No Way by S. J. Morden

Author:S. J. Morden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2019-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

20

[Internal memo: Mars Base One Mission Control to Bruno Tiller 3/4/2049 (transcribed from paper-only copy)]

Sir, we need to talk. Securely. Urgently.

[transcript ends]

The next day, they all went out—the remaining six of them—to look for Jim. Two buggies. Three people apiece, and the highest-resolution satellite maps downloaded onto their tablets. Frank had shown Lucy where he’d searched, and she’d thanked him for his efforts in such clipped tones, she thanked him again straight after, in case he hadn’t realized she was actually thanking him.

He knew what it was like to lose someone. He kept wondering if he might have missed something on his search. Maybe the others wondered that too. That if it had been them, they would have found him. It gnawed at him, at his bones, like a feral beast.

Luisa couldn’t help. Her hands were as tied as his. She made all the right sounds, for sure. Conciliatory. Concerned. But she was having to follow the party line at this point, insisting that M2 were gone, were history, dead, incapacitated, dying, couldn’t possibly have taken Jim. Station seven had fallen into a hole, and maybe Jim had gone the same way. Mars was an unknown, unpredictable place, full of danger. Who knew? They could have been right, but he sure as hell didn’t trust XO to tell her anything like the truth.

In Frank’s experience, it wasn’t Mars that was the problem. It was people—XO people—who were the problem.

He drove. He had Fan and Isla on the back of his buggy. But no one spoke unless they had to. He’d already been up and out earlier, in the freezing dark, checking the vehicles over, making sure they had a full charge despite the amount of crap that had built up on the solar panels: he’d dipped into the reserves to make certain each fuel cell was at capacity, and that was something they were going to have to watch if the dust kept on coming. He hadn’t slept. Hadn’t eaten either. He was burning out and only sheer willpower was keeping him going.

As they got higher up, the dust became more mobile, fuzzing the view with haze and causing Frank to keep wiping his faceplate. The walls of the Santa Clara valley trickled with grains of sand like gossamer.

Lucy was behind, driving the second buggy. Whatever she felt about Yun and her complicity in Jim’s disobedience, she had at least treated them both like adults rather than shoveling the entire blame onto one or the other. If there’d been shouting, Frank hadn’t heard it, and the base was small enough. Perhaps ice was worse than fire, but neither was directed at him.

Frank had some of his lights on. The weather had made everything particularly gloomy, and they were up and out barely a quarter of an hour after sunrise. The shadows were deep and almost tangible, but each buggy had only one fuel cell, and running the lights would eat into the range. They’d brought all the spare life support packs with them, fully charged.

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