Oxygen Series Box Set: A Science Fiction Suspense Box Set

by John Olson

  Valkerie gathered her feet under her and pushed off. Her heart leaped out of her chest and hung for a sickening moment in the inky black void. Then she hit the side of the capsule with a dull thud.

  Valkerie clawed at the capsule’s smooth surface. There was nothing to hold on to. She was drifting away, propelled backward by the force of her collision. “Bob!” She unclamped a flashlight from her belt and flung it behind her to propel herself forward. She hung in space, reaching for the capsule. The handle of the hatch rotated slowly into view, if only ... She stretched out her hand for the handle. Closer. Closer. There!

  Her hand closed around the handle, and she held on tight. With her other hand she pulled the secondary tether from her belt and clamped it onto the handle. “I did it! The capsule is tethered!” Valkerie moved along the capsule, careful not to push herself away. “Bob?”

  “That’s great ... Valkerie.” Bob sounded out of breath. “Now cut ... your way ... to that oxygen tank.”

  Valkerie studied the diagram on her sleeve and located the indicated spot on the capsule. If she was off by four inches in any direction, she could puncture the LOX tank’s vacuum jacket. “Okay, Bob. Here goes.” She unhooked the crowbar from her Display and Control Module and jabbed it into the hull of the capsule. So far, so good. She took the oversized metal shears in both hands and cut a large circle into the thin metal skin. A spherical tank lay just below the surface. The LOX tank! Just where they said it would be.

  Valkerie quickly located the valve on the feeder line and cut through the pipe that connected the valve to the engine. No LOX. The valve was holding. “Almost!” She quickly cut through the mountings that held the tank in place.

  She tugged at the tank, and it drifted free. “I’ve got it, Bob! Hold on!” Valkerie pulled out the tank and reached for the tether line that connected the capsule to the Hab. Gripping the oxygen tank between her knees, she loosed the clamp from the capsule hatch and pulled herself back to the ship.

  “Hold on, Bob! I’m at the hatch!” Valkerie climbed in through the hatch, pushing the oxygen tank ahead of her. “Bob? Answer me!” She closed the hatch and swatted at the repressurization controls. The pressure gauge moved slowly to cabin pressure, and she pushed herself into the Hab.

  “Bob?” Valkerie braced the tank against the floor and opened the valve with her wrench. A stream of sputtering liquid oxygen spewed from the tank and filled the chamber with a white cloud. That was probably more than enough, but she didn’t want to take any chances. They needed it to diffuse through the ship as fast as possible. She clamped back down on the valve and launched herself for the stairwell. In a leap and a bounce, she was upstairs at the command center, tugging the oxygen tank behind her.

  Bob lay motionless, floating above the console. Kennedy’s PLSS floated next to him, but the bleed valve still seemed to be closed. Valkerie released another blast of life-giving oxygen from her LOX tank, then removed her helmet and flung away her gloves. “Bob?”

  He didn’t move.

  Tears clouded Valkerie’s eyes. Bob had Kennedy’s tank right there. Why didn’t he use it? Why didn’t he bleed off just a little more oxygen? She reached a trembling hand to Bob’s neck and felt for his carotid artery.

  His pulse was shallow and weak. He was alive.

  Part 4: Independence Day

  Furthermore, no matter how many backup plans and abort options the mission design includes, we must understand that in sending a crew to Mars, we are, one way or another, sending a group of humans into harm’s way.

  Robert Zubrin

  ... an entry vehicle must walk a tightrope between being squashed and skipping out, between fire and ice, and between hitting and missing the target.

  Gerald Condon, Michael Tigges, and Manuel I. Cruz

  in Human Spaceflight: Mission Analysis and Design

  Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

  John 15:13

  King James Version

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Friday, May 16, Year Three, 4:00 P.M.

  Bob

  A SOFT TOUCH TINGLED ACROSS Bob’s face and stroked back his hair.

  “Bob, wake up. Please. Don’t do this to me.” Valkerie’s voice. She sounded like she was in trouble.

  “W-what?” Bob opened his eyes. “Valkerie, are you ... okay?”

  “Bob, I was so worried. I thought you were going to ...” Valkerie looked down into his face, tears glistening in her eyes. “Why didn’t you bleed more oxygen from Kennedy’s tank?”

  “I didn’t want to take the chance. His tank is down to fifty-eight minutes. We’ll need every second when we land.”

  “When we land? We don’t even know we’ll make it that far! You could have been killed.”

  Bob shook his head. “Valkerie, please. We’ll be fine, but we’ve got to hurry. We don’t have much time.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Did you get the LOX?”

  Valkerie took a deep breath and nodded. “I don’t know if it will be enough, but it seems like there’s lots of mass left.”

  “Inspect the tank carefully. If the vacuum jacket is damaged, the tank could lose insulation and blow a burst disk.”

  Valkerie disappeared from view. When she came back her eyes were dry and full of determination. “The jacket looks fine. The valve looks good too. What else do we need to do?”

  “Now we need to build a Sabatier scrubber.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a low-power method of cleaning carbon dioxide out of the air. Nate sent instructions while you were in the airlock.”

  “I don’t understand. Aren’t we going to wake Lex and Kennedy?”

  “Not till we’re done. This is time-critical. Our current scrubber is costing us a kilowatt, and we won’t have that for much longer.”

  “Okay, how do we get started?”

  Bob checked the printout. “First, go get all the laptops in the ship.”

  * * *

  Friday, May 16, Year Three, 6:00 P.M.

  Valkerie

  Valkerie attached a copper tube to the catalyst bed and soldered it in place. She looked expectantly toward the hatch, wondering if Bob needed help with the bathroom door. He’d been gone a long time.

  “Valkerie! I just got a message from Nate.” Bob drifted into the lab. “He’s worried that Kennedy might be the bomber.”

  “Kennedy?”

  “Apparently, Kennedy e-mailed schematics of the Hab to a student group in Japan—using Josh’s computer.”

  “Why Josh’s computer? I don’t get it.”

  Bob shrugged. “Kennedy’s apartment was full of psych articles by Abrams. They think he jiggered the psych interviews to get Josh kicked off the mission. If he was capable of that, he could be capable of anything.”

  “That may be true, except for one thing. Kennedy didn’t plant that bomb out there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just ... know. I know Kennedy. No, I don’t trust him—at least not in personal matters. But he’s not the type to sabotage his own mission.”

  “If it’s not him, then who?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m dead sure that nobody on board this ship set that bomb. There are ways of knowing that have nothing to do with facts. I don’t expect you to understand that, but—”

  “I do.”

  “What?” She turned to gape at him.

  Bob’s face reddened. “Valkerie, I get why you didn’t believe me, but I told you the truth at the Outpost.”

  “Which truth is that? That you hate Christians or that you are one?” Valkerie’s heart pounded in her chest as she watched Bob struggle to formulate an answer.

  “I don’t mean to sound combative,” Valkerie said. “It’s a serious question.”

  “I know, it’s just that every time I open my mouth on the subject, I get slammed. Usually from both sides. There’s a reason I don’t wear my religion on my sleeve.”

 
“Neither do I, but when somebody asks me a direct question, I give them a direct answer.”

  Bob gave her a lopsided grin. “I guess you do, but even a direct answer can be misunderstood.”

  “Maybe so, but it beats the heck out of silence.” Valkerie placed a hand on his arm. “Don’t worry about me. I can hardly beat you up worse than I have already.”

  Bob’s eyes locked on her hand. “I was raised Catholic. In high school, I studied a lot of philosophy, straight through from Aristotle to Aquinas to Hume to Popper. I about drove my Jesuit teachers crazy, but they stuck with me and gave me space to think. I guess what it boils down to is that I believe in God, but I don’t believe in the church.”

  “The church? Meaning … ?”

  “My people. Your people. Especially your people. No offense, but when someone tells me they’re ‘born-again,’ what it means to me is they’ve accepted a party line that can’t be questioned and don’t confuse them with the facts. They’ve got this direct pipeline to God and if you have the temerity to disagree on one tiny point, you’re suddenly the enemy. I’ve always hated that kind of thinking—that kind of nonthinking.”

  Valkerie slid the catalyst matrix into the flow chamber, afraid to say a word.

  “Does that make sense?” Bob asked.

  Valkerie soldered the endcap onto the flow chamber. “It makes a lot of sense. Every time I went home from Yale on vacation, people asked how I could study biology and still be a Christian. Some of them just assumed I was doing it to disprove evolution. After a while I got this sick feeling in my stomach whenever I went there. Because the message I was getting was that you can’t believe in God and in science at the same time.”

  Bob’s eyes lifted to Valkerie’s. “Do you … ever feel like you live in two different worlds, and they’re at war with each other for no good reason?”

  Valkerie tightened down the nuts, locking the tubes into the endcap. “Sometimes I think I have two different brains, and they’re at war with each other and that maybe there’s a good reason they’re at war—maybe they can’t both be right. While you were asleep, I asked a lot of questions that I didn’t have any answers to. Finally I just gave up and tried to stop believing.”

  “I’m sorry if I … I didn’t mean to—”

  “It’s okay,” Valkerie said. “I tried not to believe, and I found that I couldn’t do it. I guess it was going against my intuition. My experience of everyday life. Bottom line, I still believe, but I still have my doubts. I can’t seem to escape either one.”

  “You can’t have faith without doubts,” Bob said. “And you can’t have doubts without faith. That’s just the way the universe is.”

  “Well, it’s not a very comfortable universe.”

  “The truth usually isn’t comfortable. If you go looking for the truth only where things are comfortable ... well, maybe it’s like looking for a bomber on the Ares 10.” Bob closed his eyes. “I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted.” His eyes blinked several times and then finally closed.

  Valkerie floated him to the wall and strapped him into an SRU.

  “Pleasant dreams ... Kaggo.”

  A serene smile slid across Bob’s face.

  * * *

  Sunday, May 18, Year Three, 6:00 P.M.

  Bob

  Bob floated in midair, doing isometric exercises with his arms. If he was ever going to get his strength back, he’d have to work out like a madman for the next several weeks. He’d been out of the coma for two days now, but he still felt almost helpless.

  Kennedy and Lex were in even worse shape. Valkerie had brought them to consciousness this morning, after working thirty-six hours straight on that Sabatier scrubber. And now she had three invalids to care for. Kennedy seemed to need more attention than a newborn babe. It was disgusting. And Lex. She was conscious now, but she still couldn’t move, couldn’t even talk. About all she could do was blink her eyes and sleep. And take up Valkerie’s time.

  Bob looked at his watch. Time for their meeting. It would be their first since waking up, and like it or not, he was in command. He pushed across to the command center. Kennedy floated motionless near the NavConsole, his face haggard—furrowed with exhaustion. Valkerie sat at the meeting table, working on an adapter that would allow them to transfer oxygen from the LOX tank to the emergency breathers. Lex floated next to her, clinging to a foam exercise ball.

  “Okay, team, let’s get started. The good news is we’re going to make Mars,” Bob said. “Thanks to Valkerie, we’ve survived this far, and hopefully we’ll have enough oxygen. And if we start running low, one of us could volunteer to go back to sleep for a while longer.”

  Valkerie shook her head. “I’m afraid not. We don’t have enough drugs. I used everything we had to keep Lex and Kennedy asleep that extra day, and we’re completely out of raw materials. We can’t synthesize more.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to make do with what we have. We’ve turned off the oxygen generators. We also turned off the four-bed molecular CO2 scrubbers, because they were burning a kilowatt we couldn’t spare. Howard Spears at JSC came up with a procedure to build a Sabatier scrubber, and that’s costing us only about twenty watts.”

  “I nominate Howard for a Silver Snoopy,” Valkerie said.

  “Give him two,” said Kennedy.

  Lex blinked twice.

  “I’ll tell Josh on the next comm link,” Bob said. “The bad news is, we spent all of our fuel margin and more trying to dock with the ERV.”

  “I’m really, really sorry,” Valkerie said. “I shouldn’t have tried to—”

  Bob held up his hand. “You saved our lives, and that’s more than we had a right to ask. But we’ve got to change plans. We had intended to aerocapture into an elliptical orbit on July third, then do a couple of burns to circularize the orbit at a 500-kilometer radius and deorbit into Mars on July fourth. We don’t have the fuel to do that. We’ll have to execute an aeroentry from Earth-Mars transit directly into our base camp on the surface.”

  Kennedy looked skeptical. “That’s going to be tough. The timing needs to be perfect.”

  “It will be,” Bob said. “Cathe Willison came up with a series of very small corridor alignment burns that we’ve already programmed in and will be executing over the next few weeks. They amount to just a few dozen meters per second total, which is all we have left. It’s not much, but we’ve got seven weeks for it to add up. We know the time we’ll get there, to the second, and we know the insertion angle to within a few dozen millidegrees. The rest is up to you and the flight software, Hampster.”

  “No sweat. This thing flies like a brick, but it flies.”

  “We’ve got all the oxygen we need waiting for us on Mars,” Bob said. “But you’ll need to land as close to base camp as possible. Two of us will do an EVA to get the rover. It would be way too slow to drive the rover to the Hab robotically, because we haven’t mapped the terrain yet.”

  “I can land this baby on a dime if I have to,” Kennedy said.

  “We’re going to kick up a lot of debris when we do our descent,” Bob said. “If we land closer than two hundred meters, we risk rock-blasting the base camp.”

  “And that means we’ve got to get you guys built up,” Valkerie said. “Coming out of microgravity is pretty debilitating. On Earth, twenty-four hours bed rest is the norm. Mars gravity is only one third of Earth’s, so that’ll help, but we’ll have to immediately do some hard work. It’s going to take at least two of us to go get the rover. So whoever’s in the best shape gets to go. Kennedy, how are you feeling?”

  “Like road kill.” His voice was a dry rasp.

  She narrowed her eyes. “How’s your eyesight?”

  “As good as before.”

  Bob’s ears perked up. What was this all about?

  “Um, Commander, I did a physical exam on each of you while you were in a coma. You, sir, have a detached retina in your right eye and you can’t see a thing.”

  Kennedy didn’t b
link. “I know.”

  “And you’re saying it’s as good as before?” Valkerie looked annoyed. “Listen, I’m your doctor. Don’t hide things from me. We’ve got some kind of a bacterial contamination on board here, and I think it infected your eye and—”

  “No.” Kennedy wheezed as he spoke. “My eye ... something happened to it when we launched. I think it was all that vibration.”

  “When we launched?” Valkerie’s eyes went wide. “You mean you’ve been suffering with a detached retina for three and a half months? Why didn’t you tell me? I could have done something. We could have—”

  “No!” Kennedy coughed. “If I’d told you, you’d have insisted that I get it treated.”

  Valkerie nodded. “Well, of course.”

  “You can’t do that kind of surgery here on board.”

  She shook her head. “No. We’d have had to return to Earth.”

  Kennedy closed his eyes. “We’d have scrubbed the mission. I couldn’t do that.”

  “So you ... sacrificed your eye for this mission?” Valkerie stared at him.

  Bob was beginning to understand a lot of things.

  “It was worth it,” Kennedy said. “I wasn’t going to make us lose Mars.”

  The crew was silent for a long moment. Then Bob cleared his throat. “Um, guys, I have something to say.” He felt his face getting hot. The others looked at him. “I ... kind of said a lot of things about Valkerie after the explosion. Really stupid things. Blaming her.”

  Bob wiped at his eyes. Keep going. Say it all. “And Valkerie just took all that and turned the other cheek. Then when we were all in a coma, she took care of me, and all of us, and ... well, I just want to say that I trust her now, and I respect her very highly. I don’t know what the rest of you think, but I say she ought to be the first man on Mars. She’s earned it. We’d be dead without her. Dead three times over. She’s saved this mission. What do you all think?”