Secret of Frost and Moon

The First Step

Alaia Skyhawk: Here's the next bit. It's rather wordy, but that can't be helped. Chapters with loads of dialogue tend to crop up at times like this hehehe! :)

Disclaimer: I don't own Rise of the Guardians, the Guardians of Childhood, or any related characters etc. This story is written purely for entertainment purposes.

~(-)~

Chapter 75: The First Step

Fingers tapped on the keyboard frantically, the woman they belonged to staring intently and in great concern at the computer screen. Every time a sequence of clicks came to an end, and she pressed enter, a desperate curse came after the following pause at the message on the screen each time.

'GPS Signal not detected.'

The woman, Marcia, tried again, and again, and again. The satellite images and weather radar had, this morning, revealed a massive wind-storm whipping up clouds of snow across the entire area where the anomaly was. Estimated wind-speed was well over a hundred miles per hour, and the area where the team had been was so flat as to be totally exposed. That combined with the lack of a tracking signal from their GPS, left only the gut-wrenching conclusion that they'd been swept away from the winds, perhaps into some glacial crevasse, and buried... That is, they were almost certainly dead.

"Dammit!"

At the sound of her fist slammed down onto the edge of her desk, a figure peered into the tiny office. It was Patrick, the research station's mechanical engineer, who looked after and maintained the generators and the snow-mobiles used to keep the small airstrip clear.

He entered the room, stopping behind her to place a hand on her shoulder.

"Still nothing?"

She bowed her head, before glancing at the nearby clock which read almost midday.

"It's been more than twelve hours since the GPS signal was last detected, and that storm... There's no thick cloud cover, just wind and the snow it's carrying, nothing dense enough to block the signal. But even without that, their satellite phone should be working; it's an entirely separate piece of equipment. If they'd managed to hunker down somewhere, they'd have at least attempted to leave a message by now using it."

Patrick sighed, giving her shoulder a small squeeze.

"Don't give up yet. Teams have lost contact for longer than twelve hours before, in storms. There was that team four years ago, that was incommunicado for almost a week. I'm sure Marcus and the others are fine."

She shook him off, turning her head to regard him hopelessly.

"Patrick, their tents are only rated for a wind-speed of eighty knots! Ninety-two miles per hour! The estimates from satellite and radar telemetry, are showing a minimum wind-speed of almost a hundred and thirty miles per hour in that area! Their shelters will have been shredded!"

Her voice was rising in hysteria. "We don't even have the equipment to send a rescue! Not at a tiny sub-station like this! It will be hours before one of the planes at Rothera could get here, and it wouldn't have enough fuel left to risk flying out to where the team were even if the storm had stopped by then."

Marcia slumped, head in hands, and started to sob. The risk of being killed in a storm was a real threat out here, everyone knew that. But it didn't make accepting a loss at the weather's hands, any easier.

Patrick knelt down beside her, placing his arm around her shoulders so her head could rest on his shoulder. She continued to cry, the screen of the nearby computer still displaying the 'GPS Signal not detected' message... until a few minutes later the computer let out a bleep.