One Way

10

[transcript of audio file #10206 12/19/2036 2147MT Xenosystems Operations, Room 62B, Tower of Light, Denver CO]

The ship airlock was only large enough for just one person at a time. Frank volunteered to go first, and Marcy had argued with him. They settled the matter with rock-paper-scissors, and he’d lost in a two-out-of-three.

His spacesuit—he’d keep calling it that, rather than an SES, because it was a goddamn spacesuit—was either identical to the one he’d trained in, or it was the actual suit. It fitted around him a little too well: the lower pressure was bloating his whole body, though Alice assured him that would sort itself out in a few days.

He waited at the inner door, looking through the small pane of double-glazed plastic into the airlock beyond. Marcy’s back unit, containing both her life support and her entry hatch, swayed as she moved, resting on one leg then the other as the air was pumped out around her.

“I still got green lights,” she said in Frank’s ear. He heard the echo of it in the cabin behind him. Alice was looking at a screen of vital signs, and Brack? Brack was just standing there, that same faint smirk on his face.

Frank didn’t know why. The situation, assuming that Brack was telling him the truth, and there was no good reason to disbelieve him, was immediately serious and long-term catastrophic. Everything they needed to live was spread miles away across the Martian desert and unless they could recover a substantial portion of it—there being very little built-in redundancy—they were all going to die.

They’d die without air, they’d die without food, they’d die without water. The amount of power they’d use would eventually defeat their generation capacity, deplete the batteries and they’d freeze to death. The solar panels they needed to connect up were somewhere out there, as was the thermoelectric generator that was going to provide their base load. Even going out of the airlock was wasting air: the pumps could only recover so much, and the rest had to be vented into the emptiness of Mars. Replacing that ate into the reserves.

Frank could find precious little to smile about. Alice wasn’t even certain that they’d been sent enough supplies to cover their asses in the best of circumstances. There were going to be difficult choices ahead, and Frank didn’t have to wonder as to who the person making those choices would be. Quite how Brack was supposed to handle that was anyone’s guess.

But for the rest of them, if he and Marcy failed to get the buggies up and running, there was only going to be one result. The two of them were their first and best shot at saving the mission. Anyone else that Alice would defrost wouldn’t have the right knowledge. They’d be less likely to succeed. They’d make more mistakes.

Marcy used the button in the airlock to tell the outer door to open. The whole structure twitched as the last of the air blew out. It was something that Frank could feel through his feet, but the only thing he could hear was the sound of his own breathing. He peered through the window, and watched Marcy shuffle forward towards the widening gap of rose-red light.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“Control your breathing,” said Alice, “or I’ll do it for you.”

“But it’s so… big.”

“And you have to walk across it, so contain your excitement, child.”

Brack adjusted his headset. “When you’ve stopped playing the tourist, feel free to leave the airlock. Number two is using up what’s in his tank.”

Marcy turned round to face the airlock, gave Frank two thumbs up through the tiny window, and slowly walked backwards down the external ladder, using the integral handrails to guide her. The outer door slid shut, and pumps repressurized the tiny chamber.

“OK, Kittridge. Let’s not hang around. You got your tools, and you know how long you have.”

“Aren’t you going to wish us luck?”

“Let’s just say, ‘failure is not an option’.”

“Failure is always an option,” said Alice. “I’ve treated enough people to know that.”

The inner door hissed open; there was nothing left but for Frank to waddle into the airlock. The door closed behind him, and he flipped open his controls, looking at the green lights and willing them to stay green.

The acoustics of the room changed, the reverberations leaking away with the air. He felt his suit expand around him, the pressure inside fighting the elastic material. Standing there, in a space barely bigger than a cupboard, knowing that on the other side of the metal door was a whole new world just waiting for him to screw up so that it could kill him.

But in a moment of clarity he realized he’d already screwed up to get himself here in the first place. At least on Mars, the rules were clear and the penalties obvious. That door would open onto a simpler, more honest environment. Was he going to die here? Possibly. But not necessarily.

The door mechanism flashed green, and Frank pressed the button to pull it aside. The sudden outrush of the remaining air dragged at the loose outer cover of his suit. Then there was Mars. First a crack, then a sliver, then a widening rectangle of brown-pink. The door pulled back to its stops, and he shuffled forward.

He was on the threshold of the airlock, holding on to the jambs, looking out at an utterly barren wasteland, where fine red dust had drifted around angular blocks of toffee-colored rocks. As his eyes became adjusted to the light, he could see the pale, distant disc of the sun rising into a rosewater pink band of sky over the crater wall. Over to the north was the black line of the horizon, and off to the west, much closer, were a series of raggedly stepped scarps.

It resembled Utah, in some respects. In others, it was completely alien. There was, of course, no sound. This desert was silent, empty and dead.

He turned round on the small platform as Marcy had done, and climbed down to the ground. The last step was a jump of a couple of feet, and he landed squarely into the bootprints that were already there.

Looking up in the suit was difficult. He had to lean back slightly, which unbalanced him. But he wanted to get his first look at the spaceship that had brought them here. It was an unremarkable cylinder, bullet-topped, with four extendable legs sprouting from the sides. Right underneath, where the rocket had lowered them to the ground on a pillar of flame, was nothing but bare rock and scorch marks. The white surface of the ship was already tinged pink, and the XO logo prominently displayed was around a year older than at lift-off.

It looked tiny. It was tiny, compared to the living area they were supposed to create. It was nothing but a fragile can, strangely unimpressive, and it was never going to sustain their existence, let alone allow anything approaching real living.

He couldn’t think about what came later, nor what Brack had said to him about going home. He had to stay alive now, to earn that reward. That they were the only people on Mars was beside the point: they were the only people who they could rely on to do the job.

“It’s empty,” said Marcy. “It’s just nothing. Everything outside of the ship is…” She tried to shrug, but the suit wouldn’t let her. “You know.”

“Not quite everything.” He turned round again and carefully took his first steps on Martian soil. The ground was a hard rock substrate, covered by a thin layer of fine dust that compacted under his weight. It felt solid enough to build on, at least the structures they were contemplating, and it had the advantage of being mostly flat, too. The loose pieces that littered the surface would need to be cleared, and there were more of those than they’d trained for. That part of construction would just have to take longer. No short cuts.

He crouched down—easier said than done—and picked up a fist-sized rock. It seemed too light for its volume, but he realized that was just down to the gravity. It was solid enough, a gritty sandstone. What was more interesting was the little patch of pale frost that was hiding underneath. He watched it smoke away until it was all gone.

He dropped the rock back down, and it fell slowly and silently. His suit was telling him it was minus four Fahrenheit outside. Cold. Freezing cold.

“We’d better get moving,” he said, carefully straightening up.

“The clock is still ticking, boys and girls,” said Brack. His voice was inescapable, and anything they wanted to say to each other would be immediately overheard. “It’s now oh-seven-oh-eight local mean solar time. Your life support will keep you going until sometime before sixteen hundred, but your suits will give you much more of an accurate measurement. Pay attention to them, because otherwise whoever goes out next will be walking past your corpse to complete your mission. Cole, you have the map, and you’re in charge. Over and out.”

Her tablet was in a pouch, carabinered to the belt at her waist. She brought it up to her helmet and pressed at the screen with her fat fingers through the protecting plastic.

“It’s this way,” she said, and started to pick her way across the rock field, placing her feet between the scattered debris. Frank fell in beside her, and faced into the pale sun. The dome of the sky was slowly changing color, from the deep red of dawn to the paler pink of morning.

There were clouds. He hadn’t anticipated clouds, high tails of pearl-white against the blush of the sky. They were running away behind him, fleeing the sun, stretched ragged and vanishing like the frost had in its pale light.

“So,” he said, watching his feet. “Mars.”

“What do you think?”

He looked up, momentarily, but the only way either of them was going to make any progress was if they concentrated on the ground. The rising sun wore a bright crown of light that diffused into the rest of the sky. The distant crater walls were slowly resolving into detail. It was as dim as a winter’s morning.

“It’s pristine. Everything we do, everywhere we go, we’ll be first. Yes, we’re a bunch of convicts, out here on a chain gang: but we’re a chain gang on Mars. That has to count for something.”

The external temperature was rising with the sun, to a balmy five degrees. The ground appeared to be smoking, and a knee-high fog formed.

“Dew,” he said. He bent down and swirled it away with his hand. His glove remained stubbornly dry.

“We’ve a long way to go,” said Marcy. She turned her tablet towards him and showed him the red line they had to traverse. The ship was barely any smaller behind them. “We’ll have to do the sightseeing later.”

It was all novel at first. The mere fact of being on another planet, the knowing that they were the only people—the rest of their crew excepted—for a hundred million miles, the situation where people were relying on them for their survival. And then, surprisingly quickly, it grew boring.

The terrain remained initially exactly the same. Even though the white tower of the ship grew tiny and indistinct, the ground around them was still the rock-strewn hard surface that lay directly outside the airlock. And their destination—invisible in the distance—showed no sign of getting closer.

Picking their way over the rocks was still easier than kicking them aside, but it was inevitable that they ended up hitting some as they walked. Eventually, one that Frank knocked rolled away, and kept on rolling. He was surprised enough to stop and watch it go, only then realizing that it was heading downhill, and the nature of the ground was changing.

It wasn’t a steep slope, but it did steepen further down before leveling off onto the main crater floor below. And the difference in height was some two hundred feet. The edge of the slope looked as if it had collapsed several times before, as if bites had been taken out of the plateau, the bitten-off material collecting below. The line they were following led straight down the incline.

“Does that look safe to you?” asked Marcy.

“If you wouldn’t walk up it, don’t walk down it.” Her proximity to the potentially unstable edge was making him uneasy. “I’d be happier if you took a couple of steps back.”

She looked at her feet, and hopped away.

“It doesn’t look as stony at the bottom,” she said. “But maybe there’s a better route.” She opened her map and expanded the part they were on. “If we follow the edge, we can go down here, where these ridges are.”

It was a less direct route, but held less potential danger. Less obvious potential danger, that was. Neither of them really knew what they were doing or heading into.

“When we bring the buggies back, we’ll have to make sure we avoid this area. Can you mark it on that?”

“I don’t know.” She poked at the screen, but the red line stayed resolutely straight. “Brack? Brack?”

“Didn’t you have training on proper comms discipline?”

“There’s only us here, Brack. Who the hell did you think I was calling?”

“Discipline, Cole.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“What was that, Cole? You’re breaking up.”

She turned and looked back in the direction of the ship, now finally vanished from view. “I can’t believe you’re making me do this. Cole to Brack, Cole to Brack, over.”

“Brack to Cole. That wasn’t that difficult, was it? Do you have a problem, or are you just missing me? Over.”

Her hand hit her helmet. Frank didn’t know which gesture she was going for, facepalm or fingers down her throat. She could do neither.

“We’ve hit the edge of a slope, and it looks loose, so we’re taking a detour, but I can’t mark it on the tablet. Can you do that?” She waited for a response, and when she realized none was coming, finally, grudgingly, added, “Over.”

“You’ve gone three miles in an hour and a half, and you want to take a detour? At this rate, you’re barely going to get to the cargo before your air runs out. Taking detours isn’t part of the plan, Cole. Not unless you want to die out there. You have one job. Jump to it. Over and out.”

“Three miles? Three? That can’t be right.” She looked at the map, bringing it so that she could judge the whole length of the route against their current position. “We’ve gone three miles in an hour and a half.”

“It looks easier going from now on,” said Frank. “But we’re going to have to pick up the pace.”

“And no detours.”

He looked at the slope. Walking poles? Something to test the stability of the slope before risking their necks on it? Just a little bit late now. He took two steps to the edge and over with a little jump. He rose, and fell, and his feet landed on the ocher sand, one foot up slope and taking most of his weight. Grains slid and slipped, carrying him slightly further before the slope stabilized and his boots dug in. He bent his knees and jumped again, bounding lower, balancing for the impact. More sand slipped down, but it didn’t seem like he was going to bring anything substantial down on top of him.

“I guess that’s safe enough,” he said. “Follow me.”

It took a fair few jumps to reach the foot of the slope. Marcy bounced down after him, causing only as much sand-fall as he had. Their boot-marks were deep dents in the loose material, and after the initial infill, seemed to freeze in place.

They were now both pink up to their waists. Frank drew on his leg with his fingertip, and just ended up pressing the dust into the silvered skin of the outer covering.

“Three miles out of fifteen,” said Marcy. She took up the map again and orientated them with the landscape. “That’s too slow, Frank.”

“But we’re still going to pace ourselves. Our turn-back point is four hours.”

“By which time we would have gone eight miles. That’s not enough. At that rate we’ll be getting to the cylinder at seven hours plus. That gives us just two hours. One to put the rover together, one to get it back before everything stops working.”

“Then we turn back now, and try again tomorrow.”

“And tomorrow will be exactly the same as today.” She looked into the distance, fixed on a point, and started walking. “Same problems. Same distance. Same kit. Come on, Frank. Up and down the mountain. They made us do that for a reason, right? This reason.”

The ground was reasonably flat, and while it was dusty and loose on the surface, it packed hard enough when walked on. Going faster, though. That was hard. On Earth, gravity brought his feet down with a slap, ready to push off again. On Mars, he flew. He had to wait to make each stride, even though each pace was longer. And lean forward more, to force his foot against the loose Martian sand.

And though his two hundred pounds registered as less than seventy in the reduced gravity, making forward progress was technically hard. His legs started to ache, and his shoulders—swinging his arms was one of the ways he could work his body to do what he needed it to do—began to burn.

When they stopped an hour later, they’d covered nearly three and a half more miles. They drank water. They chewed some of the energy bar that was fixed in a holder inside their helmets. They looked at each other. Six and a half miles in two and a half hours.

The same again would see them within sniffing distance of the cylinder, but they’d have used over half their air to get there. If that cylinder didn’t contain the buggies, then they’d never make it back to the ship in time.

“Brack?”

The airwaves hissed.

“Kittridge calling Brack. Over.”

“That’s how you do it. Your progress isn’t good enough, Kittridge. What are you going to do about that? Over.”

“We’ve upped the pace, but we’re not going to make it to the cylinder by the start of the third quarter. Over.”

“Well, I guess you and Cole are just going to have to make the call. You’re not going to be stealing any of my bases though. I want a home run from you. Nothing else will do. Over.”

“Can you tell me for sure that the cylinder we’re heading for has the buggies in it?”

“That’s what the manifest says it is. The only way to check is to open it up and take a look.”

“If it’s wrong, we’re dead and this base never gets built.”

“Then you’d better pray the manifest is right. Shame you were never the praying type, Kittridge. Over and out.”