He racked his life support, dumped the panels back in Comms, and went to reread Phase three.
OK, so there it was, buried in the small print, because it didn’t involve people: arrival of MAV, on or around Sol 529. He had to research what MAV was, and found it in another, even more technical document.
Mars Ascent Vehicle. It was his ride home, or at least off Mars. It was designed to suck Martian air in, and turn it into fuel, a process that would take about one hundred and twenty sols. It would take him and the rest of the astronauts back into Mars orbit, to dock with the transit ship which then would spend two hundred days going home. By which time he’d either be dead or safe.
It was happening. He had a deadline. Either he’d finish in time, or he wouldn’t.
7
[Message file #98943 12/3/2048 1843 MBO Mission Control to MBO Rahe Crater]
Thanks for giving the MAV a clean bill of health, Frank. It must have been a wonderful sight, watching it come down—it almost makes me wish I was there with you!
You seem to be making really good progress on Phase 3. I know that this is hard for you, and it’s not what you would have chosen, but I think we’re working well together now. You’ve been diligent in your work, and creative with your solutions to problems that have presented themselves. It’s great to see you take the initiative.
Remember, wherever in the sol you are, I’m just at the other end of this app. I’ll answer straight away.
Take care.
Luisa
[message ends]
Frank had increased the power bank by another battery pack, and plugged in another ten kW of collectors. He’d supplemented his larder with an extraordinary array of instant puddings and drinks powders. He now had spare wheels. And extra fuel cells. And hab sections. He had airlocks, and he’d left one, complete with a spare life support and oxygen cylinders, at the top of Long Beach. Just in case he got caught out at some point.
It should have always been like this. At the start, XO had kept them short. He remembered the early days of not enough power, not enough food, not enough EVA time, of having to make decisions among themselves—no help or guidance from Brack—as to what to prioritize and what could wait. It had been deliberate, and it was one of the reasons he hated them. The second round of launches had shown that they could have supplied everything sooner. He still had to work with XO, though, and had to mute his anger.
There was more out there stilclass="underline" he was just about ahead of schedule in the base, and he needed a day off from the close-work and monotony of scraping blood out of the ceiling voids. He looked at the tablet, and decided that he really wanted to see what the In-situ Resource Management Device did. It was on the eastern flank of Ceraunius Tholus, by no means the furthest adrift of the deliveries, but still twenty miles out from Long Beach. That made it a seventy-mile round trip. Doable on one pack, just.
Not to say that Luisa wasn’t nervous about his trips out. She cautioned him to be careful, to repeatedly ask himself if his journey was really necessary. If he died out on the plain, then MBO stayed in exactly the same state as he’d left it. Partially bloody, obviously not constructed by robots.
Maybe that was why he was doing it? Subconsciously subverting the deal with XO. Not wanting to entirely obliterate the memories of Alice and Marcy, Zeus and Dee, Declan and Zero. They had been here, and now he was colluding with the same murdering bastards that had tried to add him to that tally.
He kept on seeing them, in and around the base. It wasn’t right, but he was lonely. He’d even taken to reading his way back through Brack’s increasingly wayward interaction with Mission Control, becoming more expansive and flowery as his opioid addiction had grown.
He’d never seen himself as a people person. Yet he’d worked pretty much every day of his life alongside others. It was the isolation that was getting to him. Despite having the whole of Mars to explore, it was still his prison, and still his solitary. It would be over soon. Another couple of months to keep it together, and the astronauts would be here. Just as long as he didn’t cry when they arrived, he’d be fine. In the meantime, he had Luisa. He couldn’t stop telling her stuff he really ought to keep to himself. But he couldn’t tell anyone else because they were all dead.
Maybe he was falling apart in the same way Brack had. Maybe this was just a nightmare and he’d wake up to find… what?
That it was all still true.
He suited up, and cycled the airlock. There was no getting away from it, no wishful thinking that’d lessen his situation. He was marooned on Mars. He opened the airlock door, and there it was. The vast barren slope of the volcano, the pink sky, the red soil.
He unplugged the buggy, checked the trailer hitch was still tight, and drove away from the base. The draft in his face was almost convincing as an analog for speed, except it was constant whether he was moving or not.
To his left was the MAV, tracking the sun with its panels, making fuel. To his right, after a couple of miles, was the descent ship, three black-and-white-shrouded bodies tucked underneath. Then down the slope to the crater floor and onto Sunset. Paradoxically, the sun was just rising, straight into his face. Elsewhere, so he understood—on the Moon, in space—astronauts had tinted visors they could pull down to prevent glare. On Mars, the sun was never more than a luminous disk. It was just about bright enough to cast sharp shadow, but that depended on the dust-load in the sky, and, more often than not, shade was a solid mass, carved from air like a dark slab. Dust. It was always about the dust.
The same dust that was spinning from his turning wheels: most of it fell in an arc like thrown sand, even though the grains were much smaller. The finest particles, however, invisible and impossible, were carried away like gauze, and they stuck to whatever they touched. Particularly his spacesuit’s faceplate, but pretty much everything and in everything. In the damp atmosphere of the habs, the dust they carried in ended up smeared on the floor, but outside it just clung.
The ghosts on Mars would be made of dust.
By the time he reached Long Beach, the slope was in full sun. He’d done it in the dark before. It was less fun than advertised. The collapsed crater wall that allowed access to the wider plains beyond was difficult terrain and a relentless climb, fifteen hundred feet at a ten per cent gradient. He squeezed the accelerator paddles and felt himself tip back in his seat.
The motors growled, and the stones clattered. It was an endurance test, for both him and the machine.
The buggy crawled over the lip of the crater, and Frank brought it to a halt next to the airlock. He’d piled loose stones against its sides, and finished it off with a cargo strap that went across the top and into the middle of two cairns that kept the anchors in place.
He did his usual checks—everything was nominal—and opened up the map so that he knew exactly which direction he was heading in. South-east, and up on the lower slopes of the volcano: the lower slopes only, and a good job too, since the summit before the yawning flat-bottomed crater at the top maxed out at twenty thousand feet above the level of the plain.
He followed his already-made track, heading south. His track, and no one else’s. He never did find what had caused Brack to take such a roundabout route. He’d checked the most recent satellite maps he had, in case he’d missed something, but there was nothing out to the east but more rock and more craters and more dust.
He could imagine getting lost out on the plain: there were so few landmarks to navigate by, and if the dust blew up, or the tablet was unable to contact, through his suit, the satellites, he’d be in trouble.