Oxygen Series Box Set: A Science Fiction Suspense Box Set

by John Olson

  Josh closed his eyes and concentrated on the four people all alone on a rust‑bucket of a planet two hundred million miles away.

  “I’m not supposed to tell you this, and you have to promise not to tell anyone else— especially not anyone here. But ... we have proof that Kennedy was the guy who knocked me off the mission. And he did it intentionally. He laid some doubts about me in the shrinks’ minds. I read the transcripts of an interview with him, and he was pushing their buttons without them even knowing it.”

  Josh stopped again, trying to regroup. “I know what you’re thinking, Kaggo. You think it was that interview you had with the shrinks that did me in. Well, you’re wrong. Kennedy set them up, too, just like he set you up. The guy’s a master at manipulating people. He leaked some plans of the Hab to a Japanese terrorist group—from my e‑mail account. He framed me, Kaggo!

  “Maybe you’re wondering how we know all this. You remember that FBI woman Nate’s been hanging around with? Agent Yamaguchi? Anyway, before you guys reached Mars last summer, she got us a warrant to search Kennedy’s apartment. You would not believe how much stuff he had on psychology. He had every paper our shrink team has written on crew selection, teamwork indices, that kind of thing. More psych books than Sigmund Freud. The guy is a genius at manipulation.That’s what you’re dealing with, Bob. If there was a degree in manipulation, Kennedy would have a Ph.D. So my point is real simple: I don’t think you’re the problem. I think Kennedy’s punching your buttons. Why, I don’t know, but he’s doing it. So you just hang tough, okay, dude? I ... we ... love you guys. Give Valkerie and Lex a hug for me, will you? Over.”

  Josh leaned back in his chair, letting the emotions flood through. Rage. Fear. Guilt. Love. The usual suspects. Now he had forty minutes before Bob’s message came back. No wonder they were all getting claustrophobic up there, penned in together in a tuna can the size of a few dorm rooms.

  Josh shook his head. What was Kennedy up to? All those years, Josh had thought he knew the Hampster, and then it turned out the little weasel stabbed him in the back.

  And now he was going after Bob... But why? What was he after? Was it just a coincidence that Kennedy was going flaky at exactly the same time the communications were going haywire?

  Comm was mission critical — especially now with tension levels set to deep fat fry. It was time to take another hard look at the evidence room. Somebody had to figure out what the Hampster was up to. The shrinks could only see what Kennedy wanted them to see.

  Josh pulled out his cell phone and walked out of the crypto room. Cell phones weren’t allowed in Mission Control, but if he stepped outside it would be okay. He walked down the hall and pushed his way outside.

  The phone answered on the first ring. “Harrington.”

  “Nate, this is Josh. I need to talk to Agent Yamaguchi. Have you got her number?”

  * * *

  Wednesday, March 18, 1:30 p.m., Mars Local Time

  Bob

  Finally Josh’s voice came in over Bob’s headset. “Hey, Kaggo, this is Josh. Listen, There’s nothing wrong—”

  Skkkkkkkkrrrrrrrrrrrr. Josh’s voice dissolved into static. Bob leaped to the console and flicked switches. “Don’t do this to me, Josh. Please. I need you, buddy.”

  Nothing. Three beats per second. This was not atmospherics. Not a loose wire. Not an accident.

  There’s nothing wrong …

  Right. The interference was man‑made, or he was an amoeba.

  Somebody was jamming the Deep Space Network.

  Bad idea, whoever you are. You better watch your back, because you’ve now officially got a Mad Kaggo on your tail.

  * * *

  Wednesday, March 18, 2:00 p.m., Mars Local Time

  Valkerie

  Valkerie’s head rocked back and forth against the rover headrest. Her body tingled with exhaustion, but her mind raced ahead, flitting from one unfinished task to the next. The last two days had been brutal. Five press conferences. Mission Control to‑do lists a mile long. She and Lex had spent every waking minute in the lab—and the nonwaking minutes dreaming about the lab. It felt so good to sit down. To be surrounded by the relative quiet of the rover’s engine, whining and creaking over the rocky Martian terrain. To be away from Bob and his haunted eyes.

  At first, when Lex suggested this trip back to the thermal vent, Valkerie had objected. She was too tired. They didn’t have enough time. But she eventually gave in when Lex threatened to go without her. Perhaps it was just as well. The excuse for a few minutes’ rest was worth it. She wished the drive out could last forever.

  The engines rumbled to a stop.

  “Okay,” Lex called from the front of the rover. “We’re here.”

  Valkerie shut her eyes and tried to summon the energy to stand.

  The rover swayed from side to side as Lex made her way back to the main cabin. Air whooshed from the bench cushion opposite Valkerie.

  “One more minute. Let me sit just one more minute.”

  “Take all the time you want. I’m taking a nap.”

  “What?” Valkerie opened her eyes.

  Lex was lying on her back with her hands clasped beneath her head. “I turned the radio off. We’re not going back until you get some rest.”

  Valkerie sat up. “But what about the thermal vent? The new samples? I’ve still got a ton of sequencing to do ....”

  “Absolutely not. Not until you rest. Have you still got a headache?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “So rest.” Lex rolled onto her side and faced the wall. End of discussion.

  Valkerie slid onto her back and closed her eyes. Her pulse pounded against her temples. She couldn’t rest. She had DNA to sequence. She and Lex had isolated DNA from spores that had been trapped in the salt crystals. It was too astonishing for words. Some of the fragments were thousands of base pairs long. Martian DNA. The 16S‑oligo‑binding study results looked pretty firm. The best explanation seemed to be that the halobacterium originated on Earth rather than on Mars. Which was quite a surprise.

  Everyone had known for a long time that, in principle, a meteorite could smash into Earth so hard it tossed up chunks of rock that floated around the sun and eventually wound up on Mars—seeding it with bacteria. Intra‑system panspermia. But the usual scenario went the other way—Mars to Earth. Gilbert Flood was going to get a good chuckle over this. Scientists had been laughing at his theory for years. If only she could be present when he read her paper ...

  Her paper. The image of sweaty, picket‑carrying protesters leaped to mind. Valkerie labored to her feet and staggered to the back of the rover. How many people would read her paper? How many people would be talking about it? It could be millions. Billions. The newspapers. Television. Her family and friends. Everybody would be talking about the implications. Not just biological. Philosophical. Theological. Was she going to be another Galileo? Branded as a heretic for reporting what she saw?

  She paced to the front of the rover and stared out the window.

  Rock walls rose up on all sides.

  What was going on? Lex hadn’t taken them to the canyon after all. She had driven them to the site they called Stonehenge, a ring of eerie, butte‑like formations standing tall and proud in the middle of a shallow, mile‑wide bowl. The crew had spent most of their first three months digging in and around Stonehenge. The geology was so unique—the place was full of gray hematite. And it was beautiful—disquietingly so. She stared out the window at the crisscross of blue‑gray stones. Lex had parked in the area Bob called the Garden. It was Valkerie’s favorite part of Stonehenge. If only she had the leisure time to sit back and enjoy it. To enjoy anything.

  But she had work to do. Science. Analysis. The scientific method. She stared out at a band of crisscrossing shadows, a purple frieze against the impossibly clear amber horizon. It didn’t make sense. She’d traveled three hundred million miles for what? To be locked in the bowels of a lousy laboratory? To run a sequence analysis on a simple halo
bacterium? Not a Barsoomian artifact, not the skull of a Thark. No buried spaceship to transport them across the galaxy to meet an ancient alien race.

  Maybe she’d been all wrong. Maybe nobody would even care. Who was going to get excited about a bacterium? Especially if it turned out to be of Earth origin. People weren’t hungry for more analysis. For more theories ... The world was already too cold, too scientific. Where was the life? The purpose? The magic? It was all so unsatisfying, so meaningless.

  What had she been expecting anyway? An image flitted across her mind, followed by a memory—the faint prickle of stale adrenaline. Had she been hoping to find a real live Martian? Is that why she thought she had seen movement at the end of the tunnel? It didn’t make sense. Why did humans, with all their powers of reason and finely honed senses, find reality so unsatisfying? What was the point of having a thirst that couldn’t be quenched?

  And what was the point of doing science when people weren’t going to like the results? There was just no way to make everybody happy.

  She moved to the back and collapsed onto her bench. “Lex, are you awake?”

  “Hmmmph?” Lex rolled onto her back.

  “I know you’re tired, but I really have to talk.”

  Lex peered out from under droopy eyelids. “Okay, shoot.”

  “Remember those protesters? The ones outside the main gate in Houston?”

  “Which ones? Right wing or left?”

  “The Christians. What do you think they’ll say about the halobacteria? Think they’ll read our paper?”

  “Doubt it. Either way, I don’t really care.” Lex rolled back onto her side.

  “You realize that we’re using an evolutionary argument—of sorts, anyway. We’re saying the halobacterium probably came from Earth because it’s on Earth’s philogenetic tree. And you know the panspermia weirdos are going to grab that and blow it way out of proportion—the whole aliens‑seeding‑the‑universe‑with‑life thing. And then the fundamentalists are going to—”

  “So?”

  Valkerie leaned forward. “So doesn’t it bother you what people are going to think? Doesn’t it bother you that a whole lot of people are going to be mad at us?”

  Lex’s shoulder twitched with what could have been a shrug. “Val, you think too much about what other people think.”

  “And you don’t? What if they picketed our homes? I don’t want to be monkey‑trialed. I don’t want to be ... shunned.” Valkerie slid onto her back and stared up at the ceiling of the rover. “Know what’s really scary? I’m not even sure what my pastor will think. Or my old Sunday school teachers back home. I don’t want to be the enemy. I’m just doing my job, trying to learn new things. I can’t help it if God is a little more creative than some people want Him to be.”

  Silence.

  “Lex?”

  No answer.

  Valkerie felt the warm trickle of tears running down the sides of her face. She swiped at her ears. Nine more months of hard labor. No shore leave. No vacations. No punching the clock and going home at the end of the day. And nobody to listen. Nobody to understand what it was like to be a sheep in wolf’s clothing. It was too much. She couldn’t do it. Didn’t have the strength.

  If she were at home she could give two weeks notice and find something easier. Something that would allow her to have a life. Even as a graduate student she had had time for friends. She’d dated—a little. But this ... And now that they’d discovered life, Houston had been tripling their work schedules. She felt so hollow—so trapped. But what could she do? NASA hadn’t sent her to Mars to round out her social calendar. Certainly not to fall in love.

  She had a job to do.

  But what if that job alienated her from everyone who cared about her? It was already alienating her from Bob. He didn’t understand why she couldn’t balance work with a relationship. She’d already tried it and failed. Miserably. She’d almost flunked out of school. Wouldn’t that have made her father proud? And she hadn’t felt for Sidney nearly what she felt for Bob.

  She hadn’t had seven billion people watching her every move either. Hanging on every press conference.

  “Lex?”

  No reply.

  Valkerie raised her voice. “Lex, I don’t think I can do it.”

  Silence.

  A muffled creak sounded from the back of the rover. Thermal pings. The temperature was dropping.

  Valkerie nodded her head and took a deep breath. There was no way around it. She’d accepted this work, and she had to do it. Even if the whole world was going to read her paper, dissect it with a dull‑edged scalpel, and parade the bits they didn’t like on pikes held high above their heads.

  She could already hear their outraged tones. The whispers behind her back. The accusations to her face, people telling her what she did and did not believe. Griping that her faith got in the way of her science. That her science got in the way of her faith.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, but she could already see the looks of condescension. The silent assumptions that would never be voiced.

  But none of that mattered. She couldn’t back out now. The next plane didn’t leave Mars for nine more months. And anyway, she had given NASA her word. She had to at least try. Even if it meant being crucified.

  Chapter Five

  Wednesday, March 18, 4:00 p.m., CST

  Nate

  FRESH BACK FROM THE AIRPORT, Nate grabbed a mug of coffee and barged into the Flight Control Room. During actual flight operations, the FCR usually held twenty or thirty engineers. Today, barely a dozen were in, hunched over a few consoles, peering at data. Everybody was smiling. Happy, happy, happy.

  “I hate to interrupt the love fest here, but I need Josh right now.”

  A young blond woman in a T‑shirt and shorts pushed back from her console. “He’s talking to EECOM in conference room two.”

  Nate spun around and charged out. Thirty seconds later, he found the room and burst through the door.

  Josh sat at a table with EECOM, a short, older woman with red hair and rounded shoulders. As far as Nate knew, she didn’t have a real name—just EECOM. Josh had drawn something on a tablet, and EECOM was looking across the table at him with that adoring look Josh got from every woman in the universe who had a pulse. Josh Bennett, rock star.

  Nate wanted to heave.

  Josh turned to look at him. “Hey, Nate, how was D.C.?”

  “Hot and cold. Freezing rain, steaming president. She didn’t like how we manhandled the righties on the whole religious implications thing and the lefties on the back-contamination thing.” I should have sent you—maybe that would have cooled her jets.

  Josh shrugged. “Even the nutcakes vote, but that’s her problem not ours, right?”

  “Right.” Nate took a sip of coffee. “The good news is we might get more funding. NIH is going ape over Valkerie’s find, and they’re talking us up to the morons on the Senate budget committee. We’re going to need you to be the face for the PR push.”

  Josh made a note on a pad of paper. “I’m on it, as soon as we get our comm issues fixed.”

  Nate narrowed his eyes. “Comm issues?”

  “On the Deep Space Network. We’re getting some intermittent static. Too regular to be an accident, not regular enough to track yet. Looks almost like somebody’s jamming us.”

  Nate scowled. “Maybe it’s our old friend, the saboteur.”

  “After all this time?” Josh reached for his coffee cup and almost knocked it over. “No way.”

  Nate studied EECOM. She had worked on the DSN years ago, and she was the acknowledged Unix wizard on Gold Team. “So track it down and fix it.”

  “That’s a problem, sir.” EECOM pursed her lips and frowned. “You can’t fix a problem until you diagnose it. CommSat 1 and CommSat 2 are working perfectly most of the time.”

  “Most of the time ain’t all of the time.” Nate stood and began pacing, then turned to Josh. “When did that Russian ship reach Mars? Maybe they’re jamming
us.”

  Josh shook his head. “We don’t know if it ever made it far enough to do a Mars Orbital Insertion. We’ve been eavesdropping on transmissions from their high‑gain antenna since they launched. Those stopped about three weeks ago, and we haven’t detected any signal since then.”

  Nate stopped pacing and leaned against the wall, drumming his fingers on the plasterboard. “We don’t even know what mission the Russians are running. What kind of data were they sending back?”

  Josh shook his head. “It was all encrypted, same as our data. All we know is they sent a lot of it. We’re just trying to think of ways to do traffic analysis on it.”

  “Any way to decrypt it?”

  Josh played with his coffee cup. “Decryption is a black art, sir. Right now we’re using the DEADHEAD cipher for our own data, and nobody can break that. I gather theirs is similar.”

  “We don’t know whether the National Security Agency could break it,” EECOM said. “The NSA’s capabilities are classified. It’s possible they could provide us some assistance—”

  “Get it.” Nate sat down again. “I betcha the Russians are up to something.”

  “You can’t talk to somebody over in RSA?” Josh said.

  Nate sighed. After the fiasco on the International Space Station, the Russian Space Agency was in crisis. Again. “Who do I talk to? Yablonsky resigned. Petrov doesn’t return my calls. Lifshutz is drunk all the time.” He rested his chin in his hands. “What do we know about that mission anyway?”

  “Nothing official,” Josh said. “One of their engineers let slip to one of ours at a conference that it’s a robotic orbiter mission. Of course, he had half a liter of vodka in him, and our guy had more, so it’s anybody’s guess. Officially, RSA never even acknowledged a launch.”