“Nothing sudden,” he said calmly. “Do not move. I will grab you.”
“Hurry up,” Holly pleaded. “My fingers are starting to—”
“Holly!” Viola screamed.
The last thing Holly saw was Robert grabbing hold of the girl to stop her from running forward.
Holly’s determined grip was of little use when a ten-inch thick section of the ledge she was so desperately holding onto suddenly broke away without warning and sent her hurtling towards the water below.
There were no sticking-out pieces of rock for her to grab at the last second; no heroic hand grasping her arm from above.
Her feet hit the water first, after a much longer fall than anyone expected. Nothing could have prepared Holly for the icy chill of the cavern’s pool, but within an instant of the impact that was the last thing on her mind.
She tried frantically to detach her airtight backpack’s countless clips and buckles as its weight hastened her descent, cursing the water containers inside it and cursing her fatigued fingers’ betrayal as they failed completely to detach it from her sinking body.
Several seconds after entering the water, she was still dropping like a lead weight.
Down…
down…
down.
sixteen
Though Holly reached the floor of the cave’s pool only after a terrifyingly prolonged descent, she could at least see hints of light coming down from above. This gave her hope.
There was a chance.
Her arm movement was greatly restricted by the size of the backpack. Its size combined with the weight of its contents to make a mockery of Holly’s desperate attempts to push off from the ground and swim to the surface. It may as well have been a steel chain around her neck or a concrete block attached to her feet, and she realised very quickly that jettisoning it as soon as possible provided her only chance of survival.
Holly didn’t have to consciously call upon the underwater training she had endured long ago — the benefits came automatically. Without the memories of spending two minutes at the bottom of a training pool, she would have been sabotaging her chances with panicked splashing and defeatist thinking. The training pool hadn’t been anywhere near this cold, of course, but then the stakes hadn’t been anywhere near this high.
After around twenty seconds of submersion, Holly’s fingers — weak and cramping from their desperate efforts to grip the ledge moments earlier — finally managed to unclip the stubborn buckle around her waist. This created enough slack for her to unclip one of its shoulder buckles and wriggle her left arm free.
The sudden shift in weight pulled Holly forward until her body was roughly jerked towards an unseen jagged rock which stabbed at her thigh like a skewer. It took everything she had not to open her mouth and scream.
As her heart-rate rose and her calmness evaporated, Holly’s hands followed the loose shoulder strap and soon fell upon the guilty rock. The inevitable lack of visual acuity that came with being this far underwater made it impossible to be sure whether the strap was hooked around one rock or wedged between two.
Her vision was then worsened by a huge disruption in the water as bubbles surrounded her and what looked like a diving body came into view.
Her first thought was anger: anger at Grav for abandoning the Harringtons.
This thought lasted mere seconds, fading the instant Holly felt the slenderness of the hand touching hers. A glimmer of blonde in the would-be rescuer’s long hair then confirmed their identity beyond doubt:
Viola.
Viola tried in vain to dislodge the backpack from the rock formation. After only two attempts to yank it free, she turned her attention to the shoulder buckles which were stopping Holly from leaving it behind.
The girl squeezed the clip harder and for longer than she had ever squeezed anything in her life, straining intensely until suddenly her efforts paid off. Holly prevented her from falling into the jagged rock when the release of tension in the strap pulled her forward, and with the backpack abandoned on the murky floor they both swam to the surface as quickly as they could.
Holly reached the welcoming light and life-giving air after a laboured ascent, by which time Viola was already safely treading water.
“Are you okay?” Viola asked.
Grav, Bo and Robert screamed the same sentiment from the ledge high above, too close to the edge for Holly’s liking.
She told them to get back in no uncertain terms, then continued taking gasping breaths to give her lungs the oxygen they craved. “I’m fine,” she panted.
Viola moved beside Holly and guided her towards a certain point of the rounded wall. There was no easy way out — from down here, what they’d previously thought of as a cave seemed more like a well — but there were reachable rocks on this section of wall which they could hold onto for now.
“I will get the rope,” Grav yelled from his unseen position.
Viola swept her long hair from her forehead. “Will you be okay on your own for a minute?”
“What do you mean?” Holly asked, some way towards catching her breath.
“While I dive back down to get Bo’s medicine.”
Holly saw in Viola’s eyes that her desire to recover the medicine was not one which could have been reasoned with, even had Holly wanted to. The girl was evidently a more than competent swimmer, anyway, so Holly answered only by nodding.
“Is there anything else in the backpack that we need?” Viola asked.
“We have plenty more water containers in the lander and apart from those there were just a few blankets, matches and a rope. Grav already has a rope and it’s not like we could throw ours high enough for them to catch it.”
“So… no?”
“Just his medicine,” Holly confirmed. She then watched in awe as Viola elegantly dove towards the pool’s floor.
Having heeded Holly’s firm warning to get away from the ledge, none of the others knew that Viola had gone back under. Holly looked up at the distant ledge and imagined what Robert must have been thinking when Viola jumped off, almost certainly without his permission. It was a high enough fall for improper form to cause a serious impact injury; the longer Holly looked up, the more impressed she was by Viola’s bravery.
After fifty-two seconds, by Holly’s count, Viola emerged from the water with Bo’s medicine case. “I got it,” she said, taking several gulps of air.
Holly smiled at her from the wall. “You got it.”
While Grav’s emergency rope was more than strong enough to hold Holly’s weight, she had less confidence in the ledge it was dangling from.
After repeated reassurances from above that the remaining ledge felt far more secure than the various fragments which had already broken off, and with no other way out, Holly insisted that Viola go first. This was non-negotiable; should anything go wrong during Viola’s ascent, Holly wanted to be waiting below to help her.
Viola reached the safety of Robert’s arms without any difficulties. Holly’s mind wouldn’t shut up about the fact that she likely weighed at least one and a half Violas, which might prove too much for the fragile ledge to bear. Fortunately, it didn’t.
Grav immediately pulled Holly well away from the ledge and out towards the barren landscape she never would have believed she’d be so relieved to see. When they were outside, he hugged her tightly. “Jesus, Hollywood, do not scare me like that.”
“Don’t scare you? That only happened because you—”
Holly’s response was cut off by the arrival of Bo, who ran towards her and clung to her waist like a limpet. “I thought you had drowned,” he said, speaking in that straightforward way only a child could.
Robert, having no doubt already either embraced or scolded Viola during Holly’s climb — some combination of the two, she imagined — followed Bo over.
“I’m sorry,” Holly said before he could speak. “I didn’t ask her to jump in.”
“I know. You didn’t do anything wrong. If I hadn’t su
ggested walking around this thing instead of over—”
“No,” she interrupted. “It’s not your fault, either.”
Robert put his hand around Bo’s shoulder to pry him off Holly. “The important thing is that everyone is alright.”
Viola then emerged from the cave in dry clothes, taken from her suitcase.
“I’ll carry your case,” Holly said. “I’ve got nothing else now, and you earned a rest.”
“It’s okay, I’ve got it.”
Holly walked towards her and forcibly took the suitcase. “I insist.”
“Thanks,” Viola said.
“I reckon we can call it even.”
Viola laughed. “We were already even. You came back for us on the Karrier, I helped you out of the water. Now with you carrying my case, I’m just going to owe you one again!”
“I’m sure I’ll think of something,” Holly said with a smile.
The lander came into sight shortly after the group made it around the mound. It looked closer than it was.
A short way into the return trek, Grav moved side by side with Holly.
“I know it would have been me down there if you had not pulled me back,” he said. Holly turned to face him and saw real guilt in his expression, like nothing she’d seen from him before. “And I know that I probably would not have made it.”
“I’m here thanks to Viola,” Holly said.
“And I am here thanks to you. Seriously, Hollywood: I am sorry for what happened. When you told me to get back, I should have done it straight away.”
“It was an accident,” Holly said, responding in the same good faith she discerned from Grav. His apology had been direct and unqualified, which she knew wasn’t a common occurrence for someone like him. “Just don’t do anything like that again, okay?”
“Spaceman was right about you,” Grav said after a few silent seconds. “You are exactly the kind of asset we need to win this thing.”
Grav stepped away and sparked up a conversation with Robert before Holly could voice the obvious and tantalising question:
Win what thing?
seventeen
The call of the lander, once considered by most as something more akin to a claustrophobic holding cell than a comfortable dwelling, grew ever more appealing as the group drew near.
Sunlight guided the rest of their return trek, though it noticeably faded towards the end.
Grav entered the security code at the lander’s entrance — the same code he’d used to secure the other lander, where he hoped Rusev and Yury had since been rejoined by Dante — and ushered everyone inside.
Aided by a lengthy stretch of unbroken sunlight, all of the lander’s systems were functioning normally. Holly enjoyed a warm shower; after her frightening incident in the cave’s icy pool, the lander’s shower was so refreshing that its greatly restrictive size barely registered.
A greenish bruise had developed on Holly’s left thigh where one of the pool’s jagged rocks pierced her skin, but fortunately the blood loss had been minimal. The swelling around her eye, caused by the face-to-table impact of the Karrier’s as yet unexplained initial collision, had also greatly subsided. Holly had no vision in the affected eye, anyway — indeed, it was no longer truly an eye — so Grav’s earlier comment of “lucky for you it was that eye” certainly rang true.
Holly, who didn’t consider her tolerance to physical pain any higher than the average person’s, put the increased soreness around both injured areas down to the fact that adrenaline was no longer coursing through her veins in the oceanic volumes it had been earlier in the day. With the lander providing overnight sanctuary and Grav’s presence providing relief that the other lander had survived its descent, her two most pressing concerns had been abated.
The lander provided warmth, shelter, and drinking water, as well as the less tangible but still fundamental benefit of making the Harringtons feel as temporarily relaxed as Holly did.
Temporarily, however, was the key word.
As the children worked through the last of Grav’s snacks, Holly asked Robert to pass her the plant from inside his bag. She then placed it safely on the floor and gave it a few drops of water.
“Do you have any more snacks?” Bo asked, his appetite piqued.
Grav shook his head but insisted that he had “plenty more” in his suitcase in the other lander. Holly wouldn’t have cared that his peanuts and chocolate lacked the nutritional punch of Rusev’s broken algae machine had she truly believed Grav’s use of the word plenty, but she felt uncomfortably sure that the group’s survival beyond a few weeks — in the worst-case scenario that neither rescue nor escape came before then — would depend entirely on whether the largely self-sustaining algae machine could be fixed. This in turn depended upon an equally uncertain point: whether the Karrier itself had touched down safely or crash-landed on the planet’s surface following the mysterious initial impact which sent it spiralling out of Grav’s control.
Holly kept her concerns to herself. She knew that Grav, at least, must have shared them, but he too saw the merit in allowing the Harringtons to enjoy the evening’s air of faux normality while they could.
When darkness began to fall, speculation turned to the question of how long the night would last. When Viola said that the sun’s movements had been similar to what they were used to on Earth and concluded that the night would probably last around ten hours, Bo pointed out that the day-night cycle Viola was accustomed to was far from universal on Earth and certainly couldn’t be confidently applied to an alien world.
No one argued with Bo’s point, but his use of the term “alien world” led into another inevitable discussion about whether the Karrier’s stranded passengers were truly alone on their desert island of a planet.
Grav firmly and decisively ended this discussion with a viewpoint Holly shared: “If something else was here, we would know by now.”
As everything outside turned black, the readings on the lander’s control panel showed the outdoor temperature plummeting.
But although it became cold enough to ensure that anyone caught outside for a prolonged period would almost certainly die, Holly and Grav were both relieved that the low-point remained well within the lander’s safe operating limits and even above the record lows felt in some populated areas of Earth. Within thirty minutes of pitch darkness, the temperature stabilised at this worse-than-they’d-hoped-for but better-than-they’d-feared level.
The stars in the sky were the brightest Holly had ever seen. The most prominent constellations were familiar to her and also to Bo, who had a far greater pre-existing interest in space than any of the others.
“Do we have anything that can map the stars and use that to tell us exactly where we are?” he asked.
Holly shook her head and looked at Grav, in case he knew about something she didn’t.
“We have scanning drones,” he said. Holly didn’t know about these. “We are using them to map terrain, though; not stars. Spaceman already sent them out. Yury, I mean. You know, Yury Gardev?”
Everyone nodded; even Robert and Viola knew Yury.
“He sent out all eight,” Grav continued. “Each flies in its own line, zig-zagging to capture as much as possible, then turns around and comes back once 45% of its power reserves are exhausted. He will sync the data and every frame will be automatically scanned against the database of images we have from every known planetary body. And if all eight come back, even if there is no match, we will still have a much better understanding of this place than we do now. I think the drones may have sky-facing cameras, too, but I do not know what kind of star map we would get, even if they do.”
Far from being disappointed by the lack of a firm answer to the star-mapping question, Bo was visibly encouraged by the news of the drones. “That means the drones will find the Karrier,” he said. “Right?”
“That is the plan,” Grav confirmed.
“So we’ll be able to retrieve our luggage?” Robert chimed in.
/> “Again…” Grav said patiently, “that is the plan.”
“And we’ll also be able to retrieve the radio?”
Holly met Grav’s eyes and agreed to speak for him. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s the plan.”
It all sounded so easy in theory, she thought.
In theory…
eighteen
Holly tried not to stare as Robert delivered Bo’s painful evening injection. She knew only what Viola had told her about the young boy’s condition: that he suffered from an uncommon but not extraordinarily rare condition which severely hampered childhood growth, and that this condition could lead to life-threatening complications in a few years if not curtailed by effective treatment.
As the boy bravely took the injection above his left hip with tightly closed eyes and a heartbreaking whimper, Holly decided there was no justifiable reason to push for further details at this stage; everyone already had enough on their plates without having to satisfy her prying.
Judging by his silence, Grav seemed to have the same idea.
Bo walked slowly towards one of the lander’s beds and positioned himself in a well-practised manner to make sure he wouldn’t roll onto the still-raw area above his left hip.
“Tell me a story,” he said directly to Holly. “From when you were in the space program.”
Holly thought for several seconds. She had stories, for sure, but none of them were fit for bedtime; rather than soothe anyone to sleep, hers were the kind that were more likely to wake her up in a cold sweat. “It was actually pretty boring,” she said. “Nothing as exciting as this ever happened, I can tell you that!”
Bo smiled weakly then settled his gaze on Grav. “What about you?”
“I have no stories, kiddo,” Grav said, struggling to hold the boy’s eyes.
Holly knew Grav had stories even worse than her own. She’d never heard them from him — he wasn’t much of a talker; to her, at least — but Rusev and particularly Yury had filled her in. Through them, she knew that Grav’s sometimes cynical-looking detachment wasn’t a facade. She knew that he’d been hardened in the worst way, horribly desensitised to things she felt no one should have to see even once.
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