Chapter 4 #2
“Oh, it was never supposed to be a real job.” She waves a hand.
“I was covering a maternity leave. One of the techs, Lorinda, had gone on bed rest with complications, and they needed a warm body who could do the work now. That was the whole gig, fill in, learn everything I could, put Timbur Minecorp at the top of my résumé, and go home.” She tips her head, considering.
“Was I hoping it’d turn into something permanent?
Obviously. I hoped so hard I probably bent the fabric of space. But I knew what it was.”
“And they transported you in?”
“They transported me in.” Her eyes go round with the memory of it. “They paid fantastical amounts of currency to have my atoms flung across the Four Sectors because they needed me a moon cycle sooner. I felt like a celebrity.”
I let out a snort-laugh. “Me too. That’s exactly how I felt.”
“Also, isn’t the vegetation here amazing compared to New Earth? I love the view each day from our apartment.”
“It’s really beautiful. So lush and green.”
“Yep. I mean, don’t mess with that jungle though, the flowers are gorgeous, but it will also eat you alive if you let it, but as long as you stay here, in the community and only venture out on the paths and with a buddy, you’re fine.”
“I can admire it from afar.”
“Exactly,” she laughs.
“Okay,” I say. “So how do you go from covering a maternity leave to ending up married to a Xylan miner?”
She settles in, elbows on the table. “First day, I’ve got a coffee stain on my brand-new uniform and I’m being walked to the lift by Sulinda.”
“Oh, I know Sulinda. She’s the one who walked me to my apartment too on the first day. I love her.”
“Isn’t she the best? Well, Sulinda gets an emergency alert that her sister’s gone into early labor, alone, and Sulinda’s the closest one to her and needs to leave immediately to go help.
So I do the noble thing and tell her to go, I’m fine, I’ve memorized the site maps, I’m a big girl.
She programs the lift for level thirty-four hundred and off she runs.
I get in the lift alone.” She holds up a finger.
“For about four seconds, because just as the doors are closing, this hand appears out of nowhere and stops the doors and in comes the single largest, most good-looking male I have ever seen in my life. Seven feet of him. Braids down to here. He fills the entire lift, takes one look at me, checks me out head to toe like he’s pricing a rock, grunts, and goes back to his tablet. ”
I snort into my stew. “He grunted at you.”
“Yep. And meanwhile my body was on fire because I was instantly attracted to him like never before. It was embarrassing. I was trying to pretend like I wasn’t internally wishing I could jump him and have my way with him, which was hard because I had to remain professional, I was going to be working with this guy. ”
“Oh no,” I gasp.
“Turns out he’s Saxon of Nine. Sulinda’s cousin. My crew. The male in charge of my training. Which meant he was about as off-limits as a being can get, and I knew it, and I was still standing there in a lift thinking about climbing him like a mountain.”
“So professional.”
“Deeply professional.” She grins. “And then the lights went out.”
I set my fork down. “Wait. You were in the first cascade?”
“I was in the first cascade. One moment we’re descending, having this awkward conversation, and the next, there’s nothing.
No lights. No motion. No sparks, no grinding, no bang.
That’s the part I’ve never forgotten. It wasn’t a failure sound.
There was no sound at all. Everything just…
stopped. Like something reached over and turned the whole planet off. ”
The engineer in me goes very, very still. “How long?”
“Hours. And Mara, it was total. Pitch black — I couldn’t see my own hand, which, fun fact I discovered at the worst possible moment, is a thing I have a real problem with.
” She waves it off. “Saxon could see fine. He’s standing there perfectly calm and I’m having a full-blown panic attack on the floor of the lift. ”
“He must’ve called it in.”
“That’s the thing.” She leans forward. “He couldn’t.
The emergency comm in the lift was dead.
His tablet was dead. There’s supposed to be a redundant backup for exactly that situation, and it was dead too.
He kept saying it — this shouldn’t be possible.
Cages don’t break down. They’re maintained obsessively and are the highest priority in the whole mine.
And it wasn’t just us. Comms array, employee housing, the outbuildings — the entire outpost went dark. ”
“What did they tell you caused it?”
Leah shrugs. “Scheduled maintenance. That’s the official answer.
That morning there was a notice — the network grid, the one that monitors energy flow for the whole outpost, was being replaced and upgraded.
So the story is, something went sideways during the upgrade and it cascaded.
Temporary cascade failure. Bad timing, bad luck, don’t worry about it. ”
“And everyone believed that?”
“I’ve been a tech here for a few years now and nowadays I don’t think it makes that much sense. A cascade takes down the primary, fine, that happens. But the primary, the comms, tablets, emergency backup, and every outbuilding, all in the same instant, with no sound and no warning?”
I nod in agreement. “How did it come back?”