Mark pushed past Seema to step back outside and take a closer look at the locking mechanism.
“Okay, let’s work the problem, people.” Seema stood in the doorway looking perplexed.
Mark felt others crowd in behind him as he inspected the sealing apparatus in the circular jamb and the large silver latch on the airlock door. The sealing clamps looked fine to him, but there was an unmistakable crimp in the main latching mechanism. It didn’t look haphazard, either. This wasn’t the result of someone banging on the door too hard. He was half-way tempted to scan the horizon for snipers.
“Yeah, the main latch is bent,” he said.
“What?!” Seema stumbled out of the airlock. “But we’re low on air!”
“This looks deliberate,” came a familiar voice. Mark was surprised to find Lori leaning down beside him. While Seema spluttered and hurled non-specific expletives, and while most of the others hovered anxiously and with no clear direction, Lori remained calm and focused.
“Uh, I think we’ve got another problem.” April’s words were nearly drowned out by a loud hissing noise that seemed to come from everywhere at once. “I think I’ve sprung a leak.”
Govind checked the enviro display on April’s wrist. “Her suit’s losing breathable air, at an alarming rate.”
April tapped Govind’s wrist, and the color drained out of his face as he checked his enviro monitor. “It’s me, too. Oxygen levels falling really fast here.”
“Everyone, check your air!” Seema was practically shrieking, trying to enforce order when she had none of her own.
Mark checked his monitor. He was in the red, too. He turned to Lori.
“It’s all of us. Everyone’s losing air.” Lori offered a grim smile. “I think the first challenge has officially begun.”
3
Lori stood and surveyed the Arizona landscape. The sun was sliding toward the horizon after beating down on them while they toiled in the dirt. All around her, Mars Ho contestants were freaking out.
Marisol kept grabbing at the fastenings of her helmet, threatening to remove it. “I don’t care if I get disqualified!” she shrieked as Oona and Yoshiko Eguchi tried to calm her and pull her hands away from her helmet. “I’m not going to suffocate here on the ground!”
Seema stood inside the airlock, waving her arms and shouting for someone to just fix the problem already so they could all go inside and not have to die on their first exercise.
Lori thought about asking April if she could turn the comms off.
Mark stood next to her, his brow furrowed. If he felt any panic, it wasn’t showing.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“We need to get everyone inside the airlock, and see if we can force it closed.”
April approached them. “I’ll get everybody inside.” She took a breath, then shouted over everyone else’s panic and excitement. “Listen up! Lori and Mark have a plan. They need everybody back inside the airlock, okay? So let’s get out of their way and let them work.”
“Who put them in charge?” Seema protested. “What makes them think they know anyth—”
She was cut short by abrupt silence. April’s communications hack.
“Let’s all step inside the airlock, okay?” April’s voice was loud and almost soothing in its command. “Everything will be fine.”
The general comms sparked back to life with some grumbling from Govind about the inconvenience of the airlock malfunction, and Marisol’s continued fretting about not wanting to die.
“No one’s going to die,” April said with a smile. “Not on an international broadcast.”
Lori almost laughed. She looked quickly to Mark and suspected he had the same thought: there was no telling what the producers would or would not allow on their program. The candidates had effectively signed away their lives for a chance at Mars. Killing a few contestants might make for riveting television.
The bent airlock latch didn’t look insurmountable, but Lori wasn’t a mechanic nor did she have any tools other than a box of dirt and a plastic spade.
“Forcing the door from the inside won’t work?” she asked.
“We’ll get better leverage pushing than pulling,” Mark replied.
“Okay. Let’s give it a shot.” Lori was feeling warm and was starting to sweat. She wasn’t sure if all of her enviro controls were malfunctioning now—heating her body instead of cooling her down—or if it was just the stress of impending disaster.
Mark shot her a sharp look. They were on the wrong side of the airlock door. His lips parted, probably to order her inside so he could handle things on his own. Instead, he dipped his chin and motioned Lori toward the door.
With the others inside and standing away from the opening, Lori and Mark each rested both hands on the outside of the door.
“On three.” Mark took an audible breath and counted down. On his command of “Push!” Lori threw her full weight into slamming the door against the seal. Once they’d rammed the door shut, they leaned heavily against it to ensure that it locked.
It didn’t.
Mark pulled the door open again and peered into the dark compartment. From the wide-eyed panic on a few of the faces, Lori guessed the power had just gone out. She couldn’t blame anyone who panicked at that point, but the comms were quiet. April had probably shut them off again.
“No luck?” April poked her head out. “Anything we can do to help?”
Lori held the airlock door open wide to let in some light. The compartment would be nearly pitch black once the door was closed. “Any tools in here?”
“Something we could use for leverage, or as a brace?” Mark added.
Govind waved his arms deep inside the compartment, then started wrenching something loose. He passed forward a long piece of solid metal, and April held it out to Mark. “Will that work?”
Mark grasped the rod and weighed it in his hands. He looked over the outside of the door and the supporting frame.
“See any place we could jam that in and force the door closed?” Lori asked.
“This just might work.” Mark sounded distracted, his mind busy with the solution.
The comms buzzed back to life.
“Mark will save us!” squeaked Marisol, her eyes bright behind her visor. The other candidates squeezed in around her.
Lori was immediately irritated that Mark had been singled out for praise. Wasn’t she out here, too, trying to solve the problem while everyone else cowered inside?
“He was the kid on that nature show in Canada,” Marisol continued. “Didn’t you see it? Real outdoorsy. Like a lumberjack.” Her expectant gaze settled on Mark. “You’ve got this, right?”
Lori and Mark stepped back and moved the door into position over the seal. She leveraged her weight against the door, pushing with all of her might while Mark slid the rod through the door’s outer access bar and then shoved and twisted to thread it through the metal eye on the compartment’s external frame.
“Just to be clear,” Mark grunted between labored breaths, his face turning red inside his helmet. “I am not, in fact, a lumberjack.”
Lori laughed but kept pushing against the airlock door. “How’s it looking?”
“Just . . . a little more.”
Lori dug her boots into the rocky soil and let out a deep, pained moan as she strained every muscle to force the door against the broken latch. Black spots swam in her vision.
Mark sucked in a sharp breath and rammed the metal rod home. He stumbled away from the door and bent forward, resting his hands on his knees. His ragged breathing filled the comms.
“Did it work?” she asked.
Her answer came in whoops of joy from inside the airlock. Lori turned to Mark with a smile. “I guess so.”
Mark’s relief was plain on his face. He straightened and stretched his arms high over his head. “Not bad teamwork, Ms. Ridgway.”
He offered his hand, and she shook it. She liked his strong grip and the smile that came wi
th it. The man might like his rules, but he’d proven himself capable and clever and willing to sacrifice himself for others. He hadn’t treated her like a damsel in distress, either.
“Of course, you and I are both dead now,” he added.
Lori recalled the scores of waivers during the application process. Yes, she accepted the risk of exploding on the launch pad, or burning up in the atmosphere. Asphyxiating or freezing in transit. Blunt force trauma on landing. Cancer from radiation exposure. Death from some routine medical issue that couldn’t be addressed on Mars.
No one minced words about the dangers of the colonial mission. The best case scenario involved being uncomfortable and isolated, and then dying far from home.
She’d signed every piece of paper they’d put in front of her. Yes, she was willing to die for Mars. Neither she nor her heirs would sue anyone for damages, no matter what happened.
She just hadn’t considered she might die with both feet still on planet Earth.
Lori stared at the airlock while her teammates called out their thanks and congratulations from inside. She heard their weary relief as the compartment pressurized and the inner airlock door opened, granting them access to the biodome.
Gamma Team was safe, but she and Mark were goners.
Her enviro display flashed red. Her air levels were reading zero-point-zero-zero. The inside of her visor lit up with warnings and strings of numbers she didn’t understand. A computerized voice advised that life support was failing, that hypoxia was imminent—that she was about to die unless she got herself out of her suit.
From the look on Mark’s face, Lori assumed he was getting the same message.
“Well, I suppose that’s that.” She reached for her helmet’s sealing mechanism around her neck.
“Wait!” a muffled voice cried from somewhere in the distance—not over the comms.
Lori looked at Mark. “Did you hear something?”
“Don’t take off your helmets!” the voice shouted.
Lori looked in the direction of The Ranch’s hiding place behind the rocks and figured she was hallucinating when she spotted Hannah running toward them. Dark hair streaming behind her, Hannah waved her arms wildly as her shouts barely penetrated Lori’s helmet. Hannah reached for a small box clipped to her belt and her voice broke loud and clear over the comms.
“DON’T TAKE OFF YOUR HELMETS!” Hannah panted as she slid to an awkward stop in front of them. “You’re not out of air! It’s not real. Just take a breath and you’ll be okay.”
Lori’s fingers hovered over her helmet seal. The flashing lights and warnings about impending death continued to blare at her.
“It’s just part of the competition! The monitors are rigged!” Hannah coughed and tried to catch her breath after her frantic sprint across the desert. “You have plenty of air left, I promise! But if you crack your helmets open, you’re out. You’ll break quarantine. Keep your freaking helmets on!”
Lori dropped her hands to her sides and ignored the computerized voice still bitching at her about her imminent demise. “Are you even supposed to be out here?”
Hannah coughed again, and Mark rested a gloved hand on her back. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Hannah panted. “And so are you. So’s your team.” She smiled. “You saved them all, by the way. In terms of the challenge, I mean. And your team, Gamma Team, did the best.”
The flashing lights and warnings inside Lori’s helmet abruptly shut off. She took a deep breath, and the air was cool and clean. The temperature inside her suit had dropped, too, and she was almost comfortable again.
“Every team had an airlock failure?” Mark asked.
“Yeah.” Hannah pulled her long hair into a ponytail and secured it with an elastic from around her wrist. “That was the plan. Lull you all into complacency with a boring exercise, then hit you with a life-or-death situation which you were doomed to fail.”
“Doomed to fail?” Lori asked.
“Good job choosing the dullest task imaginable,” Mark said.
Hannah laughed. “You’d be surprised. There are others that probably would have been worse. When’s the last time you cleaned an air filter with a pair of tweezers?”
“So, everybody’s okay?” Lori asked.
Hannah grinned. “Totally, absolutely fine. No one was really ever in danger. The show, the experts—they wanted to see how you would react.”
Lori kicked at the dirt. “It’s the Kobayashi Maru.”
Mark turned and looked at her. “The what?”
“The Kobayashi Maru.” She shrugged. “It’s from Star Trek.”
Mark grimaced. “Yeah, I know what the Kobayashi Maru is. I loved the Star Trek shows. You’re talking about the test where Kirk cheated.”
Lori cocked her head and smiled. “It was from one of the movies, not the TV show. It was a no-win scenario designed to test Starfleet cadets—”
“To see how they’d handle failure. I know.” He blew out an exasperated sigh. “And it was the second movie. The Wrath of Khan.”
Hannah stood motionless, watching them bicker over an old sci-fi movie from before they were born. “Whatever. But yeah, they wanted to see how you would deal with it. A test of character. And you both totally aced it.”
“So if everyone was supposed to fail, how did Gamma Team perform better?” Mark tried to cross his arms over his chest but his suit didn’t quite allow it.
Hannah’s smile widened. “Well. Both Alpha and Delta Teams suffered one-hundred-percent casualties. Alpha had everyone inside the airlock, trying to shut the door while everyone suffocated. Delta Team was half inside messing with the door and half outside trying to break into the dome through a wall.”
“That would depressurize the entire habitat!” Lori exclaimed.
Hannah threw her hands up. “I know, right? Beta Team had an idea similar to yours, but they had four people outside working on the door. They got the airlock sealed up all right, but lost those four—that’s a greater casualty rate, so Gamma wins! Isn’t that great?”
“So we won, even though we failed?” Lori asked.
“Exactly!” Hannah tapped the wireless bud tucked into her left ear and listened to something Lori and Mark couldn’t hear. She looked back up at them. “Okay, so I need to get back. Technically, I’m not supposed to be out here. I just didn’t want you to scrub yourselves out by cracking your helmets, like some of the others did.” She gave a light laugh. “We didn’t think anybody would be able to fix the door. So great job!”
Hannah gave them a quick thumbs-up and then turned to sprint back across the rocky soil toward The Ranch. After she disappeared behind the rocks, Lori and Mark stared at each other.
“Well, hooray for us,” Mark said.
Lori giggled, mostly in stress relief.
A banging sound came from inside the airlock door they’d jammed shut, followed by April’s voice over the comms. “Hey, you two! Come inside already, yeah? Unless you’re too busy making out or something.”
Lori and Mark worked together to pull the metal rod out of its bracing position, then swung the airlock door open wide.
Mark gestured her forward. “Cool-headed, kick-ass ladies first.”
“And rugged, smart gentlemen second.” Lori smiled and stepped inside.
4
That night was a flurry of departures. First, there were the three who cracked their helmets during the airlock challenge, including Lori’s bunkmate, Robyn. Then came the meltdowns over their meatloaf dinner, hysterical outbursts from candidates who’d expected Mars Ho to be more summer camp and less Hunger Games.
Lying in bed, Lori heard Kirsten, Irene, and Leah whispering together as Irene freaked. She hadn’t counted on risking her life on the very first day, she cried.
By morning, Lori had lost track of how many candidates had scrubbed out of the competition—including Kirsten, who’d snuck out while her roommates slept.
Lori blinked her eyes open and squinted at the overhea
d lights and blue-gray walls. The framed Mars maps reminded her of where she was, and why there were no windows. She yawned loudly as she sat up, and accidentally punched the underside of the bed above hers as she stretched her arms.
“Sorry!” she laughed, but then she remembered that Robyn’s bed was empty now.
Lori went into the bunk’s bathroom to brush her teeth and splash cold water on her face. She’d slept hard but not well, her dreams filled with empty sample bags and hissing air gauges.
“Day 2,” she said to her reflection in the mirror.
She slipped into her dun-colored underwear, pulled on a fresh Mars Ho jumpsuit, and tried not to think about the cameras outside the bathroom. Instead, she considered Mark Lauren.
They’d worked well together, moving and thinking in easy sync without a whole lot of conversation. No wasted time. No wasted air, either.
Would Mars Ho’s panel of experts credit them for risking their lives to save their team? Or would their actions be deemed reckless and impulsive? For all Lori knew, she’d already blown her shot as a corporate-sponsored colonist.
Back at her bunk, Lori pulled on her Tempe Sportswear socks and soft Avid boots and imagined the chyron text that might run beneath the video: Antibacterial liners! Space-age moisture wicking fabric!
April was already dressed but still curled up on her bed, working on her tablet. Leah came in from the hallway carrying a yoga mat that she unrolled in the middle of the floor. She tightened her dark ponytail and lowered herself into a cross-legged position.
“It’s a total bitch-fest in the fitness room right now. I’d avoid it.” Leah stretched her upper body to either side. “Breakfast in an hour, according to the schedule.”
Breakfast. Lori wondered what might be on the menu. Dinner had been surprisingly good with broccoli and baked potatoes, but Lori knew she shouldn’t get used to it. Most of their meals on Mars would come out of a food printer. Even after they got some crops growing, their diets would be limited. No more ice cream cakes or wine and cheese, unless someone got crafty on the supply shipments that would arrive about every two years.
Mars Ho! (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 1) Page 5