Then there was the atmosphere balance in the greenhouse itself. Was that automatic, or did it need him to manually vent the excess oxygen and top up the carbon dioxide? Not going to think about that now either.
He carried both bowls to the kitchen, and stared down at the fish. They stared blankly back. Their gills were still pulsing, and they gave the occasional twitch of their tails. Frank frowned as his stomach shrank at the thought of killing them. This was not the time to get squeamish. The protein wasn’t going to come from anywhere else. Beans and nuts and grains, sure. But meat was concentrated calories.
He opened the drawer, took out a knife, and slapped one of the fish down on the counter. He raised the knife, and slowly lowered it until the blade was resting on the join between head and body.
His fingers flexed on the knife handle. He adjusted his grip and started to press down. It was easy, right? He’d done this so often. Cut the head off, slice down the belly, scoop out the guts: fresh fish. Bony, but he wasn’t going to spend time filleting the damn things. Take a deep breath, and push.
The edge sliced clean through, crunching when it met the spine. The sound made Frank gag, and he tried to swallow back on the rising bile, but then his stomach spasmed and he lost all control. He remembered to grab one of the containers from the side as he collapsed to the floor. The tilapia still in it arced away, and he forced his head over the now empty tray and puked pink watery slime until he was weak and gasping.
His throat burned. His eyes streamed. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and let the frothy liquid drip into the tray. Then he rolled onto his back and held his aching ribs.
What a mess. What a state to get himself in. He was going to die here, and he’d never get to see his son again.
Declan was standing over him, looking down at him with his one good eye.
“Get the fuck up, Frank. You’ve got work to do. You got to fix this. You can’t let them win.”
“Goddammit, Declan, I’m doing my best.”
“You’re naked and drooling puke. If that’s your best, then you may as well toss yourself out the airlock.”
Frank wiped his mouth again, and flicked his fingers clear.
“I’ll try,” he said. “I’ll try.”
“You’d better. It’s down to you.”
And he was gone, and Frank was alone again.
2
[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 11/11/2048, transcribed from paper-only copy]
I don’t know what to do. For the first time in my life, I don’t know what to do. I thought I’d left this feeling of powerlessness behind for ever. I’ve dedicated the past decade to becoming the master of not just my destiny, but of others’ destinies too. And I was there. I was there. I had the power of life and death over people I hardly knew.
I know that this is not a time to waver. Looking from the outside, no one knows my struggle. I keep up my wall and I keep everyone out. Inside, I’m breaking. If this goes badly, I’m finished. The only choice I’ll get to make is who else I take down with me.
[transcript ends]
Frank cleaned up, the best he could. The fish, both dead, went into the waste system, and he levered up the floor tiles one by one and rinsed them off in the sink.
Declan was right. OK, Declan was dead, but that didn’t stop him from being right.
He found his overalls where he’d abandoned them, next to the shower stall. They’d dried stiff, and he had to peel the cloth apart. He’d been wearing them inside his spacesuit when he’d got shot, so there was a corresponding ragged-edged hole high up on the sleeve. But he put them in the washing machine and spent half an hour manually cranking the drum around. He had plenty of watts to play with—it was just that the tub was designed for manual use. When the overalls came out, the black patches weren’t visibly lighter. They were more pliable, though. The garment would be wearable, even if it would carry its marks for ever.
He draped it over a chair in the kitchen to dry, then picked it up again and followed the blood trail through the yard to the airlock at the far end. It wasn’t one they used—the traffic went through the cross-hab connector—but it was there because the base was designed to be modular and extendable.
He dropped his overalls on the airlock floor, closed the door, and pumped the air inside back into the hab. As the pressure dropped, the water boiled out from the cloth. Just like it did with people. He waited for the fog to clear, then bled the air back into the airlock chamber. Once the pressure had equalized, he could retrieve his clothes.
They were cold, cold enough to now attract condensation, but nowhere near as wet as they were before. OK, it was a grievous waste of water, but he was one man living in a base built for eight. He had resources to burn, which was ironic since they’d been short of everything at the beginning. If he needed more water, he was literally sitting on a reservoir of almost limitless supply, and all he needed to do was fire up the water maker and shovel some dirt into it.
Frank slung his overalls back over a chair, then slumped into it himself. He still felt so very tired.
He was, he guessed, around a hundred million miles from Earth. The distance meant nothing, as he’d been asleep the whole journey. He hadn’t any feeling of having traveled such a vast distance, just experience of an edit: fall unconscious on Earth, wake up on Mars. But he thought he knew what Earth looked like in the night sky, and if that bright dot was really what he was searching for, then of everyone who had ever lived, he was the most alone human being in the whole of history.
Somewhere between him and Earth was supposed to be a spaceship with some NASA astronauts. He didn’t know when they were going to arrive, nor what they expected to find when they did. It was likely they weren’t expecting to find a con who’d now killed three people.
What was he going to say to them? How would he know they were here? He might see their fiery entry. He might catch their sonic boom. The astronauts were expecting to be picked up, though if they were too far away, and either he didn’t try to, or couldn’t, find them, then what would they do? There’d been so many rockets descending recently, it’d been difficult for him to tell who or what was coming down. What they were, he didn’t know—Brack had pointed out that XO didn’t own Mars. If they’d been supplies meant for MBO, Brack would have collected them at the bottom of the crater, together with the NASA kit.
OK, NASA: if they were all in this together with XO, perhaps getting stranded miles from help or hope would be justice of sorts. But how likely was that collusion? They were the ones who were smart, idealistic explorers. They’d trained for this mission for years—unlike Frank, who’d barely got six months.
Sure, someone had to have signed off on this. Someone high up had to know that Frank and his fellow cons had been sent on a one-way trip as disposable labor. If not the astronauts themselves, then their bosses, or their bosses’ bosses, but if it came to a fight, he knew how this would pan out. He’d seen it on the screen often enough, a war between planets, where humans and aliens would duke it out until, inevitably, the good guys would win. He—Frank Kittridge—was the Martians. All of them. And he knew he wasn’t one of the good guys.
He started to laugh, because he found the idea funny. He ended up kneeling on the floor, crying, because it was only going to end one way. Eventually, he raised his head, wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand.
What was he going to do?