Patel travels across the Martian landscape to find a deserter. When he finds him, will he do his job—or follow his instincts?

Patel ripped the new work order from the printer and saw the ghost-pale corporate logo and heading. The name told him everything he needed to know about what kind of job it was.

He drove the crawler alone across the B17 basin; four hours of ochre hardpan, violet ridge lines, and rock formations that had been standing since before anything on Earth had even thought of forming into something worthwhile. After six years on Mars, it still wasn’t home. Maybe a safe harbor for a while, but not home.

The job was a retrieval order—Earnest Bauer, listed as a deserter. Last known coordinates were somewhere sensible people avoided, near the outer boundary. There, addresses stopped being addresses and became descriptions. East of the third relay. The silver dome with the dents. Patel had worked three jobs in the B-Ring fringe and knew that few people lived there by choice.

He had been a staff sergeant in the federal forces, doing dirty deeds with dirty soldiers for dirty reasons. Now he found people. Different, but somehow the same; finding dirty people in dirty places for dirty money.

Bauer opened the door as Patel approached.

He stood with an unhurried look, one hand on the doorframe, the other holding a coffee mug. He had had plenty of time to decide how he felt about the approaching guest and apparently had processed those thoughts well. Leaner than the service photo; more weathered. The current look came from years of hard work in an environment that didn’t seem to care about the weakness of the human body. The sun and cold had rearranged his face into a series of lines and fields and patterns looking as much like a topographical map as a man.

He looked at Patel the way you look at an approaching dust storm.

“Coffee,” he said, more a statement of what was about to happen than an offer.

The entirety of the module was a single room partitioned by purpose rather than by walls. A cot. A workbench buried in parts from any number of projects happening there. A heating unit working harder than it should have had to. The coffee pot looked to be a well-used feature.

The dog in the corner watched him with professional disinterest and went back to sleep.

Bauer handed him a cup and sat without clearing the metal table in front of them. The clutter didn’t embarrass him. He lived in his space the way the rock formations outside lived in theirs.

The coffee was awful. Really bad. Patel drank it anyway, though he noticed the grit floating and swirling on top. Just like back in the day.

“Took ‘em long enough,” Bauer said.

“Six years.”

“First year, second year; I kept thinking about it, about running deeper into the dust.” He picked up an old-fashioned book from the table and turned it in his hands. “By the fourth, I stopped. Whole thing seemed kinda silly at that point.”

“You didn’t run.”

“Nowhere worth running to.” He set it down. “Besides. I like it here.” He waved his hand around toward the land outside and then again to his meager possessions in his domed unit. “I like what I have.”

Patel looked at the room. Exposed insulation on the ceiling. A water ration gauge hovering near the lower third. One window with its view of hardpan, ridge, and a sky that looked no cleaner than any other part of the landscape.

“It’s rough,” Patel said.

“Yes.”

“Most people—”

“Most people are in the main station paying sixty percent of their wages for the privilege and comfort of the big dome.” No spite or malice in his voice. He was just stating a fact. “I own twelve hundred square meters of a lot of dirt and a lot of nothing. But it’s mine.” He paused, raised his mug to take a sip, and paused again. “The nothing is mine.”

Patel set his cup on the workbench beside a regulator whose mouthpiece mount had been stripped and re-threaded by hand. Careful work. Important work; a task that only confident and steady hands could do. Done wrong, it would mean death in a sandstorm.

He hadn’t yet said why he was there, but it seemed Bauer had figured it out already. The calm face and determined eyes told him that he didn’t need to. The mark had figured it out the moment he stepped out of the crawler. Bauer was tolerating something that he knew might end him, as if he were offering tea to the snake poised to bite him.

The shame arrived with texture and pressure. A low persistent friction beneath everything. The thing you noticed when the other things went quiet.

He thought about the corporate header. Ghost-pale and visible only if you looked for it. He thought about a lot in a short amount of time. The bulk of his thoughts were on how his old dog, Bess, would have gotten up and greeted any visitor, no matter how worn out she was at the end.

It also crossed his mind that where he now lived, a twenty-square-meter metal cave in the worst part of the junction wouldn’t be a fit home for a dog. Maybe it was better that Bess was gone.

“I should tell you,” Patel said, returning to the moment, “that I’m very good at my job.”

Bauer sat and watched his hunter spin his wheels.

“I should also tell you I haven’t decided yet what my job is.”

Bauer stayed silent for a moment. Outside, the wind wanted to push against something and chose the module. It pushed hard for a minute. The heating unit cycled. The dog let out a sigh like its time in the red dust had rendered life too difficult.

“There’s more coffee,” Bauer said finally. “If you need time to figure it out.”

Patel looked at his empty cup, traces of red in the bottom.

“Yeah. I’ll have some more.”

Grit

Witness to the Flames