chapter 28
FATE OF A LONE GIRL
Jessamyn awoke the next morning with the sense of having left something undone. The solars? Did Mom ask me to give them a
scrub? Rolling over, her arm struck the metal bar designed to prevent her from tumbling out of her bunk, and she came fully awake,
millions of kilometers from her mom and the solars. Her throat felt awful—like it had the day she’d dared her brother to eat sand.
Ethan had sensibly declined, but Jessamyn, curious, had tried it. One painful swallow had been enough to keep her from consuming
more.
She climbed out of her bunk and shuffled to the rations room where she drank not one but two water packets to soothe her burning
throat.
“Water-grubber,” she murmured to herself. Talking hurt, so she made a mental note to stop. It was time for a ration bar. Jessamyn
found herself holding it unopened in her hand, certain it would hurt to swallow. Shoving it in a pocket, she decided she’d think about
eating later. It was the sort of thing she’d seen her brother do dozens of times. She could do worse than grow up to be like him, she
reasoned. Well, minus the part where he got captured by Terrans and re-bodied.
Making her way to the bridge, she went through the routine of verifying her heading. Everything checked out nominally, and after a
boring hour at the helm, Jess decided to pay an extended visit to the ob-deck. Perhaps she’d do a bit of napping as well. She felt so
lethargic, even with what had been a very good night’s rest behind her. A nap in the ob-deck sounded idyllic right now.
She opened the seal-door. The room’s lighting, normally dimmed for better viewing, glowed warmly on its “orchid” setting.
“I suppose you think you need that light,” she rasped to the plant. The pain in her throat reminded her of her intention to avoid
speech, and she thought the rest of her words.
Well, I’m sorry, but I’m turning the light off anyway.
Feeling ridiculous for sending thoughts to Crusty’s plant, Jess was just about to settle for her nap when she saw the nasty blackened
patch had grown, spreading across one entire leaf. Or petal. Or whatever they were called. Moving closer and squatting before the
plant, Jess twisted the watering bowl to examine the far side. Nothing bad over there, at least. But in twisting the bowl, she disturbed
the slimy growth between the watering bowl and the pot.
She pulled back. It had moved on from green and ugly. Now it was brown and nasty.
And that was when Jessamyn recalled the thoughts that had passed through her mind as she’d fallen to sleep. Air filtration. Her sore
throat. The slime on the plant.
“Oh, no,” she murmured. What was it Crusty had said about the filter? That he’d had to order a new one? Jess couldn’t remember
him telling her that he had installed the new one, only that he was waiting for it. When had that been? Dread filled her belly.
“Oh no,” she repeated.
It had been the night she’d slept in his tool locker. The night she’d discovered Cavanaugh’s treachery. The night that had folded into
the day she launched alone.
Crusty had not replaced the air filter.
She rose and dashed back to the bridge, seating herself at the mechanic’s station. Her lungs tickled from the effort of running and
she coughed. She glanced through the information the ops panel returned on air filtration.
“Oh, Hades,” she whispered.
It looked bad. The air filter showed significant contamination in five places. She asked the computer for a recommendation and
received instructions for an antiseptic flush, which she quickly initiated. The monitor before her began counting down from four
hours, informing her that the flush would be completed within that time.
She wondered how many of these antiseptic flushings the ship could perform. Enough for seven more days of travel? She coughed
again and it occurred to her that she’d been coughing a lot during her stints on the bridge. Could the air quality on the bridge be
worse than in other parts of the ship? Crusty would know how to ask the ship where air quality was suffering right now. Jess made a
few frustrating attempts to access this information, but she didn’t know the right sort of question and the answers the ship’s
computer returned were either baffling or useless. “I’m a pilot,” she growled. “How am I supposed to make sense of any of this?”
Storming off the bridge, Jess began to explore each room on the ship’s habitation level, looking for evidence of microbial
overgrowth. Once she started looking, she found things everywhere. Sometimes what she thought she saw turned out to be a
shadow or an imperfection in the paint. But she also discovered seven varieties of oozing, sponging, and flaking growths. Some
rooms fared better than others. The microbes displayed a preference for darkened corners. The bridge, her last stop, was worst-off
of all.
While she waited for the antiseptic wash to complete, Jess scanned through a handful of articles on the subject of microbial
overgrowth in deep-space vessels. None of it was encouraging. Some of it was frightening. Not only did the little creepy-crawlies
reproduce rapidly away from normal planetary constraints, but several varieties consumed oxygen.
A shudder ran through Jessamyn. She calmed herself by reasoning that the ship had enough oxygen for five passengers. But she
also took a reading to find out what the oh-two levels were like.
“Well, that’s a relief,” she muttered, seeing a nice distribution of the nitrogen, oxygen, and trace element gasses she needed in
order to continue in the land of the living.
Four hours later, however, the ops panel returned disappointing readings: the antiseptic scrub had done almost nothing to combat
the problem of contamination in the air filter. A new round of coughing shuddered through her. Resolving to spend as little time as
possible upon the bridge, where her throat tickled worst, she strode back down the hall to the ob-deck to consider her options.
The orchid upon the floor looked forlorn. She could see clearly where the black spot had enlarged. A closer examination revealed
that two other parts of Crusty’s beloved plant had small black spots. As she gazed in grim contemplation, a petal drooped and fell
away to the floor, joining one which had fallen earlier. Jessamyn looked away.
What were her options? She could run another antiseptic scrub. She could clean up the growths that she could see. She could look
through the herb-sims for something to keep her lungs healthy. And she could pray the contaminating species didn’t need much
oxygen.
Not being made for inaction, Jessamyn commenced project Clean The Galleon. She ran another antiseptic wash and scheduled
two more during her intended sleep cycle. She scrubbed and scraped and scoured. And, on the chance it would have the opposite
effect of talking to the orchid, Jessamyn hurled invectives at every visible microbe she saw.
All of which meant her throat was very sore indeed come bedtime. She drank two water rations and then downed a few more
without counting, justifying her behavior with the fact that she had five times as much water as one person needed aboard the ship.
Either the water or the herb-sims calmed her throat enough so that she could fall asleep.
After a twelve-hours’ slumber, she returned to the helm, which she now recognized had a subtly malodorous scent. She examined
the data from the filter scrubs she’d ordered the day before.
“How’s that even possible?” she muttered. The number of contaminated areas had grown instead of shrinking. “Where’s Crusty
when I need him?” she asked aloud.
This was a situation she did not know how to handle. What if the antiseptic washes were making a cozier environment for the
microbial infestations? She simply didn’t know what she was doing. She needed Crusty. Or her mom. Her mom would have known
how to treat microbial infestation. Jessamyn determined to take a step she’d vowed she wouldn’t.
Sliding into her brother’s comm station, Jessamyn placed a call home.
It took several minutes for the “incoming call blocked by order of MCC” message to be returned to the Galleon. Jessamyn stared at
the message in disbelief. She made a second attempt. And a third. And a fourth. But the message came back the same each time.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said aloud.
She decided to give Planetary Ag a try. There had to be someone there who would be willing to speak with her. But she received
the same message in response to her attempt to raise someone in her mother’s department.
Jessamyn felt angry and betrayed. Outrage and self-pity battled inside her, with outrage coming out the winner.
“Fine,” she said at last. “MCC it is, then.”
She rubbed her hands against her thighs as she decided what angle to take. Outrage would probably not get her very far. She’d
stolen the Red Galleon. So, instead of sending a message that encapsulated her indignation, she chose the form of communication
she’d used with MCAB as a pilot-in-training. Language that was calm. Cool. Logical. She felt empowered as she utilized the
familiar phrases.
“MCC, this is Mars Class Planetary Spacecraft Red Galleon, Pilot Jessamyn Jaarda at the helm requesting advice on a life-
threatening microbial overgrowth aboard this vessel. Over.”
She waited for the message to reach Mars. Counted down the minutes that would bring a response.
The ship’s voice synthesizer spoke the words that appeared in written form upon her screen: “Rogue Vessel, this is Mars Colonial
Command. We do not communicate with deserters. Any further attempts at communication will be blocked. Mars Colonial
Command out.”
At this point, all her intentions to play nice evaporated. She gathered all of her anger—at her situation, at Marsians who had
intended deadly harm to Mars, at the Terran satellite makers, at Lucca Brezhnaya and Red Squadron forces, and at the microbial
overgrowth on her ship—and she stuffed every blessed bit of that fury into a three-wafer-pages response.
But as she read through her response prior to sending it, she realized that the missive indicted Mei Lo and Crusty as party to the
theft of the Galleon. She couldn’t send the communiqué as it stood. The writing of it had, however, dulled her anger, leaving in its
wake her truer, deeper emotions.
What she really wanted was for someone to tell her that everything was going to be okay—that she wasn’t alone. But no one could
do that. Jessamyn was really and truly by herself. Sending a letter to MCC—whether angry or contrite—would not change the fact
that she was in this alone.
She instructed the comm panel to delete her message and strode down the hall to the observation deck. When she arrived inside
the room, darkened at the moment except for a small light directed upon Crusty’s orchid, she sank to the floor, feeling every one of
the nearly two hundred million kilometers between her and home for the first time since she’d departed Mars.
Woeful, Jessamyn stared at the small plant. As she watched, two last petals drooped and fell from the flower onto the ground. She
recoiled, feeling a fleeting panic. She’d killed her only companion. And before she could stop herself, Jess was sobbing over the
loss of the orchid which had connected her to Crusty and made her loneliness upon the Galleon more bearable.
She was alone. Abandoned. No one back home cared whether she lived or died.
A new round of tears began, more bitter than the first. The stars outside the observation deck blurred together, pulled apart, blurred
again. Whereas she had seen them before full of glory and wonder, now they appeared cold. Distant. Dispassionate. None of them
cared about the fate of a lone girl inside a tiny ship. Jessamyn crumpled, a small creature in a vast universe, and wept until her eyes
ran dry.
It was the astonishing experience of having run out of tears that roused Jessamyn. She’d read of such a thing in books, but had
never known anyone who could confirm it was possible. She supposed she must be very dehydrated, indeed. She felt worn, like a
pair of thermals run through the clean-mech too many times.
“The difference being that you have not yet outlived your usefulness,” she murmured aloud. “You’ve still got a shot at saving your
planet. Now get up and find solutions to your problems, Jaarda.”
Stooping, she gathered the fallen orchid petals and carried them to the rations room for disposal. She drank two water packets.
And she sat at the rations table to make a list of things to do and problems to solve. Fuel and Not crashing topped her list. Finding
Ethan, Pavel, Harpreet, and Kipper was somewhere in the middle, being less something upon which she could take immediate
action. Clean the filter and monitor oxygen levels were the last things on her list.
And that was when it occurred to her that there was something much more important than monitoring the percentage of oxygen in
the air. What she really needed to ask the ship was this: how much of the oxygen in the tanks had she and her trillions of
companions gone through so far? And was there enough remaining for the next seven days?