Chapter 10 - The Backup Plan

They sat in the clear emergency medical tent that was serving duty as their jail cell, and stared obliquely across the crater to that incline on which perched the remains of their shuttle. It was surrounded by copters with spotlights trained on the crushed tin can of its hull. For the time being, the three copters arranged around the shuttle and the singular copter guarding them at the tower were all there was, but it seemed inevitable that more reinforcements would soon be en-route.

Initially, all four of the copters had overflown them on their way directly to the crashed shuttle, which they orbited for some time. Then they had landed and trained their spotlights upon that craft, and for a long time, neither Nestor nor Jack had seen any other activity at all from their vantage upon the crater floor. Eventually, a sole copter had lifted off and tentatively hovered over to spotlight them waving desperately at its approach.

Jack was positive they’d found the bomb, and that was why the other copters had stayed with the shuttle. He assured Nestor that the quadcopter hovering above them and then slowly landing a safe distance away whilst never once removing its spotlight from them had followed the emergency locator beacon to them. He used the fact that only one of the party had been dispatched on that mission as proof positive that they had much larger priorities than rescue at this point. He further insisted to Nestor that the shuttle was too heavy for any copter or combination thereof to lift and carry over any sort of distance. They’d need to use trucks to transport any of it.

While Jack talked, a man had disembarked and walked cautiously over to them. It became quickly apparent that he did not speak their language, nor they his, but his wary approach and brusque search of their persons at gunpoint made very clear that they were less patients or victims and more prisoners or at the very least suspects in his eyes. That guard, lacking any other way of detaining them, had set up this transparent medical stabilization tent and staked it down in a dozen places against the wind and had gestured them inside with his weapon and set up a small portable atmospheric generator and then had gone back to guard them from the comfort of his copter. At least, that’s what they assumed he was doing in there, as they could make nothing out through the canopy.

Now that they were here, Jack was fuming at the search party’s presence. He’d spent the hour since they’d arrived speaking under his breath, saying little but swear words in a never-ending litany of curses, a meditative chant of frustration. Nestor did not know if that frustration was because Jack had realized, only after seeing the copters, that there was no shooting their way out of the situation, or if it was because they were so far removed from the bomb as to have no chance of recovery from this position, or if it was because their guard now had his antique gun and so he was once again unarmed. Nestor could see no other choice before them and spoke up to this point, “We gotta jes do what we told, now, Jack. I understand you wanted to complete the mission, but it’s over now. They know we have a bomb, and you can bet someone in a position of authority is gonna want to talk with us about what we were plannin’ on doin’ with it.”

Jack didn’t look at him at all, and kept swearing in his continued prayer to whatever god would intervene to improve their circumstances. After a few moments of being ignored, Nestor looked away and stared instead through the gloom at the spindly framed quadcopter guarding them. It was black and yet it shone reflectively in the dark, its cockpit glistening prismatic in the referred light from the spotlight. The rotors were held high above its angular fuselage on segmented arms, and it perched lightly on gracile landing gear. It looked repulsive and alien in a way that Nestor couldn’t put to words. He tried Jack again:

“You hear me, Jack? We need to jes give in.”

Jack swore on and looked at Nestor, still not seeming to see him at all. At length he stopped, which somehow seemed worse once it happened, the constant soft white noise of his chanting gone and leaving nothing behind but an odd sense of foreboding.

“We ain’t leavin’ the bomb. You know how hard…how much had to come together jes right…to get that bomb? We ain’t never goin’ to get another one, and we ain’t never goin’ to get another chance at the objective, neither. It is now or never, and it will only be ‘never’ if I’m dead.”

“But what you propose we do here, Jack? Them copters is armed, and so is the men inside ‘em. We cain’t outrun ‘em, which is even if we somehow got past ‘em, which we also cain’t do.”

“When their reinforcements arrive, they’ll come with torches. With tools. They’ll have that shuttle open in no time, and the bomb loaded in a truck jes as quick. All we need to do is take that truck. It’ll be almost like they’s loadin’ it for us.”

Nestor looked quietly at Jack in the dark and Jack looked straight ahead, seeming to picture the crazy plan playing out in the theater of his mind.

“That plan is dumber’n smeared shit, Jack. How do you plan on takin’ a truck from someone who knows they jes loaded a nuclear bomb onto it? You think there’s anything in the world will stop them from recoverin’ their truck? You think there’s anything in the world will stop them from jes cripplin’ the fucker and killin’ everone in it and puttin’ their new bomb on another’n?”

“We will find a way. Our place in all this ain’t finished, Nestor, and as long as we keep goin’, we can still make our objective. You jes gotta be with me. Are you? With me?”

Nestor shook his head slightly, still looking at Jack, and Jack returned his gaze. Neither was certain they could really see the other in the dark. They sat like that for some time, until Nestor nodded, “I am.”

*****

There was nothing to do inside the little medical tent, and late into the night, Nestor reclined on the tent floor and closed his eyes. Jack was staring into the dark whilst sitting cross-legged beside him, and the only noise was the low hum of the atmospheric generator, keeping them breathing and warm. Occasionally the wind would gust through the crater, howling around the guy wires anchoring the tent to the ground as a perfunctory banshee wailing her warning only in fits and spurts before retiring back to warmer and more hospitable environs. It was otherwise quiet, dark, and boring, and Nestor hadn’t properly slept in days, and found himself irresistibly pulled until he gave in.

He dreamt he was running through the flickering tunnels and pedestrian corridors of Calahorra, or perhaps Poynting, for it contained elements of both. He ran from an unknown predator whose pursuit he could track by a cackling laugh that boomed in echo from the tunnel walls. He turned a corner and the tunnel before him opened to an endless expanse of opaque white ice beyond. A wind was kicking up off the ice, bearing with it the smell of water pouring over rock. The cackling was close behind him and he turned to face it. His pursuer shuffled around the corner, and he could see that it was Asa and she was not laughing but sobbing. He took two steps toward her, and she collapsed on her knees, hugging herself with her head bowed low. He paused to look at her, and she returned his gaze with fire in her eyes. He knew, without her saying, why she was sobbing, and he walked to her to cradle her chin in his hand, but she would accept no comfort. She bowed her head again, leaning it to the side, and her hair fell away to lay bare a giant gaping hole in her skull. From this wound emanated a great gout of blood which floated up above her head, and it ballooned grotesque before his eyes, looking very much like it might pop. He backed away from her, horrified that it would deluge him. She resumed sobbing, and in her cries, he felt he could almost hear the cries of the child which he had abandoned. Her child. He’d abandoned only hers. He kept backing until the ground of the tunnel disappeared from beneath his feet, and then he was falling ceaselessly.

*****

The sun was setting, having completed its truncated arc across the pink southern-winter Martian sky, when the two salvage trucks finally arrived. The smaller of the trucks was a range truck that could have passed for the old Creede Family range truck, except it was much older, with paint flaking to expose the bare metal beneath, already oxidatively crumbling into brittle orange lace. Its companion was a huge treaded transport rig with two massive cylindrical tanks seated behind the double-decker cab, and perched high above the ground sat a platform that overhung all sides. Attaching the bed to the vehicle below were trunks of hydraulic arms, bigger around than Nestor’s arm span, for tilting the bed so items could be dragged on. To the right side of the platform was a crane, its boom folded in on itself much like a slender spindly arm being held at rest.

“Those trucks’re methane powered,” Jack said, with a sense of minor awe, drawing attention to the tanks on each. He pointed out that it was rare to find anyone who ran methane trucks, as methane exclusively came from off-world, and wasn’t sold in the huge quantities of other off-world materials, making it much too valuable to burn without a clear plan for turning that burning into profit. To use it for transportation fuel, even in the efficient way these trucks did it, in a methalox generator that then powered electric motors, was incredibly wasteful. The margins on whatever you were transporting had to be substantial. Like selling a nuclear bomb and whatever can be salvaged from a downed shuttle to the highest bidder.

Nestor, knowing all this already, simply let Jack talk and then offered, “Don’t imagine that big one could run on solar.”

The trucks crawled through the crater and came to a stop beside the tower, and at this point their guard disembarked from his copter to gesture them from their jail tent with his gun. By the time they had exited, men had come from both vehicles and were conversing animatedly with their guard, with much pointing at both prisoners. Watching the silent conversation from afar, it seemed to Nestor that they could not agree on the proper way to transport their new captives. He guessed the challenge was that there was a shortage of space in the vehicles. The copters didn’t appear to hold more than a single person apiece, and while the range truck looked like it might carry four, Nestor could count six men arguing with their guard. Which seemed to leave only the truck with the platform.

Their guard paced back and forth, impatient with these proceedings, and it was clear to all in attendance that he wanted to join his copter friends, who were already spinning up their rotors for departure. By the time the group agreed to transport the prisoners with the shuttle and bomb on the platform truck, one copter had already lifted off, not waiting for its compatriots before passing over their heads, headed back north.

A man from the platform truck seemed to have drawn the short straw and was handed Jacks’s antique gun, which he shoved in his belt and then walked over to stand before his two unwanted prisoners. He examined them appraisingly, like the luggage they so clearly were to him, while the pilot clambered back into his copter and spun up his own rotors for departure. Those rotors whirled out a cloud of dust which obscured all, and then the copter was gone.

Their new guard was lightly armed with a handgun he wore on a belt of his bulky enviro suit. Fighting the suit considerably, he took their backpacks and inexpertly searched them again. He found nothing new, and he shackled them both with rope and gestured with an oversized hand towards the big platform truck. Jack couldn’t help himself but look pleased with these proceedings.

*****

They spent all the following day slowly crawling north, the platform truck carefully trundling along the smoothest ground its crew could find, the remains of the shuttle upon its back swaying precariously, and the metallic serpentine of its colossal tracks groaning over every berm and gulley of these midland plains. They did not stop that night, their captors instead electing to switch off driving duties continually all night long, and in the middle of that night they came across a road in middling condition that ran almost due north-south. Jack assured Nestor in confidential tones that this was the Great Seed Bank Road that ran from Argyre all the way to the South Pole. According to him, it had been maintained for centuries by the combined efforts of the citizens of Argyre and the Argentea Plains, in preparation for the day when traffic to the Seed Bank would require a reliable road for reseeding the entire planet with life. Nestor looked out the front windows at the eroded path, the fingers of sand poking across and the jagged crumbling shoulders and long potholes filled to the brim with dust ground to atomic powder rippling and curling as miniature waves upon microscopic shorelines, and wondered aloud where those efforts had been expended, but received no response. They saw no one else on the road, which was all the better as the giant truck took up the entire thing and left destruction behind as it crushed along the old asphalt.

Their guards soon tired of minding the captives’ ropes for every little thing, and midway through that first day upon the road had untied them, leaving them to their own recognizance in the back of the truck. The walls of the back of the truck were empty of weapons, or of any other device whatsoever, and so both dusty young men sat obediently unhelmeted in their envirosuits upon the uncomfortable jump seats. Being free seemed to make Jack more watchful, and he crouched upon his seat leant forward in the stance of his predatory forebears, ever at the ready to cast himself at dangerous megafauna to demonstrate his suzerainty absolute. Nestor watched Jack more than the road or even their guards, realizing almost unconsciously that here beside him was where the genuine danger in their situation lurked, nowhere else.

They traveled for two more days upon that road and saw little change in road condition and no indication of the existence of the rest of humanity at all. Near the end of their fourth day of travel, the road took them on a winding path through a shallow canyon and they departed that wash headed due east up an incline that led to a series of buildings nestled in the crescent-shaped drainage of a huge, wild-looking mountain, the entirety of which was filled with kilometers of garbage. Jack assured him that this must be Charis, a settlement that Nestor had never heard of, but which Jack seemed to believe held special importance. Charis did not look important from where Nestor sat, for besides being surrounded by detritus of every type, it was composed of only three major surface buildings. There was an enormous cube of a building that served as the surface airlock for the elevator down to the settlement below. There was a low rectangular building surrounded by maintenance vehicles in a fenced-off yard, that place comprising the only garbage-free patch of ground Nestor could see, and then there was the methane fueling center. The fueling center was a series of pods arranged in a loose row facing a small administration building, and a series of fifty-meter-tall aboveground tanks. It was towards these pods that the platform truck headed as the daylight faded.

Their escorting range truck pulled away at this point and headed over to the elevator airlock on some other mission. There was no traffic at the fueling pods, which was just as well for the platform truck didn’t fit inside any of them and needed to pull crosswise in front, blocking all but one. Having shut down all other fuel commerce, the truck’s crew clambered down out of its tiny airlock one at a time, passing through the trapdoor in the passenger area’s floor and putting on their bulky suits inside the airlock itself. The last guard to depart said something to them in his language with a fierce look upon his face, and the prisoners nodded their vigorous assent in complete ignorance of what was being requested.

As the trapdoor closed down behind that guard, Jack leaned close and whispered to Nestor, “This is it. This here’s our chance. Are you ready?”

Nestor stared at Jack, and then looked over into the front of the cab, “How is this our chance? I don’t think we gonna get far runnin’ through all this trash.”

“No, remember, the plan was for us to take this truck. I’m pretty sure I can start it. I been watchin’ ‘em since we left the crater, and I think the security protocols are broke.”

“But this thing is huge. They’ll jes follow us and take it back. Probably kill us in the process.”

“You know how to disable GPS on a truck like this? I think if you can do that, I can drive us up into them mountains, and then they’ll never find us. Once we’re up there, we can switch out the truck GPS for the shuttle’s GPS, and use that to navigate back to the road, when it’s safe. They’ll never find us.”

Nestor looked around the ceiling of the truck cab and found the panel he was looking for above the passenger seat. “I think I can get to the GPS, yeah. That should be the access panel for it right there,” he gestured with his chin to the panel, “But I still don’t know how you reckon on hidin’ this thing. It ain’t exactly easy to miss, even at a distance.”

“If this is Charis, that makes this mountain we’re butted up against one of the Charitum Mountains. It’s some of the roughest terrain out there. I don’t even think somethin’ that ain’t a full-track can make it in them mountains. No one’ll follow us. Trust me. Plus, what you wanna do, stay in this truck ‘till they decide to kill us or turn us in to whatever sort of authorities they got out here?”

Nestor thought about it for a moment, “But what about them men? Won’t they jes jump aboard as soon as we try to leave?”

Jack shook his head, “Them men’ll be dead. They left the antique gun in here with us. I saw the one showing it to th’other last night when they thought we was both asleep. He put it in the passenger side pocket there. He thought it was hidden, but I know jes where it is.”

“You gonna kill ‘em? How? Won’t they know yer comin’ as soon as you get in the airlock?”

“It ain’t me. It’s we. We gonna kill ‘em. It ain’t ever jes been me out here, you know. If you don’t have the guts to do it, then we jes gonna have to give it all up. So. Do you want to be free or do you want to be a prisoner? You gotta choose, and quick.”

Nestor stared at Jack for a moment, wanting to argue further, but not really seeing the point. Of course, he wanted to be free.

“How then? And I thought you jes said there’s only the one gun?”

*****

The platform truck crew chief climbed up into his vehicle’s cramped airlock, pressurizing it and then stripping off his bulky envirosuit and stowing that suit in the lockers built into the airlock walls, which although they had been designed for the purpose, always seemed too small for the suits. He fought against the unreasoning cruelty of three-dimensional space for a moment before finally stuffing his suit satisfactorily away, and then up the ladder he climbed and swung the trapdoor open to emerge into an alternative universe not of his own design. One of the young men he’d been inexplicably made warden of was standing beside the trapdoor, and the crew chief blinked in astonishment to see an antique pistol shoved into his face, and he looked beyond that weapon to see his compatriot knelt behind the main seats, hands atop his head.

“Go on, get the rest of the way up here,” Nestor said through his external suit speakers to this man who spoke no language that Nestor spoke. The man remained frozen half in/half out of the airlock, and Nestor leaned forward with his free hand to pull the man the rest of the way out, to which the man recoiled and replied with admonishing tones in his foreign tongue and clambered the rest of the way out of this wormhole between the world in which he was in charge and the one in which he was very much not.

Nestor kept the pistol pointed at his newest captive and disarmed that man and tossed the man’s weapon to Jack, who shoved it into his belt. Nestor flipped the trapdoor closed with his toe, and it fell sealed with a loud thump that made the man in Nestor’s charge jump involuntarily at that noise, for his attention had been on his captors. In fact, both captives were studying him and Jack closely, apparently drawn to the fact that they were wearing their envirosuits, helmets and all. Nestor pushed the barrel of the gun into the man’s forehead, and used his free hand to firmly place the man’s hands on his head, and then guided him over to join his kneeling friend.

Nestor stepped back to give Jack the thumbs up, at which point Jack sat down in the driver’s seat and depressurized the truck cab. Relief welled up within Nestor to replace all other sensations as the men in front of him began gasping for air, their eyes panic-stricken and feral. Relief because it hadn’t been him who’d had to kill them. He was thus caught by surprise when the crew chief made a lunge for the gun. A desperate, futile attempt at salvation during his final moments. Nestor’s finger automatically pressed down on the trigger, and the gun bucked in his hand, multiple shots loosed in the time it took his thinking mind to process his actions. He hadn’t been aiming the gun in any particular way, and wasn’t prepared for the stream of bullets that issued forth, nor for the gun to sweep down and to the left as he fought to bring the beast thrashing in his grasp under control.

The bullets that hit the lunging man killed him in his tracks, and he collapsed in a heap at Nestor’s feet. Several also whined and ricocheted across the cab between the front seats, and the final bullet caught the now-dead crew chief’s compatriot in mid-lunge toward safety. His knee exploded in blood and gore, and he screamed in what little air there was left, the very expression of his searing pain being stolen from him as the last bit of air exited the cab.

As Nestor’s brain caught up, he noticed the pool of blood spreading from the body at his feet and side-stepped to avoid it, his eyes locked onto the other man writhing in his final throes on the floor. The man’s knee was squirting blood in cardiac pulses, and it wasn’t apparent to Nestor then or at any point thereafter if it was the blood loss or the oxygen loss that ended his life, but either way he watched the last seeps of pale blood issue from the man’s knee as he went limp. He suddenly felt very ill and hot and itchy and nauseous and he stepped back, looking for escape, for a moment wishing to dive for the airlock and run from that place entirely, through whatever trash may surround them, for those environs could not possibly be worse than these.

Jack came through on his coms then, “Nestor, you hear me, boy? Hello?”

Nestor looked up from the body to Jack, who was now standing between the two front seats.

“We got to get goin’. There’s no way someone in that buildin’ over there didn’t jes hear that. Put them in the back fer now. We’ll thow ‘em out the airlock when we’re clear of the city. C’mon, get up here and let’s go.”

Nestor left the bodies where they lay and followed Jack up front, feeling a strange sense of déjà vu as Jack sat in the driver’s seat to pull the big truck away from the fuel pod. As they departed, the security guard from the administration building came running out to watch them travel into the darkness beyond the pool of lights cast from the pod itself. The guard watched as the lights on the big truck bounced the opposite way from the road and civilization, crawling through an effluvium of human waste towards the mountain that loomed out in the eastern dark. He watched forlornly as, a couple kilometers out, the lights went off entirely, and then the truck was consigned to the trash and to the darkness absolute.