The guy had said south, and at the time he’d been roughly fifty miles south-east of MBO. The open container was a few miles short of that—the cross showed exactly where that had been. Frank was going to guess that the tracks he’d found out on the plain, the ones that seemed to come from, and go to, the south, were also made by the second crew. Call that the very extreme of its range, because he hadn’t found any north of that.
So, if he had two points that he thought were as far out as they could reach, could he calculate roughly where they’d started from?
Ninety miles south was smack out in the middle of the plain, at the far end of the huge cracks in the ground the map called the Uranius Fossae. But realistically, they could be anywhere on an arc going south-east to south-west, from the southern slopes of Ceraunius Tholus to out in the middle of nowhere.
If they were to the south or south-west, they could only get to him by over-reaching. It’d have to be a one-way journey, in the hope that they could recharge and swap out at MBO. And if they were at the south-west end, it was almost inconceivable that anyone would dare make the trip. Frank would be safe.
If it was to the south-east, though, on the southern flanks of the volcano… that would put them just within ninety miles of MBO. They’d have to drive up and over fifteen thousand feet of mountain, and Frank didn’t know whether that was feasible. He spent a little longer looking at pixels, measuring distances, then pushed the tablet away.
If he was designing a network of colonies on Mars, then isolating them from each other didn’t make any sense—separate enough that they were self-sufficient, that they didn’t overuse whatever resources were nearby, sure. But close enough that they could be used as staging posts to the next base, if there were problems. Say if something broke down that someone couldn’t fix on site, but a guy in the next base could. What was the betting that XO had deliberately put them within range of a there-and-back journey? When he thought about it, it was obvious. They were evil, not stupid.
What he couldn’t get out of his mind was how hungry that other astronaut had looked.
How long had they been out there, on the other side of the volcano? Things had been falling from the sky for months, and only gone quiet in the last few weeks. Certainly, they’d been there long enough to have scoped out MBO already. If they already knew where he was, and that he was alone, and that he’d killed Brack and was holding XO to ransom, why hadn’t they moved against him already?
The only conclusion was that they hadn’t been able.
The man he’d met didn’t have comms. He didn’t have comms out on the volcano, and if he wasn’t able to pick up the locator beacons for the supply drops, he didn’t have comms, period. Frank’s own descent ship had come with all those functions, and the second mission had clearly made it to the surface…
But if the ship was broken, and they had no downlink? They had no way of calling home, and no way of home calling them.
That would explain everything.
It also meant that while they knew where he was, in the sense that they might remember where the MBO was supposed to be situated, they had no maps, and only the sun to navigate by. Compasses didn’t work on Mars, either.
So if—a huge if—they couldn’t talk to XO and XO couldn’t talk to them, they were effectively isolated from everything. From Earth, from MBO, from all their supply drops. All they had was what they’d brought with them or could scavenge, and if Frank thought that his own initiation to the Martian surface had been a hardscrabble, then those guys had to be having it so much worse.
In other circumstances, he’d feel sorry for them.
Frank checked the tablet to see if Luisa had responded. If she didn’t reply soon, he was probably going to have to decide what to do about that, too. But it chimed as he was holding it.
She simply said: “Frank, please stay calm. I don’t understand what you mean by ‘another base’. Don’t do anything to jeopardize your safety, please. Can you tell me exactly what’s happened, so I know what questions to ask?”
Yes, he could. In no uncertain terms.
“I met another astronaut, wearing an XO suit and driving an XO buggy, out on the eastern side of Ceraunius. There is only one way he could have got there, and that’s if XO put him there. The hour I gave you for giving me answers is close to up, and I meant what I said.” Send.
Just when he’d got to a level of complexity that he could actually cope with, something else came over the horizon—literally in this case—and pissed all over his parade.
Sitting there, at the comms desk, he was warm, clean, well fed. He had water and air, and the prospect of getting home again. Just over the hill was a bunch of people who had very little and would probably kill him. Should he have struck first? Sabotaged the other buggy? No. Maybe. Just as long as they left him alone.
There was no guarantee of that, though, and if Frank was right, then there could never be a guarantee of that.
Had he made a mistake of showing surprise when he saw the other man? Was that the clue that he’d dropped the ball? A Brack who’d known about the second base wouldn’t have done such a thing. Maybe he’d messed it up. But he’d been called Brack by the XO man.
If they knew who Brack was, and what his function was, then that might give them cause to hold back.
Amid all his guesswork, he knew one thing for certain: only he had his own interests at heart. Only he was going to keep him safe.
So while XO sorted their shit out, he was going to suit up again, drive out to Long Beach with a trailer and get that airlock. He had enough daylight to manage it, just, and he wasn’t going to leave it out there any longer than he had to. He certainly wasn’t going to be heading out to the plain any time soon.
He was bunkering down. Four weeks. Four weeks to hold out. He could do that, right?
He clipped the tablet to his suit, took the gun and the bullets out of his pockets and put them separately but together in his pouch bag, loaded up a fresh life support, and clambered in through the back hatch.
His spacesuit looked as tired as he felt. How many miles did these things have to have on the clock before they wore out? He could very well ask the same question of himself. Fifty-two. He was fifty-two years old and he was on Mars.
And his son was on Earth. Focus, Frank. Focus.
He cycled the airlock, and wondered if he was being watched, even now.
The first buggy was still recharging. It’d take hours for the electricity to strip the water in the fuel cell back into its component gases. He had two vehicles, though. Was that one advantage he had over the others? Maybe not. If they had one, they probably had their second one too, even if they didn’t have the power to recharge both simultaneously.
He swapped the trailer over, and drove out to the drop-off, pausing to stare into the distance, along the length of Rahe, trying as best he could to see if there was anything moving down there. It always came down to the amount of dust in the air. Currently, visibility was some fifteen or twenty miles, which was good, but still not enough to see detail at the far end of the crater. He could follow the line of Beverly Hills, but they became nothing but shapes carved into the late afternoon, and the crater wall was a hazy, rosy glow, bright and undifferentiated.
Whatever he thought he saw, he still had to get the airlock back. He drove down the drop-off and onto Sunset.
Worst-case scenario: XO had planned another mission, from the start, in case Phase three didn’t work out. They were primed to step in and take over if it went wrong, or something happened to Brack.