Mars Ho! (Mars Adventure Romance Series Book 1)

by Jennifer Willis

  “This happens from time to time, folks.” Molly’s voice came over the speakers again, her tone less rigid. “It’s probably nothing to worry about. But treat it like the real thing and we’ll be fine.”

  “Okay.” Lori drew out the syllables on a long exhale, using the exercise to calm her breathing and heart rate. “Okay.” She looked at April. “Do you know where they’ve stored our suits?”

  April nodded. “It’s one of the things they had Dina and Yoshiko doing.” She paused. “And they were not happy about being put to work, loading up the transport.”

  “Show me.”

  April pushed off from the wall and moved into the corridor. Lori was literally on her heels.

  By the time Lori and April reached the Mars transport vehicle, the damage to the station had already been done.

  “Four of twelve solar arrays are down,” Molly explained over the station speakers while the colonists gathered their Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garments and EVA suits.

  “Solar-2 has three panels down. Solar-5 has five panels down. Solar-6 has two panels down. And Solar-7 has a whopping eight panels out of service, along with a potential mechanism issue.” Molly’s voice was cool as she relayed the damage report simultaneously to the station and Ground Control. “That’s the obvious external damage.”

  There was a pause over the speakers, and Lori had a bad feeling Molly was getting ready to lower the boom.

  Already in his EVA suit with his helmet tucked under his arm, Gilbert caught Lori’s elbow as she and Leah followed along at the end of a line of colonists headed toward the airlock. “This way. It’ll take too long if you all go out Airlock B.” He took a sharp left to head down another corridor.

  With her LCG bundled against her chest and a tight grip on her helmet and EVA suit, Lori didn’t have any free hands to maneuver. She and Leah collided with walls and bulkheads as they followed Gilbert toward Airlock A.

  “The real problem is the electrical system,” Molly said over the speakers. “When the panels were hit on Solar-5 and Solar-6, we experienced a surge that temporarily overloaded the station’s circuits. Built-in safeguards shut down the affected systems, but not before some damage was done. April Chennells, if you’d make your way to the control room, I’d be much obliged.”

  April shot through an intersection just ahead. She flashed an excited thumbs-up as she caught Lori’s eye. Even in the midst of serious injuries to the station, Lori smiled back.

  “Besides the repairs, we’ll also perform a visual inspection along pretty much every inch of the outer hull,” Molly continued. “Mars transport appears undamaged, but obviously we’ll be checking that out, too. With Clint Levorski, Maya Williams, and April Chennells inside, it’s everyone else outside for repair and reports. Grab your helmets and check your suit supplies, folks. It’s going to be a long couple of shifts.”

  “Suit supplies,” Lori quickly discovered, included more than oxygen tanks and water. She had to pack in sufficient nutritional units—fruit bars wrapped in edible rice paper. Also, she had to put on a diaper.

  “Maximum Absorbency Garment,” Leah corrected her. They’d both stripped down to pull on the disposable underwear. Leah tumbled gracefully as she struggled to get first one foot and then the other into the high tech elastic shorts that would keep her dry and comfortable for hours outside ISS-5. Then she wedged her shoulders into a corner between a bulkhead and the wall for leverage so she could pull the shorts up over her hips.

  Lori found her own little corner and pulled on her MAG. She’d just used the space toilet for the first time—a strange, suction-filled experience that was not unpleasant—and wasn’t wild about the idea of her next orbital elimination being facilitated by extra absorbent fabric. The next frontier was a lot less glamorous than it looked on TV.

  “It’s better than a diaper,” Leah explained. “There’s a chemical, sodium something. It’s a powder. It absorbs something like 300 times its weight in water.”

  Lori shimmied into her shorts. The MAG was oddly comfortable, even though she felt like she had a thick layer of socks in her panties.

  “The ISS prep material said the MAG can hold two liters of urine, feces, blood,” Leah said.

  Lori made a face. “You memorized the MAG details?”

  Leah reached for her LCG, tethered to the wall. “It was interesting.”

  “Yeah, nothing like knowing how much blood your space diaper can hold.” Lori pulled on her LCG over her MAG and tried not to feel like a complete nerd with so many acronyms fast entering her lexicon. “I’ll bet that kills at parties.”

  “I told you it’s not . . .” Leah yanked the LCG up her thighs and then wriggled a little to accommodate the bulk of the MAG. “Okay, so it’s pretty much a space diaper. Yeah.”

  Even with the tedious task ahead of inspecting the outside of the station, Lori’s brain was buzzing. I’m pulling on my LCG. I’m securing myself inside my EVA suit. EVA suit!

  A rush of adrenaline thrummed through her body as she reached for her helmet.

  Mom. I’m here. I made it. I’m doing it.

  Leah was asking a question, her voice muffled as she spoke through the comms in her helmet.

  “Hang on.” Lori dipped her head and put her own helmet on. She heard the clicks of the closing seals and felt the cool hiss of her suit’s life support starting up. “What did you say?” Her own voice sounded close and loud.

  “Is it going to be a problem that you’re assigned to work with Mark?”

  Lori’s enthusiasm quickly dampened. “Mark . . . ?”

  “We heard you fighting earlier.”

  Perhaps there weren’t any secrets on a space station—or on a ship headed to Mars, either. Everyone already knew about Trent and Leah’s extracurricular activities, so why not the details of Lori’s argument with Mark?

  Leah’s concern was entirely reasonable. Lori just didn’t have a good answer. She pushed past Leah through the bulkhead opening that led to Personnel Airlock A. She half-expected to run into Mark, but he was nowhere in sight.

  Leah floated up beside her. “Ready?” She reached for the angled lever beside the airlock’s inner door and grunted slightly as she turned it in an arc toward the right. There was a palpable shuunk as the seal was released, and the door swung slowly inward.

  “Hang on there, hot stuff.” Maya Williams swam past Lori’s visor in a blur of navy blue. She entered the airlock just behind Leah. “I need to check your suits before you head out.”

  Maya’s close-cropped blond hair stood straight up and shimmied with every movement as she double- and triple-checked the connection points on Leah’s suit. Then she faced Leah and leaned close to her visor. “How’re you doing in there? You feel okay?”

  Leah smiled and nodded, then lifted her left hand to give a thumbs-up.

  Maya pushed herself out of the airlock, headed toward Lori. She inspected Lori’s suit from the top of her domed helmet to the bottoms of her massive boots.

  Moon boots—what her mother had called Lori’s heavy snowshoeing boots when she was in college. Light-gray instead the standard black. She’d bought them used from her roommate’s cousin’s boyfriend, but they were warm and they fit. Her mother had taken one look at them and called them moon boots.

  “You okay in there?” Maya floated in front of her, eyebrows arched upward as she waited for a reply.

  “Yeah, I’m good.” Lori knew her smile looked fake, because it was fake. So she gave a thumbs-up, too. “Just lost in thought.”

  Maya patted her on the arm. Lori barely felt it through the suit.

  “Your first EVA—hell, any EVA—can take your breath away,” Maya said. “You’re just another object in orbit.”

  The air rushed out of Lori’s lungs in an awkward laugh. The view from the station’s observation window had left her awestruck, and now Lori was about to head out into the cold vacuum to have the Earth turning directly beneath her, surrounded by dark, endless space on every other side.

/>   “Yeah.” A surge of butterflies tingled in Lori’s stomach.

  “Okay, you’re all set.” Maya tapped Lori’s helmet and helped her into the airlock. “Mark Lauren and Yoshiko Eguchi went out just ahead you, so you’re the last pair. Just remember to listen to your suit. It will tell you if you’re in trouble, and it will tell you when to come back inside. We’ve staggered your exits. Keep that in mind when you come back in, all right? This airlock depressurizes pretty quickly, but it takes seventeen minutes to re-pressurize. Same for Personnel Airlock B, but that’s on the other side of the station. The cargo airlocks are bigger but take even longer. But when your suit tells you to come inside, you come inside. Got it? You don’t want to be waiting in line for the airlock while running low on air.”

  “You know, I am really beginning to hate airlocks,” Leah said.

  Maya started to close the inner hatch. “Leah, you’ll meet up with Aleksandra, your team leader. Lori, you’re with Gilbert. Strap into your MMUs, and you’re good to go.”

  Maya closed the hatch, and depressurization began.

  After the prolonged hassle of donning their EVA suits and its sublayers, Lori and Leah attached themselves to the waiting pair of Manned Maneuvering Units with no more effort than hoisting a half-empty knapsack.

  Jetpacks! The little girl inside Lori squealed.

  As the airlock vented its air, Lori and Leah glanced about the compartment, noticing the gauges and switches and lights.

  “What do you think?” Leah asked. “You could get three astronauts in here, maybe a piece of equipment? Not much more, I don’t think.”

  “I don’t have any problem working with Mark Lauren,” Lori said. “We have some things to work out, and it’s complicated.”

  Leah looked like she wanted to interrupt, but Lori waved her off with a slow, awkward gesture, given the bulk of her suit.

  “You probably think I’ve been unfair. And maybe I have, given everything he’s done for me.”

  “No, Lori, we’re not—”

  “There’s nothing you can say that I haven’t already beat myself up about.” Lori was thinking out loud, and this was probably more than Leah wanted to hear. But Lori needed to clear her head before the outer door opened to the vastness of space and to the job ahead. “Maybe I don’t deserve Mark. I know how exceptional he is.”

  “But, Lori, everybody can—”

  “It’s my job now to earn my way back into his trust and respect.” A thrill came over her as she realized the truth of her words. “So that’s what I’m going to do. And maybe, eventually, I’ll get to a point where I do deserve him.”

  Leah’s eyes went wide with embarrassed horror. Lori almost laughed.

  “Leah, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Well, it’s just that we’re not on private comms. Everyone on the station heard what you just said.”

  “Oh.” Shame burned bright and hot over Lori’s cheeks and down her neck. “Oh, God.”

  “Not just on the station,” April’s voice broke in over the comms. “Everyone outside on EVA, too.”

  Depressurization complete, the light on the outer door changed to solid red. Leah hit the fat button with her gloved fist to open the airlock. The door swung slowly, silently open, revealing the bright jewel of the Earth suspended in the velvet blackness of space. Leah gasped at the sight.

  But the first thing Lori saw was Mark, a few meters from the airlock door, waiting alongside Yoshiko. She felt the sinking dread of double mortification—that the entire station had been privy to her confession, and now she had to face Mark, too.

  But he winked at her. “Okay, everybody,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”

  17

  Setting aside the exhilaration of his first EVA, Mark focused his attention on making repairs. He couldn’t prevent himself entirely from gawking at the surreal, spectacular view. But the Earth was in constant motion even as he felt himself floating still. It was disorienting and amazing and a little terrifying, and it was all too easy to get distracted as he moved from one visual inspection to the next and followed Gilbert’s instructions on how to repair tiny leaks in the station and its storage units.

  Yoshiko took to the work as if he had been born to it, his movements careful and deft within his restrictive suit. He worked without complaint to make minor patches to an unused docking port—methodically sliding a repair gasket over the rupture, inserting the toggle bolt and placing the self-sealing nut, then injecting adhesive with an applicator gun for a permanent seal.

  Mark wasn’t sure why he was a finalist but Yoshiko wasn’t. Now that the reality of Mars was sinking in, parts of the colonist selection process didn’t make sense, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t because he was too dense to understand. Maybe he was just missing information about what was going on behind the scenes.

  “There’s a . . . Hell, that’s really stuck in there, isn’t it?” Gilbert grunted over the comms. He was working a few meters away from Mark and Yoshiko, with Lori passing him a string of progressively less elegant instruments to unstick the gears of the Solar-7 array.

  Molly’s team had already repaired Solar-7’s damaged panels and now were back inside the station. Gilbert’s team of four was the last group still on EVA, patching up the last of the leaks and trying to get Solar-7’s gears back to operational status.

  “And space junk did all this.” Lori’s voice was tinged with a flat note either from frustration or the buzzing crackle of the comms. A large metal box of tools floated beside her, clipped to her waist by a cable. She grasped a pick-looking tool from where it hovered near Gilbert’s elbow, secured it in its magnetic cubby inside the tool box, and handed him a large, silver crowbar instead.

  “Space junk, yeah.” Gilbert tried to fit the crowbar’s forked tip between a jagged hunk of metal flotsam and the cogs it was jamming. “Those junkers are supposed to be cleaning things up, not causing more problems.”

  Since starting his EVA, Mark had heard more than he’d wanted to about the nearly thirty thousand manmade objects hurtling around the planet at 7.5 kilometers per second. The vast majority were “dead” but still causing problems with decaying orbits and occasional collisions—including increasingly frequent impacts to ISS-5 and other manned stations.

  It was even rumored that a chunk of space garbage—possibly no larger than whatever Gilbert was trying to dislodge—had killed the Chinese crew on orbital insertion, though the official story still pointed to flaws in design or manufacturing.

  His last patch finished and his kit nearly depleted, Mark watched the progress on Solar-7. While Gilbert proceeded with meticulous care, the operation looked like increasingly desperate attempts to unclog a stubborn gutter.

  “Want an extra pair of hands?” Mark quick-fired the jets on his MMU and headed slowly toward Gilbert and Lori.

  “I’m not sure.” Gilbert grunted again as he found some leverage against the jam.

  “Gilbert?” Yoshiko’s voice came over the comms. “My suit’s telling me I’m low on air.”

  “Head back inside,” was Gilbert’s immediate reply.

  “But I should be good for another hour,” Yoshiko said. “It’s a safety buffer. And I’m right on top of the station, so I don’t have far to go—”

  “Head back inside,” Gilbert repeated, his tone more stern. “We’ve still got three pairs of hands out here, and the station’s sealed up tight enough for now. We’ll all take a break and send another team out after anything we’ve missed. Okay, Yoshiko?”

  “Yeah, all right.” Disappointment hardened Yoshiko’s voice. He pushed away from the docking port and used his MMU to propel him slowly toward Personnel Airlock A. “But I want in on the next team, okay?”

  “If we send out another team,” Gilbert replied.

  “Yeah, yeah. If.” Yoshiko glanced at Mark as he passed and gave an exaggerated eye roll.

  Mark doubted Yoshiko was looking for his sympathy. As an alternate, Yoshiko was ready to take the place of any coloni
st who might be suddenly unable to make the trip. He would do everything he could to prove his worth in the meantime, to be first in line for the next colony flight.

  “I’m here to work,” Yoshiko added. “Just so you know.”

  “See you inside.” Gilbert growled with another failed effort to free the gears. “Yeah, I don’t think this is working. Let me think for a minute.”

  But Gilbert didn’t stop trying to pry the junk out. He had the crowbar wedged in deep between the debris and the Solar-7 mechanism and kept working it back and forth. Whether by intention or accident, his MMU thrusters fired, and Gilbert pivoted violently around the gears. There was a scream of pain over the comms, followed by the sudden thunk of metal against Mark’s visor. The impact spun him around and around.

  It took Mark a second to register what had happened: he’d been hit by the freed space junk. He used his thrusters to stop his spin and then immediately went after the jagged projectile. It was an angular, fist-sized hunk of metal with a half-dozen spokes, some twisted in on each other and others bent outward into spikes. Careful not to let the sharp edges abrade his gloves, Mark secured the junk in a large velcro pocket clipped to his suit. He was glad it wasn’t his job to figure out where the thing had come from.

  Mark turned back and felt an abrupt panic when he gauged his distance to the station. He was no more than fifty meters out, but without his MMU he would be one more pice of space junk himself. He fired his jets and headed back.

  “Mark!” Lori’s distress was sharp in his ears. He watched her and Gilbert atop Solar-7, their slow movements at odds with the anxiety in Lori’s voice. “Mark, help!”

  “I’m coming.” He couldn’t hurry. He was at the mercy of technology, microgravity, and physics. He kept himself steady. Losing his cool wouldn’t get him to Lori any faster. “What’s wrong?”

  “Gilbert, he . . .” Lori audibly gulped, then paused. Her voice was more even when she came back on the line. “The debris tore through his suit. He’s bleeding. And he’s losing air pressure. Fast.”