Oxygen Series Box Set: A Science Fiction Suspense Box Set

by John Olson

  “Okay, now what? There has to be something.” Valkerie shut her eyes, trying to concentrate through the storm of thoughts that swirled in her head. Nothing. Just the gentle rustle of floating food packets. And the staccato beat of her own pounding heart.

  Relax. Come on relax. Calm, soothing thoughts. Come on, concentrate! Her heartbeat refused to cooperate. Traitor! It was out of control, and she couldn’t do a thing about it.

  “What more can I do?”

  Silence.

  Well, if she had done all she could do, wasn’t the rest up to God? Valkerie started to relax, but then jerked to alertness. She was falling helplessly though space. What if God didn’t catch her? What if they couldn’t dock with the ERV?

  Then they would die. There was nothing she could do. She had to trust in God.

  Just like that? Was that what faith was all about? Grasping at hope after all other options were used up? That wasn’t faith. That was willful self-delusion. Ignorance.

  “God, it doesn’t make sense. Give me one good reason why I should believe in you. I can’t think of one good reason!” Valkerie shouted her frustration at the circular walls.

  She bit her lip and listened. What was she doing? Waiting for an answer? She was so brainwashed it was pathetic. Nothing but a sniveling coward, too scared to face the truth. There was no God. She was just too self-important to live in a universe with no purpose. Too needy to live life cut off and all alone.

  “God, I can’t do it anymore. My whole life is a lie. I can’t believe without a reason. Sorry, but I just can’t.” Valkerie shut her eyes and went limp. The swirling packets made a gentle rustling noise, like the sound of leaves on a late summer afternoon. She could remember her mother, laughing and trying to cover her with leaves. She could remember winning her first robot competition. Her father had swooped her up on his shoulders and carried her all the way back to the pit area.

  “God.” Valkerie swallowed back a lump in her throat. “It doesn’t matter, does it? I’m going to believe whether I want to or not. No matter how illogical it might feel.” Valkerie chewed on the thought. Wasn’t that reason enough? She never worried about proofs that her mother had existed. Maybe it was just that simple. Somehow, once upon a time, she had met God, and that meeting had changed her. How could she argue with that? The knowledge was deep down in her spirit—too deep to be argued away. It was a part of her. She didn’t have a choice.

  Or did she? Couldn’t she choose not to follow? Hadn’t she been doing that ever since her mom died? How long had it been since God was a real part of her life? Until now, when she desperately needed him. Foxhole faith—what kind of faith was that? Now that she was in horrible danger, she couldn’t stop talking to him, whether he was there or not. She was ridiculous.

  “Okay, God, if you’re real, why didn’t you just speak up? Why didn’t you make me follow? If you had just said something, I would have listened. You spoke to a fig tree and a storm, why don’t you speak to me?”

  Valkerie lay still for a long time, waiting for an answer. The storm had obeyed. The fig tree had withered. God spoke and the universe sprang into being. They had no choice.

  But she had a mind of her own, a choice to make—to believe or not believe—and apparently God wasn’t going to force her hand by giving her proof. Most of life was about making decisions based on fuzzy data. Friends, career choices, romantic relationships. Even science, if you got right down to it. Why should faith be any different?

  Valkerie felt dizzy. She lay back and watched the shimmering packets, trying to take it all in. Maybe she didn’t have to have an ironclad reason to believe. She had known she could trust Bob and couldn’t trust Kennedy, based on her intuition. Maybe that was enough.

  She felt her body relaxing for the first time in weeks. Their oxygen was running out. They’d been exposed to radiation from a solar flare. They’d been infected with an alien bacterium from God only knew where. She was forty million miles away from the nearest conscious human being. There was nothing that she could do about any of it, but somehow she was at peace. Happy even. Did that make sense?

  Valkerie smiled and swatted playfully at a packet of food, sending it glittering through the dim light. She actually felt happy. It didn’t make any sense, but it didn’t have to. Happiness was its own reason.

  She drifted into the edge of Kennedy’s dangling SRU and was surrounded by the smell of burnt plastic. She’d wasted a ton of oxygen by starting that fire. It had been her fault, but somehow she was beyond self-reproach.

  Why hadn’t NASA warned her about using the torch? They’d put everything else on the list, why not the torch?

  Because it wasn’t on the official manifest. It was part of Bob’s personal weight allotment.

  Valkerie spun around, and scrambled up the stairs, stopping suddenly to keep from getting tangled in Bob’s IV tube. “You’re a genius!” She planted a kiss on Bob’s cheek. NASA hadn’t said a word about the torch because it was part of Bob’s personal luggage. And it had a canister of compressed oxygen. It wasn’t much, but it would help. It had to.

  Valkerie opened the hatch and pushed out into the upper deck. The torch was still in Kennedy’s room where she’d left it. She hefted the oxygen canister. No it wasn’t much at all, but it would do. Maybe. And if it didn’t ... well, she was okay with that too. She was forty million miles away from Earth, but she was not alone.

  * * *

  Saturday, May 3, Year Three, 1:00 P.M.

  Nate

  Nate sat sweating at the table while Perez finished making his statement to the press. If this wasn’t the loneliest seat in America.

  “ ... no real news to report,” Perez said. “Our last contact with Dr. Jansen indicates that she’s doing as well as can be expected and that the crew is alive and healthy. At this time, we’ll entertain questions from the floor.”

  A dozen reporters were on their feet, bleating for recognition. Perez pointed to the science reporter from New York.

  “Hank Russell, New York Times.” Russell waited for the TV camera to swing around and focus on him. “Mr. Perez, what does that mean—‘as well as can be expected’? Under the circumstances, I’d expect that ship to be a little house of horrors. Would you honestly describe Dr. Jansen as ‘doing well’?”

  Nate leaned forward toward his mike.

  Perez nodded to him.

  “It means,” Nate said, “that Dr. Jansen is doing a lot better than you or I would under similar circumstances. She and the other crew members were specially chosen to be stable in a harsh environment. She’s been trained to be tough—both mentally and physically. She is doing very well and has adapted to what we’re now calling a ‘routine crisis.’”

  Nate pushed the mike back and radiated confidence at the reporter. Everything he’d said was true—and a lie. Valkerie had been alone now for over three weeks, and cracks were starting to appear. But only the Capcoms knew about that, and they weren’t going to say anything. Because if they did, all four of them would be out of a job just as quick as Nate could plant a twenty-pound boot in their fat little behinds.

  All around the room, Nate saw reporters feverishly jotting notes, as if he’d just told them the crew was solving the Unified Field Theory in their spare time. Routine crisis. You could see it in their eyes that they liked that one. If you wanted to fool the press, feed them an oxymoron and act like it made sense, and they’d treat it like the gospel straight from Buddha.

  * * *

  A week or so later, the press had moved on from “routine crisis.” Tonight, it was an hour-long documentary on Valkerie Jansen’s life. They’d dug up every teacher back to kindergarten.

  Yes, I remember Valkerie. I always knew she’d go far.

  Valkerie Jansen—best student I ever had.

  She was strong—a real competitor, and never gave up.

  Nate shook his head and turned off the tube. Today, she was getting the hero treatment. Tomorrow, if she screwed up the mission, they’d haul out those sa
me teachers to remember what a know-it-all little piece of plastic Miss Jansen had been.

  * * *

  Eventually the reporters got to Bob—the least interesting of the crew. Somehow a news jerk had dug up the story of Sarah McLean. Before you could say “Kaganovski,” the Enquirer was running one of those stupid “Separated At Birth?” stories, with side-by-side pictures of Valkerie and Sarah. Nate wanted to puke.

  * * *

  “Sir, we finally tracked down that Air Force officer Anderson.” It was Hanson, the communications specialist, looking like the dog who ate the cheesecake.

  Nate scowled. “What took so long? You do realize he might be important to tracking down the bomber, don’t you?”

  “He was on assignment at a quote undisclosed location in the middle east unquote, and the Pentagon wasn’t very cooperative. He just got back to Sacramento yesterday.”

  Nate slammed his open palm on his desk. “Why didn’t you tell me they weren’t cooperating? Perez can go to the president if he has to.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t realize—”

  “So what’s Anderson’s connection to Lex?”

  Hanson shrugged. “Nothing spectacular. He claims he knew Lex, sort of, at the Academy. Says she sometimes e-mails him, and he e-mails back. Denies anything else.”

  “Did you threaten to put his feet in the fire if he lied to you?”

  “Sir, you know we can’t do that. Anderson is some kind of golden boy in the Air Force—got a bunch of decorations that would make an Iraqi general blush. We can’t exactly waterboard him.”

  Nate rubbed his aching neck. If waterboarding would save the mission, he’d be tempted.

  “What should I do next?”

  “Anything legal. Get the Fibbies to throw a wiretap on Anderson. Talk to Ms. Yamaguchi. She’ll get some mucky-muck somewhere to sign off on that and they can handle the techie stuff. Remind them this is important and keep on them every day until you get an answer.”

  “When do we stop, sir?”

  “When my crew is dead, or I’m in hell, whichever comes last.”

  * * *

  Monday, May 12, Year Three, 1:00 P.M.

  Nate

  “Mr. Harrington, we got that Sabatier scrubber working.”

  Nate looked up from his desk on the floor of Mission Control. It was one of the hotshot engineers, a kid named Howard something-or-other. The kid was grinning as if he’d just won the Nobel prize. Nate tried not to scowl, but he was exhausted. “What are you talking about?”

  Howard motioned to the door, and three engineers wheeled in the most lame-brained Rube Goldberg contraption Nate had ever seen. “What is that thing?”

  “Sir, when you launched Operation Lifeboat, you tasked us to put together a Sabatier-process carbon-dioxide scrubber using only materials on the Hab. We did some research and found that the metal they use for speakers in laptops makes a very efficient catalyst. We’ve put together a procedure that Dr. Kaganovski can use to build a scrubber. The process is exothermic, and it costs practically no energy—as long as they have some excess hydrogen. And they do, in the fuel cells.” Howard grinned at Nate. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  Nate had been taking heat for weeks, and all of a sudden he felt it busting loose in his gut. “Cool? Yes!” he bellowed. “Useful? No! Have you kids been asleep for the last few weeks, or what? Our crew is going to dock with that ERV in three days, and they’ll have all the energy they need. We do not need this ... contraption.” Nate stood and jabbed a finger at the scrubber.

  Howard looked stung. “Um, sir, what do you want us to do with it?”

  “Junk it!” Nate roared. “And get working on something useful!”

  The kids wheeled the monstrosity out of the room. Nate collapsed back in his chair. Why didn’t they teach the young engineers to think about what they were doing?

  * * *

  Wednesday, May 14, Year Three, 4:00 P.M.

  Nate

  “Nate, we’ve found the smoking gun.”

  Nate looked up from his desk.

  Crystal Yamaguchi stood beside Josh Bennett. Behind them were a couple of Fibbies, each holding a plastic crate full of papers.

  “What smoking gun?” Nate asked.

  The Fibbies dumped the crates on Nate’s desk. “We got a court order to search Kennedy Hampton’s apartment,” Josh said. “He seems to have an unusual interest in psychology.”

  “That’s not a crime.” Nate picked up one of the photocopies. An article by Roger Abrams on crew psychoses in restricted environments.

  “These are all papers by our shrinks,” Josh said. “Abrams. Hartmann. Avery. All about teamwork indices and how they’re computed. Psychometric analyses. Crisis-adaptability predictors.”

  Nate shook his head. “Josh, it’s not against the law for astronauts to study psychology papers. And you can’t tell me this had anything to do with the Kaganovski interview.”

  “Yeah?” Josh plopped a thick sheaf on Nate’s desk.

  Nate looked at it suspiciously. “What’s this?”

  “That,” said Josh, “is what led to the Kaganovski interview in the first place.”

  Nate picked it up as if it were on fire. “Interview with Kennedy Hampton. And the date on it is August 8.”

  “Read it and roar,” Josh said. “The little weasel knew exactly what buttons to push. Exactly.”

  * * *

  Thursday, May 15, Year Three, 1:00 P.M.

  Nate

  “Hank Russell, New York Times.” Russell pointed his perfectly coiffed mug toward the cameras. “Mr. Harrington, when the crew comes out of their comas tomorrow, what sort of physical condition will they be in?”

  I have no idea. Nate cleared his throat. “We’ve given that a lot of study, Mr. Russell. As you know, a microgravity environment causes loss of muscle tone and bone density. In typical missions, crews are able to recover much of that within a few weeks.”

  “Yes, but this crew is entirely different. They’ll be coming out of complete inactivity into a microgravity environment.”

  “So we expect the transition to be somewhat smoother,” Nate said. “We’ll still have forty-eight days left for the crew to get buffed into condition for Mars gravity, which is only a third of earth gravity. We’ve got a volunteer on the International Space Station who just spent the last month recovering from a weeklong total inactivity regime. Based on his experiences and a supercomputer physiological model, we’ve put together a rehabilitation program that we project will bring the crew back to ninety percent of baseline by the time of Mars orbit insertion.”

  All of which was probably bogus, but it was the best NASA had been able to come up with. Nate didn’t expect anyone to challenge him. He’d said the magic word—supercomputer. That automatically put the imprimatur on any kind of scientific work, no matter how half-baked.

  Russell nodded sagely and sat down. Next week—count on it—he’d be running an article quacking about how great supercomputers were, featuring interviews with all the big names in computational physiology.

  In the meantime, God help our boys and girls, because they’re going to need more than some stupid supercomputer model to put life back into their poor little spaghetti muscles.

  * * *

  Friday, May 16, Year Three, 3:00 A.M.

  Valkerie

  Valkerie pushed Kennedy through the lower hatch and Velcroed his SRU to the wall of the lab. The effort left her panting—as if she had just finished a 440-yard sprint.

  “Kennedy ... if you can ... hear me.” Valkerie forced out the words between breaths. “I’m sorry I ... didn’t trust you. Forgive me for the fire. I did ... my best.” Valkerie pulled herself slowly to the stairwell. The oxygen level was getting lower. They wouldn’t last much longer. Spreading the crew throughout the ship would buy them a little more time, but only a little. She had to call Houston now. If they couldn’t dock in the next twenty-four hours, they weren’t going to make it.

  Valkerie powered up the r
adios and plugged her headset into the transmitter. “Houston ... this is Valkerie. How close is the ERV?” She took a few shallow breaths. “O2 levels are getting low. We aren’t going to make it much longer.”

  Valkerie caught her breath and braced herself for the nine-minute wait, but a reply came almost immediately. “Ares 10, this is Houston, come in. We have the ERV at nine hours fifty-five minutes to docking.”

  “Houston, how ...” Valkerie swallowed. There was no way her signal could have reached Earth that fast.

  “Ares 10, this is Houston, come in. We have the ERV at nine hours fifty-four minutes to docking.”

  Valkerie waited impatiently as the Capcom’s voice ticked down the minutes. Ten hours was cutting it close, but it was doable. They hadn’t even tapped into the oxygen supply in the EVA suits.

  “Good to hear from you, Valkerie!” Josh’s voice replaced the drone of the other Capcom. “The ERV is on target and speeding to your position. We’re uploading docking instructions now. You should begin preparation for docking.”

  Valkerie’s heart sank. They were expecting her to pilot the docking. She should have realized that before. Of course, Kennedy couldn’t pilot the docking. He was blind in one eye, if not both—even if he could recover from the coma in time.

  “Copy that, Houston.” Valkerie fought down her panic. “Um, Houston? I’d like to request permission to wake up Bob for the docking. I could bleed the oxygen from Lex’s EVA suit to sustain us for a few more hours. Over.”

  Valkerie drummed her fingers on the console. I have to be able to talk to Bob before docking. There’s so much I have to say to him. If something were to happen ... Valkerie bit her lip. She shouldn’t have requested permission. She should have insisted. She—