Oxygen Series Box Set: A Science Fiction Suspense Box Set

by John Olson

  Heads nodded around the table.

  “All right, go out there and dig me up some oxygen. And if you need a magic wand to do that—get one.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Saturday, April 5, Year Three, 9:00 A.M.

  Valkerie

  VALKERIE WIPED LEX’S ARM GENTLY with an alcohol swab. It was hard to see in the dim emergency lights, but the scarlet blotches that covered Lex’s skin were beginning to fade to a sickly blue. Lex was still on ventilation, but her lungs seemed to be clearing. She was still unconscious, though—not a good sign.

  Valkerie opened a syringe and jabbed the needle into the septum of a sealed vial. She could barely make out the label.

  “What’s that?”

  Valkerie jumped. “Bob, you scared me to death!”

  “What is that stuff?” Bob demanded.

  “It’s Propentofylline—for Lex.” She ignored Bob’s frown and turned back to her patient.

  “What does it do?”

  Valkerie gave Lex the injection. “For your information, it’s an NMDA antagonist. It protects the hippocampus and dorsal thalamic nucleus from hypoxia-induced calcium influx. Are you satisfied, doctor? Do you agree with my treatment?”

  Bob shrugged. “You’re not supposed to do anything that could be construed as hostile. We all agreed. If anything happens to Lex—”

  “Something already happened to Lex!” Valkerie snapped. “I’m doing all I can for her, but you have to trust me. We have to trust each other.”

  “You’re saying you trust him?” Bob nodded to the sleeping form of Kennedy. He floated vertically in a Sleep Restraint Unit attached to the wall, his arms floating out in front of him like a zombie in an old black-and-white movie.

  “I have to trust him. Our survival depends on it.”

  Bob moved to the control center and flipped through the monitoring systems.

  “Bob, all this paranoia is ridiculous. If you wanted to destroy the ship, you could do it right now. How would I be able to stop you?”

  “The ship has built-in safeguards. Redundant controls. Self-monitoring subsystems to block out dangerous commands.”

  “And you could get through those in a second, couldn’t you?”

  Bob turned back to the screen and a stream of clacks erupted from the keyboard. “Whoa ... look at this!”

  “What?”

  “The day before the explosion you wrote Josh four e-mails, and he only sent one reply.”

  Valkerie moved toward the computer station, trying to remember if she had written anything embarrassing. “Don’t you dare read my mail. Those are private messages.”

  “I’m sure they are,” Bob said grimly.

  “For your information—”

  “Uh-oh ... get this.”

  Valkerie peered over Bob’s shoulder. The screen showed a log of sent and received messages.

  “Lex got six messages from an rjanderson@gimli.usaf.gov—all the day before the explosion. The server shows sixteen unopened messages since then. Did she ever mention anyone named Anderson to you?”

  Valkerie shook her head. Something was familiar about that address. USAF, the air force ... “You know, there was an air force officer who came to our prelaunch send-off. I thought it was odd at the time, because he never talked to anyone. Just stood in the back watching. I think he was watching Lex.”

  “Are you sure? He never said anything?”

  “Nothing. He may have signaled to her, but that would have been all. He didn’t stay long.”

  “Come on!” Bob pushed away from the command station and pulled himself across the room.

  “Come on, where?” Valkerie followed him to Lex’s room. “What are you doing?” She stopped outside Lex’s door and watched as Bob went rifling through Lex’s gear.

  “Just trying to save our tails.” Bob brought out Lex’s computer and aimed his phone at her IR port.

  “We can’t do this. Her computer’s password-protected.”

  Bob stared at the screen of his phone. “Come on, baby ...”

  “Bob. What—”

  “Yes!” Bob pocketed his phone and began hammering at Lex’s keyboard.

  “You have a cracker on your phone? Those are illegal.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Look at this.”

  Valkerie craned her neck to see the text file on the screen. “It’s encrypted.”

  “Look at the subject headers,” Bob said. “Those are easy enough to read.”

  Valkerie squinted. “I’ll miss you.” “Maybe you should wait.” “My last and final message.”

  “Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Bob flipped the laptop shut.

  Valkerie nodded. Lex had been so guarded during training. So quiet. Maybe—

  A loud knock filled the ship. It sounded as if it came from the control room.

  Bob dashed for the doorway, leaving Lex’s computer spinning in midair. Valkerie pulled herself after him. Could it be Lex? Was she finally waking up? Valkerie careened off the wall of the hallway and bounced into the control room.

  The room was still. Lex and Kennedy lay in their Sleep Restraint Units. Kennedy’s right eye twitched. His face wore a taunting smirk, and his head bobbed up and down to the throb of his pulse. Valkerie examined the SRU that held him against the wall. Had it been unzipped before? She couldn’t remember.

  “Uh-oh ... more trouble.”

  Valkerie followed Bob’s gaze across the room to the command center. A red light flashed on the console. She couldn’t tell from where she floated, but it looked like the life-support emergency alarm.

  * * *

  Saturday, April 5, Year Three, 9:30 A.M.

  Bob

  Bob floated to the console. What was that flashing light? “WARNING: Current Power Usage Is Within 200 Watts of Available Power.”

  He checked the power usage stats.

  Quarks and bosons! Life support was using an awfully high percentage of total power. He ought to have thought about that, but he’d been so tired. At midnight Lex had gone into a crisis, and it took all night to get her out of the woods, with all three of them watching each other like hawks. He desperately needed a sleep shift. But he couldn’t leave Valkerie as the only person awake. If she were the bomber—she couldn’t be—but if she were, then ...

  “What’s up?” Valkerie settled in close behind Bob. Uncomfortably close.

  “We got a warning from the system about power usage.” Bob moved to give Valkerie more room. “I checked, and we’re not using much. But about 44 percent of that is for life support.”

  “Um, remind me,” Valkerie said. “Our solar panels won’t generate as much energy when we get farther away from the sun, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s an inverse square law. Worst case on this mission: Mars is about 1.5 times as far from the sun as Earth is, and we’re at maybe 1.2 astronomical units now, so we’ll get a power reduction by a factor of ...” Impossible! “When we get to Mars, we’ll be getting only about 64 percent of our current power!”

  He looked at Valkerie and saw in her eyes that she could subtract.

  “But we’re using almost all available power right now,” she said. “Can we cut the power on the ship any further?”

  Bob spun to the CommConsole. “Houston, this is Ares 10, come in.” While he waited, he scanned the power usage stats again. The ship was down to a bare-bones budget already.

  Four minutes later Josh’s voice floated in over the speakers. “Ares 10, this is Houston. How are you on this fine day?”

  “Josh, listen, I’ve got a major concern here. Valkerie and I did a hand calculation, and we see an energy crisis coming up as we get closer to Mars. Has anybody down there noticed this?”

  More minutes passed. Bob was beginning to hate this two-way delay in radio-signal time. Four minutes was a long time when you just wanted to talk to a human. We are a long, long way from Kansas, Toto.

  “Roger on that, Ares 10,” Josh said. “Be assured, we are working on that now. Over.”

 
Bob tapped his fingers on the console. That was it? They were working on it?

  “Why haven’t they bothered to inform us about this?” Valkerie asked.

  “Good question.” Bob keyed the mike. “Houston, we see this as a serious issue. What is wrong with you people? Why haven’t you mentioned this to us yet?”

  Again, the pause. This one seemed longer than usual. “Affirmative on that, Ares 10. We also are taking this very seriously. Over.”

  Bob turned to stare at Valkerie. “He didn’t answer our question!”

  “Let me talk to him.” Valkerie leaned over the console. He could feel her body heat, could almost smell her anger. “Josh, this is Valkerie, and I want you to get one thing perfectly clear. We are not going to tolerate you keeping us in the dark on things that affect our safety. Over.”

  “You tell him, sister,” Bob said.

  “Don’t get sarcastic with me.”

  He sighed. “Valkerie, I’m not being sarcastic. That was a compliment.”

  The next few minutes passed in frigid silence.

  “Valkerie, Bob—this is Josh.” He sounded contrite, humble. “I must apologize for that error in judgment. Please believe me when I say that we intended to bring up the power crisis with you after your next sleep shift. We didn’t feel it was wise to discuss it when you’re exhausted. We do have teams working around the clock on it right now.”

  Bob felt a stab in his heart. Power crisis? Working around the clock? What was going on? “They’re scared,” he muttered.

  Valkerie clutched his arm. He turned to look at her.

  “They’re not the only ones,” she said.

  Then it hit him—a rush of cold fear that shot through his body, a bolt of raw adrenaline in his veins, little prickles of terror in his palms. He shivered.

  “Bob?” Valkerie still clung to his arm.

  He swallowed hard.

  “Bob?”

  He looked down at Valkerie. Her eyes were frightened. Trusting. Like a little girl’s. His heart pounded in his throat. “Yeah?” He choked out the word.

  “We’re going to be okay, right?”

  He swallowed again and swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. Even if she were the bomber, she was still scared. She was still human. He took a deep breath and wrapped a protective arm around her.

  “Yeah.” His voice sounded thick and distant, and there was a ringing in his ears. “Yeah, we’re going to be okay.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Saturday, April 5, Year Three, 10:00 A.M.

  Nate

  NATE LAY ON A COT, staring up at the ceiling of the war room. Footsteps sounded outside.

  The door flew open and Josh stormed in.

  Nate leaped to his feet, heart pounding. Had they blown the ship up completely?

  “They know.” Josh wiped his eyes. “Nate, what are we going to do? They know they’re going to die, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.”

  “Josh, listen, it ain’t over till the gravitationally enhanced lady sings.”

  “It’s over!” Josh shouted. “This isn’t Apollo 13. Will you get that through your head? We don’t have a lifeboat on board this time.”

  “Josh ...”

  But Josh had already stomped out, slamming the door, swearing like a sailor. A few seconds later his bellowing cut off in midcry.

  Nate rushed out. If Josh had a heart attack now, that’d just be cherries on the old cheesecake, wouldn’t it?

  But Josh was still on his feet, staring into space.

  “Josh? You okay?” Nate hurried up to check on him.

  “What did I just say?” Josh spun and grabbed Nate’s arm. “Nate, what’d I say?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “No, after that. We don’t have a lifeboat on board. Isn’t that what I said? But we do have a lifeboat!”

  “What are you talking about?” Nate wondered if he ought to order Josh to take a rest. The guy was sick as a dog and had stayed on duty all night. Anybody could crack—

  “The Earth Return Vehicle, Nate! It’s waiting for them at Mars right now. They were going to come home in it. Why can’t they use that as a lifeboat?”

  “Josh, that’s crazy. The energetics are all wrong. You’d have to bring it back from Mars, intercept the Hab, stop the ERV on a dime, turn it around the other way, catch up to the Hab, and then dock. You know what kind of delta-V you’d need for that? We thought about that years ago, for the Mars Sample Return mission. The best case we could design cost twenty-five kilometers per second of delta-V. The ERV has three.”

  “Okay, forget the ERV that’s at Mars now. What about the one we launched in December for the next mission? It’s halfway to Mars. All we have to do is bump its trajectory a little, intercept the Hab, dock it, and they’re home free.”

  Nate shook his head. “That’s like saying all you have to do is toss a Coke bottle from your T-38 into the open cockpit of a 747 and hit the pilot in the eye. You’re talking about hitting a bullet with a bullet in deep space. We talked about it for Mars Sample Return and it’s doable—in theory. But we don’t have the operations experience. And anyway, the biggest problem—”

  “So you don’t even want to try?”

  “Josh, my master’s degree was in orbital mechanics, okay? I kind of have a clue here. The energetics for a catch-up or a catch-down with a one-month launch separation are all wrong. Not as bad as an opposite-direction rendezvous, but it’s still impossible.”

  “Impossible—just like that? Just because it’s never been done?”

  “Josh ...”

  “I can’t believe this. What kind of a steely-eyed missile man are you? Human lives are at stake. If there’s even a chance—”

  “Josh. Listen to me. This isn’t helping. Go home and get some rest. We’ve got a team looking at reducing scrubber power requirements using the Sabatier process.”

  “Whatever.” Josh smeared his sleeve across his eyes, turned, and walked away.

  Nate watched him go, feeling ... nothing. What was the matter with him? He brushed a hand across dry eyes. Josh had him figured wrong, he decided. It wasn’t his eyes that were made of steel. It was his heart.

  * * *

  Hours later Josh broke in on a meeting Nate was holding with the life-support team. Josh looked as if he’d just survived a flogging. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was wild, and his borrowed shirt had huge sweat stains at the armpits.

  Nate stood up. “Josh, I told you to go home.”

  Josh beckoned to somebody out in the hallway. “I’ve been talking to Cathe Willison. You know her, Nate? She’s got a master’s degree too—in orbital mechanics. And she’s got a hot little simulation program for calculating rendezvous. You want to see it? Cathe, get in here.”

  A slender young woman wearing a New York Marathon T-shirt walked in. She held out her laptop to Josh.

  Josh flipped it open and double-clicked on an icon.

  “Operation Lifeboat,” said a soft, sexy voice. It was the laptop. Nate wondered if that was Cathe’s voicefont, or something she’d gotten off the web.

  The laptop’s display flashed to a backdrop of the solar system. “December 28,” said the laptop in its silky voicefont. “The Earth Return Vehicle launches from Earth on a seven-month minimum energy transfer to Mars. The intended arrival date is July 24.”

  On the display, a tiny ERV launched from Earth, and the whole solar system began slowly moving. A little calendar zipped up and began highlighting dates sequentially.

  “One month later, on January 26, the Hab launches on a somewhat faster trajectory intended to bring it into Mars orbit on July 3.” A tiny model of the Hab blipped up from Earth, circled it several times, and then did a trans-Mars injection burn.

  The display cycled forward a couple of months, then froze at the current date, April fifth.

  “Operation Lifeboat requires the ERV to perform one burn to intersect the Hab’s trajectory, then another burn to match velocities so it can dock wi
th the Hab. The crew will then live in the ERV temporarily, until they transplant an ERV solar panel to the Hab, restoring energy production to near-normal levels. Finally, the crew will return to the Hab and continue safely to Mars.”

  A couple of small ellipses projected out from the positions of the Hab and ERV, showing where they’d be at various dates and how they’d intersect with the orbit of Mars. Nate grimaced. Any fool could see how hard it would be to do the intercept in time. Right now the two ships were three million miles apart.

  “The Hab has no additional fuel to burn,” said the laptop. “But the ERV has sufficient fuel to perform two burns with a combined delta-V of approximately 3.1 kilometers per second. The ERV can rendezvous with the Hab at any time after May 16.”

  A red conic section projected out from the ERV, demonstrating a sample trajectory.

  Nate slouched in his chair. “Nice job, Cathe.” He put his head in his hands.

  “You don’t look too happy,” Josh said. “This is flat-out brilliant, if you ask me. I say Cathe gets a Silver Snoopy Award for this.”

  “It is brilliant,” Nate said. “But there’s only one problem.”

  “What’s that?” Cathe Willison sounded exactly like the voicefont on her laptop.

  “The Hab runs out of oxygen April ninth or tenth,” Nate said. “The rendezvous is gonna be about five weeks too late to save the crew. I’ve been trying to tell you that, Josh, and you wouldn’t listen.”

  “What about that Sabatier idea you were working on?” Josh asked. “Couldn’t that stretch things out?”

  “We’ve been looking at that,” Nate said. “It ain’t gonna work. You need a ruthenium catalyst, and there isn’t any on the Hab.”

  “What about if you ...” Cathe stopped. “This is going to sound cruel, sir, but has anyone considered the possibility that one or two of the crew could survive till rendezvous, if ...”

  “If two or three of them perform a noble sacrifice?” Nate stared at her. This was one stainless-steely-eyed missile chick. “Um, no, we haven’t considered that option.”