Oxygen Series Box Set: A Science Fiction Suspense Box Set

by John Olson

  “Kennedy?” Voices were yelling in Valkerie’s earphones. She pulled her Snoopy cap off and moved in to examine him. “Kennedy?”

  Kennedy rocked back and forth in his seat, teeth bared, eyes clamped shut, forehead furrowed in pain.

  “Kennedy, are you okay?” Valkerie pushed her way to Kennedy’s side.

  Unshed tears bulged at the corners of his eyes.

  “Kennedy, what’s wrong? Can you hear me?” Valkerie shouted.

  Kennedy brushed at his face with his sleeve. “Quiet! I’m trying to listen.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought you—”

  “Shhhh!” He repositioned his microphones and turned away. “That’s a negative, Houston, but there was a bit of turbulence. We are commencing to check for damage.” He popped his seat restraints and pushed off for the central stairwell. “I’m checkin’ Level One!”

  Valkerie stared after him in surprise and turned to see if the others had noticed his strange behavior. Lex had already released from her seat and was starting to type at the NavConsole.

  Bob floated above Lex like a phantom. “Keep your eye on the cabin pressure. If it so much as hiccups I want to know about it.” He moved deliberately, clutching his vomit bag tight. His eyes jittered like his world was moving faster than his equilibrium could keep up.

  “Bob, let me give you something for the nausea.” Valkerie held up a syringe. “I think Kennedy needs something too.”

  He waved her away without even looking at her. “Get below deck and help Kennedy. I want every ORU pulled. Every system double-checked.”

  “Is something wrong? I heard a crash, but I thought it might be—”

  “Now!” Bob snapped. A second later he looked suddenly apologetic. “Please, Valkerie. Telemetry is out. I really need you downstairs.”

  Valkerie pushed off for the stairwell. At the hatch, she turned to look back. Bob was typing furiously at the master console. A fresh vomit bag was floating in the air next to him. His face was pale and glistened with a sheet of sweat.

  “This really will help.” She flicked the syringe packet in Bob’s direction and pulled herself into the central stairway. If he was afraid of a little needle, that was his problem. Her job was to offer it.

  Valkerie pulled herself through the stairwell tube using the steps that were folded back against the walls of the metal cylinder. The lower deck was lit by a dull orange glow. Something was wrong. The main lights were out. She hurried through the circular corridor.

  Kennedy was in the equipment bay shining a flashlight across the back wall panel.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Huh?” Kennedy swung around and caught her in the beam of his flashlight.

  “Bob’s worried about the ship. He wants me to help you with checkout.” Valkerie squinted into the light.

  Kennedy’s head was cocked at a funny angle. He didn’t look good at all.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Valkerie pushed herself closer. “Need an antinausea shot?”

  Kennedy shook his head and turned to face the wall. “I’m fine. No problems at all. But I could use some help checking the ship.” He swept the wall haphazardly with his flashlight. “I’ve already checked this area. You check the decontamination bay.” He floated past her with his head still cocked to the side.

  “Are you sure? What about the lights?”

  “I’m about to check them right now. You make sure none of the hoses vibrated loose.” He pulled himself through the door and disappeared from sight.

  Valkerie pulled a flashlight from one of the charging stations and flicked it on. An odd flash caught her eye. She played her light along the walls of the room. A shiny spot on the back wall reflected the light back at her. The same part of the wall that Kennedy had been examining.

  Valkerie pushed herself over for a closer look. A large patch of the lower section of the wall glistened with some kind of a residue. She ran a finger across the patch. It was wet, oily. An organic solvent? She examined the patch closer. It was streaked with a strange pattern. Like somebody had wiped it with a cloth.

  “Juice.”

  Valkerie jumped at Kennedy’s voice. She spun around to face him. “What?”

  “My drink bag sprang a leak.” Kennedy brought out a clean towel and wiped at the spill.

  “But—”

  “This isn’t exactly a spectator sport. Didn’t I ask you to check the decontamination bay?”

  Valkerie held her ground. “That wasn’t juice. I checked—”

  “The decontamination bay,” Kennedy growled.

  “But that wasn’t—”

  Kennedy pushed his way past her with a look of irritation.

  Valkerie watched him leave, too surprised to say another word. Kennedy was hurting bad—he had to be. Either that or ... Valkerie pushed off the wall and headed for the decontamination room. The faster they checked the ship, the better.

  * * *

  Saturday, January 25, Year Three, 2:00 P.M.

  Bob

  Bob moved a shaky finger down the column of data on his computer screen. Life support—stable. Cabin pressure—stable. Over two hundred indicators of structural integrity—all of them read stable. He couldn’t believe it. A stabilizer fin had winged the tower—a video analysis on the ground had confirmed it. They could have been killed so easily. The vibrations alone could have torn them apart. One loose hose. One weak O-ring. There were millions of failure modes, any one of which could have killed them. And that was just in eight minutes. How many billions of failure modes would there be if they went all the way to Mars?

  What had he been thinking? Up till now, he’d been brushing aside his fears as trivial things, as phantoms to be mastered by his mind. But what if the phantoms were real and his logic a slave to an illusion? That had never occurred to him. He had been a fool. If the Hab had broken up during launch, if it had exploded in a bright orange fireball that repeated itself over and over on his parents’ big-screen television—how would that have been substantially different from committing suicide? Sure there was a chance that he’d make it back from Mars. But there was a chance he’d survive a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge too. Failure to think through consequences wasn’t a valid excuse. How many times had the Sisters taught him that lesson? How many times did the ruler have to smack his knuckles before the message finally lodged in his bony little head?

  He turned slowly to face Lex, careful to avoid the kinds of sudden motion that had been making his inner ear send out general distress signals to his stomach.

  “How are you doing with the Guidance and Nav checkout?” His voice pounded in his head. His face felt bloated, as if he were hanging upside down. No gravity to pull the fluids down. They had warned him about that too, but of course he hadn’t paid attention. He hadn’t considered the possibility of death, much less issues of general discomfort.

  Lex looked up from her console and shook her head. “The primary IMU is glitching. I’m resyncing it with the secondary.”

  “Great.” Bob closed his eyes and sighed. The Inertial Measurement Unit had glitched on Earth under a lot less severe shaking. Of course it wasn’t working. And the IMU was mission critical. If they didn’t have both secondary and primary working, they’d have to scrap the mission. Yesterday the thought would have ticked him off but good, would have pumped him full of determination to make this mission succeed. But now ... now he felt almost relieved.

  Because after the beating they’d just taken, there was no way this ship was going anywhere but to a docking port with the International Space Station. He’d just looked the Reaper in the eye and walked away in one piece. A normal, everyday life on Earth was suddenly looking like a pretty good deal. A wife. Kids. Minivan. House in the ‘burbs. If they twisted his arm, he’d even take the white picket fence.

  “Hey, Bob, this is Houston.” Josh’s voice sounded tinny and thin. “EECOM and TELMU want to know when they’re going to have telemetry back on line. We’re feeling kind of lonely down here wit
h all our consoles flatlined.”

  “Roger that, Houston,” Bob said. “The answer to that is not very soon. The telemetry data bus is fritzed, and our Ku-band antenna seems to be locked up pretty good. It may take a spacewalk to fix the antenna, and that is not going to happen today.”

  “That’s another thing,” Josh said. “Flight is asking if maybe we shouldn’t push back the trans-Mars injection burn a little bit. We’ll miss prime time, but I don’t think we have any other choice.”

  Trans-Mars injection? Josh was still thinking there was a chance to do TMI? The Hampster would set him straight on that real fast. “Um, Josh, hasn’t Kennedy sent you his report yet?”

  “That’s affirmative, we have Kennedy’s preliminary report. All life-critical systems are online and in order, but we’ve got no data down here. Zero. Zippo. So you need to be our eyes and ears. We need an exact accounting of what’s broken and what isn’t.”

  “Roger that.” Bob checked his console. “Looks like the Hampster and Valkerie have already fixed the problem with the lower level lights. They’re downstairs right now kicking the tires on the fuel cells, but I can see from our power usage that those are in good shape.”

  “EECOM is concerned about the integrity of the solar panels,” Josh said. “They weren’t designed to take that kind of stress. Recommend you deploy them and check for damage. That’s a mission critical function and it’s gonna take a few hours to deploy those, so you need to get started right away.”

  “That’s affirm. Beginning deployment of solar panels.” Like there’s any chance of saving this mission. Bob flipped open the procedures book, read through the first section, and began toggling switches. They hadn’t planned to deploy the solar panels while in orbit. It would take a couple hours to reel them out, another couple to bring them back in. And who knew how long in between to check them out. Busy work. The boys on the ground were obviously stalling. Giving themselves time to work out an emergency rendezvous with the International Space Station. The Hab was designed to land on Mars, not Earth, so they’d have to rendezvous with the ISS and wait for the next bus back to earth. A day catching down to the ISS, a few weeks on the station, and they’d be back on terra firma. They wouldn’t be heroes, but they’d be alive.

  Which sure beat the alternative.

  * * *

  Saturday, January 25, Year Three, 4:00 P.M.

  Nate

  Nate scanned the faces of Gold Team. They had just finished their shift, but every one of them had volunteered to hang around and back up Maroon Team. “All right, kids, that was a tough launch. What’s our status?” He jabbed a finger at EECOM. “You first.”

  EECOM was a short, thin woman with bright red hair and hunched shoulders. She licked her lips nervously. “I do not have data at this time. Bob is investigating the situation. We seem to have multiple failures in telemetry. The data bus has failed, and the Ku-band antenna has a malfunction. That is all he knows at present.”

  “Telemetry is mission critical,” Nate said. “Is it fixable?”

  TELMU shrugged. “Too early to say. The Ku antenna should be easy. Don’t know about the data bus. But let’s assume so for now.”

  Nate scratched his neck furiously. “What a royal mess. So what have we got? Does anybody have any hard data?”

  GNC cleared his throat. “Josh talked to Lex about the Guidance and Nav. They had a glitch in the IMU, but she resynced it with the secondary. Other than that, she’s happy.”

  Josh nodded. “Lex is ready to rocket. I also talked to Kennedy, and he’s done a pretty thorough checkout downstairs. All life-critical systems are fine, and he’s gung-ho to move on to the next phase. Bob is being ... Bob. We had a question on the mechanical integrity of the solar panels, so I asked him to deploy those and test them thoroughly. That’ll take a few hours.”

  “What about Valkerie? Have you talked to her?”

  “She’s worried about neck injuries and wants to examine the crew right away. Flight Med concurs and has put it on the schedule.”

  Nate leaned back in his chair. “Okay, obviously we’re not gonna make the burn for Mars tonight. My question for you all is real simple. How long before they’re ready to break orbit?”

  “The bottleneck is currently in the solar panel checkout,” EECOM said. “Once Dr. Kaganovski completes that procedure, we can pronounce the ship good to go.”

  “Assuming we get telemetry fixed,” said TELMU.

  Nate turned to the Flight Dynamics Officer. “What’s our deadline?”

  “We need to do the burn as soon as possible,” FDO said. “Every day we wait is gonna cost us about eighty meters per second of delta-V, and we’re marginal now. We should have launched a week ago.”

  “Tell that to NBS,” Nate said. “Any other issues? Everybody comfortable with where we’re at?”

  Heads nodded around the room.

  “Okay, people, go keep an eye on Maroon Team.” Nate stood up. “As soon as we’re ready to do that burn, I want to know about it.”

  * * *

  Saturday, January 25, Year Three, 8:00 P.M.

  Bob

  Bob studied the powerflow diagnostics. “Um, Houston, good news/bad news on the solar panels.”

  “Yeah, Bob, go ahead.” Josh’s voice cut through the static. “EECOM is begging me to give her some numbers.”

  “Okay, Panel B is good. It’s operating at something like 99.8 percent of nominal.” Bob took a sip of juice. “The real problem is with Panel A. I’m seeing just about 48 percent of nominal power. I deployed the CamBot out there to do a visual, and we have some serious damage near the middle of the array. I’m talking busted semiconductor, dangling wire, and structural damage.”

  The signal cut out. When it came back on, Josh was still swearing.

  “I’m gonna estimate we’re operating at a combined level of about 74 percent of rated power,” Bob said.

  “I think that’s below our safety margin,” Josh said.

  Which means we don’t fly. “That’s affirm.”

  “I’ll pass that information along, and we’ll see if there’s any way out of that,” Josh said. “Any other damage reports? We need to know everything, Bob. If you’ve got a broken toilet paper dispenser, we need to know, okay?”

  “Roger that,” Bob said. “Lex is monitoring the primary IMU to make sure it doesn’t go hinky on us again. The Hampster should be sending his next report in a few minutes. Stand by.”

  Bob pushed off toward the stairwell. The mission might be dead, but nobody was going to say that he hadn’t given it his best effort. Bob floated down the stairwell and entered the brightly lit lower level. “Hampster! Shake a leg!”

  Kennedy came around the corner, looking like he had a migraine. “Hey, Bo, sound don’t travel in a vacuum. No matter how loud you yell, they aren’t gonna hear you back in Houston.”

  “Sorry.” Bob looked around. “Where’s Valkerie?”

  “She’s working on the bioreactor. One of the hoses pulled loose, and we lost a little water.”

  “Like how much?” Bob pulled out his phone to make a note.

  “Not even enough to report,” Kennedy said.

  “Houston wants everything reported.”

  A pained expression crossed Kennedy’s face. “Hold on.” He floated back into the service bay, where a panel had been yanked out of the wall. “Valkerie, is the bioreactor fixed yet?”

  “Just about.”

  Kennedy turned back to Bob. His face had taken on a slight greenish cast. “It’s online again. There’s nothing to report.”

  “Are you feeling okay?” Bob asked.

  “I’m fine, and you’re not my mother, so back off, all right?” Kennedy’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Did you hear me? We’re not going to report that bioreactor.”

  “Um ...” Bob didn’t want to make a scene, but he didn’t feel comfortable, either.

  “Look, they wanted a list of what’s broken, right? As in present tense? So if it’s fixed by the time you
check in with Houston, you are not going to mention it. They’ve got enough to think about down there. How do the solar panels look?”

  “Panel A is busted up pretty bad,” Bob said. “Definitely not fixable. We’ll be below margin on energy production when we hit Mars.”

  “We can turn off some of the flight computers,” Kennedy said. “That’s not going to be an issue.”

  How do you know? You haven’t even seen the data. Face it, Hampster. The mission is over. Bob scanned the checklist on his phone. “Okay, what else do we have glitching?”

  “Everything else is fine.”

  “What about the Reaction Control System? Have you checked it yet?”

  “RCS is fine. There’s a busted valve in one of the hypergolic fuel lines, but we’ve got enough redundancy that it’s not an issue. We can easily keep station with fifty jets.”

  Bob narrowed his eyes. “Just one valve? We’ve got fifty-two jets.”

  “Okay, it’s two valves, but we aren’t going to bother reporting them to Houston. You know how Perez is—he’ll freak out over any little thing. The solar panel is the main thing.” Kennedy looked at his watch. “Time for my report.” Kennedy pushed past Bob and ducked through the hatch of the stairwell.

  Bob let him go. Denial. And after denial came resignation. Or was it acceptance? The Hampster would be all right. He just needed a little more time. They’d all work as hard as they could to salvage the mission, but in the end it wouldn’t happen. It wasn’t in the stars. Still, acceptance would be a whale of a lot easier knowing they’d given it everything they had.

  Bob floated toward the lab. “Valkerie, I’m sorry about yelling ...” He stopped outside the door. Soft tones drifted from the open chamber. Humming. No. Not humming. She was singing to herself. A heavy lump formed in his throat. He stopped himself at the door. She was busy. He could come back later. The apology would keep.