“Options,” Holly said, frantically gazing between Robert and Bo Harrington, the two individuals she saw as most likely to come up with something workable. “Steve is way past the point of reason here, and we have less than half an hour until he tries to leave.”
Jillian and Christian Jackson were understandably distraught by the plight of their son, having watched Steve knock him out with a fire extinguisher and then threaten further damage to ward off the rest of the test crew.
Young Vijay Kohli had begun crying hysterically as soon as Steve turned violent, which led to Peter carrying him out of the room. The boy had no desire to see any more and felt safe in Peter’s arms, which allowed his father Romesh to remain with Holly and the others.
“Let him leave,” Grav said. “When Steve leaves that Kompound, our problem solves itself. I say we do nothing. I say we let him die. Why not?”
“Because they’ll all die!” Robert Harrington yelled, breaking a very short but momentarily optimistic silence. “He just initiated the emergency evacuation procedure and we can’t stop it, because he destroyed our core system linkup when he smashed everything to pieces! If we can’t somehow make him halt the procedure — if that airlock opens in thirty minutes — no one is getting out alive.”
Jillian began to sob uncontrollably.
“This is your fault!” Romesh snapped at her. “You’re the psychologist who signed off on that maniac. He’s in there with your son, but he’s also in there with my daughter! And the difference is, I wasn’t the one who signed off on his state of mind being stable!”
“That’s enough,” Christian said, stepping in to defend his wife as her head fell under the weight of the guilt. His voice was shaky as he spoke; for however much he hated to acknowledge it, a similar thought to Romesh’s had automatically crossed his own mind.
“Enough? I haven’t even started!” Romesh yelled. He glared at Jillian, with something close to hatred in his eyes. “That stupid light was your idea, too… don’t think I’ve forgotten that! You didn’t just sign off on Steve, you signed off on the whole reason my daughter is—”
“I signed off on everything,” Holly interrupted. “I made the final calls and I’ll take responsibility when the time comes, but we’re not having that discussion right now. This isn’t the time to talk about how we ended up in this situation, it’s the time to talk about how we get out of it. Jillian provided data-backed suggestions and I took them into account, along with advice and suggestions from plenty of others. So if you want to blame someone, blame me — but do it some other goddamn time, okay?”
Romesh turned away, still scowling but now doing so at no one in particular.
Grav was next to chime in. “If we cannot halt the procedure, and if Chase does not recover in time to do anything, we have to focus on finding a way to convince Steve to halt it. There has to be a way. There has to be…”
“What about writing a new message on the visual cloak that blocks out their view of this Buffer and makes it look like they’re on an empty plain?” Viola suggested, desperately trying to come up with ideas. “We can do that, right?”
“But how do we get them to look outside?” Grav replied. “We cannot communicate any more instructions.”
“And Steve didn’t believe that the last message was from me even when he could hear my voice,” Holly said, “so we definitely couldn’t count on him believing a written message. Come on, everyone… keep thinking.”
“Everyone just think,” Viola pleaded. “If it’s going to take two or three days to clear up the atmosphere enough for it to be safe outside the Kompound, there has to be something we can do to deal with Steve until then. Holly, can we change the access mechanisms on any of the Kompound’s internal doors? Maybe revoke some of Steve’s access privileges via the Terradox-wide system and lock him in somewhere?”
After the nature of her recent disagreement with Holly, there was certainly a degree of irony in Viola’s suggestion; but with everyone both firmly on the same page and firmly focused on the jeopardy of the test crew’s situation, this point understandably went unacknowledged.
Holly shook her head briskly. “I don’t think so. Bo?”
“Definitely not,” he confirmed. “The Kompound is a world of its own, off the grid.”
“But that’s exactly the kind of thinking we need,” Holly said, approvingly glancing at Viola before turning to the others and rolling her right hand in a circular motion. “Anyone else?”
“Wait, what about a microsphere?” Christian exclaimed in high-pitched excitement. “Bo… just like in the Gardens! Put a bubble around the Kompound and make it hospitable to life. How long would that take?”
Bo’s expression did the answering: too long. “I could put up the cloak,” he expanded, “but reverting the atmosphere would take days. It’s so alien, making it hospitable would—”
“Safeguards should have been in place,” Romesh lamented, sounding primarily rueful but with more than a hint of anger thrown in. “We should be able to flick a switch and purify the atmosphere in there immediately.”
“Romesh, we’re not bloody magicians,” Robert snapped, stepping in with uncharacteristic annoyance in his voice. “Romotech affords us some incredible capabilities — generating and maintaining such an alien atmosphere, for one thing — but what you’re suggesting doesn’t just involve making Little Venus a few degrees cooler and adding some oxygen. The pressure in there didn’t rise to its current level at the flick of a switch, and we can’t reduce it any more quickly than we raised it. And on the point of temperature, do you understand just how hot it is in there?”
Romesh shook his head, not in answer to the question but rather in an expression of general and understandable frustration.
“What if we unsealed Terradox’s inner cloak, but only above Little Venus?” Christian offered, thinking out loud with awkward phrasing that reflected how far from his area of scientific expertise he was currently venturing. “Wouldn’t that equalise everything really quickly, because there’s a whole ‘ring’ of perfect atmosphere between the two cloaks and everything in Little Venus would mix with that?”
Holly, who understood a lot more of the technical aspects of Terradox’s artificial atmosphere than Christian but a lot less than Bo and particularly Robert, deferred to them.
“There’s no way we could even think about testing a theory like that on a scale like this,” Robert said. “If we did open the inner cloak over Little Venus and the effects were what I imagine they could be, the worst-case scenario isn’t that everyone inside that zone would die instantly. The worst case is that everyone in every zone would die instantly.”
“In that case, it’s off the table,” Holly confirmed. “I would risk my own life to save them, but I can’t risk everyone else’s.”
“So how the hell are we going to get them out?” Christian asked, directing the question to everyone and no one at the same time while forlornly shaking his head at the ceiling.
“Well,” Bo said, breaking an uncomfortable silence and raising his eyebrows as he looked only at Holly. “We could always go in…”
twenty-six
“Hear me out,” Bo said, reacting to the understandably shocked expressions that greeted his suggestion of a rescue crew venturing into the most hostile artificial environment ever created. “Their emergency rover is more than a year old and I wouldn’t count on it to keep anyone alive out there. In fact, at this point I would count on it not to. But the rovers Sakura had been using to test her new AI developments — the rovers my team have progressively improved over the past year? There’s one of them in the test zone right now with live insects inside it, crawling around as we speak. They’ve been in there for days, withstanding the conditions, and we only need an hour to get in and get out.”
Robert was first to reply. “Bo, listen…”
“No, Dad, you listen,” he shot back. “We don’t have any time to waste, and this will work. Christian talked about a microsphere around
the Kompound and I said it would take too long. But I’ll tell you what wouldn’t take any time at all: creating a very small microsphere around a rover before it leaves the Buffer, and moving the microsphere as the rover ventures inside. Think of it as an air bubble… a romobot cloak around the rover, shielding it from the external conditions.”
“Would that really work?” Christian asked, his voice tinged with a level of fresh hope and enthusiasm that was also reflected on the expressions around him.
“Would the bubble stick around the rover and move with it automatically?” Holly added, indicating for the first time that she wasn’t intrinsically opposed to the drastic and risky idea.
“I would have to manually control it,” Bo said, deliberately using six words where ‘no’ would have gotten the same message across in an effort to make this issue sound like less of a problem than it was.
“So let’s do it!” Christian said. “Trying anything is better than trying nothing.”
Reluctantly, Holly shook her head. “Look, I want to get them out of there, but there’s no way someone can drive in there protected only by something Bo is controlling by hand. We saw what happened with the triple button-press for the light, let alone if we’re asking him to control a rover and a bubble at the same time — independently of each other.”
“I won’t be controlling the rover,” Bo said. “And as long as whoever drives the rover keeps it steady, I won’t even have to change the bubble’s pace. But listen: that really doesn’t even matter. I’m telling you, Holly, the rovers are safe in there, bubble or no bubble! They could drive straight in and make it the whole way there and back, so even if my controls slipped for a second, so what? Seriously, you know how conservative I am with our rover testing. Sakura wanted to personally cross the border inside the previous rover iteration so she could test its AI override features in the obstacle area — to see if it would correctly override potentially dangerous commands and only those commands. I didn’t let her, because at that point we hadn’t even tested invertebrates and I wanted to test some more complex life-forms for reasonably long periods before I started to think about letting people go in. She wanted to ask for approval to drive one of the latest iterations inside in the next few days, before the isolation test ended, and I was ready to let her. I told her you would never say yes, but I wouldn’t even have been willing to let her ask unless I knew it was safe. Not thought… knew.”
“Trust him,” Christian pleaded.
Holly gazed at Bo, in whom Rusev and later herself had placed so much faith at such a young age. His work in the rover division had been extraordinarily productive and his successful side-project of introducing atmospherically-independent microspheres, primarily in the Botanical Gardens, was something which could benefit the colony in countless ways that hadn’t yet been considered.
Aside from his admittedly disastrous slip-up when trying to flash the light — a task he had been performing for the first time — Bo Harrington had never let anyone down. But this was on another level entirely, and Holly knew it only too well.
Romesh Kohli, having listened to everything, turned up the heat even further with an incisive comment: “Holly, not five minutes ago, you said that you would risk your own life to save them, but that you couldn’t risk everyone else’s. This option does not risk everyone else’s.”
Before Holly could reply to this — indeed, before she could even consider the nature of her reply to what was a cutting but accurate observation — Grav tapped her shoulder and pointed to the largest screen in the observation room.
“Uh, Hollywood…” he gulped. “You might want to take a look at this.”
twenty-seven
“Goddamn liars,” Steve muttered to himself as he walked under the light on his way to his room, ready to put on his EVA suit’s helmet now that the emergency evacuation procedure was underway.
He then looked directly into the inactive overhead light and raised his voice. “Whoever has taken over out there, you’re going to pay for this. We’re coming!”
In truth, no one else was going with Steve. The crew’s situation felt utterly hopeless, with each of the other test subjects understanding that the Kompound’s evacuation procedure couldn’t be aborted without angering Steve to the point of likely killing them and that a temporary override would be meaningless.
Their only rover’s remote status reports also made it clear to everyone except Steve that all but certain death awaited if they ventured outside, where their EVA suits would do little more than offer breathable air for the few moments before the atmospheric pressure killed them.
Their only hope, as they all reluctantly recognised, was of overpowering and permanently neutralising Steve. But with Chase unconscious, the group sorely lacked natural leadership as well as anyone capable of physically standing up to Steve — let alone taking him down.
Nisha remained at Chase’s side in the control centre, frequently tempted to press the button to halt the evacuation procedure. She reluctantly but wisely stopped herself each time and instead tried to think of a more workable plan for surviving beyond the time it would take for Steve to reach her and forcefully express his displeasure before restarting the procedure.
What was made abundantly clear by Steve’s careless decision to leave Chase unrestrained was that his mind truly was gone. Given that Chase showed no sign of coming around any time soon, however, Nisha saw Steve’s irrationality as nothing to be pleased about; all it meant was that Steve’s actions were likely to remain dangerously erratic.
On the other side of the Kompound, Kim Lee and Sarah Helms took futile shelter, even more insulated and distant from the others than they had been for most of the last few months.
Marcel, on the other hand, stubbornly persisted in his lost cause of an effort to talk some sense into Steve. Like Nisha, he had no idea just how badly or permanently Chase might have been injured but feared there was nothing the rest of them could do to prevent Steve from having his way unless they could come up with a plan to trap him somewhere and ideally eliminate him altogether.
But as he looked again at Steve’s muscled frame, Marcel began to seriously doubt the chances of success for any plan that involved physicality. And the more he looked, the more he understood that his best hope of protecting his own life as well as every other in the Kompound rested upon somehow changing Steve’s mind about leaving.
“No one has taken over,” he said, trying to sound relaxed and as though he was on Steve’s side rather than thinking of ways to overcome an obvious physical disadvantage and somehow restrain him until Chase recovered from a brutal impact to the head. “Holly and the others are out there, Steve; everything is okay! They were trying to calm us down by explaining the mix-up with the light and they’ll still be watching now, trying to think of ways to make sure that we don’t make any costly mistakes. Everyone is on the same side.”
“They are,” Steve said. “You’re right.”
“Exactly. We’re all on the same—”
“No, not that; the other part. Whoever is out there, they’re still watching… they’re still looking for ways to stop me,” Steve said. “You are smart,” he grinned, patting Marcel on the back before turning around and sprinting off towards the control centre once more.
Marcel stood dumbfounded for a few seconds. “What are you doing?” he called, belatedly setting off and trying to catch up.
“Killing the cameras,” Steve said. “Thanks for the tip!”
twenty-eight
Holly and the others watched in utter shock as the screens before them showed Steve Shepherd re-entering the Kompound’s control centre and destroying everything he could see. He thrust his fire extinguisher into every section of every console and recklessly grabbed at exposed cabling with his bare hands.
While Chase Jackson remained unconscious on the control centre’s floor, the camera feeds — all of them — died in an instant.
“Oh, shit,” Grav groaned.
Although Steve
was now out of sight, his movements continued to be relayed on another screen which showed a live location map of the Kompound. He was still moving around inside the control centre, and the next development revealed that his destruction was far from over: in an instant, the screen containing the live map turned as black as the dead camera feeds.
Mere seconds later, a third screen which had been relaying extremely detailed and crucial atmospheric data from inside the Kompound followed suit.
Before long, every single screen in the Buffer’s observation room showed nothing — only black.
“We won’t know if Chase is able to stop him,” Bo said. “We won’t know if he opens the airlock. We won’t know anything else until it might be way too late!”
Hands were on heads and eyes on the floor. The Jacksons and Romesh Kohli — aching with helpless fear over the safety of their son and daughter respectively — were now barely consolable.
“Junior,” Grav barked at Bo, his voice rising high above the sobbing. “It is time. Get the rover ready.”
Bo and everyone else turned to Holly, hanging on her word.
Her gaze fell on Bo. “Are the EVA suits in the rover?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Okay,” Holly said, gulping away her hesitation. “Show me the way.”
Romesh leaned back in his chair, suddenly overwhelmed with relief that they were going to take direct action at last. Others exhaled audibly, some sharing in the relief and others — primarily Robert — expressing a more conflicted kind of surprise.
Holly then looked at Viola, who was one of the visibly conflicted. “Do you remember what I said before I stepped out of our lander and onto Terradox for the first time?” she asked.
Viola smiled slightly through her trepidation. “Wish me luck?”
“Yeah,” Holly said, raising her eyebrows before following Bo towards the door. “Well… that.”
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