Mars Heat (Mars Adventure Romance Series (MARS) Book 3)

by Jennifer Willis

  He’d never had a health code violation at Cocina Zarafan. He’d worked hard to keep every aspect of his restaurant running above any standard anyone could think to impose. He’d been a Muslim man of Persian descent trying to run a business in one of the least diverse cities in the country, and he made doubly sure everything he did was beyond reproach. That included kitchen cleanliness and employee safety.

  There was that one time he’d made a nearly inedible pumpkin soup—when he was 12 and practicing his skills in his parents’ kitchen, and accidentally reached for the horseradish powder instead of ginger. And then there was the broken glass jello monstrosity he’d served to Hogan.

  Hogan. She didn’t think he could survive on Mars. Maybe she was right, because now he couldn’t even cook.

  “Come on, man. It’ll be fun, like always.” Trent stood at the end of the table. His tablet’s camera was pointed at Trevor, and the red light was on. “Just a few minutes, and then we’ll quit. Promise.”

  Trevor nodded. He tried to brighten his face into a smile as he looked into the camera lens. “Since we’ve been getting viewer questions about prepackaged food on Mars, we wanted to spend some time today showing you a few of the things that got packed along with us.”

  They’d already recorded a boring tour of dehydrated fruit snacks and granola bars.

  “But we’ll see if we can get a little creative with what we have on hand.”

  Trevor’s first on-camera experiment required a cup of hot water and a packet of dehydrated tomato soup, from which he made a thick sauce to pour over a microwaved pouch of macaroni and cheese. But that got him to thinking about Hogan’s awful eggy-mac from the picnic.

  Was that how the bacteria had gotten to Ares City from Progress Base? From the food she’d made in her kitchen and he’d disposed of in his? Or had he picked it up from her as they made out in the rover?

  “Trevor? You okay?”

  Trevor looked up to find Trent staring at him from behind the camera. Trevor realized he’d frozen in the middle of stirring a pouch of chili into the cheesy pasta.

  Trent motioned for him to proceed. “We’ll just, uh, edit that part out.”

  Trevor tilted the bowl toward the camera. “See? Just like that, we’ve got a spicy, creamy dish that introduces a little variety using pre-packaged and dehydrated options that otherwise could get really boring.”

  Trent motioned Melissa into the kitchen, and she practically bounced across the floor to Trevor’s side. Her smile was bright and wide as she positioned herself for the camera and showed off her modified jumpsuit—the one with the deep v-neck and cut-off legs—to maximum effect. He handed her a spoon and she dug in, articulating every movement as though she were a space food spokesmodel.

  “Mmm!” she exclaimed with campy exaggeration.

  Trevor gave her a hard look. “You’re not going to win any prizes here, okay? What do you really think of it?”

  “Yeah, all right.” Melissa’s smile dimmed but didn’t disappear. She tasted another spoonful of the pasta dish and chewed thoughtfully. “Yeah, I do like it. But I think it could use a little more heat, you know? Just a little. But I’d eat this for dinner. In fact . . .”

  She mugged one last smile for the camera, then scooped up the bowl and skipped out of the kitchen.

  Next up was a bland mixture of dehydrated cream of chicken soup and potato flakes, with another half-portion of hot water. Trevor grimaced at the sticky, salty paste that resulted, but Trent took a generous taste and his eyes went wide.

  “That bad?” Trevor asked.

  Trent shook his head as he worked the food around in his mouth and swallowed it down. “Nah, man. That’s good stuff. Chick-tatoes!”

  “Yeah, I don’t think that’s an appropriate name for anything.”

  “Chick-tatoes!” Trent declared again, then gestured in the air with his spoon. “But the same as what Melissa said. It needs something. A little spice. Can I have this?”

  “Well, I’m not going to eat it.”

  Trent grinned and scarfed down the remainder of the chick-tatoes on camera. Trevor watched him in disbelief and was laughing by the time Trent took his last couple of bites.

  “You know, my birthday’s coming up.” Trent dropped his spoon into the empty bowl.

  “When?”

  “Whenever we figure out what our calendar is going to look like here.” Trent shrugged. “But when it does . . . Chick-tato cake!”

  “No.” Trevor gave him a playful shove out of the frame.

  “Okay! So what’s next, Chef Trevor?” Trent asked as he resumed his place behind the camera.

  “Now, I’m afraid this next concoction doesn’t require a great deal of imagination.” Trevor couldn’t help his smile as he grabbed a fresh bowl. Trent was right—this was fun. He placed a handful of dry noodles in it, covered by dehydrated peas, carrots, and onions. “If you’ve been or known a university student, you’ve probably already guessed what I’m making here.”

  Trevor unwrapped a vegetable bouillon cube and dropped it into the bowl. “Trent would you like to take a guess?”

  “Martian ramen!”

  “Sure. Martian ramen. Okay.” Trevor dipped a measuring cup carefully into one of the pots boiling on the range, then poured the hot water over the ingredients in the bowl. He gave it a good stir.

  “Now, we’ll have to wait a little longer for, uh, our Martian ramen here to cook than you would an old-fashioned cup of noodles, because these noodles are thicker.” He covered the bowl with a polycloth napkin. “But the idea’s the same.”

  Trent gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up from behind the camera, and Trevor spread his arms out wide.

  “Okay, so that’s our episode of Cooking for Martians. Thanks for coming along with us on this adventure as we, um, explore all our options.” Trevor was careful not to mention the recent illness on camera. Helmut Brandon and the rest of MCP knew only that there had been a stomach bug making the rounds at Ares City, and the colonists were so far following the lead of Progress Base on not being too specific in answering questions from home.

  No one, not even Hogan, had said out loud what they all knew—that even something as standard as a norovirus could be lethal for a small outpost like Ares City.

  Trevor glanced at the pots of boiling water. He was doing what he could to keep his people safe, just like he’d always rushed to the kitchen to bake up a batch of almond ghotab pastries whenever his parents and grandparents started fighting, and the rice cookies and pistachio shortbread he’d made when one of his sisters had a disappointing report from school.

  The simple pleasure and comfort of a good meal was better than hope when things were bleak. Hogan could think whatever she wanted to about the colony’s chances on Mars. Trevor had his kitchen, and he knew how to care for his people.

  Trent was back again, standing at Trevor’s side. “So, that’s it from us at Dorito Village!”

  Trevor laughed as they waved at the camera together.

  Then Trent packed up his gear and headed to the Ares City office for some quick post-production work. After Trevor put away the experimental dinners and got his kitchen back in order, he made a general announcement to the habitat that they were on their own for dinner, with plenty of prepared food pouches to choose from. For himself, Trevor wanted nothing more than the solitary quiet of his quarters.

  He stepped into his room and closed the door behind him, then dimmed the lights. He checked his tablet to get a rough idea as to the position of Earth. He thought about laying his towel across the floor in lieu of a proper rug or mat, but he didn’t feel moved to prayer, not yet.

  Instead, he sat at the edge of his bed and faced in the direction of Earth. He closed his eyes and thought of his family, now so far out of reach. He made them a whispered vow that he wouldn’t give up. He would find a way to make it work on Mars.

  They were back again at Ares City. Hogan wrinkled her nose now at the idea of calling this place Dorito Village, though the
monicker still fit. The colonists didn’t take their own habitat seriously, so why should their settlement be called anything else?

  But standing in Trevor’s kitchen with the scents of cooking and baking whirling around her, Hogan felt wrapped in a warm blanket of comfort and welcome. There were pots on the stove and full mixing bowls on the wide kitchen table. Did she smell actual bread baking? She hadn’t thought Ares City had much flour to spare, but that didn’t mean Trevor wouldn’t put it to good use.

  This kitchen—this man—was the cozy center of a true home on Mars.

  She hadn’t seen Trevor since the radiation storm—what she privately referred to as “the rover incident—more than a week earlier. He was pleasant enough, and his greeting was stiff but not unfriendly. In the domain of his kitchen he was efficient and cool, when Hogan herself was feeling anything but.

  She picked up the delightful aroma of warm pickling spices. She couldn’t quite mask the noise of her growling stomach, so she kept to the periphery of the room. At least she no longer had to keep her jumpsuit zipped up to her ears. The hickey Trevor had given her in the rover was finally fading.

  Hogan was present to oversee a food stores exchange. Progress Base sent over what they could spare in the way of freeze-dried vegetables, and the residents of Ares City were generously giving the astronauts a full third of their protein paste to make up for the loss of spiruliza from the bioreactors.

  It was enough food to keep the astronauts comfortably fed until their departure just over three weeks away. The offer of UNSC vegetables was largely a token gesture. The Ares City water supply was safe again, and the colony was stocked with enough dehydrated food for another seven months without harvests from their bioreactors and eventual fresh produce from their garden. But Hogan didn’t want to take anything from them without offering something first.

  Whatever the astronauts had left over at the end of their Mars sojourn would be reclaimed by the colonists. And there would be a supply ship coming their way in just over a year’s time.

  The colonists wouldn’t starve—barring some unforeseen catastrophe like another incident of local flora getting into the habitat and making everyone sick, or worse. And that was no small concern. But there were plenty of worse and more present dangers facing the fledgling colony.

  Trevor didn’t say a word as he loaded the containers of protein paste into the last of the transport boxes Hogan and Yusuf had brought from Progress Base.

  “And you should send over your recipes.” Yusuf was badgering Trevor again. “Or if you could help us reprogram our food printer?”

  Trevor chuckled and wedged another container of protein paste into the transport box. “I think April and I can figure something out for you. She’s a genius with anything that has a digital interface. And, if not . . . We’ll just have Guillermo hit it with a hammer.”

  Yusuf laughed and slapped his palm on the table.

  “Yusuf?” Hogan asked. “Would you check on the Ares City bioreactors before we head back? Make sure everything’s gotten set back up properly.”

  Yusuf grabbed a handful of the dried fruit snacks Trevor had set out for the visitors. “Sure. Good idea.”

  But Trevor visibly tightened, and Hogan didn’t need him to tell her precisely what he thought of her suggestion—that Hogan assumed the colonists couldn’t be trusted to look after themselves, or their own equipment; that the colony was just sols away from disaster and certain death without the oversight of the professionals at Progress Base; that the colonists had signed their own death warrants by entering the Mars Ho competition to begin with.

  Hogan wanted to tell him how wrong he was about her, and how wrong she’d been about the colonists. She’d been skeptical and cynical and hadn’t treated them fairly at the start. But she’d come to respect their drive and determination, although she did still think they lacked solemnity.

  And she wanted to tell Trevor how much she had come to admire him in particular, and how the idea of leaving Mars with so much unresolved between them ate at her.

  But Yusuf was in the room. And then Grigori made an unexpected appearance.

  “Commander?” Grigori stood in the kitchen doorway. “Martin and Miranda have arrived.”

  “We’re just about done here,” she replied.

  Grigori looked to Trevor. “We’re grateful for your hospitality, yet again.”

  “No problem.”

  Grigori threw Hogan a strange smirk, cocked his head in Trevor’s direction, and then ducked out the room.

  Hogan hadn’t hid the hickey as well as she’d thought.

  They gathered in the Ares City recreation room for Martin and Miranda’s announcement. Tables and chairs had been pulled in and arranged to accommodate everyone. The meal was set up buffet-style along one wall, and Hogan hurried through the options. She wanted to sit down, listen to whatever Martin and Miranda had to say, and then get back to Progress Base—away from Trevor and her nagging misgivings about how she’d left things between them.

  She was making mental plans for organizing and expanding her personal duty roster for the coming weeks when she came to a tureen of soup. She frowned. Who would bring a tureen to Mars? Who would cook soup on Mars? She made a personal note to look up the calorie efficiency of various food types—loafs and casseroles and muffins and soups—but she stopped herself.

  The Mars colony was not her problem—or wouldn’t be once the Hermes 5 crew lifted off. If the colonists wanted to prioritize video games over bioreactors, or to eat soup instead of a dense protein loaf, that was their business. Some of the early towns in the Old West had managed to survive and thrive. Maybe Ares City could pull through, too.

  Hogan lifted the lid off the tureen and felt rooted to the spot when the friendly, starchy scents of potatoes and picking spices filled her nostrils. She grasped the ladle and stirred. The soup was light green, flecked with bits of white and orange. She had never seen such a thing before, but it smelled delightful and reassuring. And delicious.

  “Pickle soup. Trevor made it special.”

  Hogan found April at her shoulder. The tiny woman smiled, her eyes dancing with delight. Hogan kept herself from groaning aloud but she couldn’t help adjusting the collar of her jumpsuit.

  Of course, April would know about what had happened in the rover with Trevor. Back inside the biodome competition, April seemed to know nearly everything about everyone and the coming challenges.

  Hogan was confident Trevor hadn’t blabbed about their encounter to the entire Ares City contingent, or spread the word to Hogan’s crew. He was the strong and largely silent type, and she couldn’t see that he had anything to gain by bragging that he had bagged the UNSC commander.

  April’s gaze flicked to Hogan’s neck. The woman’s sixth sense had evidently survived the trip to Mars.

  “Pickle soup?” Hogan replied. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Some old German recipe, I think? It’s a stretch, I know.” April laughed. “I was afraid to try it! And Trevor had to make it with freeze-dried cauliflower instead of potatoes, and some canned sweet potatoes. And carrots, I think? And no real pickles, yet. Obviously.”

  April gestured toward the ladle, still in Hogan’s hand. “It’s really good.”

  April leaned in close, and Hogan bristled at the unwanted intimacy. But then she relaxed. April was entirely nonthreatening.

  “I think he made it for you,” April whispered. “So, maybe take some?”

  And then she was gone, moving past Hogan in the buffet line to grab . . . Dinner rolls? Hogan couldn’t believe her eyes. Freshly baked bread. She glanced over her shoulder, looking around for the Ares City chef. But when she finally caught his eye, his gaze was cool. He offered a curt nod, then looked away.

  Hogan filled her plate with a little bit of everything, and she ladled a healthy serving of soup into her bowl. She was one of the last to take her seat at the table. Again, she noticed how the astronauts clustered together on one side—and how Melissa an
d Guillermo were sitting far apart from one another. Grigori and Yusuf had mended their rift, but things were not looking good for the colonist couple.

  As Yusuf, Guillermo, Mark, Trevor, and Leah individually bowed their heads, Hogan reached for her spoon and warily tasted the soup. Her mouth filled with the tangy flavors of dill pickle, garlic, and other spices she couldn’t name. The soup was hearty, too, and she could imagine herself curling up with a bowl of the stuff in front of a roaring hearth fire on a snowy winter evening.

  And it was pretty much always cold on Mars.

  Before she knew it, Hogan’s bowl was half empty. She tore off a piece of fluffy but slightly sticky bread, and dipped it into the soup. Trevor was an absolute genius with food—and with his hands and mouth as well, if she remembered correctly.

  “Okay, so we wanted to tell everyone at once.” Miranda stood at the head of one of the tables and glanced at Hogan. “I’m sorry, commander. I know the protocol would have been to have this conversation with you in private first, but . . .” She gestured at the assembly of astronauts and colonists. “We’re such a small group, and it’s not like we could really keep this news to ourselves. Plus, it was a joint effort—”

  Hogan put down her spoon. “Let’s dispense with the prelude.”

  Miranda looked to Martin, but he gestured back to her. “Well, all our testing confirms what we suspected from the start. Definitive proof of bacterial life on Mars.”

  A collective gasp went around the room. The news wasn’t a surprise, but it was more than Hogan’s team had hoped for. Finally, at the end of their mission, Hermes 5 had stumbled across a discovery that would forever change human space exploration—and human history.

  Hogan tried to keep her voice calm, but her questions came tumbling out one after another. “So, where exactly did it come from? And how did it get into the habitats? And this is what made everyone sick, right? Is there any continued danger, or long-term consequences?”