In simple terms, they were running out of places to look.
As the lander came into view, Holly’s anticipation grew. Would Rusev and Grav be back? Would they have already gone back out, as she was planning to? And either way… what had they found?
Her first two questions were answered as soon as she re-entered the lander and saw Rusev sitting at the table with Yury and what looked like some kind of testing kit.
“Did you find the Karrier?” Grav’s voice boomed.
Holly turned to see him sitting on the floor in the corner. She shook her head solemnly, knowing that his question obviously meant that he hadn’t found it, either.
“Did you find anything?”
“A beach,” Holly said. “White sand, fresh water, a tide. It looks tropical… like a photo of what a perfect beach should look like. I’ll show you the photos from my wristband. And we found an aquatic plant that might be edible, but I didn’t see where it was growing. There were other weird plants on the way to the beach; I didn’t want to touch them, but we got photos of them, too.”
Rusev turned away from what she and Yury were doing. “You found a beach? A tropical beach?”
“Yeah,” Holly said, surprised by just how… surprised… Rusev was. “Why? What did you find?”
Grav pushed a container along the floor towards Holly’s feet. The sealed container was metallic and extremely cold to the touch. “What the hell is in here?” Holly asked.
Rusev and Grav answered in unplanned unison: “Snow.”
twenty-seven
“The sample is from the ground, but snow was falling,” Grav said. “Heavily.”
“So there’s snow lying on the ground?” Bo chimed in from the top of the ladder, having overheard their conversation as he climbed up. “Deep enough for snowmen and igloos?”
Grav nodded. “Deep enough that we could not walk through it. It got deeper and deeper as we walked on until it was up to my waist.”
“I haven’t even seen a cloud since we landed,” Holly said, trying to make sense of what she was hearing.
“Oh, the sky was blanketed,” Grav said. “Just like the snow, the cloud coverage got denser as we walked on. We did not expect to get so wet, so we had to collect a sample and turn back. It has only been fifteen minutes since we arrived.”
“Which isn’t enough to be sure,” Yury began, “but the tests so far strongly suggest that this is regular snow… for want of a better word. Tell me more about the aquatic plant you found. I’ll see the photos in a minute, but did you bring some samples back?”
Holly took the container from Dante’s backpack and brought it to the table. The Harringtons all sat on the floor next to Grav, with Bo excitedly telling him how warm the sand was at the beach and trying to describe the weird trees and fungi he’d seen on the way.
“Hmmm,” Yury said, eyeing the seaweed-like sample. “Aside from nutrition and digestibility, which we can test for, there is the question of toxicity. Even if we detect no known toxins, I would be very hesitant to eat this until we truly have to. Still, to find something like this within walking distance is more than I expected. I’ll test it thoroughly tonight.”
Holly couldn’t hide her confusion over the delay. “Tonight?”
“I’m going on the next search,” Yury said. “I want to see some of this craziness for myself.”
The group, save for Rusev who agreed to stay behind in Yury’s place, prepared for the second excursion of the day. Holly joined the Harringtons in the extension as they packed some warmer clothes in case the next direction of travel took them to a cold environment.
“Having to pack three sets of clothes for the changeable weather,” Robert mused with a quickly widening grin. “This is worse than when we went to Scotland.”
Outside, after navigating the ladder with less difficulty than he feared, Yury wasted no time in taking control of the search. “We proceed as one group,” he said. “We sweep forward in one line, spread as widely as possible while remaining within sight and within hearing distance. Pay attention to the ground; if you see anything that may be debris from the Karrier — or indeed anything else of interest — you will call your neighbours to check it with you. You will not touch it. Is this clear? Those at the outside have the greatest responsibility to scan the distance. Grav, Holly, I think you are the obvious choices.”
“Holly might want to stay on the inside,” Dante said. “Nearer the kids. I can go at one of the edges if she does.”
“Okay with you, Holly?” Yury asked.
She nodded, glad that Dante had volunteered.
The group then set off in a direction some 45 degrees between the route to the beach and the route Dante had taken in his first-day attempt to locate Holly’s lander. Dante flanked one end of the line, with Bo to his right followed by Holly, Viola, Robert, Yury and ultimately Grav.
The landscape in the early stages was relatively barren; closer to the sterile canyon which had surrounded Holly’s lander than the grassy area that led to the beach. Rock formations were dotted around, some of which were quite substantial. The lack of conversation caused by the distance between each member of the group made time pass slowly, and after the better part of an hour neither Holly nor either of her immediate neighbours had found anything of note on the ground.
Before long, the ground became slightly softer and broken by the occasional tuft of yellowed grass.
Holly looked again towards Viola, marching steadily forward several hundred metres away, and saw that there were trees not far ahead of the girl. She then looked the other way towards… nothing.
Where Bo should have been, there was a gap.
Frantic, Holly looked backwards to see if Bo had left his position and walked sideways to check on something. He hadn’t. Dante continued forward in the distance beyond Bo’s previous position, as oblivious to the boy’s absence as Holly had been moments earlier. Around one hundred metres behind where Bo should have been, Holly saw a boulder that looked higher than a person.
He must have found something, she reasoned. He must have found something and forgotten that he was supposed to call out.
Holly ran towards the rock. As she neared, she heard Bo’s voice calling her name. A wave of relief crashed into her when she heard him, but his tone — pained — sent her back towards worry just as quickly.
“I’m here, I’m here,” she called. She reached the boulder, which was in fact a medium-sized formation, and found Bo on the other side with his foot lodged between two large ground-level rocks.
“I just wanted to climb over,” he said, his voice full of sorrow. “I didn’t think I’d get stuck.”
“How did your foot get in if you can’t get it out?” Holly asked, leading with the obvious question rather than berating him for acting irresponsibly. There would be time for that later.
“I slipped. I don’t know… my foot was straight and now it’s not. Now it’s flat on the ground and there’s not enough room to move it.”
Holly crouched down and tried to move the smaller of the two rocks, which was still substantial in size. She failed to budge it but felt enough movement to know it would be possible.
“Dante,” she yelled.
He alone was close enough to hear, and he hurried over without hesitation. “What the hell happened here?” he asked when he arrived, looking more confused than concerned.
“His foot got lodged,” Holly said, looking at Bo as his face turned ever deeper shades of red. “I need you to help me move one of the rocks.”
Dante cracked his knuckles and performed a series of exaggerated stretches to prepare himself for the task.
“On three,” Holly said.
They moved the rock with ease, freeing Bo’s foot.
“Don’t do that again,” Dante said, suddenly serious.
Bo nodded timidly. “Are you going to tell my dad?”
Dante and Holly shared a look. “Are you going to do it again?” Holly asked.
“No! I promise: I w
on’t touch anything.”
“Okay,” she said. “We won’t.”
“Thanks.”
Holly looked at Dante again. “You better get back to your position. Take a few steps inside so there’s less distance between the three of us.”
“Good idea,” he said, setting off.
In the shadow of the rocks, Holly spotted what was by far the most mushroom-like fungus she had seen so far. She wasted no time in snapping a photograph and then placing a sample in one of the empty containers in her backpack, taking care not to touch the fungus. Fungus was the word in her mind, but she knew there was no firm justification for assuming the organism could be neatly classified in such Earth-based terms.
“I didn’t mean to get stuck,” Bo said before she set off. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, but that’s exactly why you don’t touch anything and don’t do anything stupid; things can happen that you don’t mean to happen.”
Bo rolled up his sleeves, reacting to a slight change in temperature that Holly thought she’d noticed a few minutes earlier. It was hard to tell how much was atmospheric and how much was down to walking with such a heavy load, but she definitely felt hotter now than before. She took a drink of water and forced Bo to have some, too.
As the boy drank, the high-pitched alarm on Holly’s wristband began to sound. She looked down at the display expecting to see that Dante had taken his off again, no doubt complaining of an itchy arm or some such nonsense. Instead, she saw something far more concerning.
One of the dots — the one representing Yury — was flashing orange.
“Run behind me,” Holly said to Bo. She pressed a button on her wristband to silence the alarm. “As fast as you can.”
On looking up, she immediately saw that Viola and Robert had already left their positions and moved towards Yury’s. She sprinted over and soon came close enough to see Grav, Robert and Viola all standing over him.
“Spaceman!” she yelled.
When Robert turned towards her, the look on his face said it all.
twenty-eight
“What happened?” Holly asked.
Before an answer came, she lowered herself to talk to Yury. He was on the ground and breathing slowly and deliberately as per Grav’s instructions. Grav was on the ground, too, making sure Yury’s body didn’t fall flat.
Instinctively, fearing that Yury may have walked into or past an unseen source of some kind of harmful interference, Grav had already gently pulled the old man’s body back several metres from the furthest of his footprints.
The dot on Holly’s wristband which represented Yury, previously flashing orange, remained steady during the few seconds she glanced at it.
“Is it your heart?” she asked. “Your pacemaker?”
Yury nodded several times, until Grav told him to stop moving too much. “Sometimes… it misbehaves,” his voice croaked. “Nothing… to worry about.”
The deep breaths Yury took between words, combined with his unconvincing tone, suggested to Holly and everyone else that this was a rarer and more serious occurrence than he was trying to suggest.
“Just sit there and relax,” Holly said.
She knew that what Yury called a pacemaker was far more advanced than the kind her grandfather had needed when she was a small child, but she also knew that it was far from the cutting edge of modern medicine. She knew Yury had repeatedly refused Rusev’s offers to fund a fully synthetic transplant, and she could only imagine how Rusev would react to learning of the difficulties now arising from Yury’s famous stubbornness.
“I’m fine,” he said, his voice growing more forceful as he inelegantly shuffled to his knees and slowly rose to his feet with some help from Holly and Viola. He pointed to his own wristband. “See? Stable. Now, everyone back to their positions.”
“You are not going any further,” Grav said. “No way.”
“Grav, it’s not for you to deci—”
“Listen, Spaceman,” Grav interrupted, unbudgingly staring into his eyes. “This is not a discussion. If I have to carry you back, I will.”
“I’m fine,” the old lion insisted, equally unbudging.
Grav looked to Holly for support.
Holly, knowing that Yury would likely be more receptive to an argument framed in terms of what was best for the group rather than what she thought was best for him, replied with that in mind. “You would be a liability,” she said. She had to force these words out and managed to do so only upon reflection that Yury’s wellbeing was more important than his feelings. “If we kept going, you would only slow us down. It’s better for everyone if someone takes you back to the lander.”
“I will take him,” Grav said, mainly to Holly. “The rest of you can keep going. If I do actually have to carry him at any point, I can do so. We really cannot afford to keep walking for an hour then going back to the lander. We need a real search.”
“I certainly won’t allow something so trivial as this to derail the whole search,” Yury agreed. “And I won’t allow myself to become a liability.”
All the liability talk brought something else to Holly’s mind. “Robert,” she said, catching his attention. “Maybe you and Bo should go back, too. It’s going to be a long day, and he’s been on his feet a lot already.”
“Why do I have to go back?” Bo complained, gesturing towards Viola. “I can walk further than her!”
“Shut up,” Viola snapped back.
Holly glanced towards the rock formation where Bo had managed to get stuck just a few minutes earlier. She didn’t have to say anything; the expression on her face when she looked back at Bo told him that he was being dismissed because she couldn’t count on him to follow basic orders.
There was a lot of truth in Holly’s words that it would be a long day, and she knew that Bo quite likely would begin to slow the group down as it wore on. But there was also an important secondary benefit of showing Bo that disregarding basic safety instructions would not be tolerated.
The fact that Bo didn’t bemoan the unfairness of Holly’s suggestion after she silently conveyed that his episode at the rocks was to blame told her that he really didn’t want Robert to know about it. Robert certainly didn’t strike her as an aggressive disciplinarian bent on instilling fear in his children, so Holly could only assume that Bo didn’t want to disappoint him.
“I wouldn’t be comfortable going back without Viola,” Robert said.
“Why?” the girl asked. “I’m seventeen! Besides, I’ll be safe with Holly.”
Holly held Robert’s unsure eyes. “She will. I promise.”
Robert sighed. He didn’t speak, but it was a clear sign of concession.
No one mentioned Dante in this discussion over Viola’s safety. He didn’t look slighted, which Holly took as an indication that he understood that his on-board title of “secondary chaperone” had merely been something Rusev concocted to give him a purpose en route to the Venus station, where his real work as a technician would begin.
After a quick farewell, which largely revolved around Robert annoying Viola with orders to be careful and Holly annoying Yury with orders to rest when he got back to the lander, the two groups went their separate ways.
“Actually, Grav,” Holly called after only a few steps. “Can Viola have your wristband until we get back? It makes sense for the people who are outside to have them.”
He shrugged. “Sure.” Holly’s alarm beeped when he removed his wristband and continued until he reached Viola and handed it to her.
“This thing’s pretty cool,” Viola said a few minutes later, pressing buttons and tapping options she didn’t understand once the wristband was securely attached. “Woah… what was that?”
“What was what?” Dante asked, taking the words out of Holly’s mouth.
Viola, having stopped on the spot, pointed to her wristband. “The screen flashed white then went black for, like, half a second.”
Holly walked the few steps back to her. “Mine seem
s… huh? It just flashed! Dante, come here.”
“What for?”
“To check your wristband, obviously,” Holly said.
He walked over and nodded indifferently when he reached them. “Yeah, it flashed. Probably magnetism or something. We could be standing at a pole for all we know.”
Holly and Viola looked all around. Apart from the foursome fading into the distance and a few rock formations, there wasn’t much to see.
“Look at the ground,” Viola suddenly said, her voice animated. “Look at the little bits of grass!” She raised her right arm and bent it at the elbow several times to signify a barrier. “The whole way along, there’s no more grass on that side. I mean, it’s not like the ground is covered on this side, but there’s literally none on that side.”
Holy shit, Holly thought. She’s right.
“Could a pole do that?” Viola asked Dante, genuinely curious.
“Maybe,” he said. “But the difference in the grass could be caused by something simpler. Maybe an underground river making that area more fertile? I don’t know.”
Viola wasn’t convinced. “Don’t you think it’s more than a little bit weird that we’d find a line like this exactly where Spaceman’s pacemaker started acting up and exactly where the wristbands go blank? You really think an underground river is causing that?”
“Maybe.”
Holly turned in the opposite direction and looked to see whether the pattern of grass only growing past a clearly defined point would continue that way. She squinted her eyes, crouched down, and looked closely at the ground under her feet then more distantly towards the horizon. There was only one conclusion.
“Dante,” she said, “there’s definitely a line.”
Viola looked at Holly. “So what does it mean? Where do you think it goes?”
“I don’t know where it goes,” Holly said. “But if whatever’s causing this line really did mess with Yury’s heart, it means this planet’s even more dangerous than we thought.”
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 14