Mars Heat (Mars Adventure Romance Series (MARS) Book 3)

by Jennifer Willis

  He tried another tack. “Maybe you can give me your message, and I can relay it for you?”

  She shoved at the air around him as she kept pushing her way down the corridor. “I have to do it myself. I’m the only one who can do it. The base is compromised.”

  “Hold on there!” He pulled her back just as she was about to collide with a doorjamb. She was having trouble with depth perception, or maybe she was falling asleep on her feet.

  Around the corner, Trevor heard the loud thump of something heavy hitting the floor, followed closely by Lori’s exclamation of surprise.

  Trevor half-dragged Hogan with him as he hurried toward the commotion. He rounded the corner and found Grigori lying unconscious on the floor. Lori hovered over him, checking his pulse and trying to rouse him.

  “Grigori!” Lori spotted Trevor and Hogan. “Help me get him to medical.”

  Trevor had only two hands. He settled an irate and uncooperative Hogan on the floor and ordered her to stay put. Then he and Lori struggled to lift the sturdy Russian even in the one-third gravity. Between the two of them, they managed to carry Grigori down the next corridor to the medical bay, where Trent was taking stock of the dwindling supply of Pepto Bismol.

  “Get Martin! Or Miranda!” Trent ordered Lori. “Whichever one is less likely to puke all over the patient.”

  Trevor lingered in the doorway and watched Trent make quick work of getting Grigori hooked up with a saline IV. Grigori was already starting to come around when Miranda pushed into the medical bay. She looked barely healthier than her crewmate on the table.

  “We’ve got this,” Lori told Trevor as she appeared at his side. “Go take care of Hogan.”

  He headed back down the corridor. Within seconds, he heard the unmistakable sounds of vomiting coming from the medical bay. When he turned the corner, Hogan was on her feet and headed for Ares City’s administrative office.

  “Hogan!” Trevor jogged toward her.

  “I have to send my report!”

  He scooped her up and cradled her against his chest. He was pleased by the heft of her—so much stronger and more substantial than tiny April or even Melissa. Hogan would have been an excellent partner, if she’d only come to Mars through the colony program instead of the United Nations Space Corps.

  “There’s plenty of time to send your report later,” he murmured against her hair. “When you’re feeling better and your mind is clear.”

  He started carrying her back to the recreation room, but she twisted in his arms and wriggled out of his embrace. Taken by surprise, Trevor was a second too late to grab her. She lurched a few steps and then ducked into the office and slammed the door behind her.

  The door was locked by the time Trevor reached it. He banged his open palm on the door. “Hogan, I need you to open up, okay?”

  Through the door, he could hear her voice. Was she logging a video report for the UNSC Administrator? No one expected hackers or intruders on Mars, so there weren’t an security measures to keep her out of the Ares City administrative computer.

  Trevor pounded on the door again. “Hogan! You’re not well. No one’s going to understand any message you send right now.”

  Who would have a key to the office? Mark was at Progress Base, but April was still somewhere inside Ares City. In Hogan’s state, there was no telling what kind of message she might send.

  Trevor pushed away from the wall and went in search of April. He scarcely made it to the colonist quarters in Module C before he felt his stomach pitch and his gut start to knot up. He didn’t have time to wonder whether Martin had been wrong about contagion before he had to dash for the nearest toilet.

  Hogan sat back and waited. She felt disconnected and floaty and feverish, but she remained confident that she was clear-headed. Mostly. She’d sent her message to the Hermes Program Director, Yan Kingsley. It would be hours yet before he’d receive her transmission, consult with his team, and send a response.

  Her message had been simple enough: Everything had turned to literal shit since the colonists arrived.

  The mission had been going smoothly. Even with the gruesome task of recovering the bodies of her fallen friends and giving them a proper burial, everything proceeded according to plan. The journey to Mars was uneventful, and her crew had used the time to drill emergency procedures and study their mission tasks. The landing was textbook clean. The habitat was in perfect working order when the Hermes 5 crew arrived, and they’d kept it that way for fourteen months. They’d conducted their experiments and logged their weather data and drilled their core samples, ticking off each checkbox in efficient and timely order.

  Her command, according to Kingsley, had resulted in the most productive and drama-free mission in UNSC history. So far.

  And then the colonists came. She was disappointed but not surprised to have been right about them.

  Almost immediately, Hogan and her crew had to suit up and chase down a runner. But they also tried to help the colonists and made time to ensure Ares City had the training and tools to survive on their own. Hogan had taken them to visit the most sacred space on the entire planet, the Hermes 3 memorial, to underscore just how serious their situation was.

  And now it appeared that the colonists had poisoned her mission.

  Poison wasn’t the right word, but it’s what kept springing to Hogan’s mind. The colonists had interfered with her crew and ruined their clean record. That everyone—astronauts and colonists alike—was suffering now from acute gastrointestinal distress was just the icing on this particular shit cake.

  Kingsley would tell her what to do.

  In the meantime, Hogan got comfortable in the Ares City rec room and watched another mindless episode of Homegrown Hooch. She’d exhausted the habitat’s library of Garbage Glamazons and a couple of old Tom Hanks movies. At least she was sitting upright now. She gulped down large quantities of tea and managed to stomach some freeze-dried carrots and peas.

  Trevor lay on the floor a couple of meters from her feet. Sweat beaded on his face and his brow crinkled with every spasm of gut pain. Hogan didn’t know why he hadn’t retreated to his own quarters like the other colonists had done—save for Mark, Leah, and Melissa puking it up over at Progress Base. Yusuf called an hour earlier with that delicious update. He was starting to feel better and the clean-up was proceeding nicely, but his colonist guests had fallen ill.

  So the entire human population of Mars was sick. At least Martin and Miranda were back in the Progress Base lab and working to nail down precisely what had happened.

  But the news from Yusuf about the bioreactors wasn’t good. He’d shut down the entire system for a thorough manual cleaning, which meant a total loss of the current spiruliza crop. With weeks required to get the food bioreactors back up and running, the astronauts wouldn’t be on the planet long enough to salvage their system. As a precaution, Yusuf recommended throwing out the previous harvest, too, and that was a lot of food to lose.

  The colony’s bioreactors would also need to be shut down and scrubbed out, which left both Ares City and Progress Base looking at a possible food shortage.

  Hogan stood up and held onto her chair to ride out a wave of wooziness. Then she stepped across the floor and nudged Trevor’s shoulder with her foot.

  “You need something?” Trevor blinked up at her.

  Hogan almost laughed. He was on the floor, sick as a dog, and was still trying to take care of her.

  “Go to bed,” she said.

  “Can’t.” He licked his dry lips. “I’m the last remaining host.”

  He struggled to sit up. Hogan propped up a couple of pillows for him. Then she held a plastic cup to his lips and helped him to drink.

  “Careful. Small sips,” she said.

  “Yes, commander.”

  She smiled. Maybe the colonists weren’t bad, but there was no way they’d survive on their own.

  “We have to put our heads together on something,” she said.

  Trevor’s ey
elids fluttered as he fought against sleep. “Whatever you need.”

  Hogan got an arm underneath his shoulder and helped him into a chair. He was heavier than he looked. She handed him the cup of water.

  “I need a thorough and up-to-date inventory of all of your sealed and prepared stores.”

  He sipped the water and nodded slowly. “Not the computerized inventory, then, but a re-check?”

  “We’ll do the same at Progress Base.”

  “But we still don’t know what made us sick.”

  “We’ll figure that out, and when we do, we’ll have the inventories to help us sort out what we have to toss, and what we can safely eat.”

  “We may have to share. Pool our resources.”

  Hogan rested her hand on his wrist and breathed a quiet sigh when he didn’t pull away. She hoped he wasn’t simply too weak to move.

  “If it does turn out to be the food . . . No one is accusing you.”

  The look of fiery indignation that flared in his eyes knocked Hogan back against her chair.

  “You think I poisoned you? And the colony?” Shock and confusion mixed with the anger on his face, and perspiration dripped from his chin into his lap. “You think I don’t run a clean kitchen? You think I haven’t studied and practiced meticulous food safety my entire freaking life?!”

  Hogan kept her voice calm as she got up to refill his cup. “That’s not what I said. But I want you to be prepared for the possibility that something did get into the food—something none us could have been prepared for.”

  She placed the full cup of water on the table in front of him. He eyed it, then took a drink—a long, full gulp—and managed to hold it down.

  “It still means I poisoned everyone.”

  “It might not be related to the food at all.” But Hogan wasn’t sure she believed that. Yes, it could have been bacteria in the water filtration system at Progress Base, but here in Ares City? The most obvious common thread was Trevor’s food—and that broken glass jello had been particularly awful.

  She stood up and offered her hand to help him to his feet. “But in case we need to know what each habitat has that’s safe to eat . . .”

  Trevor emptied the cup and accepted Hogan’s help as he climbed unsteadily to his feet. “Sure. Let’s see what we have to ration, so we don’t all starve to death.”

  They were nearly out of the rec room when the wall-sized screen beeped. Hogan left Trevor leaning against the doorjamb as she hunted for the remote and then accepted the comms request. Miranda’s face filled the screen, with Martin pushing into the frame. They both looked pale and exhausted from dehydration and illness, but their cheeks were flushed with excitement.

  “Commander?” Miranda looked like she was about to burst out of her skin.

  “Yes,” Hogan answered warily. “Got a cure for everybody yet?”

  “No, no cure.” Martin almost choked on his words as he laughed. “It looks like it just needs to run is course, so to speak. But we’ve isolated what happened. And, uh . . .”

  He glanced at Miranda.

  “Commander?” Miranda said. “We’d like to report that we believe we have found proof of life on Mars.”

  10

  It had been a mad scramble for information in the hours following the announcement, but there were few answers. Life on Mars! Despite Miranda and Martin’s excitement, the findings were still preliminary.

  Word spread like wildfire through Ares City, and Hogan found herself repeating every few minutes that the colonists absolutely could not even remotely hint at this possible development in any outgoing communications. They’d individually and collectively given her their word, and so far they were holding true.

  Yusuf completed the scrub of the Progress Base bioreactors, water filtration, and the air recyclers, even though the local flora appeared to be entirely water-borne. Then he headed to Ares City to repeat the process there. The colony’s bioreactors weren’t yet producing enough spiruliza for harvest and their water filtration had been clear before the colonists arrived, but Hogan didn’t want to take any chances. Each habitat got scrubbed from top to bottom—to discourage any Martian bacterial colonies and to seek out samples of the stuff.

  Hogan still hadn’t notified Yan Kingsley or anyone else at the UNSC. She wanted more proof before she sent a message dropping this particular bombshell. She also wanted to know where the hell the stuff had come from and how it had gotten inside.

  Miranda and Martin scoured the path between the two habitats, digging into the ruts of rover tracks and bootprints, but they didn’t find anyplace microbial life could have survived in the harsh conditions of Mars.

  Next came a thorough inspection of the exterior of each habitat module at Progress Base and Ares City, and scrutiny of each rover’s wheels and chassis and a thorough vacuuming of the interiors. Nothing. The colonists’ landing craft yielded similar results.

  Hogan was beginning to question Miranda and Martin’s findings in the lab. Just because they’d isolated something they hadn’t seen before didn’t automatically mean the bacteria was local. The new bacteria—which Miranda had nicknamed Mars bazonga—wasn’t alien in appearance. M. bazonga could have hitched a ride to Mars inside one of Trevor’s crazy spice concoctions, though every ingredient was supposed to have been irradiated and sterilized prior to travel.

  So Hogan was getting frustrated. She and Miranda were now retracing the steps of the rover tour they’d given the colonists. They were looking for a microscopic needle in a planet-sized haystack.

  Hogan was in the driver’s seat as she piloted UNSC Rover 1. Trevor sat quietly in the passenger seat while Miranda and Trent were in the back cabin, and their giddy chatter combined with the hangover from Hogan’s recent gastrointestinal adventure wasn’t making for a particularly steady mission. But Hogan kept her gaze forward and tried not to get too excited about what they might find.

  Working backwards, they drove first to the Hermes 3 memorial, but there was no solemnity to this visit. Miranda barely waited for the airlock to depressurize before she was out of the vehicle and approaching the cairn with a sampling box. No one had walked around the memorial on the colony tour, but it was possible the rovers had picked up something.

  Hogan winced as Miranda crawled over the cairn and took samples from different points. There was no dignity to this task, but they had to rule out the fallen astronauts as a source. Hogan simply wished Miranda would do a better job of containing her glee over the comms as she stomped around the memorial with her kit.

  “How soon until we know something?” Trevor asked as Miranda stepped back inside the rover’s small airlock.

  “I’m not sure.” Hogan kept her eyes on the cairn. She wondered what Marla, buried under so much rock, would have made of all this—the colonists, the excited hunt for microbial life, Hogan’s dalliance with Trevor. She missed her friend. “We’ll get everything back to the lab, and Martin and Miranda will go to work.”

  Trevor leaned closer. “Thanks for letting me come along. Even if we don’t find anything, this is exciting. Historic.”

  Hogan was surprised by the sting of tears, and she wiped at her eyes. “I had to practically strap Grigori to the bed to keep him from chasing after us on foot!”

  Everyone wanted to come out on this particular field trip, but someone had to stay home and keep scrubbing the habitats. In the end, Hogan and Mark had volunteered two members of each habitat for the rover and ordered the others to remain behind.

  “I’m telling you, it’s beginner’s luck!” Trent was visibly bouncing in his seat. “Mission after mission, and all the robots and probes and everything, you’ve been looking for decades, right? And then we get here, and bam! Right out of the gate!”

  They repeated the process at the sites where Hermes 5 had drilled core samples over the past year. Trent and Trevor helped Miranda outside the rover, and Hogan kept a close eye on the colonists to make sure no one was accidentally contaminating their collections. But she nee
dn’t have bothered. Everyone followed protocols to the letter.

  And the collection kits were stacking up. The vehicle was slower with the extra weight, and the hours were wearing down even Trent’s enthusiasm.

  There was one stop left: the lava tubes in the shadow of Pavonis Mons.

  Hermes 3 and Hermes 5 had only generally explored these lava tubes, but they’d taken samples and had a look around. If there was microbial life here, Hogan assumed they would have identified it already.

  The colonists and astronauts piled out of the rover and spread out. Hogan took a few samples from where she remembered spotting April doing some sightseeing. Trent was following Mark’s tracks, and Miranda retraced her own steps and those of the other colonists.

  Trevor was hunched down taking a soil sample at the mouth of the cave. Hogan headed in his direction.

  “You’ll want a buddy to go inside with you,” she said. “No one should venture anywhere on this planet alone.”

  Trevor gestured toward Pavonis Mons. The volcano was a good distance away—too far to drive without considerably more in the way of provisions. “I’m trying not to get distracted by the volcano. And just the landscape in general. It was pretty overwhelming the first time we were out here.”

  He closed his collection kit and stood up.

  “And now?” Hogan asked.

  Trevor turned slowly as he surveyed the Martian landscape. “Yeah, it’s still pretty much the same. Overwhelming. Mind-bending. How long does it take to get used to it?”

  Hogan shrugged inside her suit. “I’ll let you know when that happens. I hope I never forget this feeling, or this view. For you guys, though, I don’t know. It’s a strange place to build a home.”

  “That, commander, is very likely the understatement of the century.”

  “And hey! This is where I fell down!” Trent announced from inside the cave. “Wasn’t it right here? I had dirt all over my knees and butt. I slid down here, I think, and you guys had to help me back out?”

  “Right!” Miranda jogged down toward him, her suit’s light bouncing with every step.