One Way

16

By unspoken consent, Alice slept on the third floor of the ship, the rest of the cons on the second, and Brack on the first. The five men in the middle had just about enough room to lie down; they snored, they turned, they talked in their sleep, they—consciously or unconsciously—were concerned about their cellies’ close proximity.

Whether anyone could have said they’d slept the whole dark night was debatable. When it had been just him and Dee, and then him and Dee and Declan, Frank had found that he could sleep without fear of accidentally touching someone else. Zeus… he was just on a different scale. He filled a space up without meaning to, and his tattoos were inherently threatening under the dim emergency lighting. And Zero twitched randomly: that was a difficult habit to get used to.

Lying there in the minutes before the alarms sounded and lights brightened, Frank listened to the sounds around him, both human and mechanical. He’d mostly tuned out the perpetual hum of the air scrubbers, and wondered if he’d notice if they ever stopped.

He was staring up at the gridwork over his head, looking at the blank rectangle of Alice’s mat. Everything would be better once they’d built the base. They’d have room to avoid each other, and they’d be busy with their own specialties. They wouldn’t have the immediate worries of whether there was enough air to breathe or food to eat. There might even be time to, what? Explore? Create? Relax? If they were making more resources than they consumed, why not? Even though they were still prisoners and everything they remembered was a hundred million miles and a rocket ride away.

He wondered what was happening back on Earth. What were they saying about the mission they were on? Mars things were the lead news items for a while, and even when they’d become more routine, they still featured. Mars Base One wasn’t routine, and neither was using convict labor to build it.

Would someone, at some point, try and force XO to reveal the names of the cons? The ACLU, maybe? Some fancy lawyer looking to make their name? What would XO do? Would their anonymity be busted, and Frank’s son find out where his father was?

While he lay there, he heard, then saw, Zeus stir. The man scratched himself, and got to his feet.

“Where you going?”

“Can,” said Zeus. “Beat the morning rush.”

He picked his way through the bodies to the tiny cubicle that served all of them. It had a folding door, but did little to mask what was going on. Zeus could barely fit inside as it was, and whatever it was they were eating didn’t make things particularly friendly for anyone else having to share the same atmosphere. Thankfully, the same scrubbers that took out the bad part of the air also took out the smells. On the whole, despite the confined space, it was anodyne, almost hospital antiseptic.

A few moments later, the lights dialed up to maximum, and the chimes sounded. Whether they were meant to be a gentle replacement for the harsh prison buzzers and klaxons, Frank couldn’t tell: they had the same purpose, and he couldn’t control them. They were therefore just as bad.

They stretched, they complained, they cursed each other for getting in the way, they hammered on the bulkhead next to the toilet to get Zeus to hurry up. Below them, Brack was already illuminated by the bright glow of the screens, and above, Alice hadn’t so much as stirred.

“Alice? Time to move.”

Nothing.

Frank reached up and smacked the flat of his hand against the underside of the grating. “Alice?”

Something fell past his face. It was tiny and white, like a snowflake. It passed through the floor at his feet without stopping on the way.

“Alice?”

Maybe it was something in the tone of his voice. The bad-tempered ruck around him quietened, and one by one, they looked up. Zeus pulled back the door to the toilet, started to say something, and didn’t get any further than breathing in.

“What’s going on up there?” called Brack.

“I’ll go,” said Frank. He scaled the ladder, quickly and fearfully, and stuck his head through the hole to the top floor. “Alice?”

She was curled up on her mat, like a baby in the womb, asleep, still. Her face was towards Frank, her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open, and her water bottle in the void between her arms and her body. In her hand was a small blister pack of pills, which Frank reached out and gently pulled from her grip.

He read around the burst silver foil: Fentanyl, 600 mcg buccal tablets.

“What’s fentanyl?” he asked.

Zero’s voice came back: “Man, that’s bad shit. China white.”

“But what is it?”

“Like heroin. But stronger.”

“How much stronger?”

“Pharma-grade. Like a hundred times.”

Frank reached out again, and touched her cheek. It was cold, inelastic. Like touching wax. He counted out the missing drugs. Six pills. And she’d died before she took the seventh that fell through the floor.

“Get Brack,” he said. “Get him up here.”

“What’s happened to her?”

“She’s… checked out.”

“Fuck, man. She was,” Zero paused. “She was our doctor. What the actual fuck?”

“Out of the way. Kittridge? Up or down.”

Frank chose up, and Brack coiled himself next to Alice’s body. He listened for breathing, felt for heartbeat, held her eyelid open, and then rocked back on his heels.

“If anyone knew how to do it, she did.” He grunted as Frank passed him the blister pack. He flipped it over, then threw it back. “Stupid bitch.”

Frank snatched the pills out of the air. He felt the strange, alien rage rising inside again. “Don’t call her that.”

“What would you call her, Kittridge? She was weak, she took the coward’s way out, and she’s left you up a narrow water-filled defile without an effective propulsion device. How’re you going to build the base? Five of you to do seven people’s work? Christ almighty, there’s no chance of you doing it now.”

They squared off across Alice.

“You could help us.”

Frank’s suggestion met with stone-faced rejection. “I keep the show running back here. I keep the systems of this ship working so you fuck-ups can do your jobs. Anyone else want to kill themselves? We got the means right here. Quick and easy, just like your mothers.” Brack stood over Frank. “I’ll deal with this. Get a bite, get suited up, and get out there.”

“Is it true?” Frank balled his fists, then deliberately unclenched each finger in turn. “We don’t have enough supplies.”

“And where did you hear that from?”

Frank nodded down at Alice.

“Her. She said we’re running out of everything.”

“We’ve got enough. Just as long as you jokers stop treating this like a summer camp.” Brack held out his hand for the drugs, and Frank passed them over. “Did everyone hear that? Do I have both your comprehension and your compliance? No more mistakes. No more making free with the medical supplies. Work. That’s all I want and need from you.”

“Brack. She’s dead. Have some respect.”

“Maybe we can get our tame, painted Nazi-boy down there to sing us some kumbaya. Light a couple of candles in our hundred per cent oxygen atmosphere. She screwed you, Kittridge. She screwed all of us. Everything she knew, everything she could do, she took with her. That’s how much respect she had for you, and I’m giving her the same amount of respect back. Yes, she’s dead. And you’re still alive. You want to keep it that way? There’s no cavalry going to ride over the hill on this one. There’s no one else here but you.”

From below, Zeus spoke up. “We’ll do something later. Tonight. Right now, we have to carry on. Come on, Frank. Come on down.”

He felt disgusted with himself, and he couldn’t work out why. When he’d been in the pen, he’d not gone out of his way to make life difficult for his guards, but neither had he snitched on his fellow inmates. What he wanted to do was get rid of Brack. What he was, was compromised. So he climbed down the ladder, and went to the stores and got out some of the bland pulp they ate for breakfast and refilled his water bottle and spent a few minutes in the can recycling all that liquid back through and checking his suit and his life support, and spent no time at all talking to anyone or remembering anything about Alice.

He synced his tablet with the main computer—just a question of pushing a button and letting the software do the job—and selected the targets for the day: Zero’s hydroponics and the water maker were already on site, which represented more than enough labor. They had, just about, a working module. Frank needed to spend some time checking it over, and fixing in the last pieces of cross-bracing. But they could inflate it with the air plant, using the power from the solar cells, and start installing the floors and racks and tanks and heaters. The pipework that would feed water through the trays and drip down into the aquariums, taking nutrients with it, was prodigious, but Zeus had all that in hand. The lights and heaters were Declan’s specialism.

Zeus would do the work of two, work until he dropped, and then get up again and carry on. He worked like he had something to prove. Like it was his penance. It probably was. Maybe a day away from the ship would help, and Frank was in charge of both construction and transport: he could do whatever he wanted. Dee could use spending a day inside a pressurized environment, and Frank could teach Zeus how to handle a buggy, get him to sit down and slow down.

“Dee? I’m taking Zeus out today. You’re working with Declan.” He kept his eyes on the short-term goal. They needed somewhere to sleep where they weren’t going to be falling over each other: there was living accommodation in this drop, seventeen miles north-north-east of Long Beach, and the central connecting module was in a cylinder twenty-two miles north-east. “Anyone got a problem with that?”

He still needed to practice changing his life support mid-journey, because there were two supply drops that were at the edge of or beyond range. One was the communications equipment—the ship had its own set-up, but this was high bandwidth kit for the base—and this was the furthest away. The other was a stand-alone hab for doing dangerous things in: making fuel, soldering, anything that required both pressure and air that wasn’t going to burn in the presence of the tiniest spark.

Both of those could wait for now. They needed the extra space. Tomorrow, they’d all build, and by nightfall they might have done enough to mean they’d actually made an impact on Mars. A Mars that had already taken two of them.

No one had a problem with his itinerary. He hooked up his life support, clambered into his suit, and closed the back hatch. The airlock was the first place he felt alone, and even then it was only until the outer door opened and there was Mars, pink and red and gold in the weak morning sun.

Mars was a thing. A living, breathing thing.

Even though he couldn’t feel it, he could see it and hear it. There was a wind that blew flecks of rust into the air and across the sand, somewhere below knee level, and the low static hiss that ebbed and flowed around him came from outside, not from his earphones. The trampled ground, the tire tracks that crisscrossed the area in front of the ship, the burn marks from the landing rockets, all were blurred and erasing themselves even as he watched.

Weather. They had weather. It was never going to rain, but it was cloudy above, pale streaks like mares’ tails stretching out across the sky.

He felt the steps vibrate, and he shuffled round to see Zeus bearing down on him.

“We need to take the air plant over to Santa Clara,” said Frank. “Dee can cart the others across, and we’ll take it from there.”

The device was the size of one of the drums, and solid. Frank unplugged it from the RTG, and removed the hoses that fed oxygen to the ship, and he and Zeus—mainly Zeus—hefted it onto a trailer. They coiled up the power lead and the hoses, put them in an empty drum, and collected the empty reserve tanks: big, black, lightweight cylinders made of carbon fiber. They stacked everything, tied it all down with ratchet straps, and mounted up.

Frank made Zeus sit in the driver’s seat and talked him through the controls. They’d not done any of this on Earth, assuming that Marcy and Frank would do what was required. That clearly wasn’t going to stand. They needed to all learn something about what everyone else was doing. Just in case.

Zeus took the wheel, and even though it looked like a child’s toy in his hands, he drove at a very cautious pace over towards the Santa Clara. Dust streamed away from the wheels like thick smoke, blown horizontally by the wind.

The hab was where they’d left it. Seeing it resolve out of the distant haze, first as a long, gray-white blob, and then with the sharp edges of the rings and the plastic stretched between them, was a relief. It looked very much like a building site, piles of materials waiting to be used, cylinders and drums sitting empty, packing material too heavy to shift, but shuddering and twitching in the wind.

The solar array was already tilting itself towards the sun, the black glossy panels turning like flower heads.

“Bring us to a halt next to the hab,” said Frank, and Zeus slotted the buggy between the containers and eased off on the throttle. The sand around them hummed a low bass note when the wheels came to rest. They started unloading. In the distance, the second buggy’s dust trail was growing bigger.

Frank beckoned Zeus over, and they muted their microphones.

“Why’d she do it, Zeus? She didn’t have to.”

“Maybe after a taste of what it’d be like for her here, she decided it wasn’t for her. Maybe she felt like her work was done: she’d got us all up, and that was all she was hanging on for. Maybe she blamed herself over Marcy. Or maybe she couldn’t live with the memory of all those people she killed. Maybe she was just lonely. Maybe she’d just had enough. Don’t hate on her, Frank. Brack says it’s the coward’s way out, but I don’t know. Alice never struck me as the cowardly type, even if her ghosts did catch up with her in the end.”

“Tough being the only woman on Mars. But it would’ve been fine. Wouldn’t it? That wasn’t the reason, was it? No one was going to mess with her.” Frank grimaced as a thought came to him. “What if she killed herself because of the food situation? One less mouth to feed. Giving the rest of us a fighting chance of making it.”

“We’re never going to find out. We can ask all the questions we like, but she’s gone. Those who are left have to deal with that, best we can.”

“This isn’t how I imagined it would be.”

“How did you imagine it to be?”

“Better. Better than this.”

“Frank, I killed someone too. I punched them in the face and they fell down and they died. You? I heard from someone else what you did. And we’re not even getting what we deserve. We should have ended up in Hell, and instead we got Purgatory. We can forge our lives anew on the anvil of this planet. We can redeem ourselves. We can work ourselves righteous, Frank. Remember that.”

He stepped back and restarted his mic, then single-handed lifted the air plant from the trailer and dumped it in the sand. The other buggy cut through the saltating dust, and Declan and Zero climbed down.

“We need to get the greenhouse materials in the hab,” said Zero. “Quicker with people outside handing to people inside. Could do with some steps up to that airlock, too.” Wherever the open-frame steps were, they weren’t in the same cylinder. The airlock module, in the center of the circular end, was some fifteen feet above the ground.

“I’ll check the inventories. See where they are.” Frank leaned back. “Park the buggy under it and pass the stuff up. But we have to be careful about putting things inside the hab. Sharp edges, OK?”

He uncoupled the trailer and moved the buggy under the airlock. Zero leaped up and manually cranked the airlock doors open—there was no power to the telltales, and no pressure against the inward-opening doors either—and jumped down inside. The outer skin of the hab was just about translucent, and they could make out his shadow moving around inside.

“Man, it’s warm in here. Like a, you know, greenhouse. Suit’s reading forty-plus degrees over already. Plants are going to love this.”

Frank followed Zero’s example, and jumped from the back of the buggy up to the airlock, and they spent the next half-hour passing beams and panels and bolts into the hab. And even in reduced gravity, it was hard.

“How are we supposed to get in and out without you here?” asked Declan. “You know, when you take the trailers away and everything?”

There were enough drums lying around to be useful. They’d make big steps, six feet tall, but easier than trying to jump the distance in one go.

“Fill four of them half full with rocks. Stack them three on the base and one on top. If you clear the site of the central module, which goes about here—” Frank indicated on the ground roughly where the base mat would sit, thinking to himself that what he really needed were flags on sticks he could push into the soil “—and here, where the second hab’s going to go, we won’t need to do that tomorrow. OK?”

Declan gave it a thumb up. “Sounds like a plan. Demetrius? We need to set the air plant running. And Frank: we’re all sorry about Alice, but we need to stay focused, right?”

“Focused. Got it.”

He turned away and set his face like the land. Cold. Hard. Unforgiving.