S Morden - One Way

So what did Brack expect to happen in just over a week that’d make it safe for him to suddenly start eating the greenhouse produce? Had he thought that far ahead? Frank forced himself to look at all the empty foil packs, really look at them. It was the detritus of an addict.

Brack wasn’t thinking about much beyond the next pill.

What a mess. What a goddamn mess. He had two people at the base, at least one of whom was going to try to kill him, if he hadn’t already tried and Frank had just not noticed because the attempt had been unsuccessful. And the man who was supposed to be the one who kept order, the one who was supposed to be on hand to sort this all out—the one he was relying on to get him back home—was reduced to this. Eating pap and scarfing down opiates.

Did XO know? Had they realized that their man had gone rogue? That the fate of Mars Base One was out of their hands, and had fallen, by virtue of being the last sane one standing, to Franklin Kittridge, construction worker and murderer?

He had to talk to Brack. Brack remained Frank’s only hope of seeing his son again. So of course, he was going to have to do something. After all, he was really very good at that, wasn’t he? All his previous attempts at intervention had led, failure by abject failure, to shooting his son’s dealer dead in front of a crowd of witnesses.

Goddammit, Alice. She would have been able to do this. She had the right and the duty to intervene and overrule in medical matters. Instead, she was dead.

He looked up through the floor towards the top of the ship. Then he put his hands on the ladder and climbed up to where the sleep tanks were, arranged in pairs against the walls.

Four were open. Four were closed, and their controls were glowing.

He stood in front of the tank with the number one decal. Alice had been One. Dee had been Five. Marcy and Zeus, Six and Seven. Those were the tanks that were closed, and active.

He knew he shouldn’t be opening them. He knew he shouldn’t, but he knew he was going to try anyway, and he might as well get on with it. He knelt awkwardly down and looked at the controls. There didn’t seem to be anything to press, though, and he realized they were probably all controlled by the ship’s computer.

He fetched his tablet, and it automatically logged on to the ship’s network. It had before, when he was looking for the cylinder containing the buggies, so why not now? He worked his way through various menus until he thought he might have found the right one, and then drilled down into it. Eventually, a schematic of eight boxes appeared, each with a status bar above it. It was the same: one, five, six and seven were working, while two through four—and eight—were offline.

He pressed box one. The information presented to him was confusing—he didn’t know what much of it meant, but he could make out that the temperature inside the tank was just above freezing, and it was in something called preserve mode.

He took it out of preserve, and the drop-down gave him the option to open.

He needed to see it with his own eyes. He dabbed at Open, and immediately the lights on the tank began to blink. They blinked for a while, and then there was an audible click through the thin air of the ship.

He opened the lid, enough that he could be sure, and then pushed it down again.

He tried not to think about anything before returning the tank to preserve mode, and the lights returned to steady.

Alice was in the tank, white-skinned, cold.

He’d thought that Brack had buried her. Buried them all. Why had he thought that? Had Brack actually told them that, or had he just let them think it? Marcy, choked and smeared with her own vomit, Zeus—whatever state he was in, with ruptured lungs and eyes and ears, skin purple with bruising and desiccated as the water had simultaneously boiled and frozen inside him, Dee, scarlet and asphyxiated.

They were all there, back in their tanks, as if this was a morgue. So who the hell chose to sleep in a morgue?

Frank wiped his tablet screen and climbed back down to the first floor.

He’d talk to Brack, try and get him to stop. If that didn’t work, he’d have to talk to XO: explain the situation, and get some help. Some advice at least, because help was a hundred million miles away and the distance still didn’t seem real.

Wherever Brack was, though, he wasn’t coming back in a hurry. Maybe he was just driving around in the crater, trying to avoid spending time in the ship.

If there was a locator on Brack’s suit, all he had to do was tab up the map and find it. Which he did.

Nothing. If there was a signal, he was blocked from seeing it. Brack could literally be anywhere. Untrackable, untraceable. Almost… as if this was deliberate.

He closed up his tablet and with a last, almost embarrassed, look around, he swapped out his life support and climbed back into his suit. Once outside, he decided that the best he could do was drive to the edge of the Heights so he could look down into the crater, and see if he could spot Brack.

The view hadn’t changed for, Frank was guessing, thousands of years. Then in a few short months, humans had put their marks all over it. Tire tracks, repeatedly driven routes that subtly altered the landscape and made a track, a path, and eventually a road across the pristine wilderness.

There was such a road down from the Heights to Sunset Boulevard below, a worn, compacted trail down the red ocher slope. And at the bottom, three white cargo cylinders that had no right to be there at all.

For a moment, he thought that they might be the same ones that he’d hauled to the vicinity of the ship, with Dee, what felt like a lifetime ago. But he’d just seen those. These were new: ones that had been missed from earlier.

But Frank hadn’t missed any from earlier. He’d collected—with enormous difficulty and considerable risk—every last one that had been marked on his map. If they weren’t on his map, though, if they had damaged transponders, he’d never have found them on the plains. It had been hard enough finding the ones he did have co-ordinates for.

His letters. His books. They might be down there. Why hadn’t Brack said anything, though? And if these weren’t part of their consignment, whose were they? Having warned them off “space piracy”, had Brack done exactly that? Except the cylinders, pale and pink in the evening light, looked just like XO deliveries.

There was no sign of the second buggy, no telltale ground-level cloud of dust. Frank had the time to go and check the cylinders for himself. Part of him still feared discovery. He felt he had to be good, to earn his jailer’s trust and confidence, to prove himself worthy of that seat home.

But the feral part of his mind, the part that was stirred up and buzzing with wild, incoherent thoughts, was still telling him he was going to die here. Maybe not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but one day. He would die on Mars and that would be that. No homecoming. No parole board. No feeling the raw, unfiltered sun on his face and the warmth in his bones. No tentative walk up an unfamiliar driveway to a screen door and a hesitant press of the bell push.

He pointed the buggy down the slope and drove all the way to the bottom, parking up next to the nearest of the three cylinders. He ran his hand over the casing, checking to see how much dust had accumulated on the white, plasticky paint. Some, but not much. It didn’t appear to have been sitting out in the desert for that long. The XO logo was still clearly visible on the side.

He undid the hatches manually, the tool for that being back at the base. It was awkward for one person to do it, but he did it in stages, and managed to pop one half of it open. He had to fight through the usual layers of insulation and packaging to get to the drums inside, but he was eventually able to see what the labels said.