My time’s up. That’s all I have to say. Except that I like the circular window in this room. It reminds me of an eye. God’s eye. Are we God? I like that we have the choice to look through it or close the blinds. I prefer having them open. I wish I could have one like this in my bedroom. When we were in orbit around Earth, it was fun to come in here and figure out exactly where we were above Earth and what time of day or night it was. The prettiest view I saw was a sunrise over the ocean. Apparently, we passed through sixteen sunrises and sunsets during every twenty-four-hour orbital period. I wish I could have seen them all. I also like that the surfaces in here are blue screen rather than green screen. Neon green would be jarring. I wonder what the Confessional will look like on the TV show. Anything could take the place of the walls, the floor and ceiling. I wonder if you’ll make us look like we’re floating in outer space.
Dr. Ava Rodriguez, Psychologist: Clinical Notes on Scarlett Love, Three Months After Mission Critical Left Earth Orbit for Mars
Scarlett has confided in me that she’s pregnant. Obviously, there is reason to be concerned about this. No woman has ever in all of humanity’s history been pregnant in outer space or on any planet other than Earth. We have no precedent.
Our trip to Mars is expected to take eight months. We have five more months before we get there. Scarlett is only three months pregnant. She has six months left if her pregnancy goes full term. Unless she goes into premature labor or has a miscarriage, she’s going to deliver on Mars. We won’t be ready for this. We don’t have an OB/GYN on board. Dr. Mia Trevino, our General Practitioner, and Dr. Tom Hooper, our Surgeon, are the only crew members who have any kind of obstetrical training. Let’s hope it’s enough.
Scarlett also confided in me that she was raped three months ago by someone other than Ace Whitaker, the crew member with whom she has a relationship.
She and Ace have been attending couples therapy with me once a week. They have been working hard on their relationship and seem devoted to each other. The BDSM behaviors they practice are problematic, in that they use them as substitutes for intimacy. I’m working to help them gain insight into those behaviors, especially in regard to Scarlett’s abusive father and Ace’s controlling, narcissistic mother. A baby complicates the situation, as they will need assistance in becoming healthier parents than they had in their own childhoods. In addition to this, Scarlett feels that the baby is not Ace’s, as they used birth control every time they had sex. She’s pretty much convinced that the man who raped her is the baby’s father.
Scarlett was not willing to tell me who raped her. She wants to make sure Ace thinks he’s the father, whether or not he is. I strongly advised her to have a paternity test done.
Dr. Gwendolyn (Gwen) Moore, Mission Critical Engineer: Computer Diary Entry, Four Months After Mission Critical Left Earth Orbit for Mars
Tonight’s meeting in the Constellation Room shocked me. In my mind, I had thought everyone chosen for this mission would be tech-oriented and serious. I guess I was thinking of NASA and traditional astronauts; not a reality show with the technical expertise to blast a group of strangers into space and land them on another planet, but with the primary focus on recording their struggles and triumphs for a curious, Peeping Tom audience back home.
Scarlett Love’s face has been glowing, I’ll grant you that. Tonight, she seemed happy as she announced that she’s pregnant, at the beginning of her second trimester. Back home, the show host, Max, was ecstatic. He jumped up and down and clapped his hands while congratulating her. He promised that the next cargo delivery to Mars will include baby clothes and lots of other baby things. We never see the audience when he talks to us, but the sound of thunderous applause broke out right after he congratulated her. They’re using sound effects now, I’m pretty sure, just to keep us motivated. Unless there is a live audience. But we never see them.
The idiotic stuff he said: “Your baby will be the first Martian! Think about it, Scarlett, you and Ace are like Adam and Eve. You’re going to give birth on Mars to the child who will be the very first human being ever born there. When Mars becomes as populated as Earth, your child will forever be mentioned in the history books as the original ancestor for a whole line of Martians.”
Scarlett smiled, but she looked uncertain. Who wants their child to be referred to as a Martian?
Fifteen minutes later, out of the clear blue sky…well, maybe we shouldn’t use that term anymore, as we’re deep into the darkness of outer space, far beyond Earth’s atmosphere…Fifteen minutes later out of nowhere, Jayden Keller reported that he thought he’d seen Ace raping Scarlett. He wondered if anyone else had seen an incident like that.
Scarlett’s face turned bright red. She looked up at the camera with fury and defiance. Then she turned on Jayden. She leaned forward as much as her harness would allow and shouted at him. “The type of sex we have is none of your goddamn business, you little tattle-telling weasel! Mind your own business!”
Max was delighted. Grinning widely, he clapped his hands together. “Oh, the drama! Is this not a perfect snapshot of the human condition? Sex and aggression—Freud would be happy to know none of that changes in outer space—love, pregnancy, betrayal. I know I’m looking forward to seeing how this all plays out! What about you, audience?” The man is a sociopath.
Next, we heard cheers, whistles and clapping from an audience we never saw.
My God, Scarlett could die in childbirth. The baby could be deformed or mentally impaired from conditions in the spaceship or on Mars. I couldn’t imagine giving birth on Mars. A planet completely inhospitable to human life. We can’t breathe its atmosphere. We can’t step outside without enclosing ourselves in a spacesuit and helmet. We don’t even know if we can grow food there. If the cargo ships stop arriving, we could starve to death.
Emotionally, Scarlett was a child. So was Ace. And so was Max.
Allison Jiang: Computer Diary Entry, Six Months After Mission Critical Left Earth Orbit for Mars
Things have gotten ugly up here on Mission Critical. Scarlett and Ace are still together, but no one trusts him. I think we’re going to do something about it. I’m not sure murder is off the table. It’s up to us to protect his child…and our community. We don’t have access to courts or police up here. We are the law. Maybe the team will wait until we get to Mars. But I’ve heard whispers that certain people may take matters into their own hands before then.
Scarlett Love: Computer Diary Entry, One Month After Landing on Mars
I’m scared.
Giving birth on Mars was one of the most horrible and frightening events in my entire life.
I had been totally conscientious about using birth control. Everything was going fine. Until I was raped.
He just grabbed me and did what he wanted. I fought back. But he was too strong.
Ace turned cold toward me after I told him I was pregnant. He suspected the baby wasn’t his. We’d been fanatically careful about using birth control.
We both wanted to be stars. It’s all we’d ever wanted since we were kids: to be famous, to be up there on the big screen. Ace went to college for Chemistry, but his real dream was to somehow become a movie star. Reality TV was the closest we’d ever get. Unless we became such huge reality stars, the audience begged for us to be brought back to Earth to do appearances. Then we’d have a shot at the big screen. If the show could get us to Mars, the producers could find a way to get us back. We were determined to make it happen and to make our dreams come true.
I was eight months pregnant when we landed. A couple of weeks before then, Allison Jiang helped me enlarge my spacesuit. She took one of the extra suits, surplus in case any of ours failed, and cut fabric from it to sew onto mine. Maternity spacesuits, a thing of the future. We were both scared that the stitches wouldn’t hold, but she did everything she could to strengthen the seams.
After Mission Critical established its orbit around Mars, we moved into the landing module attached
to it. Twenty-four hours later, we climbed into our spacesuits and prepared to jettison away from the mother ship and land on Mars.
As we hurtled down through the Martian atmosphere, g-forces pushed on us and pinned us to our seats. The landing was rougher than expected. I thought we were all going to die.
We survived.
When I stepped onto the red planet, my water broke. I was immediately plunged into a nightmare: the baby was coming early on a planet with no resources to handle it.
As Allison and Jayden helped me into the waiting rover, the red dust of Mars swirled around us. The ride to our settlement over the rocky Martian surface was brutally painful. Every bump felt like a knife ripping me open. Burning pain seared my abdomen.
Finally, our settlement came into view: stark white pods, the color of bleached bones, against a deep red soil and pink sky. The pods were connected to one another by what appeared to be hallways.
Tom Hooper grabbed me by the elbow and guided me out of the rover, across the Martian ground and through an airlock into the settlement. I didn’t want him touching me, but I was in too much pain to resist. Inside the first pod, he told everyone to help me out of my suit. I released the lock on my helmet. Someone pulled it off my head. Hands flew, peeling my suit away from my skin.
Suddenly, there was a gurney. Someone lifted me onto it and rushed me through hallways into the medical pod. It was the last one, at the far end of the string of pods.
Dr. Trevino and Tom Hooper started pulling things off shelves and out of cabinet drawers. There was a taking of my blood pressure. A monitor. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. The baby’s heartbeat. It was still alive!
Minutes later, Tom Hooper decided I needed a Cesarean. I didn’t want him anywhere near me with a knife. He was going to kill me, I knew it. And kill the baby. I screamed. And screamed. And screamed.
I was deranged. And desperate. I begged Dr. Trevino to save me. She said, “Sure. Sure.” Dr. Rodriguez came in and held my hand.
I kept calling for Ace. Tom Hooper bent down and whispered in my ear, “He’s gone.”
What did he mean, He’s gone!? Where could he possibly go? We were in the only place any of us could survive on Mars. We were all here. At the Mission Critical settlement. There was nowhere else he could safely go. This was it, the only human habitat on the entire planet.
They stuck an IV in my arm. I calmed down. I entered a world of haze. I understood. Ace was somewhere in the haze. I’d find him.
Then, suddenly, a baby crying. Loud, healthy, lustful cries. It was my baby!
Dr. Trevino placed the baby on my chest, just long enough for me to see her tiny pearl-shaped eyes. She told me, “It’s a girl. You have a daughter, Scarlett.”
I named her Carmine for the red color of the Martian soil. We were both named for the red planet. We belonged here.
That night, life took a horrible turn. Tom came alone to my bedside in the medical pod. The only sound in the room had been Carmine, gurgling and making sucking sounds in her incubator. Then, suddenly, there were his footsteps.
In the darkened room and swirling confusion of my drugged mind, I thought his face that of a demon. The wrinkles along his forehead arched into an expression of monstrous evil. He said, “Ace is dead, Scarlett. Everyone believes he raped you. Life is fragile here on this hostile planet. No one wants to risk a sociopath within their midst. We all voted. There was only one Nay; all the rest were Ayes. The men drove off with him in the rover, then unlatched his helmet and pushed him out of the vehicle. He’s gone, Scarlett.”
Tears flowed down my face onto the pillow.
Dr. Ava Rodriguez, Psychologist: Computer Diary Entry, Five Months After Landing on Mars
Even though we have spacesuits and technology complicated enough to outwit the environment on Mars that’s nothing more than poison to us without our intellectual abilities to fight back, at heart we’ve become little more than a primitive tribe. We took a vote the day we landed. I was the only Nay vote, the only voice of reason. The men murdered Ace with everyone else’s consent. No one wanted to have a rapist in their midst.
I don’t think he was the rapist.
Tom Hooper’s behavior has become increasingly maniacal and grandiose. He’s placed himself in charge. The women are becoming increasingly uncomfortable around him. He talks incessantly about how cool it would be for a man to become Adam, the father of an entirely new civilization. He claims he could be Adam here on Mars.
I think he is Adam, Adam to Scarlett’s Eve.
I spoke with my sister by videophone today. She told me weird things that don’t match our reality. She told me that people love the show. She talked about how incredibly romantic it was when Ace walked out across the Martian landscape, driven there by grief when he thought his baby had died. She said the world loves Carmine. She’s so beautiful and sweet. They love how well she’s thriving on Mars.
I started to respond. To tell her that Carmine doesn’t look well. That she’s underweight and not lifting her head yet. That there’s something wrong with her bones. I wanted to explain about the effect zero-gravity appears to have on developing bones.
The transmission went dead. A few minutes later, a message appeared on the screen: There will be no more videophone communication with Earth until the second crew arrives on Mars next month and the entire first season of Mission Critical: Journey to the Red Planet has aired. Thank you for your patience.
Max McKinney, TV Show Host: Season 1, Final Episode of Mission Critical: Journey to the Red Planet
“And there you have it, folks. Our brave, brave crew members have all become heroes. Scarlett Love, our inspiring young mother who fought against all odds to bring the first human life into existence on Mars. Carmine, our beautiful first Martian. And her father, Ace Whitaker. I want to cry. If only all of us fathers could be as attached and loyal to our children as he was. And, oh, what a tragic turn of events when he believed his thriving child to be dead! It pulls at our heartstrings and breaks our hearts. And our admiration goes out to Dr. Tom Hooper. Not only did he perform the Cesarean section that saved Scarlett and Carmine’s lives, he’s beginning to assert himself as a natural-born leader. Until next season, we wish our crew all the best! You are in our hearts and minds. You will forever be a part of us. Mwaaah!...I’m blowing kisses clear across the universe to all of you dear people, our pioneers on Mars.”
****
Dear Reader,
I hope you enjoyed this book. When choosing books, people often make decisions based on the recommendations of others. If you enjoyed Mission Critical: Journey to the Red Planet and would consider leaving a review on Amazon or the site where you downloaded it, I would deeply appreciate it.
If you’d like to receive updates on my other books and notifications about special book sales, please sign up for my newsletter here: http://www.marilynpeake.com/newsletter.html
My website: http://www.marilynpeake.com
Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/Marilyn-Peake/e/B00LZV77Q8/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1437976058&sr=1-2-ent
Follow Marilyn Peake on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Marilyn-Peake-Author-1649249058685297/
Follow Marilyn Peake on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marilynpeake
Follow Marilyn Peake on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/387792.Marilyn_Peake
All My Best,
Marilyn Peake
Mission Critical: Journey to the Red Planet Page 3
