Transmit Failure (Part I)

Transmit Failure
Part 1

(Word count: 1330)


Joshua Kellum awoke to a volcanic tremor. It had begun as a minor rumble but by the time he was fully conscious, he found himself being tossed about his sleep pod.  It startled him because the tremors were usually ones and twos, barely enough for someone to feel them. This tremor was more like a seven, rattling the digital flatscreen mounted to his right and knocking over the little, framed picture of his wife and two children on the shelf to his left. The deep rumble made his teeth chatter until he clenched his jaw. The shaking had knocked him to the edge of the pod when and just when he was about to fall out of his pod, the fierce vibrating stopped.

In the silence of the sleep pod, he found himself breathing like he had just run on the treadmill. No sense in panicking yet. This wasn’t his first level seven tremor. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, rolled onto his side and stood the family picture back up, caressing the image gently with his thumb. The longer he stared at the portrait, the easier it was to calm down and catch his breath. He thought it strange how the picture could change fear into yearning in such a short amount of time.

He’d taken the picture of Clara, Steven and Nora while on vacation at the Mars resort of Santa Maria.  Olympus Mons was in the background, a hundred miles away but looking much closer because of its massive size. Clara and the kids were dressed in their white spacesuits, toothy smiles showing through the clear face shield of their helmets. The picture was taken two years and billions of miles ago. After that Mars vacation in 2169, his family had taken the cruise ship back to Earth while he took a charter flight to Io to begin a three year commitment as a mining specialist for Minutor Inc.

“That was a good rumble, wasn’t it?.....Guys?” he said, peeking over the lip of his sleep pod. The other seven pods in the room were open and empty. 

He rubbed his eyes, climbed out of the pod and dressed quickly, throwing on a red jumpsuit. He didn’t think he’d woken up that late. Another moderate tremor caused him to look out the thick, triple-paned window of transparent, impermeable Pyvex. It wasn’t the biggest eruption he’d seen but it was larger than most others. Megatons of bright, molten sulfur shot miles high from the top of Vesuvius II, landing all around the massive lunar mountain twenty miles away. Maybe the base had been built too close to the volcano, but what a view with Jupiter rising behind the volcano, its wavy, orange bands filling much of the black sky.

When Joshua was in the washroom standing in front of the urinal, the digital information screen mounted at eye level said ‘NO SIGNAL.’  Not being fed the usual base news, his mind wandered, replaying the previous day’s events: He’d worked at Site 263, alone, excavating twenty tons of Gadsum, a compound used for fusion and propulsion. His muscles ached but it wasn’t too bad. Thank God for hydraulic space suits and machinery.

There was nothing in the sandy brown, Tuscan-textured corridor but silence. Where were all the other miners, technicians, pleasure-bots?  He walked by several small rooms similar to his own and they were also empty. Was he in the middle of an evac drill and somehow didn’t know about it? He checked his wrist computer for messages but his inbox was empty.

Turning towards the dining hall, he walked on dark green carpet. The eating area was a large banquet room with several Chandeliers hanging from the tall ceiling, long tables and thick chairs made of cherry wood. He wanted to grab one of his fellow miners by the front of his shirt and ask why the hell nobody had bothered to wake him up.  But the tables were empty and many of the chairs were knocked over, causing Joshua’s heart rate to accelerate and his skin to go cold. Frantic but not panicked, he typed a message on a thin keyboard that had slid from his wrist computer across his forearm.

PETE, WHERE’S EVERYONE?

He hit ‘transmit’ and was a few steps into the walk back to his room when his wrist beeped.

TRANSMIT FAILURE

A deep, powerful tremor rumbled through the base for several seconds, making him reach for the wall to steady himself. Clara, Steven and Nora flashed through his mind and for an instant he feared he’d never see them again.

When the floor stopped jerking his feet from side to side, he sprinted to the spaceport to discover there wasn’t anyone at the gates. He rushed halfway down the long corridor and looked out through the massive windows. There wasn’t a single ship to be seen on the golden surface of the moon, or in the dark, star-filled sky for that matter.

Those assholes left without me! But why? Why now? Several months before, one of the sentry satellites had detected a meteor on a direct course for Io. Military ships were able to blast it into dust before the stray, 2-mile wide rock could strike Io, but the inhabitants were evacuated as a precaution anyway.  Had the meteor struck Io, it would have decimated most of the surface. The base would’ve simply been peeled off the Galilean moon in a violent sweep of rock and fire.

Could this be why everyone cleared out? Could it be that another meteor was threatening Io, this one slipping detection before anything could be done about it?

The windows began to clatter as another tremor rolled through the base. He dashed back towards the main facility, afraid of a breach. If one occurred, the spaceport’s corridor would be sealed off automatically, not that it would matter; he’d be sucked out of the base before his mind could process what had happened.

He was out of breath when he arrived at his room and began checking his computer screen for messages. Trying to send out a message was fruitless, the words ‘transmit failure’ appearing on his desk screen. Dammit. Not again. Computer and communication glitches, although rare, were not unheard of. Most of the technical problems occurred when Io passed through Jupiter’s powerful magnetosphere. Although most systems were encased in special material to combat this, the system wasn’t infallible, as he was finding out.

The reset button on the screen glowed red and he pressed it, rebooting his computer. When the system came back online, messages began pouring into his inbox. The subject of the emails chilled him to the core.

-EVACUATION WARNING

-MASSIVE ERUPTION IMMINENT

-FINAL EVAC CALL

He was about to read one of the messages when a shockwave rocked the base, knocking Joshua to the floor. He stood back up and peered through his window. Half of Vesuvius had exploded and a massive pyroclastic flow, a churning wave of hot gas and rock, expanded outward from the giant volcano. The flow was moving so fast it didn’t look real, swallowing up the varying textures of the landscape like spilled paint on carpet.

Maybe twenty miles was a safe enough distance from the catastrophic event. Maybe death wouldn’t reach him. But the longer his eyes followed the wave of smoke, ash and rock, the more it became apparent that someone screwed up big by building the facility so close to Vesuvius. He calculated the wave would overrun the base—by a lot, and there was no way the base was going to withstand it. He was going to die by fire.

Survival instinct led him to his sleep pod. Perhaps it would provide him with enough protection so that he could recite an Act of Contrition. He locked himself into the pod and focused on the picture of his family while the roar of the approaching volcanic flow grew louder and louder.

* * *

Transmit Failure (Part II)  (13+) Joshua Kellum finds himself alone on Jupiter's moon, Io. (Revised 10-25-09) #1602990 by jsouthcross