Mars Ho! (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 1)

by Jennifer Willis

  Mark held up a hand to stop Trent before he could plow forward again. “No, sorry. I’m afraid I don’t.”

  Trent shrugged, but then laughed a little. “Hey! That’s funny, the way you say ‘sorry.’ Are you Canadian or something?”

  “I am.”

  “That’s so cool!” Trent grabbed Mark’s hand and started pumping it, as if congratulating him on his country of birth. “I’m American, and so is Ric.” Trent gestured behind him with his thumb, not bothering to turn around to include Ric in the conversation. Trent leaned closer to Mark and whispered, “He thinks he’s going to bag all the women in the dome before we even get to the first elimination.”

  “Does he now?” Oskar raised his eyebrows and glanced over at Ric, who hadn’t heard Trent’s comment or was doing an excellent job at ignoring the conversation.

  Trent piped up again. “And Oskar is from Germany.”

  Mark turned to his bunkmate in surprise. The United Nations’ Mars Colony Program emphasized international cooperation in the planning and building of the future human settlement, but the Mars Ho show producers had heavily favored North Americans in the first colonist candidate pool. He remained skeptical of why the MCP would hand over something as critical as colonist selection to a reality show, but then he remembered all of the branded clothing items and toiletries. Everything had a price.

  Oskar dipped his chin. “You’re wondering where the accent went? Very many years at international schools. English is the language of business and academia, no? You learn to speak it well.”

  “It’s just the five of us in here,” Trent offered to no one in particular. Mark found the kid’s gracelessness annoyingly endearing. “Five men each in two bunk rooms, plus a third with just four. The women have three bunks of six.”

  Trent glanced over at Ric, who was still ignoring them. Trent lowered his voice again. “No way he hooks up with all eighteen of them. I mean, the time commitment alone—”

  “I get it.” Mark waved him off.

  Oskar nodded toward the third bunk where an olive-skinned man lay stretched out on the lower bed, flipping through digital pages on his Mars Ho-issued tablet.

  “That’s Trevor,” Oskar told Mark. Trevor raised his hand in a half-wave without looking up. Oskar raised his voice a notch. “Avaz, was it?”

  “Azam,” Trevor replied, his eyes still on his screen.

  “Like Shazam!” Trent struck a pose that Mark assumed was meant to evoke a superhero. But with his feet wide and his hands on his hips, Trent looked even skinnier.

  Trevor’s face quirked into an amused smile. “Sure, kid. Just like Shazam.”

  “Hey! I know where I know you from!” Trent said with excitement. Mark felt his stomach drop, but Trent was looking at Oskar.

  “Do you now?” Oskar replied with a playful waggle of his eyebrows.

  “Yeah! You’ve got that BlueChannel show.”

  Oskar leaned forward, as though sharing a confidence. “You’ve seen it then?”

  Trent’s cheeks reddened and his shoulders hunched forward as he looked down at his shoes. “Well, yeah, I, uh, I’ve seen a couple of the episodes. They’re, they’re very tastefully done.”

  Mark frowned, both at the sudden change in Trent’s demeanor and the kid’s description of Oskar’s online channel.

  Trent giggled. “Cocks Unblocked. It’s an awesome name, and I totally get it.”

  Mark barely concealed his shudder. Precisely who were his bunkmates? He decided to study the featureless gray slab of the floor.

  “Thank you,” Oskar replied, oblivious to Mark’s discomfort. “We put a lot of thought into each episode, the topics we explore, and the execution as well. And it’s a true partnership between Cecilia and myself, because—”

  Oskar’s words were lost in the sudden blaring of an alarm from speakers hidden in the ceiling. Trent jumped as the klaxon went off.

  “ATTENTION! ALL MARS HO CONTESTANTS!” An incongruously cheery female voice made the announcement at such a high volume that the words distorted and blended together as the sound bounced off the walls.

  “WELCOME TO YOUR NEW HOME! WE HOPE YOU ARE ALREADY SETTLING IN AND GETTING TO KNOW YOUR BUNKMATES.”

  Trent pressed a hand to his chest and grinned as he pretended to have a heart attack. “Geez!” he yelled to be heard over the loudspeaker. “Someone sure wants to make sure they have our attention!”

  Oskar chuckled at Trent’s antics, but Mark’s eyes were on the ceiling. He didn’t want to be distracted.

  The voice on the loudspeaker dropped the saccharine pretense and got down to business. “ALL MARS HO CONTESTANTS ARE REQUIRED TO REPORT TO GENERAL USE ROOM 1 IMMEDIATELY. CONSULT YOUR MAP OR FOLLOW ARROWS ON THE CORRIDOR WALLS. ALL CONTESTANTS REPORT TO GENERAL USE ROOM 1 IMMEDIATELY.”

  The announcement cut off as suddenly as it had begun. Mark’s ears were ringing in the abrupt silence, and he made a mental note to speak to someone in charge about the unnecessary volume. No doubt the PA system needed to rouse even the deepest sleeper, but there had to be a better way to issue instructions than by bursting everyone’s ear drums.

  Trent climbed up off of the floor, where he’d been thrashing about in the final throes of histrionic death. His eager grin returned. “You think they’ll have snacks?”

  Mark clapped him on the shoulder. “Sure. Why not?”

  Trent pumped a victorious fist in the air, then grabbed his tablet from his bunk. Ric maintained his air of robust nonchalance as he lowered himself from his top bunk, all the while continuing to make a show of his biceps and shoulder and neck muscles for anyone who happened to be looking. Mark wondered if Ric might be angling for his own BlueChannel show, Space Bruisers.

  Mark retrieved his tablet—a late-model Scroll made exclusively for Mars Ho by Google, according to the bright, multi-colored lettering on the device’s back cover. He doubted there would be any snacks. This was a competition, and Mark figured the producers wouldn’t waste the opportunity to exploit the contestants’ hunger, fatigue, excitement, and disorientation. That kind of drama and tension would make good television and would test everyone’s mettle right at the top of the show, too.

  “You think they’ll have cheesy balls?” Trent asked no one in particular. “I could really go for something salty. Or maybe it’s dinner time already? You know, they’re going to have to put us on Mars time eventually, right?”

  “Sure,” Mark said again, more or less automatically. “Why not?”

  2

  Lori sat in a folding chair between April and Irene at one of General Use Room 1’s six long tables of heavy plastic, three on each side of the room. Like the bunk room and the curving corridors, this multi-purpose room was an exercise in blue-gray minimalism filled with the sharp scents of off-gassing plastic.

  But this space was alive with orange jumpsuits.

  The color of prison, Lori thought. This orange was deeper and redder than the coveralls she saw on prison work crew on the side of the road, but she was already feeling a little claustrophobic herself.

  The room was quieter than she would have expected, even filled with thirty-two excited contenders to be the first colonists on Mars. Nearly everyone remained seated, eyes mostly front, though there was plenty of side-whispering.

  Conscious of the cameras and of the other contestants watching, Lori scanned the faces around her. She was impressed by the rainbow of skin colors, but there weren’t any national flag patches on the jumpsuits. These were the men and women with whom Lori might spend every day of the rest of her life. Would April’s spreadsheet be any help?

  She spent a bit more time looking over the male candidates. One of these men might be her partner. Her eyes lingered over a handsome and muscular Latino man, then sucked in her breath when he returned her gaze and winked at her.

  “Ric Vargas,” April whispered. “He’s in the top three.”

  “The top three of what?” Lori whispered back. It made sense that the candidates would enter the contes
t already ranked and sorted by technical qualifications, experience, congeniality, and ability to entertain Earth-based audiences. Did April have access to that information, too?

  “The top three picks of every woman in this room.” April nudged Lori’s shoulder while Irene stifled a giggle.

  Lori went back to surveying the room and avoided additional eye contact with Mr. Vargas. She was determined not to invite any flirtation before she had a chance to get to know everyone. So she looked at the familiar Smithsonian and National Geographic maps and prints of Mars on the walls and the long row of wide lockers at the back of the room.

  But when her eyes fell on Mark Lauren, sitting one table back, she felt the corners of her mouth twitch downward. He was just as handsome as she’d remembered, but he also had the same rigid bearing—sitting perfectly upright, his tablet squared to the table edge, his hands neatly folded in front of him.

  Could anyone that anal be a serious candidate for the world’s first extraterrestrial colony? She had visions of Dr. Lauren in space, making routine checks of everyone’s personal items to ensure that every toothbrush bristle remained tidily in place and issuing demerits for improperly folded toilet paper.

  She swallowed a chuckle, but wasn’t quick enough. Mark looked her way. Lori immediately sat up straighter, then slouched in defiance. If Mark noticed either action, he didn’t react. But he did give her a quick, timid wave.

  Lori tried not to groan as she looked away.

  “I would totally break off a piece of that,” Irene whispered. “You have dibs, obviously, but just say the word if you want to pass. I’d happily take that off your hands.”

  Lori turned sharply to Irene, a rebuke poised on her tongue. This competition was not a meat market! She’d worked hard to get this far, and she assumed the other contestants had done the same. Sure, this reality show had all the trappings of constant surveillance and video confessions and audience voting, but this wasn’t a game to Lori. Mars had been a dream since she was a little girl peering through her grandfather’s telescope, and she wouldn’t let her big chance be compromised by horny attention-whores.

  That’s what she wanted to say. What she said instead was more along the lines of “Oh, I, uh,” in long, drawn-out syllables, mercifully interrupted by the wide screen at the front of the room snapping to life.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of Mars Ho!” The perfectly groomed program host, Gary Nelson, beamed a bright, white smile that looked like it cost more than Lori’s college degree. “Welcome to your very first day inside the Mars Ho Candidate Habitat!”

  The candidates mostly behaved themselves during the inane pablum of the host’s welcoming statement, though there were some groans and not-quite-under-the-breath snide remarks about Gary’s immaculately casual hair. Naturally, every reaction was captured on camera for Mars Ho’s global premier, just a day or two hence.

  Nelson stepped aside and the screen revealed a man and two women in identical white lab coats as they stood behind a black table covered in clear plastic sampling bags. Lori worried they were about to embark on an embarrassing medical exercise. She’d been poked and probed to her absolute limit over the months of her application process, and she wasn’t keen for her fellow contestants to practice blood draws on her.

  But, no. This was geology instead.

  A ninety-minute lecture instructed the candidates in collecting and recording soil and rock samples from the Martian surface. One of the women on-screen even donned the top half of a surface suit to demonstrate how to close the sample containers and operate an ink pen while wearing silver-and-orange gloves.

  Why did everything have to be so orange? Maybe someone had gotten a really good deal on a bunch of burnt orange fabric or had found it especially easy to trademark the color—“Martian Brick,” she’d heard it called. If the Red Planet lived up to its nickname, Lori didn’t like the odds of the colonists contrasting with the landscape. They’d lose each other to the principles of camouflage as soon as they stepped outside the airlock door.

  The surface suit demonstration perked up the mood in the training room. Soon the contestants were laughing and cracking jokes, even teasing each other as they asked questions about airflow and temperature control.

  Lori didn’t let herself relax. This felt too much like the classroom portion of her SCUBA training in college. The other kids were rowdy and goofed off and missed critical information—information that could save their lives if they got into trouble at depth. No one had had to learn that lesson the hard way during their certification dives—the other students just followed the Dive Master around and mimicked his movements without any skilled autonomy. Lori doubted they knew how to check their own tank levels.

  A pressure suit wasn’t much different than SCUBA gear, Lori figured. The coming exercise was all about collecting rocks, but the fact that they had to do it in pressurized suits got her attention.

  The lecture concluded, and everyone was abuzz with team assignments and working out instructions for donning their pressure suits.

  Lori ducked away from eager conversations about getting their first tastes of Mars and friendly wagers on the outcome of the exercise. She registered her assignment to Gamma Team—which, she noted glumly, also included Mark Lauren. But April was on Gamma, too, and she took some comfort in that.

  She made her way to her assigned locker at the back of the room.

  Inside, she found an orange, cream, and silver pressure suit—complete with heavy boots, gloves, and her very own space helmet—along with a box labeled, “EXERCISE 1: GEOLOGY.” Other boxes and bags of various sizes were pushed to the back of her locker’s top shelf, probably kits for future exercises. Lori had a pretty clear idea that this was more than a simple field trip. The competition was underway, and every step could get her that much closer to Mars.

  She was tempted to reach for the other containers, just to look at their labels to get an idea of what might be coming next. Would it be cheating if she just had a peek?

  “Hernandez!” barked one of the lab-coat women on the screen at the front of the room. The excited conversation fell silent.

  “Jacki Hernández!” the woman shouted again. “Do not tamper with the additional containers in your locker.”

  “No, I was just . . .” Four doors down from Lori’s locker, Jacki stammered, her brown cheeks flushing pink as she gestured toward the screen with a green-topped cylinder she’d pulled from her locker. Lori tried to read the label on the container’s side, but the print was too small and too far away. “I thought maybe we might need—”

  “Put the container back immediately.” The instructor’s stern features were accentuated by the pull of the tight bun high on her head. “Immediately,” she repeated.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Jacki placed the offending container back on the locker shelf and gave it a hard shove toward the back.

  “Man.” April kept her voice low as she lifted her giant boots out of her locker and dropped them on the floor. “I didn’t think they’d be so strict right up front. But it makes sense, I suppose.” April walked over to one of the classroom tables and dragged it across the floor toward the lockers, ignoring the squeal of the metal feet on the concrete slab. She piled her suit, helmet, and boots on top and invited Lori to share the space.

  “Like how they’re doing the instructions via video feed.” April stepped into the legs of her suit and then leaned against the table to shove her feet into her boots. “We’re going to be far away and sometimes cut off. We won’t have real-time communications, like we’ve got today. They need to make sure we can follow instructions, to the letter.”

  Lori was a step behind April in pulling on her own suit. She attached her boots to the legs of her suit and waited for the air seal to lock. It took a couple of tries. “But we’ll need to be able to think for ourselves, too.”

  “Well, sure.” April worked her arms into her suit. “But that’ll come later.”

  Lori kept an eye on April as they went through a d
ozen additional steps to get their suits sealed up tight. Just like SCUBA, she thought, to make sure your buddy’s gear was in working order.

  Everyone left their helmets for last. They split into their four teams and prepared to march off to four different airlocks. Lori thought they all looked rather impressive in their suits on their first day of competition. But then Ric Vargas caught Lori’s eye again, and again he winked at her just before he pulled on his helmet and rotated the pressure seal into the locked position.

  Flustered and annoyed—and annoyed about being flustered—Lori pulled her hair back beneath the silver cowl she found tucked inside her helmet. She walked across the floor toward the other members of Gamma Team and felt four inches taller in her massive boots, though her movements were sluggish and ungainly beneath the suit’s many layers of protection. It didn’t help that she’d not eaten anything since her meager breakfast, just a few bites of toast and egg against the rabid butterflies in her stomach.

  But it was the close proximity and attention of the men that unsettled her the most. Everyone was checking everyone else out. It didn’t matter that the pressure suit wasn’t doing anyone’s physique any favors. Gamma Team was suddenly no better than a bunch of over-eager singletons at an astronaut bar.

  It was over with Charlie, Lori reminded herself. There was no going back. It was one last Earthside fling before Lori rocketed away in the direction of her dreams.

  Now she had to focus. April and Irene seemed to think successful candidates would need to not only master each skills test, but find a mate as well. They were competing to be colonists, and colonization meant making babies. Irene had decided to choose the male candidate she was most physically attracted to and not worry about long-term compatibility—she’d have one partner for sex and everyone else for companionship.

  Lori wasn’t so sure. She felt ridiculous worrying about being untrue to an ex-boyfriend, but in the space of a few hours she’d already seen one man naked and had another wink at her, twice. Maybe life in the dome was just a televised meat market.