Forever Magazine Issue 98 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, science fiction magazine
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2023-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2021.

The Plus One

Marie Vibbert

Blaine held her face over the broth after her husband handed it to her, inhaling the scent. Yeasty, and a hint of . . .

“Dill.” Keith settled down next to her on the storage tub they used for a bench. “The plant was just big enough to trim.”

“Ooo.” Blaine kissed him in the steam over her cup. “My man can COOK.” After two months on Mars trying to get anything to grow, after a day spent digging out a faulty drainpipe, this felt like a trip to a luxury spa. She felt her hair and her toes uncurl.

Which of course was when the radio buzzed. “Marshal? Are you there?”

Blaine slumped. She was sitting down for the first time in ten hours.

“You better answer that, Marshal.” Keith kissed her cheek and unhooked the receiver from her belt.

With a sigh, she pressed the transmit button. “What is it, Control? I’m about to eat dinner.”

There was a static wash of sound—an environment suit rubbing against the radio. “Oh, sorry. No rush. We got a dead body for you to look at, that’s all.”

Blaine raised her eyebrows, lowered the radio, and mouthed “No rush” at her husband.

“I suppose it’s not an emergency if they’re already dead,” Keith offered, but that was it, she was off her food, hint of fresh dill or no. “I’ll be out the airlock in twenty. Where am I going?”

Keith sighed and stretched. She could see how much he’d been looking forward to their little dinner break, too. She mouthed “Sorry” and went to find her environment suit, sipping on the way without tasting.

It was a temporary shelter, the kind every habitat dome carried in case of emergency. Really no more than a pressurized pup tent; you were supposed to put them up inside a leaky dome to keep yourself alive until help came. This one wasn’t inside a leaky dome. It was tucked into the edge of a crater, three hundred meters from the dense cluster of structures for Fraxinus Pharmaceuticals, a privately owned research station not officially under U.S. jurisdiction.

Blaine’s jurisdiction, technically, began and ended wherever U.S. citizens breathed air. The surface of Mars was international waters, and she had to be careful what she did or didn’t do. There was a Chinese settlement nearby, as well as a Brazilian one. It would help to know what nationality of air had once filled this sad little tent.

“I was taking canisters to Fraxinus,” the witness said. She was American, slight, swimming inside her size extra-small suit, Southern accent, no discernable features through her sun-screened faceplate. “Camden” was painted on her breast in the usual place for names. “They refill O2 in exchange for bio waste. Anyway, I noticed the tent, the shine of it, and came over to look.”

Camden held open the limp door of the temporary shelter. There was the body, frozen in a fetal position. American environment suit, the helmet still on, probably for warmth, the visor open.

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