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?
29
THE PERFECT ECOSYSTEM
Lucca had been very pleased at the rise in her popularity following the inciter attack upon the hospital in Hong Kong. As had happened following the previous “inciter” attacks, citizens clamored for better protection and praised Lucca’s government for its swift response. She smiled. The more she harmed them, the more they realized they needed her. It was the perfect ecosystem.
But the attack had not produced the actual result she’d been after. She’d meant it as a message, a punishment for Pavel. And he’d ignored it. Surely her nephew had received the message: If you continue to defy me, I know how to hurt you. It did not occur to her that he might be someplace where watching vid feeds wasn’t a part of his routine.
She had no further clues as to his whereabouts. She was no closer to locating and destroying his little band of would-be interstellar travelers. Around the clock, her surveillance teams searched to discover anything that looked like a craft intended for launch