Transmit Failure (Part II)

Transmit Failure
Part 2

(Word count: 2179)


The churning of thick sulfuric ash and rock over the barracks was deafening, even as he lay in his closed and sealed sleep pod. The debris covered the window quickly, cutting off the ambient light the gold surface of Io had reflected into his room.  Joshua lay in darkness feeling buried alive and it didn’t help that he was lying in an oversized coffin. When everything settled, Joshua could hear nothing but his heartbeat and his breathing.

He remained in the pod for several hours, afraid to open it because he didn’t know if there had been a breach in the barracks.  What if he had to stay in the coffin—er, sleep pod for hours, days, weeks? He felt around on the right side of the pod for the light switch and when he turned it on, he only felt slightly better. Although the pod was large enough for one to read or bend one’s leg with the knee up towards the ceiling, it began to feel very cramped.

What if the air filtration system failed? How long could he stay alive in the sleep pod? What would it feel like to run out of air? Would he just pass out and fall asleep forever or would he endure some horrible, agonizing death, his lungs on fire, burning for air. He imagined trying to inhale in a vacuum, his throat clenching. How he would pray for death.

“Stop it! Get a hold of yourself!”

He took some deep breaths, counting on the filtration system to work, concentrating on the fact that he was still alive and that the base seemed to be in one piece, at least in the barracks. He activated his wrist computer, searching for something to take his mind off his predicament. There had been a musical group that was very popular a couple hundred years before named Pink Floyd. He loved the band’s soaring melodies and believed they were ahead of their time as their music made him think of space travel. He selected Shine On You Crazy Diamond.

The melody soothed him as he continued to lie in the pod’s soft light, contemplating how in the hell he had missed the evacuation notices. He reset his wrist computer to check his tracker log. It hadn’t occurred to him to check it while he was working at the site and now he saw that the tracker had gone offline during his shift. He checked the times of the warnings and they too had been transmitted the day before while he was on site. Messages had been sent to him while his communication system was down and he supposed when the company saw that his tracker was offline, they probably assumed he was dead. The messages were only minutes apart and he wondered if anybody had even taken the time to look for him.

He’d left the site later than usual last night and since there had been an increase in volcanic activity, there was that much more sulfuric ash to dig his transport vehicle out of before driving back to base. Back at base, he radioed that he’d arrived but there was no reply from the control room. He didn’t think much of it because it’d happened before a handful of times. He’d opened the gates remotely and secured himself and the vehicle in the airtight garage facility. He’d bypassed the popular parts of the base like the dining area and the pub and entered the base near the barracks. He hadn’t really paid attention to the sleep pods in the dim light of his room. Exhausted, sleep had been the only thing on his mind. If he’d taken his head out of his ass, he might’ve noticed everyone had already departed.

Now, in the midst of his anxiety and the darkness outside the escape pod, different ‘what if’ scenarios played out in his head, some of them ending with him being aboard an escape craft with everybody else, other scenarios evolving a little differently.

The mental strain of the past several hours overworked his brain, so much so that he eventually fell asleep. His family was there with him in his dream, buried under who knows how much ash and soil. The walls of the base were dark gray and black. Joshua’s eight-year-old son, Steven, was starving to death, the boy so frail in his arms as Joshua held him. The father listened to his son’s shallow breaths until they faded to nothing. Joshua stroked the boy’s face, the smooth skin under his fingertips turning cold. Steven’s skeletal frame began to stiffen in his father’s embrace.

He screamed and shot up, striking the pod’s clear Pyvex lid with his head. He wept for a moment, relieved that it had been just a dream, not wanting to ever fall asleep again, afraid that perhaps he was losing his mind. The picture of his family comforted him and the yearning to be home again got him thinking about leaving the pod, his first step towards freedom. But had the base had held together? How could he know? Obviously, he wasn’t floating in space; he hadn’t been sucked out of the barracks and tossed about Io like a leaf in a hurricane.

Then he realized something: If the barracks’ structure had been compromised, everything not bolted down would have been sucked out of wherever the breach had occurred. Of course, the noise of the ash and soil covering the base was pretty loud and there was a chance he might not have heard the desks, chairs and computers being sucked out of the room. But he was fairly confident that, more than likely, he would have heard the breach.

And if the base had held together, he could make his way to the dining hall and, probably, anywhere else he wanted. Unless the power plant was destroyed, the base could be powered for years giving him plenty of time to figure a way out of the base. But what would he escape to? The freezing, inhospitable, life-ending vacuum of space?

He shook the negativity out of his head and forced himself to move, unsealing the pod and pushing the lid open, the motion causing the light in the room to turn on. The other sleep pods and desks were where they’d been before. He sat there for a moment holding his breath until he waved his hand in front of his face and could feel a tiny breeze. He breathed again, safe, at least for the time being. He tucked his family’s picture into his breast pocket and climbed out of the pod, swearing he’d never sleep in it again with the lid closed.

He walked slowly down the bright corridors expecting to see a large steel door after every turn, the base sealing itself as well as it could to prevent its entire destruction. He wanted to feel safe but he kept telling himself that there was no way the facility could have held up against the massive rush of ash. There was no relief from the grip of anxiety until he realized the path to the dining hall was unimpeded. In fact, it appeared the base had held up pretty well.

What he found haunting was that every window was now black. Even when Io was in the shadow of Jupiter, he and the other thousand of the base’s inhabitants could still see a thick blanket of stars as well as Io’s brothers and sisters—Europa being the most impressive (and closest). In the mornings, they would gather at the spaceport gates, looking up through the glass ceiling to watch the swirls of orange, white and that enormous red spot fill most of the sky. He’d always known Jupiter was massive but it wasn’t until he landed on Io that he could really appreciate the beauty and the magnificence of the gas giant. And to think Jupiter was a thousand times smaller than the Sun. The comparison was hard for him to visualize.

It had only been a day and he was already missing the view.

There were aftershocks of the eruption every few minutes but they were mild, almost back to the usual 1s and 2s that used to remind him that the base was built too close to an active, alien volcano. He wished he could see if the mountain was still spewing lava and ash and could only imagine the spectacular scene.

He ambled to the control room, hopeful the various life support systems were as robust as the base seemed to be. If the air filtration system was down, he knew he would eventually run out of air.  The layout of the control room was designed for simplicity and ease of navigating through all the screens, the digital dials and gauges. When he walked in, the lights turned on but everything else was powered down. In moments he had the screens flickering to life and telling him what was functional and what wasn’t. His priority was the air filtration system and when he saw ‘operational’ in green underneath a gauge that read ‘100%,’ he knew he wouldn’t suffocate.

He scanned the rest of the system screens, the reactor, water levels, structural integrity and temperature levels were good. When he looked at the communication status readout, it said ‘offline’ in red text. He cursed out loud. The only thing he could think of was that the pyroclastic wave that covered the base had also knocked over and buried the transmission tower and radar dishes. If that had happened, then he knew he would be in trouble.

It might have been the anxiety of not being able to reach out for help or the fact that he hadn’t eaten in over a day but he was feeling a little light-headed. He needed to eat but he just had to see if there was anything he could do to bring the com system back online first.

The communications center looked very similar to the control room except the room was a little smaller. Two people at a time worked in the office, sending and receiving messages. He knew there was a lot of waiting around in that room when communicating with Earth as it took anywhere from 35 to 40 minutes for radio signals to travel from the Jupiter system to Earth.

The screens flashed to life and he sat in front of them, taking a few moments to figure out how to run self-checks. When the computer finally told him that he was correct about the towers and dish being damaged, he felt a twinge of despair grip him. He paced the room for several minutes trying to get himself to calm down so that he could think clearly of a way to signal someone that he was alive. After an hour, he figured he’d just have to take his time about this, not wanting to do something that would jeopardize his well-being or the structural integrity of the base.

The base was fully powered and although he could’ve taken advantage of this by making himself his favorite meal (medium rare steak and a side of crab legs), he grabbed a stygnola bar and ate in the kitchen among the stainless steel countertops, stoves, pots and pans, not wanting to sit in that large, empty dining area. The absence of his crewmates’ usual bedlam made him feel scared. Not ‘ghost’ scared, just afraid of being swallowed up by the silence.

As he leaned against one of the stainless stoves, he started to worry that he might never be found, at least not in a timely manner. He imagined he’d be found a thousand years later by archeologists researching the hereditary destruction of Baby Vesuvius. Men in spacesuits would be brushing the yellow, sulfuric soil and begin to uncover the base. Eventually, they’d find a way inside and discover him in his sleep coffin, just like King Tut, except it would just be him, Joshua Kellum, mining specialist. Who’d care?

Stay positive. He had plenty of food, shelter, light, warmth, and air but eventually, just like everything else, everything would run out. But what would end first, the water supply, the food, the base’s power, the air? Or would time run out before anything else? Did time even play a role in all this?

Someone has to come back and look for me. They have to. Clara will demand it. Even if it’s just to recover my body. There has to at least be some kind of half-ass search for me. And if it was too dangerous for humans to come back for him, he knew they could easily send androids. Those things were constructed of titanium and temperature resistant materials, able to work in the vacuum and extreme environment of space, most of the time without space suits.

He wouldn’t have minded having an android to talk to at the moment but for now, he walked back to the communications center, trying not to think of the silence that was after him.

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ID: 1605037   (Rated: 13+) Title: Transmit Failure (Part III)   Description: Joshua makes a discovery. (Revised 10-25-09) By: Chucky69