That was where he’d fainted. He slid his hand up and felt the side of his face. The hard plastic floor panel was unforgiving, and he’d cracked his cheek hard as he’d gone down. Just bruising, he told himself. One-third gravity meant he’d not fallen quickly enough to do real damage.
He rolled over, pulling faces as he stretched out his skin, and levered himself up using the edge of the desk. He reset the chair on its feet. He sat down again.
Phase three.
Brack had been given three months to get rid of everything that might give the impression that there’d been anyone else on Mars. Bodies. Equipment. Anything that might look worn or used. Data. NASA were expecting a clean base, built by robots, maintained by one man. XO were going to tidy up and pretend Frank had never been there.
He looked over his shoulder at the trail of blood that passed through the doorway and headed out across the yard.
No wonder Brack had been pissed about the state of the med bay. All that work he was going to have to do, cleaning up what had leaked out of Zero. That was what all the storing of the bodies on the ship was about. That was why their personal effects had never arrived. Why all the scientific equipment and NASA-specific material was still in containers at the bottom of the Heights. Why XO had taken the encryption off Brack’s tablet: no cons, no need for secrecy.
Phase three even included plans to scale back the hydroponics and then expand production again in time for the new, legitimate crew. Three months.
Goddammit, how could he have been so stupid, so naive, so trusting?
It was actually worse than he’d thought. They’d been treated like they weren’t even human. Cattle. They’d been treated like cattle. Herded, used, then slaughtered. It was probably a good job that Brack was already dead. Frank felt as if he should go and hang the body from one of the struts. Let the overhead satellites make sense of that.
His cheek was sore, and his eye felt puffy. The skin tightened uncomfortably when he blinked. He pressed his hand against it.
XO were going to bury him for sure. This wasn’t just one man going off the rails because of the stress and isolation. This was no more Brack’s idea than it was his. And it wasn’t the work of a few, either. This was a full-blown conspiracy.
All the people he interacted with at Gold Hill. The medics, the technicians, the drivers even. They knew what the plan XO had sold to NASA meant. Robots. One crew member. They all had to be in on it, to some degree or other. Dozens of otherwise normal people, who were just there to do a job, who’d go home to their families and their children, and maybe take the dog for a walk, or watch a game, or help their elderly neighbor with their groceries, knew the fate of the seven poor schmucks they dumped in the freeze chambers long before the occupants ever did.
Surely, there had to be someone within XO who’d been just a little bit uncomfortable about the whole “let’s kill seven people” thing? Someone who’d say something to their wife, their husband, their mother or their father, and be encouraged to go to the authorities?
Yet here Frank was, knowing that all those opportunities, all those people who had to have been on the inside, had done absolutely nothing. If they had spoken out, he wouldn’t have been there.
All that effort. Just to cover up what had been… he didn’t know what to call it. XO had agreed to deliver a Mars base a certain way, and found they couldn’t do it. Rather than putting their hands up and saying sorry, they decided that the only solution was to fake it. Sure, they’d have to kill some people in the process, but no one would miss them.
It was monstrous. Like he’d blundered onto the set of a snuff movie and then had to watch as, one by one, his fellow actors got struck down. If he’d been stuck on a studio back-lot in downtown Burbank, he could have walked home. But no: they decided to fake it a hundred million miles away where there was no atmosphere and no human being belonged.
He had no way out of this. He might as well trash the place now and have done with it. It would be a shame that he wasn’t going to be around to hear XO’s explanation for NASA as to why their lovely base turned into so much scrap metal and flapping plastic, but that would be the price of his revenge. Though he had really wanted to see his boy again.
He got up, slowly this time, and hesitated for just a little too long.
What if the NASA people needed the base to be intact, in order to get home again? Anything he did here would be condemning them before they even got to Mars. He couldn’t talk to them, either, and warn them off. They’d come crashing through the atmosphere and land, expecting to be picked up and taken to safety. Could he do that to them? He’d never met any of them, but they didn’t deserve to die on Mars any more than he did.
He couldn’t talk to them: he could only talk to XO, and they had nothing to say to him that he wanted to hear. He imagined the conversation that would ensue, trading threats and recriminations across a twenty-minute delay. Even then, the temptation to tell them exactly what he thought of them was tempered by the fact that they’d be trying to work out how much of the base they could control remotely and how they could use that to kill him. Every tablet had access to the deep and vital functions that kept the habs viable. Only Brack had had the motivation to use them to kill.
Frank righted the chair again, and slumped into it, crouching forward and staring at the Project Sparta summary. There were links in it, which would open other files. Details. Carefully drawn-up, terrible details.
What the hell was he going to do?
He shrank the file and sat there for a moment, tapping the side of the tablet with his fingernail, thinking about the nuclear option of suiting up, running through the base with a scalpel, overturning the trays of plants and barrels of fish, smashing the satellite dish and the solar panels, then driving the buggy out into the desert and finding a chasm to hurtle into.
If it was the only way to do damage to XO, then that’s what he’d do. Suicide, taking a multi-billion-dollar investment with him, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. He wondered what they were thinking right now, with days of non-contact, their precious base uncommunicative and for all they knew… What did they know from their orbital cameras? That someone was alive. And that three people were dead.
The last message they’d received from Brack was on—Frank checked—the ninth. Phase two complete. That was it. That was what Brack had sent straight after finding both Frank and Zero in the med bay and thinking them both dead. The dish had been offline since, so XO’s reply was somewhere in a queue over his head. Along, presumably, with increasingly urgent queries as to why he wasn’t responding.
Yes, he could trash the base. But that wasn’t going to get him back to Earth, to freedom, to Mike. And maybe his ex-wife, though depending on whether she’d moved on or not, that might be awkward. No, scratch that: of course she’d moved on. Mike, then. Concentrate on his son. Concentrate on the idea of his son, who, in Frank’s imagination, had turned his life around and gone to college and was starting out poor but happy in his chosen career. Frank needed to be alive for that. He needed NASA for that.
Just how long did he think he could survive here?
Indefinitely? Not that long. Something would break down that he couldn’t fix. If he got the hydroponics wrong, he could go from feast to famine in a matter of weeks. If he couldn’t eat the fish, and couldn’t replace the protein, then he was going to get sick.
But he didn’t need indefinitely. It said there, in black and white, when NASA were coming: three months. That was all. Three months to hang on. Could he do that?
He went into the greenhouse, cycling the airlock that kept the higher CO2 inside with the plants, and just stood there on the staging by the door. The bright lights, the constant sound of circulating water, the startling greenness of the plants. It looked… complicated. Zero had managed the whole system, from set-up to harvest. Though if the kid could do it, so could he, he guessed.