The boy lowered his blanket, revealing a series of almost cartoonishly soft features. His skin was pale, particularly around his eyes. Holly, who admittedly didn’t have much experience with children, wouldn’t have put him a day over eight years old.
Holly took a few seconds to take in the lander’s layout. The exit to the secure air lock and beyond lay at the opposite side from the fast-closing seal which Holly and the girl had so narrowly avoided.
The space between these points contained two beds, as expected. The open bag of beauty products placed on a makeshift third, which the boy was currently sitting on, suggested that Jessica had been sleeping on the floor. The impact of the Karrier’s collision didn’t seem to have had quite so devastating an effect here as it had in the utility room.
Next to the bed Holly assumed to be the boy’s, several physically printed photographs were stuck to the wall. Most featured the Venus station; the only one that didn’t was a very old image of Ekaterina Rusev.
Holly knelt down and looked at the boy. “You know Rusev?”
He nodded carefully.
“So you know that she owns the station and that her son is in charge until she gets there?”
“Dimitar,” the boy said.
Holly’s eyebrows rose in surprise that the boy knew Dimitar’s name, but she tried not to let it show too much. “Exactly,” she said with a deliberate smile. “And you can bet he’s already looking for her.”
“They’ll be looking for you, too,” he said, sitting up a little straighter as he grew into the conversation. “I know who you are.”
This came as less of a surprise; the extent of Holly’s fame had been so great at its peak that her name and face were still strewn across all manner of media, even after a decade of living as quietly and as far from the public eye as possible.
She grinned. “Good. So that means you know I know how to land this thing, right?”
The boy smiled slightly for the first time and nodded.
Holly rose to her feet and pressed her fingertip against an outlined panel on the thick air-seal to identify herself. The exterior of the panel slid to the left, revealing a busy control interface.
The Karrier’s landers were extremely sophisticated and could effectively land themselves in most circumstances. Holly’s early Air Force training, undertaken before her high-profile move to the public space program, had involved more complex operations than those she would face here even if moderate complications arose.
With all systems working well and the lander’s descent feeling as controlled as anyone could have hoped for, Holly caught sight of Jessica, who looked strikingly young without the makeup, grimacing and holding her collarbone.
“Are you okay?” Holly asked.
“I’ll be fine,” the girl said, lowering her hand in what Holly took as reluctance to show weakness. But where Jessica’s hand had been, Holly now saw a nasty-looking bruise.
“Are you sure?” Holly asked. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just had to make sure—”
“I said I’ll be fine.”
Holly dropped the point. Jessica clearly had something of an attitude, and though this kind of hardened stubbornness would likely prove no bad thing when it came to surviving the trying days which lay ahead, antagonism was the last thing anyone needed right now.
Back at the control panel, Holly was pleased to see that the lander had chosen a patch of the solid ground below and that the atmospheric readings were conducive to a relatively straightforward touchdown. She stood beside the control panel for the rest of the descent, only looking away from the readouts to warn the Tanners when the thrust was about to kick in. A small live feed of the lander’s downward-facing camera gave her a perfect view of the ever-approaching terrain below.
The ease of the landing brought to Holly’s mind a joke her neurosurgeon father used to tell: “Anyone can cut someone’s head open; it’s keeping them alive that’s the hard part. What you do after the incision… that’s what separates the surgeons from the serial killers.”
“We made it!” the young boy yelled. He threw his blanket aside and walked across the now stable floor to join his father at the window. Wearing neither shoes nor socks, he was even shorter than Holly expected.
The man put an arm around his son’s shoulder and finally turned to address Holly. She anticipated the question before it came: “Where are we?”
Even these three small words — two more than he’d ever previously spoken to Holly in any single interaction — were enough to reveal an accent far more formal and refined than Jessica’s. The man’s voice was utterly incongruent with his unkempt appearance, but Holly knew from the photo on his travel card that he didn’t normally look like this. Now more than ever, he struck her as someone important.
Holly considered her response. The obvious one kept trying to escape her lips but in the presence of two children she knew that “I don’t know” — however true — was the worst thing she could say.
After a few seconds, she settled on a response and delivered it as positively as she could: “Solid ground.”
Holly then preempted Norman’s request for something more specific than that by explaining that she was about to analyse some data to build up a clearer picture. She didn’t say exactly what data she meant, in case the picture it painted was not one she wanted to share with them at this delicate stage.
What Holly already knew was that Dante and Grav had been safely inside the other lander with Rusev and Yury when the landers separated from the Karrier. What she needed to know now was where that lander was. The wristbands they all wore had impressive range, but the altitude of the separation left Holly looking at her own wristband for updated proximity data more in hope than expectation that the other lander had touched down somewhere reachable.
SIGNAL LOST [RANGE EXCEEDED].
Even through low expectations, this pop-up message hit Holly hard.
She navigated to the log to see how long ago the signal had been lost, hoping this would give some kind of clue as to the other lander’s course.
The previous update displayed a time just forty seconds ago. Finally some good news, Holly thought. This wasn’t as good as knowing where they were, of course, but it at least meant that they had only veered too far from her wristband to maintain a signal towards the end of their descent.
“Do we know where the others are?” Norman asked, responding to the slight warming of Holly’s expression.
“Roughly,” she said, navigating to see the details of the last successful update. But when the data filled the screen, an unmaskable look of horror crossed her face.
As Jessica hurried towards Holly to see what was on the wristband, Holly covered it with her other hand.
“What does it say?” the girl demanded.
Holly searched her mind for a euphemism. “Uh, they’re not as close as I thought.”
“How far away are they?” Norman chimed in.
Even as Holly met his understandably concerned gaze, the image from the wristband remained etched in her mind: the four dots representing Rusev, Yury, Grav, and Dante, all of which had previously flashed green, were now an ominous steady red.
Worse than anything she had imagined, this told Holly that their vital signs had flatlined before the signal was lost.
“How far?” the man repeated, quickly losing patience.
Holly pressed the button to retract her wristband’s screen then met his eyes again. “Too far.”
seven
We’re all alone, Holly thought to herself, trying to maintain something of a brave face for the children’s sake. Dante and Grav aren’t coming.
“So what’s the plan?” Jessica asked.
Holly hesitated. The plan, to the extent that there was one, was to find whatever was left of the Karrier and hope there was something to salvage. The need for this could have been neither simpler nor stronger: the lander had sufficient supplies to last four weeks at most, while the Karrier’s radio presented the only
potential hope of calling the Venus station for help.
Although Holly hadn’t lied to the boy when suggesting that the people on the station would already be looking for them, there was a potential complication that she herself couldn’t fully comprehend. Grav’s statement that the planet they’d just landed on had “appeared from nowhere” after something hit the Karrier made as little sense now as it had at the time. Holly worried that the planet might disappear just as quickly, or that something made it visible only from close range.
None of it made sense, but here she was.
“We’re going to run some atmospheric tests,” Holly said. “That’s the first stage. The results will determine where we go from there.”
The girl nodded keenly.
“Okay, you go to the window over there and look down at the circle on the leg straight below you. And Norman, you stay at that window and do the same. They should both open to let the instrum—”
“Who’s Norman?” the boy interrupted.
Everyone looked at him.
When Norman began to talk, asking the boy why he was being so silly, Holly raised a hand to him without turning around.
The boy gulped, feeling the weight of everyone’s stares.
“What’s your name?” Holly asked him, as gently as the circumstances allowed.
“Bo.”
“Bo?”
He nodded.
“What’s your dad’s name? He is your dad?”
The boy nodded again.
“And his name…?”
The man stepped between them. “That’s enough.”
Holly stared into the man’s eyes. “I’ll give you one chance,” she said, almost whispering. “And I do mean one chance. If you tell me the truth — all of it — then I’ll forget that you just tried to make a sick child lie to me.”
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” the man insisted. His English accent now struck Holly as truly refined; the kind she rarely heard anymore. The young boy spoke similarly to his father — clearly coached, if less resonant — which made Holly think that the girl’s incomparably common speech was a deliberate rejection of social expectations. If this had ever bothered her father, which Holly imagined it might have, he had clearly lost the war.
“Well so far I know that you’re travelling on fake names,” Holly said, focusing on the facts. “And there are more of you than there should be. So that’s two things you’ve done wrong, straight off the bat.”
The man gulped. “And we’re guilty of nothing beyond that. All this secrecy is nothing personal, but that’s the point: we don’t even know you. Personally, that is. We know who you are, where you’ve been, what you’ve done… we know all of that. But we don’t know you.”
Holly doubted that the family knew all of where she’d been and what she’d done. She imagined they’d know as much about her life as everyone else did; she imagined they would know the narrative.
She imagined they would know that she’d been born into a life of relative comfort 39 years earlier; that she was a decorated gymnast in high school and a promising pilot afterwards. She knew for sure that they’d know all about her recruitment from Air Force training into the public space program at the age of just 20, when she was presented as the poster-child of what was supposed to have become a new golden age of exploration.
Back then, the space program had both wanted and needed mainstream attention to combat a dearth of qualified applicants amid ever-waning investment. When a huge media conglomerate proposed a partnership to document a flagship mission from selection to completion, it made sense for all involved.
When Holly was selected, every media outlet — without fail — used the same already two-year-old photo of her being crowned prom queen of a tiny school in the middle of nowhere, thus creating and perpetuating the idea that she’d been plucked from a pageant stage and dropped into a spacesuit to smile for the cameras. Inevitably, many resented her selection.
Holly did well out of the situation financially, but the mission failed to materialise due to chronic funding gaps despite huge viewing figures and public engagement. The ever-decreasing political will to invest in space ultimately led to many of the public program’s most qualified staff leaving for private enterprises.
This brain drain amounted to death by a thousand cuts for the public program, and in the end Holly had no choice but to leave. She then accepted the wrong offer — Morrison over Rusev — and she would regret that decision until the day she died. Holly was certain that the family in front of her knew nothing of her time with Morrison, let alone what happened. She was glad of that.
But what mattered most right now was what Holly didn’t know about them. What mattered now was their backstory.
“I said I would give you one chance,” she said, refocusing intently on the man’s shaky eyes. “And this is it.”
“Dad,” the girl interjected. “Tell her.”
He looked to the ground, closed his eyes tightly as if trying to squint away the doubt, then sighed deeply. “My name is Robert Harrington,” he said, slowly meeting Holly’s eyes. “This is my son, Bo, and my daughter, Viola.”
Holly turned to the girl first, ready to read her expression. “Your name is Viola Harrington?”
The girl looked to the side and gulped.
Taking this affirmatively, Holly said and did nothing for several seconds. Robert Harrington’s expression fitted a man who had just had a weight lifted from his shoulders. But that weight — that heavy, heavy weight — had just been dumped squarely on Holly’s.
“Harrington,” Holly said, breaking the silence with something halfway between a statement and a question. “As in… Olivia Harrington?”
“They killed her for telling the truth about the famine,” Bo snapped from his father’s side, the childish pitch of his voice providing stark contrast to the gravity of his words. “They said they didn’t, but they did.”
Holly exhaled slowly, her resoluteness boosted by hearing such horrible words from such an innocent child. “I know,” she said, making sure to look at Viola, too. “But I’m going to get you all to that station, and we’re going to make sure they don’t get away with it. We’re going to make sure she didn’t die for nothing.”
eight
After a brief discussion with Robert Harrington, Holly now understood that he had paid for two spaces on the Karrier’s final journey to the Venus station using his late wife’s substantial life insurance payout. Since the death had supposedly been caused by workplace violence on company property, Olivia’s publicity-averse employer sought to bring the matter to a swift conclusion and quickly delivered a considerable payout which happened to be large enough to cover two tickets — but not quite three — and still leave enough for the fake travel cards Robert had used to mask his own identity as well as Viola’s.
He explained his fear that travelling to Rusev’s launch site without fake papers would have risked their lives and that revealing themselves at the point of boarding might have rendered their tickets invalid by virtue of being booked under fake names.
Without Holly having to prod, Robert then moved on to how he’d managed to sneak an extra person on board: Bo had literally hidden inside a suitcase.
This struck Holly as fantastical until Robert added that the Karrier’s security officer, who he knew only as Goran, had noticed movement in the suitcase while he loaded it. It took her half a second to realise that Robert was talking about Grav, who was referred to as Goran about as often as she was referred to as Ivy.
“I thought about telling him everything,” Robert said, “but in the end I only said that my wife is dead, I could only afford two tickets, and that I would be forever in his debt if he pretended not to have seen anything. He lifted Bo out of the suitcase and put him on the bed, then told me to stay in here until we reached the station. He said he didn’t know what would happen when we got there.”
Holly firmly believed that Robert was leaving out a part about buying Grav’s coop
eration with whatever money he’d had left, but there was nothing to gain by pressing the matter. Still, Grav’s request for her and Dante to give the Harringtons some privacy in the wake of their earlier suspicions certainly made more sense now than it had at the time.
“Did Grav ever come in here to check up on you after the launch?” she asked.
“Goran?” Robert said. “No. Well, he came in a few hours later with a child-size emergency suit he’d managed to find in amongst the cargo.”
Holly followed Robert’s hand to the wardrobe-like container which housed the EVA suits. Each lander had an emergency suit for everyone who was supposed to be on board the Karrier — only seven people, in this highly atypical instance — but Grav’s decision to go out of his way to provide one for Bo caused Holly’s mind to wander.
Did Grav know the boy would need it?, she wondered, half seriously. He was the only one at the control console when the Karrier hit trouble and the emergency landing on this mysterious planet became necessary…
Another, more useful thought then arose: Holly and Dante had been in the windowless utility room when the planet “appeared from nowhere”, but Robert and the children hadn’t.
“Which one of you saw this planet first?” she asked, now firmly in the habit of thinking and speaking of it as a planet even though that designation was far from confirmed.
“Me,” Bo said, smiling with a proud kind of excitement. “I was on the bed looking out. There was nothing there, but then everything shook… and suddenly there was something there. It was like we broke through a forcefield or something.”
“That’s pretty much what Grav said,” Holly mused. She liked to think that Rusev was too good a judge of character to have employed someone capable of deliberately sabotaging a mission by crashing the Karrier into whatever it had crashed into, but it was reassuring to have Grav’s “it appeared from nowhere” line reaffirmed by someone she knew was telling the truth.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 4