One Way

22

[transcript of audio file #7907 2/10/2035 1000MT Xenosystems Operations boardroom, 65th floor, Tower of Light, Denver CO]

They didn’t keep recordings, not from the spacesuits, not from the fire control cameras. They didn’t have the computer storage space for it. Brack was right: the base had been designed to be a place for scientific research and planetary exploration. No one had envisaged there’d be a need to watch the crew for a potential saboteur in their midst.

Dee did, however, show him how the fire control worked. The ceiling cameras weren’t normal cameras, but infrared ones, tuned to spot for high heat sources that might trigger ignition in the oxygen-rich atmosphere. The background was almost uniformly black, and the crew pale ghosts washing across the screen. The only real contrast was offered in the greenhouse: the areas under the growing lights and the fish tanks. The hot water storage, held in a drum on the second floor, was insulated enough to appear merely dark gray.

There was no way anyone could be identified through their image.

And to think, Frank had been worried about being spied on.

“Who was your second?”

Dee left the screen on a five-second cycle, even though the camera software continuously monitored everything. “Alice. That didn’t work out so well.”

Frank watched the black and gray picture on the screen. “Just hope none of us gets sick. We can always radio home, get a doctor to talk to us. And when the NASA guys are here, they’ll have a medic with them, right? Someone to look after them on the journey: they don’t get frozen like we did.”

“There was one guy I read about once. Russian. He was the camp doctor in a base at the South Pole, and he got appendicitis.” Dee made a slicing motion on his abdomen. “He had to operate on himself. No anesthetic. He had people hold up mirrors so he could see inside himself and do it that way. That’s just extreme.”

“That’s the kind of thing I could have imagined Alice doing. She was a tough old lady. Still don’t know why she did it.” Frank reached across Dee and dabbed at the cameras. “Why did we install one in the workshop? There’s no risk of a fire in there.”

“It was in the specifications. One for every hab section, upper and lower floor.”

“So you can tell from here where everyone is, just not who everyone is.” Frank looked for the ghosts. Zero was in the greenhouse. There was him and Dee in Control. Declan was in the yard.

“I guess so. But we’re just piggybacking the fire-detection software. None of this was designed for us.”

“And there are still no cameras outside at all?”

“No.” Dee frowned. “Why would there be?”

“I don’t know. I’m just used to being watched, and I thought I was.”

“If you’d have asked sooner, I would have told you sooner.”

“Zero knows?”

“Sure. Told him when I put the cameras in the greenhouse. He said I was working for the Man, and I explained that they weren’t watching him, just looking out for fires.”

“Well, don’t I feel the idiot now?” Frank leaned back and looked around. Control didn’t have much hardware, but it did have redundancy. It was one of the few places that had more than what it strictly needed. All the cameras, all the other environmental sensors, fed into a series of black boxes. The radio traffic was logged there, and one station was set aside for video messages, with a camera facing the chair, and a mic and headset combo still in a cellophane pocket on the desk.

There were screens, too, flat ones that were of a new generation to what he remembered from life outside: as thin as a sheet of plastic, just stuck into a frame like a picture. They consumed power, so were currently dead. Dee sat at the only one that was active.

“So what can you do from here?”

“Do? Pretty much everything. I’ve got read-outs from all the habs: those get logged and transmitted. I’ve got read-outs from us—”

“Hold up. You’ve got access to our medical implants?”

Dee tapped through the menus on the screen.

“So this is Zero. This is Declan. This is me. And this, this is you.”

Frank placed his hand on his chest as he watched the lines cross the screen. His heart rate. His breathing rate. His body temperature. His blood pressure and something called pO₂.

“How does it collect this stuff?”

“Wireless. Same way the tablets work.”

“I mean if we’re in our suits.”

“Gets picked up by the suit and broadcast back here.”

“Well, damn.” Then a thought. “Does Brack have one?”

“If he does, it’s not on this system. It’s just the four of us. For now.” Dee tapped a couple more keys. Marcy: no signal. Alice: no signal. Zeus: no signal. He clicked off that screen. “So this is the electrics—this is what Declan looks at for most of the day. Red is higher power consumption, blue is less. The greenhouse takes most, but when we go and heat up food in the kitchen, that goes reddish too, or when we need to turn the satellite dish or recharge the buggies. You know. Total consumption is here, and what we make goes in here. Batteries are on a separate screen. Then we’ve got the same for water and air.”

“But you can’t start and stop things from here.”

“Sure you can. All the automatic systems. You can reset them, change the levels, turn stuff on and off. It’s not difficult, but I mean, why would you want to? I leave all that shit well alone. All I’m doing is bundling up the daily reports and transmitting them to Earth. I keep them all for a rolling seven days in case the files get corrupted and I have to resend, but that’s all we can hold. Then I overwrite them with the day eight data. I’ve written a script to do all that automatically. It’s no big deal.”

“So you don’t actually need to be here.”

Dee blew out his cheeks. “If something went wrong, you’d need me. Otherwise, I guess not. I just come in here to goof off. Don’t tell Brack. Don’t tell anyone.”

“So what do you do all day?”

Dee returned the screen to the top of the menu tree, so that the XO logo was staring out at them. “I just… read. Manuals. Tech stuff. Geological reports. Maps. I like that kind of stuff.” He pressed his hands together and looked down at the floor.

“It’s OK. It’s fine.” Frank risked tapping his fist against Dee’s shoulder. “You can keep doing that. I’m not in charge of you, or anything.”

“I just want to be useful to the NASA guys when they get here. Knowing things that they might not about the base, about the local area, that’s going to be good, right? They’ll need someone to carry their kit and lend them a hand. I want them to think… good thoughts about me. Include me. Come to rely on me. You know.”

Frank knew. “I get that. I know this is going to be a stupid question, but do you need a password to access any of this stuff?”

“Why would you need that? It’s not like we’re vulnerable to hackers, or unauthorized users. We’re all authorized. Everybody who comes to the base is.”

“I don’t know: I just thought that maybe Brack—”

“Brack always calls home from the ship. It gets routed through the main dish for ease, but it doesn’t pass through this computer.” Dee tapped some keys. “This is the uplink log for the last seven days. It’s just automatically generated reports, like I said.”

“Declan told me he was going to ask you to hack XO’s responses to Brack. I’m kind of hoping you didn’t, because I think that’d be a very bad idea.”

“He hasn’t. Why would he do that?”

Frank ignored the question. “If he does, turn him down.”

“They’re encrypted.” Dee shrugged. “I can’t crack them.”

“You tried already?”

“I was just seeing if I could. They’re working off of some public-private key thing, so I can get the message block, I just can’t tell what the text says. Brack will have the key in the ship, and, well, whatever: I’ll just tell Declan what I’ve told you.”

“And there’s no way you could crack the code?”

“No,” said Dee. “This is a key of twenty or so random characters that work in an algorithm to scramble the data. I could write a script to try every possible combination, and I’d be old a hundred times over before it got even close to working. Unless I have the key, it’s not going to happen. Just forget about it.”

“Forgotten,” said Frank, holding his hands up. “Thanks for showing me around. I feel like I learned something.”

“No problem.”

Frank turned to leave.

“Why did Zeus die?” asked Dee.

Frank stopped. “I don’t know yet,” he lied. Mostly lied, at least. Why he died was different from how he died. “If someone comes by and asks you to do something you’re not comfortable with, or throws questions at you, or just does something you don’t expect, you could let me know.”

Dee looked down at the screen, then back up. “Frank, what’s going on?”

“I haven’t worked it out yet. But stay frosty, OK?” Frank went back to the crew quarters to push the button. He ended up sitting there for longer than he needed to, thinking about things. Water reclamation was below the yard, and was little more than a machine that exposed their waste to vacuum and caught the water as it boiled off. The dry solids were sterilized, turned into bricks, and handed straight over to Zero. All of that had been Zeus’s job.

It, along with Dee’s comment that the computer system didn’t really need him until it really did, got him to wondering just how many people were actually required to run the base? What was their minimum crew?

Marcy had been their driver. But they could all drive now. Alice had been their doctor. But since she’d dragged them from their long hibernations, they hadn’t needed her expertise. Zeus was plumbing, but since it had all been put in place and water pulled from Mars’s freezing soil, they were a closed loop. If they needed more water, a couple of shovelfuls of fresh dirt in the machine would make it for them. He was construction, and everything had been built, in this phase of building at least. Thermal expansion happened, but after the first few weeks, the bolts pretty much held everything together. Dee had set up Comms and Control so that neither needed intervention from him or anyone. Declan? How much did he do over cleaning the panels by hand and stalking the corridors to find people to shout at? Brack? He didn’t do anything related to the upkeep of the base.

Zero: he was the exception to the rule. They wouldn’t eat without his efforts. A lot of his work was monitoring the growth of his beloved plants, analyzing the mix of the nutrients being fed into the hydroponic reservoirs, and adjusting the flow rates. He harvested and replanted. How much, or how little, would carry on without him, was something Frank was going to have to look into. But out of all of them, Zero worked the hardest and complained the least.

So to answer his own question: a couple. Zero could probably manage on his own for months, maybe even years, until something broke down that he couldn’t fix. For all his smarts, he couldn’t know everything and he didn’t seem to want to, either. He was content, and Frank had to admit that perhaps he was a little bit jealous of that. But maybe even Zero needed someone else, running around behind the scenes, keeping all the systems fine-tuned.

Given all that, which one of them could have decided that Zeus was surplus to requirements? Was it even that calculating? Did Zeus die simply because someone thought they could get away with killing him?

He didn’t want to agree with Brack, but kept circling the same conclusion. If—and there still might be something that he’d missed that made Zeus’s death accidental and not deliberate—Zeus had been killed, neither Dee nor Zero seemed at all likely to have done it. Neither of them had had any beef with the man while he’d been in training or on Mars. Zeus’s Aryan Brotherhood tats could have unnerved Zero or Dee, as they did Frank, but there’d been no evidence of animosity.

Declan. It came back to Declan every time.

So what was Frank going to do about that? He didn’t have proof, and neither did he have any way of getting that proof, save trying to beat a confession out of Declan. Which, if he was right or wrong, wasn’t going to make anyone happy at sharing a confined space with him.

How was he supposed to do this without turning himself into a pariah? Was that even possible? He’d promised to help Brack in exchange for a ride home. With a possible murder on the base, Brack had called that promise in. How much did Frank want to go home?

Frank didn’t love Mars that much. He found it fascinating, beautiful, stark, lethal. But it wasn’t his home, and it wasn’t where his son was. OK, so he wanted to go back to Earth more than anything, in order to see his son. What was he going to do about that?

He was going to make some assumptions. Firstly, that Declan had done one of the two things to the workshop—either fix the airlock valves or open up the pump vent—that had ended up killing Zeus. Maybe he’d incapacitated Zeus beforehand by slipping him something. Or Zeus had done it to himself, and Declan had got pissed with him and wanted to teach him a lesson. Secondly, that having killed one of them and got away with it, he’d be much more likely to try and kill someone else when they pissed him off too.

Zero was too important to lose, at least at this point. So next, it was either Frank, or Dee, or Brack. If Brack died, there’d be no trip home. If he died, he wouldn’t need one. Dee? Dee was just a kid who no more deserved to be on Mars than he deserved to be serving life. There were more than enough tech companies in California for one of them to have hired the boy and kept him out of jail.

The best way to off someone and get away with it was to make it look like an accident, and to keep the base intact as much as possible while doing it.

Where was he most vulnerable, then? Outside, in his suit, or driving? His suit was his own suit, identifiable, but the life support was a random pick from the rack. The buggies? Both he and Brack drove, and Declan hardly ever did. Neither did Dee or Zero. Declan spent a long time outside, unsupervised, unwatched. If he wanted to do something to a buggy, then he could.

Frank decided that he’d ask Dee to pull the full manual on the buggies. His training had been almost all practical: how to identify and solve problems. Not included were those catastrophic errors that would have meant he wouldn’t be around to solve the problem at all. Was it possible to fix the fuel cell so that it exploded? There were compressed gases and lots of energy stored inside, and the driver sat almost directly over it. Shards of fast-moving fractured casing would slice a spacesuit into shreds.

So much to think about. So much of it depressing. He didn’t want to spend his time on Mars doing this—playing detective. Definitely playing. He had no idea where to start.

He pushed the button and pulled the levers, zipped up and washed his hands and face. Part of the training. A stomach bug would pass around the crew like wildfire, and there’d be no hiding place.

There was Zero in the kitchen, and Frank walked up the corridor to see what he was doing.

“So I’ve never done this before,” said Zero, pointing at a fish in the bucket between his feet. “I was told how to defrost the eggs and grow them on in tanks, how big they have to be before we start chowing down on them. Not how to get one ready to cook.”

“Last time I saw them they were no bigger than my finger.” Frank got down on his hands and knees and peered in. “Look at the size of them. Longer than my hand, some of them.”

“They gain weight fast, just chewing algae. I figured we could do with cheering up, so I picked out four of the fattest, but man, I’ve no idea what to do now.”

“You’ve got to clean them.”

“You’ve lost me.”

Frank dipped his hands into the lukewarm water and scooped up one of the tilapia. It was strong, trying to wriggle out of his grasp, and slimy too, its slippery mucus layer making it difficult to hold.

“I need a knife. Sharpest we have. And a plastic tray.”

Zero picked a knife up from the bench. It didn’t have a point, but the blade was keen enough. Frank pinned the fish inside the tray and with one swift slice took its head clean off.

“Jesus, Frank!”

“It’s a fish, Zero. They barely have enough brains to register pain.” He turned the fish in his palm and sliced down the belly. He put the knife in the tray and scooped out the guts with a pull of his two fingers. “And that’s how you clean a fish.”

Zero had gone visibly pale, and his eyes were as round as saucers.

“Why don’t you go make us a salad?” suggested Frank. “I’ll deal with the rest.”

“Sure. OK. Whatever you say, man.”

Frank dispatched the three remaining fish and tossed the waste down the john. Almost perfect recycling. The plants would feed off the detritus, and the water flow ended up in the fish tanks. He washed his hands and caught sight of loose silvery scales circling the plug as he rinsed, shining like tiny planets.

He watched them spin in ever tighter circles, then vanish into the drain.

How to cook them? They had two options: microwave, or steam. Steam them, then. See what herbs they had, stuff them in the cavity and give them five minutes. Long enough to round everyone up and get them sitting down together. How long was it since they’d done that? Normally they just smashed and grabbed an evening meal when they felt like it. Why not make this an occasion?

Except he was already thinking about turning any conversation to his advantage, whether there were any off-guard comments that he might use to catch someone out. Everything from now on had to be about finding out who killed Zeus, and every opportunity had to be turned to that purpose.