Olivia grinned, but a second later the corners of her mouth turned down. “Norman got canned.”
Hannah nearly choked on her coffee. “When?”
“Around lunch.” Olivia leaned back against the wall by the kitchen doorway. “You were with the candidates. Didn’t want to bother you.”
“He’s gone already?”
“No severance, either, since his contract expired last month.”
Hannah took another gulp of coffee and tried to swallow down the lump in her throat with it. Norman had been one of only two people left in the props department, and the third employee let go within the last ten days. She forced herself not to think about what creeping layoffs might mean for her own job security. “Well, they’ve got to pay Gary’s rocket bill somehow.”
Olivia’s laugh was hollow. She lifted her mug in an apathetic toast. “Here’s to another all-nighter. May the DayLite gods have mercy on us poor, humble serfs.”
Hannah clinked her mug against Olivia’s and drank down another mouthful of eye-wateringly strong coffee. Gary’s laugh came again from somewhere down the hallway. Hannah didn’t try to hide her grimace.
Hannah leaned back in her chair and watched eighteen video windows—six feeds on each of her three screens—running simultaneously at double-speed. She blinked her heavy, dry eyes and tried to will away her fatigue. Two associate field producers had been let go in the two weeks leading up to the second round of Mars Ho, and the five who were left had to pick up the slack.
She squinted at the video of empty corridors in the Mars Ho Candidate Habitat. Colonist hopefuls jostled in and out of the kitchen on the sped-up video and looked like superheroes working out in the fitness room. She slurped down lukewarm instant noodles and emptied her tall thermos of extra-strength coffee while flagging four different clips of candidates already getting physical with each other on their first night inside the dome. Rufus Day was going to love this.
Hannah’s mobile chirped at her. She frowned at the display, then gulped when she saw that the message had come directly from Rufus Day himself.
Why would the CEO be calling her into his office, especially after 9 o’clock on a Sunday night?
The sinking feeling in Hannah’s stomach told her there could be only one reason for such a summons. She gathered up her noodles, thermos, and the canvas jacket hanging over the back of her chair and headed toward her locker in the hallway.
“Hey, Olivia?” Hannah called out to the only other person in the editing suite. The other AFPs—Chris, Chrissy, and Mark—had drawn 18-hour daylight shifts for the coming week and were probably banking as much sleep as possible before dawn. “Can you keep an eye on my feeds?”
Olivia looked up from her own array of monitors, the flickering light throwing her soft features into shadow and making her look almost sinister. “Sure.” She stood and stretched her arms over her head with a loud yawn, then followed Hannah into the hallway. “You got a hot date or something?”
Hannah grabbed the few personal items she kept in her locker—mostly extra clothes that were in dire need of laundering—and shoved them into the old leather rucksack she carried as a purse. “I’m pretty sure I’m about to get fired.”
Hovering in the doorway, Olivia shrugged, unfazed. Olivia and Hannah were friends on and off the set, but it seemed barely a day went by at The Ranch that someone didn’t get the boot. During the first season of Mars Ho, someone less experienced and less expensive was typically brought in to fill the newly vacant position. But the production had lost five production assistants and one of three show runners in the past month with no one coming in to cover the shortfall. Even Craft Services had been reduced to a wilted salad bar and paltry cold cuts station maintained by a pair of teenage interns who couldn’t legally work past 6 p.m.
“Good luck, I guess.” Olivia lifted a can of diet soda in mock salute. “Let me know?”
Hannah tapped her brow in reply. A few days earlier, they’d spent their one and only “coffee break”—twenty minutes out of an eighteen-hour shift—scarfing down leftover pizza and stale toaster pastries and speculating on whether it would be better to be snared in the current round of layoffs, or to keep their shitty contracts on what was supposed to be the world’s most-watched reality TV program. There hadn’t been a clear verdict.
It wasn’t a long walk between the production suite and Rufus Day’s executive office—just far enough for Hannah to slurp down the rest of her ramen. She passed a dozen empty offices downstairs before climbing to Rufus Day’s domain on the second floor. She dropped the empty noodle cup in a trash can by Rufus’s secretary’s desk, which was curiously unoccupied. Even late on a Sunday night, if Rufus was in the office, his support staff was generally nearby as well—and Kirk, the secretary, rarely left his post before Rufus departed the executive suite for his palatial apartment at The Ranch.
But Kirk’s computer was dark, and the overhead lights were off. Just beyond Kirk’s unmanned desk, Rufus’s door stood ajar and spilled light into the waiting area.
“Hello?” Hannah thought back on old episodes of Executive Exterminations, where each week some big boss was discovered brutally murdered in his office and the unlucky employee who found him was always the first suspect.
She shifted the weight of her bag on her shoulder. “Mr. Day?”
“Hannah?” From deep within the shady office, Rufus’s voice was surprisingly bright. “Come on in, Hannah!”
She dropped her bag on an upholstered chair near Kirk’s station, then stepped slowly inside to find Rufus sitting behind his massive mahogany desk with his back to the door.
The only light in the room came from a floor lamp in the lounge area of Rufus’s spacious office. Everything else, from the thick carpeting to the abstract art on the walls, was in deep shadow. Hannah watched his reflection in the wall-to-wall window behind his desk, his ghostly frown marring an otherwise breathtaking panorama of the Arizona desert at night.
She wondered if her boss, one of the remaining Mars Ho show runners, knew that she’d been called in by the big man himself. Assuming her boss still had his own job.
Hannah stopped in the center of the room and stood facing the desk. When Rufus didn’t turn around, she forced a cough. Still no response.
“So, all of the candidates got into the dome all right. No issues.” She paused. “Some of them are even getting a little randy on the first night. Some great footage, I think.”
“Good. That’s fine.” Rufus spun his chair around to face her. He looked up at her for a long moment, seeming to study the features of her face and the set of her shoulders. Hannah made a deliberate effort not to squirm.
As a woman in the entertainment industry, even behind the scenes, she’d had to get used to rampant ogling, sexist taunts, and worse. She’d been given the once-over by co-workers, superiors, and even interns dozens of times a day since she started in the business six years earlier. She’d pretended for so long that it didn’t bother her that now she almost believed it.
Rufus, though, was up to something different. She didn’t feel objectified by his silent scrutiny but sensed herself being measured by some other yardstick, and that made wary.
He leaned back in his wide leather chair and steepled his fingers. “Tell me, Miss Cuthbertson, have you any desire to go into space?”
Oh, crap. Hannah tried to smile and even offered a half-hearted laugh. One rumor circulating through The Ranch was that Mars Ho was so excessively over budget that Rufus would try to make up the shortfall by sending ordinary people up to one of the space stations and then broadcasting their space sickness and microgravity toilet misadventures—all to draw higher ratings and more advertising dollars.
Hannah was sure she would prefer to be fired.
“Um, no, not really.” She worked to keep her face serene. “Why?”
Rufus’s gaze hardened. Hannah had given the wrong answer. “Because you’re going.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Hannah replied before her brain coul
d override her mouth. She forced another smile and tried to backtrack. “I mean, I’ve got my hands full here with the new Mars Ho candidates, and we’re short-handed as it is—”
“Everything that needs to get done will get done,” Rufus replied sharply. Then his face lightened. “Have a seat.”
He motioned to a macaroon-shaped footed cushion in front of his desk. It looked more like a designer footstool than an actual chair, but she lowered herself onto the edge of the backless thing anyway—and sat ramrod straight when she saw how much higher Rufus was on his leather throne.
It was a cheesy power move, placing the visiting team so much lower than the guy with home court advantage. Hannah demurely crossed her ankles and folded her hands on her knees and hoped the pose didn’t look ridiculous on someone wearing faded blue jeans and a rumpled pullover that was two sizes too big.
“You’re familiar with Space Junkers,” Rufus said. It wasn’t a question.
Hannah nodded and wondered just what depth of loyalty he was looking for. Hannah had heard of the show. She knew that Rufus owned it. Beyond that, the details were murky.
Rufus reached for an open can of soda. “You haven’t seen it. That’s fine. Ratings indicate most everyone else hasn’t seen it, either.” He took a sip and when he grimaced, Hannah noticed that the can was the wrong color—it was some off-brand, not the high-end Gold Bear Cola he normally had flown in from the Yukon for his personal consumption. Money must be tighter than she’d realized.
He put the can down and turned away from it. “We want to change that. We’re sending the Face of Space into orbit—”
Hannah couldn’t help her snort when she heard Gary Nelson’s ridiculous monicker on the media mogul’s lips. Rufus indulged her with a good-natured smirk.
Then he added, “We want you to go with him.”
Hannah gripped the edge of the upholstered seat to keep herself from sliding to the floor. “No. No, I can’t.”
Rufus’s grin widened. “You’re heading up, with Niffenegger. It’s been decided.”
Hannah ignored his use of Gary Nelson’s real last name. “But I get queasy on elevators.”
“We’d thought the recent . . . excitement surrounding the first Mars colony launch would have spurred interest in the Space Junkers show, especially since . . . Well.”
“Since it was the junkers who caused the damage to ISS-5 to begin with.”
It hadn’t taken long for NASA, ESA, and the UN Space Corps to piece together what had happened in orbit just after the first team of Mars colonists reached the space station. A crew of overeager junkers had lost track of some of debris while they were salvaging a dead satellite in a decaying orbit. As a result, sections of ISS-5 had been damaged and even punctured. One of the space station astronauts might have died, too, if not for Mars Ho superheroes Mark Lauren and Lori Ridgway pulling out the stops to save the day—on live TV. It had been a ratings bonanza.
But when the truth came out, the fact that the culpable salvagers hadn’t been under contract to DayLite Syndicate or its Space Junkers show was irrelevant. Almost nobody on Earth wanted to watch a program glorifying the mercenary space-riggers who had nearly stopped the Mars Colony Program in its tracks. “Space Pirates” was what most people called the show now, and not in a favorable way.
Rufus dismissed her comment with a wave of his hand. “We were impressed by you last season. You supported the most popular characters through some challenging circumstances.”
Hannah instantly wanted to correct him—Lori and Mark and April and the others were people, not characters—but she was dumbstruck by the praise. She’d gone behind her boss’s back to help the candidates, and she’d gotten chewed out for it, a lot, and often in front of the rest of the crew. Probably got put on double-secret probation, too.
“But . . . ?” She drew out the syllable, encouraging Rufus to make his point.
He rested his elbows on the desk, his expression suddenly grim. “Your methods were less than ideal.” He let his words sink in, then quirked the corners of his mouth up into a tight smile. “So we’re giving you this opportunity to show us what you’re made of.”
“You mean, to make it up to you.”
Rufus gave a noncommittal shrug.
“Is this some kind of punishment?”
He paused, mouth open, before he broke into genuine laughter. “My dear, this is a promotion. Why on Earth would you think this was anything but?”
“Look, I can’t even go on a rollercoaster.” Hannah tried to smile away the panic she felt coming on. “I’m not kidding. The Six Flags near my house permanently banned me after my brother forced me on the Terror Typhoon. They had to shut down the ride and call in the fire department—”
“You’ll be fine.”
“If you make me do this, you’ll end up with really up close and personal footage of the first person to die on camera from excessive vomiting.”
“History is full of such anecdotes,” Rufus replied flatly. “Just make sure you get proper lighting.”
Hannah balled her hands into fists. How could she tell Rufus Day—her employer and the genius behind Mars Ho and Space Junkers and a half-dozen other space-themed reality shows still on the drawing board—that she was genuinely afraid of space?
She was enthusiastic about new tech and interplanetary exploration and even the new Mars colony, just like everyone else. But she had no desire to ever leave terra firma herself. And the story about the theme park was real. She even had to stay away from carousels. And Rufus Day wanted to send her into space?
Worse, he wanted to send her into orbit with the Face of Space.
Rufus spun his chair back around to face the dark desert night outside his window. “You’ll leave as soon as Niffenegger is done with his current round of maintenance.”
“His what?”
“It’s in his contract.” Rufus sighed, his reflection looking weary in the glass. “Botox injections and similar treatments, all manner of cosmetic dentistry. Whatever it takes to maintain that face.”
For all Hannah knew, DayLite Syndicate had sunk its capital into some new cosmetic technology to turn Gary Nelson permanently plastic—to preserve his perfect visage against the ravages of time so he could host every DayLite space program from now until the next millennium. Or, somebody on the payroll was meddling in some seriously powerful black magic.
Rufus flicked his hand in the air, and Hannah got the impression she had been dismissed. She stood and tugged at the hem of her pullover.
“And what if I don’t want to go?”
His reflection met her eye and smiled at her in the glass. “You have a contract, too, Miss Cuthbertson. You’ll go where I say, and when.” He returned his gaze to the nighttime landscape.
Hannah stood there for a moment longer, not sure if she should continue her protest. She had a dim recollection of a meeting with her father’s lawyer when she’d gotten the employment offer from DayLite. Just off the failed and miserably ill-conceived Clown Mechanics of Aberdeen, she was unemployed and broke and desperate to sign on with the fledgling company headed by Rufus Day, the wunderkind behind hard-hitting documentaries on water pollution, emerging technologies, and social injustices—products of conscience that made people think. She hadn’t listened when the lawyer cautioned her against the blatantly exploitive contract. Had he said she was signing her very life away? Only later did she learn that Rufus Day had devolved into a money-hungry cynic who’d sold out to corporate interests and was pushing reality television instead of righting wrongs.
And now Rufus Day was ordering her into orbit with Gary freaking Nelson.
If she quit, her career would be over, in any kind of media. She wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near the worst internet sitcom, much less join a documentary crew. Lenny, former Mars Ho line producer, quit a few months earlier and then came crawling back when he discovered just how deep his non-compete clause went. Now Rufus had Lenny on custodial duty, replacing toilet paper in the interns
’ toilets.
“I could make you fire me. I could set fire to the biodome, or something.” Hannah shoved her hands into her back pockets and waited.
“The terms of your contract would still apply, and you would have proven yourself a criminal and a liability in the process.”
Rufus turned his chair in a quarter-rotation, his profile sharp against the desert vista. “Don’t ruin your future over a single assignment.” He paused. “This should be fun. Do the work, and perhaps we’ll reexamine your contract when you’re back on the ground.”
Hannah stopped her smile before it started. She’d never heard of anyone being offered a chance to renegotiate a DayLite contract. This Space Junkers assignment must be more important than she realized. She gave Rufus a curt nod, which she was pretty sure he didn’t see, then turned on her heel and headed toward the door.
“One more thing.”
Hannah turned back and found Rufus facing her as he rose to his feet.
“We’re working a new angle for Niffenegger.” Rufus smirked and looked away, reliving a private joke or machination that he didn’t bother to share. “We need a villain, and he just might fit the bill.”
Hannah frowned. She had no love for Gary Nelson, but she wasn’t a fan of the manipulation and forced drama of reality programming, playing on the pain and insecurities of real people in the name of entertainment. Her resistance was precisely what had gotten her in trouble during the first round of Mars Ho, when she’d allied herself with the contestants over the production company.
“I don’t like the idea of making a villain out of anybody,” she said. “Even him. Even under the circumstances.”
Rufus met her eye. “Explain.”
Hannah took a breath and dropped her shoulders. She still wasn’t sold on the whole going-into-space thing. And now, precisely how should she tell the head honcho that his show pig was very likely an actual pig?
His smile widened. “That awful tape of Niffenegger and all the offensive, misogynistic comments?”
Hannah nodded.
Rufus rested his weight on his hands on top of the desk. “Terrible, terrible stuff. Naturally, it’s been deleted. If you’ve not heard it, consider it a blessing.” He paused. “As I mentioned, Niffenegger is also under contract.”
Lovers and Lunatics (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 2) Page 2