One Way

17

[transcript of audio file #8106 (Engineering team briefing) 3/10/2036 0830MT Xenosystems Operations, Room 35E, Tower of Light, Denver CO]

Frank felt the suit around him relax as the air pressure increased. The airlock lights flicked over from red to green, and he could hear the lock safety click. He opened the door—the equalization was perfect, but the seals always required an extra shove—and stepped through. There were already four other suits hanging from hooks on the wall, like empty shells, and the life-support rack was pumping fresh oxygen into the depleted tanks.

He was dusty. He was always dusty. Everything was covered in a thin film of orange that proved almost impossible to remove. About the only thing that did it was water, and while they had some, they didn’t yet have plenty, and it didn’t work outside. Frank seemed to spend his life staring out of his helmet around the smears. Zeus told him it was a salt rime, but knowing what it was didn’t help much. The only cleaning cloths that they had were parachute material. It was thin and light and incredibly hard-wearing, but it wasn’t absorbent.

He opened up the back of his suit, and crawled out backwards. He was lean. Hungry all the time, yes, but wolfen rather than starving, though it was only because they’d lost Marcy and Alice that they’d had enough food to last them this far. He wasn’t the only one, and hungry men argued—not about calories, but about everything else that wasn’t.

He put on his overalls—dirty, torn in a couple of places, the number on the pocket losing its crisp edges—and put his suit on an empty hanger. He disconnected his life support and slid it into the rack, plugging it in to the power and the air. He needed the can, and at least this was now plumbed in to the water reclamation system. And there was space: he had three doors to choose from. One, another airlock, led into the greenhouse. Left went to what should have been, and what would be, the sick bay. Zeus hadn’t started unpacking the supplies yet, as he’d been too busy on the pipework. Right to the rec area—they called it the yard, even though it was inside—and the crew quarters.

Frank padded through the yard and along the corridor to the john. The non-airlock doors didn’t close automatically: they were supposed to be left open, to allow air to circulate better than the narrow between-floors ducting nominally allowed. Even shut they were only airtight up to a point, and it was up to the crew to seal them properly in an emergency, using the hard upswing on the door handle.

That something as basic as screens, doors, and curtains would make such a difference to him, to them all, had surprised him. Literally, the first thing they’d done after fitting out the greenhouse was put up the walls for the bedrooms. They slept alone, initially on their foam pads on the floor, and now on a bed base with storage underneath.

Not that they had anything to store. There was still no sign of their personal effects. Frank’s books and letters were nowhere to be found, and what little the others had managed to save from their former lives were likewise absent. Brack answered all questions on that with “I don’t know”. He was the only person in contact with XO. If he’d ever asked Mission Control where their gear was, he never let on.

Frank pulled the screen across the toilet cubicle’s opening, squatted down, read again the instructions for use—pull handle A, press button B, release handle A, pull handle C, press button B again—and rested his chin against his chest. He was tired. More tired than any of them.

Zeus still exhibited an endless appetite for physical labor, trying to prove his worthiness to a power even higher than XO. Dee and Zero were young men, and Zero spent all day in the greenhouse, planting seeds and watching them grow. Dee was more active, wiring up the habs with Declan, but the heavy lifting and the long hours outside fell to Frank.

He still hadn’t seen Brack do a scrap of actual work. He was their guard, their overseer, but they didn’t need guarding or overseeing. They all knew what was at stake, and Brack’s role was redundant. It was hardly a free ride, but he knew he wasn’t the only one to resent it. At the back of his mind, though, was the deal he’d made: Brack had to survive for long enough for Frank to book the trip home.

Frank pushed and pulled everything in the correct order, and washed his hands and face. Water, sterilized, lukewarm, splashed into his palms. He rubbed them against his cheeks and into his growing hair. His skin felt so very dry, the effect of spending most days in his suit, the blowers pushing air across already parchment-like flesh.

The air in the habs was wetter. They were making water, more every day, and storing it in repurposed drums on the first floor of the greenhouse, but it also got piped to the other habs using click-and-connect pipework that went through bulkhead walls and bypassed airlocks. Some of it evaporated, and made things a bit more pleasant. In the greenhouse, the walls streamed in the mornings. They had enough power to warm the air as it entered, but it was still cold. In all the habs bar the greenhouse, it was breath-condensingly chilly. They’d need to fix that, especially as their power demands were going to go up as they installed more of the lights and equipment. They were already tripping fuses when they turned something on, and one day they’d take out something critical.

Which was dangerous, as Declan told them, loudly and frequently, as he stomped off to find the offending circuit, isolate it, and restore power to the base. It was just one of the things that caused tension, and kept everyone on edge: still not enough of the basics, and always one accident away from disaster.

The plan to route hot water from the RTG and into the habs was still just that, a plan. It had been refined slightly to go in through the greenhouse first, since that hab needed to be kept warm anyway, and using the greenhouse to store the hot water in would free up the heaters to be used elsewhere. The details of the gravity feed loop were coming together, as was the permission to take apart the rocket motors and bleed the remnant hydrazine off.

Tomorrow, they’d move the RTG over to Santa Clara. Today, Frank was spent.

He dried his hands: no towels, so there was more parachute material which didn’t really work, and went in search of the others.

They’d eventually have a laundry in the crew quarters—even though the washing machine was designed to be hand-cranked. They’d also have an intercom, and computers, and gym equipment. They’d be able to download entertainment: music, films, books. They’d have chairs. Frank never thought he’d miss chairs, but apart from the drivers’ seats on the buggies, there weren’t any chairs on Mars.

Eventually. Some of those things were on the surface now. Some of them, he assumed, were in transit. Maybe that included his stuff. Maybe he should stop obsessing about that.

He turned out of the kitchen area and down the corridor to the cross-hab again.

Here was the paradox. The pure oxygen atmosphere, that kept him and everyone else alive, wouldn’t support plants. So the air in the greenhouse needed to be buffered with carbon dioxide. Only a little. A tenth of one per cent. Less than that would mean the plants would wither and die. More than that wouldn’t help, and increasing amounts would be dangerous to humans.

Hence the airlock between the greenhouse and the rest of the hab. The air needed to be carefully controlled, inside and out. Frank opened the outer door and walked in. The airlock, confused, because it could read the same pressure on both sides, showed green lights anyway, but Frank went through the cycle of closing the door, pumping the air, and waiting for thirty seconds before opening the further door into the greenhouse.

There were racks and racks of warm, dripping matting, already with their first flush of green. Blue-white lights were everywhere, directed downwards and suspended bare inches from the mats. The glare was painful, and left after-images.

The greenhouse was on two levels, with an open grid floor between them. Frank could see Zero below, adjusting the flow rate of precious water onto the capillary matting, and he dropped down one of the ladders to land next to him.

Without turning round, Zero held out a fist, and Frank dapped it with his own.

“’Sup?”

“Checking you’ve got enough kit to be getting on with.”

“I’ve got my NFT trays running, and the drips more or less online. More growing medium would be good. I can flush the perchlorate out, but it’s the texture I need. Granular, like kitty litter, and absorbent. I guess we have to go back to breaking rocks like old-time convicts.”

“Crushed rock. OK. Anything else?”

“More lights?”

“Declan’s not going to be happy about that.”

“Two things I need from him. Light and heat. That’s it. The rest I can do myself.” Zero spun round. “You want to eat? I can’t bring half of my growing space online because he says he can’t afford the power. Five hundred watts, man. Five hundred. That’s like, not even a hairdryer. We’ll have fish, and salads, and roots and beans and peas and groundnuts. Strawberries. We can grow strawberries. I got experimental wheat here, for bread, and that’s not going to happen until he gives me more power.”

“I’m not in charge of that. You can talk to Brack if you want, ask him to order Declan to give it you. But he can’t give you what we don’t have.”

“Can’t he just mend some of those broken panels?”

“Sure. In time, maybe. But for what feels like the hundredth time, we haven’t got a workshop, and I don’t want him burning the hab down. Goddammit, Zero, it’d be easier if you guys talked to each other instead of expecting me to act like some sort of hostage negotiator. You’re both adults. Just do it.”

Zero huffed. “He gets on my fucking nerves. Like, why’s he even here?”

“Because he did bad shit and got sent down for a Buck Rogers like the rest of us.”

“He never says what he did, though. You know?”

“No. Never asked you why you were inside, either.” Frank looked at all the tiny plants and the glowing blue-white lights and tried to imagine it on a scale that would get a grower sent down for life. “I’ve probably guessed. But it doesn’t matter. We have to work together. You know this. Just talk to him, OK? I’ll get you your rock, but you have to talk to him.”

He couldn’t tell whether he’d extracted a promise from Zero, or if the kid had just blown him off. Frank clanged his way back up the ladder to the upper deck, and just about caught his parting words before he left through the airlock.

“I could grow some dank weed in here. Just saying.”

Frank shook his head, and closed the door.

Zeus was working in the ceiling void under the medical bay, fitting lengths of plastic pipe together with push-fit connectors. It was cold, and the rubber seals on the joins were stiff. His breath steamed in the thin air, and his bare, black-inked arms were glossy with sweat as he reached up into the space over his head. He could manage without a stepladder. Or standing on a chair, for that matter. He was the only one who could: Frank’s fingertips just about touched the ceiling panels.

Zeus stopped humming a hymn for long enough to ask: “What’s it doing outside?”

“Sun’s setting. You’re going to have to leave this soon.”

Zeus was holding two ends of pipe to warm them up. “One more length. Can you move the light?”

There was a directional LED lamp on a tripod, down by his feet. Frank picked it up and carried it to Zeus’s other side, angling the beam upwards. “That do?”

“Thank you, brother.”

“I need some help of my own tomorrow.”

Zeus grunted as his fists squeezed the two sections of the pipe together. They resisted even his strength for a few seconds before relenting and pushing home with a hollow click.

“Going for the long one?”

“It’s now or never. We need to put up the last habs, and that’ll mean fixing the airlocks in place. We need to take an airlock with us to swap out the life support during the trip.”

Zeus lowered his arms, and let them hang limply by his sides for a moment, just dangling. Then he pulled his sleeves down and covered his tats.

“We can wait. We haven’t got enough power for the habs we’ve already got.”

“Declan needs the workshop in order to fix the panels. And once we’ve picked up the last of the cylinders we can see what we’re missing, and get Brack to radio home for spares.”

“Spares?”

“Tell me about it. I just don’t understand what XO were thinking.” Frank turned off the portable light, even though it consumed less than five watts. They were left with the emergency lighting of point LEDs. The color made it seem even colder. “You’ll come with me?”

“There’s nothing happening here that can’t wait for a day.” The big man shivered, but didn’t otherwise move. “We could do with the hot water from the RTG.”

He turned his head in the direction of the black-finned device, currently stuck on the sand behind the greenhouse. It was working at full capacity, generating electricity, but all the heat it generated was wasted: more than enough to keep the entire base subtropical.

“Shame we can’t just bring it inside,” he said.

“You’ve seen the figures,” said Frank. “We couldn’t vent the excess heat fast enough.”

“We need to control it. Tame it. We will do.”

“We’ll bring the last two cylinders in whole—drain the hydrazine before we do—so we don’t have to go out as far again.” Frank wrapped his arms around himself. “How can you stand this? It’s freezing in here.”

“Work. I’ve been out on rigs in the Arctic Ocean, where the ice was so thick you could hear the rig creak under the weight of it. This? This is mild weather. Come on, brother. Let’s heat some food through.”

They climbed to the upper deck, where it was fractionally warmer, then through to the crew quarters. Because it was night, they closed the doors behind them, to keep the heat in. The solar panels were offline, and for the next twelve hours they were relying on whatever was stored in the batteries.

The food was in pouches, designed for spaceflight. Dehydrated, and mostly unappetizing. Zero had targeted the herb seeds to grow first, because whatever the freeze-drying process had done to the meals, it had robbed them of any flavor, and rendered them all essentially the same, whatever it said on the outside.

Mixed with hot water—it was technically boiling, but because of the air pressure it only managed hot—the mixture then had to be kneaded for five minutes while it grew even more tepid. It was fuel for the body, nothing more.

“Why didn’t you ask Demetrius to do the trip?” asked Zeus. “Or did you?”

“No, I didn’t.” Frank looked down the corridor from the galley, to see if either Dee or Declan had appeared, but they were still on their own. “The kid’s fine. He does what I tell him. But he’s flaky. And for a trip like this, where we have to squeeze into an airlock that’s not attached to anything, and pressurize it, and get out of our suits and swap life support over? I don’t want someone who might freak out. Two deaths is two too many. A third would…”

His voice trailed off.

“You’re protecting him.”

“From himself. I guess so.”

In the absence of chairs, they sat against the end walls of the galley, feet extended in front of them.

“How are you doing, Frank?”

“Why? You going to offer to pray for me?”

Zeus shrugged. “I pray for all of you anyway. Even Brack. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Though I don’t think of him as my enemy. He’s trapped in the same way we are.”

Frank almost said something about that. The words were on the tip of his tongue, and he had to swallow them back inside. Brack wasn’t trapped. What were they paying him? Surely whatever it was, wasn’t enough.

“People do stuff for all kinds of reasons. Out of love, out of hate, out of greed, out of wanting to just feel alive. I don’t know why Brack signed up for this. I’m sure as hell not going to ask him.”

“You haven’t given me an answer, though.” Zeus tore the top of his meal off and inspected the contents. It didn’t look anywhere near enough, the portion dwarfed by his huge hands.

“How am I? Does it matter?”

“Matters to me. You’re worried about everything. You’re worried about the food, the habs, the power, the buggies, the cargo, about how we’re all getting on. You’re worried about someone else dying, and I’m worried it might be you. Just practically, you know how things work around here, and you keep the peace between Zero and Declan.”

“You noticed?”

“You’re still not answering the question.”

“And I don’t have to give you an answer.” Frank opened his own food pouch. It didn’t smell bad, but it didn’t smell of anything. “Don’t push it.”

“I give up.” Zeus squeezed some of the pulp into his mouth, and chewed, even though the consistency meant he didn’t have to. “It’s not that much different to a rig, this place. Isolated. Hostile environment just looking for ways to kill you. All men. I’m used to this.”

Frank thought about Marcy and Alice, and how it was strange that both women had died. He thought about it, but didn’t know what to feel about it. He extruded his own meal and realized that he was hungry, just not for what he was eating. He choked it down anyway.

“We’ve still got a lot to do. And if just one of those things we rely on breaks down, we’ll have to retreat back to the ship. There should be two of everything, twice as much as we need. We should have it in plenty.” He washed down the pap with some water. “I’m tired because I’m scared all the time. Scared of what can go wrong.”

“You ever think about him, Frank? The man you killed? I think about mine all the time. I don’t even remember how it happened, I was that far gone. Whether he picked a fight with me, or it was the other way round. We already know what can go wrong.”

“I don’t think about him at all. Guess that makes me a bad person, right? We both made our choices sober.” Frank shook his head a little. “But like I said: don’t push it.”

“Here’s something else you might not have thought about: when the greenhouse is up and running, we’re going to produce more oxygen than we need. We’ll have to bleed out what we can’t store. We’ve got enough water and food and air for now. We’ll make more power: I’ve a couple of ideas for a steam turbine. And XO are going to send us more panels for the farm, and until then, we’ll make do.”

“What happens when the NASA guys turn up, and they find we’ve got a steam engine powering the base?” Frank stretched his feet, heard his ankles crack. Old, was what he was: old.

“They’ll know about it long before they get here. None of this is going to be a surprise to them. They’re awake the whole journey, not like us.”

“You mean, they’re valuable, not like us.”

“They’re valuable to more important people, but that doesn’t mean we’re worthless. We have to keep this place going before NASA arrives, and after they leave. That makes us the custodians and janitors, and that’s OK. It’s better than what we had before.”

Frank couldn’t deny that.

Noises in the corridor—door opening, feet on the floor panels, voices—made him look up. Demetrius, then Declan, came single file towards them, rubbing their numb hands and cupping them in front of their mouths to breathe life back into them.

Frank drew his legs in to make room for them. Days had started to take a predictable rhythm, with them all gathering together in the galley to eat, talk, bicker, swap stories and problems. Brack was still camped out in the ship, and showed no sign of coming over. Declan was convinced that they couldn’t be overheard, since they’d put the habs up themselves from scratch. It would have been all but impossible to sneak hidden microphones and cameras past them.

There were going to be cameras, linked to an automated fire-suppression system that could be monitored from what would become the control room. But it was all just a mess of unplugged wires and powerless monitors at the moment. They had freedom, real freedom, but they kept on doing their assigned work anyway because this was their home and no one else was going to do it for them.

The other two selected their meals from the bin and started mashing them with the hot water, grumbling about the cold and the never-ending nature of their task, even though there was clearly an end to it.

Then Zero arrived.

“Hey hey.” He was dangling some foil sachets from his lean fingers, shaking them like tambourines. “Who wants to start the party?”

Declan, with unexpected speed, snatched one away, and peered at the tiny writing on the side.

“Coffee. You found some actual coffee.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘found’, but we are, after all, criminals.”

Zeus looked up. “You stole it?”

“From the ship. What’s Brack going to do? Send us down for life? We’re doing that already.” He threw sachets, one apiece, at each of the men. Frank’s landed in his lap.

How long was it since he’d had a decent cup of joe? At least a year, even though he’d slept through most of that. Months, then.

Frank put his sachet to one side, climbed to his feet, and poured the water in his plastic beaker down the sink. He carefully tore the foil packet open, shook the granules out into the beaker, making sure to get every last one, and slowly poured hot water from the little heater until the cup was half-full. He swirled the contents and leaned over to inhale the steam.

“I will personally bury all evidence of this tomorrow morning. In the meantime,” he said, raising his coffee and saluting each of them in turn. “To us. The best men on Mars.”