Read Over the Moon (Star-Crossed Book 1) for Free Online Page B

opening up?
    Again and again, she pressed the panel, frustrated. The door wasn’t opening. She looked inside through the window, but everything looked normal. The inner door was closed. Even if the airlock had refilled with air and had to cycle that out before opening, shouldn’t it have finished that by now?
    Then she saw faces inside. They went to the panel beside the door, and…nothing. She could see them working on something on the inside door, and then one of them was talking over a radio, saying something she couldn’t hear.
    This wasn’t good. They couldn’t get the door open!
    “Airlock doors are frozen,” someone said over the emergency channel. “What’s the nature of the medical emergency?”
    “Electrical accident,” she said. “Victim is unconscious. Not sure if he is breathing or not.”
    “What does his cardiac monitor say?” the voice asked.
    Cardiac monitor? The suits had cardiac monitors? Where was the display? She set Jacob down – if his heart was stopped, it had already been a couple of minutes, and he was running out of time, fast. She searched his suit. Where was it?
    “Carmen.”
    This time, she knew the voice. It was Patrick, the captain from the ship. Oh, she was in so much trouble now. She could hear it in his voice. With her luck, he’d want to space her, too.
    “Yes?” she replied.
    “The readout is on the wrist computer. Same display that controls the radio. Press the heart icon on his wrist,” he said.
    She did as he said, and a medical display popped up. The suit was monitoring breath rate, heartbeat, oxygen level, radiation exposure, and body temperature. And thank god! Jacob was still breathing, his heart still beating. Slowly – but it was a nice, steady beat.
    “He’s still breathing,” she said.
    “Good. Now hang tight, I’m on my way to you.”
    How, she wanted to ask. But she held her tongue. He seemed pretty calm. No sense antagonizing him. Actually, she admired that calm. She’d seen plenty of people who fell apart in a crisis, and she couldn’t stand it. She was in her element hip deep in the middle of a mess. She’d worked more emergency rooms than she could count, in the few short years she’d been a doctor. Chasing viral epidemics left one in hot zones way more often than not. And her dad was getting on in years – he’d started relying on her as his eyes and ears.
    She remembered calling one now-ex-boyfriend from a clinic in Israel, once, where she was tracking a possible Ebola outbreak. He’d asked what all the noise in the background was. When she’d calmly replied that the area was under a rocket attack, he hadn’t believed her. So she took video. He completely freaked out. She broke up with him shortly after.
    There was something very unattractive about people who couldn’t handle themselves when things went bad.
    She felt a vibration, and looked up. Something was coming over the dome! She looked more closely and realized it was a person, in a space suit, with some sort of flying setup. A thruster pack. That had to be Patrick on his way to get her. He wasn’t just coming around – he was flying over to her.
    He jetted over her, setting down a few feet away. The blast from his landing kicked up huge plumes of dust, and she covered her face with her arm instinctively at first, before remembering that the suit mask would keep the dust away from her eyes. His suit was the same as hers, but the thruster pack on his back looked like a huge turtle shell. It was clearly heavy, too. In the low gravity they could carry a lot more, but she’d already learned that the additional mass made moving with a heavy load difficult. That thruster had to weight about as much as Patrick did himself, but he took slow, careful steps toward her and never lost his balance.
    “You OK?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    He picked up Jacob’s body, hefting it over a shoulder. It was a lot of weight, and he did wobble getting Jacob into position. But he managed. “What