Defying Mars (The Saving Mars Series) - By Cidney Swanson Page 0,60

some very healthy bodies that day.

She called in the two members of Red Squadron who had failed her so miserably at New Timbuktu, glad she’d spared their lives after all.

“The pair of you are volunteering for a special mission. I’m in need of a few … committed inciters,” she said. The two officers glanced at one another as if to say, “Did she just say what I think she said?”

Lucca smiled. She adored the moment of puzzled confusion that always followed pronouncements such as this.

“Your target is the Hospital for Mental Illness and Recovering Minds in Hong Kong. I want something messy.” She paused, imagining Pavel’s reaction. “Very messy.”

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