Hannah’s too-big EVA suit swallowed her slender features and made her look like a kid playing astronaut dress-up, but she was still the most beautiful thing Gary had ever seen. Her eyes found his, and the relief that washed over her face launched an army of butterflies in his stomach.
Forgetting the pain of his injury—and what he must look like with a swollen nose and patches of dried blood still crusting his face—Gary tipped his head toward Sid and Dana and gave Hannah a wide grin. He didn’t even mind that it hurt.
The captains had proceeded into a full-on make-out session, with hands tangled in each other’s hair and getting caught in clothing. Sid was halfway out of his EVA suit. He paused to shuck off his long-sleeved undershirt and murmur something in Dana’s ear. Dana laughed and pulled him closer to wrap her body around his.
But Hannah kept her eyes on Gary. His breath rose high in his chest as she took a step forward, a bit clumsily in her awkward-fitting suit. Gary opened his arms to her. Maybe he wouldn’t need words at all to show her how he felt.
Barbie moved quickly to cut in front of Hannah and shoved her helmet into Hannah’s reluctant arms. Then she made a beeline straight for Gary. Barbie’s eyes shone bright with determination, and Gary couldn’t move fast enough to evade her embrace.
“I thought I’d never see you again!” Barbie’s voice quavered with tears as she planted one hand around his neck and forced her puckered lips onto his.
The pain was blinding, shooting electric currents into his sinuses and cheeks. Gary tried to pull away, but Barbie was surprisingly strong for someone who spent most of her time in microgravity. He gasped in near agony as her mouth moved over his and put pressure on his tender face.
Barbie took his moan as a sign of pleasure and tightened her grip around his waist and at the back of his neck, pulling his head roughly downward and impaling his mouth on her eager tongue.
Help! He tried calling out, but again Barbie got the wrong idea. If he bit down on her tongue, would she release him? He had a bad feeling she would instead take his rebuff as encouragement and redouble her ardor. He pawed at Barbie’s suit to try to pull her off of him, but the fabric was slick.
Gary’s chest tightened when he heard Hannah, her voice distant and hollow, excusing herself from the room.
“I’ll just wait in the airlock,” he thought he heard her say beneath Manny’s vexing whoops. Gary wanted to shut him down and not give Barbie any further motivation. He was genuinely afraid he’d have to do injury to Barbie or her EVA suit to break her hold.
“Damn, girl, let the man come up for air!” Manny chuckled as Barbie finally released him.
Out of breath, Gary stumbled backward into the table Dana had used as her first aid station. Misinterpreting Gary’s disorientation, Manny cackled.
“I survived, too, you know.” Brett affected a theatrical pout. Barbie danced across the floor and gave him a sloppy kiss on the cheek.
Gary’s face throbbed. He couldn’t breathe through his nose. His stomach contents crept up the back of his throat. Gasping, he looked around the room. Sid had backed Dana against a wall where they stood together entwined, grinning, speaking softly to one another, and kissing quite a lot. Sid’s EVA suit rested on the floor by his feet.
Hannah was nowhere in sight.
“Happy to be alive, huh?” Barbie skipped back toward Gary, her movement lithe and cheerful even within the confines of her bulky suit. Her wide grin blocked his view at every turn, as she kept positioning herself directly in front of him.
Gary pushed her aside and stumbled toward the apartment’s modest bedroom, where the Churly Flint crew had stowed their EVA suits. He was pretty sure there was a space sickness bag in there somewhere.
9
After all of Joey’s protests about how the Midden wasn’t designed for a surface launch, that the ship was not an actual space-plane, and that everyone should strap in and prepare for certain death, the Midden lifted off from the moon without incident.
Only after the smooth transition to open space did Sid come over the comms to remind everyone that Joey had just been nervous about his first-ever surface launch and hadn’t wanted to inflate anyone’s expectations of his performance.
By that time, the capsule Gary and Hannah had ridden to the Churly Flint was on the wrong side of lunar orbit for the Midden to capture directly, and the decision was made to leave it for another salvage ship—probably the Spiffy Lobster, which already had the abandoned capsule in its sights.
Hannah had strapped herself inside her sleep sack for the take off, letting Gary take her seat in the Midden’s cockpit. There’d been a quiet, tense hand-off of the footage Gary had shot on the Churly Flint as well as some voice-over recording and a production meeting with the crews of both ships. But other than that, she’d managed to avoid contact with him since the incident in the Star-Merlin plant. Now she was hiding out in the galley, knowing that Gary was resting in Joey’s cabin.
Sitting at the Midden’s galley table, she mashed her fingers angrily over her tablet screen to get set up for an on-camera interview with Sid. All the while, she was cursing under her breath.
She felt like an idiot.
She’d gotten to walk across the surface of the moon—no one else from her media school class had done that. With her own eyes, she’d seen the magnificence of her home planet from afar. She’d participated in an honest-to-goodness space rescue, for crying out loud, and all she could do what sit and stew about a guy.
She’d gotten herself all worked up over Gary and had even mostly convinced herself that maybe he was the man she wanted to be with, only to watch him lock lips with Barbie at the earliest opportunity.
She didn’t kid herself that Rufus had been right about Gary. She refused to slide down that slope again. Rufus was just as much of a manipulating weasel—no, he was far worse. He had deliberately sent Hannah and Gary and the crews of both the Midden and the Churly Flint into harm’s way. And his ruse had likely killed the crew of the October Surprise.
Three other salvage ships had incurred damage trying to lasso the now mangled and drifting Klondike-3, but at least none of them had been sent crashing to the moon. The last time Hannah checked, all three ships were limping toward Earth, impaired but operating under their own power.
So Rufus was a murdering, reckless, manipulative crapturd.
And Gary was . . . Complicated.
He hadn’t played her—at least, she didn’t think he had. He’d seemed genuine in his interactions with her before the Churly Flint and the Midden parted ways, though that enhanced face of his was difficult to read. His enthusiasm for space was earnest, his frustration with the writing—which Hannah had to admit was sometimes quite bad—was real enough.
And that kiss, as he’d brushed his lips over her knuckles, and the way he’d gotten all flustered and shy . . . Well, she was pretty sure he hadn’t faked that.
In her post-crash interview a few hours earlier, Dana insisted that Gary had been desperate to get back to Hannah. But she’d made that statement off-the-record, after Hannah turned the cameras off, so she couldn’t review the footage to confirm what the captain actually said.
Hannah thought Gary had looked awfully glad to see her when she stepped into the Star-Merlin plant, but his eyes could have just been watering from the pain of his puffy, bruised face. And then he’d gotten awfully darn cozy with Barbie.
Maybe Hannah had dodged a bullet with Gary. Maybe he was fickle and had shown his true colors in the rush and excitement of the reunion. Hannah felt her face flush hot when she imagined how big a fool she might have made of herself in front of both crews if she’d been the one to pull Gary into a passionate embrace at the moment of recuse.
Hannah hoped his nose hurt, a lot.
“Are you all set there?” Sid sat on the other side of the table, sipping on a bulb of hot coffee and patiently waiting for Hannah to pull herself together.
“Sure.” Hannah used her production app to turn on the two cam
eras—one mounted to the wall over her head, the other anchored to a corner of the table, and both framing Sid. She recorded about fifteen seconds for B-roll of Sid drinking his coffee and looking pleasantly nonchalant, and then she pulled up her list of questions.
“So, this is a quick follow-up, to get a few soundbites from you for the finished piece,” she said.
Sid gulped down more coffee. “How long?”
“Oh, just a couple of minutes. Five minutes of your time, max.”
“I meant, how long ’till you release this opus of yours.”
“Tomorrow morning, U.S. West Coast time.” Hannah took a deep breath to counteract the nervous jitters rising in her gut. It had been barely twelve hours since the rescue, and Hannah had spent most of that time locked in her quarters doing the best post-production work she could with her limited tools. Everything she and Gary had uncovered—from video interviews and footage of the Klondike-3 fiasco to the memos and other materials Olivia had transmitted—was getting edited together into a documentary that would blow the lid off of DayLite Syndicate.
She’d had to record more video and voice-overs with Gary, and that had been uncomfortable and awkward, but at least the project was an excellent excuse to avoid personal interactions with him for a good chunk of time.
She’d kept her anxiety mostly at bay, but what she and Gary were about to unleash would create a tsunami they wouldn’t be able to control.
But Hannah and Gary and the members of both crews had gone over the plan, and everyone agreed this was the best possible strategy. They’d have one shot at getting it right.
“What more can I tell you?” Sid asked. “You’ve got documentation on the fifteen million Rufus promised me and my crew. Reparations, or whatever he called it.”
“And DayLite Syndicate’s likely inability to pay up. Even if Rufus had that money before, he won’t after this goes public.”
Sid grimaced. “Right.” He drained the remaining coffee in his bulb. “And you’ve got all the damning evidence from Dana and her people.”
“I wanted a few sentences from you about the difficulties involved in being a space salvage captain, to get edited in with the rest of the footage. And if you have some more general thoughts, we can cover that as well.”
Sid crumpled the empty bulb and slid it into his pocket. “Well, it isn’t an easy life. I think you and Gary have seen some of that for yourselves.”
He paused, and Hannah nodded for him to continue.
“It’s hell, actually. To be plain about it, it’s lonely. And it’s dirty. You find yourself in circumstances and making decisions you never even thought about before. You find yourself challenged—really slammed against the wall. And I’m not talking about just physically, though it is hard work. We’re kind of captive workers up here, not a whole lot of choices once you’re committed.” He took a breath and looked down at the table. “You have to make compromises that you just wouldn’t ever have thought you’re capable of. And what it does to the people you love . . .”
Sid fell quiet. For a moment, he looked like he might have been blinking away tears. Hannah wanted to reach out to him, to at least squeeze his hand and offer some modicum of comfort like he’d done for her. But the cameras were running, and she didn’t want to make herself part of Sid’s story. So she watched and waited.
He sighed heavily and met Hannah’s gaze. “Anyway. That the kind of thing you wanted?”
“Yeah, that was really good.”
Sid scratched the back of his head. “You’re not what I expected. You and Gary.”
“We’re not?”
“Yeah, well, I guess I had an idea of what a TV producer would be like—pushy, getting in the way of me and my crew, twisting everything we say or do. Generally being a righteous pain in the ass. I figured Gary would be even worse. Big time TV host, you know? Prima donna. I told Dana straight away not to have anything to do with you people. But the money was too good.”
It was Hannah’s turn to sigh. “I can’t say I blame you.”
He laughed. “No, I don’t imagine so. But you’re not like that. Well, I assume as much—I’ve not seen yet what you’re putting together.”
“I’ll show it to you—all of you—before it goes out.”
“Appreciate that.” Sid glanced self-consciously at the cameras, then looked back at Hannah. “You’re good people, Hannah. I was pretty opposed at first—that whole Face of Space nonsense, and the way Barbie was drooling all over him.”
Hannah tried to smile, but Sid read the pain on her face.
“But he was a real gentleman about the whole thing,” Sid was quick to add. “He could have made a real fool out of her—not that she wouldn’t have deserved it, the way she was carrying on and mooning over the guy.”
Mooning over Gary. Hannah thought it would be a long time before she could look at the moon and not think about Gary.
“But he let her down real nice, you know? Nice and easy, and in private,” Sid said.
“He did what?”
“Yeah. She’s heartbroken, of course. Would’ve been no matter what your man there had said, but from what she told me about what he told her—and take from that game of telephone what you want—he was real gentle. Told her she was too good for him, too strong. And the real kicker, that she was a real space explorer when he was just a wanna-be.”
Hannah’s mouth dropped open and she stared at Sid as she parsed his words, making sure she hadn’t just heard what she wanted to hear. In her surprise, Hannah’s feet slipped out of the tethers beneath the galley table, and she had to re-secure herself. She was relieved but somehow also felt even more irate. She looked at her tablet and pretended to read something on the screen. If Sid knew she was using the distraction to fight back confused, frustrated tears, he didn’t let on.
“Like I said, real good guy there. Class act. Barbie said he’d told her she deserved someone who could give her his whole heart.” Sid waited until he had Hannah’s full attention again. “She didn’t know what that meant. Not really.”
Hannah swallowed hard.
“Because that heart of his, it already belongs to you, girl. Dana tried to tell you the same, but you didn’t believe it from her, did you? Don’t go digging trenches to divide yourselves. You don’t want to end up in love and constantly circling around each other.”
“Like you and Dana, on two different ships.” Hannah’s voice caught in her throat. She was angry, and exasperated, and hurt—but mostly baffled. She’d been going round and round in angst-worn circles, scorching herself with thoughts and hopes and recriminations. Sid’s words, though, were the right balm at the right time.
“Grab hold while you can, and steer your ship together in the same direction.” Sid got up from the table and made his way toward the cupboard. “Want any coffee?”
But Hannah was already on her way out of the galley, leaving her tablet floating in the air behind her.
Gary wandered aimlessly through the corridors of the Midden. He didn’t have assigned quarters on this ship; there simply wasn’t enough room to go around with eight people aboard instead of the usual three.
Dana was resting in Sid’s bunk, and Manny, Barbie, Brett, and Joey had figured out a complicated hot-bunk arrangement. Mostly, though, everyone was dividing up duties and shifts and generally taking stock of how god-damned lucky they all were to not be marooned or dead on the moon.
Gary was exhausted. He’d tried resting in Joey’s bunk, but his brain was just too busy. He needed to be in motion, even though there was nothing in particular he had to be doing.
He’d tried hanging out in the cockpit, but the space was tighter than the Churly Flint’s control cabin and Gary was just getting in Manny and Barbie’s way as they monitored the communications of other salvage ships and the command centers on the ground. They weren’t sending anything out yet, per the plan they’d all agreed to, and the Midden’s identifying transponder had been turned off on the lunar surface.
Barb
ie had offered to show him some of the memorials that were being aired on the ground—mostly tributes to Gary, but with some impressive remembrances of Hannah and both ships’ crews, too. But Gary wasn’t interested. Every one of those broadcasts was generating more social and financial support for DayLite Syndicate and its programs.
He’d been hoping for some time alone to gaze out the cockpit window at the stars and the Earth, but Manny and Barbie were blocking the ship’s only view. So he moved on. He needed to think.
He and Hannah were working together, at least in small increments, and he was grateful for that. She was focused and professional with an edge of irritation, just as before. But any time he tried to broach the subject of their personal relationship—and whether they even had one—she bristled and advised that they concentrate on their immediate project instead.
He couldn’t fault her logic—their priority had to be getting the word out about what had really happened with Klondike-3, and on the moon, and along pretty much every step of this ill-fated adventure. And the world had to know about Rufus Day’s criminal hand in it all.
Other lives were still at stake. There were the in-transit Mars colonists to consider, and the new batch of candidates still in the competitive biodome on Earth. There were the crews of the other salvage ships, and the families of the October Surprise crew.
And there was Gary’s sister and her children, who were actively mourning him. It physically hurt not to send them word that he was alive and headed back home, but they needed to maintain radio silence outside of the encrypted channel Barbie had set up for Hannah.
He paused outside the entry to the galley when he heard Hannah interviewing Sid, gathering more last-minute footage for their project. She was doing an outstanding job and had kept her wits about her in extremely trying circumstances. Because of her diligence and determination, this crazy trip and all its peril would ultimate count for something important.
He pushed away from the galley and continued his wandering. At this point, he was doing actual laps around the ship.
Lovers and Lunatics (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 2) Page 18
