One Way

20

[transcript of audio file #10126 8/2/2038 0930MT Xenosystems Operations boardroom, 65th floor, Tower of Light, Denver CO]

Frank went back to the workshop. He knew that Brack had finally forced his way in, and taken Zeus away. He knew where they were heading: a buggy was missing, and there was dust over towards the ship. But he didn’t know what Brack was going to do, any more than he knew what he’d done with Marcy and Alice. He should ask, really. He assumed that somewhere out the back of the ship would be a line of graves, shallow scrapes in the ground, covered by rocks. Three cairns. The human conquest of Mars.

The outer airlock door was closed, and he hesitated with his hand on the handle. What was he going to find?

He didn’t know that either. He swung the door open, and there were red stains on the floor, spatter marks that crossed the walls.

There was also a black canister of oxygen, and a soft face mask, abandoned in the middle of it all. The mask was coated on the inside with a film of blood, coughed from lungs too weak to draw a breath.

He didn’t want to go inside. He’d be standing where Zeus had died. Where Frank had killed him. He looked down at the floor, and eventually took that short step across the threshold. He closed the door, and stooped to pick the gas bottle up. The film in the mask shattered and fell away, crumbling into ever-smaller flakes. Perfectly dry, it was already turning into something indistinguishable from the dust of Mars itself.

He opened the inner door, walked through, closed it.

There was no air but outside air. Zeus’s suit was draped over the workbench just the other side of the airlock, the helmet staring blindly at the roof, and the arms and legs limp and lifeless. He placed the cylinder next to it, and draped the hose between the mask and the valve across its chest.

There were bits and pieces from Zeus’s DIY activities littered across the two long benches: fragments of pipe and cargo drum and rocket motor scattered in between meters and wires and makeshift drills and vices and clamps. They were never going to get a steam engine now, even if it had been possible. That project had died with Zeus. Frank certainly didn’t have the smarts to make one, and he doubted anyone else did either.

The remains from Declan’s repairing of the solar cells were further down. Shards of crystalline black glass glittered in a discarded pile.

He couldn’t see a break in the plastic envelope on the top level—though he might be missing it, it wasn’t obvious. He climbed down the ladder to the first floor, and turned on the lights. Empty racking either side of the walkway shivered soundlessly. He slowly walked down to the end, and still couldn’t see anything that was wrong.

“Declan? I’m going to start the pump, take it up to maybe six psi, and do a pressure test.”

“Roger that.”

The pump was against the far wall, taped into its ducting. He flicked the switch and opened up his suit controls, watching the external pressure rise, even as he could feel his suit relax and sag. The walls of the hab slowly stretched out, and sound returned. He could hear the rhythmic putt of the pump now, but no high-pitched whine of air escaping.

He walked the lower level again, peering into all the dark corners and pushing against the plastic, searching for the tear. Nothing. He moved the racking, one tower at a time, and got down on his hands and knees, lifting up floor panels and smoothing his hands across the hab cover where it met the thick rubber mat. Still nothing. No rocks had worked their way through.

He’d spent so long, the hab was up to almost seven psi. He hurried to turn the pump off, and sat there in silence, expecting to see a slow, gradual decrease in the numbers.

After half an hour, there was no change.

He stood up again and climbed to the upper level. He waited for another half hour. Still nothing. If there was a leak, it was almost imperceptible. Yes, there were pressure fluctuations with the changing temperature, but they were trained to check the outside pressure before taking their suits off, even if they thought it was safe.

There wasn’t a leak. Yet the hab had definitely been depressurized.

Had Zeus done something stupid, and accidentally opened the hab to outside? Was there any way for him to do that? Neither airlock door, on manual, would open against the nearly eight tons of air pressure on the inside. Even Zeus couldn’t manage that. The pressure either side of the door needed to be almost equal. Had the pumps malfunctioned, or been altered to cycle air from the hab into the chamber, and then again to the outside?

No, because the locks went one way. The pump from the airlock only fed into the hab, pressurized or not.

There were the connecting feeds that they used to run the cables and pipework through from hab to hab. That was the only other weak point. And as he’d proved so far, there was no leak. But he checked them anyway, inside and out, and they were airtight.

He’d done enough. He went back inside the workshop, slung the empty oxygen cylinder over his shoulder, and gathered up Zeus’s spacesuit in his arms.

It dragged on the ground on the way back to the main airlock. He looked into the distance. The dust had settled, and he could see the pale finger of the ship rising from the Heights. How long did it take to bury a body? Clearly, longer than the time he’d spent trying to work out why they had a body to bury in the first place.

There should have been a ceremony. The first two deaths had happened when they were at such a breakneck pace there’d been no time to stop. Now, there was space to do something meaningful. And Zeus would probably appreciate that, even though he wasn’t around to see it. In the end, anything they did wouldn’t be for him, but for the living.

As he climbed the steps to the main hab, Zeus’s boots knocked on each riser.

“Goddammit, man.”

“Frank, you good?” asked Dee.

“Talking to myself. I’m coming in. I could do with a hand, though.”

He punched the button to cycle the lock, squeezed in, and pressurized the chamber. Each action he made, he watched carefully, trying to work out ways he could inadvertently subvert the safeties. He couldn’t. He couldn’t understand how the workshop had leaked out, when there was no leak.

Dee opened the door, and took Zeus’s suit from him. Frank put the oxygen cylinder on the floor, and opened up his suit to the hab’s air.

“Did you find it?”

Frank scraped his fingers across his head. “Find what?”

“The leak.”

“No.” He pushed his suit down to his knees. “No I didn’t.”

“But…”

“I don’t know. I’ve left it under pressure. If it goes down, I’ll know I’ve missed something.”

“What do you mean, if?”

“Not now, Dee. I’ve been through the whole hab. I’ve checked the seals and everything. You want to go out there and do it all again? Knock yourself out. Just get off my case.”

“You’re responsible for this shit, Frank. Buildings and maintenance. That’s your bag.”

“Don’t you think I know that? And you’re responsible for agreeing to turn the fucking alarm off, the one thing that might have saved his life.”

Dee was slight. The time spent in hibernation, and then on reduced gravity, hadn’t made him any bigger. Frank had been physically active every single day. If they squared up, there was no question as to who was going to win.

Dee was just a kid. Currently, just a scared kid. Beating up on him wasn’t going to solve anything, and was only going to make it worse.

“Why don’t we stay out of each other’s way for a while, Dee? Probably best for both of us.” Frank felt the first flush of rage turn into something else. He’d never been one for much introspection. He preferred to keep busy. So why not keep busy doing this, digging into detail of the workshop until he had his answer?

It was in all their best interests, because whatever had happened could happen again, and if Zeus had been caught out, it could be any of them next time. They wanted him to be responsible? OK: the workshop was out of bounds from now on, until he declared it safe.

Dee dropped Zeus’s suit where he stood, and left, only to be replaced by Declan.

“What? You going to smack me down too?”

“No. Just that I had an idea, and I wanted to show it to you. I’ll be in the medical bay.”

Frank was alone again. “Well, fuck. If I’m going to burn bridges, may as well burn them all down at once.”

He hung his suit up and plugged his life support in, and picked up the oxygen canister from the floor. That had to be refilled manually from the air plant, and he wasn’t going to stand over it while it filled, not now. He saw that Zeus’s mask was missing. The hose must have got detached in the workshop. He’d collect it later, when he went back to test the pressure.

And there was Zeus’s suit. He hefted it by the shoulders, and stared in through the dust-smeared faceplate for long enough to reach the moment where he could imagine Zeus’s broad, tattooed face staring back out at him.

For an ex-neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang member, he’d been OK. Dependable. Reliable. Kind, even, if a little intense.

Frank hung up the suit and racked the life support, and went to see what Declan wanted.

He was sitting on one of the beds—a metal-framed gurney that could be moved higher or lower by a lever—with a box of blue nitrile gloves open by his side.

“You coping?”

“It’s pretty shitty, everything considered.”

“That it is. However.” Declan took one of the gloves, shook it out, and gave it a few preparatory stretches. The white dust coating floated into the air, and danced under the lights. Then he put the sleeve of the glove to his lips and gave a couple of puffs so that the fingers inflated slightly. He pinched the glove at the wrist, twisted it to trap the air, and swiftly knotted it. He tossed the thing that resembled a limp blue octopus at Frank, who caught it and held it up.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Put it in your pocket.” Declan started making another. “Go on.”

Frank didn’t have the energy to argue. He squashed the glove into one of his pockets. “Now what?”

Declan tied off the second glove, hopped off the bed, and walked to the airlock at the end of the hab. They weren’t supposed to use it—emergencies only—but it was fully functional. He opened the inner door, tossed the glove on the floor, and closed the door again. He beckoned Frank over, and pointed through the tiny window.

“Watch.”

He flipped the switch and the air started pumping out, back into the hab. Frank peered down at the glove, which slowly and inexorably started to plump out. It kept on expanding, bigger and bigger, until the pump stopped and the glove was the size of a party balloon, stretched out to a translucent blue skin with five fat extensions.

Frank patted his pocket, feeling the small, rubbery mass there.

“Do you think you’d notice that?” asked Declan.

“I reckon.”

“It’s yours to keep.” He cycled the lock back up to pressure, and retrieved the now much deflated glove from the floor. “If, for some reason, the alarms didn’t go off, or they went off too late, it might just save you.”

“It would’ve saved Zeus.” Frank turned away from the airlock. “I don’t get it. There’s nothing wrong with the hab.”

“And yet he died because he couldn’t inhale the oxygen that was right in front of his face. Something depressurized the workshop, and by the time he realized—and clearly he did realize, otherwise he wouldn’t have made it into the airlock—he was already dying.”

“He should have been able to pressurize the airlock with the O₂ can he was carrying.”

“If he was unconscious he couldn’t. And you know that the airlock is only sealed from the hab when you’re pumping it down.”

Frank stopped his slow walk to the connecting corridor.

“Even if he opened the valve all the way, the gas would have just blown out back into the hab. He’d have had to manually close the valve by opening up the maintenance panel and isolating it. But as I say, you knew that, right?”

“Maybe I’d forgotten.” Frank leaned against the door frame. “Why are you here, Declan? What did you do? I mean, I know what I did. I know what I deserve. And Alice, and Marcy, and Zeus. We all killed people. I know Zero got into the supply chain, and Dee got mixed up in some serious cybercrime. You? You just seem so normal.”

“We all have our demons, Frank. Mine are just a bit more specialized, that’s all.” He blew out a long breath. “You really want to know?”

“Yes. No. Maybe.”

“I liked to watch, Frank.” Declan let that sink in, then continued. “In my line of work, at my level, it meant I could watch a hell of a lot of people doing all kinds of things. When you get caught, and you run a couple of hundred nickel sentences together, turns out you end up inside for the better part of a millennium. Which wasn’t quite what I’d bargained for.”

“So you made a deal?”

“Same deal you made. Die in prison, or live on Mars.”

“Yeah. About that.”

“You weren’t getting ground glass or worse in every meal. Sooner or later, someone would have offed me. I think I had even less to lose than you did.” He shrugged. “Well, there you go. I’ve got to check some battery efficiencies, because I’ve a suspicion that the long-term effect of massive temperature fluctuations between day and night is degrading their ability to hold charge. You need to go and do whatever it is you need to do. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you killed Zeus, by anything you did or didn’t do. It’s this fucking planet.”

He picked up his tablet and brushed past Frank, leaving him alone in the med bay.

Frank tidied up. He put the gloves back in their box, then back in the packing crate they’d come in. He brushed his hand across the wipe-clean vinyl surface of the bed’s foam pad. Then he went back to the boxes. They’d all been opened. There was more than just high-grade pharma lying around now. Surgical packs. Pre-sterilized, sealed, but right there was a scalpel sharp enough to notch bone, with only a plastic guard and a blister pack in the way.

Could the reason that Zeus didn’t notice the depressurization be down to narcotics? There were hundreds of foil packets, all stacked up in neat rows. One or two or more missing was going to be difficult to spot.

Zeus was Alice’s second. In her absence, it would have been his job to count the drugs. There’d been no evidence that he’d checked them against the manifests, but maybe, informally, he had. Alice had killed herself with fentanyl. Now, possibly, Zeus had been at the tablets.

Perhaps “going to work on the steam engine” was code. The cameras wouldn’t have picked anything up. Popping a pill could be done in an instant. Taking a swig of water afterwards wouldn’t appear anything special. Who was going to take the time to watch him for hours to see he was actually working?

None of that explained the depressurization. It merely explained why Zeus had been caught out by it. If—a big unanswerable if—he was right.

Frank closed the boxes, and leaned heavily on his knuckles against the racking. It was no good, he was going to have to talk to Brack about all of this. Get him to secure the drugs. Take them back to the ship, maybe, as the lock on the consulting room door was pretty flimsy. None of them were doctors, and while all of them had had basic first aid training, only Zeus had anything more than that. Getting the more dangerous drugs out of the way wasn’t going to cause them any problems.

When they were at Gold Hill, “What if one of the crew turns out to be an addict?” hadn’t come up. It should have: they were criminals, and of course unfettered access to a whole pharmacy wasn’t going to be a good idea. It was bad planning. It was a mistake.

Zero, of course, was the only one with drugs on his rap sheet, unless Alice and her overprescribing counted. If the kid had been helping himself along with Zeus, then he was going to be pissed and develop withdrawal symptoms. Frank knew what that was like. He’d seen it with his own son.

How much of this was his suspicious mind, fine-tuned to the consequences of drug-taking, reacting viscerally against the mere possibility of it? He had no evidence, and unless he was prepared to account for every single pill in all of the boxes, something going on for a year’s supply for a busy dispensary, he’d never get any.

And how much of this was deflecting his own guilt, looking for other people to blame? Because that hadn’t been a pattern in his life, had it? There was a fault in the workshop hab. He was going to find it, no matter what.