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  Frank swallowed. This guy was going for his ribs: in prison, he’d have had to respond somehow, let the other guy know he wasn’t going to be a pushover. But this wasn’t a fight he could settle with his fists and his feet.

  Instead, he said: “Does that mean you’re my new cellie? You taking the top or the lower tray?”

  The man was again confused by Frank’s reply. “I don’t think you quite get it, Kittridge. I’m in charge of you. Everything you say or do from now on, you say it in response to something I’ve said, you do it because I’ve ordered you to do it. I tell you when to get up and when to go to bed. I tell you when to start and when to stop. You understand me, Kittridge? I own you.”

  “I thought the company owned me. And unless you own the company, maybe they own you too.”

  The man clenched his fists and his jaw, working it as if he was chewing gum. “You giving me sass? You?”

  Frank’s hands were cuffed, but if it came to a fight, he could still use them. The chain between them might even be useful as an improvised garrote.

  He needed to calm that right down. That was prison Frank talking. He hadn’t always been prison Frank: he’d been someone else before, and he could go back to being that, if only he could remember how. The man was attempting to intimidate him, make him afraid, assert his authority, and the only entry in Frank’s ledger on the credit side was that they’d recruited him. They needed him. It had to mean he wasn’t going to get beaten, because who beats up an astronaut, right?

  “Hey.” Frank raised his arms, bumped his wrists together with a clink. “You’re the boss.”

  “And don’t you forget it.” The man unclenched his fists again, and continued to stare at Frank. “You want to go back to prison?”

  Frank said nothing. It seemed like one of those questions that, whatever he answered, the response was already prepared, and designed to humiliate him.

  The man leaned forward and straightened his finger like a gun at Frank’s head. “OK. Time for some truth, let you know what’ll happen if you crap out here, for any reason. Supermax. Pelican Bay. Security Housing Unit. You know what that is, don’t you, boy? For the rest of your sentence, you’ll never get to speak to another human being again. You’ll be buried. Do you understand?”

  It took a moment for it to sink in. He wouldn’t be returning to his cell, to spend his life turning gray and desiccating like dust. He’d be in the SHU, the Hole, locked away out of sight and out of mind. The Hole sent men mad.

  Frank stiffened in his seat. “That’s not the deal I signed.” He didn’t want to let his fury and terror slip out in his voice, but it did. There was nothing he could do to stop it. He’d been played and he was burning.

  “That’s changed your tune, hasn’t it, Kittridge? That’s made you afraid of me. You remember that, now. When I tell you to jump, what do you say?”

  His silence was all he had left. That and the Hole. The goddamn Hole.

  “I asked you a question, Kittridge. When I ask you a question I require an answer, an instant answer, because I’m not asking twice.”

  “How high?” said Frank, reluctantly, almost tearfully. Apparently, his decision to go to Mars, freely made, now left him on the precipice of a lifetime of solitary confinement. He wondered what would have happened if he’d turned Mark down in the first instance. Would he already be there, in a tiny, windowless cell, a ball of rage and regret knotting his insides?

  He’d dodged that bullet. He had no way of knowing, no way of finding out, how many others they’d asked before him. Perhaps he was the last on the list. He might have been the first. Any feelings of being special, and somehow too valuable to kick to the curb, were gone.

  His position was precarious. Yes, he’d remember that. And resent it. Always resent it.

  His expression had slipped to briefly unmask his true horror. He tried to drag his impassivity back into place, but the damage had been done. The man had seen it all, and knew him now.

  “Tell me you understand,” said the man.

  Frank understood all too well. “Yeah. I got that.”

  The man gave a giggle, and only belatedly tried to hide his smirk behind his hand. It was an act, nothing more, nothing less, even if the threat was real. Frank, who’d never really had much cause to hate anyone, even the man he’d shot, realized that he genuinely, viscerally hated this grinning malevolent idiot already.

  “At least you won’t go forgetting.”

  Frank was still churning inside. He’d never not be scared now, at least until he got on that rocket and was on his way to Mars. Then, and only then, would he be free of that particular threat.

  He turned his head away, so he didn’t have to look at the man for a while. They drove around the side of the mountain peak. As the sun slipped westwards, the color leached away, and left a cold monochrome landscape.

  The road went on, now turning southwards.

  In the middle of precisely nowhere, a double fence barred their way. There were signs with dire warnings about dogs patrolling, of deadly force being used against trespassers, how secret the area was and how many violations an unauthorized person might clock up. But the fence was all that was needed, really. Fifteen, maybe twenty feet tall, topped with a coil of razor wire, and inside that, across a bare kill zone, another identical barrier. If anyone was looking for a hint, it was right there. This was where the world ended. Beyond was … there was nothing. No buildings, no people, just the single track.

  They could do literally anything to Frank here, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  The car rolled to a stop. “Out,” said the man.

  He left the car without looking to see whether Frank would follow, presumably because he knew he would. Frank opened the door on his side, picked up his box, and stepped out. It was cool, rather than cold, but the air was dry and strangely thin and it tasted of salt and stone. The wind tugged at his shirt, swirling and directionless.

  He pushed the door shut with his foot, and the moment it had closed, the car just reversed back up the road before executing a turn. As if it was afraid. The tail lights receded, and the headlights soon faded. They were left alone with the wire gate that rattled, singing and shivering in the desert breeze. A camera mounted on top of a pole, halfway across no-man’s-land, angled up, and whirred.

  The first gate clacked and drew aside.

  The man walked forward, and Frank trailed after him, looking backwards, clutching his box tight against his tightening chest. The gate behind them closed before the second gate opened in front. The wirework rattled.

  This hadn’t been what he’d expected when he’d left Cali. Not welcomed with open arms, maybe. But not this. He’d been … he didn’t even know what the word was that described what had happened to him. Kidnapped didn’t cover it. Disappeared didn’t either.

  Another vehicle was coming down the road, from the inside, to collect them. Dust rose from the tires and hung out the back like a silver cloud. It pulled up, and he was goaded in. They were driven away, further in, deeper and down.

  Enslaved. That was it. He was their slave. They owned him, body and soul.

  Frank clutched his small box of belongings. In the distance was the bright airglow of floodlights, growing closer.

  3

  [NASA briefing to Xenosystems Operations 2/23/2035: NASA Headquarters Room D64, Washington, DC. In the public domain.]

  1. Facility located in environmentally and geologically stable region.

  2. Facility located in resource-rich location.

  3. Facility in well-mapped location.

  4. Facility in area of diverse morphological and geological features.

  5. Facility must be self-sustaining.

  6. Initial facility must be expandable to include workshop facilities, manufacturing and fabrication using local materials.

  Frank was getting used to the taste of acid bile in his mouth, the burning in his chest and the deeper agony of feeling like he was running on knives. He was eve
n beginning to enjoy it, after years of being numb. It was sharp and hard and relentless, a world away from the stultifying atmosphere of prison.

  Even the air was different: it was needle-thin and austere, and it hurt to haul it in by the lungful. He’d never been a runner. He’d always thought himself too big and too heavy for that. What he thought, what he wanted, was no longer a consideration. He did as he was told, and right now he was being told to run up a big-ass mountain, as fast as he could. He could run down it again at a slower pace, but up was for speed-work, and his achievement was marked in splashes of vomit by the side of the trail.

  He was unfit. He was a fifty-one-year-old man who’d done pretty much nothing for eight years, and eaten some pretty crappy food while doing it. Just how unfit came as a surprise: as it did, he supposed, to most.

  The implant they’d inserted under the skin over his sternum talked to a computer, while the earpiece he wore told him to run to the limit of his ability. They—the medical team—wanted to know those limits. They wanted to push him right to the edge, without killing him. And sometimes, times like now, he wondered if they’d really mind if his heart burst and he dropped down right there, down among the mine tailings. For a bunch of doctors, they didn’t seem to care that much about his physical well-being, more about how best to manipulate him, puppet-like, to get more work from him.

  The sky above was a deep dark blue, fading to a pale ribbon round the horizon, where the land was gray and rough-edged. His feet, encased in some surprisingly light running shoes, seemed to move of their own volition up the dusty path. A beep coincided with every second footfall, and he unconsciously fell into that rhythm. It was faster than he wanted to go, and with his position tracked by GPS, it wasn’t just his pace he needed to watch, but also his stride length. A certain speed was required. Every stride was a stretch.

  He climbed. His toes dug in to the cushioning, as if trying to grip the cinder-rock trail. Sweat washed down his face, into his eyes, making them sting, into the corners of his mouth, where he tasted salt. His breathing was one-in, one-out, a pant, timed to his cadence, but never quite enough.

  His calves ached like they were being flayed. And still he ran.

  He ran to avoid the Hole. He ran because Mars was just over the next hill. If he could just get off the planet, then it’d be OK. He wasn’t going to crap out. He wasn’t going to fail. He’d run up and down the mountain. He’d show them what he was made of. He wasn’t going to be broken.

  There came a point where all of those thoughts just faded into the background. All that was left was the road to the top, and him. It was pure and clean, and also terrible in its purity and cleanliness. Nothing existed but pain and path. The beeps were just noise, the voices in his head just static. One hundred yards. Fifty. Ten. Five. One.

  He stopped, loose-limbed, leaning over. He spat on the ground. Hardly anything came out, he was so parched. He put his hands on his knees and watched the sweat drip down his nose and onto the ground. The beeping had stopped. He coughed and spat, used his already damp shirt to wipe his face, and hauled air, in a controlled, deliberate way that stopped him from hyperventilating.

  He had an uninterrupted view to the east, over the salt pan in the valley and into the far distance. There was no habitation visible, and the only indications that people existed there were the contrails of planes far above him. Even the double line of fencing was invisible to his fatigue-etched sight. He was alone.

  He straightened up, his hands on his hips, and lifted his chin towards the sun. There was heat in it, despite the chill wind. He had tried to forget. But the moment had gone. He’d dragged all his problems up the mountain with him, and now he had to drag them all back down.

  The beep started again, and he knew better than to ignore it. The Hole beckoned. He dreamed of it most nights. The door locking behind him. The close silence. The four windowless walls.

  He turned around and pointed himself down the track. Trying to get his legs to work again, trying to remember how to breathe. Beep. Beep.

  Going down was a different discipline to up. He had to use his heels on the loose-surfaced path. Too fast, and he’d career head-first down across the rocky slopes, certainly injuring himself, possibly killing himself, but crapping out one way or another. Too slow, and he’d be made to do it again. And he didn’t want that either.

  He ran, each foot-strike jarring his toes against the front of his trainers. Several of his toenails had already turned black. One had bled so profusely he’d had to soak the sock off, and the nail had come with it. The medical team hadn’t cared. Just as long as he could carry on with the battery of tests and exercises they threw at him.

  He hadn’t met any of the other astronauts yet, so he had no way of comparing experiences. He had to assume there were others. There was no good reason for him to be first and only. They’d promised him a team. All it meant was that they were keeping them separate, for whatever purpose, and they’d bring them together at some point. Perhaps it was just until they’d completed their medical tests—no point in integrating someone into a group only for them to crap out on health grounds.

  And maybe there were more than seven of them. Maybe they were competing against each other, unseen, as to who filled the crew slots. Those that didn’t make it would end up in the Hole. That wasn’t a happy thought. He was a middle-aged man, up against potentially younger and fitter specimens from Panopticon’s jails. He could lose out through no fault of his own.

  He concentrated on running for a while, feeling the solid impact of each footfall, the way his body adjusted to the changes in contour and surface. Simply winning this race could mean he was condemning someone else to life in solitary. He wasn’t comfortable with that, either.

  Yes, he’d shot a man. Yes, he’d done it deliberately, in a planned act of violence. He’d put him in the ground, and he’d had no qualms about it. Someone else might have continued looking for ways to solve the problem of his son’s addiction and his slow and inevitable enmeshment with dealing and criminality, but there’d been other things they’d both tried over the years, and none of them had worked.

  Frank’s decision to put a bullet in the brain of his boy’s dealer had been coolly calculated and carefully weighed. They were all someone’s son, but he’d decided that his own was the one who mattered most. There’d been no innocent parties. Not the perp, not the victim. That, he’d come to terms with.

  Sending someone to the Hole, though, just for being beaten to the punch by a determined, driven fifty-one-year-old? That wasn’t on the level. Another black mark in Panopticon’s ledger, making them fight each other for the limited spaces available. Were they running a sweepstake on it? Did bears shit in the wood? Someone, somewhere, was betting on him blowing up and failing.

  The path started to flatten out. His feet hurt. His throat was raw. His shoulders ached. Why would they ache so much? Then he caught himself throwing his hands forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards, as a counterweight to balance his body. Every step, he swung. Could he do that more efficiently? Probably. As if there weren’t enough things to concentrate on already, there was now his form. He couldn’t afford to waste energy in exaggerated movements, because he had less of it. He had to be wise, and conserve it.

  He couldn’t do anything about the others, he decided. They couldn’t do anything about him, either. He wasn’t going to slow down, stop, give up. So sorry, unknown person, even though they weren’t Frank’s enemy, and he wasn’t theirs. It was Panopticon, and this other company, this Xenosystems Operations, who owned them. It was the man who’d intimidated him on that first day here. Brack. He’d overheard that name. At least, that was what he thought he’d heard. Brack, the shaven-headed smirker who delighted in Frank’s struggles and went thin-lipped when he jumped another hurdle.

  Frank wouldn’t try and take him on. He had excellent impulse control. Certainly compared to the average con. Someone else would try, though, even if it meant disappearing into the Hole.<
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  He was on the flat. The beeps slowed slightly, but that just meant he had to take longer strides, go a little faster. Just not as punishing as the climb. They’d really pushed him on the ascent today. And still he’d made it, through willpower alone. That wasn’t going to show up on any medical chart, was it? Courage, fortitude, grit. He’d deliberately shot a man to save his son, knowing that he’d have to endure whatever sentence they handed down. He had courage by the bucketful. It was his aging body he was worried about.

  He carried on, down the path, listening for the beeps, pre-empting them, and then into the long slow descent into the valley where the training base was. Squat concrete slabs as yet unbuilt on. Stainless steel pipework extruding from pressure vessels. Long, low hangars, large enough to swallow a jet. Blocks of identikit offices. Electric carts going from one to another, hauling trailers or people. Caverns in the side of the valley, with wide trackways leading to them. Some of the structures he’d been in. Most of them he hadn’t. Given that his every hour was dictated, there hadn’t been the opportunity to look around, let alone explore. Doors were locked, and opened only on a fingerprint. His finger worked only for the doors he was supposed to use, and no others.

  His waking and sleeping, his resting and his activity, what he ate and drank and when, were all strictly timetabled. When he wasn’t tossing his cookies out on the trail, he was on the treadmill with a mask over his face, or making simple models out of building blocks from pictures on a screen, or watching yet another instructional video on Mars. The medics had spent longer than his wife—ex-wife—had staring into his eyes, and X-rayed him top to bottom.

  And speaking of bottoms, they’d gone in with cameras: but at least they’d had the decency to lube up first.

  Mental tests. Physical tests. Everything they could throw at him, they did. He had no idea if he’d passed or failed, but he was still there, so that had to count for something.