S Morden - One Way

“Despite everything, I’ve still got chores to do.”

“Chill. Do it tomorrow. Base isn’t going to fall down because you’ve skipped a day.”

“Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.” Frank started to back towards the airlock that led outside. He had the spare life support cradled in his arms. What else did he have? A nut runner and his tablet hung from his external belt. A pouch of slap-on patches for immediate hab repair. Not anything good in a fight, though the nut runner would make a impromptu blackjack. He needed to tool up. He couldn’t head for the kitchen, because Declan was in that direction.

“You’re not coming in to swap over? I’ll clear the way for you.” Zero’s face disappeared, and Frank darted towards the med bay instead. The boxes of drugs and equipment were still sitting on the shelves. He put the bulky life support down, looked at the labels, then opened one particular box, took out a sealed pack of surgical instruments and slipped them into the same pouch as the patches.

He hoisted the life support again, and rather than go back to the main airlock, left the base through the little-used one in the med bay itself. He felt his suit tighten around him as the air pumped down. He ought to be used to the feeling, but now it felt as it had done at the beginning: claustrophobic and constricting. He waited out the surge of panic, remembering his breathing, closing his eyes and going to his calm place: a brightly lit back-yard, warm from the summer sun, brittle grass underfoot, and the sound of an excited boy splashing around in the new pool. Drops of water glittered in the air, arcing gracefully up, stretching and breaking and shattering on the stone surround.

He was OK. He could do this.

He trotted down the steps, down and across the red sand to the remaining buggy. He slid the life support ahead of him and climbed up, wedging the box between his legs and the seat. He started the fuel cell. No sign of Declan. That was fine. Neither he nor Zero needed to know where Frank was going.

The buggy pulled away, and Frank pointed the front wheels at the distant spire of the ship, just about visible through the surface haze. A trail of dust plumed up behind him, and the wind dragged out what didn’t settle.

It took only a few minutes to cover the distance that would otherwise take an hour to walk.

He pulled to a halt outside the ship. There were empty cylinders, from the things they’d towed there and unpacked right at the start of the mission. But there was no second buggy. Brack wasn’t at the base. He wasn’t at the ship. Frank stood up on the seat and searched the distance for the telltale ribbon of pale dust, but there was nothing.

He got down and walked around the ship, expecting to find the raised cairns of his dead colleagues at any moment, but again, there was no sign. If there was anything that was going to be obvious on the flat landscape of the Heights, it was going to be a cemetery. Maybe, for some reason, it was further away.

He went back for the life support, and climbed the stairs to the ship’s airlock. He’d wait for Brack inside.

[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 9/2/2041, transcribed from paper-only copy]

Sometimes I wonder how we got to this point. We are so far below our budget, we’ve had to set up shell companies to bid us for non-existent work, just so that I can keep the numbers up.

Project Sparta are right: we can build another Mars base for what we’ve saved. An XO Mars base. This is an extraordinary achievement. Paul is going to be so proud of me.

Frank hadn’t been back inside the ship since they’d inflated the crew quarters. The internal layout hadn’t changed—how had he ever thought it possible that it could?—but it had become extraordinarily dirty. The first floor was strewn with used food packets, torn foil, empty bags and dust. So much dust.

He propped up the spare life support against the airlock door and opened up his suit. There was an obvious, odd smell to the ship. When it had been eight of them in close quarters, the filters had managed to keep the odors at bay; it looked like they’d been finally overwhelmed. He pushed his head out into the thin, cold air. That smell really wasn’t good. Sort of a teenager’s bedroom smell. His own teenager’s, for that matter.

He slipped out of the rest of the suit, and shuffled through the debris. What didn’t get kicked aside, crunched underfoot. Every surface was coated with a thick film of red, oddly both oily and gritty to the touch. He ran his finger across one of the screens, and sniffed at the residue. It was sharp and sweet at the same time.

Something caught his eye in among the litter, and he crouched down. It was a blister pack. He picked it up. Every tiny blister was empty and crushed. He turned it over and read the contents: oxycodone hydrochloride, thirty milligrams.

That wasn’t a good sign.

He dropped it back onto the floor, and swept his foot around. There were several more he could see, and probably more that he couldn’t.

He climbed up to the next level. Brack’s bedroll was there, and his sleeping bag, unzipped and rucked up, lay mostly on top of it. He’d thought that Brack slept in the base, in the examination room off the med bay. He probably did, but it looked like he slept in the ship too. There was more litter around the sleeping bag: more food pouches, more pill packs, other trash Frank couldn’t readily identify.

The place was… a garbage dump. There wasn’t any other way to put it. Brack was living in what could only be described as squalor.

Frank slowly turned, taking in the whole scene, and knew he was missing something.

Apart from the first few days, Brack had been pretty hands-off. He’d come over to inspect the works, making sure they—minus Alice and Marcy—were getting on with it. Then he’d go away again. And they had got on with it. They’d built the habs, fitted them out, powered them up, installed the comms, and even come up with new solutions to overcome the shortages XO had imposed on them. They’d worked relentlessly, as long as their suits had allowed them, and then when the jobs had moved inside, they’d worked until they’d dropped. Rinse and repeat. Sol after sol.

They hadn’t needed Brack at all. They all knew what had needed to be done. They’d done it, by themselves, for themselves, because otherwise they would have starved to death. The ship-brought supplies would have run out before they’d finished building the base: that’s what Alice had told him, and he had no reason to doubt her, even now.

They’d even made a priority of setting up the greenhouse because there’d been nowhere near enough calories to feed them. Zero, whatever else he might be, had taken to hydroponics like a pro. And yes, fish for protein and all those greens was starting to get monotonous, but the cereals were beginning to ripen, as were the beans and groundnuts and roots. They already had an abundance: an abundance that Brack hadn’t so much as touched, not even a single leaf.

He gathered up a handful of empty sachets, reading the typed names on the outside of each one, and letting them fall to the ground afterwards. The same meals, over and over again. At some point, Brack was going to run out.

Frank started rummaging through the storage bins, trying to work out exactly how many days’ food was left. There wasn’t much: maybe a dozen packets, a few energy bars. Probably no more than a week’s worth. There was a drawer in the kitchen area of the crew hab that had sachets of instant porridge they kept for emergencies, when they needed a quick hit of carbs, but there weren’t many of those, either. Call it two weeks on short rations.

Then what?

Then Brack would have no choice but to eat produce grown in the greenhouse, even if he was going to prepare it himself. And as limited as the menu was, Frank had to concede that not only was it fresh and of good quality, it actually tasted of something, which he couldn’t say of prison food which was mainly salty slurry. No wonder life expectancy in jail was so low: if the other cons didn’t kill you, the diet eventually would.