She lowered her helmet into place and felt instantly like she was wearing a fishbowl. Her ears filled with the sounds of her own breathing and heartbeat. Every footstep was a monstrous thud. But then she activated her suit’s radio and her isolated world filled with the enthusiastic and nervous chatter of her teammates.
“Gamma Team!” One of the candidates raised and arm and waved. Lori read the name “PASSOTA” in bold black letters on the breast of the woman’s suit.
“I’m Seema,” she continued. “I have a degree in geology. I nominate myself as leader of this expedition.”
“Not that you’re being pushy or anything,” another voice broke in. Lori looked around at the seven other figures and identified the trash-talker as someone named “AVALOS.”
“Someone’s got to take charge, Marisol,” Seema replied. “It might as well be me.”
There was more grumbling but no strong objections. Seema led Gamma Team out of the multipurpose room and along the curving corridor to Airlock 3.
Apparently bent on doing everything herself, Seema stationed herself in front of the airlock door and pivoted awkwardly to look at the others. “Everybody set?”
The rest of the team—Lori, April, Mark, Marisol, and three others Lori could so far identify only by the names NARA, EGUCHI, and TAELMA emblazoned on their suits—answered in the affirmative.
“Okay, so when you see a green light, like this,” Seema gestured to the wall-mounted panel. “That means the airlock is pressurized. When it’s red, it’s in vacuum.”
“Seriously? Are you Professor Airlock now, too?” Marisol protested.
Seema sighed and pressed a large button below the airlock panel and stepped out of the way as the door swung open.
Gamma Team crammed into the airlock compartment. The space was no bigger than the passenger van Lori and her team would ride in to swim meets, and the eight candidates bumped and scraped against each other as Mark closed and sealed the door behind them.
“Anybody feeling claustrophobic?” April’s voice came over the comms, followed by someone’s nervous laughter.
“Cut the chatter!” Seema’s voice was harsher than necessary. She took an audible breath and forced a smile onto her face.
Gamma’s leader was just as anxious as the rest of the team.
“Okay,” Seema announced in a more relaxed tone. “Everyone ready to go rock hunting on Mars?”
“Hell yeah!” someone cheered. Lori thought it might have been TAELMA.
Seema activated the airlock’s outer hatch, and the door slid open. There was a collective intake of breath as the contestants all got their first glimpse of “Mars.”
To Lori’s left, the man named EGUCHI groaned. “It looks just like it did last week.”
“Well, sure,” Marisol replied as Seema and April filed through the open airlock doorway. “It’s still just Arizona. Did you expect they’d spray-paint everything red?”
Stepping out into the Sonoran Desert—the Mars Ho stand-in for Mars—felt like nothing short of the real thing. Lori tried to imagine each footstep at one-third her present gravity. She kept her breathing steady and even, to conserve her air supply. She tried to ignore the desert brush and cacti she had to skirt around as she followed her team leader across the dry landscape.
The Arizona air was perfectly breathable, but their suits were running off of their built-in supplies of air, water, snacks, and other resources for the duration of the exercise. Lori wasn’t sure what the “other resources” might be, and she wondered about the fact that they hadn’t been equipped with “space diapers”—neither were there any Mars-themed port-a-potties nearby.
One thing was certain: Anyone cracking their suit’s seal outside the biodome would be automatically disqualified and removed from the contest. Such an action would result in nearly instant death on Mars, and exposure here at home would break the medical isolation they’d all been under.
Gamma Team located their quadrant for study easily enough—thanks to a bright green Mars Ho flag planted right in the middle of it. Were the producers going to fly to the Red Planet to set up the colonists’ work for them there, too?
They spent their first hour setting up grids, under Seema’s direction. It was a straightforward process to tap the little posts into the dry ground and run string back and forth to segment the sections of dirt that had been assigned to them. It reminded Lori of the archaeological site she’d visited on an elementary school field trip. Jamestown, maybe? The archaeologists had been studying early American colonies, and now Lori and her team were playing at being Martian colonists studying a world far older.
Seema directed Mark and Marisol in laying out the team’s four-by-eight-meter grid and then had them divide the area into thirty-two smaller sections, with each team member responsible for four squares of dirt and rock.
Lori followed Seema’s instructions to the letter. She would be a good little colonist. She would get used to using the metric system. She wondered how deep into the contest they would face a challenge that would require them to think for themselves, with no guidance from Earth and no one coming to the rescue.
Gamma Team went about their work collecting and labeling samples. Nothing about the exercise was strenuous or complicated. It was actually fairly monotonous. Scoop, fill, label. Next bag. Seema proved herself a capable if bossy leader as she moved down the rows, supervising each person’s movements and methods. Lori wondered if Seema was collecting any samples herself. Didn’t she have her own kit to fill?
Working on a series of squares near Lori, April passed the time describing the male candidates she’d so far had the opportunity to “collect and sample.”
“What are you talking about? When? How?” Lori replied at first, ignoring that they were on an open comms channel and were being recorded for the Mars Ho viewing audience. “We went directly from the bunk to the training, then into our suits and out the door.”
April glanced up from where she was kneeling in the dirt and shoveling another scoop of granulated soil into a clear plastic bag. “Waiting around before the strip search and before the dome entry? And all that time sitting around after I was already inside and waiting for everyone else to come through.” April gave Lori a friendly smile through her visor. “Want to know what I found out?”
Lori glanced around at the rest of Gamma Team, all going about their geology business without any indication that they were listening in. She spotted one of the other three teams about a quarter of the way around the dome.
“Don’t worry,” April said. “Nobody else can hear us. I’ve put us on a private channel.”
Lori was sure there hadn’t been anything about private communications in the Mars Ho handbook. “Not even the producers?”
April shook her head inside her helmet, though her suit barely budged.
“How?”
“If there’s any important news, we’ll hear it. Otherwise, it’s just us.” A coy smile lingered on April’s face as she knee-walked over to start taking samples from a new section. “So, do you want to know?”
Lori also moved over and started scooping up samples from a fresh section. “Why not?”
That was definitely the answer April was hoping for. She described spotting Solomon Sharp when she was brought in for her last medical check, but she hadn’t been gotten close enough to do more than make eye contact.
“He’s got a nice smile,” April said. “Although I couldn’t tell if he was just being polite or maybe showing a little interest.”
Ric Vargas was someone April had managed to “accidentally” bump into when she got herself deliberately lost on the way to her body-cavity search.
“We all knew what was coming.” April sealed another bag and labeled it, making deft use of her thick marker even through bulky gloves. “But what did they think I was going to do? Try to smuggle some snack cakes or a mobile phone in my hoo-ha?”
That made Lori giggle. She shoveled another sample into an empty bag and realized t
hat, somewhere along the way, the knot she’d been carrying in her stomach had eased.
“Anyway, I wasn’t kidding when I said he was a perfect gentleman,” April said. “Very polite, helped me find my way back to where I was supposed to be, that sort of thing.”
“He winked at me.” Lori labeled her bag with her section number and collection date and then stowed it in her kit box. She frowned at her black marker. On Mars, wouldn’t the ink dry out in the thin atmosphere? Someone, somewhere, had probably already developed a high-tech marker specifically for Mars. Or maybe they’d just use pencils.
“Well, well,” April said with teasing laughter. “Aren’t you the saucy lady of the dome?”
“I thought you wanted to be The Mars Ho. I sure don’t.” But Lori was smiling as she scooped more gritty dirt and filled more sample bags. April’s conversation kept her from worrying too much over technical details and focused her attention on making a new friend—maybe even her best friend for the rest of her life.
“Wait a minute.” Lori frowned across her current square at April. “Didn’t you tell Irene you’d merely heard that Ric was well-mannered?”
April made a movement inside her suit that looked like a shrug as she sealed up a soil sample. “I’m not sharing every detail with everyone.”
“I thought your spreadsheet was supposed to help all of the women.”
“Yeah, but there’s something about Irene. I don’t know.” April worked her scoop back and forth into unbroken ground. “I just trusted you right away, I guess.”
Lori nodded, but even if April had been looking right at her she might have missed the gesture. Lori was going to have to get used to being more verbal instead of relying on body language.
April went on to detail what she thought of Peter Sokolov: ”dark and brooding,” probably a deep thinker. She was curious about what kind of accent he might have, born in Russia and relocating to New Zealand as a teenager.
Of Robbie Gaines—whose large, dark hands, she said, were just as a strong and commanding as they looked and whose lips were marshmallow soft: ”confident in his abilities, maybe a little arrogant but hopefully in a good way.”
Of Lewis Muldoon, whose skin felt clammy: ”maybe he was nervous, or maybe there’s some underlying medical condition, but he’s graceful and considerate.”
Of Trent Jennings: ”sweet and only slightly annoying in his boyishness,” and “he looks kind of geeky, but that can be good.”
And Devon Springer: ”sounds more like a dog breed, but he’s got to be in here for a reason.”
“But Mark Lauren, he might be the best of the bunch.” April sealed up another in a seemingly endless series of sample containers. “Handsome and smart.”
April glanced down the line to where Mark was working on his assigned grids at the far end of Gamma Team’s quadrant. Lori followed her gaze but made an effort not to linger. She wasn’t sure Dr. Lauren deserved her attention. Besides, there was nothing alluring about a man in a space suit kneeling in the dirt.
“Strong, too, from the looks of him.” April smiled. “Nice going there.”
“But I didn’t, I wasn’t doing research!”
April’s laughter drowned her out. “You’re going to have to relax and have some fun in here, or you’ll never make it.” She paused and rested her elbows on her thighs. “I don’t think I could spend the rest of my life with just a handful of people with no sense of humor.”
Lori blew out a sigh and tilted her head in Mark’s direction. “If that’s your top priority, you might want to give Mr. Stickler a miss then.”
April dipped her chin inside her helmet. Was that a knowing nod? Lori couldn’t tell. “We’ll see how things shake out.”
They’d been scratching at the dirt and filling small containers with dust and gravel for what felt like half a day, though Govind Nara assured Mark it had been a little over three hours instead. And now it was finally over.
“I hope they got a lot of good footage out of that,” Mark grumbled. Govind laughed as they walked with the rest of Gamma Team back toward the biodome.
The day had been a warm one, even for winter in Arizona. The environmental controls in Mark’s suit had done a decent job of keeping him cool and comfortable, but his muscles ached from crouching in the dirt. He’d also had a buzzing pest of an itch on the tip of his nose since just a few minutes into the exercise—and there was no scratching in a space suit.
Moist layers of long underwear clung to his body and made his skin crawl. He sure hoped the clothing supplies sent to Mars would have better moisture wicking. Then he found himself wondering about laundry on the Red Planet. There would already be a detergent sponsor lined up, and scripts written for the colonists to read on camera as they stuffed their sweaty jumpsuits and grimy socks into the literally space-age washing machine on Mars.
“You think we scored some good points, collecting all those rocks?” Govind asked with a jovial tone.
Mark didn’t want to be a sour puss. He genuinely wanted to do his best and show the world—and the program judges—who he really was. But so far, with his underwear rules and his barking about personal chatter on the comms during the geology exercise, he feared he was making a poor showing.
And it hadn’t helped that Govind had tried breaking the ice by calling Mark out over the comms as the smooth-talking casanova who’d demanded that Lori Ridgway “say goodbye to her panties.”
At that remark, Mark had glanced nervously in Lori’s direction. But she didn’t react. She kept her head down and focused on her work. He respected that. He felt better knowing there was at least one candidate in the dome with some integrity.
Not like Ric Vargas, cracking homophobic jokes on the way from the bunk room to the classroom, and the smug, smarmy way he’d played off his humor as acceptable because “there are rules about faggots on Mars.”
It was a shameful truth that the Mars Colony Program wanted only heterosexual, cis-gender candidates in this early round. It was about being able to breed children, the familiar argument went, but it meant plenty of qualified, passionate people got left out—including Mark’s friend, Paula, a globally recognized geneticist whose application was rejected right out of the gate.
Mark was rethinking his decision not to fight Vargas in the bunk room. But breaking the man’s nose wouldn’t result in any justice and might trigger Mark’s own disqualification, even if it felt good.
“Well, that must have been incredibly boring for whoever was watching.” Oona Taelma appeared beside Mark. The top of the woman’s silver helmet barely came up to his shoulder. “I don’t envy whoever’s job it is to sort through all of that scooping rocks footage. For four teams, too.”
“I guess they could up the excitement by adding land mines or snipers or something,” Govind mused. “That would weed out the competition.”
Mark nearly stopped in his tracks. He hadn’t considered the possibility of outright trickery and real peril. It was a given that the producers would manipulate candidates and scenarios to heighten drama. That would draw a rabid audience just like any good soap opera. Govind’s snipers would be a ridiculous addition—who would encounter snipers on Mars? But that didn’t mean the producers wouldn’t put the contestants in physical danger.
Oona and Govind exchanged more absurd ideas about what nasties might be waiting for them—a cockroach infestation in the dome’s plumbing, laxatives in the food, poltergeists in the shower. Each suggestion was more preposterous than the last, a list of fraternity pranks. Mark laughed with them, and it felt good.
Seema stood by the open airlock door and waved the members of Gamma Team inside. “Check your enviro gauges,” she called out. “Sound off how you’re doing on air.”
Mark bristled when he realized he hadn’t been paying attention to any of his gauges or bio monitors while he’d been scooping up dirt and tossing rocks into bags. Stupid. They were supposed to treat the exercise like a real geology mission on Mars, but the authenticity of their s
urroundings only went so far. A dozen commercial planes flew overhead while they’d worked in the Arizona sun, and a trio of helicopters—probably Mars Ho camera crews or maybe infotainment media—had hovered above.
Halfway through the exercise, Oona had even shouted out something about a drone, but either she’d been joking or the thing disappeared by the time Mark looked up. What he did spot, though, was the roof of the production facility, The Ranch, peeking above a rocky outcropping.
“One twenty-nine!” Oona called out beside him, followed by Govind: “Two zero one.”
“I’m at one nine three,” Marisol added. The numbers didn’t mean all that much to Mark. He was busy watching Lori as she stepped into the airlock ahead of him. All during the exercise, he hadn’t had any success trying to catch her eye. Was she avoiding him? Her voice was clear enough when she read off her own air level—two-point-six-five. No trace of anger. But it was impossible to read body language in these suits.
When it was his turn, he had to remind himself how to check his air. “Uh, three-point-one-seven.”
“Our steadiest breather,” Seema replied with a hint of congratulations. “Looks like you’re the calmest of the bunch.”
“That’s because he wouldn’t talk to anybody.” Marisol moved deeper into the airlock and pressed her back against the wall to make room. “Kind of rude, if you ask me.”
“Right, we’ll debrief later.” Seema waited for Govind, Mark, and Oona to step into the airlock and then came through after them. She pulled the heavy door closed behind her. “Let’s just get inside and get out of these suits.”
There was a loud thunk as the heavy door hit the sealing mechanism and didn’t engage.
Seema tried again. She grabbed the door’s inner bar with both hands and bent her knees to use her bodyweight to pull the door shut. There was another loud thunk as the door bounced away from the seal instead of locking.
“Can somebody help me with this?” Seema dropped her center of gravity and pulled on the door one more time, with the same results. Govind and Oona grasped the bar with her, and the three of them gave the door a solid yank. This time the door made a loud, clanging sound as it rebounded.
Mars Ho! (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 1) Page 4