One Way

26

[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 3/22/2047, transcribed from paper-only copy]

They met around the kitchen table in the crew quarters. Declan was standing at one end, Zero in the middle on the far side, so that when Frank stepped into the hab, he had a natural place at the other end of the table.

He took the chair, pulled it slowly out, eyeing up the others. “I’ll sit if you will.”

“Sure, why not?” Declan nodded. “All we’re going to do is talk, right?”

Frank reached into his pocket, and saw where the others touched their overalls. They were all tooled up, for certain. Frank’s knife was in his other pocket: he could feel the hard mass of it through the fabric. He pulled out the blue latex glove and tossed it onto the table in front of him. It landed like a stranded jellyfish, limp and shapeless.

Then he sat, perched on the edge of his seat, ready to spring up at a moment’s notice. Declan and Zero did the same.

“So who’s going first?” asked Frank.

“Why not you?” said Declan. “You’re the one playing cop. Isn’t that right?”

Zero’s gaze darted between the two older men. “What’s going on? What d’you mean, cop?”

“It’s a fair question, Frank. Why don’t you answer him?”

“Zeus… died. I thought it was my fault, something I had or hadn’t done. Some structural problem with the workshop. I had to check it out. That’s when I realized that the hab was perfectly sound. No leaks, no way that it could leak. Nothing that would have depressurized the whole thing quickly enough to catch Zeus out.”

“So you went worrying at it like a dog with a bone, right? Trying to prove you weren’t at fault.”

“And I discovered that there were a couple of ways you could do it, but both of them were deliberate sabotage. You had to really want to do it. Someone really wanted to kill Zeus.”

Declan placed both hands on the table between them. “You told Brack, of course.”

“I told him.”

“And what did you tell him, Frank?”

Zero bounced nervously in his seat. “Yeah, tell us, Frank. What did you say?”

Frank scratched at his chin. “I told him we had a murderer on the base.”

“Why didn’t you tell us too, Frank?” Declan’s voice went very quiet. “Didn’t you think we had a right to know?”

“Brack told me not to say anything. He didn’t want to tip you off.”

“Me?” Declan put his hand to his chest. “You thought it was me? Or did you think it was Zero here? Or maybe it was Dee?”

“It wasn’t me, so it had to be one of you.” Frank glared at the men alternately. “It still does. It’s one of you. Or both of you. I don’t know which.”

“It wasn’t me,” said Declan. “Zero?”

“Not me. I’m not like that.” Zero gripped the edge of the table and stared back at Frank. “You are, though. You killed someone, right?”

“That was—”

“Different? So let’s look at this rationally.” Declan counted off the corpses on his fingers. “Marcy ran a couple of dozen people over after switching off her truck’s autodrive. Alice euthanized God knows how many. Zeus sucker-punched someone in a bar.”

“How the hell do you know all that?”

“I talk to people, Frank! And you shot someone; from our point of view, you’re the only murderer left. To us, that looks like someone’s taking out the opposition, the ones who might take you on.”

“That’s not what’s happened.”

Declan carried on regardless. “Then Dee, whose only crime is to hack various company computers and try and divert some cash his way—”

Zero shrugged. “I don’t know: it was a lot of green, man. Maybe he was boasting, but what he was saying was more money than I ever made.”

“Point is, Dee wasn’t a killer. He was squeamish, for pity’s sake.” Declan folded down his thumb. “So who’s next on the list, Frank? Me, or Zero? A white-collar pervert, or a gangbanging drug dealer. Who do you think’s more dangerous?”

Frank clenched his jaw. “I’ve done nothing.”

“You opened the door on Zeus, Frank.”

“He was already dead. I wouldn’t have been able to get that door open if the airlock had been pressurized.”

“You can manually vent the airlock to the outside, just by pulling the lever. Come on, Frank, we did the same training as you did.”

“But I didn’t do that. And you were outside with me when Dee died. You saw me with your own eyes. I couldn’t have been by the buggy at the same time as holding the Comms door shut. Could I?”

Declan screwed his face up. “Yeah. Well. Maybe that one was Zero.”

Zero jerked back. “Fuck you, man. I didn’t kill Dee.”

“You didn’t get on.”

“Didn’t mean I wanted to kill him.”

“So who did?” Declan pointed at the other two. “Because, from where I’m sitting, I’m in the clear.”

Several seconds of silence followed.

Frank cleared his throat. He should have brought his water bottle with him. “What if I’m wrong? What if they were both accidents?”

“But you don’t believe that,” said Declan. “You started all this because you didn’t want to be responsible for killing Zeus. So which is it? Did the workshop depressurize because you installed something wrong, or not? What would you rather it was? A mistake, a catastrophic, fatal mistake that you made, or that one of us killed him?”

Frank pressed his palms against his legs. The scalpel blade’s guard poked his thigh. “I checked the hab. It was sound.”

“So it wasn’t an accident. Someone killed Zeus.”

“Someone killed Zeus,” echoed Frank. “One of you two. And then killed Dee.”

Zero pushed himself back from the table. “I’ve had enough of this, man. I killed no one. You two want to fight it out, go ahead. Tell me when you’re done.”

“You can say that,” said Declan. “And we can say, you could have got to Zeus, and you’re the only one who could have done for Dee.”

“I don’t leave the base!”

“I was outside with Declan,” said Frank. “You were the only one inside with Dee. And you’ve got an airlock at the far end of the greenhouse. No one would ever see you go out, or come back.”

Zero stood up, and his chair bounced away behind him, against the soft wall of the hab and clattered to the floor. He pulled out a short curved knife and held it in a shaking hand out in front of him.

“I’ve done nothing. You’re not going to pin this on me. I’ll tell Brack who really did it.”

“You got any evidence to back that up?” Declan remained impassive. “No, you don’t. So sit down and shut up.”

Zero hesitated. Then he picked up his chair, put it back on its legs and sat down again, well away from the table.

Frank rubbed at his face. “This is crazy. We all know that. If one of us killed Zeus and Dee, we’re never going to admit it because of what Brack will do to us. That just leaves us sitting here, wondering who’s going to get it next.”

“None of us want to get spaced,” conceded Declan, “any more than we wanted to go in the Hole. Which is pretty much why we’re all here. We got tricked into this, and we have to make the best of it. But living like this? This isn’t what I’d call living. We’re all at the point where we’re terrified to even close our eyes. Our suits might kill us, the air might kill us, there’s all kinds of shit out there that’ll kill us, and then there’s the radiation giving us cancer and the reduced gravity thinning our bones.”

“We’ve done a good thing, though,” said Frank. “We built this. We had our problems but we came together and built this. We’ve done something we can be proud of. That’ll make other people be proud of us.”

“Which is why what’s happening to us now makes no sense.” Declan took a deep breath of the rarefied atmosphere. He reached into his own pocket and tossed a long, thin screwdriver on the table in front of him. “I’m tired of this shit. I’m betting you are, too.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Zero, passing his knife from hand to hand. “It can’t be none of us.”

Frank pulled out his own blade and carefully laid it on the table. He knew what he had to do, but knew that if he wasn’t very, very careful, he’d never get home. That he might never get home was something that had been preying on his mind ever since waking up on that first morning on Mars.

“Do you think XO can listen to what we’re saying?” he asked.

Declan glanced at Zero, and his knife. “When I plugged in the controls, I didn’t put any mics in. Just the fire-control cameras.”

They all looked up at the ceiling.

“There’s these, too.” Zero used his free hand to touch his sternum. “I don’t know. I guess I just forget about it most days.”

“Can we turn the comms off?” Frank felt his own chest, and the hard lump under his skin. “Dee said they were pretty much on automatic.”

“The tracking is,” said Declan. “But I can trip the fuse to the dish controls so that it stops. Doesn’t mean that a satellite won’t pick up a signal as it goes overhead.”

“Can we point the dish at the volcano first?”

“I reckon. But why do we want to, Frank? Why do we want to cut ourselves off?”

“Because we’ve got things to talk about. I’ve got things to talk about. I don’t want anyone outside this room hearing me.”

“I’ll go and do it,” said Declan. “OK with you, Zero?”

“Whatever. We can’t get into any more shit than we are, right?”

Declan’s hand hovered over the screwdriver on the table. In the end, he picked it up and pocketed it before heading towards Comms/Control. “Back in a minute.”

Frank and Zero sat there, impatiently tapping and scratching and shifting while they waited for Declan to return. It wasn’t long, but it felt like an age. He came back, sat in his chair, and put the screwdriver in front of him again.

“We’re offline until we power up the dish again,” he said. “What did you want to say that you don’t want XO to know?”

Frank pressed his hands together. They were slippery with sweat.

“I went over to the ship. I wanted to talk to Brack—about you two. I know I didn’t kill Zeus, or Dee, or Marcy or Alice. I was certain it had to be one or both of you. Declan, you killed Zeus. Zero, you killed Dee. I was going to tell Brack he had to space both of you, to save the mission, save the base.”

“Well fuck you, Frank. Fuck you very much.” Declan swept up his screwdriver and examined the point. Zero just stared, mouth open.

“He wasn’t there. He’d taken a buggy, out on to the plain. To bring back a cylinder.”

“What cylinder?” Zero rocked forward. “What are you talking about? We got all the cargo.”

“Some of that shit falling from the sky was NASA stuff,” said Frank. “He’s storing three of them down at the bottom of the Heights. I opened one of them up. I also checked out the ship. It’s… he’s put all the bodies in the tanks. The floor’s covered with empty Oxycontin packs.” He took a moment’s pause and looked down at his lap. “Before we left Earth, we—me and Brack—had a conversation. He said…”

A silence deepened.

“What did he say, Frank?” asked Declan.

“He said that if I watched his back for him, I’d get a seat on the NASA ship home. And if I told anyone about that, the deal was off.”

“Shit.”

“Fuck.”

“I told him I’d find out who the killer was. Told him I’d find the evidence.”

“Me too,” said Declan.

Frank went cold. He could feel a knot tighten inside his guts and everything went very still.

“What?”

“Exactly what he told me. Watch his back, free trip home. And I’m guessing Zero’s the same. Am I right?”

Zero gripped his knife hard and stabbed down at the tabletop. The curved point dug in and scored a line in the plastic.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Declan spun the screwdriver, and watched it whirl around on the table. The blade rotated until it came to a rest, aiming back at him. He picked it up and pushed it back into his pocket. “So what have we got?”

“What have we got? We’ve got jack,” said Zero. “He’s not going to get us all home, is he? He lied to us. And one of us is still a fucking murderer!”

“Yeah. About that,” said Declan. “Anyone else joined the dots yet?”

Frank stood up. “I’m going to suit up. I suggest everyone else does the same.”

Zero stabbed at the table again. “Will someone tell me what the fuck is going on?”

“It’s Brack,” said Frank. “He’s gone postal.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“No.”

Declan headed towards the cross-hab. “Maybe the freezing process messed with his mind. Maybe it’s the drugs, the loneliness, the stress. Maybe he’s just fucking nuts. But I’m putting my spacesuit on, right now, before I do anything else.”

Frank was left with Zero. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll think of something.”

A muscle in Zero’s lean face was jumping, right along the jaw-line. “I’m never going to get home, am I?”

“There’s three of us, and only one of him. Maybe we can put him back in his tank, refreeze him, until help gets here. The NASA astronauts can’t be far behind: all their kit’s turned up. We’ll be OK. Now, suit.”

Zero looked at the curved edge of the gardening knife. “I trusted the Man. How else was this going to go down?”

“We’ve got to play this cool. We’ll call up XO, we’ll tell them we’ve got a problem, and we’ll wait for instructions.”

“We don’t even know for sure! How do I know anything any more? This could be you and Declan doing the dirty on me. And where’s Brack now?”

“We can’t know: he’s off the grid. He’s always been off the grid.” Frank picked up the scalpel. “We’ve got to get into our suits, Zero. We’ll be at least a little bit safer in them than not.”

Zero started to cry. “What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to do what we’ve done for the last few months, and when we were in training. Look out for each other and stay together.” Frank was about to tell Zero to put the knife down, but he was holding his, and they might still need them after all. “You’re not going to get left behind. All right? I won’t let you. Forget what we promised Brack: we’ll stick together, make them take us all home.”

“Does that mean he killed Marcy? Alice?”

“I don’t know. Yes, maybe.”

Declan’s voice cut through their conversation. “You are not leaving me to face Brack on my own. Get your goddamn asses in here and get your suits on.”

Frank felt light, trembly, even inexplicably hungry. “He’s right. We’ll talk again in a minute. Now, come on.”

He stood back when Zero walked by on his way to the door. The kid was still as twitchy as a cornered dog, and likely to lash out at anything. He was right—they didn’t know anything—but none of this felt right any more.

This was their home: they’d built it, lived in it, died for it.

The main lights abruptly failed.

They were replaced a moment later by the emergency lighting, a hard blue wash over everything that left everything either black or glowing.

“Jesus, give me a break,” he heard Declan say.

Frank went to put his suit on.

There was enough space for the three of them to dress simultaneously. Frank pulled his suit off the hanger, turned it around, grabbed a life support from the rack—no time to see whether it was full or still recharging—pushed it into place, turned it on, and without taking his overalls off, got his left leg in, his right leg in, hauled the suit up to his waist, pushed his left arm in, his right arm in, ducked down and squeezed his head through the neck seal. He worked his fingers into the gloves and checked that nothing was pinched or tight by bouncing up and down on the spot. He opened the suit controls, thumbed the back-hatch closed and felt the reassuring deadening of sound as it sealed and locked in place.

The suit whispered air into his face, and he turned the suit lights on full. A blue-white glow diffused into the cross-hab. Declan was almost as fast as he was, but Zero wasn’t as practiced. It took him longer, and by the time his suit was sealed, he was breathing hard.

Frank put his helmet against Zero’s.

“In, and hold it. Hold, hold, hold. And out, nice and slow. In again. Hold, hold, hold. And out.”

He looked inside, and Zero nodded.

“I’m Ok. I’m fine.”

Frank bent awkwardly down, and picked up the scalpel. As well as the tablet and nut runner attached to his suit’s utility belt, he still had the pouch of patches. He eased the blade back in. “Let’s get the lights back on, and then phone home. We’ll be OK. Hang in there.”