Lovers and Lunatics (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 2)

by Jennifer Willis

  Hannah nodded again. She didn’t need Rufus to spell it out for her. It would cost DayLite—and Rufus personally—a pretty penny to break that particular contract. But as long as Gary kept showing up for work, Rufus was free to use or abuse him just about any way he pleased. Just as he was doing with the rest of his employees.

  Rufus’s face froze in a rictus grin, and it chilled her.

  “But you’re a professional, Hannah. You’ll do what needs to get done.” Rufus turned away from her to look out over the endless rocks and dry brush. “I wouldn’t want you to get distracted by that expertly polished exterior. Just remember that Niffenegger is a preening, sexist dickface, and you’ll do just fine.”

  2

  Gary gripped the armrest as the needle pricked his flesh and slid into his forehead. If he’d had any alert nerve endings left, he might even have grimaced. Instead, he groaned and tried to keep his body still. It wasn’t his favorite way to start the week, in spite of the hour.

  “Almost there.” The tech kept her intent focus on Gary’s brow. Judy, the tag on her white uniform shirt read. She was new but seemed to know what she was doing, even at three in the morning.

  “Hold . . . still . . .” She drew out each syllable as she pressed the syringe deeper and rooted around, depositing little squirts of toxin. Each one felt like a match strike beneath his skin. “Just a few more pricks now, and then we’re done.”

  Just a few more pricks—exactly like the midnight production meeting he’d left to keep this appointment. It had started off with talk of rockets and orbital rendezvous and flight suits and satellite retrievals—just the kind of stuff that got Gary’s blood pumping. But all of his questions had been referred to various distributed documents instead of entertained in open discussion, and the agenda soon turned to ratings, ratings, and more ratings. Every sentence was about market share or advertising returns or some other financial concern the DayLite hotshots liked to hash out, but which turned Gary cold. He’d sat in his assigned seat, doodling space planes on his napkin while Rufus and his immediate underlings took each other to task about pre-emption roadblocking over web-based superstations.

  Gary tried not to laugh. He didn’t care if not a single person watched his adventure in space—though that would be a lost educational opportunity. The only thing that mattered to him was that he was actually, finally going.

  Judy dug deeper with her syringe, injecting botulinum into every conceivable crease, and Gary was back to white knuckling the armrest.

  “All in pursuit of beauty.” Judy smiled as she withdrew her instrument of cosmetic torture, laid the spent syringe on the metal tray beside her, and picked up a fresh one.

  Gary smirked at the comment, though he wanted to groan again. He hated Pristine and every other brand of botulinum and dermal filler he’d had injected into his face. He hated the army of cosmetic consultants who were constantly at his elbow, poring over every nook and flattening every cranny and treating him like the commodity he’d unwittingly become.

  It had started simply enough, when he was the on-call meteorologist for a local station in Reno, filling in for audience favorite Karl Reese from time to time and getting sent out for the occasional meteorologist-on-the-scene segment when something of note happened in the desert, which was infrequent. Mostly he’d been responsible for studying the forecast models and the alerts that came in over the wire, writing Reese’s teleprompter text, and shooting a whole bunch of B-roll that never made it to air. It wasn’t a glamorous job, and it wasn’t remotely close to where he wanted to be. But it was a good, steady job, and that’s what he’d needed.

  Five years later, it was still what he needed. Even the Face of Space had commitments and responsibilities. Boyhood dreams of setting off on his own voyages of exploration and discovery had long since been put away.

  Rufus had, of course, rejected Gary’s plea to be included in the first Mars Colony group, with the rationale that he could report in-person from the Red Planet. But now Rufus was finally making good on his promise to make Gary’s space-faring dreams a reality. Just like that, all those nights from his youth and beyond spent lying on his back beneath a star-filled sky seemed like they might actually add up to something real.

  Judy was working her way around the rest of his manufactured face, jabbing gently into the soft tissue around his eyes and deadening every possible nerve to smooth out wrinkles both real and imagined. She withdrew her needle for a moment and dabbed a square of white gauze against his skin. Gary wasn’t surprised by the spots of blood when she dropped it on her instrument table.

  “Did they tell you? That they’re sending me into orbit?” Gary knew he was supposed to keep his face relaxed while Judy did her work. He wasn’t supposed to talk. He wasn’t supposed to smile, even.

  But he couldn’t help himself. He thought about the rockets being fueled even as he sat in his chair, getting stuck with one needle after another. The refueling process wasn’t as slow or dramatic as it had been in the early days of spaceflight, but his imagination always conjured those iconic, pre-dawn images of the towering Saturn V at Cape Canaveral, with the thick vapor trailing away like so much smoke from a witch’s cauldron as the stages were pumped full of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.

  The moon shots had happened before he was born, when his parents were kids. Now he was getting his chance, and he was getting paid for it, too.

  Rufus had explained in painful detail how Gary was expected to spend some time with the crew of the salvage ship Churly Flint, get some raw and up-close footage of a couple of salvage operations for the floundering Space Junkers show, do some interviews, and record a few promos for Mars Ho with his producer. Nothing more. No space walks or orbital classroom appearances. No showboating and no goofing off.

  But it was still a trip to space. That was enough for Gary.

  Except . . . The producer. Rufus surprised him by choosing Hannah Cuthbertson. Gary knew her by reputation, and he nodded to her in the hallway from time to time. But he was affable with the production staff only as a matter of practicality and principle. It was easier for him to get in, do his job, and then get out again without any deep friendships on set. It kept him from getting sucked into the reality programming machine. Or so he justified it to himself, every time he read another tabloid story built on cherry-picked details that were stretched far beyond any semblance of actual reality, or which were outright fabricated.

  He remembered Hannah from the first run of Mars Ho—and had come to admire her. He respected what she’d done to stand up for, and with, the contestants inside the biodome. She’d put her own career on the line. She’d argued openly with her superiors in production meetings and followed her conscience even when that meant going against program directives. Gary wondered if Mark Lauren, Lori Ridgway, and the rest of the candidates had any idea what Hannah had risked for them.

  That Rufus had selected Hannah as Gary’s producer in orbit, however, signaled that she was being brought back into the fold. And there was no worse zealot than a rebel who had been re-indoctrinated.

  “I’d heard that, yes. Exciting stuff.” Judy had switched syringes again and was now concentrating on injecting VerveDerm filler into the tiny, stubborn wrinkles that had been cropping up around his mouth and spreading toward his cheeks. Gary liked those wrinkles, when he could see them. He’d even taken to patting on extra foundation when he noticed them coming on, just so he could hold onto them a little while longer. Judy worked the syringe under his skin and eliminated them, one by one.

  Judy sat back and smiled. “Okay, all done, Gary.” She rested the half-empty syringe on her tray and peeled off her thin rubber gloves. “That should hold you for another seven weeks or so.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Gray tried to be polite. It wasn’t Judy’s fault that DayLite Syndicate required these loathsome sessions—plus the occasional surgery, the team of personal trainers, the prescription food, and the not-quite-legal “nutritional supplements.” It was all spelled o
ut in his contract. Gary knew he couldn’t make anything close to his Mars Ho salary anywhere else, so he continued to submit.

  He still snuck the occasional doughnut, though.

  But now he couldn’t feel his face. The flesh tightened against his bones like an ill-fitting Halloween mask—which, Gary supposed, was pretty much what his face was these days.

  He started to get up from the reclining chair, but Judy pressed a hand against his shoulder and pushed him back down again.

  “No, you don’t.” She smiled with the amusement of a dungeon sadist. “You’re done with me, but the dentist is up next. You remember Dr. Lowrey?”

  An artificially tanned man in a white lab coat appeared behind Judy as she rose to her feet. Dr. Lowrey smiled down at Gary with a mouth full of perfectly squared caps.

  Gary sank back into his reclined chair and reminded himself of his sister’s kids in high school, college, and medical school. Then he closed his eyes and conjured a daydream about salvage ships, microgravity, and a dark sky filled with stars.

  Within hours of her late-night meeting with Rufus Day, Hannah was wearing a standard-issue space suit that was too big for her while strapped into a generic crash couch. She lay flat on her back inside the capsule, her crash couch one of six arrayed around the center of the craft like spokes of a wheel, her head pointed inward. She glanced at the few small windows cut into the cabin’s curving walls and saw nothing but the clear, pink-tinged sky of early morning.

  Countdown to launch was already underway.

  “Shouldn’t we have gotten some special training first?” Hannah experimented with balling her hands into fists inside her silver and white gloves. She was surprised by the level of flexibility she had inside the suit, though it had been made for an astronaut who was broader and taller and generally more robust than she was.

  For Hannah, the term “space suit” had always conjured images of the first Americans on the moon and the bulky EVA get-ups used by space station crews when they had to exit the airlock. But what she wore on the launch pad was more of a pressure suit, like what the Mars Ho contestants wore on their competitive challenges outside the biodome.

  She herself wasn’t headed outside any airlock, and that helped her breathe a bit more easily. So this suit would do what? Keep her alive in the event of a loss of cabin pressure? Or maybe that was what the oxygen masks on an airplane were for, and this was definitely not an airplane. She wasn’t sure what the suit was supposed to do. She spent her days shepherding Mars colony hopefuls through the rigors of the Mars Ho reality competition, but she knew little about the conditions and technology of real exploration.

  “Everything’s automated,” a male voice chirped in her ear, and Hannah jumped at the unexpected reply. If not for the five-armed harness securing her to the crash couch, she probably would have landed on the capsule floor.

  Her comms were on. Everyone—from the capsule’s one other passenger to the control room just over two kilometers away—had heard her complaint. At least for the duration of the launch and then their rendezvous with the Churly Flint, Hannah was going to have to get used to the probability that she was live on the air, all the time. She’d coached her contestants on becoming accustomed to this new, exposed normal, but she’d never had to deal with it herself.

  “If anything goes wrong, we’ll be okay,” Gary continued. He was strapped into the crash couch directly opposite hers, the tops of their helmets a mere meter apart. “But, yeah, it would have been nice to get some real astronaut training. And better fitting gear, too.”

  He paused, and Hannah could feel Gary swiveling his head around on his couch.

  “Are you having any problems with chafing, or is it just me?”

  “Really, Gary?” Hannah didn’t try to keep the irritation out of her voice. She remembered Rufus’s comments about Gary’s contractual line items for cosmetic upgrades and figured everyone listening in was just as exasperated with the Face of Space as she was. “We’re sitting here, without any autonomy or preparation, strapped to I don’t know how many cubic pounds of combustible whatever and about to be rocketed off into the great beyond with the simple hope that someone might be there to catch us, and what you’re concerned about is a little rash?”

  “Okay, first off, it’s not ‘how many pounds of combustible whatever,’” Gary replied, his voice full of enough giddy excitement to set Hannah’s teeth on edge. “For a craft of this size—two human passengers plus what I assume is a standard load of supplies in cargo—we’re looking at a rough estimation of nine-point-four-seven kilogram of propellant for every kilogram of weight. That’s the weight of the vehicle, plus the rockets, and the cargo, of course. And the two of us. And the fuel, too.”

  “What are you talking about?” Hannah knew Gary couldn’t see the incredulous look on her face, so she hoped her abrasive tone would signal that she didn’t really want an answer. Gary didn’t get the message.

  “You have to account for the added weight of the fuel, when calculating how much liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen will be required for any particular launch. It’s actually fairly straightforward.”

  Then Gary laughed. He laughed. Hannah was befuddled. Gary was a rocket nerd? Maybe that was a good thing. But now he kept on, throwing out facts and figures as casually as if he had been talking about the weather and not the particular details of the freaking bomb they were both strapped to. A bomb that was less than two minutes from being ignited. Hannah sniffed hard and gripped her armrests.

  “Now, back in the days of NASA’s space shuttle program, there were additional solid rocket boosters, which provided about two-point-eight million pounds-force at sea level during vehicle launch—that increased to what? Three, three-point-one million pounds-force after take-off? And the heaviest ingredient there, I believe, was the oxidizer—ammonium perchlorate. But the rocket we’re riding today should be an entirely liquid affair.”

  “Should be?” Hannah craned her neck, fighting against the straps as though she could turn her head all the way around to see Gary’s face. “Do you even know what you’re talking about?”

  “Kind of. It’s really fascinating stuff—”

  “Okay, guys,” a voice Hannah didn’t recognize came through the speaker in her helmet. She assumed it was someone in the control room. She didn’t even know anyone’s name. Who was she supposed to call for if there was an emergency? “We’re go for launch in ninety seconds. We’re at T minus one minute and thirty seconds.”

  “So I didn’t have time to study the specific details of our launch set-up today.” Gary paused again, and Hannah thought she heard a note of embarrassment in his voice. “But judging by our present surroundings, I’d say we’re inside a SpaceCat 12 capsule, which would probably mean we’re using a Lucas FirstLight 90B—”

  “Aren’t you the least bit concerned about dying in the next seventy-five seconds?” Hannah blurted out. The tech who had strapped her in told her to keep her limbs loose and relaxed, but she was clenching the straps across her chest, her grip tightening as though her tension could protect her from an imminent launch pad disaster.

  Gary’s response was immediate. “It’s okay, Hannah. Safety records are constantly improving for launches like this one. There hasn’t been a fatality or even a significant accident in years now.”

  Hannah wanted to ask precisely what level of damage or disaster would lead to an accident being deemed “significant.” Instead, she loosened her grip on her harness and let her arms fall loosely to her sides.

  “Okay,” she whispered, willing the tension out of her body. She wasn’t remotely successful in unwinding the anxious tendrils, but she was breathing more easily.

  “Feel better?” Gary’s voice sounded less obnoxious in her ear.

  “Actually, I do.” She answered slowly, and even started to smile as the adrenaline lost some of its bite. She was headed into space. Okay, she could accept that—which was good, because she didn’t have much choice in the matter. She was already
inside the capsule, strapped in and ready to go. Like Rufus said, it was just one assignment, and nothing worth ruining her career over.

  The launch would take, what? Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? She tried to remember what the time sequence had been for the first Mars Ho finalists on their way up to ISS-5, but she instead ended up fighting an intrusive vision of the rocket she was sitting atop exploding on the launch pad.

  Her stomach lurched, bringing back unfortunate memories of that rollercoaster at Six Flags. Despite the prescription motion sickness meds they’d injected in her arm an hour earlier, Hannah felt the bile rising in her throat and she started looking around the cabin for the nearest emergency exit. No, that was on airplanes, too. Her only out, at this point, was to go up and come back down again.

  “Oh, God,” she mumbled inside her helmet. “Are there any cameras in here? I’m going to be puking blood within minutes.”

  Gary laughed. “That’s not really how space sickness works. You’ll be fine. You’ll see. After the launch, you’ll laugh at how easy the whole thing was.”

  After the launch? After a successful launch, she corrected herself. Then there would be a few hours of syncing up orbits so their capsule could rendezvous with the salvage ship. And from that point . . . Rufus hadn’t been too specific on a schedule for an Earth return, but given the scope of the work he’d laid out, Hannah figured she and Gary were looking at three or four days, five at most, before she’d be safely on the ground again.

  Back on the ground with a promise from Rufus himself to renegotiate her contract—or a promise to consider renegotiating her contract, at least. It was more than she’d had a day earlier.

  “This is going to be fun.” Gary’s voice was in her ear again, sounding almost soothing. It felt weird to be grateful for Gary Nelson’s presence, and Hannah tried not to think about it. “Enjoy it as long as you can, because before you know it, this will just be one more launch for the record books.”