He knew he’d be on the clock. He knew what he wanted to do with that time. Find his boy. Give him a hug. Tell him that he loved him and was proud of him whatever. Apologize to Jacqui for what he’d done. That shit had gone down without her knowledge or her assent. The kid he’d shot’s family? Maybe not. He was sorry, but it was unlikely they’d want to hear from him, let alone see him.
After that? Fuck XO. Let them come. He’d be pretty much done by that point. He knew he was never going to make old bones. Oh, he could lead them on a merry dance, and maybe they’d give up first, and leave him alone, or maybe he’d give up and let them find him. That bridge needed to be crossed at some point.
For now, he had a deal. And that deal started with driving three dead bodies over to the ship.
In their black-and-white parachute shrouds, they’d been stiff like boards. Easy, then, especially now they behaved more like luggage than corpses, to lever them upright and push them onto the open latticework of a trailer, then hitch that up to the back of one of the buggies. Each one went lengthways, and he’d fastened them down with ratchet straps from the cargo cylinders.
He unplugged the fuel cell from the base power supply. The cold had made the cable stiff and unyielding, and it wasn’t going back into its drum container. He dropped the connector inside under the lid and would finish coiling it up when he’d returned and the air was warmer.
Frank set off deliberately slowly across the river delta Dee had christened the Heights. The buggy’s wheel plates would be brittle, and he hadn’t worked out a way to replace any of them yet: repairing a wheel, out in the middle of nowhere, on his own, wasn’t something he wanted to do. He was going to have to be more cautious from now on. No more joy-rides up the Santa Clara.
The journey was barely two miles, but it still took a quarter of an hour. The morning fog had burned off, leaving the cold, hard ground with long shadows from the rough fist-sized rocks that littered the surface. Each shadow twinkled white, a frost-pocket that would soon evaporate away, but dust was now rising from the turning wheels.
The rising sun illuminated the horizon far more brightly than the sky above; the wind blew the dust up into the air where it caught the light. The zenith was still nearly black. Between, the typical pinkish blue was smudged with ribbons of high cloud that seemed to chase towards the night.
It could be called beautiful and perhaps, in the right company, it might be. Right now, though, he knew how lethal Mars could be, even without someone actively trying to kill him. To him, it was a barren wasteland that was indifferent as to whether he lived or died. One mistake, and it’d all be over.
The ship they’d landed in was a bullet-shaped white cone that sat off the Martian surface using four retractable legs. Its off-white color had slowly stained red, and sand, blown by the ephemeral winds, had mounted up against the dinner-plate-shaped feet, burying them completely. It already looked part of the landscape, and Frank was used to seeing it there, either as a small pearl in the distance, or as a landmark as he drove past.
Only once recently had he had cause to stop and go in. That had… ended badly. He’d found the floor swamped with empty painkiller packets and used food containers. He’d found four dead people in the sleep pods. It had been, ironically, his wake-up call that all was not well with Brack.
He let go of the throttle on the little steering wheel mounted on the controls, and the buggy coasted to a halt opposite the steps to the ship’s airlock. He jumped down to the surface. The gravity made it seem like he was flying.
Under the ship was a bare area that had been scoured clean down to the bedrock by the landing rockets. It had only slowly been reclaimed by the dust. Frank pulled the bodies off the trailer one by one, and laid them out beneath the downward-flaring nozzle, then retreated again. He’d put them inside only when it was time for the ship to leave, carrying its cargo of evidence. Because rot and decay, that was still going to happen, right?
He climbed up the steps to the airlock, wondered if it was going to cycle, because it was XO’s ship and they could still probably control it remotely. But the lights changed and the door opened automatically. If XO really did control the ship, what could they do to him? Nothing in the twenty or so minutes it took for a signal to reach Earth and a command to come back. He ought to make that a rule, not to spend any longer than that inside the ship. Though XO probably had other things to worry about right now.
He entered the airlock and cycled it through again. The outer door slid shut, and slowly sound returned.
Inside was as he’d left it. Of course it was. There was no one but him who could have moved anything. And he didn’t really believe there were the ghosts of his dead crewmates walking around: that was just a coping mechanism, along with the dreams of knives and asphyxia and standing naked to the Martian day, screaming as his life’s water boiled out of him. OK, not dreams. Flashbacks. He blinked them away.
The floor was still covered in trash. Brack’s sleeping mat was still stretched out on the storey above, and beyond that, on the third level, the sleep pods containing four corpses. There were lockers he probably needed to check, see what supplies were still usable, but not today. He wasn’t even sure why he’d come inside. Was it to confirm to himself that he really was alone?
Probably.
Lights burned on the consoles, red, amber and green. Blue lights for power. Some were flashing, but he knew better than to touch them. Flipping switches might well cause him more problems than he already had. Why add to them unnecessarily? The base was sufficient for his immediate needs.
There was still something strange—eerie, even—about this abandoned vessel turned into a morgue. It had brought eight people to Mars. One was left. And he didn’t need it any more. It was part of his past, not his future, however that turned out and however long it might be. It was a monument. It might as well be made of granite.
He cycled the airlock and felt his suit grow stiff as the air pumped away. He checked his read-out to make sure he had plenty of air and power. Then he opened the outer door, and there was Mars again. Still cold, still lifeless, still red.
While he was here with the trailer, he might as well collect one of the four cargo containers which had all the NASA equipment inside, that Brack had parked at the bottom of the drop-off. They had to come up sometime, and now was as good a time as any. He could stick them all in the boneyard outside the base and then transfer stuff, a few boxes at a time, each time he went back through the airlock. Otherwise, he’d have a week of nothing but lifting and carrying, and continually running the airlock pumps, which was going to exhaust both him and the base’s batteries. He wasn’t going to be as diligent as Declan at keeping the panels clean; he had enough power for normal circumstances, but repeatedly cycling the airlock? That would quickly leave him in the dark.
It could even kill him. Better not do that.
He hadn’t been down to the crater floor for a while. The last time had been early on in that long night, the one he was trying to forget but couldn’t. He drove the slope carefully, the empty trailer bouncing and slewing around behind him as it slipped unweighted on the loose sand. Ideally, he’d have enough cable on the winch drum to park up at the top and just pull the cylinders towards him, but the drop was a lot more than a hundred and fifty feet.
Marcy had taught him how to reverse the trailer into position. She’d been the first to die. Not an accident, but such was the situation at the time, Frank didn’t know that it would have mattered if he’d been the one with the “faulty” CO2 scrubber. The others would have carried on without him, just in the same way that they carried on without Marcy. By her dying, there’d been one less mouth to feed, one pair of lungs fewer to breathe the air.