So what’s it going to be? You want this base standing when NASA turn up? Or do you want NASA to know what you did here? Because if I think—hell, if I suspect you’re thinking—that you’re trying to replace me with one of them, so help me God I’m taking you down with me. I will find a way.
I am ready to call the truce off.
You’ve got an hour to start talking some sense, because otherwise we are finished. Got that?
[transcript ends]
His journey back was arduous, crossing unfamiliar and difficult terrain, and he had to rely on his map to guide him. But he thought the risk of breaking a wheel was necessary: he’d been able to travel a significant distance over the lower slopes of the volcano, all frozen lava steps and very little dust. What there had been was thin, and seemed often-blown. The tracks he had made would be resurfaced in a few days. Certainly, it seemed windier on the exposed slopes than it did on the plains.
Praying for a storm that would wipe everything was pointless: either it happened or it didn’t. In its absence, he had to make plans.
He’d need to remove the airlock at the top of Long Beach, bring it back, along with all the spare air he’d left with it. It could so very easily be used against him.
What else? He needed to know where the other XO mission had come down, and when. He needed to be able to work out for himself whether or not they could reach him. He also needed to know what they were supposed to be doing there.
He guessed they were, yes, south of him. But how far? Did their ranges barely overlap, or was there the possibility of travel between their descent ship and MBO? He needed to get a map out in front of him, when he wasn’t being shaken around on the rock-hard lava. He knew his buggies well enough to know what kind of distances they could manage, depending on the terrain, whether he was towing, whether he needed the lights on, and whether he could take it easy—going fast used disproportionately more watts. If he called it two hundred miles, generously, then that would cover a surprising amount of Mars.
Of course, if it was a round trip, then it’d be half that. And even then, the buggies weren’t the limiting factor. Unless the infrastructure was in place to swap out the life support, then somewhere between hours eight and nine a spacesuit would run out of oxygen. Even if the buggy was doing its top speed of twenty, and that was only possible on perfectly flat concrete, that brought the range from base down to eighty-ninety miles.
If the second base was beyond that, he might be OK. Possibly. Closer, and the potential for more interaction was significantly higher. Frank didn’t want to interact with these newcomers. He wanted nothing at all to do with them. They frightened him.
Perhaps he should have offed the guy while he had the chance. He clenched his jaw and pulled back his cracking lips. Perhaps. He hadn’t. He’d let him go. For all sorts of reasons. And some of those reasons were the same as why he’d held the dying Brack’s hand, even though it was Frank who’d killed him.
He was running low on air, and watts. That would normally be a cause for huge concern, and he was never comfortable with letting the reserves get as thin as he had. But it was a good sign right now. The narrower the margin, the less likely that the other guy—the other guys, and he really ought to have tried to find out how many of them there were—could reach MBO.
He’d just about squeak it. He’d traveled the southern edge of the crater, up on the volcanic ledges, and he’d reached the Santa Clara. The map didn’t give that many clues as to whether he’d find a route down into it, or whether he’d need to leave the buggy where it was, and hoof the couple of miles across the Heights to MBO. The resolution was decent enough, but in close-up the pictures got granular.
In the end, it wasn’t anywhere near as difficult as he’d feared. There was some slumping of material—a landslide maybe, a cliff that had fallen inwards onto the Heights—that let him slither down from the volcano and onto the flat plain that now housed MBO, the MAV and his descent ship.
He eked out his watts to get him to the base, and the first thing he did, even though he was at less than ten per cent air and well within the margin of error that meant his pack could give out any minute, was to scan the horizon to see if anything was coming.
No plumes of dust. No moving shapes. It was like it had always been since before he’d arrived. Still. Desolate. Dead.
Then he plugged the buggy back into the battery, and entered the cross-hab airlock.
His hand went to his nut runner again. Could someone have slipped inside while he’d been away? Of course. There was no way of locking the doors completely—though there was a way once he was inside, he realized. But there wasn’t any way of protecting the hab structures themselves. They were composed of a flexible plastic skin, held rigid by a metal frame, screwed together by bolts. Anyone who wanted to wreck it, could. It was what he’d threatened XO with, and now it was threatened against him.
Goddammit, what a mess. He’d allowed himself hope, that he could outwit the company and get one over on them. How could he have been so stupid? Trusting XO? That was never going to happen again.
The airlock cycled. He checked the atmosphere before taking his suit off, and made certain he clipped the scuba mask and O2 tank onto his belt before he did a thorough search of the habs, upper and lower levels. He’d thought he was done with this. Clearly, he was wrong.
As he went, he opened the inner door of every airlock. Such was their design that the outer, Mars-facing door couldn’t now be opened automatically, and not manually until the pressure either side had equalized. And that would give Frank more than enough time to get into his suit and figure out what to do.
His last call was to the Comms/Control hab.
The gun was still tucked in behind the monitor. His hand hovered over it, then he carefully picked it up, painfully aware that a gun very similar to this one was the reason he was on Mars in the first place. It still felt unnaturally light. A gun should have heft, a weight to its purpose, and not feel like a plastic toy.
He pulled the magazine free, and, placing the gun on the desk in front of the keyboard, he clicked the rounds out one by one into his hand. Fifteen. He pushed them back in, and put the magazine in his left pocket. The gun went in his right.
Sitting in the chair, scrubbing at his scalp, he felt… he didn’t know what he felt. Like this was the last thing he wanted to do, and at the same time, the only thing he could. No, he knew exactly what he felt. He felt vulnerable. He’d been backed into a corner, and his instinct had told him to pick up a gun and get ready to use it.
It was what, four weeks now until NASA arrived? Until then, he was on his own. No, that wasn’t right. He wasn’t on his own, he’d only thought he was. This was worse. This was far, far worse.
His tablet was still on his spacesuit. Time to call home. Time to demand some answers.
He typed it out. Oh, he was angry. Angry and scared and just about holding it together. Send. He was going to have to wait to see what Luisa and her team at Mission Control were going to say. In the meantime, he had some maps to stare at.
The question—the million-dollar question—was simply this: could they reach him?
He’d been at the absolute limit of his endurance, both in terms of what his spacesuit could manage, and his buggy. The other guy? Well, he didn’t look so good, but he still had a working buggy, and therefore had to have a way of charging it up. Maybe from the descent ship, but maybe they’d got lucky and found the RTG for a bit of base load. They sure as hell didn’t have the solar panels that were currently plugged in outside MBO. Had they a second set? Maybe XO had suddenly got a lot more generous.