Defying Mars (Saving Mars Series-2) (25 page)

If she’d been home, she could have taken all the ship’s water and pulled oh-two from it with equipment common in most Marsian dwellings. If she weren’t alone, she could have asked Crusty for a solution.

She wished she had paid better attention during survival basics at MCAB, but she’d spent much of the class rolling her eyes at the sorts of scenarios that stranded people on the planet far from life support. She wasn’t going to wander off into the desert by herself or take a get-about for a joy ride far from home or crash her ship in the middle of nowhere. Jessamyn Jaarda was better than that.

She laughed mirthlessly at her former self.

“Yeah, Jessamyn Jaarda’s the kind of person who takes off in a stolen spacecraft with an insufficient supply of oxygen,” she muttered to Crusty’s leafless plant. She’d moved it back to the bridge—a macabre reminder to survive.

Gazing at the plant, dead or dying, she wished she’d been more attentive to its health. She should have checked it more frequently. She might have enclosed it within a safer environment. A spacesuit would have done the job. She laughed, a gravelly sound, as she imagined the plant encased within a globed helmet, the rest of the suit trailing empty.

And then it struck her.

Oh.

Oh.

Jessamyn’s mouth hung open. She had an alternative source of oxygen. She had five alternative sources in fact, thanks to the Ungrateful Wretch and his cronies. Leaping up from her seat, she raced to the nearest crew quarters and walked straight to one of the lockers holding a clean white spacesuit. She ran a hand along its cool surface. She had air.
Each suit
was equipped with a full day of air: twenty-four hours and thirty-eight minutes of oxygen.

She’d found the aft quarters to harbor the least amount of microbial growth and she hauled four suits to join the one already back there, helmets clacking as they bounced against one another.

Although her lungs’ tickle bothered her most on the bridge, she returned there now. The helm was where she could Do Important Things. First off was to estimate exactly how many hours she had left of good air and how many hours she had before she reached Earth. Taking a seat at the ship’s nav-panel, she calculated. She had one hundred fifty-six hours of flight to go. But she had only one hundred twenty three hours of “suit oxygen.” She needed to survive another thirty-three hours on whatever the ship could provide.

She stared out the view screen at Earth. “Oxygen, fresh oxygen. Get your oxygen here,” she chanted in a huckster’s sing-song. Then she rolled her eyes at herself.

“
Aphrodite’s hair curlers!
” she swore, swiping the chair at her brother’s station. It spun round and round.

Did the
Galleon
have thirty-three hours of oxygen left? She didn’t know. But even if it did, her lungs wouldn’t enjoy breathing air the filter was no longer keeping clean. She thought of the plant and its growing splotches of black. She tried not to think about what her lungs might look like. She badly wanted to race back to the aft quarters and don a suit. But if air quality was degrading with each passing hour, and if there would be
no
oxygen at all left in a day or two, this was something she had to wait on.

“Safety protocols generally recommend launch and landing be carried out by a
living
pilot,” she murmured.

No, it wasn’t time to suit up yet. Her best chance was to wait out the thirty-odd hours and
then
suit up. She added a two-hour buffer as a margin of error, and then decided to spend as many of the intervening hours as possible in Ethan’s and Crusty’s drier quarters.

On her way, she stopped at the rations room to gather food and drink. Then she frowned. Once she began living her days inside a suit, she wouldn’t be able to eat ration bars—the helmet would be in the way. She wasn’t happy at the thought of being hungry for five days. On a hunch, she checked behind panels and cupboards until she located slimy packets of zero-g food.

“Oh, boy,” she murmured. “Won’t that be fun?”

She grabbed up an extra three packets of water for her aft-ship sojourn.

Water-grubber
, her mind whispered in accusation.

“That’s me,” she agreed, reaching for a fourth and fifth just in case.

In the middle of the night, Jessamyn awoke from a nightmare where she’d watched in despair as the
Red Galleon
missed her intersection with Earth.

“Just a dream,” she mumbled, bringing on a fit of coughing.
Hades
, but her mouth was dry. Her throat burned as well. When she took a deep breath before standing, she realized that her lungs felt as though an iron band were slowing squeezing them shut. Was this what her mom’s dry-lung felt like? The thought of her mom cut through her like a heat-knife through polar ice. Jessamyn didn’t want to think about her parents right now.

And then her wish for distraction from parental memories was dramatically fulfilled. The ship rang out with a warning about insufficient oxygen.

31

SEAT OF YOUR PANTS

Insufficient
oxygen was different, according to the ship, from
insufficient oxygen for human life
. The
Galleon
was notifying her that the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen and other gasses was no longer optimal. But it wasn’t bad enough to kill her. Not yet. And putting on a suit now would mean she would run out of suit air at a time when the ship had
no
oxygen left. She shook her head. If she made it at all, it would be by the seat of her pants.

“Well there’s something you’re good at, Jaarda,” she said. “Flying by the seat of your pants.”

She turned from the ops panel to the navigation panel, scowling at the ship’s
low fuel
warning. It had been glowing steadily since her last course adjustment seven days ago. She needed fuel and she had no way to get it. It was the same as her oxygen problem. Except that with the oxygen problem, she’d found an answer. She hoped.

Was there some “elsewhere” on the ship she could find fuel?

“Come on, Jaarda,” she growled. “This is the kind of thing you’re good at.”

Jessamyn knew the location of the fuel containers upon her ship, understood how the cylinders delivered requested fuel to her aft or forward thrusters, to port or starboard rockets. Ethan had even shown her a non-standard procedure for delivering extra fuel to the ship’s escape pods.

The escape pods!

“Well, I’ll be,” she whispered. “There it is.”

Jess stood with excitement. The person-sized pods each came filled with a small quantity of fuel. In the event of an emergency evacuation, you didn’t want to be stuck taking the time to divert fuel to your escape vehicle. And if she could transfer fuel from the
Galleon
to those other vehicles, could she not reverse the process? Transfer the fuel from the extraneous vehicles into the
Galleon
’s tanks?

Jessamyn had
five
fueled escape pods on board. At least she hoped they were fueled. Would they have been fueled? She wasn’t sure. Maybe the crew of Ungrateful Wretches wouldn’t have thought of fueling them. But Crusty would have ordered it. Without fuel, the pods’ only other method of speed reduction was old-fashioned whiplash-inducing parachutes.

She needed to go below-decks to check the pods. Marching back to the aft quarters, Jess reached out to grab a pressurized suit to descend into the lower levels. She had already shoved one leg through before realizing what she was about to do.

“Use the suit now and that’s one less suit you can use come landing day,” she murmured.

Frustrated, she sank upon the bunk, the suit in her lap now, her fingers pinching at the cool fabric. A faint reflection of her face—fish-eyed by the curvature of the helmet—caught her attention.

“Seven hours until you can suit up,” she murmured to herself. “Okay, get back to your list.”

She frowned at the next task on her list: determine how to safely land the
Galleon
with limited fuel. Of course, even if she could siphon off a few kilos of fuel, the landing was going to be
anything
but safe.

Jessamyn soon lost herself checking Academy texts which explained how to calculate the optimal angle at which to enter Earth’s kilometers-thick atmosphere. Enter at too shallow of an angle and you risked simply “bouncing” back out. Enter straight “down” and your craft would come in so hot that no amount of forward thrust could slow you in time to land. Jessamyn preferred landings which didn’t end in a flaming ball of fire.

Having determined her optimal angle of entry, she then examined Earth’s tilt and spin to see which continents would be closest as she approached. She had several possible landing points—all in unpopulated wastelands—but decided upon a deserted position in North America close to where it met the Pacific. This would get her planet-side more quickly than the other locations: she had the limited oxygen to factor into her decision. Best to get off the ship as swiftly as possible. North America it would be, then.

Her destination chosen, Jessamyn then set out to determine how much fuel she would need for braking. While entry through Earth’s dense atmosphere would provide much of the reduction in speed she required, it wouldn’t reduce her speed
enough
. She would still come down too hot and too fast.

Early Terrans had solved the speed reduction problem with the use of parachutes. In fact, early Mars landings had also used the parachute as the most efficient way to apply the brakes, since Mars, unlike Earth, didn’t have several kilometers of atmosphere to create drag.

Well, the
Galleon
didn’t come equipped with parachutes, so that option wouldn’t work. Her head ached and her stomach growled. Jessamyn couldn’t remember when she’d eaten last.

A ration bar and a drink of water later, she felt better—physically anyway—and set herself back to calculating how much of her braking would be done by Earth’s atmosphere and how much of it had to be accomplished using her forward thrusters.

Coming up with a number she didn’t like, she repeated her calculations. And repeated them again. And again.

Things did not look good. She knew how many kilos of fuel remained, but precise conditions on Earth would mean she might be off by a bit in her estimation of fuel consumption. Not to mention a degree or two difference between the angle she
planned
to enter the atmo and the angle she actually achieved meant there would always be a margin of error.

“Anyone want to place bets?” she demanded aloud. “Anyone?”

Shaking her head, she rose and crossed to the clean-stall. Her hair, kept from the influence of sunlight and Marsian peroxides, had darkened slightly. It was still red, but a deeper shade than she remembered. The skin below her eyes was tinted with purple.

Jess startled. If she squinted just right, she could see where her First Wrinkle had arrived sometime in the past weeks aboard the
Galleon
. She was an adult now. “Well,” she said to her reflection, “You’re probably going to asphyxiate or crash into a million pieces very soon, but at least you look amazing.”

With two hours to go before she could suit up, Jessamyn began to worry that her ability to concentrate was fading. She checked the ship’s oxygen levels—dangerously low—and grabbed one of the suits off the bunk. Sinking down where the suit had rested, she looked into the share-mask. She found her new tiny wrinkle reflected upon the share-mask. She wondered if she should get up and do something to stay awake.

And then she drifted to sleep.

32

YET HERE WE BE

Pavel Brezhnaya-Bouchard was regretting he hadn’t attempted to perform surgical facial alterations upon himself while he had the chance. His claim that despite being Lucca’s nephew, he was only in Yucca to build satellite dishes sounded implausible to many of the residents.

“This whole group of strangers is part of an elaborate trap put into play by the Chancellor,” said Roy to Yucca’s leading citizens, gathered to examine Pavel and his friends. “She makes everyone think her nephew’s been abducted by placin’ that reward on his head, but really she’s got him doin’ her dirty work findin’ dissenters.”

The Shirff frowned and tugged at his moustache.

“It’s true my aunt wants me back,” said Pavel. “The reward is real. But the kidnapping claim is ridiculous. Does it look like I’m with these friends because they kidnapped me?”

Brian snorted in laughter.

“Brezhnaya looks weak if word gets out that her nephew’s run off of his own accord,” muttered the enclave’s oldest citizen, her pipe between her teeth.

“Exactly,” said Pavel. “But it’s also not the case that I’m doing secret spy work for her. My aunt knows the truth about me—that I have no interest in supporting her goals or her government.”

Harpreet’s clear voice rang out. “With all due respect, I believe it might be better to ask why Lucca Brezhnaya would send her highly-recognizable nephew to trap dissenters when an unknown face would surely garner more trust. Not to mention the fact that had her government been made aware of your existence, Red Squadron might have put an end to all of us by now.”

The woman with the pipe nodded. “Yet here we be.”

The Shirff cleared his throat and addressed the five strangers. “We need time to discuss this situation. I’m sure you’ll understand if we place your party under protective custody for the remainder of the day.”

Harpreet spoke for the group. “Of course you must be allowed to consider what you have learned. It changes nothing for us, however. We remain grateful for your hospitality and hopeful that it will continue.”

But the discussion continued long into the night, and the party of five were told to expect word the following morning. Harpreet graciously accepted the information, passing it along to her companions.

Pavel felt restless.

“I’m going outside,” he said.

“Are we allowed?” asked Dr. Zaifa.