Lovers and Lunatics (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 2)

by Jennifer Willis

  The producer was all business, and not particularly friendly—but not especially unfriendly, either. Gary wondered what it would take for her to loosen up and enjoy her first space flight, something the vast majority of human beings never got to experience. He wasn’t sure she’d even taken a gander out the Churly Flint’s windows to gawk at the majesty of the planet they were circling, or to consider their tiny place in the infinite universe.

  But Gary was also curious about what it would take for Hannah to unclench on a more personal level. She’d given him a glimpse at launch of who she really was, when she was freaking out and relying on him for reassurance. And then she’d asked about that horrible recording Rufus had made. If she knew the truth about that, maybe she wasn’t the DayLite pawn he’d suspected.

  Gary studied her movements, smiling when she tried to tuck a stray strand of her curly hair back into the tight bun she wore to combat the “mermaid effect” of microgravity. But the lock was stubborn. It sprung up and to the left, like a fuzzy insect antenna.

  Hannah frowned when she caught him watching her. “Help you with something?”

  “Nah, I’m good.”

  Hannah angled the tablet screen toward him again, and he read the large, digital letters spelling out the first of the Mars Ho promos Rufus had ordered.

  “Let’s just get through these.” She positioned herself behind the camera and started recording.

  “Whatever you want.” The Face of Space is here to serve. Gary pulled a tube of lip balm from his sleeve pocket and applied some salve to his dry lips.

  3

  “And we are go for capture . . . Four minutes, thirty-seven seconds out.” Dana Jackson’s voice filled the close control cabin and sounded simultaneously over Hannah’s headset.

  Hannah checked the tablet computer that served as her dedicated mobile control board for any echo or feedback on the audio portion of her recording. All the levels looked good.

  Dana sat in one of five identical chairs inside the dim, circular cabin, but she wasn’t front and center. The pilot, Brett, had the seat directly in front of the sectional windows that made up the ship’s forward bubble. To Hannah, sitting above and behind him at a nearly 180-degree offset to his orientation, Brett was a slender silhouette against a rapidly approaching luminescent satellite. If he hadn’t been upside-down from her point of view, he might have looked like a tourist standing before one of the rose windows inside National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

  The captain sat to Brett’s right, her chair nearly perpendicular to his as she faced a bank of monitors. The one other crew member, a guy named Manny who carried the sufficiently broad title of “tech,” was strapped into the seat to Brett’s left and focused on his own set of screens.

  Gary, occupying the seat nearest Hannah and in her same plane of orientation, started humming again. No one else in the cabin seemed to notice—or if they did, they didn’t mind. Hannah thought she even caught Dana looking to Gary with a nodding smile.

  “How are we doing on approach?” Dana asked over the comms, though they were all sitting within a couple of meters of each other.

  “Approach is good,” Brett replied. His hands were steady on the joystick mounted to the dashboard. There was an impressive array of instrument panels and displays in front of each of the five control stations. Hannah kept an eye on the central monitor in front of her, showing a feed from one of the ship’s external cameras.

  Hannah had already set up her equipment to record video from each of the Churly Flint’s external cameras so she could capture every angle of the salvage operation. And she’d mounted a few portables around the control cabin and trained them on the crew to record every reaction, every word, every facial tic. She and Gary were making good progress with their work on the promos and expository clips, too. Hannah was determined to hit Rufus’s curve ball out of the park, so that he’d have no choice but to honor her contract demands once she was back on the ground.

  She would just have to leave herself enough time to consider what those contract demands should be.

  “Manny? How’s it looking?” Dana’s calm authority came over the comms like velvet cake. Hannah made a mental note to add an extended interview with the Churly Flint captain to her production list.

  “We’re five by five, boss. Y’all just bring ‘er to me, I’ll take care of the rest,” Manny’s thick twang filled the cabin. Hannah hadn’t yet nailed down the tech’s accent, though Gary guessed it was an affectation to honor Chuck Yeager—and then he’d rolled his eyes and given her an exaggerated sigh when she told him she had no idea who Chuck Yeager was. Probably another one of Gary’s favorite astronauts.

  Hannah checked the half-dozen tiny screens on her control board again. All the video feeds—inside and outside the ship—looked clean and strong. She’d have to review the footage on a larger screen later, but so far everything was proceeding smoothly.

  And it was all perfectly boring. As the minutes ticked by, Hannah began to worry she wasn’t doing such a good job after all, but she wasn’t sure what she could do to stir up excitement and drama in the midst of a routine satellite capture without putting herself and everyone onboard in danger.

  “Really gets the blood pumping, doesn’t it?” Gary commented. It took Hannah a second to realize he was talking to her.

  “Uh, sure.” She didn’t take her eyes off the video feeds.

  “I mean, we’re in space! We’re cleaning up a dead satellite. We’re helping to make a difference.”

  “We’re watching a three-person crew pick up trash,” Hannah replied flatly. “It’s not exactly Buck Rogers up here.”

  That earned her a sharp look from the captain. Hannah immediately offered Dana a shrugged apology. Dana went back to monitoring her own station, and Hannah wondered if she’d committed a fatal faux-pas with her host.

  “What I meant was, I’m not sure how we’re going to spice this up for broadcast. To make people want to pay attention.” Hannah glanced Dana’s way again but failed to catch her eye. She’d have to figure out some way to take back her unintentional insult if she was going to get that interview with the captain now.

  “Not living up to your expectations of the thrill ride of a lifetime?”

  Hannah grimaced when she realized the question had come from Brett. How long would it take for her to alienate the easy-going Manny as well?

  Before she could respond or try to walk back her comments any further, Gary’s voice came over the comms. “It’s hard to convey the importance of this work and the real-time excitement of the experience to a viewing audience back home. That’s true regardless of the subject matter.”

  “Right.” It was the only reply Hannah managed. She decided to keep her mouth shut and her focus on her control board for the rest of the operation.

  “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact,” Gary mused.

  “What?” Hannah replied.

  “The lunatic, the lover, and the—”

  “Yeah, I heard you the first time,” Hannah interrupted. “I just don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “People see what they want to see,” Dana answered for him. “You can find beauty and meaning everywhere, if you want to, even if there’s nothing there.”

  “Okay . . .” Hannah drew out the pair of syllables. “So I guess that’s a famous quote or something?”

  “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Gary answered. “Our employer, and his competition, have a talent for crafting televised reality to suit their own ends. Don’t you worry about Rufus. He’ll find a way to take anything you throw at him and still deliver precisely what he thinks his audience wants.”

  Hannah looked up from her control board. The Face of Space was quoting Shakespeare now? Added to his calm recitation of fuel requirements for payload lift back on the launch pad, the mystery of Gary Nelson was deepening. Hannah wasn’t sure she wanted to listen to musings on The Bard’s seminal works and theories of orbital mechanics for
however many days this assignment might last, but Gary had piqued her curiosity.

  She craned her neck, trying to make eye contact with Gary, but his gaze was firmly forward on the wayward satellite slowly approaching on the other side of the ship’s segmented windows.

  “Anyway, it might not look like much up here, even from where you’re sitting,” Dana said. “The last thing we want is drama. Because when you’re really in it, everything is pretty much slow and careful. Or you’re dead.”

  “Coming into grappling range now,” Brett said over the comms. “Manny?”

  “Yeeesss,” came Manny’s drawling reply. “Come to papa.”

  Gary’s humming resumed.

  “What is that?” Hannah asked.

  “Sorry?” Gary replied.

  “That song. Some sci-fi theme music? I can’t place it.”

  Gary chuckled. “Was I humming again? Probably Magic Carpet Ride.”

  A pair of robotic arms sprung into movement on three of Hannah’s screens. From what she remembered of the ship’s schematics, the arms were located just beneath the control cabin along the extended cylinder of the ship’s main body. The three-pronged claw at the end of each arm opened as the derelict satellite came into range.

  Okay, so now she was feeling a slight thrill at the approaching capture. What had seemed an interminably slow process minutes earlier took on a new urgency as the Churly Flint closed fast on the dark gray, cone-shaped satellite—the Saakh-5, a defunct climate survey craft that was tumbling lethargically on an asymmetrical axis.

  Hannah turned away from her control board and looked out the window just in time to see the Saakh-5 fill the ship’s forward window and then pass quickly beneath into Manny’s awaiting robotic arms. Within seconds, she felt a subtle thunk reverberate through the ship. When she looked again at the monitors, she saw the motionless cone in the Churly Flint’s firm embrace. Her cheeks tightened with a genuine grin.

  Gary clapped his hands in delight, and Dana smiled as she bent over her instrument panel.

  “Capture success, cap’n.” Manny’s voice was cheery as he released the straps holding him to his chair and pushed past Hannah and Gary on his way deeper into the ship. “You just reel ‘er in while I get set up, ‘k?”

  With a quick glance at Gary, Hannah unstrapped herself, clutched her control board and gear bag to her chest, and prepared to follow Manny.

  “Pretty exciting stuff, huh?” Gary unfastened his own harness and pushed away from his seat.

  “We’ll see.” Hannah swam through the bulkhead partition and tried to catch up with Manny. As she left the control cockpit, she heard Gary humming to himself again.

  Closer to the stern of the Churly Flint, Hannah watched Manny slip his socked feet into a pair of tethers at the base of what she recognized as a docking control station—and then she quickly congratulated herself on not being as ignorant of space operations as Gary apparently thought her to be.

  And then she had to stop herself from wondering why she cared what Gary Nelson thought of her.

  She turned her thoughts instead to camera angles and glanced around the ship’s docking control module, a space that took up about 64 cubic meters along what Hannah had started thinking of as the bottom of the Churly Flint. There was more light in this compartment than there was in the control cabin, which was a blessing, but just about every surface and fixture here was a drab gray. In his dark blue overalls, Manny himself was the only real visual contrast. So far, Hannah hadn’t been able to convince any of the Churly Flint crew to affix one of the red and purple Space Junkers patches she’d brought up with her.

  While Manny busied himself with a pair of joysticks to manipulate the newly captured Saakh-5 satellite, Hannah reached into her gear bag for another tiny camera and mounted it to the wall above and to the left of Manny’s workstation.

  “Don’t let this make you self-conscious.” Hannah gave a gentle smile that she hoped would set the tech at ease, though he didn’t look the least stressed. He seemed scarcely aware of her presence as he focused on his prey’s final docking procedure.

  “Don’t let what make me feel self-conscious?” Manny flashed a sideways, grinning glance at Hannah. His accent wasn’t as thick now, and Hannah wondered if Gary was right about his speech patterns being artificial.

  She angled the camera to frame both his head and the instrument panel, then checked the monitors on her tablet’s control board app to make sure the new feed was clean. She pulled out another camera and attached it to the front of her green jumpsuit. This footage would be a bit unsteady—she was still working on her microgravity maneuvering but seemed to be getting the hang of it. And two feeds were always better than one, especially for reality programming.

  “How’s it looking, Manny?” Dana entered the ship’s docking control module and hovered behind him.

  Hannah moved to the far side of the compartment to make room for the captain, and for Gary who was close behind Dana and still wearing a goofy smile in the afterglow of the satellite capture.

  Hannah hadn’t yet figured out how to enliven the proceedings to boost ratings to Rufus Day’s satisfaction. She also couldn’t shake the point Gary and Dana had made about people seeing what they want to see, and about Rufus’s proven ability to wrest pretty much whatever show he wanted out of the footage she’d be sending down.

  “Uh . . . Not so good, cap.” Manny’s drawl was back. “I mean we’ve got ‘er. We’ve got ‘er good. But she don’t seem to wanna come all the way in.”

  Dana peered over his shoulder at the video screen. “No dock?”

  “No dock, check,” Manny confirmed. “I’ve been turning her round every which way, and I can’t seem to find the . . . Her docking mechanism is just gone. You can see where it’s supposed to be. It’s just not there.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Manny shifted to give Dana some room beside him. “And it’s got no power. If we can’t dock, we can’t make good on data retrieval.” He glanced at Hannah and then at the camera she’d mounted on the wall. “I can suit up and try for a manual operation, but that would be more of a breach than a benign dock, and I don’t think I could guarantee a smooth transfer—”

  “I get it.” Dana pushed away from Manny’s instrument panel and peered down the ship’s long, central corridor toward the control cabin. “Brett? Brett!”

  It took Hannah a second to realize that Dana was calling over the headset instead of shouting down the length of the ship. Hannah checked her control board to confirm that she was still recording the ship-wide comms audio.

  “Yo,” came Brett’s casual reply.

  Dana closed her eyes and pressed one hand against her temple. “Brett, do you see any other salvage ships in the not-so-immediate area?”

  “Hang on.”

  Manny looked up at his captain. “You’re thinking Sturbin?”

  Dana pressed her lips together and kept quiet.

  “Three ships in our same general orbit,” Brett said as he came back on the line. “Though none in visual range right now.”

  “And they are?” Dana’s voice was calm and practiced, but irritation tugged at the corners of her mouth. Hannah couldn’t tell if the captain was annoyed by her crew or if there was something larger afoot. She squared her body so that she was facing Dana directly with the camera clipped to her jumpsuit—and reminded herself that every member of the ship’s crew had signed a contract with DayLite Syndicate for precisely this kind of coverage.

  “Well, the Mary Mae is just about directly opposite us, working on a retrieval of the Yang Guang satellite. Then there’s Mister Frog, but they seem to be getting ready to go geosynchronous for the Njiwa-8 job. You know, the x-ray astronomy retrieval that we passed on?”

  Hannah turned to Gary. “Mister Frog?” she whispered. “What kind of ship name is that?” But Gary shook his head and kept his eyes on the captain.

  Dana’s mouth stretched tight. “And the third ship?”

&nbs
p; There was a long pause before Brett answered. “Well, the third ship, um, that’s the Midden . . .”

  Dana sighed heavily as her face turned to stone. “And what’s the Midden up to?”

  “Yeah, not a whole lot,” Brett replied. “They’re just hanging around not too far away. Kind of like a cat, about a quarter-orbit off—”

  “Dammit to hell!” Dana smacked her palm against a nearby row of supply cupboards recessed into the wall, then corrected her reactive backward float by resting her hand on Manny’s shoulder. After a loud, extended huff, Dana regained her composure and even managed to put a smile in her voice.

  “Brett,” she called over the comms. “Would you be so kind as to invite the captain of the Midden to join us?”

  Brett laughed. “At his earliest possible convenience?”

  “If I know Captain Sturbin at all,” Dana replied, “he’s expecting your call.”

  Dana glanced at Hannah and Gary and seemed to consider explaining the situation, but then her gaze fell on the camera attached to Hannah’s suit. Dana offered a tight smile and pushed off from the wall to exit the compartment.

  Gary wasn’t shy about cozying up to the amiable tech, while being careful not to block the wall-mounted camera. “So, Manny, who’s Captain Sturbin?”

  Hannah casually positioned her own body cam for a two-shot of Gary and the tech together. If Manny noticed, he didn’t let on.

  “Sid Sturbin.” Manny grabbed hold of the joysticks again, and Hannah glimpsed the robotic arms slowly manipulating the satellite via the screen in front of him. “Captain of the Midden, another space salvage crew.”

  “And, uh, is there some kind of rivalry between the two ships?” Gary prompted.

  Manny leaned away from his station and erupted into laughter. “A rivalry. That’s a good way of putting it.” He narrowed his eyes and went back to work on the satellite. He locked the Saakh-5 into place and magnified the image on his monitor, pointing at an empty mounting bracket and a square hole toward the craft’s rounded base. “See that there? That’s where the docking mechanism’s supposed to be. All we’d have to do is plug into that, do a little back and forth on the computers with permissions and protocols, and we’d be in.”