“Okay,” Russ monotoned and stepped forward. “Only one rose left.” It came out as one word, onlyoneroseleft, so Margo took a moment to decode it. Russ stepped back.
Margo realized only she and Misty remained rose free. Misty grabbed her hand and squeezed tightly. Margo would have patted her in reassurance because she knew Misty was staying, but she tried to stay in character and look worried.
“This has been such a hard choice,” Chad said.
What a crock. We both know I’m first off. Margo tried to stop thinking so her face wouldn’t get her in trouble with Lynette.
“It’s so hard, since we’ve only had a short time together, but I really feel like I had an instant connection with one of you.” Chad stared at them soulfully.
Straight at Margo. A spark of worry filled her.
He’s just trying to make me feel better because I’m getting kicked off.
“But, Margo, I really want to get to know you better.”
“What? No!” three people gasped.
Misty turned to her, flinging the hand away she’d gripped so hard. “You don’t even want to be here,” she accused, large tears gathering in her eyes.
“Misty, I’m so sorry,” Margo said, so befuddled, she hugged the other woman, and she wasn’t a hugger.
“Margo,” Lynette hissed.
Margo turned and Lynette pointed to Chad meaningfully.
Oh my God, Margo thought. She wasn’t kicked off. They’d promised her. Promised!
The other girls helped her off the riser and she hobbled the few feet to Chad.
“Margo,” he said, his face so sincere, she almost thought he wasn’t acting. “Will you accept this rose?”
For a moment, time stood still as a battle took place in Margo’s brain. From the sidelines, Lynette waved and gestured, bouncing up and down on the balls of her toes, pointing at the rose and then making throat slashing motions.
My rover. If I say no, they won’t let me test it. She knew Lynette wouldn’t let her even see her vehicle if she messed up this filming.
But dang it, she wanted to say no. So. Badly.
She couldn’t believe the lengths she had to go to for science.
All her earlier bravado fell away, and working harder than she’d ever worked in her life, Margo looked deep into Chad’s sincere eyes and said, “Yes.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Margo stood with Chad, Lynette and Russ in the lab. The rose ceremony had stopped when Lynette yanked them all back here.
“Chad, we talked about this,” Lynette snarled.
“Yeah, well, Hank told me I had complete autonomy on who I picked in this process,” Chad snarled back.
Margo blinked out of her brain freeze and really looked at Chad. Hands on his hips, his body a stiff, angry line, Chad wasn’t backing down to Lynette. Whoa.
“You do, except for Margo. She is a stand in for the real Margo who couldn’t come. You agreed to this back on Earth.”
“Complete autonomy means I can pick who I want,” Chad informed her. “Even if it’s her.”
“Wait,” Margo interrupted. “Are you picking me just because Lynette told you not to?” She turned on Lynette. “Because if so, that’s crap. We had a deal.”
“Zip it, Margo,” Lynette said, not bothering to look in her direction. “Chad, I know what Hank told you, but Margo isn’t really Margo.”
Margo would have laughed if she wasn’t so pissed. Staying in the game meant that she had to do all the annoying things the contestants had to do. Which was a ton. The filming schedule alone left little time for sleep and equated to working their asses off.
When Hank had convinced her to come, she’d had no idea that she’d have to do so much, including moving furniture and boxes, setting up for shoots, and generally doing what a huge support staff must have done in the past. Just putting makeup on and doing hair took hours and was much more stressful than she’d ever imagined. “My rover—”
“You’ll have plenty of time,” Lynette cut her off, waving at her as if she were a fly. “Chad is going to vote you off tomorrow night.”
“I will keep her if I want to.” Chad’s voice clearly said he would never let Margo go. Just to be a dick and screw Lynette.
“Wait a minute, you can’t keep me just to spite Lynette. I made a deal to fill in that didn’t include stuffing me into these ridiculous outfits and forcing me to be sickly sweet to everyone for longer than the first rose ceremony.”
Chad turned to her, a mean light gleaming in his gaze. “Oh, yes I can.”
Margo threw up her hands and stomped in a small circle to blow off some steam, although it wasn’t very satisfying in the gold heels she wore, which were killing her. She longed for her tennis shoes and her lab coat. “I am testing my rover, people, for the record,” she declared. When Hank showed up, she was going to kill him for doing this to her. She’d known this would all go horribly wrong. Known it!
She crossed the room to peer out the small window in the door, wondering which of the small outside buildings they’d stashed her rover in. Maybe she could sneak out somehow.
“Chad, don’t be silly,” Lynette said, her tone patient, as if she spoke to a child. “This is your chance to find real love. Do you really want to exclude a real contender to get back at me for locking you in your room all day yesterday?”
In the small window, a man’s face suddenly appeared, distorted through his grey moonsuit helmet.
Margo jumped back, her gaze locking with his panic-filled eyes.
“Help,” he mouthed.
“Oh my God.” She raced to punch the release button to let him in.
The man fell forward without trying to catch his balance, his hands feebly scrambling on the floor.
Russ appeared beside her and helped her turn him over. “What’s wrong with him?”
They dragged the man fully into the room so the doors could close.
The man floundered at the catches at his neck, his hands scrambling as he struggled, the skin of his lips an angry blue.
She pushed his hands away and flipped the latches, then wrestled off his helmet.
Jack Boyle curled onto his side, rasping in big gulps of air. He was older than her, thirty-five she knew, but he looked ancient, a bluish tint surrounding his lips and a rough day’s growth of beard on his face.
She pointed to the screen attached to his wrist. “He was out of oxygen,” she said to the group.
Chad and Lynette stood frozen beside her.
“We’re in trouble,” Jack gasped out.
“What kind of trouble?” she asked, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. Jack Boyle wouldn’t panic. Whatever was happening had to be bad.
“The dying kind,” he said. “You need to evacuate immediately.”
Jack blinked, wondering if he was hallucinating from lack of oxygen.
The blonde woman barely dressed in a gold floor-length gown propped her hands on her hips. “I’m not going anywhere without running my tests,” she snarled.
Jack shook his head, trying to make some sense of the words. All he could think about was the fact that the same people who took out his rover—he’d begun to think it was the Russians because the Chinese wouldn’t be so obvious—could be on their way to Station 7. And that meant he had to get these people out of here, pronto, before he ended up with a bunch of dead debutantes on his hands.
He tried to wrap his mind around the odd group staring down at him. The two men were polar opposites. One looked like he stepped out of an ad for six-figure watches, the other a poster child for aging video gamers everywhere. The two women weren’t very similar either, but he figured the one in the full-length dress had to be a contestant on the idiotic show they were filming. What was all this about tests?
“Are you hard of hearing? I said you need to evacuate. Someone vaporized my rover and they may be heading here.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” She turned to the other women, dismissing him. “Lynette, Chad can k
eep me in the game as long as he wants, but I’m testing my rover. Period.”
“No one is leaving,” Lynette answered, a finality in her words that meant she was the one in charge.
Despite being completely exhausted from hours traveling on little oxygen, Jack sat up. “Are you people deaf? Someone blew up my vehicle and left me hiking six hours back to the station. By all rights, I should have died. Hell, I almost did. You need to get out of here before they attack the station.”
“Someone who?” Goldie asked, leaning down to catch his shoulder when he started to tip backwards.
He shooed her away. “I don’t know. Maybe the Russians.”
Goldie’s blond hair swept into a twist on her head and her face had the delicate, carefully bred features of a super model. But she wasn’t acting like a super model. She was acting like a large pain in his ass.
“Or possibly the Chinese, although it seems too aggressive for them,” he conceded. “The craft wasn’t like anything I’ve seen before,” he said, staggering to his feet and over to the console. “The U.S. Government recently warned that both were moving to establish a presence on Mars for their countries, but I’d thought they were just setting up their own research stations. More information was supposed to be forthcoming but I guess things were put in play sooner than they’d thought.”
He typed: Rover blown up by hostile forces in an unknown aircraft with no markings. Evacuating cast of show immediately.
He sent the message to his NASA contact.
Lynette smacked her clipboard onto the lab table. “Listen, Boyle, you promised us a place to film and we paid you good money up front to get one.”
“I think any lawyer on Earth would agree I can’t control the Russians attacking the planet.”
“You’re pulling the Act of God clause?” Lynette’s voice was incredulous, but he didn’t try to soothe her.
“You bet I am. I’m not having your deaths on my hands.” His plan was simple. Get rid of the cast and stay here to defend his station.
“I’m not leaving,” Goldie said again.
“No one is leaving,” Lynette said, clearly under the impression she was still in charge.
“All of you are getting out of here as fast as we can load up that rocket out there. I’m not going to have a bunch of dead civilians on my hands.” He had thought about it the whole walk home. If he made it here alive and the station hadn’t been attacked yet, he’d bundle the cast up and send them home. Since it was an act of God, he would be free of them and could keep the money.
Then he’d find whoever was out there and lay some traps. He’d blow up his station before he’d let it fall into anyone else’s hands. For the first time since he left the army, Jack had the burn to fight.
But first, he had to document what was happening so those on Earth could avenge him if he wasn’t victorious.
“No one is leaving because no one can leave,” Lynette said.
“What?” Jack froze, his hands mid-motion as he typed another message.
“We didn’t bring enough fuel for a return trip.”
“What?” Jack asked again, this time louder, because he couldn’t believe his ears.
“To get all the items here we needed for filming, we had to reduce the fuel on board down to nothing. We barely had enough to make it up here.”
He couldn’t believe it. “You did what?” he had to ask again. These people were driving him to reiterate.
Lynette shrugged.
Jack swung past her. “Where is that idiot Hank Carson?”
“Um, he had to stay back, too,” Lynette said.
“Hank’s not an idiot,” Goldie said, so huffily that Jack figured Hank must be her boyfriend.
“He didn’t come to his own TV show? What kind of operation are you people running here?” He waved off the two women’s answers. “It doesn’t matter and frankly, I don’t care,” he said, trying to think.
The calendar on the wall said it was the beginning of the month. Then it came to him. Walter Haxley might have a supply shuttle coming to Station 5.
For a second, Jack didn’t want to ask Haxley for help. If it had only been to save his own life, he’d die before he begged Haxley for a favor. They’d been rivals all of Jack’s career. But he had a bunch of civilians here, trapped, and he had to be a bigger person if he was going to save them.
He brought up the communications unit and paused again, because he really didn’t want to call Haxley. They’d hated each other since Jack had won a grant right from under Walter’s nose and he’d retaliated by calling Jack a third-rate rockhound.
But Jack’s gut told him now was not the time to quibble over past slights. His gut told him whoever had blown up his rover was coming here next. In fact, he couldn’t believe they hadn’t already arrived.
He threw the switches and typed the commands.
His Spidey sense screamed at him to get them out while he still could. But where could they go? There wasn’t any place to hide.
When he made it to the lab, he should have been home free, but his hands hadn’t been working right when he’d punched the code into the door and he’d errored out. He suspected he’d been fat fingering his code in the haze of hypoxia. Maybe he had been hallucinating and never actually hit any numbers at all. He’d looked through the small window to see an angel staring back at him. She’d obviously had enough sense to punch the button to let him in, although he wasn’t sure how intelligent she was now that he’d met her.
He was lucky he hadn’t died a single step from his lab.
Lynette pushed past Goldie, trying to take back command. “If we’re in trouble, what are you going to do about it?”
“Everyone quiet,” Jack barked, sick of the harping.
He connected to the satellite. A steady ping began, lasting for over ten minutes. Goldie came closer and scanned the control panel, as if it made sense to her. Which was silly, since Jack figured anyone who went on these shows had to be a moron.
Finally, after what seemed like a short lifetime, Haxley answered. Only it wasn’t the usual, arrogant face Jack was used to. Walter’s face was covered with black smudges and his eyes were huge and filled with fear. “Jack! Jack! You called.”
“Yeah,” Jack said, a bad feeling creeping up his spine as he realized that they—whoever “they” were—weren’t here yet because they were taking care of Station 5 first.
“Our long-range transmissions are disabled. I didn’t even think to try to contact you. We’d just assumed the feed had been cut.” Haxley looked behind him at someone off screen, his actions nervous and jittery. “Our rovers were all destroyed by long-range missiles. My tech guy died in the electrical shed trying to patch through to Earth. It’s just Ellen and me left.”
Oh shit. We’re all going to die.
Jack took a deep calming breath, stuffing down the uncharacteristic punch of panic. No, no we aren’t. I’ve got this. “Do you know who’s behind the attacks?” Jack asked, although did it matter? Russia or China, they were still dead if they didn’t get outside help. Know your enemy is a motto for a reason. You can’t fight what you don’t understand.
“No. We haven’t even laid eyes on any of them, but this must have been what the CIA warned us about last month.”
“The CIA said there were plans for China and Russia to land teams here, not for them to sabotage our stations.”
Haxley shrugged off his point. “It looks like they want to take the buildings intact and they’re going to starve us out.”
They were going to be under siege. And he had fifteen new mouths to feed. Shit. “Do you have a supply shuttle coming any time soon?”
“No. It won’t be here for two weeks.”
Two weeks would be too long. “My shuttle should come in the next couple days, I’ll let them know your situation. I’ve sent a message, but you know how that goes out here.” Communication all depended on not running into any sun spots and atmospheric storms.
Haxley’s gaze sharpened.
“When exactly is your shuttle coming?”
“Sometime this week,” Jack hedged, not sure why he was reluctant to say, but following his gut. If the Russians had tapped into their communications, then they would know too. “Listen, Walter, I have to go,” he said, cutting their conversation off, because he still had a big problem on his hands he had to solve.
“Was that your idea of help?” Lynette said, her voice filled with anxiety.
“Would it make more sense to combine forces, invite him here to hunker down with us?” Goldie asked.
The thought of Haxley at Jack’s station made his skin crawl. “It makes more sense to force the opposition to spread out to keep us both locked down.”
Lynette stomped closer. “Why don’t you call someone on Earth?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, there are no phones. AT&T hasn’t set up shop here. I’m sending messages now.” Technically, he could call if the rotation of the planet was in the right alignment. Usually, the lag was so extreme it wasn’t worth trying to have a conversation. It took four to twenty-four minutes for a message to reach Earth from Mars, then the same amount of time to come back.
Lynette’s mouth opened and closed a few times as she started to argue with him, but the reality of their situation must have sunk in. “Oh my God, we’re going to die,” she moaned.
Jack tried to tune her out. He needed a new plan. Quickly, he typed another message to Earth. If they were cutting communications, then he might only have a small amount of time to get more messages out. It was also possible that his rover had just gotten caught up in an attack on Haxley’s Station, although from the location he’d been in, that seemed unlikely. He was so far north from Station 5, he shouldn’t have attracted notice.
Behind him, the heavy guy with a ponytail and goatee said, “I knew I shouldn’t have signed up for this shit. Hank always talks me in to joining his crews, but I had a feeling Mars was going to be a bust.”
“Don’t panic,” Goldie said, her voice firm and in control. “There is always a solution. Jack Boyle will get us out of here.”
Bachelor on Mars Page 5