Oxygen Series Box Set: A Science Fiction Suspense Box Set

by John Olson

  * * *

  Saturday, March 21, 10:00 a.m., CST

  Josh

  Josh pushed open the door to Kennedy’s apartment and handed the key back to Agent Yamaguchi.

  She led the way. “I doubt you’ll find anything here. Our team was pretty thorough.”

  Cathe followed her in. “They missed the passwords and Kennedy’s EZMail account.”

  Yamaguchi gave a brusque nod. “Congratulations, Miss Willison. That was a lucky catch. If you find anything else, which isn’t likely, I’ll need to log it right away.”

  Josh followed the pair into the living room and gasped. The place was immaculate.

  “Do your agents do windows too?” Cathe circled the room.

  Yamaguchi sat down primly on the couch. “I assure you, everything is exactly as we first found it. And you will keep it that way. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Crystal.” Josh grinned at Yamaguchi and then turned to exchange glances with Cathe.

  Her look said it all. Kennedy’s apartment couldn’t have been any more different from his office. It was eerie.

  Josh wandered through the two‑bedroom apartment. The kitchen, living room, both bedrooms, office, two baths—every room was neat. Meticulously so.

  Compulsively.

  Josh looked at Cathe. “Where do we start?”

  “You go through the living room. I’ll play with his computer. Keep your eyes open for anything weird.”

  “Right.”

  An hour later, after he had finished going through every book on the shelves, Josh turned to Kennedy’s TV and the shelves of carefully labeled DVDs on either side of it.

  It turned out Kennedy liked shoot‑‘em‑and‑kick‑‘em flicks. Schwarzenegger. Bruce Lee. Jake Lloyd. Josh flipped through the stack of DVDs, wondering what qualified as weird enough. At the bottom of the shelf was a handful of DVD recordables in jewel cases. All of them were labeled. “Katy’s Birthday Party.” “Rusty’s Little League.” “Family Christmas.”

  Cathe walked out into the living room. “Find anything?”

  Josh held up the stack.

  “I found some of those in the office too. Who are Katy and Rusty?”

  Josh tried to place the names. “Niece and nephew, maybe?”

  “You don’t know?”

  Josh shrugged. “I’ve never met them.”

  “We’ve already checked those.” Yamaguchi moved to stand in front of the TV and looked pointedly at her watch. “They’re all what they say they are: birthday parties, Little League, kids unwrapping presents …”

  “You watched all of them?” Cathe popped open the jewel case and inserted the DVD into Kennedy’s player. “All the way through?”

  “Enough to verify the contents ...”

  Cathe fast-forwarded through a half dozen hyperfrenetic kids wearing party hats.

  Josh shifted under the weight of Yamaguchi’s impatient look. “Cathe, I appreaciate your thoroughness, but maybe our time would be better spent—”

  The television went black and the party scene was replaced by a black and white image of an office.

  His office.

  It was a little skewed, but there was no doubt about it. He could even see the screensaver on his computer—a bunch of animated penguins playing baseball in fast motion.

  “I don’t believe this.” Yamaguchi’s voice was tight and controlled.

  He just stared at the screen.

  His TV image entered his office and sat down at the computer. Cathe aimed the remote at the player, and the scene slowed to normal speed. The Josh on the screen typed in something. A little box popped up and he entered his password and then started up his e‑mail program.

  “Did you see that?” Yamaguchi turned to him, eyes narrowed. “The camera had a perfect view of your right hand. I couldn’t see the left hand, but if it just had a little bit better angle, he could have run it in slow motion and picked off your entire password.”

  “That’s how he did it!” Josh grabbed the remote from Cathe and replayed the scene from the beginning. “He set me up!”

  He sank into the couch as Cathe and Yamaguchi fast-forwarded through one DVD after another, but he didn’t need to see more footage of his office or the password-protected schematic of the Hab to know that Kennedy had been trying to frame him. If he hadn’t been replaced by Valkerie when he was, Kennedy would have seen to it that he was kicked off the mission. Kennedy wasn’t just crazy. He was a psychopath. He wanted what he wanted and was willing to bury anybody who stood in his way.

  A buzz vibrated into his leg, pulling him reluctantly back to the present. He let the call go to voicemail, but it rang again a few seconds later. Whoever it was wasn’t taking no for an answer. He yanked the phone out of his pocket and held it to his ear. “Okay already! What’s the big emergency?”

  “I need you here right now.” Nate’s tight voice. “Valkerie’s unconscious, and they’re saying she might be sick.”

  “What?” Josh was already on his feet and heading for the door.

  “Not a word to anybody until we understand the situation. Got it? If word gets out now, those bactamination fearmongers might not allow our boys and girls to come home.”

  * * *

  Saturday, March 21, 5:00 p.m., Mars Local Time

  Valkerie

  Valkerie woke to a soft touch on her cheek. She opened her eyes and squinted up into dark eyes and a white surgical mask. “Bob?” She winced. Her throat felt like it had been scraped raw. Her head throbbed with the echoes of her voice.

  A cool hand soothed back the hair from her forehead.

  Her face was on fire. She reached a trembling hand to Bob’s. His skin felt sticky. Rubbery. She turned her head and blinked the hand into focus. He was wearing latex gloves.

  “Bob, what’s wrong?”

  “It’s okay.” His voice sounded remote. “You were sick, but you’re going to be just fine.”

  Valkerie closed her eyes and tried to make sense of it all. Why was Bob wearing gloves? And a mask? She was obviously sick—with something that was either very contagious or ... Valkerie opened her eyes and tried to sit up, but gloved hands held her down.

  “Easy, now. Don’t try to move. Think you can drink some water?”

  She shook her head. “Flight Med made you wear a mask, didn’t they?”

  He nodded. Worry flashed across his eyes.

  “They can’t think I caught something here. That’s ridiculous.” She watched his eyes, searching for the answer. But where else could she have caught it? No one had been sick since leaving Earth.

  “It’s just a precaution. You know how the flight docs are.” Bob’s voice sounded hollow.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me, and I want to know what it is.” Valkerie tried to sound angry, but she didn’t have the strength. She met his eyes again. “Bob, please.”

  He hesitated, then nodded. “Flight Med’s worried it might be the bacteria from the micrometeorite. We tried to tell them—”

  “That’s ridiculous. Josh said he used a permafrost bacterium from Antarctica. It’s not infectious. He injected himself just to be sure.”

  “But they don’t know that.”

  Valkerie shut her eyes and tried to put herself in Flight Med’s place. Did they really believe a micrometeorite could carry living spores? Well ... why not? It was looking like the halobacteria might have come from Earth. Its morphology looked surprisingly similar to that of Earth archaebacteria. Could life have been carried between the two planets on impact meteorites? How else could it be explained? Convergent evolution? That just didn’t make sense. The halobacterium was—

  “Wait a minute.” Valkerie opened her eyes. “Why are you still wearing a mask? You know it’s not Josh’s bacterium. You don’t think ...”

  Bob shook his head. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “But it can’t be Martian. That’s ludicrous. There’s nothing out there. If there was life, I would have found it by now.”
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br />   “It took you nine months to find the petrified snot ...”

  “Bob, that’s—”

  “What else could have caused it? One minute you’re fine and the next you’re puking all over the hallway. Valkerie, you’ve been out for thirty‑six hours. And you’ve got a fever of 101. For a while it was 104. We were afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

  “A hundred and four?” Valkerie swallowed and grimaced at the ragged pain in her throat. “How long?”

  “Lex put you in your LCG and cooled you down pretty fast. But still ...”

  “What about strep? Or maybe a staph infection? I could have carried it from Earth—and my throat feels like it’s gone through a shredder.”

  “Lex did a throat culture. Definitely not strep—or staph. Plus she’s done all kinds of other tests. Must’ve taken a gallon of blood.”

  “Food poisoning?” Valkerie stared up into Bob’s eyes. It had to be food poisoning. There was no other explanation.

  Bob shook his head slowly. “We checked all the empty food packets. Went back over two weeks.”

  “But that’s ... impossible. You made a mistake. You had to.”

  “You’re probably right.” Bob turned his face to the open doorway. “I, uh ... I should go tell Lex you’re awake. I’ll be right back. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  He rose to leave, holding his hands out in front of him like a surgeon in preop. If he really thought she had food poisoning, why was he still wearing a mask?

  He was just being paranoid. They all were. Jumping at shadows. Screaming at reflections. There was no life on Mars. There couldn’t be. It didn’t make sense.

  * * *

  Sunday, March 22, 8:53 a.m., CST

  Nate

  Nate scrubbed the whiteboard clean. When he turned, he saw that, for the first time in the history of NASA, everybody had arrived early for a meeting. Seven minutes early, to be exact. It was a fairly large group. Six doctors from Flight Med; Dr. Frazier, the NASA epidemiologist; some expert on infectious diseases from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta; Steven Perez; Josh Bennett; and all the engineers who’d been in the Flight Control Room for the last forty‑eight hours. That was when Bob called in with news that Valkerie had an unknown infection. The kids looked haggard, but not one of them wanted to go home.

  “Okay, that’s everybody. Sit down and circle the wagons.” Nate shut the door, then stepped to the whiteboard. “As most of you know, Valkerie is not out of the woods yet, but she’s on the rebound. None of the others have come down with it yet, so we’re hoping it isn’t infectious. Dr. Frazier, have you got an assessment on what this thing is yet?”

  Frazier was a short guy with a white goatee, white mustache, white eyebrows, and no hair. He pushed up his black plastic glasses. “My first thought on Friday morning was that it sounded like a virulent form of Legionnaires’ disease.”

  “Any signs of mental incapacitation?” The man from the CDC put his elbows on the table and rested his jowls on his fleshy hands. “Any hallucinations? Dizziness? Forgetfulness?”

  “No,” Nate said. “Not that I know—”

  “Actually ...”

  Everybody turned to look at Josh.

  Josh took a sip of coffee. “I had a chat with Bob the other day. You know, just talking. Anyway, he mentioned in passing that they did an EVA Thursday morning just outside the Hab. He was kinda embarrassed about it, but they were looking for ... footprints.”

  “Footprints?” Frazier said. “The astronauts walk outside all the time, don’t they?”

  “Apparently, Valkerie saw ... something Wednesday night. Just outside the porthole in the commons on the second floor.” Josh looked around at the others. “Looking in at her.”

  Nate leaned back in his chair. “What kind of a something are we talking about? Some kind of peeping Martian Bigfoot? That porthole’s got to be fifteen feet off the ground.”

  Josh shrugged. “Valkerie wasn’t quite sure what she saw. Not a dust devil—not at midnight. But it could have been just the wind blowing dust around. There’s a dust storm kicking up at the South Pole. Or maybe she was just tired. But she saw something—a couple of nights before she came down sick.”

  Nobody said anything.

  Nate twiddled a whiteboard marker in his hands. I love it when they tell me these things right away. “Okay, getting back to the tangent, Dr. Frazier, what’s the consensus on Valkerie’s disease?”

  The doctor consulted a sheet of paper. “Like I said, it sounds like Legionnaires’ disease. It doesn’t seem to be a virus. Therefore, it’s got to be some sort of bacterial infection—but not one of the usual ones. We’ve ruled out strep, staph, E. coli, and a dozen others. The problem with this theory is that it should have manifested itself on the crew long ago if they brought it with them from Earth. And it is implausible in the extreme that they picked it up on Mars.”

  “How implausible?” Nate crossed his arms. “Are we talking one in a hundred, one in a million, what?”

  “Not even one in a billion,” Frazier said. “It is most certainly not possible. Any bacterium that had adapted to survive on a cold, dry planet with almost no atmosphere could not be adapted to a human host.”

  That was pretty much what Nate had always believed, but it was good to hear it from an expert. “But you’re saying it’s got to be some kind of bacteria.”

  “Or some unknown life‑form,” the man from the CDC said. “It is impossible to speculate—”

  “Then don’t.” Nate glowered around the room. “Listen, people. Time is short and we need to keep things simple here. I’m looking for facts—”

  “Well, then, why don’t you listen?”

  Everyone turned to Cathe Willison in shocked silence.

  “You keep interrupting everybody.” She jutted her jaw at Nate. “Why don’t you listen to what we’ve got to say?”

  Who did she think she was, anyway? He would have thrown her out, but he couldn’t afford to break security.

  Perez tapped his pen on the table. “Nate? I think the young lady has a point. Less haste, more speed. Okay?”

  Nate could see by the averted eyes and unsmiling expressions around the circle that the majority agreed with Perez. “Okay, fine, less haste. But, folks, we don’t have a lot of time, so let’s keep on subject. Now, here’s the real problem, which is why I called this meeting: There’s a small possibility that this bacteria might not be of Earth—”

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree, Mr. Harrington.” The man from the CDC shook his head. “Even if that fossil could be resuscitated, halobacteria are harmless. I understand your crew has already done the sequencing to show that your fossil is an archaebacteria from Earth’s own Tree of Life. We don’t know of a single species of archaebacteria that has ever—”

  “If you wouldn’t mind”—Nate all but growled the words—“I’d like to finish my sentence. Most of you don’t know this, but on the trip to Mars, the ship briefly got itself infested with some kind of bacteria that Valkerie didn’t recognize. She suspected it came from a micrometeorite that embedded in the exterior foam shielding of the Hab. Kennedy stuck his finger in the impact hole and didn’t decontaminate his glove afterward. Valkerie eventually traced the microbe back to the glove.”

  “And you didn’t notify us about this?” The man from the CDC looked like he’d just swallowed a frog.

  “I had a few other things to worry about,” Nate said. “Like keeping my astronauts alive.”

  “We don’t know that the infection came from space.” Josh leaned forward. “It could have come from Earth.”

  “Valkerie didn’t recognize it under the microscope,” Nate said. “She didn’t have time to characterize it then—she was kind of busy trying to breathe.”

  “So it could be from Earth.” Josh had that look in his eye that said he wasn’t gonna let go of this one.

  “Or it could be from space,” Cathe said. “Panspermia. Life seeding the galaxy from another star system.”
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  Frazier glowered at her over the rims of his glasses. “Who are you, young lady?”

  She stood up and walked over to stand in his face, turning up her ID badge so he could see her Silver Snoopy pin. “If it weren’t for me and a whole bunch of other kindergartners who worked our tails off last year, those four astronauts would be dead right now.”

  Josh came up behind her and took her elbow. “Dr. Frazier, Cathe’s one of our best engineers. Cathe, how about you have a seat?”

  She stalked back to her chair.

  Nate returned to the whiteboard. “We’ve got a few different possibilities, so let’s make a decision tree. First off, either the infectious agent is from Earth, or it’s from Mars, or it’s from somewhere else.” He wrote those three possibilities on the board and circled them.

  Josh cleared his throat. “Well, if it’s from Earth, then it’s not a big deal, right?”

  “Right.” Nate wrote No Big Deal beside the Earth circle.

  “And the probability for that is fairly large,” Josh said. “Like maybe 99 percent?”

  “If I didn’t know about the micrometeorite, I’d agree. But I do, so I don’t.” Nate wrote 90% beside the Earth circle. “Obviously, it’s not headline news if Valkerie has come down with food poisoning. So the real question is what to do if Valkerie’s caught some kind of space flu or Martian bug. Dr. Frazier, what’s the probability that this halobacteria is causing the problem?”

  “I told you already,” Frazier said. “Zero. It can’t happen.”

  Nate wrote .1% beside the Mars circle. “And there’s only one possibility left, which is the micrometeorite bacteria.” He wrote 9.9% next to that circle. “There aren’t any other options.”

  The man from the CDC took off his glasses and polished them on his tie. “So they were exposed to this micrometeorite bacteria a year ago? That’s an awfully long incubation time. It doesn’t make sense. Why aren’t the other astronauts infected?”