Alone

DATE: Year 322-B. Sol 356

LOCATION: MTC Loader Yard 4

Eni Clarion wiped his forehead with the back of a grease-stained glove, but it did little to help with the heat. The cooling fans in the loader were struggling.

He was deep into his second shift, a "Recovery Beat" mandated by the MTC Auditor, and the neural lag was starting to set in.

It manifested as a slight ghosting of the HUD on his retina, a delay between his hand moving the joystick and the massive hydraulic claw responding.

-Yard 4, keep the pace, a voice crackled through his headset. You’re lagging three beats behind the quota, Clarion. Optimize your rotation.

Eni and the workers sometimes debated whether there was an actual person somewhere watching the feed and supervising them or if it had been automated. Sometimes they tested it with non-sensical questions, but it was usually a waste of oxygen. The responses did always feel too long coming.

Eni adjusted his grip on the controls silently. The scavenger’s rosary wrapped around his wrist clacked against the metal housing of the joystick, heavy steel washers that had once been part of an old atmospheric scrubber his father had worked on.

-Easy now, Eni whispered to the machine. Just forty more beats. Juyiet’s waiting. Leo’s waiting.

He nudged the loader forward. The Type-4 was a beast of a machine, a six-legged walker designed to haul raw silicates from the airlock to the refinery. Today it was sickly. Every time he engaged the primary lift, he felt a vibration through the soles of his boots. It was a hydraulic stutter.

He looked at the external pressure gauge mounted on the arm’s hinge. A thin, dark mist was spraying from the primary seal, hydraulic fluid vaporizing in the thin Martian air.

-Supervisor, Yard 4, Eni said. I’ve got a seal failure on the primary lift. I need to cycle down for a field repair.

There was a long pause, filled only with the static of the station's interference.

-Denied, Clarion. The quota is at ninety-eight percent. The MTC Safety Expert has logged your machine as ‘Asset Viable’ for another six hours. Continue.

-Be human, Eni muttered to himself, looking at the spray of fluid. It was thicker now, a dark smear against the dust of the yard. He thought of Juyiet’s face in the chapel. He thought of the school, and the young Teacher who looked at them like they were more than just biomass.

Eni muttered a prayer to himself, closing his eyes for a second as the glitches in his vision worsened.

He engaged the lift. The claw bit into the silicate pile, barely. The loader tilted as it took the weight, the internal gyros spinning up frantically and erratically.

Then, he heard it. A sharp tearing sound and then a great sigh. The pressure gauge on his HUD spiked into the red and then vanished entirely as the primary line burst. A geyser of superheated fluid erupted from the arm, obscuring his forward cameras in a blur of black oil.

The loader lurched violently to the left. Eni slammed his hand onto the emergency override, but the joystick was dead.

-Supervisor! The arm is—

And then nothing.