chapter 26
THE PROSPECT OF DEATH
On the morning of her twenty-fourth day out from Mars, Jessamyn awoke with her heart pounding hard against her ribcage. She’d
thought of a third reason the ship’s computer might be reporting she had so little fuel remaining.
“Extra weight,” she muttered.
Jumping out of her bunk, she stumbled to her locker. To find out if her hunch was correct, she would need to descend into the
bowels of the ship, which weren’t kept habitable. She hesitated a moment between her g-suit and a spacesuit. A part of her school
pledge echoed in her head: I will not waste oxygen. She grabbed the g-suit.
Slipping inside the suit, she toggled the oxygen reserve to supply itself from the main cabin. This meant a wait of a minute and gave
her time to admire the fit of her boots and gloves. She wondered briefly if she could talk MCC into allowing her to keep the suit for
everyday use upon Mars. She rolled her eyes at her idiotic idea. MCC was going to lock her up and throw away the key once she
got home.
Even with its customized fit, the suit felt awkward. Jess had grown accustomed to movement without a suit. She’d passed nearly a
month in deep space. She was certain she’d never gone more than a single day on Mars without suiting up, often spending entire
days back home inside the pressurized suit with the oxygen supply which made her life possible upon Mars’s surface.
She eased into the tiny airlock that led to the ship’s lower levels. Lighting was poor down here, and she flicked on her headlamp.
For over three weeks, she’d assumed her fuel indicator was malfunctioning. But what if someone—some trade-obsessed individual
too contemptible to mention by name—had filled the ship’s hold? Jess felt sick as she considered the possibility. But it would
explain the larger burn to get the ship off Mars and up to velocity. A heavier ship would have consumed more fuel. Something Kipper
’s idiot brother would have been likely to overlook.
Shuffling past the ship’s escape pods, Jess made her way to the large doors leading to the ship’s hold. She felt her pulse
increasing as she waited the agonizing time it took for the hold doors to retract. What she saw in the glow of her headlamp took her
breath away.
Cavanaugh had filled the ship’s hold with tellurium.
Sinking onto the floor, Jess gazed in despair at the valuable metal.
“No wonder you burned through all that fuel,” Jess whispered to the ship.
It was a potential disaster. If the ship’s fuel readings were accurate—and she had to assume now that they were—she had big
problems. Jess leapt to her feet and sped back toward the ship’s habitable level.
This was not a minor issue like last week’s episode with the squealing clean-stall beside her quarters. Not a humorous one like the
morning she’d awoken bobbing about in her quarters like a floating cork and had to reengage the ship’s artificial gravity with a cold
frame boot to the system.
“Trouble always comes in threes.” In her mind, Jessamyn could hear the rasp of Crusty’s gravelly voice as he’d spoken those words
in the past. She heard, as well, Harpreet’s laughing response: “Only a fool borrows trouble from the future.” Jess supposed that
meant something along the lines of, “Don’t go looking for a third problem.”
“Well, we’ve got one now,” she said aloud, including the ship in her use of the plural pronoun.
Back on the bridge, Jess ran calculations through the ship’s computer over and over again. Her results, unfortunately, were not
encouraging. The fuel indicator reported the consumption of an amount of fuel in proportion to a ship loaded down with tellurium.
The fuel indicator wasn’t busted.
No, it was fairly certain Jess did not, in fact, have the fuel she needed to make the kind of safe landing she’d made six weeks ago
upon Earth’s Isle of Skye. Nor did she have enough to come to a full stop and return to Mars. In fact, assuming the indicator was
correct, she might not even have enough to guide the ship back into Mars’s orbital path to wait out the red planet’s arrival.
“Great,” she said aloud. “I’m dead.”
She’d faced death in a cockpit before—most recently just before MCAB had grounded her. But those times, the prospect of death
had been immediate. This time she had nearly forty days between her and her probable demise. And this meant she had time to
think about death.
And so, day by day, she learned to live alongside the fact that each day brought her closer to the probable conclusion of all her days.
She vacillated between utter despair and a sense that everything would work out in the end.
It was a strange way to live.
She continued to receive periodic communications from Mars with demands for her return. These she read and ignored. Then one
day a message arrived from her parents, pleading for her to reconsider. Her mom sent a set of calculations showing she’d still have
the fuel to return until day forty-seven. Her mom didn’t know about the additional tellurium weight, of course. Jess stopped reading
messages after that, and on day forty-eight, they stopped coming. MCC had apparently given up on her.
Jess spent much of her time analyzing the ship’s three hundred Earth-years of data regarding entry, descent, and landing on the
Terran world. But this activity, like reading MCC’s messages, served only to fill her with unease. What she saw did not look hopeful.
The day after the MCC messages ceased, Jess decided to discontinue analyzing possible landings as well.
“I’ll make it or I won’t,” she said aloud.
But with two weeks to go, she badly wished she’d brought something to read.
And then she laughed aloud. Running down the hall to Crusty’s storage locker, Jess fished inside the small dark space and pulled
out a long-forgotten bag, crammed with the items she’d packed her last night at home. She hadn’t intended for it to be her last night,
obviously, but now she hugged the bag to her chest in delight.
She pulled out her reading wafer and settled on her bunk to lose herself in a favorite story. And then another. And another. Until she
fell asleep reading.
On the seventh day of this new routine, she woke with a massive headache throbbing through her right eye. You’ll ruin your eyes, her
mother had told her when Jess used to read for hours on end.
Standing, Jess stumbled to the rations room in search of synthetic feverfew. While this did the trick for the headache, she decided
to spend her time in more varied ways.
Searching her brother’s wafer, she found the music of the Cratercoustics, a band popular on Mars, and she cranked the music until
it blared throughout the ship. The band was supposed to have played at the planetary celebration, which made her feel a bit sad.
But the music was energetic and soon Jess was bouncing down the hall, singing along with lyrics about the girl she’d left behind in
Barsoom Station.
It was a good workout. Crusty would have approved, Jessamyn thought with a smile. If she had to spend some part of each day
exercising, she might as well enjoy it. Just in case she managed to land the ship after all.
The song finished and the crooning voice of the lead singer switched to a melancholy ballad about wearing his heart on his sleeve
and how his girlfriend had stolen his jacket away. The words were silly. Very silly, Jessamyn told herself as she sang along, but the
emotion felt raw and pure and she found herself remembering Pavel, his smile, his mouth warm on hers.
Which brought Jess to a new depth of miserable.
It wouldn’t do. Calling out a command for the ship to cut the audio, she marched to the helm. It was time for a rational activity. Like
checking her trajectory.
Staring at the readings, her mouth pulled to one side in half a frown. Not because anything was wrong, but because the trajectory
looked perfect. Mind-numbingly perfect.
“The Galleon doesn’t need me,” she said to Crusty’s orchid. Fortunately, she’d never once heard the plant respond to anything she
had to say.
She looked for something else to do. She supposed she could swab the decks, but cleaning had never been a favorite task of hers.
Sluggishly, the days crawled by, Jess filling them with letters to Pavel, strenuous exercise, reading through blueprints of her brother’s
inventions, and occasional one-sided conversations with Crusty’s orchid.
As dull day succeeded dull day, the nights grew ever more wearisome. Jessamyn had stuck to the twenty-four hours and thirty-eight
minutes of a Marsian day until she reached day thirty-two, her half-way mark. Since then, she dropped the thirty-eight minutes and
set her schedule to match Earth’s shorter twenty-four hour days.
Not that it mattered a great deal. She lay each night awake for what seemed like hours, trying various rooms to see if change
improved her ability to sleep.
One problem that interfered with sleep was simply that Jessamyn felt as if she were doing a Very Wrong Thing each night by
allowing the ship to fly itself. She would awaken with her heart pounding, adrenaline coursing madly through her system, and the fear
that she’d forgotten something important, left something critical undone. Which led to an inevitable trip to the bridge to check on the
ship.
She even tried sleeping at the helm. That didn’t last long. As she lay on the floor of the bridge, she couldn’t help but imagine the Red
Galleon frowning sternly at her, demanding to know what, exactly, she thought she was doing asleep at the proverbial wheel.
Her letters to Pavel grew more frequent, although her memory of him seemed each day to thin out until only a gossamer thread of
Pavel remained to anchor his memory to her. She recalled in flashes small things: his fingers, with sand pouring off of them; the
bright bloom of red as he removed her subcutaneous Terran scan chip; and often, especially as she dreamed, his breath upon her
lips as he leaned near for a kiss.
Upon her fifty-first day in space, Jessamyn broke her self-imposed ban from visiting the observation deck. Pausing before the seal
-door, she attempted to brace herself against a rush of memories of her brother, an ache for his companionship. But as she passed
over the threshold, she saw only the stars. Glorious, infinite in number, bright against an inky backdrop.
She sighed as she moved across the shallow room to lean her forehead upon the window. Why didn’t I come here before? She had
no answer. Only a certainty that she’d been a fool to cut herself off from such beauty. It looked to her as if someone had frozen in
time an image of rain, the small pelting bits caught stationary and then lit with fire, stretching unto an infinite distance.
Dear Pavel, she composed the letter in her head, I am staring out at Zhinü and Niulong this morning—if you can call it morning—and
wondering if you think of me when you look into the night sky. I am surrounded by eternal night (or perhaps it is eternal day), and I
know now that I cannot live without the beauty of this vision spread before me. Will we, as the lovers in the tale, find one another?
Form a bridge across the distance? I am not crossing the Milky Way. My journey is a minute one, Pavel, and sometimes I have a
sense of being caught in a river that carries me to you. Well, I hope it will. Earth seems so tiny when I view her in the vastness of
space. How hard could it be to find you upon so small a surface? Your friend, Jessamyn
It wasn’t a letter she committed to her wafer. These were thoughts only, ephemeral, private, foolish. She walked to the far end of the
arched window and tucked herself against the wall, watching the fiery worlds, wondering if any watched her back. And then, trying to
number the stars between the smallest space she could form between two fingers, she fell asleep.
When she awoke the next day, she decided to move the orchid from the bridge to the observation deck. “The view’s a lot better from
there,” she murmured to Crusty’s plant as she carried it. Pausing to open the ob-deck door, she disturbed the pot-within-the-bowl
system Crusty had set up for watering. Instantly, her nostrils were assaulted by a smell so rare upon Mars that she had to stop to
think where she’d encountered it before.
“Algae rot,” she murmured finally. “Like Mom’s bad pots.”
Wrinkling her nose, she adjusted the ob-deck’s low lighting so she could see the orchid better. The smell definitely originated from
the plant—Jessamyn discovered a layer of slime where she’d disturbed the bowl. Quickly, she shifted it back to its former position
as best as she could, hiding the slime and the odor.
Jess remembered how her mom got angry when Jess or her father accidentally turned off the lighting over the algae pots. Maybe
the orchid needed more light. She fiddled with the ob-deck lighting, aiming one light at a spot just in front of the window. Carefully,
she set the plant in the light.
“There,” she said. “That should help you get better.” But as she said this, she saw a black spot on one of the leaves. Rot, she
thought. She had no idea how to treat a plant for leaf-rot.
How did a plant even contract such a thing out in space? Frowning, Jessamyn walked to the door, looking back over her shoulder at
the plant. The orchid did look happier here.
“You’re losing it, Jaarda,” she said as she exited the ob-deck.
Sleepless nights became an increasing challenge as Jessamyn hurtled through space to her rendezvous with Earth. No longer able
to stick to a schedule where she’d be awake at the same time every day, Jess began to set reminder alarms so that she could
check her course at twenty-four hour intervals.
She wondered again if sleep might come in a different room, a different bed. A move to the ob-deck had helped, initially. She
decided to try out the captain’s quarters next. Walking down the hall, she shuffled inside, bleary-eyed, before depositing herself
upon the slightly larger bunk.
A few days ago, her throat had begun to feel irritated. Tonight, the night of day fifty-seven, it felt worse. She yawned, wincing at the
ache in the back of her throat. Apologizing in her mind to the citizens of Mars Colonial, Jessamyn reached for a second evening
water packet and guzzled it gratefully.
It was only as she crossed from fatigue into the liminal stage preceding sleep that it occurred to her the scratch in her throat might
be an indicator of air filter malfunction.