Defying Mars (The Saving Mars Series) - By Cidney Swanson Page 0,73

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.

31

SEAT OF YOUR PANTS

Insufficient oxygen was different, according to the ship, from insufficient oxygen for human life. The Galleon was notifying her that the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen and other gasses was no longer optimal. But it wasn’t bad enough to kill her. Not yet. And putting on a suit now would mean she would run out of suit air at a time when the ship had no oxygen left. She shook her head. If she made it at all, it would be by the seat of her pants.

“Well there’s something you’re good at, Jaarda,” she said. “Flying by the seat of your pants.”

She turned from the ops panel to the navigation panel, scowling at the ship’s low fuel warning. It had been glowing steadily since her last course adjustment seven days ago. She needed fuel and she had no way to get it. It was the same as her oxygen problem. Except that with the oxygen problem, she’d found an answer. She hoped.

Was there some “elsewhere” on the ship she could find fuel?

“Come on, Jaarda,” she growled. “This is the kind of thing you’re good at.”

Jessamyn knew the location of the fuel containers upon her ship, understood how the cylinders delivered requested fuel to her aft or forward thrusters, to port or starboard rockets. Ethan had even shown her a non-standard procedure for delivering extra fuel to