If at first you don't succeed...

5. Back at the Base

The tremors caught her completely by surprise. 

Giovanna raised an eyebrow and called up the seismograph on her console. It was unmistakably a quake. Faint, but too strong to be a landslide. Odd for a geologically dead world, she thought, but hey, it happens. She used to work on the Moon before Border and even there, from time to time, the ground shook a bit. No rocky planet's surface is ever entirely static. There are always tidal effects, cave-ins, underground rivers eroding away the crust, occasional patches of deep lava still churning, things like that. Markus, their new geologist, would have loved that. The kid was a fresh addition to their prospecting teams and he constantly complained that his first assignment obviously had to be on a geologically dead world.

Maya and Riccardo were the nearest team out that day, just a few kilometers from Base Alpha, as the only human Outpost on Border was unimaginatively called. Their suits' video feed was muted, as usual, because monitoring every team's communications would be useless and confusing for a human operator, so she called them directly. They were exchanging jokes about poor Markus when the ground shook again, violently this time. Her chair rocked like a skittish horse. Then Giovanna heard Maya yelp. The video from her suit showed the ground beneath the rover crumbling away into darkness. It was disquietingly fast. She fell in the hole and her feed went dark. At the wheel, Riccardo was swearing and trying to get the rover on solid ground. He failed, and she watched his video feed cut abruptly too.

"Shit," was all Giovanna was able to say. She checked the rover's GPS data only to find they weren't available anymore. The tremors had subsided, but she wasn't aware of it. She wasn't aware of anything, really. She remained there, frozen, for a few seconds. In the year she'd spent on Border, nothing had prepared her for something like that. There had been emergencies, sure, but they never lost contact with anyone. Sometimes someone got injured, sometimes she had to send a Falcon to rescue some over-enthusiastic prospector who thought climbing a steep ravine to go see some unusual rock was a good idea, and got stuck without being able to go up or down. But they were all professionals, and such incidents were rare. She didn't feel particularly professional now. 

Despite working as operations manager in a governative mission for the mining and exploitation of an extrasolar planet, she wasn't an adventurous woman. Quite the opposite. She was born on Earth, in Chicago, and never would have guessed she would travel off-planet in her life. It just wasn't on the cards. What she had always wanted, above anything else, was lots of books to read undisturbed in a quiet place, and two cats. When she was a kid friends and family, with a tender smile and a bit of worry, called her "the old lady". Growing up fascinated by words, she discovered a talent for languages and started studying on her own. Her parents were a little troubled about the time she spent perusing grammar guides and dictionaries instead of running in the park with the other children. By the age of fifteen she could speak a fair Russian, a good French, and a perfect Spanish. At twenty-five she graduated in linguistics with a minor in communication science and, at twenty-six, got a job as a library counselor at the Harold Washington Library Center. The money was middling, but the work was fine and, above all, she had access to a veritable cornucopia of texts. While there, she learned even more languages, adopted two cats, and filled her house with all sorts of books, spending her evenings curled up in her comfy armchair with a novel or an essay, while Harpo and Groucho purred the time away. She had been happy, there. She never would have left of her own volition.

She shook herself out of it. It wasn't the time to get distracted. She tried contacting Maya and Riccardo again for several, tense seconds, to no avail. She pulled up real-time satellite imagery of the spot where they had been. Resolution was not particularly good, because they were primarily communication satellites, but there was a gaping fracture in that position.  

She was about to notify the base manager and thinking about a rescue mission when, on her panel, other lights started blinking; incoming calls from the other teams, all at once. All of them were far away, especially Markus and his engineers in Garda Bay, on the other side of the planet, so that simultaneity was disquieting. Surely the quake was localized? She checked the seismograph again. She wanted to have something to say to them, to reassure them. 

The data feed left her baffled, mouth agape.

"What the fuuuu..." she murmured to herself. Base Alpha didn't have seismographs everywhere on Border, for convenience's sake. It would have been a waste of money, on a purportedly geologically dead body. But every single one of those showed the crust of the planet dancing the samba. She surveyed the video feeds and realized nobody was in immediate danger, so she opened the audio channel to Markus' team to hear from him. She didn't exactly know why, there were three other geologists on the staff, all scattered around on surveying missions. Maybe it was because she was just talking about him with Maya and Ric.

"Giovanna!" he cried out when she switched the audio on, "A quake! We just felt the ground shake! Awesome!"
"You're not the only one, Markus," she answered, her voice a bit unsteady. "Something's wrong here. I felt that too! Maya and Riccardo just disappeared!"
"What do you mean Maya and Ric disappeared? And you felt that? We're six thousand kilometers aways from Base Alpha, how..."

Giovanna never heard the end of that sentence because the lights went off, along with every single panel in the SatCom room. The constant, reassuring humming of the base's life support systems was suddenly replaced by the terrifying silence that can only come after what's keeping you alive is no longer going. The emergency lights didn't even switch on. The only illumination in the control room came from the dim, pale blue early morning sky, falling through the huge transparent aluminum windows in front of her. It wasn't even enough to read labels on the console. 

"Aw, shit," commented Giovanna, the talented linguist.