One Way

7

Building Fifteen was bigger on the inside. The back wall, which abutted the side of the mountain, was hollowed out and tunneled through. The electric carts they were in—sitting on rear-facing seats, wearing their spacesuits—drove all the way, then stopped. The voice in their ears told them to get out, and prepare for a live test.

When they turned round, they were confronted by a door that looked like it belonged in one of those apocalyptic movies, behind which the generals and the president shut themselves to escape the oncoming disaster.

“Well, damn,” said Marcy. It was almost too difficult to look up to the top. “What the hell do they do here?”

A klaxon sounded and the door ground open, slowly and inexorably. It was huge, and very thick. It opened inwards, powered by massive hydraulic rams that glistened and growled. Inside, across a threshold that was high enough to need steps to get over it, was a gray empty space. Something rattled against the lip of the door, and two white-covered technicians slowly appeared in the doorway as they climbed up. They came down on the outside, and stood at the base of the steps.

Then Brack pushed through them all and mounted the steps, facing them as if he was some kind of general, addressing his troops.

Frank could hear the others groan through the open circuit.

Brack was wearing a headset: they couldn’t block him out. “Get moving. We’re on the clock.”

One by one, they filed past Brack and into the dead area beyond. Concrete floor, curved concrete walls, louvered openings high up in the ceiling. On the floor, several items drew Frank’s eye. One was a long white cargo cylinder, like they’d been playing with in Building Ten. The other things were two igloo-like structures. They had the domed shape, but instead of an entrance tunnel there were hatches that looked like airlocks.

“Listen up, you retards. This is different. This is for real. You can die in here, and there’s jack anyone can do about it. In that tube is everything you need to build and pressurize one module. Against my advice, you have been provided with a couple of lifeboats. Use them for anything other than a medical emergency and you will be canned. Use them at all and I’ll get you canned anyway.

“When I step out of this facility, the door will close and the air will be sucked out. It takes half an hour to pump down, twenty minutes to refill so you don’t explode. After that first thirty minutes is up, you will get to work. You will be working in total vacuum, and you are on your own. There are cameras. Don’t interfere with them. But there will be no help except what you can provide for yourselves.”

He stood on the thick concrete sill and kicked the stairs away. They rolled across the smooth floor and eventually stopped.

“You’re the most useless bunch of fuck-ups I have ever had the displeasure of working with. I’m kind of hoping that when they open this door again, you’ll all be dead or mad. You get out of this coffin when you’ve done. Not before. You got that?”

Those who weren’t already looking at him shuffled round so that they could.

“I asked you a question.”

“We got it,” said Frank. “We know what to do.”

The klaxon sounded and the door began to creep shut again.

“And do not start until you are told. Or I’ll can you.”

The huge door obscured his body, but they could still hear him.

“I got fifty bucks on you fucking up.”

The reverberation when the door finally closed was profound. The echo seemed to go on and on. Then distant fans in the ceiling started to take the air away. Frank walked over to the discarded steps and locked the wheels using the brake. He sat down on the third flat, like they were bleachers, ready to wait out the half-hour.

Zeus lumbered over, climbed past Frank and perched on the very top step.

“We going to go early?”

“Tempting, but cameras. We know what we have to do. We know we can do it.” Frank felt his suit begin to stiffen. “We’ve done this before. We’ve got suit time. Just another day at the office.”

“Any idea how long we got to do this?”

“That’s probably something Brack should have said. It’ll take less time than we have air for. We’ll be fine.”

The others drifted over. Alice took the seat next to Frank, effectively blocking the rest of the structure to those still standing.

“Anyone feeling light-headed, got cold spots, feel like they’re struggling for breath?”

“I’m good,” said Zero. “You good, Marcy?”

“Chill. That is, I’m fine. Dee?”

Demetrius nodded inside his suit, and unless anyone was watching, he didn’t look like he was moving.

“You got to speak to us, Demetrius,” said Frank. “Let everyone know you’re OK.”

“I’m good,” he blurted, too abruptly for the compression to cut out the initial volume. “Sorry. I’m good. This…”

“Feels like the real deal?” said Declan. “Marcy’s right. We should chill. It’s nothing we haven’t done before.”

Frank flipped out his control box and peered down at it. He had solid green lights, all the way. The situation was novel enough that he’d rather trust them than his own impressions. “I’m doing OK. Zeus?”

“Don’t worry about me. Just enjoying the view.”

Frank closed his controls. He knew it had just clicked shut, but he hadn’t heard it. He raised his boot and tapped at the steps. He could feel the vibrations, but other than that, it was silent. Sound simply wasn’t traveling. He thought about the consequences of that, being on a building site. If he was driving around in a buggy, no one would hear him coming. If he was reversing, he could run someone over. In fact, he could run them over lots of times, and unless they were on the same frequency, he wouldn’t know until he actually checked.

He could be standing right behind someone, and they wouldn’t know. And they could be right behind him…

The suits had decent enough vision out of the front, but didn’t allow more than maybe ten o’clock to two o’clock to the sides. He could stand beside someone, and unless they turned towards him, he’d still be in their blind spot.

Which was all pretty bad news.

“I want to change the rules some,” he said.

“Oh, God. Here we go.”

“Shut up, Alice.” Frank paused, but she’d finished lodging her objection. “We’ve got limited vision, and limited hearing. All the usual things that keep us out of trouble aren’t there, and we have to do this differently. So one of us—we’ll take it in turns—stands to one side and watches out for the things that no one has spotted. Things that might drop or fall or crush or impale. People about to get in each other’s way. That sort of shit. They just have to call it before it happens.”

“And you’re taking first watch, right?”

“I won’t be taking any watches. Declan? You’re up first, if that’s OK. Just sit up here and keep an eye out. We’ll swap it around every fifteen minutes or so, so we stay fresh.”

“W-will we really explode?” asked Demetrius.

“No,” said Alice. She sounded bored. Bored with even having to think about nursing any of them, now or in the future. “You’ll be unconscious within ten seconds, less when you inevitably panic. You’ll have a double pneumothorax and you’ll go into cardiac arrest within a minute. There’s a window of about thirty seconds where, if you’re repressurized, you’ll live. Probably.”

“No one’s dying today,” said Frank.

“Accidents happen,” she said.

Frank exchanged a look with her. “Preventable accidents happen. So let’s prevent them.”

They waited, and after what seemed an age, the voice told them to start.

Stirring himself, Frank got to his feet, feeling the drag of the life-support system on his back as he stood. The steps wobbled, but didn’t rattle. Strange how things that he’d taken for granted were so important in building up the environment around him. All he had was the sound of his breathing.

“OK,” he said, and started walking towards the cylinder. He had no idea if anyone else was following him, because he couldn’t see them. It was just him, the few inches to his faceplate, and on the other side of that, pretty much instant death.

He was going to a planet where that was the rule, not the exception.

They cracked open the cylinder—the air trapped inside made the hatches pop out—and they started dragging the drums out, lining them up, ready for Frank to give them the once-over.

Declan made what sounded like a yawn, and Frank wasn’t having that. “Stay frosty, man,” he said, belatedly remembering that everyone would hear him equally loudly. “Declan. We need you alert.”

“I am alert. No one’s done anything stupid yet, that’s all.”

The first drum he opened contained the nut runners, and spare batteries. He counted them out, checked them all, and handed them round. He tapped three drums. “This, this, and this. Let’s do it.”

The mat went down first, rolled out with what should have been a loud slap and a gust of wind, but instead done in total silence. Then the airlock was carried into position—it took four of them—and placed face down on the concrete. Frank checked it, and got Marcy to check it as well: he didn’t want the thing going on backwards.

He swapped Marcy out for Declan. They unrolled the plastic from the airlock surround, and started building the inner ring. All in absolute, uncanny silence.

“This is weird as fuck,” said Declan.

“Makes it difficult to concentrate. You expect the tool to make a noise. It doesn’t. You wonder if it’s working, when it obviously is. That’s OK. It’s a test. We’re supposed to find things out so it doesn’t freak us when we’re up there.”

Up there. Mars was no more up than the Sun was down, but soon it would be Earth that was up there, just a pale dot in a pink sunset.

The first inner ring was done. They tied the airlock to it with tensioned cables. They lifted over the main plastic tube and positioned it. They started work on the first outer ring.

And Frank was tired. He was tired in a way that he shouldn’t have been. Every move, deliberate and precise, needed additional effort: not much, just a little, but all those added up. His timer told him they’d been working forty-six minutes.

They could go to the hour, and everyone then take ten minutes. They couldn’t eat anything, but there was water in the suit, supplied by a little sippy straw.

Frank swapped out Zeus for Alice, because she was as old as he was, and likely to be feeling the strain as much as him. Not that she would ever admit to it. So he cycled her to be on watch.

And people were starting to drop things, misthread and misalign bolts, and get on each other’s nerves. Without suits, they’d be halfway done by now, but they were barely a quarter of the way through.

The last section of the outer ring went into place. Zero secured it in position, and stood slowly, wearily. He was almost reeling. Frank had had enough. It was starting to get dangerous.

“OK. Let’s take a break.”

No one complained. They were that exhausted. They put their tools down—and there was no way they could do that on the Martian surface, so Frank had them all pick them up again and stow them on the belts that went around their waists, and only then could they rest.

Except finding a position to rest in was awkward. Lying on his back wasn’t an option, due to the hump of the life support. On his front, there was the bulge of the faceplate. On his side was possible, but sitting, slumped forward, forearms on thighs, head bowed, was about the best any of them could get. Four of them could fit on the steps. Small folding stools would be a bonus, but there weren’t any. The remaining three—Frank, Zeus, Marcy—stacked the drum lids up until they reached a respectable height, and sat down.

The cooling air blowing around Frank’s face was drying him out even while it cleared his faceplate of fog. His eyes felt scratchy and his skin was tight. He couldn’t even rub some life back into his features, so he pulled faces for a while and drank some water.

How bad would this have been if they hadn’t forced him up and down the Mountain every day, or made him spin on the static bike until he couldn’t feel his legs? He could grudgingly admit to the point of it, while still disliking the actual effort. No, it wouldn’t be this bad on Mars. It’d still be grueling, but the suits were designed to work there, not here.

They sat, mostly in silence, or exchanged one or two words that required little in the way of reply. The clock ticked on, numbers on his console that slowly accumulated like falling dust. He could feel the ache in his muscles slowly dissipate, to be replaced by a general fatigue.

He let the timer run past the ten-minute mark, then decided that they should start again.

“You heard what the man said: we don’t get out of here until we’re done, so let’s get it finished.”

No one moved until he did. He took his nut runner back off his belt, and while three of them built the next ring, the others assembled the outriggers.

It was still surreal, as if everything that was happening outside of his suit was being played on a screen with the sound turned off. Disassociative. Mute images of people working. A silent film.

Music. That was what they needed. Anything, maybe without words, but something other than their breathing to measure time by. When they were on Mars, that was what he was going to do. Get Demetrius to load up some music, if they had any, and play it out over the headphones. It was what the chain gangs used to do. Sing. And what were they but a high-tech chain gang? They might be wearing spacesuits rather than shackles, but that didn’t fundamentally alter what the relationship was.

He wasn’t the only one to think that. He heard someone humming. There was a threshold of volume below which speech wouldn’t be broadcast. It often clipped the first word of their conversations if they didn’t precede it with an opening sound. That made it difficult now to pick out the tune, but after a few bars it became clear:

“Swing low, sweet chariot.”

Frank looked to see who it was. It sounded odd over the speakers. Higher pitched. But everybody was bent over their work, faces down. He couldn’t tell.

“I’m sometimes up, and I’m sometimes down, comin’ for to carry me home.”

“Keep this channel clear. No unnecessary traffic.”

It stopped. It hurt when it stopped. Frank spoke into the quiet. “It’s OK. We just need to keep going. Stay alert and we can get the job done.”

Alice broke in. “Everyone check their suits, make sure you’re all the right temperature and breathing the right mix.”

They did that, and reported they were all well within the green bands.

Except Demetrius, who said: “I’m losing pressure.”

Frank put his tools down, then picked them up again and hung them from the clip at his waist. He located Demetrius, who was staring at his chest-screen, tapping at it as if he could make the numbers change.

“That’s what this says, right?” He tilted the screen so that Frank could see it. “That I’m losing air.”

Frank, reading it upside down, watched as the digits fluctuated up and down. The green indicator was turning amber, then back to green again, as the suit detected the lower pressure and dispensed more air to make up. “Why didn’t your alarm go off?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why. F-Frank? What do I do?”

“You don’t panic. You keep breathing easily. It’s a slow leak. We just have to find it and plug it.”

“I’ve got a leak? Do I bail? Do I get canned if I do? Frank, I don’t want to go in the Hole.”

“No one’s going in the Hole, Demetrius. I need to check your suit.”

Marcy was there. “It’s going to be fine, Dee. Just stand with your arms out.”

Frank took one side, Marcy the other. Everyone else was watching. Frank checked the seams, the seals, the outer fabric layer.

“Do you feel cold anywhere?” asked Marcy.

“I don’t know: my arm, maybe.”

“Left or right?”

“Right. I just thought…”

Marcy was on the right, and she rechecked. “I’ve got it. There’s a tear just above the elbow.”

Demetrius immediately tried to turn his arm so he could see, but couldn’t because it was his elbow. “What do I do? What do I do? What if I run out of air?”

Frank grabbed Demetrius’s arm and held it tight. “Stop moving around. Let me see.” Quite why this was his job was anyone’s guess, but there he was. He held the cloth taut, and yes, there was a rent, an inch long, just behind the elbow joint, on the upper arm. “How the hell did you do this?”

“I just got caught on a latch. I pulled, and… it came free. I didn’t know.”

“You got to be more careful.”

“What do we do? We’ve got something to fix this with, right?”

They hadn’t been given anything. Help was the other side of a six-foot-thick concrete wall.

“You’re going to use one of the lifeboats.”

“He’ll can me. Brack’ll can me.”

“He might can everyone,” said Alice. “I wouldn’t put it past him. We know there are others in training, and we’ve already had one replacement.” She looked pointedly at Declan. “I’m not going to risk that. So we improvise.”

She pushed Marcy out of the way and inspected the tear in the cloth. She dug her fingers into the hole and pulled it apart. There was no tearing sound. She pinched and pulled at the inner suit, and stepped back. “God only knows what you thought you were doing. You caught the seam at the elbow pad, yanked it hard enough that you’ve torn a flap in the pressure garment. Mostly seals when you bend your arm, but when you straighten it, the inner suit relaxes and it opens up more.”

“Have we got something to fix it with?” asked Marcy.

“We could use a ratchet strap as a tourniquet,” said Frank. “What’s the long-term effect of vacuum on just an arm?”

“Swelling, bruising. Possible embolism. If we tourniquet it too long, he’ll end up losing his arm. I wouldn’t recommend it.” Alice looked at the hole again. “Get me the strap anyway: I’ll need it. Find me something with a blade, or that can be sharpened to a edge. I can seal a hole that size.”

“Shouldn’t I just put my hand on it, or something?” Demetrius tried to put his free hand over the tear, and Alice batted him away.

“You’re losing air, you little punk. You’ll continue to lose air until that hole is sealed. I am not, repeat not, getting canned because you did something monumentally stupid. Do you hear me?”

Demetrius nodded inside his helmet.

“Now I need a blade.”

“We don’t have a knife,” said Frank, “or anything like that.”

“He made that hole with something, didn’t he? We’re cons. If we can’t make a shiv, what the hell are we doing here?”

“I can get one of the latches,” said Zeus. “Five minutes rubbing it down on the floor will give it a rough edge.”

“It’ll do.” She held Demetrius’s arm bent. “Don’t move.”

Zeus broke off the latch with part of the unfinished ring, and started stropping it on the floor. They were all just standing around watching him, and there wasn’t really any need for that.

“OK, this is Alice’s thing,” Frank told them. “We can get some work done: the sooner we’re out of here, the better.”

They left Demetrius with Alice, and went back to work. Declan took up spotting for them again, and with Zeus making the blade, it was just Frank, Marcy and Zero.

“We got to work fast, man,” said Zero.

“No we don’t. Just steady. That’s all. We can’t afford any more mistakes.”

“But Dee’s air?”

“Which is why we need to carry on. We’re getting there. Ring’s almost done. We just need the outriggers fixed on, and the module set out. Then we can inflate it, and we’re finished.”

“This wouldn’t happen on Mars, right? We’d get him inside straight away and that’d be that. We wouldn’t have to do any of this. So why didn’t they give us anything to fix the suits with?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps we should ask for stuff. Sticky patches and the like.”

“You going to ask, Frank?”

“OK. I’ll ask.”

Zeus finished sharpening up the flat piece of metal, and he carried it over to Alice. Frank let the other two carry on working, and went to see what she was going to do. Zeus was Alice’s second, but there wasn’t any medical stuff going on here. This was suit repair.

“It’s sharp,” warned Zeus. “Don’t get that anywhere near your suit.”

“Loop the strap around his arm, around the biceps.” She used the blade to saw away some of the loose outer layer, and wadded it up, folding it in half, and half again. She gave that to Frank. “Don’t just stand there: make yourself useful. Zeus, straighten his arm, hold him tight.”

“What’re you going to do?” Demetrius’s voice was tight and high. “What?”

“Shut up,” said Alice, and stabbed his elbow through the tear.

“Fuck,” said Frank.

“Pad,” she said. Then she just snatched it from Frank and pressed it hard against the sudden bloom of frothing blood. “Strap.”

Zeus pushed the fabric strap down one-handed and tightened it in place. He held Demetrius fast with the other.

“Not too tight. We’re trying to hold the pad in place, not stop his circulation.”

“You cut me,” Demetrius protested. “She cut me.”

“The blood will soak into the cloth, and when it coagulates it’ll form an airtight seal. Any more questions from anyone?”

“You could have told us,” said Frank. “You could have told him.”

“Because that would’ve kept his breathing rate down, wouldn’t it? He can still spot for us, and now he’s not leaking out.”

It was true. Demetrius’s suit’s internal pressure had stabilized.

“Go sit down,” Frank told him. “You’ll be fine.”

The boy’s face was ashen, but he nodded. He went over to the steps, and Declan rejoined them down at the ring.

He grinned. “I don’t think much of her bedside manner, but she gets the job done.”

Yes, she’d got the job done. But she was dangerous. Frank wondered what XO made of that little show. “Go and get the ropes,” he said. “Let’s get this upright.”