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August 22, 2526. The caravan has been continuing on its way. They have
started noticing tracks in the regolith which suggest that others have had
to drive to escape. Their own trains might have also been damaged, or they
just didn’t want to use them. There’s no way to communicate with people that
far away, though. Radio signals can only reach a short distance with all
this electromagnetic interference in the air now. Breanna has had to keep
the vehicles closer together so they don’t lose track of one another. They
obviously lost contact with the two dissenters right quick, so they don’t
know what’s become of them, but it’s been more than a day. In all
probability, they’re already dead. The truth is, it would be nice if they
could confirm that just to be ultra confident that no one else will get the
idea to do the same thing.
By and large, despite their horrific circumstances, everything has been
going relatively smoothly. Breanna is still the de facto leader since she is
the most knowledgeable one here, and everyone seems to be respecting that.
While she still says that she’s operating the lead car, it isn’t
always the one in front. One or more of the others will periodically come
across a nice, road-like surface, and gain some speed. This is fine, it’s
not like they’re in a single-file line, so there is no way to serve as
vanguard for all of them. Unfortunately, that may be precisely what they
should have done.
“So.” Cash spins her seat around to face the rest of the passengers. “Does
anyone know any driving ga—?”
The vehicle suddenly veers to the left. They can’t quite tell why at first,
but they certainly feel the lurch, and a bright orange light overwhelms
their eyes. Breanna reaches up instinctively to take manual control, but
that is not the right thing to do in this situation, so she holds back. The
autopilot changed directions for a reason, and while it may not be smarter,
it does have greater awareness, and can react faster.
“Oh my God!” someone on the radio screams. “It just threw them into the air. Oh my God what is that? What is that!” They continue to hear voices, but it’s just an
unintelligible cacophony.
“Zero-three-one is down!” Cash declares, looking at her terminal.
“Down how?” Breanna demands to know. “What happened?”
“This.” Cash flings the image on her screen to Breanna’s. A giant spinning
vortex of fire is spiraling up into the air and widening. “I don’t know what
any of this means. Weather and natural disasters science isn’t my bag.”
“It’s a pyrotornado. The methane levels just spiked off the charts. There’s
probably a reservoir underneath us, which the CME destabilized, and it just
went critical, possibly due to our presence.”
“Hello?” someone manages to radio clearly after a brief lull. “What do we do?”
Breanna grabs the mic. “Go radio silent and wait for my instructions. Don’t
touch the controls.” She faces Cash. “The rovers haven’t stopped, so I
assume it’s better to keep going. If we’re over the pocket, we need to try
to get off of it.”
“Impossible to say,” Cash explains quickly. “We don’t have time to survey
the land. The one behind us could be a baby. We could be driving
towards the motherlode.”
“What’s that right there?” Aetrena asks, leaning forward over Cash’s
shoulder, and pointing at her screen.
“The computer is calculating a 56% chance that it’s safer to hunker down
than to bug out, but that’s too close to call, so it’s deferring to the
operator. It maintains the status quo until you give it a new plan. So we
should do that,” Cash urges.
Breanna glances back at the data and tries to make a snap decision. This
really isn’t her forte. She likes computers. And that’s why she should trust
it. Those are terrible odds, but 56 is higher than 44, so without any
further information, the only logical response is to give yourself the best
chance. “Do you think that zero-three-one triggered it by running over some
kind of entrance? It literally lit a spark?”
“That would be my guess,” Cash concurs.
“Then I’m activating hunker mode for all vehicles.” She starts tapping her
interface. “It looks like that thing is moving away or running out of gas. I
don’t want what happened to three-one to happen to someone else.” Their
rover comes to a complete stop, as do all of the others, spread out a little
for safety. “We wait it out while we use our caravan sensor array to run
that survey. We need to know where to go, and how to move safely.” She gets
back on the radio to do her best to explain all that to everyone else. They
have some questions, but Cash is going to have to field them...one at a
time, in an orderly fashion. For now, they just aren’t going to move. The
computer begins to lower their suspensions, and inject their anchor spikes.
“Boss? This is one-two-one,” someone radios in a panic shortly
thereafter.
“Go ahead, one-twenty-one.”
“We lost someone,” Rover 121 says quickly. “He ran out, out of his mind. He doesn’t know anyone here, and has been a
little crazy this whole time, but now he said he’s afraid of the small
space, and just had to break free.”
“Is he wearing a suit?” Breanna asks.
“Not even a mask. He was scared of that too.”
“I see them, they’re not far,” Cash reports.
“Shit,” Breanna says, going back to the controls. “It will take some time to
reverse hunker mode, but faster for us than anyone else, and we all have IMS
units.”
Tertius is looking at the screens now. “No time. He’ll die out there. I’ll
hoof it.”
“And then what?” Breanna questions.
Tertius grabs the door handle. “Then I’ll give him my suit. Lower your
visors.”
They all seal up their suits, except for Aeterna. As soon as her father runs
out, also without a vacuum seal, she casually closes the door. Who
are these people?
“Come on, come on!” Breanna urges. She keeps one eye on the release
progress, and the other on Tertius’ beacon. He’s moving fast, but they’ll be
able to catch up if this blasted thing ever gets going. “Goddammit,
let’s go!” She impatiently waits a little more, and a little more. “Finally!”
She activates manual mode this time, peeling out, and spinning a doughnut.
Visibility is low, but they draw close enough to see Tertius open his suit
in the back, grab the panicking guy by the wrists, and shove him into it in
his place. Without even waiting for the vehicle to stop, Aeterna opens the
door again just as a new explosion right underneath flings them all into the
air. She grabs the man just in time, and pulls him in to safety. Her father,
though...Breanna doesn’t care how enhanced he is, he’s not surviving
a thermal cyclone out in the open like that wearing little more than shorts
and a t-shirt. He’s just not. They might not even survive.
