Defying Mars (The Saving Mars Series) - By Cidney Swanson Page 0,72
beyond the travel ban of three hundred kilometers above Earth. Parts and equipment suppliers for such a ship were put on alert and monitored carefully.
How she wished she could send a massed military fleet to destroy the Martian hangers-on once and for all. That would foil Pavel and his new friends. She closed her eyes and reminded herself why she could not pursue this course of action.
Because it would be too large an undertaking to keep secret.
Because it would be too costly an undertaking to keep secret.
Because destroying humans on Mars would be political suicide.
Because someone on Mars might reveal what they knew about improprieties in the Terran Re-body Program.
The expenditure was the real problem. The original Mars Colony had come with an unbelievable price tag. The costs year after year had crippled her ability to run Earth the way it should have been run. She shuddered at the remembrance. And if the cost to establish the forlorn colony had been great, the cost to send an armada of destruction would be unimaginable. It would set her tidy little plans for Earth back by decades.
Of course, Mars had tellurium … but the cost of mining and returning it to Earth had not offset the cost of running the colony previously. Nor would it now. No, best to stay the course with regard to Mars and Marsians. Pretend they don’t exist until, some blessed day, they no longer did.
And that meant preventing anyone on Earth from reaching Mars. Perhaps Pavel would respond more favorably to a series of unfortunate events than to a single one. Everyone had a breaking point. She just needed to find Pavel’s.
Lucca sighed. All she asked was to rule Earth well. That’s what her people needed—what they wanted—a firm ruler. So why did a handful of people have to make her job so difficult?
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.