“Oh no,” she repeated.
It had been the night she’d slept in his tool locker. The night she’d discovered Cavanaugh’s treachery. The night that had folded into the day she launched alone.
Crusty had not replaced the air filter.
She rose and dashed back to the bridge, seating herself at the mechanic’s station. Her lungs tickled from the effort of running and she coughed. She glanced through the information the ops panel returned on air filtration.
“Oh, Hades,” she whispered.
It looked bad. The air filter showed significant contamination in five places. She asked the computer for a recommendation and received instructions for an antiseptic flush, which she quickly initiated. The monitor before her began counting down from four hours, informing her that the flush would be completed within that time.
She wondered how many of these antiseptic flushings the ship could perform. Enough for seven more days of travel? She coughed again and it occurred to her that she’d been coughing a lot during her stints on the bridge. Could the air quality on the bridge be worse than in other parts of the ship? Crusty would know how to ask the ship where air quality was suffering right now. Jess made a few frustrating attempts to access this information, but she didn’t know the right sort of question and the answers the ship’s computer returned were either baffling or useless. “I’m a pilot,” she growled. “How am I supposed to make sense of any of this?”
Storming off the bridge, Jess began to explore each room on the ship’s habitation level, looking for evidence of microbial overgrowth. Once she started looking, she found things everywhere. Sometimes what she thought she saw turned out to be a shadow or an imperfection in the paint. But she also discovered seven varieties of oozing, sponging, and flaking growths. Some rooms fared better than others. The microbes displayed a preference for darkened corners. The bridge, her last stop, was worst-off of all.
While she waited for the antiseptic wash to complete, Jess scanned through a handful of articles on the subject of microbial overgrowth in deep-space vessels. None of it was encouraging. Some of it was frightening. Not only did the little creepy-crawlies reproduce rapidly away from normal planetary constraints, but several varieties consumed oxygen.
A shudder ran through Jessamyn. She calmed herself by reasoning that the ship had enough oxygen for five passengers. But she also took a reading to find out what the oh-two levels were like.
“Well, that’s a relief,” she muttered, seeing a nice distribution of the nitrogen, oxygen, and trace element gasses she needed in order to continue in the land of the living.
Four hours later, however, the ops panel returned disappointing readings: the antiseptic scrub had done almost nothing to combat the problem of contamination in the air filter. A new round of coughing shuddered through her. Resolving to spend as little time as possible upon the bridge, where her throat tickled worst, she strode back down the hall to the ob-deck to consider her options.
The orchid upon the floor looked forlorn. She could see clearly where the black spot had enlarged. A closer examination revealed that two other parts of Crusty’s beloved plant had small black spots. As she gazed in grim contemplation, a petal drooped and fell away to the floor, joining one which had fallen earlier. Jessamyn looked away.
What were her options? She could run another antiseptic scrub. She could clean up the growths that she could see. She could look through the herb-sims for something to keep her lungs healthy. And she could pray the contaminating species didn’t need much oxygen.
Not being made for inaction, Jessamyn commenced project Clean The Galleon. She ran another antiseptic wash and scheduled two more during her intended sleep cycle. She scrubbed and scraped and scoured. And, on the chance it would have the opposite effect of talking to the orchid, Jessamyn hurled invectives at every visible microbe she saw.
All of which meant her throat was very sore indeed come bedtime. She drank two water rations and then downed a few more without counting, justifying her behavior with the fact that she had five times as much water as one person needed aboard the ship. Either the water or the herb-sims calmed her throat enough so that she could fall asleep.
After a twelve-hours’ slumber, she returned to the helm, which she now recognized had a subtly malodorous scent. She examined the data from the filter scrubs she’d ordered the day before.
“How’s that even possible?” she muttered. The number of contaminated areas had grown instead of shrinking. “Where’s Crusty when I need him?” she asked aloud.
This was a situation she did not know how to handle. What if the antiseptic washes were making a cozier environment for the microbial infestations? She simply didn’t know what she was doing. She needed Crusty. Or her mom. Her mom would have known how to treat microbial infestation. Jessamyn determined to take a step she’d vowed she wouldn’t.
Sliding into her brother’s comm station, Jessamyn placed a call home.
It took several minutes for the “incoming call blocked by order of MCC” message to be returned to the Galleon. Jessamyn stared at the message in disbelief. She made a second attempt. And a third. And a fourth. But the message came back the same each time.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said aloud.
She decided to give Planetary Ag a try. There had to be someone there who would be willing to speak with her. But she received the same message in response to her attempt to raise someone in her mother’s department.
Jessamyn felt angry and betrayed. Outrage and self-pity battled inside her, with outrage coming out the winner.
“Fine,” she said at last. “MCC it is, then.”
She rubbed her hands against her thighs as she decided what angle to take. Outrage would probably not get her very far. She’d stolen the Red Galleon. So, instead of sending a message that encapsulated her indignation, she chose the form of communication she’d used with MCAB as a pilot-in-training. Language that was calm. Cool. Logical. She felt empowered as she utilized the familiar phrases.
“MCC, this is Mars Class Planetary Spacecraft Red Galleon, Pilot Jessamyn Jaarda at the helm requesting advice on a life-threatening microbial overgrowth aboard this vessel. Over.”
She waited for the message to reach Mars. Counted down the minutes that would bring a response.
The ship’s voice synthesizer spoke the words that appeared in written form upon her screen: “Rogue Vessel, this is Mars Colonial Command. We do not communicate with deserters. Any further attempts at communication will be blocked. Mars Colonial Command out.”
At this point, all her intentions to play nice evaporated. She gathered all of her anger—at her situation, at Marsians who had intended deadly harm to Mars, at the Terran satellite makers, at Lucca Brezhnaya and Red Squadron forces, and at the microbial overgrowth on her ship—and she stuffed every blessed bit of that fury into a three-wafer-pages response.
But as she read through her response prior to sending it, she realized that the missive indicted Mei Lo and Crusty as party to the theft of the Galleon. She couldn’t send the communiqué as it stood. The writing of it had, however, dulled her anger, leaving in its wake her truer, deeper emotions.
What she really wanted was for someone to tell her that everything was going to be okay—that she wasn’t alone. But no one could do that. Jessamyn was really and truly by herself. Sending a letter to MCC—whether angry or contrite—would not change the fact that she was in this alone.
She instructed the comm panel to delete her message and strode down the hall to the observation deck. When she arrived inside the room, darkened at the moment except for a small light directed upon Crusty’s orchid, she sank to the floor, feeling every one of the nearly two hundred million kilometers between her and home for the first time since she’d departed Mars.
Woeful, Jessamyn stared at the small plant. As she watched, two last petals drooped and fell from the flower onto the ground. She recoiled, feeling a fleeting panic. She’d killed her only companion. And bef
ore she could stop herself, Jess was sobbing over the loss of the orchid which had connected her to Crusty and made her loneliness upon the Galleon more bearable.
She was alone. Abandoned. No one back home cared whether she lived or died.
A new round of tears began, more bitter than the first. The stars outside the observation deck blurred together, pulled apart, blurred again. Whereas she had seen them before full of glory and wonder, now they appeared cold. Distant. Dispassionate. None of them cared about the fate of a lone girl inside a tiny ship. Jessamyn crumpled, a small creature in a vast universe, and wept until her eyes ran dry.
It was the astonishing experience of having run out of tears that roused Jessamyn. She’d read of such a thing in books, but had never known anyone who could confirm it was possible. She supposed she must be very dehydrated, indeed. She felt worn, like a pair of thermals run through the clean-mech too many times.
“The difference being that you have not yet outlived your usefulness,” she murmured aloud. “You’ve still got a shot at saving your planet. Now get up and find solutions to your problems, Jaarda.”
Stooping, she gathered the fallen orchid petals and carried them to the rations room for disposal. She drank two water packets. And she sat at the rations table to make a list of things to do and problems to solve. Fuel and Not crashing topped her list. Finding Ethan, Pavel, Harpreet, and Kipper was somewhere in the middle, being less something upon which she could take immediate action. Clean the filter and monitor oxygen levels were the last things on her list.
And that was when it occurred to her that there was something much more important than monitoring the percentage of oxygen in the air. What she really needed to ask the ship was this: how much of the oxygen in the tanks had she and her trillions of companions gone through so far? And was there enough remaining for the next seven days?
29
THE PERFECT ECOSYSTEM
Lucca had been very pleased at the rise in her popularity following the inciter attack upon the hospital in Hong Kong. As had happened following the previous “inciter” attacks, citizens clamored for better protection and praised Lucca’s government for its swift response. She smiled. The more she harmed them, the more they realized they needed her. It was the perfect ecosystem.
But the attack had not produced the actual result she’d been after. She’d meant it as a message, a punishment for Pavel. And he’d ignored it. Surely her nephew had received the message: If you continue to defy me, I know how to hurt you. It did not occur to her that he might be someplace where watching vid feeds wasn’t a part of his routine.
She had no further clues as to his whereabouts. She was no closer to locating and destroying his little band of would-be interstellar travelers. Around the clock, her surveillance teams searched to discover anything that looked like a craft intended for launch beyond the travel ban of three hundred kilometers above Earth. Parts and equipment suppliers for such a ship were put on alert and monitored carefully.
How she wished she could send a massed military fleet to destroy the Martian hangers-on once and for all. That would foil Pavel and his new friends. She closed her eyes and reminded herself why she could not pursue this course of action.
Because it would be too large an undertaking to keep secret.
Because it would be too costly an undertaking to keep secret.
Because destroying humans on Mars would be political suicide.
Because someone on Mars might reveal what they knew about improprieties in the Terran Re-body Program.
The expenditure was the real problem. The original Mars Colony had come with an unbelievable price tag. The costs year after year had crippled her ability to run Earth the way it should have been run. She shuddered at the remembrance. And if the cost to establish the forlorn colony had been great, the cost to send an armada of destruction would be unimaginable. It would set her tidy little plans for Earth back by decades.
Of course, Mars had tellurium … but the cost of mining and returning it to Earth had not offset the cost of running the colony previously. Nor would it now. No, best to stay the course with regard to Mars and Marsians. Pretend they don’t exist until, some blessed day, they no longer did.
And that meant preventing anyone on Earth from reaching Mars. Perhaps Pavel would respond more favorably to a series of unfortunate events than to a single one. Everyone had a breaking point. She just needed to find Pavel’s.
Lucca sighed. All she asked was to rule Earth well. That’s what her people needed—what they wanted—a firm ruler. So why did a handful of people have to make her job so difficult?
30
BETTER THAN THAT
Jessamyn frowned as she looked at the readings she’d pulled up at Crusty’s station. The ops screen told her the ship’s oxygen tanks were critically low. Which meant she and her many hitchhiking companions would soon be low. The wee beasties, feverishly hungry, had made a larger dent in the ship’s supplies of oh-two than four humans would have done in the same period of time. It was unfathomable. But it appeared to be true. She would run out of breathable air tomorrow or early the following day.
It began to look as if she wouldn’t die in a magnificent collision with the blue planet after all. Somehow suffocation sounded a far less inspiring way to go.
If she’d been home, she could have taken all the ship’s water and pulled oh-two from it with equipment common in most Marsian dwellings. If she weren’t alone, she could have asked Crusty for a solution.
She wished she had paid better attention during survival basics at MCAB, but she’d spent much of the class rolling her eyes at the sorts of scenarios that stranded people on the planet far from life support. She wasn’t going to wander off into the desert by herself or take a get-about for a joy ride far from home or crash her ship in the middle of nowhere. Jessamyn Jaarda was better than that.
She laughed mirthlessly at her former self.
“Yeah, Jessamyn Jaarda’s the kind of person who takes off in a stolen spacecraft with an insufficient supply of oxygen,” she muttered to Crusty’s leafless plant. She’d moved it back to the bridge—a macabre reminder to survive.
Gazing at the plant, dead or dying, she wished she’d been more attentive to its health. She should have checked it more frequently. She might have enclosed it within a safer environment. A spacesuit would have done the job. She laughed, a gravelly sound, as she imagined the plant encased within a globed helmet, the rest of the suit trailing empty.
And then it struck her.
Oh.
Oh.
Jessamyn’s mouth hung open. She had an alternative source of oxygen. She had five alternative sources in fact, thanks to the Ungrateful Wretch and his cronies. Leaping up from her seat, she raced to the nearest crew quarters and walked straight to one of the lockers holding a clean white spacesuit. She ran a hand along its cool surface. She had air. Each suit was equipped with a full day of air: twenty-four hours and thirty-eight minutes of oxygen.
She’d found the aft quarters to harbor the least amount of microbial growth and she hauled four suits to join the one already back there, helmets clacking as they bounced against one another.
Although her lungs’ tickle bothered her most on the bridge, she returned there now. The helm was where she could Do Important Things. First off was to estimate exactly how many hours she had left of good air and how many hours she had before she reached Earth. Taking a seat at the ship’s nav-panel, she calculated. She had one hundred fifty-six hours of flight to go. But she had only one hundred twenty three hours of “suit oxygen.” She needed to survive another thirty-three hours on whatever the ship could provide.
She stared out the view screen at Earth. “Oxygen, fresh oxygen. Get your oxygen here,” she chanted in a huckster’s sing-song. Then she rolled her eyes at herself.
“Aphrodite’s hair curlers!” she swore, swiping the chair at her brother’s station. It spun round and round.
Did the Galleon have thirty-three hours of o
xygen left? She didn’t know. But even if it did, her lungs wouldn’t enjoy breathing air the filter was no longer keeping clean. She thought of the plant and its growing splotches of black. She tried not to think about what her lungs might look like. She badly wanted to race back to the aft quarters and don a suit. But if air quality was degrading with each passing hour, and if there would be no oxygen at all left in a day or two, this was something she had to wait on.
“Safety protocols generally recommend launch and landing be carried out by a living pilot,” she murmured.
No, it wasn’t time to suit up yet. Her best chance was to wait out the thirty-odd hours and then suit up. She added a two-hour buffer as a margin of error, and then decided to spend as many of the intervening hours as possible in Ethan’s and Crusty’s drier quarters.
On her way, she stopped at the rations room to gather food and drink. Then she frowned. Once she began living her days inside a suit, she wouldn’t be able to eat ration bars—the helmet would be in the way. She wasn’t happy at the thought of being hungry for five days. On a hunch, she checked behind panels and cupboards until she located slimy packets of zero-g food.
“Oh, boy,” she murmured. “Won’t that be fun?”
She grabbed up an extra three packets of water for her aft-ship sojourn.
Water-grubber, her mind whispered in accusation.
“That’s me,” she agreed, reaching for a fourth and fifth just in case.
In the middle of the night, Jessamyn awoke from a nightmare where she’d watched in despair as the Red Galleon missed her intersection with Earth.
“Just a dream,” she mumbled, bringing on a fit of coughing. Hades, but her mouth was dry. Her throat burned as well. When she took a deep breath before standing, she realized that her lungs felt as though an iron band were slowing squeezing them shut. Was this what her mom’s dry-lung felt like? The thought of her mom cut through her like a heat-knife through polar ice. Jessamyn didn’t want to think about her parents right now.
Defying Mars (Saving Mars Series-2) Page 19