Mars Ho! (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 1)

by Jennifer Willis

  Lori didn’t envy whoever’s job it had been to crawl around outside the dome, spraying grime on the camera lenses and caking them up with dirt. But as she made her way around the MHCH and scrubbed clean yet another camera, Lori thought the exercise was the perfect time for the producers to stage another emergency. Maybe a fire inside the dome or a simulated space radiation storm. But the camera cleaning chore was straightforward and entirely free of drama—and probably dull viewing for the Mars Ho audience.

  Life inside the dome had become quite boring as well, which was probably the point. Once the colonists got the grow unit on Mars up and running and secured their supplies and living quarters, there wasn’t going to be much to do that didn’t involve some kind of tedious habitat maintenance. Outside of emergencies and some limited exploration, the interplanetary pioneers would essentially be a cleaning and service crew. Until they got down to the business of populating.

  Before she turned in for the night, Lori pulled out her tablet and ranked her fellow candidates. Immediately after April was named a finalist, Mars Ho required the candidates at the end of each sol to name the seven others they’d most want to go to Mars with, and then they had to rank everyone top to bottom on estimated intelligence, physical strength, and “likability.”

  Lori tried not to repeat the same choices and rankings from one evening to the next, but she was always careful to include April and Mark in her “preferred fellow colonists” lists. Even with her residual hurt, it was an easy choice. April had been a friend from the start, and a vote for April meant Lori didn’t have to think as hard about the rest of her list.

  Mark was also a given. He was skilled and strong and undeniably attractive, and she held out hope that something might work out between them, down the line. Mostly, though, he deserved to realize his dream.

  Leah was normally on Lori’s list, too, because she was friendly enough and often had the guts to say out loud and on camera what everyone else was thinking. The only candidates Lori never included in her top seven were Oskar and Cecilia.

  They were getting used to the longer sols and the rotating duty roster of shifts in the kitchen, grow unit, control room, and general maintenance. Just like real Mars colonists.

  And they’d adapted to the simulated time delay in communications. At least a week had passed since Lori had talked “live” to anyone outside, and that had just been Hannah checking in. The candidates were getting a good sense of what the isolation of Mars would feel like.

  Routine kept Lori physically occupied while she planned and schemed. Playing the game wasn’t all that hard. All Lori had to do was flirt mercilessly—but tactfully, strategically—with every man inside the biodome. She doubted that the solicitous giggles, suggestive glances, and sly comments tinged with innuendo would ever come naturally to her. But she had to keep it up only a little while longer, maybe two weeks, before the candidate pool was whittled down to the final eight.

  She’d even been flirting with Mark. He seemed to welcome the attention, too. But he was playing the same game. Not every situation is as it appears to be, he’d said.

  With thoughts of luring Govind into the grow unit, Lori stripped out of her jumpsuit and slipped into her Sleepz sweatsuit-style pajamas. She wasn’t as shy with the cameras anymore, showing what she hoped was just enough skin to keep the viewing and voting audience interested. She switched gears to the problem of hooking Guillermo’s interest when she slid beneath her blanket and closed her eyes to sleep.

  It was dark in the bunk room when Lori opened her eyes. Had there been a loud bang? No, that had been from a dream about a pair of food printers trying to mate in zero gravity. Judging by the even breathing of her slumbering bunk mates, Lori was the only one awake.

  But something was wrong. She was cold. Shivering, even.

  The biodome’s regulated temperature—everything a pleasant 23.8 degrees Celsius—had plummeted.

  Lori pulled her blanket around her shoulders and crossed the chilly floor in her bare feet. She opened the door to the corridor and looked out, but she couldn’t see anything. Everything was dark.

  11

  Mark was on his feet in the center of his bunk room before he was fully awake. He wasn’t a sleepwalker. Only an emergency would rouse him to readiness like this, but looking around in the dark he couldn’t tell what the problem was.

  But he could feel it.

  He turned slowly and registered every detail of the room, trying to determine what was off. It didn’t take more than a quarter turn for him to realize that the room was far too quiet. Trent was snoring in the corner, and Oskar was mumbling in German in his sleep.

  But the air wasn’t running.

  He pulled on his jumpsuit and boots, grabbed his tablet, and headed for the door. He didn’t notice the temperature drop until he felt the cold metal of the bunk room’s door handle. And then he stepped out into total blackness.

  The power was out.

  The corridors had been lit every minute of every day, but now he had to feel his way along the curved wall to the control room. He’d walked this path enough times to find the control room in his sleep, but his heart pounded in his chest with every step.

  A power outage wasn’t a big deal for Arizona, but it was a critical failure for a Martian colony. And inside the entirely self-contained simulation of the MHCH, the outage could become a real problem for the candidates.

  If this was one of the competition’s unscheduled challenges, it was an awfully good one.

  Mark dragged one hand along the wall and kept moving. He opened every door he passed, even the other bunk rooms, and poked his head inside. Not a single light.

  He made some quick mental calculations. By his tablet clock, he’d been asleep just under four hours, giving him an outer time limit for the power outage. The first team would still be on watch and were probably scrambling to get the main power back up. But the auxiliary generators were supposed to hold enough juice for at least three sols, so why was the entire biodome dark?

  He pushed open the control room door and found the operations center blacked out, when a wall of screens should have filled the space with a bright, ambient glow. It was quiet, too.

  Mark felt his way forward. “Govind? Lindsay? You guys okay?”

  Mark’s foot caught the corner of one of the rolling chairs, and he went down with a painful groan as he banged his knee on the hard floor.

  “What? What’s happening?!” Startled from sleep, Govind shot up out of the chair and flailed in the darkness, colliding first with the edge of the desk that supported half the control room’s monitors and then stepping back onto Mark.

  “Hey! Easy there, if you please.” Mark forcefully removed Govind’s boot from his chest. He sat up and tried to make out any shapes or features of the room. “No generators, eh?”

  “What? Mark? Where are you? What’s going on?” Govind found the back of the rolling chair and held onto it.

  “Stay where you are.” Mark turned on his tablet and used the screen to illuminate the few inches around him. Where was the backup power? Govind’s wide-eyed face came into view, and Mark angled the light away from his eyes. “You okay?”

  Govind nodded dumbly and then glanced to a second bank of monitors where Lindsay was slumped over the desk, asleep. Following the weak light from his screen, Mark made his way to her and shook her gently. “Lindsay? Are you okay?”

  She was slower to rouse and less excitable. She blinked at Mark, her face breaking into a drowsy smile as she reached for him and wrapped her arms about his waist. “There you are,” she slurred. “Come back to bed.”

  “Lindsay.” Mark laid his tablet on the desk and shook her awake. “Hey! Lindsay! I need you to focus. Wake up!”

  Sensibility came into her eyes in the form of alarmed embarrassment, and Lindsay dropped her arms to her sides. “Mark? Is it shift change already? I didn’t think you had control duty.”

  “I don’t. What happened?” Mark didn’t smell any gas or smoke,
but that didn’t mean something hadn’t gotten to them. He held his tablet screen up to Lindsay’s face and then Govind’s, but they both looked fine, albeit sleepy and irritated by Mark’s scrutiny.

  “Mark, come on. What’s going on?” Lindsay asked in genuine bewilderment.

  There was no reason for the power to be out and for both backup generators to be offline. The Mars Ho Candidate Habitat, just like the real thing on Mars, was supposedly designed with redundancies upon redundancies. A total failure of power and life support wasn’t something that just happened.

  “Go wake the others,” Mark commanded. “It’s all hands on deck.”

  “What’s happening?!” Jacki’s fingers dug into Lori’s arm. She’d grabbed hold of her in the dark corridor and wouldn’t let go. Lori reached for Jacki’s shoulders to soothe her and try to ease her grip.

  “I don’t know.” Lori kept her voice calm. “We’re all headed to the control room. Just stick close. We’ll go together, so we don’t get lost.”

  “Okay.” Jacki sounded weak, but at least her grip on Lori’s arm lessened. “You don’t think it’s something really bad, do you?

  “Let’s find out.” Lori hooked Jacki’s hand inside the crook of her elbow, then felt her way toward the control room. She could hear the other candidates moving cautiously in the same direction.

  Trent was cracking lame jokes—his personal coping mechanism. Oskar punctuated the darkness with authoritative statements about the dome’s complicated circuitry, though Lori was pretty sure everyone around him knew he had no idea what he was talking about. When he started inventing statistics about how long humans could survive without oxygen, Lori elbowed him in the ribs.

  “Shut up!” she hissed into what she hoped was his ear. “We need everyone calm, not speculating on how long it will take us all to die.”

  “We’re going to die?” Jacki’s voice trembled.

  “Absolutely not. This is a simulation, people!” Lori called out, having no idea how spread out her listeners might be. “Worst case is we manually crack the airlocks and step outside, voiding our isolation. But we won’t have to resort to that, right? Because we’ll figure this out, just like if we were on Mars.”

  There was a low murmuring of what sounded like unenthusiastic support mixed with grumbling dissent. Lori chalked up the lack of commitment to rudely interrupted sleep.

  Lori pushed forward and worked at keeping her wits about her. The power was out. The temperature was dropping, and the air was growing stale. Despite Oskar’s dire predictions, the candidates should have a week or more of breathable air inside the biodome without the recyclers running. They wouldn’t freeze to death, either. Probably. But water would be a problem.

  Once they got to the control room, they’d get guidance from The Ranch—standing in for Mission Control on Earth. Even with the simulated communications delay, they’d have this sorted out in short order. An hour or two at most.

  Lori walked into someone’s back. “Hey! Keep moving.”

  “Sorry,” Trent replied. “We’re at the control room, and there’s no light here either.”

  “No light at all?” Lori recognized Leah’s voice and felt her move close.

  Lori guided Jacki’s hand to Trent’s elbow and then pushed past them through the doorway. There was a dim glow from someone’s tablet deep in the room—at least those things were still working, until their batteries were drained. A strong arm caught Lori around the middle.

  “Careful there.” It was Mark, his voice close in her ear. She tried to mask the thrill of his breath on her neck and his arm around her waist.

  “You were about to step on April.” Mark let her go.

  “And we can’t have that, can we?” Lori cringed at her sharp tone, but there was nothing she could do about it. Someone bumped into her back as the others groped their way into the control room.

  “No reason I can find for why we’re sitting in the dark.” April pulled herself up off the floor, where she had been rooting around beneath one of the banks of monitors. Her face was illuminated briefly by ghostly light before she shut off her tablet to conserve power. “Of course, it’s pretty hard to see. But the emergency lights should be on. I don’t get it.”

  “All right, listen up!” Mark stepped away to give himself room to be heard, but he ended up treading on Lori’s foot. She shoved him away, but not too hard. “Let’s be smart about this. Do we have everyone?”

  There was some giggling at the far side of the room, followed by a distinctly amorous groan.

  “Can we all just please pay attention?” Lori shouted.

  The sounds of impromptu hanky-panky came to a stop.

  “Thank you,” Mark said quietly to Lori.

  She felt him leaning close, and she breathed in the scent of his body. She understood immediately why somebody used the dark as an excuse to fool around in the corner. Any touch would be soothing and intimate, and the possible danger and break from routine had her own heart pounding. Lori resisted the urge to reach for him.

  Mark raised his voice. “Do we have everybody present and accounted for?”

  A disorganized sound-off ensued. Everyone was inside the control room, and Lori felt the temperature begin to rise from collective body heat. It was a small comfort. At least no one was sniping at each other or making time-of-death predictions.

  “This is nothing to be alarmed about,” Mark’s voice was clear and calm in the darkness, and it was enough to allay Lori’s anxieties. When Oskar started to object to Mark’s assumption of command, Lori elbowed him again.

  “It’s probably just another exercise,” Mark continued. “And we’ve likely got infrared cameras on us this very minute.”

  “Oh, crap,” Trent exclaimed in exaggerated horror. “So I shouldn’t be picking my nose right now?”

  There was a scattering of laughter, and Lori smiled. Mark had started the ball rolling toward reassurance, and now the others were chipping in.

  “As long as you don’t start picking my nose, you’re probably all right.” Dina’s voice.

  “Well, you know what they say,” Leah chimed in. “You can pick your friends . . .”

  Mark chuckled. “Okay. Good. Keep your spirits up and your minds sharp. Just like everything else in here, we need to treat this situation like it’s the real thing.” He paused. “I’d ask for a status report, but I think we all know what that would be.”

  “No lights, no power, no air?” April replied.

  “Situation Normal,” Trent said, followed by a chorus of, “All Fucked Up!”

  Mark loomed over the bank of dark monitors as April sat on the floor and swiped through apps and readouts on her tablet. Trevor worked the hand crank they’d found in the control room’s metal supply cabinet. He gave the crank another half-dozen turns, grunting with each revolution, and then placed it on the floor with a loud sigh.

  “Okay, how’s that?” Trevor asked. “Enough?”

  April scrambled to her feet and nudged past Mark to reach for a keyboard. She pressed hard on the start-up button, then whooped with delight when a single monitor sparked to life. After a few keystrokes, the overhead lights flickered on.

  She smiled. “I think we’re in business.”

  The outer corridor was still dark.

  “Found another one!” Trent entered the control room with a second hand crank. “In the kitchen, under the sink, if you can believe it.” He lowered himself to the floor and went to work hooking up the crank to another bank of batteries under the desk.

  Mark sat in an empty chair and watched April work. She glanced at her tablet while she moved through a succession of report screens on the single functioning monitor.

  The candidates had divided into teams easily enough—with self-identified leaders for each group, although Mark wasn’t thrilled with Oskar being in charge of checking life support. Lori’s team would have reached the grow unit by now, and Yoshiko’s group was assessing the communications hardware. April had no trouble issuin
g orders to Trent, Trevor, and Mark in the control room.

  Mark reached for one of the old-fashioned two-way radios Dina had found with an army of flashlights deep inside the laundry room supply closet—almost the last place anyone thought to look for emergency tools. “Yoshiko? What’s your status?”

  After a barrage of static, Yoshiko’s voice crackled over the speaker. “Everything checks out inside the dome. We’re suiting up now. These airlocks can be operated manually, yes? In the absence of power?”

  Mark tapped the back of April’s chair. She reached back for the radio. “Yes. Just keep your eyes on the gauges.” April skimmed a digital page on her tablet. “With the network down, I can’t send the instructions to your tablet, but I can talk you through it.”

  Mark thought again about the cameras. With no communications, the candidates couldn’t contact anyone at The Ranch—which made sense for a blackout simulation on Mars. But for a challenge to be monitored, the cameras would have to be running on a different electrical circuit, right? But nothing in the schematics April had pulled up indicated a separate power source.

  The hours unfolded at a frustratingly slow pace. Lori’s team worked to get the heating units running so the biodome’s meager crops didn’t freeze—and powered them with a single wall outlet that was miraculously hot. The air recycling systems were more difficult to bring online, as they were tied into the biodome’s main power and primary backups, all of which were still down.

  “I don’t understand it.” April slumped in her chair while the monitors flickered on and off. “Everything checks out. There shouldn’t be a problem.” She closed her eyes and tapped her fingers together.

  “What do you need?” Mark was feeling particularly useless. After taking charge at the start, there was now little for him to do. Apart from taking his turns on the floor with the hand cranks, he’d been relegated to taking status reports from the teams. “Can I get you something from the kitchen?”