If at first you don't succeed...

2. That doesn't look good

Until now, at least.

The fog clouding her brain was starting to dissipate. By what her inner ear was telling her, she was more or less upright. A bit slanted on her back, perhaps, with arms splayed at her sides and legs straight down. Probably because the suit stiffened at the first sign of danger. Then the idea to check her head, or anything else for that matter, suddenly stampeded through her addled brain like a startled herd. She immediately started sweating.

"Stupid motherfucker that you are, Maya," she murmured. Then, louder, "Dan, give me a status update."

A flurry of high definition schematics and labels appeared on her visor, along with a biomonitor. It was all green, with just an orange dot on top of her head. The display shifted and recomposed in an anatomical section of her skull with a little red area highlighted at the top. The expert system of her suit answered with its calm, deep voice.

"I detect a light concussion with subarachnoid hemorrhage due to an impact. It's minor and should be reabsorbed in twenty-four hours without consequences. You may feel dizzy and confused for the next three to six hours."

She felt elated. If Dan were corporeal she would've hugged him.

"I am, but I'm also happy. It could've been worse," she said, still mentally cursing herself and feeling very dumb. "What about you?"

"Minor damage to suit exterior. Core functions unaffected."

She checked the time: less than twenty minutes had passed.

"Ok, first things first. Call Riccardo, all frequencies."

"Unable to establish radio contact," answered Dan.

Damn. She should have guessed it, there were no notifications of incoming calls. She started considering the issue with slow deliberation, checking her mental processes. It was difficult. Well, the radio was surely working, otherwise Dan would have told her. This meant she was too far down, or covered by too much dirt and rock to let radio waves in or out. If memory served, while she was falling from the rover the hole was still spreading along the other wheels on the right side and outward. In a cave-in like that, there would be a lot of debris. She remembered seeing what looked like a literal cave, a dark, empty space barely revealed by Border's rising sun, before the fall made her pivot towards the sky.

She needed light, but she couldn't reach the deck on her forearm.

"Dan, torch please."

The heads-up display got washed out as light shined from the top of her helmet onto the brown rubble pressed to the transparent plate in front of her eyes. Well, fuck.

Her head was getting clearer by the minute, probably because of adrenaline. It looked like she had two options: wait for rescue or try to get out by herself.

Riccardo was probably shoveling dirt with his gloved hands right now. She thought of him as a standing fella and good engineer. Surely he was already calling for help. SatCom could send someone in a couple of hours; they weren't far from the base.

"Dan, how much air do we have left?"

"Approximately eleven hours, thirteen minutes at current rate of consumption."

They would rescue her well before that. Maya sighed and resigned to wait.

She killed time trying to call Riccardo or Giovanna, to no avail. Nothing moved in her dark, silent world, except the heads-up display. She tried to read some technical papers but couldn't concentrate. She mused about poor Markus, the most bored geologist she'd ever known, and imagined his sad little face when someone eventually would have to break the news of the borderquake to him. She recalled her time on Ceres, when she was a fresh-faced young kid from Mars, longing for the stars but looking for work in Dantu Station in the meanwhile. Then she thought about the stories of old miners haunting asteroids after being killed on the job. By the job. Blasted away by a malfunctioning plasma lance, crushed by an ore grinder, trapped in some boring tunnel with nothing to do except wait for suffocation.

Not that she believed in ghosts, but that mortality rate was precisely why she accepted the five years mission on Border. She wanted out of the solar system. Being a government prospector on this godforsaken shithole of a planet was way better than suffering poor food and poor wages. For the first month, every night, she had snuggled up in her room with a cup of hot cocoa she couldn't even dream of affording back in Ceres and stared through the large window at the white, frozen plains under the unfamiliar constellations, taking an occasional, incredulous peek at the bank balance on the screen of her pad. She had never seen so much money in her entire life, and it was hers. Yes, Border was boring, isolated, and sparsely populated, but it was paradise.

And now, this.

She waited, trying to fight the dizziness. And waited. And waited.

After more than four hours Maya realized she was keeping track of the time a little too much. She was sweating again, her heart was racing. She felt a surge of anxiety. Her head was clearer now, but she caught herself frantically biting her lip while trying the radio for the umpteenth time. Adrenaline was now working against her, making it hard to maintain a grip on reality. She was getting frantic, which meant consuming more oxygen. It wasn't good.

Maybe they couldn't dig for fear of causing a collapse. Maybe all the excavators were far away on some job. She should've paid more attention to the work schedule. Maybe Riccardo was trapped too, crushed under the rover, unable to communicate and as lonely as she was.

Maybe he was dead.

Fuck that.

"Dan, can you soften the suit without harming me?"

"Only to a certain extent."

"Please do."

She sensed the suit relaxing and started to gradually feel pressure over her whole body, like the weighted blanket she used to have as a kid. The rubble crunched while it shifted around her. She mentally thanked the gods of physics for Border's relatively low gravity.

"Stop it here. I wanna be able to move."

She started the laborious task of trying to wiggle out of there, or at least make some room to look around. She would've loved to know what lay directly above her but, advanced as he was, Dan was not equipped with a ground radar. There was a chance her movements could displace more rubble, and she sure as hell didn't want another cave-in on her head, low gravity or not.

"Nothing to do but press forward," she said to herself pushing with her elbows against whatever was under her.

Which sagged a little.

She stopped.

"Ok," she said to herself. "Now, slowly..."

She started to shift and rotate. The rubble was loose enough to let her, so maybe there wasn't so much of it. Shift a bit, try to force the right arm up close to the body, rotate. With the help of the semirigid suit and a lot of swearing she managed to turn slightly on her left side. From there she could see something she didn't really expect. She was resting on what appeared to be a translucent surface of dark blue glass. Her helmet light bounced on it, causing bright reflections that prevented her from seeing what was on the other side. She couldn't see any crack, which was good news in her book.

What didn't occur to her was that, if the same weight was applied on a surface of reduced size, the pressure would increase sharply.

The surface gave way, and she plunged in the dark again.