the safety features?

There was a vent that led from the chamber to the hab, that the pump was attached to. There was also another vent that led from the chamber to the outside, in case the pump failed—the inward-opening doors were impossible to use if there was pressure on the inside and none on the outer side. Manually venting the chamber, and letting the air outside, balanced the pressure. The outer door would now open.

He tried that. It worked.

There was also a manual override going the other way. If a hab lost power, someone from outside could vent the airlock chamber, enter it, then open another valve to equalize the pressure with the hab.

Each time this happened, the hab would lose an airlock’s worth of air to Mars.

But what if… what if he could open both valves at the same time? Leak air from the hab into the airlock, and simultaneously vent to the outside? Under normal circumstances, he’d have to be insane to try that.

He did it anyway. The valves were operated by levers. They could be left open, although the hatches that housed them wouldn’t close with them in that position, so it’d be obvious what state they were in.

Stuck inside a suit, it was impossible to tell whether it was working or not. He couldn’t hear the air moving, so he got a square of parachute canopy and held it up over the grille. It fluttered weakly. He was now venting the hab. And he could do all of this from the airlock. He didn’t have to set foot inside the hab. The same valve that opened the hab to the chamber could be accessed either side of the inner door.