“Holly, tell him,” the concerned officer pleaded.
“It’s fine, that’s an overly cautious restriction,” she said, briskly shaking her head in a way that made it quite clear she’d previously forgotten about the diagnosis of a lymphatic condition which had led Terradox’s medical team to firmly encourage Grav to steer clear of atmospherically modified areas such as the Little Venus Buffer and the Primosphere. He had never had any real reason to visit those places since the diagnosis, but today his calling was too strong to care about such excessively precautionary measures. “Right, Grav?” Holly added.
“Of course,” he said. “But good work, junior: I commend you for stopping me so decisively. But in this instance, well, I am going in.”
The young officer stepped back. “Of course, sir. Peter is on top of things for now, but as you can imagine… people are getting restless and pushing to come out.”
Grav patted the officer on the back and continued inside.
A cacophony of noise hit the trio as soon as they crossed the line into the Buffer. The chaos quickly quietened, filtering through the area as people became aware of their arrival. Grav wanted to roar at the researchers who were hassling his security officers near the entrance but was loath to do anything that would publicly undermine Peter’s authority as the colony’s official Head of Security. Although the researchers backed away from the officers as soon as they saw Grav, the disrespect they had been showing for Peter’s staff angered him greatly. He briefly and quietly commended the officers’ restraint before following Holly over to an area which had been taped off. She couldn’t see any medical staff or any sign of activity aside from the people who had been trying to leave.
Bo Harrington appeared seconds later, hurrying out of his workshop as soon as he heard the hush which signalled that Holly and Grav had arrived. “Are you okay?” he asked, directing the question to Holly.
“What’s going on?” she replied, nodding to answer his prior question as she spoke.
Bo pointed to the area beyond the tape. “I don’t know, she just collapsed. I got everyone out of there and put up a visual cloak so no one would see her. The medical staff are still there. They tried to resuscitate, but she was dead when they got here. I know I’m not supposed to use romotech like that without specific clearance, but people are antsy enough at being stuck in here… if there was no cloak and they could all see her body, I don’t know if Peter would have had enough numbers to keep everyone in.”
“Don’t worry about the cloak,” Holly said. “That was smart. But where is Peter?”
Bo pointed again. “Still talking to the medics.”
“Peter,” Grav called. “Come here.”
Seconds later, Peter emerged from behind the visual cloak. It would have looked like magic if everyone hadn’t seen similar things before, and even with that prior experience it was still an odd thing to see.
“Holly…” Peter said solemnly, speaking as he walked over to the relatively private area where they were standing, “I am so sorry. Grav, you, too. I know you were close.”
“Do they have any idea what happened to her?” Holly asked.
“I don’t have to tell you that it is very early to say much, but they don’t think anything is suspicious,” Peter said, his weary expression more sorrowful than concerned. “They say it looks like a heart attack. But she is not old, and we test for everything, so I don’t know how that can be.”
Holly turned to Bo. “Didn’t she go home early yesterday because she felt ill?”
“A headache,” he nodded. “She was never ill, so it can’t be unrelated. But they know what kind of things to look for, right? So if they’re saying it’s not suspicious…”
“My gut says it’s not,” Peter said.
“So does mine,” Grav added, fully meaning it.
Holly nodded. Throughout her journey to the Buffer, when she had known very few details, she had momentarily thought about which potential cause for Sakura’s tragic death would be the least troubling. Suicide, sabotage, human error and system failure were among the worst she could think of.
And although ‘hope’ was an imprecise and rather inappropriate word in the current situation, something along the lines of an undiagnosed medical condition or a sudden and unpreventable cardiac arrest, though hardly palatable, was just about the least undesirable cause of death anyone could have hoped for.
Holly was impressed by Bo’s decisive handling of the situation and by Peter’s security team’s success in containing, if not fully controlling, a highly unsettled crowd. She was far from thrilled with those researchers who had defied orders and attempted to leave, but that was an issue for another time.
“Peter,” she said, “I want you to make a colony-wide announcement that there’s been an emergency medical incident in the Buffer. Make sure you use the word medical. Say that all research throughout the colony will be suspended for the day and request that all parents collect their children from the CDD as soon as possible. Okay? Ask everyone to go home and stay home once they finish their work and collect their children; not because there’s any danger, but because all of our operational resources and attention have to be directed towards dealing with this incident. This is a precautionary measure in case something else is going on here, but we don’t need the public to know that; we need them to think it’s strictly operational. And once you’ve made the announcement, I want you to go out to the CDD to assist with the unusual situation of all the parents arriving at the same time, and I want you to stay there with Viola and Jillian until the last child is collected. There’s no reason to think anyone is anything but completely safe, but I want you personally stationed at the CDD.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Right away.”
“Come to my workshop to record the message before you go,” Bo said. “It’s quiet in there.”
Once Bo and Peter set off, Holly and Grav crossed the visual cloak towards the medical personnel who were solemnly gathered around Sakura. Her body had already been bagged.
“We’ll deliver a full report as soon as we can,” one of the medics said, a man of around thirty years. There was a tear in his eye; although they were all excellent professionals, the colony was a small world and Sakura had been well and widely liked. “But right now, nothing leads me to think this is suspicious.”
Before Holly could reply, Bo’s voice filled the air as he bellowed in an uncharacteristically angry tone: “Who the hell is supposed to be on the light? You’re forty seconds late!”
“Oh, shit,” a young woman shrieked, sprinting towards the unusually vacant observation room. A second followed behind, less spritely but moving as quickly as she could.
“Idiots,” Grav moaned. “How fucking basic?!”
Christian, immediately concerned about his son Chase, called out for someone to pull up a live feed from inside the Kompound. He didn’t know which of the walls around him were viewing walls so couldn’t do so himself using his own wristband, but fortunately Holly was on it.
Even more fortunately, when the feed appeared it revealed that only one person was uneasily waiting for the light within the Kompound to flash as it should have done almost a full minute earlier, and it wasn’t Steve Shepherd.
eighteen
Chase Jackson stood alone under the light, his heart-rate quickening with every passing second.
It was already more than twice as late as it had ever been in the past, and he couldn’t help but think that someone on the outside was toying with him.
“Is this someone’s idea of a joke?” he said, quietly enough to make sure that no one else in the Kompound heard him through any closed doors, but loudly enough to be picked up by the microphones he knew were all over the place.
“I deal with Steve… I get Marcel to occupy him over this shift-change window so he forgets about it for once, and so we can tell him ‘see, nothing bad happened just because you weren’t watching’… and now you do this? Because I dealt with him, you’re messing
with me?”
In three hundred and fifty-nine days, Chase had never spoken directly to the observers except when sitting in the privacy room which had been designed for that very purpose. This moment represented a change in his one-way relationship with the observation team, and it wasn’t a move in a positive direction.
“A minute,” he said, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “A whole damn minute?”
Another six seconds later, the light finally flashed.
Chase closed his eyes and breathed a deep sigh of relief. As angry as he might have sounded moments earlier, his emotions had been driven primarily by fear. The flash of the light was all that told the group they were still being watched — it was all that told them they hadn’t been abandoned or that a horrible fate hadn’t befallen the rest of the colony — and Chase had just become aware that its punctuality was something his own sanity depended on a lot more than he’d previously realised.
He looked around the corridor, unsure where the nearest camera was. “Seriously, if that happens again…” he said, trailing off not for effect but rather to think of how to best finish the sentence.
His gaze then intensified as he stared at the light itself, correctly guessing that there was a 360-degree camera hidden within it. “Please, just don’t let that happen again.”
Chase then walked away, ready to put on a brave face and tell Steve the light had flashed as usual and that nothing bad had happened despite Steve missing the whole thing. Marcel had done an admirable job of distracting him for the requisite time, but now that Chase could no longer count on the punctuality of the flash — something he had always taken as a given — he really did have to make sure that Steve wouldn’t keep obsessively watching it every time.
“Oh, Ste-eve,” Chase said in a mocking tone, opening the door to the room where he and Marcel were playing cards. “Look at the time, genius.”
Steve glanced at his wristband and grinned. “You lousy sons of bitches,” he laughed.
“Flashed right on schedule,” Chase lied, forcing it out as convincingly as he could.
“Thanks,” Steve said, his laugh dying down. “Seriously, I appreciate what you did there. I kind of lost myself in the routine over the last few days. So yeah… thanks, man.”
Chase nodded, hiding a gulp as he tried to look relaxed. “No problem.”
nineteen
Having recorded a message which had since reached every single colonist on Terradox, Peter Ospanov stepped into a transport capsule with Christian Jackson and set its course for the CDD. It arrived quickly, at which point Christian headed straight inside to assure Jillian that their son Chase was safe.
Peter, meanwhile, made a point of looking calm as he strode through the main gate and towards the front door. Many of the kids from the year groups who used this entrance were waiting around for their parents to arrive, but a handful of parents who had been working in nearby research zones were already present to collect their children.
When they saw him, several parents approached Peter to ask for more details of what was going on at Little Venus. He ushered them away in no uncertain terms, telling them that his recently broadcast message contained all of the currently available information and that there was no reason for alarm. When some persisted, he firmly told them that all they were doing by crowding around him was alarming their children.
As he neared the door, Peter caught sight of young Vijay Kohli sporting an astronaut-themed outfit; a regular shorts and T-shirt combo with highly detailed printing in the style of Rusentra’s standard issue EVA suits. The boy was sitting on a low wall waiting for one of his parents to arrive, gazing at his feet and looking more than a little concerned.
Peter took a moment to sit down next to Vijay. “Hey, big guy,” he said, trying to raise a smile.
Vijay looked up, but his expression didn’t change.
Peter tried again. “So you want to be an astronaut one day, like Nisha?”
“More like Chase,” the boy said. “Chase is strong.”
“They’re all strong,” Peter replied, laughing slightly at the boy’s straightforward words. “That’s why they’ve made it this long inside that little Kompound, and that’s why they’re all going to walk out of there with smiles on their faces in a few more days.”
“I meant strong strong,” Vijay said, standing up and flexing his six-year-old arms to illustrate.
Peter responded in kind. “Some of us security officers are pretty strong too, you know!”
Vijay smiled at last, shyly hiding a chuckle. “But astronauts get to go into space,” he said.
“I’m a security officer and I’m in space,” Peter said. “We’re all in space, remember?”
This time, Vijay laughed. “I meant real space.”
“How old were you when you left Earth?” Peter asked, beginning to wonder if Vijay had any recollection of walking onto a spaceship and travelling well over a hundred million miles to his new home.
“Four.”
“Do you remember much about Earth?”
Vijay shrugged. “Yeah, but I prefer it here. The people are nicer.”
“They sure are,” Peter said as he rose to his feet to go inside. “And I don’t know what everyone might have been saying before I got here, but Nisha and Chase and everyone else in the Kompound are totally fine. Someone had a problem in the Buffer, but it had nothing to do with the isolation test.”
“Who had a problem?” the boy asked in a naturally curious tone.
“One of the staff, but I’m not supposed to talk about it yet.”
“Why not?”
“Well, my boss was pretty clear on that. I’m allowed to tell people who it wasn’t, so they don’t worry about their family members who work in the Buffer, but that’s all.”
“Who’s your boss?”
“Holly.”
“Really?” Vijay asked. “I didn’t know Holly was your boss. What about Grav?”
“Grav is ‘officially’ retired,” Peter grinned. “And even when he wasn’t, Holly was his boss, too. Holly is everyone’s boss.”
“Not Rusev’s,” Vijay replied without missing a beat. “Rusev is Holly’s boss.”
“Rusev’s not here,” Peter said, smiling slightly at the boy’s sharpness. It shouldn’t have been a surprise — he had the same parents as Nisha, after all — but it was, nonetheless.
Peter said goodbye to Vijay for now and entered the building to find that Christian had already explained everything to Jillian and Viola. Jillian looked pensive while Viola was sobbing at the news of Sakura’s untimely death.
Peter walked towards Viola to comfort her but she beat him to it, rising to her feet as soon as she saw him and meeting him halfway.
Above and beyond what the death might do for the colony, and above and beyond his own sadness, Peter knew that Viola had lost a very good friend. After a rocky start, their dangerous mission on Netherdox had led to Viola and Sakura growing extremely close and the level of sorrow in Viola’s expression led Peter to immediately regret not having come right inside with Christian so he could have been there when she heard the news.
Viola was crying hard, only able to utter a few words at each attempt. “Part of me was… glad it wasn’t Bo,” she choked out, the guilt of such feelings only making her grief stronger.
“I felt exactly the same way about Chase,” Jillian interjected, trying to ease Viola’s unfounded feelings of guilt. “That’s the most natural feeling in the world, but it doesn’t mean you care any less about Sakura. She knew how much you cared about her.”
Many miles from the chaotic situation at Little Venus, Peter spent the next several minutes comforting Viola, with more than a little help from the Jacksons.
When the tears dried up and Viola sat down again with Jillian and Christian, some five or six minutes later, Peter excused himself to check how many children were still waiting for a parent or authorised guardian to collect them. He knew that none could leave the area without an approv
ed adult — a fingerprint-operated lock had been present on each of the CDD’s gates long before the newly introduced access restrictions had ever been considered — but he was keen to check on Vijay Kohli, in particular.
“There are only two children left in this sector,” Jillian said, pointing to a map on the wall which displayed the current location of all present children. “Actually, there’s no one left from any of the age groups that use the other entrances, so these are the last two in any sector. Vijay Kohli and Simon Fish.”
“I’ll just make sure they’re okay,” Peter said, even more keen to do so now that he knew Vijay was still there.
When he stepped outside, the first person he saw was Simon Fish’s older brother, Leon.
Now nineteen, Leon Fish was the closest thing to a deadbeat the colony had to offer. Having travelled as a semi-willing seventeen-year-old when his father was recruited to join the Habitat Management division, Leon had long since lost interest in even pretending to care about being a productive member of the community.
Peter’s father-in-law Robert Harrington, who led that division, had more than once spoken of the challenges Leon had posed for his own father in recent months.
After failing to hold down any of the several clerical and administrative roles he’d been assigned, Leon was now set to return to Earth on the next departing Ferrier. Since learning of this, his demeanour had morphed from indifferent to positively abrasive; now more than ever, precious few colonists would be sad to see the back of him.
Peter knew why Leon was here at the CDD — he had an 8-year-old brother who fortunately seemed to have little in common with Leon, according to Viola’s reports — but that didn’t make him any happier to see him. Leon had a dumb grin on his face, and Peter’s annoyance at seeing him turned to full blown-anger when he saw and heard what he was doing.
The area was now all but empty, with Leon’s brother climbing the tall climbing frame a few hundred metres in the distance and Vijay Kohli the only other child still waiting for a parent to arrive.
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