The record books. Hannah felt a chill run through her. Records. Recording. One specific recording Rufus had advised her not to worry about. With just a few hours to put her affairs in order and turn her Mars Ho duties over to an already overburdened Olivia, she’d forgotten about the mystery recording she’d wanted to root around for, the one with Gary and “all the offensive, misogynistic comments.”
There was a succession of loud thunks that reverberated up into the cabin through the rocket’s fuselage, followed by a low rumbling. Hannah’s gut clenched into a painful knot, and she had to remind herself that it would be a good idea to start breathing again.
Gary was humming over the comms, unable to contain his exhilaration. It was a familiar tune, though Hannah couldn’t quite place it. A military anthem? Maybe an old kids’ adventure cartoon? Hannah’s heart was pounding against her ribs, stress tears streaming down her cheeks, and Gary was humming. Just who was this man she was strapped down next to?
“Okay, guys,” came the anonymous voice again. “Twenty seconds out now. Get ready for the ride of your lives.”
“Gary?” Hannah’s voice cracked. Her mouth was dry. The adrenaline came flooding back into her system, and her fingers trembled inside her gloves.
“Mmm?”
“Just tell me one thing?”
“T minus ten . . .” The final countdown was on, and Hannah felt the initial thunder of the rocket engines igniting beneath her just before the low roar hit the capsule cabin, growing louder by the millisecond.
“Okay?” Gary raised his voice to be heard even over the comms.
“Nine . . .”
Hannah cleared her throat. “Rufus said you made a recording!”
“Eight . . .”
“A recording?” Hannah could barely make out his words over the speaker in her helmet.
“Seven . . .”
“There’s a recording!” Hannah shouted, unable to hear even her own voice over the deafening rocket engines. The capsule shook violently, her crash couch rattling on its bolts.
“Six . . .”
“A recording with some really awful, offensive things on it?!” Hannah was screaming herself hoarse. Why was it so important to dig into this at this exact moment? If she was going to die on this launch pad, did she simply want to know the character of the person who was going to perish with her? Or maybe she was really that bad at personal confrontation.
“Five . . .”
“I think I know the one!” At least, Hannah thought that’s what Gary said. She couldn’t hear the guy in the control room any more. But Gary had confirmed that the recording existed, and that was enough.
Just remember that Niffenegger is a preening, sexist dickface, Hannah replayed Rufus’s advice in her head, and you’ll do just fine.
The savage kick of liftoff slammed her body down into her couch like an invisible avalanche. An apocalypse of flame engulfed the capsule’s window ports as the rocket strained against gravity, thrust itself upward, and hurtled its passengers away from the Earth. How could anything like this be routine? Hannah labored for breath under the mounting g-forces, her body growing heavier by the second. If she puked now, it would choke her. Vibrating powerfully with her couch and everything else in the capsule, she felt her tears pooling in her ears and running down the back of her neck as the skin of her face flattened against her skull.
How many people had told her this was going to be fun?
For a moment, she could have sworn she heard Gary humming again.
Gary’s face was buried in the liner of yet another space sickness bag—the third one he’d used in just the last hour. Surely his stomach was empty by now?
He waited, hesitating to pull the bag away. He felt another surge coming up his esophagus, and he held the seal of the open bag around his mouth for what had to be the last rush of stomach acid projected out of his body.
He felt a hand clasping his ankle, steadying him and keeping him from crashing into the walls as he vomited. Hannah. After all of her whining on the launch pad about how she was so sure she’d puke up her intestines, she’d not had a single problem with nausea. At least she was making herself useful during his agony.
Gary waited for the next round of sick, but his system seemed to being calming down—for the time being, at least. He wiped his face on the bag’s liner and shoved it down into the plastic sack. He zipped it up and looked around for the nearest wet waste receptacle.
Hannah held out a hand for his barf bag and he gladly handed it over. His producer was now his space nurse. He reached for the wall to hold himself in place as he deepened his breathing and tried to get his bearings.
They’d been aboard the Churly Flint for a few hours and were setting up in an open cargo hold for their initial recordings. The crew had been happy to leave them alone as soon as Gary started barfing.
Every available surface inside the dimly lit ship was purposed to some need—to his left was a wall of cabinets, curving into a contiguous wall of tools and boxed kits secured by magnets and lashed down with elastic straps. He was learning to think of every surface as simply a wall instead of floors and ceilings. These little details, the things he hadn’t thought to prepare himself for, were the most disorienting and the most delightful now that he was finally in orbit.
Maybe now that he was done puking, he’d start to enjoy himself.
“You want some water or something?” Hannah returned from disposing of his barf bag and held out a clear, liquid-filled bulb. “You’re probably pretty dehydrated at this point.”
She was right, of course. Nobody could vomit that much without running low on fluids, but the thought of swallowing—much less having anything in his stomach—made him start to feel queasy again.
“No, thanks.” He kept his lips tight and his jaw clenched against the nausea even as he tried to smile. “I’m probably up to only about half a Garn, so I should be all right.”
Hannah floated in front of him, her alignment about 12-degrees off from his. She frowned.
“Jake Garn? The senator who flew on the Space Shuttle?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.” She reached for the bag of production gear she’d tethered to the wall over her head.
“Yeah. He was the head of the appropriations committee overseeing the NASA budget in the 1980s, so they took him up as a, what did they call that? A payload specialist?” Gary laughed, and he felt his body relax. Even his stomach settled a bit more. He watched Hannah pull a large tablet out of her bag, attach it to a slim equipment arm, and mount it on the wall.
“He puked so much that they had to recalibrate the space sickness scale, just for him!” Gary chuckled again, but Hannah didn’t seem interested. “One Garn still stands as the most anyone has ever puked in space in a week.”
Hannah removed a small camera from the gear bag and looked around for the best mount. A few frustrated experiments had already proven that having her hold the sensitive camera in free-fall made for an especially dizzy picture and, unlike the Mars Ho biodome, there weren’t any cameras built into the walls of the ship.
“So, you see, it could be worse. You know, if I’m only at maybe half a Garn . . .” He cleared his throat and wished the crew of the Churly Flint had some mouthwash handy.
“Or maybe you’re starting to rethink that massive breakfast you had.” Hannah didn’t look up from the wall where she was busy attaching another equipment arm to a cabinet door with some blue-colored putty.
“That was the Shepard Special, through and through,” Gary protested, though in truth he was surprised she’d been listening to him in the capsule cabin earlier. Just after the main engines shut down and pushed them into an intercept orbit with the Churly Flint, and about seven minutes before he puked the first time, he’d described his early morning meal of scrambled eggs, bacon-wrapped beef fillet, and coffee—the same breakfast Alan Shepard, Jr., had enjoyed before becoming the first American astronaut in space. He wondered if his mistake had been substituting a glass of c
itrus-flavored Tang for orange juice, trying to squeeze in too many space-age traditions at once. It wasn’t the first time nostalgia had led him astray.
He’d tried to explain the significance of instant Tang, too, but she’d not gotten that reference, either. How could a Mars Ho producer care so little about the history of space travel?
Hannah mounted the tangerine-size camera on the end of the jointed equipment arm and then pushed off from the wall to head toward Gary. She had taken to microgravity surprisingly well for someone who had no interest in space, and for someone who’d been practically apoplectic just before launch. Now she seemed like she’d been born to operate in free-fall.
“So, you’re still not feeling any ill effects?” Gary asked.
Hannah kept her eyes on Gary’s chest, where she was affixing a tiny wireless mic to the front of his yellow-green jumpsuit. DayLite Syndicate had provided them with clothing that was slightly less unattractive than the ugly orange suits they’d stuck two rounds of contestants with, but this one-piece, cotton/poly blend emblazoned with both the Mars Ho and Space Junkers logos was probably the least flattering thing he’d ever had on his body.
Nuclear puke green, Hannah called it. There weren’t any mirrors about, but Gary didn’t image the color was doing his complexion any favors, and there were no makeup artists around to touch him up. No doubt someone back at The Ranch was taking a rollicking dig at Rufus, and at Gary’s expense.
“No problems at all.” Hannah tucked the mic’s transmitter tail into the fold of his chest pocket and smoothed everything down. “Funny, ‘cause I always got sick just looking at a ferris wheel. You know, all that around and around and around . . .”
Gary closed his eyes and swallowed hard. “Yeah, I get it.”
Hannah rested a hand on his shoulder, and he found himself feeling suddenly better, steadied. “Ready to give this a try?”
“Mmmph.”
Using the equipment tethers on the wall overhead, she turned around and guided herself back to her equipment. She switched on the tablet and adjusted the display toward Gary to serve as a teleprompter. Then she framed him up in the camera, with a perfect shot behind him down the connecting corridor into the ship’s cockpit with its forward windows looking out onto empty space.
Viewers wouldn’t be able to pick out any constellations in the background, Gary thought, and a view of the Earth would’ve been better, but the black emptiness beyond the windows was probably stark enough to drive the point home: space was still a dangerous place.
The camera’s red light flared to life, followed by a thumbs-up from Hannah.
“Whenever you’re ready,” she said.
Gary cleared his throat and pushed the nausea and every other bodily discomfort out of his mind. He also had to tone down the giddiness he could feel creeping onto his face. He’d celebrate his arrival in orbit later; for now, he had to focus. He found the smile he wanted, held it for a few seconds as he looked into the camera, and then started speaking.
“Earth’s orbit is littered with thousands of tons of space debris—debris that can be dangerous and . . .” Gary stopped and shook his head.
Hannah glanced up from behind the camera and checked the angle of the tablet. “What’s wrong? Can you see the display all right? Do you need to be sick again?”
“No. Yeah, the display is fine. It’s just that, well, tons of space debris? That’s a measurement unit of weight—you know, mass multiplied by acceleration due to gravity—and up in orbit it’s not so much a matter of weight being a problem. Space debris is an issue because of its very existence, and its mass, and its decaying orbit. It’s not about weight.”
Hannah looked over the top of the camera at Gary. The red light was still on. “Yeah, that’s not my problem.”
“It’s just that if we’re trying to educate people about the realities of space exploration—”
“It’s not your problem, either.” Hannah gestured toward the tablet teleprompter. “This is what the writers have come up with, so this is the script we’re following. Okay?”
Gary nodded. It wasn’t okay, actually, and he had serious doubts about both the qualifications and intentions of whichever so-called writers had crafted the script. Probably just a couple of interns stuck in a closet with a word processor and some cold Thai food.
“Ready to try it again?” she asked.
“Yeah, okay.” Gary thought back to the previous Christmas at his sister’s house with her kids—getting snowed in and playing board games and watching episodes of Jupiter Rising and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. He didn’t want to let them down. If he was contractually obligated to be the purveyor of bad space science, well, there would be parents and teachers to fact-check for their kids, right?
“Earth’s orbit is littered with thousands of tons of space debris.” Gary gritted his teeth and maintained his expensive smile. “Debris that can be dangerous and even deadly. The first Mars Ho colonists found this out the hard way when ISS-5 was impacted by debris from the defunct RegalStar satellite.” He waited a beat. “And that’s where the space junkers come in.”
Gary paused too long and Hannah looked up again from the camera. “Problem?” she asked.
“It’s just that . . . Wasn’t that accident caused by a scavenger crew going after a satellite that wasn’t in fact dead yet, or even in a decaying orbit? Because otherwise, the debris would have been far below the orbit of the space station—”
“You know what, Gary?” Hannah braced herself against the wall as she floated out from behind the camera, her impatience clear on her face. “I don’t know the answer to that question. We’re not making an investigative documentary here. Whatever did or did not happen, or whose fault it was, it all got worked out in some boardroom by a bunch of suits. And you know what that means?”
“Not our problem?” Gary asked.
“You got it.” She moved back into position behind the camera. “Let’s pick it up from where you left off.”
Gary took a deep breath and warmed up his smile again. “The space junkers are actually working under government contracts to clean up the debris in Earth orbit. There are an awful lot of derelict satellites and other craft in Earth orbit, tens of thousands in fact. Space is getting a little crowded.”
He was revising the script on the fly, changing out “derelict satellites and other craft” for the word “junk,” and adding the bit about “tens of thousands”—something he knew to be factual. He saw the frown lines deepen on Hannah’s face with every extemporaneous edit—and was reminded of his own deadened, expressionless brow—but he kept moving through the script and she didn’t stop him.
“Multinational corporations and countries around the world hire space salvage contractors to clean up the space junk they’re responsible for, so a single space junker can be working for multiple corporations and countries at once.” Gary tried not to grimace at the clunky syntax and repetition of words, though it sounded conversational enough. “Some space junk gets processed in lunar facilities and resold to other space programs as raw materials. Some space junk is returned to the rightful owners on Earth, and some more sensitive materials are outright destroyed by the space junkers.”
Hannah looked up with a querulous scowl as he added that last part about sensitive materials, but he went back to reading from the teleprompter and she kept recording.
“So tune in each week as DayLite Syndicate brings you a new orbital adventure on the high seas of space . . . In Space Junkers.”
“You know, we don’t really like that term, space junkers,” a voice called from the control cabin.
Gary turned and found Dana Jackson, captain of the Churly Flint, far ahead and leaning into the frame to mar their perfect shot through the ship’s front windows. Gary widened his grin and turned on the charm. “I know. It’s a travesty, isn’t it?”
Dana pushed farther out into bulkhead doorway. “Makes us sound low.” The curves of her cheeks hardened into a scowl, and even at this distance h
er dark eyes bore into Gary’s.
This wasn’t the early impression Gary wanted to make. He nodded, then braced himself against a wall to keep from drifting into it. “I quite agree. But I’m a working stiff, just like you. It’s ridiculous what we have to put up with, just to fulfill our contracts.”
Dana narrowed her eyes. Gary could tell she wasn’t satisfied with his explanation, but at least she wasn’t eyeing him with suspicion any longer.
“I’m sorry, captain.” Hannah floated up next to Gary. “I apologize about the scripts. Unfortunately, we have to follow them.”
“Next time we’ll get them to clear it all with you and your crew first.” Gary offered a chuckle, and he caught the flicker of a smile on Dana’s face before she nodded curtly and then disappeared back into the command cabin.
“We’ll need to record that last bit again,” Hannah muttered to him. “Without the captain’s comments. Just that last line.”
Another twenty seconds of work, and they were done with the first segment. As soon as the red light of the camera winked off, Gary started looking around for another barf bag, just to be safe.
“That was awful,” he groaned.
“I don’t know.” Hannah pulled up a new file on the teleprompter. “I thought it was pretty good.”
“The text.” Gary pointed at the tablet as he readied the fresh barf bag. “Honestly, at this point, I don’t know if I have space sickness or if I’m just allergic to bad writing.”
“Really, Gary? You want to be a diva right from the start?”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“I’m sure you have.” Hannah held his gaze for a long moment. He thought her hazel eyes looked more frustrated than hostile, which he took to be a good sign.
The danger having passed, Gary folded up the empty sickness bag and shoved it into one of his jumpsuit’s cargo pockets. Now would be the perfect time for some Tang, he thought of saying, but he was pretty sure Hannah wouldn’t get the joke.
Lovers and Lunatics (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 2) Page 4