The whole of ThorGate’s operations on Mars were in turmoil after the shutdown of the Noctis site. The corporation still had a lot of projects running, but the atmosphere in Thor Town was tense. Luka tried to distance himself from the fear, speculation and anxiety and spent much of his evenings going through Gianni’s diary. He repeatedly watched the videos to understand how he had become the frightened and suspicious man who Luka had seen in his last diary entry.
Watching him talk about Anita across the six months of their relationship was like watching a movie in which the slow decline of a man is compressed into a few hours. At the beginning, the love he had for her was real and deep and the joy of the early entries seemed to spill out of the window. What started as a crush and a tentative first date became more intimate and intense. Then, as time moved on, Gianni got more and more frustrated. He kept talking about something bothering her, about Anita refusing to talk to him about it and how it was souring their relationship.
There was one entry which seemed to be key. It was from a week before Gianni died and was recorded late at night. As Luka watched it again, he not only listened to the words, he paid attention to Gianni’s body language. He came across as nervous and distracted, speaking to the camera in an urgent whisper, often averting his eyes from its probing lens, as he recounted the events of that evening and tried to make sense of them.
“I was looking for Anita,” he said. “I wasn’t stalking her or spying on her. I actually wanted to spend the evening with her. I’d just received a small bottle of Barbera del Monferraato Superiore which my parents had sent in the recent shipment from Earth – I can’t imagine how much it cost them – and I could think of no one that I would rather share it with than Anita.
“I wanted to surprise her,” Gianni continued. “But she wasn’t at her apartment. I went to her office, but it was all locked up. That’s when I realized she hadn’t picked up my messages. I called her again, but there was no response and her WristTab was out of range. That meant she wasn’t in Thor Town and that’s when I got worried. If she hadn’t been so secretive over these past few weeks, I might have assumed she had business at Tharsis City and forgot to tell me. So, I checked the computer systems.”
Gianni shot a guilty look at the camera. “I suppose you could call it an abuse of power, but I’m in charge of the systems, so I can cover my tracks. Which is more than Anita had done. Records showed the last known location of her WristTab in Thor Town was at the rover depot. She had taken out a rover and, according to the time noted on the log, it was already getting dark out on the surface when she did so. No one takes a rover out at night unless it’s an emergency. Satellite navigation works just the same and the rover’s headlights are enough to illuminate the ground ahead to avoid any big rocks, but visibility is still reduced. Not to mention the cold. She knows that temperatures can drop to minus seventy out there and keeping the inside of the rover warm takes a lot of power. So, I went down to check it out. Like I said, I was worried.
“I found one maintenance guy who confirmed that a rover was missing. He pulled up more detail on the log and found Anita’s authorization code, but it wasn’t linked to a planned route. Safety protocols insist people log a route when taking out a rover – for heaven’s sake, she shouldn’t have been able to take it out at night at all! But she’d got round the rules somehow. I suppose, the Head of Martian Projects can do what the hell she likes.
“I tried calling her on the radio, but there was no response. The maintenance guy was nervous about being blamed and asked if we should alert someone and send out a search party, or commandeer the satellite network to trace her. But I knew she had deliberately left Thor Town under the cover of darkness and not told anyone where she was going, so I said it wasn’t anything to be concerned about. That it wasn’t his fault. She had the authority, although I’m not sure that’s the truth. He didn’t believe me – he must have seen I was worried – but he didn’t question it when I said I would wait until she came back. He said he had responsibilities at home he couldn’t ignore, and that no one would be in until morning. I didn’t mind if he left me alone at the end of his shift.
“I sat there for…” Gianni paused as he thought back. “It must have been a couple of hours before the airlock warning alarm sounded and the automatic systems sealed off the bay to allow Anita’s rover to return. When it repressurized, I went back inside and watched as the hatchway opened and waited for Anita to appear. She looked shocked to see me, but it wasn’t her expression that made me realize she had been doing something secret out on the surface. It was her clothes. They were covered in red, rusty Mars dust. The stuff gets everywhere when you step out onto the planet. You try to be careful when you take off your rad-suit, but it still seems to find its way into your hair, on your skin and all over everything you’re wearing. The more contact you’ve had with the dust, the more it seems to want to go home with you. A lot of it had attached itself to Anita tonight.
“She was furious and accused me of stalking her and spying on her. I tried to tell her I’d been worried, but that only made her swear at me. When she ran out of rude words in English, she swore at me in Norwegian. That’s when I caught a glimpse of the equipment she had with her inside the rover. I only saw it briefly before she climbed out and closed the hatch, but it was definitely some sort of drilling and lighting equipment – the sort you might need if you were working outside in the dark. She tried to explain away the dust, the equipment, and the fact that it was the middle of the night by claiming the rover got stuck in a pothole and she had to manually dig herself out of it. But I didn’t believe her. And, by the look on her face, she knew I could see through her lies.”
Gianni looked directly into the camera, so Luka felt he was looking across the passage of time. “So, what do I do now? Tell someone? Who do I tell? She’s my boss! And tell them what? That she’s been behaving suspiciously? They’d say I’m reading something into nothing. They’d say I was upset with her because our relationship isn’t what it was. They might even be right – about that last bit, at least.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just open that bottle of Barbera del Monferraato Superiore on my own and get drunk and forget about tonight. Maybe, in the morning, I will have the courage to say I don’t want to see her anymore.”
Gianni seemed to hold onto that last thought, as if it was the first time it had occurred to him.
Luka paused the image so he could study Gianni’s face closer. He looked so sad. Like a man who had realized a great love affair was over. Even so, subsequent diary entries revealed that he never had the courage to break up with Anita. Perhaps, deep down, he didn’t want to. Perhaps, deep down, he still loved her.
But one thing was certain: in the message that Gianni had recorded a week before he died, he didn’t appear paranoid. He was angry, hurt and frustrated, but apparently completely sane. Which meant that Anita really had been up to something secret that night in the rover. Something that, when Gianni found out about it, caused her to be furious with him. So furious that after Gianni had spoken about it in his diary, he made sure to hide away those recordings for someone else to find, nel caso in cui.
Which Luka had translated from the Italian and discovered meant “just in case.”