S Morden - One Way

“Brack told me not to say anything. He didn’t want to tip you off.”

“Me?” Declan put his hand to his chest. “You thought it was me? Or did you think it was Zero here? Or maybe it was Dee?”

“It wasn’t me, so it had to be one of you.” Frank glared at the men alternately. “It still does. It’s one of you. Or both of you. I don’t know which.”

“It wasn’t me,” said Declan. “Zero?”

“Not me. I’m not like that.” Zero gripped the edge of the table and stared back at Frank. “You are, though. You killed someone, right?”

“That was—”

“Different? So let’s look at this rationally.” Declan counted off the corpses on his fingers. “Marcy ran a couple of dozen people over after switching off her truck’s autodrive. Alice euthanized God knows how many. Zeus sucker-punched someone in a bar.”

“How the hell do you know all that?”

“I talk to people, Frank! And you shot someone; from our point of view, you’re the only murderer left. To us, that looks like someone’s taking out the opposition, the ones who might take you on.”

“That’s not what’s happened.”

Declan carried on regardless. “Then Dee, whose only crime is to hack various company computers and try and divert some cash his way—”

Zero shrugged. “I don’t know: it was a lot of green, man. Maybe he was boasting, but what he was saying was more money than I ever made.”

“Point is, Dee wasn’t a killer. He was squeamish, for pity’s sake.” Declan folded down his thumb. “So who’s next on the list, Frank? Me, or Zero? A white-collar pervert, or a gangbanging drug dealer. Who do you think’s more dangerous?”

Frank clenched his jaw. “I’ve done nothing.”

“You opened the door on Zeus, Frank.”

“He was already dead. I wouldn’t have been able to get that door open if the airlock had been pressurized.”

“You can manually vent the airlock to the outside, just by pulling the lever. Come on, Frank, we did the same training as you did.”

“But I didn’t do that. And you were outside with me when Dee died. You saw me with your own eyes. I couldn’t have been by the buggy at the same time as holding the Comms door shut. Could I?”

Declan screwed his face up. “Yeah. Well. Maybe that one was Zero.”

Zero jerked back. “Fuck you, man. I didn’t kill Dee.”

“You didn’t get on.”

“Didn’t mean I wanted to kill him.”

“So who did?” Declan pointed at the other two. “Because, from where I’m sitting, I’m in the clear.”

Several seconds of silence followed.

Frank cleared his throat. He should have brought his water bottle with him. “What if I’m wrong? What if they were both accidents?”

“But you don’t believe that,” said Declan. “You started all this because you didn’t want to be responsible for killing Zeus. So which is it? Did the workshop depressurize because you installed something wrong, or not? What would you rather it was? A mistake, a catastrophic, fatal mistake that you made, or that one of us killed him?”

Frank pressed his palms against his legs. The scalpel blade’s guard poked his thigh. “I checked the hab. It was sound.”

“So it wasn’t an accident. Someone killed Zeus.”

“Someone killed Zeus,” echoed Frank. “One of you two. And then killed Dee.”

Zero pushed himself back from the table. “I’ve had enough of this, man. I killed no one. You two want to fight it out, go ahead. Tell me when you’re done.”

“You can say that,” said Declan. “And we can say, you could have got to Zeus, and you’re the only one who could have done for Dee.”

“I don’t leave the base!”

“I was outside with Declan,” said Frank. “You were the only one inside with Dee. And you’ve got an airlock at the far end of the greenhouse. No one would ever see you go out, or come back.”

Zero stood up, and his chair bounced away behind him, against the soft wall of the hab and clattered to the floor. He pulled out a short curved knife and held it in a shaking hand out in front of him.

“I’ve done nothing. You’re not going to pin this on me. I’ll tell Brack who really did it.”

“You got any evidence to back that up?” Declan remained impassive. “No, you don’t. So sit down and shut up.”

Zero hesitated. Then he picked up his chair, put it back on its legs and sat down again, well away from the table.

Frank rubbed at his face. “This is crazy. We all know that. If one of us killed Zeus and Dee, we’re never going to admit it because of what Brack will do to us. That just leaves us sitting here, wondering who’s going to get it next.”

“None of us want to get spaced,” conceded Declan, “any more than we wanted to go in the Hole. Which is pretty much why we’re all here. We got tricked into this, and we have to make the best of it. But living like this? This isn’t what I’d call living. We’re all at the point where we’re terrified to even close our eyes. Our suits might kill us, the air might kill us, there’s all kinds of shit out there that’ll kill us, and then there’s the radiation giving us cancer and the reduced gravity thinning our bones.”

“We’ve done a good thing, though,” said Frank. “We built this. We had our problems but we came together and built this. We’ve done something we can be proud of. That’ll make other people be proud of us.”

“Which is why what’s happening to us now makes no sense.” Declan took a deep breath of the rarefied atmosphere. He reached into his own pocket and tossed a long, thin screwdriver on the table in front of him. “I’m tired of this shit. I’m betting you are, too.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Zero, passing his knife from hand to hand. “It can’t be none of us.”

Frank pulled out his own blade and carefully laid it on the table. He knew what he had to do, but knew that if he wasn’t very, very careful, he’d never get home. That he might never get home was something that had been preying on his mind ever since waking up on that first morning on Mars.

“Do you think XO can listen to what we’re saying?” he asked.

Declan glanced at Zero, and his knife. “When I plugged in the controls, I didn’t put any mics in. Just the fire-control cameras.”

They all looked up at the ceiling.

“There’s these, too.” Zero used his free hand to touch his sternum. “I don’t know. I guess I just forget about it most days.”

“Can we turn the comms off?” Frank felt his own chest, and the hard lump under his skin. “Dee said they were pretty much on automatic.”

“The tracking is,” said Declan. “But I can trip the fuse to the dish controls so that it stops. Doesn’t mean that a satellite won’t pick up a signal as it goes overhead.”

“Can we point the dish at the volcano first?”

“I reckon. But why do we want to, Frank? Why do we want to cut ourselves off?”

“Because we’ve got things to talk about. I’ve got things to talk about. I don’t want anyone outside this room hearing me.”

“I’ll go and do it,” said Declan. “OK with you, Zero?”

“Whatever. We can’t get into any more shit than we are, right?”

Declan’s hand hovered over the screwdriver on the table. In the end, he picked it up and pocketed it before heading towards Comms/Control. “Back in a minute.”

Frank and Zero sat there, impatiently tapping and scratching and shifting while they waited for Declan to return. It wasn’t long, but it felt like an age. He came back, sat in his chair, and put the screwdriver in front of him again.

“We’re offline until we power up the dish again,” he said. “What did you want to say that you don’t want XO to know?”