One Way

18

Frank stood in the lee of the RTG housing, and rattled the repurposed drums to make sure they were secure. Inside, six feet down—and hadn’t they had the worst job digging out that hole in the hard-packed, frozen alluvial soil of Santa Clara’s run-off?—the reactor belched out heat and, more sparingly, electricity. But the heat: the solution was simple, crude almost, but it worked. A cargo drum, lowered into place over the hole, and filled with water, captured some of the excess energy radiating from the black fins. The hot water rose to the top of the tank, and through a buried pipe—insulated with the material that had been around the cargo—to the unused airlock at the back of the greenhouse. From another tank inside, it was moved around the habs with a simple fifty-watt pump scavenged from a rocket motor.

As the water cooled, it got heavier, and returned to the fish tanks. Filtered water went back outside, returning parallel to the feed, and into the tank halfway up. Zeus had fitted it all up with isolation valves and emergency drains so they could just dump everything if they had to. After a few weeks of running the water maker, they were so good at conserving the resource, they turned it off. If they needed more, they could just turn it on again.

They had hot showers. They had abundance. It had been an extraordinarily hard road. The last, long run out onto the plains to pick up the two most distant cylinders had been the worst, and also inexplicably the best. The mile after relentless mile of red dust was punctuated twice—going out and coming back—by the unique, unsettling experience of climbing into an unattached airlock and swapping out their life support. Frank hadn’t freaked out, because Zeus had been right outside, talking to him. What help Frank had been to Zeus was more difficult to ascertain.

They’d done it. All the way out to the lower slopes of Uranius Mons. Loaded up and brought them home. They hadn’t killed themselves or each other. It was a triumph. A record-breaking journey, even. Afterwards, they didn’t have any reason to do anything like that again, and their lives had shrunk back and now revolved around the base.

But they had food and air and heat and light and water and clean clothes and space to move around in and jobs to do. It almost didn’t feel like a prison, even though it still was.

The hot water tank was surrounded by another upturned drum, packed with more insulation to protect it from the weather. It was warm too, but nothing like the fierce heat of the vanes underneath. He checked the ventilation was free of windblown dust, scraping out what had accumulated with the edge of an improvised shovel—an access panel bolted on to a support strut.

The prevailing wind blew from a definite direction, west to east, so they knew where to park the buggies and set up the workshop. The solar farm was on the east side, to best catch the rising sun. It was someone’s job—usually Declan’s—to manually dust the panels three times during the day in order to maximize the power generation.

They had enough. Just. If they remembered to turn things off they weren’t using, and with the heat coming from the RTG, they could run the control panels and safety systems, the cameras and the air compressors. The big antenna outside didn’t take much to broadcast, but the tracking motors were two two-fifty watt beasts and powering them up needed advance warning.

They still tripped the circuit breakers from time to time. It wasn’t quite the scramble to get everything back on that it had been before.

Zeus was working on his steam engine. It still sounded ridiculous, but he was convinced he could get it to work. He had a big pile of parts, and time on his hands, when he wasn’t unblocking drains. Dee had more work, cataloging data and using the uplink to pass details of their ad hoc modifications back to XO. Declan spent his waking hours prowling the corridors, looking for things that consumed power and trying to sync the lights into a day-night cycle without affecting anything that happened in the greenhouse, which was where Zero lived, emerging only to eat, sleep and shit.

Frank’s work had settled into a series of tours, inside and outside. His constant companion was the nut runner, because the range of temperatures between midday and just before dawn was so extreme, the bolts they used to hold almost everything together had a tendency to slacken. That problem hadn’t been immediately apparent. Fixings that were rock-solid by day were barely finger-tight when the temperatures crept down to minus one hundred and fifty.

He maintained the buggies, too, every day making sure they worked, and using some of that time to go a little further afield than he might normally do. He knew he could be tracked, and he was consuming resources in the form of watts, and wear and tear on the tires. But no one—Brack, mainly—had told him he couldn’t.

Their overseer commuted backwards and forwards from the ship. The first time he’d done it, he’d walked the couple of miles to Santa Clara with only the most perfunctory of warnings, carrying only a locked metal case with him. He installed himself, not in the crew quarters, where there was plenty of room, but over in the medical bay, in what was purposed to be a private consulting room.

It had the only lockable door in the whole base. Frank wondered if that was by accident or design. Brack spent most of his time on the base either in the comms room with Dee, or one floor down in Control, doing something or other. Most of the time, the cons could forget about him—Declan assured them the cameras were there for fire detection, not keeping tabs on them. Frank wasn’t so sure.

But on occasions when they wanted to let off steam and bitch about Brack, and there was nowhere they could safely do that, they resorted to whispered side-by-side conversations while they were working. It was the best they could do. Otherwise, they’d have to all suit up, step outside and turn their microphones off. Which wouldn’t look suspicious at all.

It was why Frank liked driving up the Santa Clara. The sides of the lower valley were steep enough that he couldn’t exit onto the broad slopes of the volcano, and he couldn’t get those same panoramic views as he had done on the top of Long Beach. But if he climbed uphill for a couple of miles, the space to the south did open up, and he could see beyond the walls of the crater.

The base looked tiny, a small pale collection of rectangles, no bigger than those ranch-style houses he’d built out towards San Fernando, and covering less ground than the boneyard of empty cylinders and drums that they’d stacked, more or less together, the far side of the workshop. The ship was out of sight, across the Heights to the east, but there on the horizon was another volcano, rising from the plain like a pimple. He’d look at it some days, and believe it was further away than the twenty miles it was. Its height was almost the same as the peaks in the Sierras, but there it was, just popping out of the ground without foothills.

And sometimes the sky was almost blue. It made it—only for a moment—almost like home. But the thin, ice-white clouds, the fast-moving moons tearing overhead, the redness all around, soon broke into his daydreaming. He’d remember he was in a spacesuit, on Mars.

Other times, if he was lucky, he’d have a ringside seat on a delivery. Some ship would throw a package at the planet, and he’d catch sight of a bright spark halfway between the sand and the sun.

It would burn and flicker, pulsing like a firework, and soot and smoke would trail out behind, blown ragged by the high winds. There’d be a low booming noise, the sound of distant thunder, rolling across the landscape. Mostly, that would be all he’d hear and see. But twice he’d spotted the dark smudge of a parachute moments before it passed from sight. Still moving almost as fast as an object in freefall, but that was what it was: a huge, extended canopy, very far away.

The first time it had happened, he’d got excited. He’d thought that it had meant a delivery for them. A cargo rocket, either one of XO’s, or one of NASA’s.

But the times didn’t add up. The incoming ships would have left Earth before Frank and his crew had even arrived on Mars.

And on getting back to base, he found that they didn’t have a signal from it anyway. Someone else’s, then, descending onto the broad Tharsis plain. Brack had nixed space piracy, and eventually they’d just got used to it happening every week or so. Mars was a busy place all of a sudden.

Frank drove back down the valley and resumed his tasks. He parked up near the workshop, and before he plugged the fuel cell into the grid to recharge, he checked with Declan they had enough spare capacity to do that.

“How long does it need?”

Frank interrogated the console. “Couple of hours?”

“We’re not up to full batteries yet. I can give you an hour now, and an hour in the morning.”

“OK.” It wasn’t worth arguing about the when, as long as it was done. He climbed down and took the cable end out of the drum it was stored in—it was buried for most of its length, and came out through a hole in the bottom of the container—and slotted the end home. Lights changed on the console, telling him it was accepting charge, and he checked the clock to know what time he had to disconnect it. Not that Declan would let him forget. He recorded everything like that on his tablet, and set an alarm ahead of time.

He walked to the main airlock, now partially obscured from view by the combined Comms/Control hab, and knocked the dust from his feet against the metal steps. He went through the whole suit ritual, noting how dirty the floor of the connecting module was getting, and how the red, on contact with the moist air, turned from a coating of dust to a smeary layer of dirty grease.

Someone was supposed to deal with this, and he couldn’t remember who it was. Alice? Did they really have the doctor on cleaning duty? Maybe they did, assuming that doctoring wasn’t going to take up too much time. They’d have to rota this unpopular chore between them. Did they even have any specific cleaning materials? They didn’t even have toothpaste. Perhaps they needed to root around in the unopened crates that were stacked on the lower level of the medical hab.

He went to use the can, always preferring to sit and think for a minute than use the collector in his suit. Wearing overalls made it more difficult, having to shrug out of the top half before pushing them down to his ankles. The air in the crew quarters was warm now, thanks to the plumbing, though the seat was still chilly on first contact.

“Frank?” It was Declan.

“Goddammit, Declan. A moment, OK?”

“Relax, I’m not coming in or anything. Just wanted to know something.”

“Can’t this wait? A couple of minutes maybe?” No, of course not. Declan was just being his usual dickish self.

“Straightforward yes or no: did you check the fuel cell level on the buggy before you took it for a drive?”

Frank sighed. “I checked that it had enough juice.”

“Did you check the actual gas levels and log them?”

“No.”

“Can you do that in future?”

“Seriously?”

“Completely seriously.” Then Declan lowered his voice and pressed his head up against the screen. “Someone’s been using it other than you.”

“Brack comes and goes.”

“Outside of that.”

“When?” Frank frowned. “At night?”

“Just log it for me, will you?”

“OK.”

Declan pulled back and Frank could hear his footsteps recede. There were always tire marks on the ground around the buggy park, but the buggies themselves were always pretty much where he’d left them. Or so he thought. Were there trackers on the buggies? He didn’t know. There were on the suits—or was it just the medical implants, working off… what? Some sort of Martian GPS? He hadn’t really given it much thought, and just assumed that it was a standard set-up, just like it was on Earth.

But driving around at night didn’t make much sense. Firstly, it was dark, and while the buggies had lights, it was still dangerous enough in the day with the potential for hitting something sub-surface. And secondly, going solo where no one knew where you were and no one was in Comms to take your emergency call?

Unless they weren’t going solo? That would mean two people keeping a secret, and that didn’t seem likely. If it wasn’t him, and it wasn’t Declan, then who? Brack had no need to sneak around. If he wanted a buggy, he’d just say so and take one. That left Dee, Zero or Zeus, and Zero didn’t seem to want to leave the greenhouse, let alone the base.

Was it actually a problem? Joyriding a buggy during the freezing night was pretty stupid, but as long as they brought it back in one piece, where was the harm? When he took a buggy up the Santa Clara, wasn’t he doing the same thing?

Yes and no. He was authorized. They weren’t.

And it was all assuming that Declan was right, and his over-zealous protection of their power consumption hadn’t got to him. Frank decided that it wasn’t up to him to call this one: he had enough on his plate as it was, doing two people’s jobs. He pulled the levers and pressed the buttons, washed up and zipped.

The expansion and contraction of the base’s exterior also translated inside. He had hundreds of bolts to check in each section, often, now they’d fitted out the habs with their floors and ceilings, involving accessing hatches and lifting panels. It was long and laborious and done on a strict schedule so that he didn’t miss any of them out from one inspection to the next.

No one was pretending it wasn’t monotonous work. It was, however, monotonous work on Mars. He worked his way along the top floor of the cross-hab, before climbing down the ladder to the first floor. No one but him went there now. The red dot on the three-sixty camera on the ceiling had been disabled by Declan (less than half a watt, but he wasn’t having it), but he could still be seen. He did his rounds: things inside did seem to be settling down now they had a more constant temperature. He could probably even scale his duties back and check less often.

And still his personal effects were nowhere to be found. None of their stuff had turned up. His books, his letters, were gone. He’d been through every inventory himself, and they weren’t listed. One possible explanation was that there was a missing cylinder, either burnt up on entry, or still spinning around in space. However, that was difficult to reconcile with the fact that they’d eventually located pretty much everything for the base.

He moved from the cross-hab to the med bay. He pressed his hand for a moment against the skin of the module. The light that seeped through turned his splayed fingers into silhouettes, and the coldness of outside stole in. The base needed better insulation. He could shovel dirt against the sides, building it up over the days and weeks until each section was half-buried. Not completely covered, though, because it was only the rings, not the plastic, that were weight-bearing. Even then he’d have to worry about sharp edges.

Use the cargo cylinders as formers? Something to ramp the soil against? He might suggest it, but to shovel that amount of soil, he’d require something like a bulldozer attachment to the buggy. He had a half-formed memory somewhere at the back of his mind, about turning soil into bricks, like adobe. That would be easier. More permanent, too.

He checked the fixings on the floor joists, lifting the panels and peering into the voids, working his way down through the yard to the far end, then as before, down the ladder to check the first floor. Nothing needed doing. Which was good. He was proud of the way the base had gone up, how they’d struggled and how they’d fixed things.

“Boredom is your enemy, Kittridge.”

Frank felt his heart rate spike and he involuntarily raised the nut runner, ready to lash out. Brack was just sitting there, among the unopened boxes that were… what? Lab equipment? Medical stuff?

Brack reached out and pushed Frank’s arm down. “Easy there, tiger.”

“I’m doing my work. I don’t want to miss anything off my itinerary.”

“I know you don’t. I keep an eye on all of you. That’s my work. Best you remember that.”

If he did, then either he already knew who was taking the buggy out, or he was lying about being able to keep an eye on them all, and he had no idea. Either way, he didn’t need Frank to tell him what was going on. The cons could sort this between themselves. This wasn’t so important that they needed to rat each other out to Brack.

“I’m not getting bored,” said Frank.

“You didn’t see me there because you were bored and you stopped paying attention. Let’s not go down the rest of that road. Each day’s going to throw different stuff at you. You got to be ready for that.”

Frank wasn’t sure what Brack meant. Unless this was a test? To see if Frank would inform on the others? “I’m ready,” he said.

“Well, I’m mighty glad to hear that. Because I don’t want to lose you.” Brack laughed, just the one little giggle.

Then he was gone, climbing back up the ladder.

Frank gritted his teeth, and waited until he was calm. Brack was right, and wrong. Yes, he hadn’t been paying attention, but no, he was certain that if he’d caught sight of something out of the ordinary, he’d have reacted to it. OK, so he was getting maybe a little sloppy with his daydreaming. What was it they said to each other? Stay frosty?

The thought that a stray spark could immolate him and potentially burn the entire base to the ground in a matter of seconds should have kept him frosty enough, but it was easy to forget. This life was now normal. As normal as being ruled by buzzers and bells and the sound of cell doors slamming, and he’d surprised himself how quickly he’d got used to that.

He was about to leave the hab himself, when he got curious about what Brack had been doing there. He looked up at the camera. He could go and check the boxes and try to work out what had been disturbed. But then Brack might be able to observe him while he did. What was he going to do?

Frank left the boxes alone for now and climbed the ladder.

Dee was in the Comms room. Frank looked in and nodded. “Brack?”

Dee gestured below. Control wasn’t out of bounds, but that was where Brack spent most of his time. None of the cons wanted to share a space with him, and it was unfamiliar territory to all except Dee, who’d had the job of setting all the consoles up.

“I’m pretty much done with the transmissions for today. Data’s loaded up. New pictures of Mars. Looks big.”

“Because it is big. Can you give me a hand? Need some help shifting things.”

Dee pushed back his chair—they had chairs now, formed from one piece of cast plastic, lightweight and disturbingly flexible—and followed him from the room. They crossed through the yard and the galley to the connector, then into the med bay. Frank slid down the ladder, stepped back, and Dee joined him in the gloom, surrounded by boxes.

“What needs doing?”

“Just start moving these around.” He gave a box to Dee, and under the cover that gave him, he quickly checked the crates where he’d first spotted Brack. Most were still sealed. Two were not.

“What’s going on, Frank?”

“There’s some weird shit going down.” Frank was going to keep Declan’s name out of it for the moment. He casually flipped up the lid of one of the crates and peered inside. “Someone’s been taking the buggies for a ride. I need them to stop, because the heat’s coming back on me.”

He had no idea if it was Dee, but he’d have the exact same conversation with Zeus and Zero, and warn them all off.

“And you think I know something?” Dee glanced at him, then went to pick up another box.

“I don’t know. I sleep hard at night. Maybe you don’t, and you’ve woken up because of something.” Frank was looking at blister packs of pills, all different shapes and sizes. OK, that was interesting.

“They’re doing it at night? Are they nuts?”

“It’s possible. It’s also the last thing we need, because if someone busts one up, we’re half-screwed. Anything you might have seen, heard?” Frank flipped the lid shut again and moved the container over to the opposite rack.

“I… no. I can’t think of anything.” Dee put his box down on the shelf and slid it along. “Does you-know-who know?”

Frank shook his head. “Don’t know. But we need to sort it first.”

“I’ll be your crow.”

“Thanks for your help,” he said, loudly. “I can take it from here.”

Dee stopped moving cargo, and Frank got on his hands and knees to shift a newly exposed floor panel. He peered into it, and extended the nut runner into the void.

“I’ll go then,” said Dee.

“Thanks again.”

That was always going to be the problem with a bunch of cons. Trust, that had been difficult to build up, was so easy to destroy. Drugs. Joyriding. Just when everything seemed to have settled into a decent, quiet routine. Whoever was responsible, Frank wasn’t going to risk them jeopardizing his ride home.