Terradox Reborn

by Craig A. Falconer

  At the hour mark, Chase again reiterated that it had been slightly late on the last occasion.

  Steve shushed him and kept staring with an intensity etched on his face like nothing the others had seen in the past. Just a few seconds later, his entire body relaxed as the light belatedly flashed.

  “Just like last time,” Chase said, breathing a sigh of relief even deeper than Steve’s.

  But then, for the first time ever, the light flashed again.

  And again.

  No one moved or spoke for several seconds, until Steve’s head suddenly shot round and he locked his eyes on Chase. “It’s a warning,” he said breathlessly. “Chase… it’s a warning!”

  Chase stood momentarily stunned as Steve ran off in the direction of the Kompound’s control centre. Marcel set off after him first, at which point Chase shook himself out of the shock and followed in their footsteps. He quickly overtook Marcel and caught up with Steve as he entered the control centre.

  “We’ll talk to them,” Chase said. “There has to be a simple explanation for this. We just need to—”

  Steve interrupted by tossing an emergency EVA suit in Chase’s direction. “Talk to them? We don’t know what the hell has happened out there!” he cried. “We need to get out of here while we still can.”

  Chase looked down at the EVA suit draped on his arms. “Steve, we have one emergency rover and it’s been sitting at the airlock for a year. Look at the status warnings: it hasn’t communicated with the system for months! If you go outside in that thing, EVA suit or not, and we’re talking about if it even starts up, we don’t know if the shielding will hold up. None of the new rovers were ever tested after a year of inactivity. You could die out there, man, and for what? If something was actually wrong, they would talk to us. Look around you: there are speakers they could use if there was something we had to know. All we know is—”

  “What I know is that we’re not safe here,” Steve interrupted, his tone and expression both as unsettling as any Chase could remember. He was now beyond paranoia and uncertainty, with laser-like focus on a ‘solution’ that might well amount to nothing more than an unwitting and painful suicide. “Or maybe something bad has happened out there and that’s why they’re not talking. Or maybe the triple-flash was an automatically triggered SOS call because the flash was late? Those are the things I don’t know, and I’m not sticking around in some faint hope of finding the answers before it’s too late. So you can come with me or you can stay in here, but I’m leaving.”

  Chase dropped his EVA suit to the floor and inched closer to Steve. His reply was simple and authoritative: “No you’re not.”

  Steve pushed him firmly in the chest and headed back out of the control centre towards the others. “Watch me,” he said, answering without so much as a backwards glance.

  twenty-two

  “I thought maybe I hadn’t pressed it hard enough the first time!” Bo said, nervously panting out the words as he tried to explain his serious error to the whole group who had now joined Christian in rushing to find out what he’d done.

  The observation room’s many monitors and speakers allowed everyone to see and hear what was happening between Steve and Chase, and their collective concern was palpable.

  System preparations for an emergency evacuation of the Kompound, even if Chase ultimately permitted Steve to initiate the process, would take around thirty minutes. This gave the group in the Buffer a short window to draft an audio message intended to ease Steve’s fears and return a degree of calm to the situation, which Holly now announced as her planned course of action. Everyone agreed that it made sense.

  “The isolation test is over,” Holly said. “The late flash earlier today was an unintended intervention and so was this triple-flash. The purity of the test is already out of the window so communicating directly isn’t going to change anything for the worse. What we can do now with a third intervention — this time a deliberate and corrective intervention — is nip this in the bud. Speaking of which… Grav, Peter, I need you both to go to Terradox Studios immediately and shut it all down — everything. I don’t want anyone outside of this room to see what’s going on in the Kompound. Clear the premises and lock it down.”

  “We can kill their feeds and lock the studio’s gates from here,” Bo said, his voice weak and his skin paler than normal following his grave error. No one seemed particularly angry at him — their concern for the crew in the Isolation Kompound left little room for anything else — but his feelings of guilt were near paralysing.

  “Okay, do that,” Holly said. She then quickly turned back to Peter and Grav. “But I still need you two to head to the Studios, because they already have footage of everything that’s happened up until now. The last thing we need is everyone worrying about this, so we need to stop Monica’s team from disseminating it. Bo will lock the gate once you’re out of there and I’ll cut their outgoing comms right now. Everyone else… while I do that, please share any ideas you have for the most decisively calming words we can use to get this under control. If Steve had any family here we’d ask them to speak, but seeing as he doesn’t I think it should probably be my voice that he hears.”

  Once again, everyone agreed.

  “Nisha is the only other one of them with family on Terradox,” Christian said, uneasily watching his son Chase on a giant screen to the left of the main control deck. “If I wasn’t here, I would want to be, so I think we should call Romesh and Farrah.”

  “Farrah is still at Gardev Heights,” Peter replied. “She’s one of the essential staff who we need to stay in place. The transport capsule network has seen major and atypical surges in simultaneous use with everyone moving around at a normally quiet time of the day, and that spike in volume triggered the need for manual oversight. Now that we’ve enacted full emergency protocols, we absolutely need her there.”

  “Well, Romesh collected Vijay from the CDD,” Viola said. “So we know he’s at home, but we also know he’s with Vijay.”

  Christian’s eyes flicked between Viola and Holly. “All I’m saying is that if he knew what was happening, he would want to be here. His daughter is in there.”

  “Call him,” Holly said. “We’re going to need to make some big decisions very soon, so make it quick.”

  twenty-three

  Thirty-six minutes after the triple-flash which panicked Steve Shepherd and greatly unsettled even the calmer members of the test crew in the Isolation Kompound, a direct message was about to be broadcast to them for the first time in three hundred and fifty-nine days.

  In a minor stroke of luck for Holly’s group, Steve had spent the intervening time gathering his things and readying himself for his walk through the Kompound’s service bays and ultimately to the waiting rover in which he planned to traverse the hostile environment outside. He was yet to initiate the thirty-minute process to prepare for an emergency evacuation, with a confrontation with Chase seeming all but certain when that time came, and he had meanwhile been trying to talk the others into going with him. Steve looked and sounded determined without being outwardly hysterical, but he utterly blanked all of Chase’s attempts to talk him out of the insane idea.

  Marcel and Chase had since agreed that they would both do whatever it took to restrain Steve should he ignore their warnings all the way to the point of trying to initiate the evacuation procedure, but they really didn’t want it to get that far.

  For his part, Chase had reluctantly come to accept that there would be no intervention from the observers on the other side of the Little Venus border. Whatever had happened to cause the triple-flash, he figured that the fact they hadn’t intervened so far — even with Steve acting so crazily and seriously preparing to leave — was a strong sign that they never would.

  It even crossed Chase’s mind that the flash might have been some kind of test to judge how the crew would react to a wholly unexpected stimulus so close to the end of their test. He knew Holly and other high-ranking Terradox personnel
too well to truly believe that this could have been what was going on, but that didn’t mean the idea wasn’t there. Needless to say, he knew better than to share it with anyone else.

  Christian and Jillian Jackson watched in rapt and pained attention as their son Chase and his close friend Marcel did all they could to halt Steve’s exit preparations without resorting to physical restraint. With six days left and no reason to expect any help from the outside until the experiment reached its planned end point, keeping Steve locked in a secure room was a last-resort which neither man wanted to fall back on.

  Grav and Peter reported success in their mission to shut down Terradox Studios and were already back in the Buffer having wasted no time at all; their transport capsules made the journey extremely speedy and on arrival they completed their task equally briskly. All Terradox Studios staff were now locked out of the main production building and locked in to the broader production zone courtesy of a modification Bo made to its three entry gates. Monica and her staff were unhappy with this, naturally enough, but the fact that their homes were all within the production zone meant that they weren’t being denied access to any essentials and that they would remain comfortable enough.

  Holly also revoked the communications privileges of all production staff, ensuring that they couldn’t sow dissent by misrepresenting the actions taken by Peter and Grav and that, just as importantly, they couldn’t spread fear by detailing the current situation inside the Isolation Kompound.

  No footage from the past hour had been shared prior to the shutdown of Terradox Studios, and the production team’s lack of access to their core facilities meant that it never would be. This was a very small victory in the scheme of things, but it at least prevented the situation from getting any worse than it already was.

  Robert Harrington, the quiet man of the group, provided most of the wording for the contact message Holly and the others were putting together.

  The message was very short and very simple, designed to get the core points across as quickly as possible given that it was reasonable to expect the crew to react in shock to hearing any message at all.

  Holly’s words would first explain the mix-up with the light and reassure them that everything on Terradox was under control, with all systems operating as normal. Equally importantly, they would reaffirm Chase’s warnings to Steve by stating in no uncertain terms that the outmoded emergency rover stationed outside the Kompound could categorically not be counted on to withstand the conditions of Little Venus even if it was able to start up.

  Bo was crystal clear on this: any reliance on that rover would very likely lead to disaster.

  Crucially, the message would also alert the crew to the opening of a two-way communications channel which would enable them to talk to the outside world while a plan for their early departure was put in place. This part made Holly feel confident that Steve would relax, because a conversation in which he could ask questions and immediately receive answers would naturally offer her an opportunity to handle any unexpected objections or concerns he might raise.

  The difficulties and risks involved in expediting the crew’s departure would be significant, with Robert insisting that it would take days rather than hours to moderate the atmospheric conditions to a level he would be comfortable with. The pre-exit atmospheric moderation process was already scheduled to begin seventy-two hours before the planned end of the test so that a team from the outside could venture into the heart of Little Venus in their transport rovers to gather the crew without taking on any enormous risks of vehicular malfunction. Unfortunately, Robert explained that the nature and extent of the atmospheric differences meant that while the beginning of this process could be brought forward, it couldn’t be safely sped up.

  Everyone in the Buffer conducted themselves with as much outward positivity as possible following the recent arrival of young Vijay Kohli, who sat by his father’s side without full knowledge of what was going on but with a clear understanding that everyone was worried about his sister and her friends in the Kompound.

  Romesh Kohli’s work in the Primosphere, the research zone with the second most altered atmosphere after Little Venus, meant that he was acutely aware of the kind of atmospheric differences Robert was referring to when he explained the difficulties of an early exit. He provided some useful input to the final wording of the message Holly was about to read, then leaned back pensively in his chair when she finally spoke into the control console’s microphone to record the all-important message.

  It was short — two loops of the same message, each no more than thirty seconds long — and it was straight to the point.

  “Do you want to press the button to send it?” Holly asked Vijay as he looked on uneasily.

  The young boy shook his head.

  Holly looked around for a volunteer. Bo stepped back, still shaken by his earlier button-pressing mishap, and no one else seemed enthusiastically keen to take on the responsibility.

  “Okay,” Holly said, reaching for the button.

  She pressed the right one and within a few seconds the message was heard throughout the previously eerily quiet Isolation Kompound.

  Steve Shepherd stopped what he was doing and listened carefully to the message.

  In a technical sense, things had gone well.

  The good news, however, ended there.

  twenty-four

  “Bullshit!” Steve yelled as the message began its second loop. Having been in his bedroom gathering his things and continuing to try to talk some of the others around to joining him in bailing out of the Kompound, he suddenly leapt to his feet. “It’s not even her! That’s not Holly’s voice! They’re trying to infect you all with lies! Someone is pretending to be Holly and trying to keep us in here because—”

  “Listen to yourself,” Marcel said, stepping in Steve’s way. “Steve, you’re losing it!”

  Steve knocked Marcel to the ground with a forceful barge and continued on his way.

  “Hey!” Lee Kim called from the doorway of her own room.

  Steve shot her a look that needed no words.

  Chase and Nisha, who had been discussing their options inside the control centre so that Steve couldn’t enter it and do anything without them noticing, were as surprised as anyone else by the sudden message. They stepped out into the corridor to hear what the new commotion was all about, and neither liked what they saw:

  Steve, sprinting purposefully towards them.

  Chase moved himself into Steve’s path to slow him down but his stationary position offered little resistance to Steve’s forward momentum, and the impact sent him backwards to the floor. He immediately got back up, unhurt, and pursued Steve into the control centre.

  “Get the fuck back,” Steve boomed, raising his fists and frantically glancing around for a stronger weapon. His eyes fell on a fire extinguisher, which he picked up and brandished in Chase’s direction.

  “We’re all on the same side here,” Chase said, inching forward as calmly as he could with his palms facing outwards in an attempt to look unthreatening. Nisha stepped back, knowing she was hugely outmatched if things turned physical as was looking only too likely.

  But as Chase inched forward, Steve turned around and eyed the communications console.

  “No,” Chase begged, unhappily realising what was in Steve’s mind. He lunged forward, but it was already too late.

  Steve Shepherd lifted the fire extinguisher above his head and forcefully smashed it against the console, instantly destroying Chase’s only means of two-way communication with the outside world.

  Chase tried to stop him from delivering another blow, hoping the damage wasn’t done, but Steve spun around to greet him with a ruthless thrust of the makeshift weapon which caught Chase square in the temple and knocked him unconscious to the floor.

  Steve, a man possessed, resumed his previous task of hammering the fire extinguisher against the console until sparks flew and wires became visible. As his former friends and now-fearful co
lleagues watched on helplessly from the doorway, he turned towards them and brandished the weapon with a menacing scowl.

  “What the hell are you all staring at?” he asked. He walked to the spot on the floor where Chase was out cold and menacingly held the fire extinguisher over his supine body, warning them of what would happen if anyone stepped forward. Still facing the others, he pulled Chase further into the room then sidestepped away from the now-shattered communications console.

  Steve moved purposefully and ominously to the emergency control console on the other side of the room. Once there, and with frequent paranoid glances at the others, he initiated the thirty-minute evacuation procedure.

  In half an hour, the Kompound’s airlock would open. This event, intended to allow a waiting rover to venture outside in a genuine emergency which might have rendered the Kompound’s atmosphere unbreathable, would in fact have the tragically ironic effect of overwhelming a stable atmosphere with the hellish toxicity of the air outside.

  And in an equally dire twist of fate, as well as ending the possibility of two-way communication, Steve’s destruction of so much of the control console had also severed the core system linkup which would normally have enabled the Buffer-based group to override the evacuation procedure.

  With the dormant rover in no condition to shield anyone from the nightmarish conditions on the surface of Little Venus, the situation looked irreversibly grim.

  A slow alarm tone began to echo through the Kompound, signalling the beginning of the countdown to the opening of the airlock through which Steve Shepherd over-optimistically believed he could successfully exit in the waiting rover.

  “There,” he said, grinning maniacally. “Done.”

  twenty-five