S Morden - One Way

A couple of times, he thought he needed to rethink his tactics, to get up and go on the attack, but playing dead was his one advantage: throwing that away because of impatience was stupid. So he stayed where he was, as still as he could, listening out for the telltale creak of the floor panels.

Eventually, he heard them. These weren’t hesitant footsteps, made by a scared young man. These were confident, almost casual. Frank took some deep breaths and then exhaled slowly. Nothing but the shallowest of breathing from now on.

“Well, won’t you look at this?”

The footsteps stopped.

“You boys been having fun?”

Silence.

“You could have died cleaner, that’s for sure. You’ve left me a hell of a job. Should bring you back just so you can tidy up after yourselves.”

Silence.

“That’s not going to happen, though, is it? Deader than roadkill. Looks like I was the only one to bring a gun to a knife fight, so I guess I win. Right?”

The silence was punctuated by the sound of a meaty kick into some part of Zero.

“Ask you a question, boy. Am I right?”

The kicking carried on. Zero was still in no state to answer afterwards.

“Stupid idea, bringing criminals to do real men’s work. Ain’t that right, Frank?”

If Brack started on him, there was no chance of him being able to carry on with his deception. But perhaps the thought of treading more blood around the base put Brack off.

“It’s all over now though, for sure. None of you chimps left. Got to make this place fit for decent human beings, and then I get off this godforsaken rock. You? I got something special planned for you. Just wait and see.”

Zero received another kick.

“Better go tell Control that it’s mission accomplished. Ain’t no sweeter sound than that.”

Brack giggled, and Frank almost surged up from the floor and attempted to strangle him there and then. But there were footsteps, going away again.

Then came back.

“You want to know how we knew what was going on? Do you want to know? We could see and hear everything you did and said. Privacy my ass. I was right there, looking over your shoulder, whenever I wanted. You never realized. Even the pervert didn’t know. You never stood a chance.”

The footsteps went away, and they stayed away this time.

At some point, Brack would be back to dispose of his body. Until then, Frank was presumed dead.

It looked like, despite what they’d all thought, what they’d been told, they’d been spied on, almost continuously. Unless that was exaggeration on Brack’s part. The ten-minute-plus delay on information getting back to Earth was the kicker, and Dee had been certain that there was no continuous delivery of data. He’d packaged everything up, and sent it in chunks.

No hardwired microphones, according to Declan. The cameras only saw infrared, according to Dee. But there was always the medical monitors in their chests. If the devices were close enough to feel them breathing, they were close enough to hear their voices resonate through their bodies. And the cameras in the spacesuits. The cameras in the goddamn spacesuits.

And, of course, the only person who could monitor everything in real time was Brack. That was his job: to watch them, to check they hadn’t got wise to what was really happening, and to kill them when they became expendable. That was what he spent his days and nights doing. Monitoring his charges, popping pills, reheating food.

He wouldn’t be watching them now, though, because he thought they were all dead.

Frank had a narrow window of opportunity in which he could genuinely act without surveillance.

He peeled himself off the floor, and took a moment to try and shake some life back into his limbs. His arm ached with a dull throb, and it felt weak. There was nothing he could do about that, unless—he was, after all, in the med bay. He carefully opened one of the boxes and looked through the strips until he found the dihydrocodeine. He pushed one, then two pills into his hand, because he’d been shot and not just stubbed his toe. He dry-swallowed them down.

Then he tiptoed past the end of the corridor and slid down the ladder to retrieve his spacesuit.

As soon as Brack came back, he’d see what had happened. Or would he? Would he think that Frank had tricked him? Or would he, in his drugged-up, addicted state, think that Frank had risen from the dead and was going to enact his supernatural revenge on his tormentor?

He acknowledged that as unlikely. His son had been capable of rational thought: just not rational action. Frank climbed into his suit down on the lower level, powered it up, and climbed swiftly up and into the airlock.

Would pressing the cycle button send an alarm to Comms/Control? Possibly. He opened the hatch and worked the manual lever. The air inside the chamber bled out into the freezing Martian night, and thirty seconds later he was outside with it, on a platform slippery with ice.

Brack had turned off the buggy lights, and the sky was a brighter black than the ground. Stars and planets wheeled, and one of the moons crossed overhead in a swift and silent passage. The habs were undifferentiated blocks against the horizon, and he had to progress slowly, with only memory and touch as his guides.

But they were sure guides. He’d built this base with his own hands, laid it out and ordered its construction. He’d maintained it and modified it. He knew it like the creases in the palm of his hand, and he didn’t stumble once.

The satellite dish was pointing almost straight up. He could see its shape against the stars as it tracked the orbit of the relay station above. He climbed the pylon and felt for the smaller microwave transmitter that connected the base to the ship. He pushed it out of alignment, then climbed down again to open up the little control panel on the side of the dish. The row of green lights burned steady.

He risked a quick dial-up of his suit lights so that he could see what he was attempting to sabotage. They were just trip switches; undoing the damage would take only a moment, but he needed Brack as isolated as he’d been. XO was going to be out of the loop from now on, until he decided what to do. Or he died.

Whichever, XO were going to lose contact with their man, and their Mars base. Their multi-billion dollar investment. Let them worry.

He flicked the switches from green to red, one after another, then closed the panel and killed his lights.

From there, he walked along the side of the yard, past the kitchen and the crew quarters, round the back of the base to the only part of it that was protected by two airlocks: the greenhouse. He manually vented the chamber, entered it and equalized the pressure with the inside.

The bright lights and the sound of running water, the banks of green leaves and the smell of freshness, of organic life, was a welcome change over the reek of stale sweat and dried blood. Zero would never see this again. Frank guessed it would be up to whoever lived to keep it running from now on.

He exited his suit, and splashed some of the nutrient-rich water dripping off the end of the trays onto his face and across the back of his neck. It was lukewarm, and it still felt cold on his skin. Everything was hyperreal, the lights stronger, the noises louder, the scents more pungent. It was like when he was being put to sleep in Building Two: it might be the last time he ever felt anything.

He knew he was never going to beat Brack in a straight-up fist fight. Especially not now he was injured and exhausted. Brack? He was well-rested, and even without the gun could whop his ass six ways to Sunday. He had to be military-trained, probably Special Forces at some point, and no one, least of all Frank, was expecting him to fight fair.