Lovers and Lunatics (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 2)

by Jennifer Willis

  Dana shut off the alarms, and the control cabin was silent.

  “Captain?” Gary called out. “Dana!”

  She lifted a hand. “Not now, Gary. Manny? Brett? How bad’s the damage? Do we have navigation? Can we maneuver?”

  Manny pushed back from his station, his head drooping. Brett turned around in his chair. “Nothing. We’ve got no control, half our engines are toast or not responding.”

  “So I’m guessing none of that was part of the plan,” Gary offered, hoping to lighten the mood and keep himself from panicking.

  Brett laughed, his eyes sparkling and wild. “That’s not the half of it, Gary! We’re now heading straight for the moon, with no way to stop.” He glanced at his instruments. “Impact in, uh, two minutes.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Dana took a few shallow breaths. “Okay, here’s what we do. Brett, fire up the engines we do have, see if we can slow things down, or maybe get some gross agility. Manny, get down to docking control. Strap yourself in as best you can. We might be able to use what’s left of our capture apparatus to save our skins.”

  “What about the capsule?” Brett asked. “Maybe we could pile in? Use it as a lifeboat?”

  Dana shook her head and cursed under her breath. Gary had forgotten about his arrival capsule, still docked with the Churly Flint, and apparently so had the captain. “No time for prep,” she said. “Jettison it.”

  Gary started to protest that the capsule was his and Hannah’s ticket back home, but then he got a very bad feeling that he might not ever be seeing home again.

  Manny flew past Gary on his way out of the cabin. Dana plucked Gary’s camera out of the air and handed it to him with a grim smile.

  “Well, Mr. Nelson. You just might just get that ratings boost after all.” Dana quickly harnessed herself into her chair.

  The glowing, pock-marked surface of the moon filled the window. Gary gawped at the sight. He forgot about the camera in his hands, pointing vaguely toward the astonishing view. His brain was screaming at him, warning him that he was surely about to die, demanding that he flee or panic or take some futile action to try to save himself. Alarms blared again inside the control cabin. Dana was shouting commands with Brett yelling back at her, while the Churly Flint fell toward the lunar surface.

  But Gary felt nothing but a strange, slow-moving calm as the craters rushed toward him. His family would be provided for. Hannah was safe aboard the Midden. And Gary was about to touch the moon.

  Hannah had been strapped into her seat for countless hours while nothing much happened around her. There had been a tiresome series of attempts—and failures—at rooting out the bug the crew of the Churly Flint had planted in the Midden’s navigational system. By the time Barbie was finally able to do a clean reboot of all the ship’s systems, Klondike-3 had progressed far enough along its path that a new intercept course had to be plotted.

  And Hannah remained in her seat, quiet as a mouse, recording every second of three people arguing about software. She had her hand-held camera and two more mounted in the cockpit. She’d done her job.

  Now, suddenly, all hell was breaking loose, and it was loud.

  There’d been an explosion on the prospector. Details were few, though no one needed to remind Hannah that the Churly Flint had been closing in on Klondike-3, possibly even in possession of the craft, when it happened.

  Barbie and Sid were shouting at each other, with Joey yelling occasional updates into the fray. Hannah deliberately did not think about Gary. He was safe. He had to be. If he wasn’t, well, she would think about that later when she could deal with an actual breakdown. There was no point getting herself worked up over speculation.

  Mentally, she secured herself inside her professional box, where nothing could touch her. She breathed and observed and kept herself occupied by making a mental list of on-camera questions to ask once everyone stopped screaming.

  Would the salvage contracts be void if there was nothing—or, nothing of value—left to recover? Had the Churly Flint blown up Klondike-3 to prevent the next ship from claiming anything they’d not been able to haul away? Had another rival sabotaged Klondike-3?

  Hannah steadied the camera in her hands and kept an eye on the video coming through her production app.

  “How long since that last message?” Sid’s voice was hoarse. “How long! Why aren’t they responding?!”

  “Almost done with the new course,” Joey offered. “And then we can—”

  “It’s been three minutes!” Barbie replied with an edge of panic. “There’s too much . . . I don’t know what’s happening. We should have heard something from them by now. But they were so far ahead, and then it took so long to get everything back online—”

  “I don’t want your excuses, Barbie!” Sid glanced back at Hannah and her camera, then took a breath and ran a hand over his beard stubble. “We all need to focus, and to stay calm.”

  Hannah wasn’t sure if the captain was trying to reassure his crew or bolster himself—probably both. Sid looked haggard, years older than he’d been barely twenty minutes earlier. His eyes were glassy and red, and the corners of his mouth drooped as he dipped his head toward Hannah.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find out what happened, and we’ll get your friend back safe. Assuming there’s anything left.”

  His words hit her like a lightning bolt, smashing through the mental boundaries she’d erected. Hannah stiffened in her chair as the dread she’d been keeping at bay started to seep in.

  “Wait! What do you mean?” Her voice felt small. She gripped the camera even tighter and trained the lens on Sid’s face, but he had already turned away.

  There had to be something left—not just something, but the entire Churly Flint crew, alive and well and with Gary Nelson safely aboard. She rubbed the back of her hand, where his lips had met her skin, and tried to recreate the tingle of his kiss. It wasn’t difficult, so that meant he had to be fine, right? Hannah heard the camera’s plastic body crackle under her fingers, and she had to loosen her grip before she cracked the thing.

  “Captain!” Barbie wore the faint beginnings of a hopeful smile. “There’s chatter about the accident. The October Surprise is already underway on a rescue mission to the Churly Flint’s last known location.”

  “Already?” Joey turned around in his seat. “There weren’t any ships in the area that I could see. And we’re the only other ship that was headed toward Klondike-3.” He glanced at Sid, but the captain just shrugged.

  “Right now, I don’t care who may or may not have known about what or when or . . .” Sid rubbed the back of his neck. “You said they’re underway?”

  Joey looked down at his monitors. “I’ve got them on my screen. They’re pretty close now, but the debris field is just a mess—”

  “Barbie, get the captain of the October Surprise on the line for me, please.” Sid looked over his shoulder at Hannah. “See? There’s a rescue mission already heading their way. Everything’s going to be just fine.”

  Sid faced forward again and asked Joey for another update on the Midden’s course. The captain sounded stronger, not quite calm but definitely in command.

  And Hannah didn’t believe him for a second.

  “Hannah.”

  Her name hung on Gary’s lips as he coughed himself back to consciousness. His head was pounding. His right temple felt tender, and there was a dull pain pressing heavily on his lower body. He was resting on his side, which seemed immediately wrong, but he didn’t fully understand why. Alarms rang out all around him, and flashing red lights strobed through the dark cabin, blinding him and encouraging his throbbing head pain. Underneath it all was a steady hissing sound and the moaning of others nearby.

  Awakening in the midst of this chaos, Gary’s first, angry thought was about how Sid was no doubt using this opportunity to put the moves on Hannah while she was trapped aboard the Midden.

  “Stupid, swaggering space pirate!” he muttered, then cried out in frustr
ated pain when he tried to move his legs and found that he couldn’t. “I’ll strangle that swashbuckling casanova myself if he dares lay a hand on—”

  “That’s all very gallant, Gary,” came a muffled voice from directly beneath him. “But first would you mind removing your shoulder from my face so I can get up and gauge the damage to the ship?”

  “What?” Gary blinked hard and looked around at the crumpled control cabin of the Churly Flint. One whole side of the compartment, where Manny’s station used to be, had caved in on itself, and Manny’s empty chair hung precariously over Gary’s head. Exposed wires sparked and spooled out of the scarred walls.

  He tried to move his legs again and saw that Brett—still strapped into his chair—lay on top of them. Brett wasn’t moving.

  Gary’s hands went to his head and face, and he sucked in a panicked breath when he realized he wasn’t wearing his pressure suit or helmet. But he was breathing, which meant there was still air available. Dana was already crawling across the wreckage toward Brett, which meant the voice beneath him had come from Manny.

  “I thought you were in the docking bay,” Gary said.

  “Never made it. Good thing, too, seeing as there is no more docking bay.”

  “Oh.” Gary looked out the forward window, still intact, and sucked in his breath when he saw the lunar surface bounded by the blackness of space.

  “Your shoulder, and your upper back,” Manny said with more calm than Gary thought the situation warranted. “They’re holding me down. I’d like to get up now, please.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Gary was lying half-out of his harness and chair, but the restraining buckles released easily. He slid gently off of Manny and landed of the floor, but his legs were still pinned.

  With some careful maneuvering around the sharp edges of crunched equipment and the live electrical wiring, Dana managed to pull Brett’s unconscious form out of his chair and off of Gary. It took a few minutes of grunting effort and significant assistance from Dana, but Gary wriggled himself free of Brett’s chair and then helped Manny out of the compressed pocket of twisted metal and plastic he’d fallen into. His muscles felt ridiculously strong in the light lunar gravity, and he had keep his movements small. Even so, he was quickly out of breath and sweating.

  “Yeah.” Manny wiped at a stream of bright red blood covering his cheeks. “Welcome to the moon.”

  Gary glanced again though the domed windows at the dusty, grayish brown landscape that looked exceptionally inhospitable. He was on the freaking moon. But there was no time to think about fulfilling boyhood dreams. He sat back on his haunches and had to catch himself when the remnants of his chair shifted beneath him. “How . . . ?”

  “Crash landing. Duh.” Manny smiled, and Gary winced when he saw that the man’s gums were bloody. “Would have been worse, too, if Brett hadn’t pulled a fucking miracle out of his butt.”

  “No thanks to you.” Brett sat up with Dana’s assistance and spat out a coughing laugh that rattled the loose metal around him.

  “Me? What did I do?” Manny replied with a red-tinged smile.

  Gary ran his hands over his body, checking for injuries. He had a desperate moment of finding a hard bulge on his chest, then discovered it was just the camera he’d been holding before the crash. It had somehow ended up inside his clothing. There was a knot on his head, just above his right eye, and a few tears in his ugly green jumpsuit. Just about every part of him ached, but nothing was broken and he didn’t appear to be bleeding.

  After a dazed survey of the electric-sparking wreckage of the control cabin, Gary had to agree that their survival was nigh-on miraculous.

  But the hissing sound was growing louder.

  “Captain?” Gary coughed as he turned to Dana. “Is there any chance we’re—”

  “Losing air pressure? It’s a certainty.” She made a visual inspection of her crew and passenger and then studied the bulkhead opening that led to the rest of the ship. “Is everybody mobile? Able to walk?”

  Gary and the others confirmed their mobility, though there was little space to test their limbs. Dana climbed slowly to her feet, looking a bit off-balance. Gary wondered how long it had been since she’d last felt gravity.

  “All right, then. Here’s what we’re doing. Everybody to your suits, full EVA.” Dana steadied herself against an unscathed section of the wall. “Help’s on the way, but we’ll probably need to go for a little hike.”

  Considering the mess of the control cabin, Gary wondered when or how Dana could have sent an SOS or received word of a rescue effort. But he didn’t ask. If the captain was simply telling her crew what she thought they needed to hear, he didn’t want to interfere.

  Manny and Brett led the way deeper into the ship, with Brett leaning heavily on Manny for support. Gary reached down to pick up his gear bag and tucked his camera inside. Dana patted Gary on the shoulder.

  “Don’t worry, okay?” Her smile was thin, but genuine. “It’s going to be all right.”

  Gary cursed as he narrowly dodged a live electrical wire hanging down by his shoulder. “And if it’s not?”

  Her smile widened. “Then I need you to stay calm anyway. I can’t have a panicked tourist putting my crew at risk and making things worse for everybody.” She motioned him toward the bulkhead, and Gary ducked his head to climb into the ship’s main corridor.

  7

  “They’ve crashed on the lunar surface. October Surprise is en route on a rescue mission. Klondike-3 is still up for grabs.”

  Hannah blinked at the email from Olivia on her tablet screen. It was short and to the point and had probably been edited by Rufus. The closing line had definitely come from her boss: “Don’t worry. Everything’s proceeding beautifully.”

  If the world hadn’t been watching Space Junkers before, they certainly were tuning in now. The Face of Space had crash-landed on the moon during a risky space salvage operation, and his condition was unknown. Gary was in danger, or possibly dead—everyone aboard the Churly Flint could be dead— and Rufus thought everything was just dandy.

  “He knew this was going to happen.” Hannah wiped the back of her hand across her misty eyes and adjusted her body inside her sleep sack. Her quarters on the Midden were larger than on the Churly Flint, even though the Midden was a smaller ship, but she didn’t want space to stretch her limbs and float free. She was anxious and tired and needed the cozy security of being strapped in. “He had to have known.”

  She opened a reply window and started composing a message to Olivia, but she stopped mid-word. Anything Hannah sent to Olivia, she had to assume, would be read by Rufus.

  “Son of a bitch!” She kicked her feet inside her sleeping bag, strapped securely to the wall. It was a frustrated and unsatisfying gesture, but if she’d been free floating she would have gotten slammed into the wall. Stupid microgravity. She couldn’t even have a proper tantrum without giving herself a concussion.

  Olivia’s message carried a few attachments, and Hannah tapped through them one by one. The first was a large PDF of the Churly Flint’s schematics, with red circles and arrows added to draw her attention to what she already knew: the Churly Flint was an orbital and open space craft only, with no ability for terrestrial take off and landing.

  So even if the ship survived the plummet to the lunar surface, it would have no way to lift off again.

  The next attachment was an encrypted audio file, with an enigmatic note: “Is this your earring? I found it underneath the hamper.”

  Hannah rarely wore earrings—not on principle; she just had few occasions to get dressed up. And she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been anywhere near the laundry at The Ranch. It took a couple of tries to figure out the passcode Olivia had set—it turned out to be a collection of vending numbers of Hannah’s favorite items from the machines in the kitchen. Instant Noodles, followed by Bar Oat Goodness and then Orange Cream Pie: B4-C12-D2. It was also the combination to Hannah’s production locker.

  She
opened the file. Olivia had found and delivered the infamous audio recording. Hannah would finally know just what kind of man Gary Nelson was.

  “. . . That April girl,” Rufus’s voice was clear over the sound of ice clinking in a glass and drinks being poured. “She’s a little thing, sure, but she’s feisty, like a baby tiger. Grrr. I’ll bet she’s fun. Tight, too.” A pause. “You can’t tell me you don’t wonder just how far she’d go to be The Mars Ho!”

  Rufus’s rough laughter drowned out all other noise, until a second voice rose up from the background. Gary.

  “Rufus, it’s one thing to make your little innuendos through creative editing—”

  “Because you refuse to allow it into your scripts!” Rufus exclaimed. “I’m telling you. I know what the world wants, and this is it. Hot, willing snatch. Eager, even. We’re sitting on top of a sex party powder keg with that biodome—”

  Hannah winced as much at Rufus’s words as the sudden clatter of glass bottles clinking together too near the microphone.

  “. . . all around The Ranch.” Rufus hadn’t been drunk enough to slur his words, but his speech was slow and punctuated by slurps from his glass. “You think it’s some accident that every woman here—here, in production—is a hot piece of ass just waiting to be plucked?”

  “Will you listen to yourself?” Gary’s voice rose in anger. “These people worked hard to get where they are. Every one of the production staff is professional and hard working and, and the contestants, too. This isn’t Spring Break in the Biodome.”

  “Hey! That’s not a bad idea.” Rufus’s hoarse, coughing laugher filled Hannah’s ears. “Something to fill the gaps between the Mars competitions. Horny Hedonists. Space Age Sybarites. Carnal Co-Eds. We’ll pencil that in for the next brainstormer. Nice work, Niffenegger.”

  “No, that’s not . . .” Gary’s voice, followed by the sound of a heavy sigh. “You have sponsors to satisfy, I get it. You need high ratings. But these are human beings. You’re playing with people’s lives. There’s a difference between reality television and actual reality.”