chapter 30
BETTER THAN THAT
Jessamyn frowned as she looked at the readings she’d pulled up at Crusty’s station. The ops screen told her the ship’s oxygen
tanks were critically low. Which meant she and her many hitchhiking companions would soon be low. The wee beasties, feverishly
hungry, had made a larger dent in the ship’s supplies of oh-two than four humans would have done in the same period of time. It was
unfathomable. But it appeared to be true. She would run out of breathable air tomorrow or early the following day.
It began to look as if she wouldn’t die in a magnificent collision with the blue planet after all. Somehow suffocation sounded a far
less inspiring way to go.
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.