There was a pause, and the sound of more ice hitting glass. “Reality is whatever I say it is, Niffenegger.”
There was another loud sigh—Hannah guessed it was Gary.
“April will be a finalist,” Rufus broke the silence. “She’s cute and capable, maybe a little complicated, but she’ll be a great source for drama and gossip once they’ve made it to Mars.”
“You sound pretty sure of that.”
Rufus laughed. “It’s my business to be sure! We’ll set ‘er up with a love triangle, engineer a few wardrobe malfunctions, maybe get her to, what did she call it, ‘sample the merchandise’ on camera?”
“You’re disgusting. I can’t believe you’d want to have any part of this filth. You’re taking something lofty and grand like colonizing Mars, and turning it into a dangerous joke.”
Rufus laughed again. “And you’re a spineless pansy. Do you even like women, Gary? I’m proud of what I’ve done here. You should all be grateful. You especially. I’ve brought together a veritable pussy buffet both in front of and behind the camera, but all you want to do is drink my booze and lecture me. A bunch of politically correct, idealistic bullshit. You can’t tell me you haven’t pulled aside a few . . .”
More clinking of glass, sounds of ice and alcohol, and unintelligible laughter masked the conversation. It wasn’t difficult for Hannah to imagine the scene in Rufus’s office. The bar service on the rolling cart Rufus kept along one wall. Gary in one of the lounge chairs, or maybe even on the same low seat she’d occupied just before launch.
It also didn’t take much to conjure the smug smiles and arrogant winks Rufus would have thrown as he talked about how much “perkier” one woman was than another. And Rufus had called Gary a misogynist dickface? No wonder he’d tried to throw Hannah off the scent of the tape, told her not to worry about it—all while painting Gary as the villain.
“. . . gotta be a real man, Gary.” Rufus rapped his knuckles on the desk, emphasizing each syllable. “You gotta be aggressive with these bitches, and they’ll respond. They don’t respect anything less. You gotta just get in there and grab them—”
“Enough!” There was a loud squeak of furniture, maybe Gary getting to his feet. “As to your earlier question, yes, I do like women. I respect my coworkers, and the colony candidates. I swear to God, Rufus, if I weren’t under contract to DayLite . . .”
Another spasm of laughter from Rufus. “Maybe so, but I own you. Which makes it your business to make my business run smoothly. Understand? It’s also your business to fucking sit down and listen to me when I tell you how my business works.”
Gary was mostly silent from that point onward. Hannah wanted to stop listening, but she couldn’t tear herself away from the dumpster fire. Every time she went to tap the pause icon, Rufus dropped another disturbing bombshell.
He wondered aloud about what it would take Lori Ridgway—a “sweet and smart girl-next-door”—to “give it up” for Mark Lauren, on camera. An environmental disaster or family emergency?
Gary had no comment. Hannah imagined Gary sitting there, fists and jaw clenched as Rufus referenced his orders to his hand-picked experts to choose the prettiest and smartest boys for the colony, so the female viewers would have something to look at while they ordered new sheets and cases of lotion from the Mars Ho sponsors.
Then Rufus chuckled about his fuckability ratings of the Mars Ho women and DayLite’s female staff, about how women should know what their real value was and how they needed a real man to remind them of it.
It was so much worse than Hannah had imagined, and Gary had been a reluctant witness instead of the perpetrator. She’d heard vague rumors about Rufus Day, but she’d never worked for him directly before. And here was audio proof that the executive had reduced every woman around him to a thing to be used and enjoyed.
On the recording, Rufus started talking about Hannah and Olivia and how much he wanted to get them into a shower together. How Hannah would be so grateful to him for helping her career that she’d be willing to “do anything” he asked.
Hannah felt the bile rise in her throat. So that was Rufus’s idea of contract negotiation.
Make Niffenegger a villain. Isn’t that what Rufus had asked her to do? What if Olivia hadn’t found the audio, and Hannah never listened to it?
There was another seven minutes in the recording, but Hannah had heard enough. She quit the audio player app and brushed the tears out of her eyes again. She cursed herself for getting emotional, but she was so tired. She’d scarcely slept since arriving on the Churly Flint and then she’d gotten caught up in a push-and-pull tango with Gary that she still didn’t know what to make of.
“Gary, why didn’t you tell me?”
When she’d confronted him about the recording—in the launch capsule, over the roar of the engines—he hadn’t been defensive. He hadn’t tried to brush it off.
Because he had nothing to hide.
And now Rufus had probably killed him—engineered some nail-biting tragedy to claim the Face of Space—all in the name of boosting ratings, and maybe even to wriggle out of paying Gay’s salary and contracted bonuses.
A shiver ran down her spine. Rufus was likely putting the finishing touches on a Gary Nelson memorial reel, to be broadcast far and wide, and Hannah had shot most of the video.
She was about to throw her tablet at the wall when she saw Olivia’s other attachments. Not the minutes from the production meetings Hannah had missed. Not the preview of the edits Olivia had made to Hannah’s footage from orbit. And not the flight plan of the October Surprise—which had conveniently been already in the area and possibly awaiting the order to go after the Churly Flint in the wake of the accident.
It was the cat photos that caught her eye. Cat photos to cheer her up, even though Hannah was allergic to cats.
“Really, Olivia?”
But then realization dawned.
“You brilliant, devious genius!” Hannah’s fingers worked quickly over the screen as she dug into the files Olivia had encoded in a dozen images of kittens romping through fields of daisies and getting tangled in baskets of yarn.
Hannah flung herself forward, moving through the ship as quickly as she could. She carried her tablet in one hand and used the other to propel herself through the unfamiliar corridors, colliding with a couple of narrower than expected bulkheads along the way.
When she reached the control cockpit, she caught herself on her passenger seat. “It’s boobytrapped! Don’t let them go near Klondike-3!”
“What?” Joey asked as he and Barbie looked up from their workstations. Sid turned in his chair to glance at her.
Hannah pulled on the spare headset that was draped over the back of her chair, though she knew the crew could hear her perfectly well without it. “I said, don’t let the other ship, what’s it called?”
“October Surprise.” Barbie glowered at her. In addition to preventing Barbie from spending some alone time with Gary, Hannah was apparently responsible for his possible death as well.
“Right, yes. October Surprise.” Hannah paused to catch her breath. “Don’t let them approach Klondike-3. The thing is boobytrapped.”
“Boobytrapped?” Joey asked in disbelief, while his captain blew out a long sigh.
“I was afraid of as much,” Sid said.
Barbie turned toward him in alarm. “Captain?”
Sid waved her back to her duties, then released his restraint harness and lifted out of his chair to face Hannah. He tipped his chin toward the tablet in her hand. “Tell me what you’ve got.”
“You knew about this?”
“October Surprise is approaching Klondike-3,” Barbie reported.
“But they can’t!” Hannah exclaimed. “They have to go after the Churly Flint. They have to rescue them. If they go after the prospector, the same thing will happen to them!”
Sid nodded grimly. “Barbie, send my message again.”
“That’ll make the fifth time,” Barbie re
plied. “Don’t you think—”
“Just send it.” Sid gestured toward Hannah’s tablet again. “You’ve got hard evidence?”
“Classified production notes.” She pressed the tablet to her chest, defensively, then she realized she was being ridiculous. Who was she protecting? Rufus? She wasn’t sure she owed him anything anymore. She relaxed her body. “Well, it’s not that kind classified. Not like military top secret or anything.”
“I’m showing the October Surprise at two thousand kilometers out, and closing,” Joey offered.
“Any response to our warnings?” Sid asked.
“Nothing,” Barbie replied. “It’s possible they’ve blocked us at this point.”
Sid’s jaw tightened. “What I might have done, too, if I were approaching the payload of a lifetime and getting messages I didn’t want to hear.”
“There has to be something we can do!” Hannah moved toward Barbie’s workstation. She blinked at the controls and wished she understood what all the buttons and screens did. Then maybe she could take some kind of action herself instead of floating around in the crew’s way with nothing but worry to hold onto. “What about mission control or something? Space police?”
Joey looked incredulous as he glanced her way. “You’re kidding, right?”
“There’s nothing we can do,” Sid said. “Except wait. Unless you’ve got something I can use?”
Barbie was glaring at her again, so Hannah turned back toward Sid. “They knew, I think. They planned this.”
Sid’s mouth hardened. “They.”
“The production company.” Hannah took a breath. “My employer. They . . . He set this up. Rufus Day. I don’t think the Churly Flint was supposed to crash. The ship was just supposed to be disabled, for an easy but exciting space rescue.”
Sid nodded. “Why the October Surprise was hanging out in lunar orbit. Waiting.”
Hannah powered on her tablet and pulled up one of the documents Olivia had sent—a memo to Rufus. “Astro-Ore, that’s the company that owns Klondike-3. Before they sent it out, they armed the prospector with explosives to keep their tech and any payload out of the hands of competitors, or opportunists.”
“And they would have given this information to whatever salvage company had the contract to retrieve their prospector.” Sid sighed. “That’s how it’s supposed to work. But they didn’t. We never received any such warning.”
“DayLite Syndicate, they knew the prospector was armed. They sent them there—Gary and Dana and Brett and Manny—knowing what would happen.”
Sid pulled the tablet out of her hands and read through the memo, then scanned several additional documents.
“October Surprise is now one thousand meters out, captain,” Joey announced.
“Sending your warning message again, captain,” Barbie said.
Sid looked hard at Hannah. “The October Surprise is flying into the same trap.”
Hannah swallowed. “With no rescue ship standing by.”
She watched the captain, waiting for him to spring into action. He looked like an astronaut superhero with his rugged looks and muscular frame clad in his ship’s simple uniform. If she’d had her mind on production, she would have trained her camera on him with the star field and curve of the moon outside the forward window as a backdrop—the reluctant champion making a fateful decision.
This would be Sid Sturbin’s moment to save the day. But nothing happened.
“Can’t we send out an emergency broadcast?” Hannah asked. “Some special frequency that no one can block?”
“There’s no such thing,” Barbie replied. “If they’ve blocked us, they’ve blocked us and probably everybody else, too.”
“But what about morse code?” Hannah glanced desperately at the faces in the cabin. No one would meet her eye. “You know, flash some lights at them?”
“Now at eight-hundred fifty meters,” Joey said.
Sid grasped Hannah’s shoulder and pulled her to the back of the cockpit. “I tried to talk her out of it. They did advise her there would be an accident. Something minor, but enough to warrant a rescue.”
“For the ratings,” Hannah said.
“They promised upgrades to her ship, on top of the repairs, and a second ship and crew under her command. Enough money to retire on, if she’d wanted to.”
“When?” Hannah asked.
“When what?”
“When did you have this conversation?”
Sid looked away. “While the ships were docked. That’s when she told me about it, how the production company had it all planned out, how they said it was perfectly safe. Dana’s no dummy. She knew they were full of shit. There’s no such thing as ‘perfectly safe’ up here.” He gave a rueful chuckle. “Or down on the ground, for that matter. That’s why I insisted that Gary stay on board with Dana.”
Hannah frowned. “So it wasn’t to keep him away from Barbie?”
At the mention of her name, the girl looked up. She glanced between Hannah and Sid, her eyes narrowing with suspicion.
“Barbie can handle herself.” He gave Barbie a smile, and she bent down over her workstation again.
“I’m not so sure about Gary.” Hannah chuckled. It was a nice distraction from helplessness.
“I just assumed your boss wouldn’t let anything happen to the Face of Space,” Sid said. “That’s why I wanted you on my ship, and him on hers.”
If not for the lack of gravity, Hannah was certain she would have slumped to the floor. Make Niffenegger a villain. Hannah knew the flip side of that strategy: Make Gary a hero, and there’s no better or more malleable hero than the one who is mourned.
Sid blew out a long sigh and laughed. “Have to say, I’m not a fan of reality shows.”
Hannah tried to laugh with him but couldn’t quite make it happen. “Right now, I’m right there with you.”
“We get television up here, you know,” he continued. “Beats looking out the window at the same scenery all the time, if you can imagine getting tired of that.”
He gestured toward the cockpit’s view of the moon. Hannah guessed the Midden was about halfway between Earth and the moon, but she didn’t know the distances off the top of her head the way Gary did. She felt tears rising again and looked away from the window.
“Kind of surprised you folks didn’t have those Mars contestants voting each other off, the way they do on all the other shows,” Sid said.
Hannah sniffed, grateful for the pivot. “Rufus wanted that, but the Mars Colony Program—you know, the United Nations people—they shot him down. Said they didn’t want any seeds of dissent or hard feelings in a group that would have to spend an awful lot of time in each other’s company.” She paused. “So Rufus found other ways to bring the drama.”
Sid’s smile was pained. “I’d say so.”
“October Surprise now at rendezvous with Klondike-3, captain,” Joey reported.
Barbie’s face fell as she monitored to her screens. “And we’ve lost the October Surprise.”
“That was their rescue. Dana and Gary . . .” Hannah felt the breath rush out of her body, and she grasped Sid’s arm to give herself some kind of anchor. She was suddenly chilled to the bone, and her voice was tight in her throat. “What do we do? Don’t you dare just tell me it’s all going to be okay!”
“Now?” Sid gave her a quick, strained smile. “Now, I’m afraid we have to wait.”
Dana stared at the emergency radio in her hands. It had just gone dead, after a short burst of screams and static from the October Surprise. Her crew, plus Gary, were assembled around her in the main cargo hold of the Churly Flint.
The hold was surprisingly tidy for a ship that had just crash-landed—a testimonial to the builder, and something Gary might document as a means of occupying himself and his cameras, under less pressing circumstances.
Other than the total loss of the docking bay and the crumpled mess of the forward cockpit, most of the ship was undamaged structurally. But they’d
come across multiple pressure leaks on their way down to the cargo hold and its secondary airlock.
Gary gathered they were supposed to wait in this compartment until their rescuers arrived, something that now looked very unlikely.
“Captain?” Brett asked.
Dana gazed at Brett for a long moment. She looked more bewildered than afraid. Then she blinked, and her air of confidence returned. “I’m afraid that was our ride out of here, boys. We’re going to have to suit up sooner than we’d thought.”
The captain stood and headed toward her EVA suit, ready and waiting for her to step into it. Manny helped Brett guide his injured leg into his suit and then shuffled over to point Gary toward a spare.
“What about the rescue team?” Gary asked, though he was pretty sure he knew the answer. He just needed someone to say it aloud: They were stuck on the moon, in a ship that was losing atmosphere, and with only their EVA supplies to keep them alive another few hours.
“We’ll have to be our own rescue team.” Dana turned and allowed Manny to buckle up her suit for her. She sounded unnaturally chipper, and that in itself increased Gary’s alarm. “Sorry about the bulky suits, though. We could easily do this in surface suits, but seeing as we don’t have any surface suits aboard, since this isn’t a landing craft . . .” She patted the wall of the cargo hold. “We’ll just have to tread more carefully.”
“Was the other ship a landing craft?” Gary asked. “October Surprise?”
“Nah,” Manny replied as he secured himself inside his own suit. “Same class as the Churly Flint. Earlier model, though.”
Gary tried to hold still while Dana sealed up his suit. “So they wouldn’t have been able to land to rescue us, right? So why even send them in the first place?”
“Nearest ship in the area.” Brett’s reply was matter-of-fact as he pulled his helmet over his head and locked it into place.
“You’re all set.” Dana patted Gary’s shoulder, which he barely felt inside the many layers of his EVA suit. This model wasn’t as cumbersome as what Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had worn, he didn’t think. But this one hadn’t been custom-made for him, so the fit was awkward and almost baggy on his lean frame. It was also bulky as hell—not at all streamlined like the surface suits the new Martian colonists would be using. But it would keep him alive outside the ship.
Lovers and Lunatics (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 2) Page 14
