One Way

9

[Redacted report from Gold Hill Assessment Center Building Two (2) to Project Sparta 5/20/2047]

The pain woke him up.

He felt as if he was on fire, and for a moment he saw the white phosphorous flames that were engulfing him. But that initial wash passed by, and all he was was cold.

Something was trying to push through his lips, and he couldn’t turn his head to get away from it, but he could clamp his jaw shut to prevent its entry.

His cheek stung with the slap, and when he gasped, a lukewarm, moist mass was pushed into his mouth.

“Chew it, and don’t swallow. It’s a sponge.”

That was… Alice?

The inside of his mouth was as dry as a sepulcher. The water-soaked sponge slowly loosened his tongue, while she ripped the tape—faster than was strictly necessary—from his eyelids.

The glare was too much to start with and, what with that and the eyedrops that more or less went in the right place, he was still functionally blind. He chewed at the sponge, and when he’d drained it completely of moisture, he pushed it to the front of his mouth and let it roll out.

“Mars?” he croaked.

“It’s either that or a particularly shitty version of the afterlife.”

He tried blinking, and it was scratchy, but doable. The lights over him started to resolve out of the white mist into individual sources. A tube replaced the sponge, and a jet of cold water splashed over his tongue.

“Swallow.”

He did so, and it was like taking down a stone. He was gasping with the effort.

“Again.”

He didn’t want to, but knew he had to. Unless she was poisoning him. But there was no way he could have stopped her from doing that, so he wrapped his tongue around the bolus of liquid and choked it down.

“We don’t have much of this: what’s in here is yours. But it turns out that we don’t have much of much.”

He heard her shuffle around out of his eyeline, which was forcibly directed to the ceiling by his head restraints. He tried to twitch his fingers, and was surprised when they responded first time. His toes, too.

“Meaning?”

“It means we’re critically short on supplies. We can afford to go hungry, but we can’t go thirsty.”

He was lying in some sort of form-fitting soft rubber, cut so that it held him in place. He lifted one arm, and it came free with a distinct sucking noise.

“But Mars?”

“There’s a window downstairs you can look through, and there are cameras on the hull. It certainly looks like it. But the kicker is the reduced gravity: can’t fake that. Be careful how you move, because it’s a bitch.” She held out her hand, and he failed to grasp it at the first attempt. “Just stay still. Let me do the work.”

She gripped his wrist and pulled. Everything felt wrong and nothing felt right. He was weak, stupid and dizzy, and had to hold on to the sides of his coffin while his world, whichever one it was, stopped spinning.

“You won’t feel up to much for a while. But the sooner you get moving, the better. You won’t be the only patient I have.”

Frank didn’t recognize where he was. He’d never seen the inside of the capsule before. He squinted, looked at the two tiers of four coffins arranged against the circle of the wall, and the hole in the center of the open grid floor. There didn’t appear to be anything above them—so they were near the top of the lander, then.

Alice threw a set of overalls at him. He didn’t try to catch it, just allowed it to wrap around his face and then slide down onto his legs. The way that it had flown through the air, on a flat arc, looked odd. Alien.

“Crap. Can’t hit jack,” she said. “Come on, up. Marcy’s next, and I guarantee you she’s going to whine like a baby.”

“Who else is up and running?”

“Brack. Me. You. And seriously, we haven’t got all day.”

A day which now lasted forty minutes longer.

“You’re not special. I’m doing this in order of priority, and currently you and Marcy are the priority. Now get out of my way.”

Her face looked puffy, and florid. Perhaps his did too. They were living under reduced air pressure and reduced gravity. He’d been told to expect fluid to pool in places it shouldn’t, at least until his body had got used to it all. And even though he’d been asleep for… however long it was… he’d been in zero g almost all the time.

He picked up his legs, right then left, and dangled them over the side of his coffin, and laboriously struggled into his one-piece overalls. There was an embroidered patch on his pocket. Not his name, nor one of those fancy mission patches either. Just a number. Two. He was number two.

He managed to focus on Alice, and saw she was wearing the same blue as him. She had her back to him, taking read-outs from one of the other coffins: Marcy’s, presumably.

“What?” she grunted.

“What number are you?”

“One,” she said, without looking round. “Because I’m better than you, I guess. Jeez, I don’t know. It’s not my prison number, so they probably just assigned them at random.”

“And how are you?”

She paused, and glanced over her shoulder at him. Her ponytail moved with unnatural slowness. “I’m doing OK. Maybe women’s physiology is better at coping with this crap, I don’t know. XO will want to know how we all are. There are tests I have to do on you all.” She turned back. “Brack’s down below. If it’s any comfort, he’s not in any better state than you are. But thanks for asking. He didn’t.”

Frank got his arms down his sleeves and zipped himself up. He sat there for a moment, thinking that it should be more momentous than this. He was on another planet, joining a very short list of people who’d been there before him. Yet, it was utterly anticlimactic. Like getting up in the morning, hunting down the first coffee of the day, feeling ill and still knowing he had to go to work.

He tried standing up. A lifetime’s worth of learned experience hadn’t prepared him for the sensation of both falling and flying. His hand shot out—thankfully at normal speed—to hang on to the curved top of the ladder. At least he hadn’t pitched himself to the floor or slithered down the hole.

Alice wasn’t making any big moves. Her actions were small and precise, and when she needed to get across the cabin she shuffled, dragging her feet over the gratings. He had to move like Alice, because he was certain he didn’t want to spend the next six weeks wearing a jury-rigged cast on a broken ankle.

He put his water bottle in a long pocket in his overalls, and placed one foot on the top rung. Slowly, purposefully, he made his way down, one step at a time. It felt wrong, and he was going to have to get used to it.

The floor below was full of panels of switches and screens. He had no idea what any of them did, so he didn’t touch them. The ladder kept on going down. He was about to continue with his descent when the image on one of the screens flipped from being an interior shot to exterior.

Pale pink stones in dark red sand. A mountain in the distance, rising up in a dusty haze. The image changed to one of Brack moving from console to console. Frank could hear him, too, below his feet.

“Get your lazy ass down here, Kittridge. We got ourselves a situation and I need to apprise you of it.”

Frank climbed down and found Brack staring at a computer screen with several windows open on it. He couldn’t see any seats. Brack was hunched over, his elbows pressed against the edges of the fold-out keyboard.

“Is there anything to eat?” asked Frank.

“About that,” said Brack. “Shepherd told you we have limited supplies? You scarf it down now, we’ve got nothing for later, and we might need it.” He relented and held out a foil-wrapped rectangle containing something that, when he bit into it, had the consistency of a chewy brick. Frank could only nibble on the corner. What he really wanted was coffee, but he settled for some lukewarm water.

“Is there a problem?”

“It’s your problem, Kittridge. Or should I call you ‘number two’? Kind of suits you.” Brack tapped at the screen, and brought one of the maps to the fore. “We’re here, a couple of miles off target, but still in Rahe crater.”

Frank hunkered down next to Brack, aware of a strange antiseptic smell coming from him. He probably smelled like that himself. He looked at the screen. The map was familiar to him: an irregularly shaped crater, some twenty miles by ten, carved out by an impact that had left a hole the shape of a football stadium, at the foot of a big-ass dead volcano.

“This is where we’re supposed to be building the base.” Brack tapped another window to the front. “And this is where all our materiel is.”

Frank tilted his head, trying to make sense of the screen. He knew what it should all look like. That oval was the crater, Rahe, where they were. To the south, there was something that looked like a giant bullet wound. The volcano. There was the arc of another smaller one to the north. A sprinkling of craters dotted the landscape.

Across the plain, to the east of the crater, were scattered points of light, like someone had taken a handful of gravel and tossed it to the ground.

“Are those our cylinders?”

“Bet your ass they are.”

“Crap.”

“For once, Kittridge, I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment. This furthest one, here, is eighty miles out. The closest one is fifteen. I’m making a list to collect them, in order of priority. And when I say priority, I mean which is most important for our survival.”

“You need your drivers. That’s why I’m up, and why Alice is getting Marcy up.” Frank sipped water, gnawed more off the bar. “What’s going to happen to the others?”

“The others are staying on ice. They can contribute precisely nothing to this part of the mission, will consume valuable resources, and I’m not having them yapping in my ear while you and the Highway Killer sort out our little local difficulty.”

Frank chewed and swallowed, and concentrated on staying upright as Brack shuffled the open windows around. But he had caught Marcy’s nickname: Highway Killer. He stored that away for later.

“OK,” said Brack. “We caught ourselves a break. The closest cylinder is the one containing the buggies.”

“Wait, what?” Frank coughed up sticky crumbs. “We don’t have the buggies?”

“Sure we do.” He tapped the screen. “Fifteen miles out.”

“No, on this…” Frank didn’t quite know what to call it, or whether it had an official name like Eagle or Endeavor “… ship.”

“It wouldn’t be so much of an emergency if we did, would it?” Brack brought up the map. “It’s fifteen miles. You can walk that in, say, four hours. Gravity is a third of what it is back home, so you’ll expend less energy and use less air and water than you would do on Earth. You’ve got nine hours’ supply of air, so a couple of hours to build two buggies, and another hour driving them back. That will still leave you two hours for any fuck-ups.”

“Four hours to cover fifteen miles in a spacesuit?”

“It’s a Surface Exploration Suit now. You telling me you can’t cover fifteen miles in four hours? What kind of pussy are you?” He was interrupted by the sound of Marcy gagging two floors up. They both glanced up, then slowly looked back at each other.

Any idea that Frank had that Brack might be different on Mars, more co-operative, less confrontational, slipped away in the rarefied atmosphere.

“You’re ordering me to do it.”

“Nothing has changed, Kittridge. Nothing at all. You do what I tell you, when I tell you to do it. Every breath you take, you’re using my air. You have to pay me for that. So I’m done explaining your shit to you. You’re both going. Now, I got a whole pile of other things to check, so I’ll let you break the news to Cole yourself.” Brack turned back to his screens, and after a moment murmured, “Why are you still here?”

Frank pocketed the food and water and pulled himself back up the ladder. It wasn’t like floating, but neither was it like climbing. He went hand over hand nevertheless, through the compartment with the monitoring equipment, again catching sight of the barren pink desert that lay just outside, and up into the top chamber.

Marcy was hunched over clutching at her knees. She was naked apart from her thin bodysuit, and wrapped in what for once was appropriately called a space blanket. She was shivering and gasping—using up Brack’s air—and her fingers were digging deep into her skin as each fresh wave of pain took her.

“Tell me it stops,” she said through chattering teeth.

He hadn’t experienced what she was going through, and he almost said so before he realized that Alice was glaring at him.

“It stops,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

The doctor refocused her concentration on filling a syringe with a clear liquid. “Side effect of the tank. This will sort it out.” She wasn’t wearing gloves, Frank noticed, and neither did she bother to swab Marcy’s upper arm. “Hold her still. I can’t get the needle in otherwise.”

Frank hesitated, which earned him a growled, “Do it.”

He hadn’t done more than knock fists with another human being—the personnel at the Blood Bank didn’t count—for years. And he suddenly realized that he was scared to break that taboo. Touching someone in prison meant harm, one way or another.

“Now.” Alice brandished the syringe in a way that indicated she’d stick it in him if he didn’t do as he was told.

He took a deep breath and snaked his arms around Marcy, taking in as much of the blanket as he could. The bodysuit was so thin it was barely there, and her skin was cool to the touch. She jerked away from him, but that could have just been her uncontrolled shaking. He held her quaking body tight, his head against hers, and could see Alice line up her shot.

“OK. Let go now.”

Frank released his grip and backed away, as much as the small compartment would allow him. Marcy shuddered for a few seconds more, then quietened. She pulled the rustling blanket tighter and looked about her.

“What was that?”

“Atropine. Should have had an auto-injector, but no.” Alice looked down at her computer tablet, dabbing her fingers rapidly across the screen. “You are… stable.”

“You can tell, just like that?”

“I’ve got your vital signs right here, in real time. So yes. Just like that. If you want a second opinion, be my guest. Nearest other doctor is a hundred million miles that way.” She pointed out the top of the capsule, back up into space.

Frank reached for his food bar and managed to work it in two. He held out one half to Marcy. “This is what passes as something to eat. Alice’ll find you some water. Then we need to talk. Things haven’t quite gone to plan.”

“This is not what I thought it’d be like.” Marcy lifted the bar to her mouth and dabbed at it with her tongue. “I’ve had worse. And at least it’s not ramen.”

Alice closed up her screen. “Brack’s told me jack so far. So if it’s not some stupid security thing, I’d like to know why I’m not waking the whole crew up.”

“We should give Marcy a moment,” said Frank.

“I’m not made of glass. I won’t break.” Marcy took the water Alice proffered her and coughed each time she took a sip. “Tell us.”

Frank shrugged. He looked down at the metal grille floor. He could just about make Brack out between the gaps. “The supply cylinders aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Some are eighty miles out from where we are. Which isn’t so bad, if you consider how far they’ve come, but we don’t have any transport. So we—you and me, Marcy—have to walk fifteen miles and hope that the manifest is right and that’s the one with the buggies in.”

“And if it’s not, or they’re broken?”

“We’ll probably have enough left in the suits to make it back.”

“There’s nothing we can use that we might have, you know, brought with us?”

“Brack says not. Everything we need to make the base is scattered across the desert. Everything we need to live is out there too. All the machines that make air, water, power, food. I don’t know who’s to blame for this, but that doesn’t really matter now. We’re here, and we have to fix it.”

“When do we have to go?” she asked.

“As soon as we can,” said Frank. “I don’t even know what the time is now, but I guess this is a daylight thing.”

“You’re going nowhere today,” said Alice. “You’re my patients until I discharge you as fit for duty.” She raised her voice. “You hear that, Brack? Tomorrow will be soon enough.”

They all listened for a reply. None came.

“Can you do that? Can you overrule him?” asked Frank.

“I don’t give a shit what he thinks. What’s important is what you do,” she said. “If he tells you to do something stupid or dangerous, you can just say no. Just because we’ve got less gravity doesn’t mean you can do without your backbone.”