Time to Breathe

"I think that should do it," Patel informed Jones as he clung to the hand-hold next to the viewport.

"Standing by, Commander."

"Executing maneuver." Patel pressed the enter key and then pushed towards Jones at the opposite end of the cabin. There was a slight tremble in the hull as the small rocket charges ejected the parachutes into vacuum. He reached out a hand for hers and she caught it. She didn't release it as they waited breathlessly, watching the star field rotate slowly past them.

"There it is!" Patel cheered as the tangle of orange and white fabric drifted into view. "I see it! I see the beacon!"

The amber light flashed, illuminating the parachute in a three burst sequence repeating every five seconds. In her relief, Patel hugged Jones, and he wrapped his arms around her and hugged her back. It was a strange sensation, holding a superior officer, a woman, like this. Jones enjoyed it a bit more than he should have, but if he was slower to release the Commander than he should have been, she didn't seem to notice.

"Finally some good news!" Patel smiled, sniffing back tears. "We might just be okay, Jones."

"Yes ma'am, just you like you said we would. So... what now?"

"Just in case it's only the receiver that's failed, I'm going to broadcast a sit-rep to anyone who might be listening," Patel replied, disentangling herself from the young Fireman. "I want them to know that we can't muster with the other pods. You lock the chairs against the walls. Let's open up some space in here. Then take an inventory of our supplies. If we're missing anything vital, I'd like to know sooner rather than later"

"Yes ma'am."

With the acceleration chairs turned to face each other in two long rows instead of facing forward, the pod felt much less claustrophobic. It only took a couple of minutes.

As Jones ticked off items in the manual's inventory list, he knew this was just busy-work—the kind of thing he used to resent in high school. But back in high school, there was always something he would have rather been doing. Here, the only option was to sit and to wait, so he was happy to have the busy work.

Behind him, Patel typed up a report and then read it aloud for the audio transmission.

"This is Lieutenant Commander Tamana Patel aboard Clark Pod Eight, requesting priority rescue," she announced to the void. The commander succinctly summarized their plight.

The Lewis—or whichever vessel was tasked with their rescue—would need to plot an intercept course to pick up all of the surviving escape pods. Ideally, all of the pods would maneuver close together, but that was impossible for Jones and Patel. Hopefully, their oxygen situation would give them priority over the others, but if another pod was in similar circumstances, the Lewis might opt to sacrifice two in order to save many more.

That decision was out of their hands.

As Jones worked, his mind wandered. "If spaceship A accelerates from rest at one centimeter per second squared," he thought to himself, "and spaceship B travels at a steady velocity of one kilometer per second directly away from spaceship A, given that the starting distance between the two ships is one hundred thousand kilometers, how long would it take spaceship A to intercept spaceship B?"

Word problems were always his favorite. Jones tried to work through the equations in his head, but finally had to admit defeat. Forgetting the half-completed inventory, he strapped himself into one of the cabin's eight chairs, plucked the mechanical pencil from the sleeve pocket of his uniform shirt, and started to jot down equations on the blank pages left at the back of the manual.

Patel filed the situation report as a log entry, then double checked both the audio and data buffers. Still no response from Earth after nearly an hour.

She wasn't sure what Jones was up to, but there wasn't much else to do, so she strapped into a chair directly across from him and watched him scribble as the expression on his face shifted from intense concentration, to relief, to frustration and despondency.

"Shit!" Jones finally exploded, flinging the manual away, startling Patel. He buried his face in his hands and tried to regain his composure.

"What is it, Jones?"

"Lewis can overtake us in about seventy-six hours," he sighed, not looking up.

"That's a six hour window for our O2 supply. That's encouraging," Patel replied. From his demeanor, she knew there was a 'but' coming.

"That's what I thought too." Jones looked across at her, his face ashen. "Until I realized they'd be moving at over twenty-three hundred meters per second when they got here. We're only moving at a thousand, tops. They need time to slow down and match our velocity when they catch us. Do you know the maximum relative speed for the pod to dock with Lewis?"

"Not off hand I don't, no." Patel admitted anxiously. She was certain it was significantly less than thirteen hundred meters per second.

"Me neither... I assumed zero. It made the math easier, and it's probably close enough to zero... Like ten or fifteen maybe."

"And?" Patel prompted. Jones was stalling, reluctant to say the words out loud.

"...Over ninety-five hours."

"Oh God..." Patel closed her eyes against the tears and stifled a sob.

"Yeah... "

They were both quiet for a long minute.

Patel had never envied the line officers in the chain of command. They carried the weight of responsibility even in circumstances they couldn't prepare for. In the infirmary, she had the training and experience to make every possible life-or-death decision. Even then, it was the doctors who were ultimately responsible, not her.

Being a head nurse was the best of both worlds. She had all of the privileges and perks of rank, and none of the heaviest responsibilities. It had always suited her just fine. But now her own life and that of another rested on her alone. She didn't think she was up to it.

"Hypoxia is not a bad way to die," Patel broke the silence, as much to reassure herself as Jones.

"Oh good. I was afraid we'd suffocate."

"No, no," she assured him, "when the oxygen runs out, there's still plenty of nitrogen in the air to breathe. Your lungs won't know the difference. As the O2 concentration drops below twenty percent, we'll start to become lethargic. Some people become giddy, others irritable. You might get a headache. We'll succumb to exhaustion and fall asleep when the oxygen gets down to around ten percent. If it drops to five percent... we just won't wake up again."

"...I guess that's not so bad..."

It was hard for Jones to grasp the idea that he was going to die—the concept of no longer existing. He was nineteen years old, and assumed he'd live that life span five or six more times. Practically forever. He couldn't really die could he? Had to be some kind of mistake.

"I had to make a lot of assumptions," Jones finally added just to fill the quiet Patel had left. "Lewis might be closer than a hundred thousand kilometers. We might actually be headed towards them instead of away... It's not hopeless... But I also didn't include any time to maneuver into a braking vector... That's probably negligible... But they may have to navigate around whatever it was that killed Clark." He was babbling nervously now, thinking out loud, trying to distract himself.

Patel understood the need for assumptions. Jones' estimate was likely the most accurate they could get, given their situation. Their oxygen was likely to run out fourteen hours before help could reach them. Plus or minus a few hours wasn't going to make any difference.

"I can double check my math... Run the equations on the computer instead of--"

"No," the Commander interrupted, pushing herself out of her chair. There was no point in stalling. The sooner they came up with a solution, the better. And the solution was her responsibility.

"Ninety-six hours is a good target number to work with. We need to stretch our remaining oxygen as far as it will go. On Clark, they recycle carbon dioxide back into oxygen, right? Can we do that here?"

"Mmm..." Jones winced. He never liked saying 'no' to an officer. "I'm not an ELS rating ma'am, but I know that takes a lot of energy and a lot of heat. Even if the batteries have enough juice, we'd probably cook ourselves in the process."

Jones had considered going into Environmental Life Support as his "A" school after basic. But ELS techs—jokingly referred to as 'Air Fresheners'— were needed on elevators and orbital stations and even training centers on Earth. He'd opted for Plasma Tech because only the big, interplanetary ships used plasma ion thrusters. The 'Spark Herder' rating practically guaranteed travel to Mars and Jupiter—and someday beyond.

Right now he was wishing he'd gone ELS after all. But he had another idea.

"The cabin pressure is set to one atmosphere. That's sea level, right? What if we set it to Denver air pressure? Or Bogota or Tibet?"

"It wouldn't do any good," Patel answered, nervously pushing herself from one side of the cabin to the other, pacing in a way. "Our bodies would still want the same amount of oxygen, and we'd just breathe harder and faster to get it."

"Oh."

"If we had time to acclimate it might help, but ninety-six hours isn't really enough... Now what we might do is reduce the oxygen saturation from a standard twenty-one percent of the air to twenty or nineteen. If we increase the nitrogen to maintain the same air pressure, our lungs won't know the difference, so we won't breath any differently."

Patel had begun her career as a flight nurse. Understanding the effects of air pressure and oxygen saturation on a patient were almost second nature. She knew that breathing hypoxic air for that long had side-effects, but they were less severe than death, so she didn't see a need to burden Jones with details.

"If we reduce our intake from five hundred and fifty liters per day to..." Patel tried to make the numbers line up in her brain, but Jones got there first.

"Four ninety at nineteen percent, ma'am... That gets us to..." Jones took a moment to work it through, "About ninety hours."

"Is that all?" Patel was hoping the risk would have a better payoff.

"We'd need to get down to... gimme a second..." Jones closed his eyes to concentrate.

"You know you have a pencil and paper right there, right?" Patel quipped. "You don't have to show off for me."

Jones blushed, "Sorry, ma'am." He scribbled on the back of the manual for a moment.

"Eighteen percent would be cutting it real close... about ninety-five and half. Seventeen percent would get us to a hundred and one hours before the O2 cylinder runs out."

Patel was uncomfortable with that number, but it still seemed preferable to death. There was equipment in the infirmary that she could use to easily adjust a patient's oxygen levels, so she started to root through sub menus in the computer looking for a similar interface.

After fifteen minutes she was forced to concede that there wasn't one.

The developers of the pod's software never anticipated a need for survivors to micromanage their atmosphere. Steering the pod out of danger and grouping with others for convenient rescue had been their top priorities. The only environmental control screen they had included was to adjust temperature, lighting, and ventilation. If necessary, the computer was still capable of adjusting the oxygen-to-nitrogen ratio through a command line call to the application program interface.

Jones scrutinized the API documentation in the manual looking for the proper command syntax. An Air Freshener would probably know it by heart. The closest example of an environmental command he could find was "env.setHeaterOutput{heater:1;percent:20;}".

"Is there any API documentation on the computer?"

"Just a digital copy of the printed manual."

"Dammit."

In desperation, Patel finally typed "env.setAtmosphere{gas:O2;percent:17;}" into the command line.

"Error: Unknown Command," displayed on the screen a moment later.

They took turns guessing randomly at a command and grew increasingly frustrated as the computer rebuked their efforts.

Patel capitulated first. She pushed away from the keyboard leaving Jones to try again, and nudged her way across the cabin following the manual that had drifted off. Catching the book in both hands, she screamed in frustration and whacked it against the side of a chair.

The violent action sent her spinning across the cabin, kicking and thrashing impotently.

"Stupid... fucking... un... docu... mented... piece of... fucking... shit!"

She hit her shoulder hard against the far side of the cabin, and bounced off. Jones caught her by the ankle before she could careen off into space again.

"Hey! Hey, Commander! Calm down..."

"Gaahhhhh!" Patel allowed herself one last outburst, kicking free of Jones grip, hurling the battered book away, and flailing in the air.

Tucking herself into a ball with her face in hands, she let herself cry. Any damage to her authority had already been done by that tantrum. Jones couldn't possibly think any less of her now.

He had turned back to stare blankly at the computer screen. Officers weren't supposed to lose it like that. And if they did, you were supposed to have a Chief who would take charge. Was he supposed to take charge now? That idea scared him more than dying of hypoxia.

"I'm sorry, Jones," she apologized at last, wiping her eyes on the back of her blood-stained sleeve and catching hold of a chair. "That was very unprofessional of me."

"S'awright, ma'am." He turned, relieved, and pulled himself into the chair next to her. "Are you going to be alright? We... we don't have to tell anybody about it."

"That's very kind of you... I'm sorry that I'm not the officer you need right now."

"It's not your fault ma'am. You were just following the doctor's orders. She could have sent a corpsman back to Engineering with me. Where would I be then?" he laughed nervously. "Trapped in here with a panicky medic no older than me... You keep your head when it counts ma'am. It's ok by me if you need to blow off some steam now and then."

"Thank you Jones... But you can't rely on me to get us out of this. I want your ideas if you have any, even if they're bad. We're in this together... and I need you to be strong when I can't, Ok?"

"Yes, ma'am... Um, maybe we're... maybe we're just too focused on a bad idea to see a better one. What if... What if instead of having the computer regulate the air, we bypass it and adjust the plumbing directly?"

"What do you suggest?"

"The oxygen cylinder has a manual valve on it," Jones gestured. "What if we just... turn it off for a while? We watch the readout on the screen, let the O2 drop to seventeen percent, and turn it back on. When it gets to back up to eighteen we turn it off again."

Patel considered the idea. In light of her behavior it was the least she could do. But finally she had to veto it. "Two symptoms of hypoxia, Jones—drowsiness and impaired judgement. We could both fall asleep without turning the oxygen back on. And even if we slept in shifts, and the other took a stimulant to stay awake, one of us might decide that it would be ok to let the O2 drop to sixteen percent, then fifteen, then just see how far it can go... Does that make sense?"

"They'd find our bodies with plenty of oxygen still in the tank," Jones realized. "Yeah, that would be embarrassing... What if we clamped down on the oxygen line from the tank to the ELS system? Just reduce the flow rate?"

"You can try it, but I don't think the flow of oxygen is constant. The ELS releases it as needed. The system was built to support eight people, so with just two of us, it won't have any trouble keeping up with our respiration, even at a reduced volume. The computer will probably just release O2 for longer periods to get up to the level it wants."

"Yeah, probably... What if we trick the O2 sensor into thinking there's more oxygen than there really is?"

"Hmmm... How would you do that?"

"...I don't know," Jones admitted. "Not without manually regulating it just like the valve."

They were both quiet for a minute.

"Alright," Patel finally sighed. "How about this? The human body uses less oxygen when it's asleep. There are sedatives in the medical kit, right?"

"Yes ma'am, five hundred tablets."

Far more than eight people would need for a week, Patel realized.

"Good. You're going to take a nap. I'm going to keep trying commands on the computer... but I'll be a little more scientific about it this time. When you wake up, you'll take over for me and I'll sleep. We'll take turns with one of us asleep at all times and the other working... Hopefully one of us will find the command to adjust the O2 ratio, but if not, the other won't be using as much oxygen."

Jones took the first sedative from the bottle. The storage pocket above his acceleration chair contained a comfort kit with a blanket, a drinking pouch, earplugs, a packet of hygiene wipes, and a book of crossword puzzles. He took off his work boots, pulled out the blanket for the farthest chair, wrapped himself in it, and strapped himself in.

"Commander?" he asked before the sedative kicked in, "How much less oxygen do we use when we sleep?"

"I don't know off hand, Jones," she admitted with a sigh. "Probably not enough."

As his eyelids grew heavy, Jones noted that the clock above the command console read three hours and thirteen minutes since the order to abandon ship.

***

The clock showed seven hours and two minutes when his eyes fluttered open again. He didn't remember dreaming.

"Morning," Patel called as Jones clicked the release on his harness. He pushed himself out of the chair towards the command console. It took him a moment to realize that the upholstery of the chair closest to the computer was covered with writing.

"I've been systematically going through every possible permutation of any API command that I can think of, trying each one with every combination of variables," the Commander explained. "I filled up the blank pages of the manual a while ago."

"No luck, I guess?"

"...No." Patel showed Jones her work and her system, the combinations she had already tried and the long list yet to try. He caught on quickly and suggested some alternatives that hadn't occurred to her.

Once Jones was confident to take over, Patel took a tablet from the bottle and washed it down with a swallow of water.

The pressure gauge on the oxygen cylinder showed 22.9 bar.

"So... a little over seventy-five hours left," Jones noted. There was a bit of improvement.

"Plenty of time to find that command," Patel assured him, handing him the pen.

"Oh, and it occurred to me that metabolism and cellular generation both require oxygen. So limit your food intake. One protein bar every twenty-four hours."

"Yes, ma'am," Jones grumbled. He'd woken up hungry.

"I know... I don't like it either."

While Jones leafed through her notes, Patel pulled her arms inside of her shirt and twisted around until she was able to unhook her bra. If these were her last hours, she was at least going to be comfortable, dammit. She pulled the useless garment out through her sleeve and stuffed it into a utility pocket next to the "bed" before wrapping herself in the blanket, buckling the harness, and closing her eyes.

"Jones?"

"Ma'am?"

"...I'm sorry," she confessed. "We should have ejected immediately instead of waiting for others... If I had been one second faster, we wouldn't be in this mess... It's my fault if you die."

"No ma'am," Jones assured her. "You ordered me into this pod. I wanted to keep going to the engineering pods. They would have been gone by the time I got there... It's your fault I'm still alive at all," he grinned.