Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  “I hope he’s okay,” Bo said, perfectly lucid but utterly sapped of his usual zestful energy. No one had told him of the stakes surrounding Dante’s mission, and they hoped they wouldn’t have to. “I don’t want anything to happen to him because of me.”

  “What happens to Dante is on Dante,” Grav said. “He chose to go.”

  Holly belatedly and ruefully considered the now obvious utility of giving Dante a wristband before he left. A wristband would have enabled the group to track Dante’s movement and know what kind of progress he was making. But even more importantly, it would have assisted Dante in finding his way back. In the dark with only a flashlight to aid his vision, that alone would be no mean feat.

  Fortunately, Holly at least had the timely idea to switch on the lights inside the lander so it would be visible once it was within Dante’s range. More fortunately still, Dante was by now much closer than she feared; so close, in fact, that he appeared in the distance during Yury’s next check.

  “Is he okay?” Dante asked upon sprinting inside, his face beet-red and his breathing looking dangerously quick. “Tell me you didn’t do it?”

  “Do what?” Bo asked.

  Dante laughed, almost deliriously. “Oh, thank God.”

  Holly took the bag from his shoulder and forced him to sit down to catch his breath. “Did you get it?” she asked.

  “All of it,” he said. “How long did I take?”

  “Fifty-eight minutes,” Viola said, quite cheerily.

  Dante grinned broadly at Rusev. “Told you I’d be back in an hour.” He then took a drink of water from Holly’s container and began unpacking his bag.

  After telling Bo how confident he was that what he was about to do would “reduce the swelling” — more than slightly downplaying the seriousness of the boy’s situation — Dante wrapped a soft ointment-doused gauze around the growth-riddled foot as gently as he could. Next, he produced a narrow cylindrical tube from his pocket.

  “You’re a brave kid,” Dante said, “so I’m not going to lie to you. This is an injection and it’s probably going to hurt more than anything you’ve ever felt, because I have to do it exactly where the sting pierced your skin.” He then walked over to Holly and Robert and whispered: “You’re going to need to hold him down.”

  After the injection, Bo jerked and writhed like an eel on land for three or four seconds before abruptly falling back on his bed and appearing to fade from consciousness once more.

  “I expected that to happen,” Dante strived to make clear before anyone got too concerned. “Give him a minute and he’ll be awake; give him an hour and the worst of the discolouration will be gone; give him a good night’s sleep and he’ll be walking on that foot tomorrow.”

  Sure enough, Bo’s eyes slowly opened after no more than thirty seconds.

  “We’re going to run through some new rules in the morning,” Rusev said to the whole group. “No one goes anywhere unless everyone else knows where, and those I expect to act responsibly will begin acting responsibly.”

  Robert and Yury, the two people Rusev intended this for more than anyone else, both nodded in understanding. “It was my fault,” Yury said. “I was in charge of my group and I didn’t stay on top of things. It won’t happen again.”

  “It won’t have the chance to happen again,” Rusev said, being more brusque with Yury than Holly had ever seen. Given how close the group had come to disaster, she could understand why feelings were running so high.

  “I’m going to lie down,” Dante announced, cueing profuse thanks from Robert, Holly, and especially Viola. “Make sure someone stays with him in case he wakes up during the night and tries to walk before his foot’s ready for it.”

  “I’ll be here,” Robert said.

  “Me too,” Holly added.

  Grav said nothing.

  “Here you go,” Dante said, pushing the plastic injecting device’s shell into Grav’s barrel-like chest and dropping it to the floor as he headed for the lander. He turned back at the door and fired two final words at Grav in a fake and mocking accent: “Fucking idiot.”

  Day Five

  forty

  No one slept better than Bo.

  When it came time to wake him in order to check his progress ahead of the make-or-break day ahead, Holly and the rest of the group were as amazed as they were delighted: the discolouration had almost completely faded, and the previously alarming growths on his foot had receded to leave nothing worse than some areas of loose skin resembling popped blisters.

  Bo was perfectly lucid within seconds of waking up. Dante gently urged him to place some weight on the affected foot. Bo took several steps with no ill effects.

  “Those painkillers are pretty strong,” Grav said.

  “They wore off hours ago,” Dante replied. Though the air between he and Grav was still frostier than normal, his answer here was very matter-of-fact and lacked any particular signs of disdain.

  Bo tapped his injured foot on the ground several times, harder and harder until Viola told him to stop. “I’m fine,” he said, as sprightly as ever. “So what are we doing today? Did we manage to fix the radio?”

  “You’re staying in your bed,” Viola said. “That’s what you’re doing.”

  “It’s not up to you,” Bo said.

  Before an argument could develop, Robert sensibly and decisively sided with Viola.

  It had been decided at sunrise that Rusev would be accompanied to the other lander — usually referred to in shorthand as “Holly’s lander” — by Grav. His brute force would greatly assist in carrying drinking water on the barren route as well as enabling the easy lifting of access panels which would otherwise take too long to detach, while his knowledge of the lander’s exact location meant that no one else would have to make the journey.

  Dante would of course join Rusev for the delicate work to be carried out at the Karrier once the necessary materials were obtained from Holly’s lander, but until then she had no need for his company.

  Given the substantial distance between the two landers, Rusev and Grav wisely set off as soon as they saw the great improvement in Bo’s condition. To ensure that nothing was forgotten, Dante and Rusev had each made separate lists of everything they thought they might need to return power to the Karrier’s control room and fix its radio. Grav initially baulked at the length of the final combined list, but he trusted Rusev’s judgement that he could carry it all with ease; the vast majority of the components were very small, she told him, and the few larger parts were very light.

  While Viola and Robert sat with Bo, telling him all about the radio situation as well as how worried about him everyone had been, Yury invited Holly and Dante into the lander to discuss something he had already cleared with Rusev.

  Yury sat at the table, with his increasingly detailed composite map of the planet filling most of the surface. The basis of the map remained the footage from the only surviving drone, with relatively accurate routes now added based on testimony from the explorers and distance data from their wristbands. Yury tapped the table on the blankest area of the map. “We need to know what lies here,” he said. “I need you to survey the landscape, with particular attention to the zonal markings you identified.”

  “I agree,” Dante said.

  Holly hesitated. “I’m not saying no… but why?”

  “I’m working on the theory that these ‘lines’ extend into the upper atmosphere,” Yury said. “You all reported that your wristbands reacted to the lines, you found a fallen drone precisely on one of the lines, and of course my own problem seems to have been caused by crossing one of them. Think back to what happened four days ago: our Karrier crashed into something we couldn’t see. What I see now is a pattern, and it’s crucial that we direct the rescue team to land safely within one of these zones — whatever they are — rather than risk unnecessarily crossing between them.”

  “We also want to find a nice flat landing spot that’s pretty close to here without being too clos
e,” Dante said. “We can map the lines while we’re at it. Two birds with one stone.”

  Holly agreed that they might as well do something productive while waiting for Rusev, and understood now why she’d been so adamant about only needing Grav.

  Upon learning that Viola was going back out with Holly and Dante, Bo full-heartedly protested against his confinement to the extension, begging to be allowed to join their mapping party with lines as varied as “I’ve honestly never felt better” and “the fresh air will do me good.”

  Though he lost the argument, Holly agreed to check out the area where Bo thought he’d seen footprints the previous day. Bo explained that the markings quickly grew too faint to follow — a point Robert backed up — but that the sight of the odd plants in the distance had encouraged him to keep going. He described the plants as “weirdly concentrated in one spot… almost like they were marking something, or maybe like they were some kind of barrier.”

  Dante stepped in at this point, making clear that the area Bo was talking about was part of the area he had swept on the first day while looking for Holly’s lander. “The footsteps are what’s left of mine after four day’s worth of dust being blown around,” he said. “I did see some plants — I told everyone that right away — but it didn’t look like they were arranged in any kind of weird way. This place is weird as hell, no doubt, but there’s nothing to see there.”

  Now that he knew about the lines, which accounted for localised variation even if they didn’t truly explain it, Bo quietly accepted that there was no good reason to be suspicious about the plants.

  After an unappetising but efficient breakfast of dissolved nutrition powder, Holly set off with Dante and Viola. She hoped to be back at around the same time as Rusev and Grav, who by now had a head start of several hours.

  Holly led her trio along the straight-line course set out by Yury. They encountered nothing of note for over an hour, until Viola spotted a barely discernible change of colour along a thin strip of ground underfoot.

  As though it was necessary to do so, Holly moved her arm across the threshold to confirm that it was indeed a zonal marking. She then walked fifty paces along the line in one direction while Viola did the same in the other. Both paused before returning. This move, as odd as it looked, would allow Yury to mark the line on his map as he tracked their relative distances from the lander like a hawk courtesy of his own wristband.

  With Bo’s condition now stable, Dante had since resumed wearing his own wristband. Grav and Robert, like Bo, currently wore no wristbands. Five had to stretch between the group’s eight members, with the current spread designed to ensure that each travelling group was covered and that Yury’s steady location could act as a ‘home base’ reference point.

  “There’s nothing up ahead,” Dante said. “We’ve mapped the line, which is what Spaceman wanted, so we know this zone is pretty big. We also know the whole area is pretty flat, which is what I wanted to know. So unless either of you can see a reason to keep going this way…”

  Holly looked down at her wristband. Its display told her that Rusev and Grav had recently begun their journey back from the other lander. “We still have a few hours to kill,” she said.

  Dante shrugged and scoured the landscape, barren even by the planet’s usual standards. “What about that, then?” he asked, pointing towards a fairly distant rock formation which was the only potential point of interest in sight. “We followed Spaceman’s route all the way to the line, exactly like he wanted, so can we at least switch course now and check that thing out? It looks pretty big.”

  “We might find something cool,” Viola chimed in, giving Holly her best “please can we go?” eyes without resorting to actual begging.

  Viola’s curiosity had led to useful discoveries in the past, Holly considered, and it did make a welcome change for Dante to be the keenest to explore. She eventually answered in the affirmative by holding her hand out towards the rocks.

  On the way to the rocks, Holly left most of the talking to Dante and Viola, who were much chattier today than they had been previously. She assumed, quite understandably, that this was in no small part down to the gratitude Viola felt for the selfless risk Dante had taken in running all the way to the Karrier and back to save Bo’s foot.

  It quickly became clear that the rock formation was both smaller and closer than the trio had originally thought; before too long, they were close enough to see that what had looked like a wall-like rock-face was in fact just one side of a conspicuously square rocky wall.

  The wall itself was ragged and uneven in height and depth, but the shape of the perimeter was there for all to see.

  “Is it just me…” Dante began, “or do those edges look like more of those right angles that nature doesn’t make?”

  “There are rock formations on Earth that you would never believe aren’t man-made,” Holly said, trying to manage expectations.

  Her efforts did little to quell the vocal speculation, which ceased only when they stood directly in front of the wall and silent wonder took over.

  The low-point of the enclosing wall stood several inches higher than Holly and Dante, giving them no way of knowing what lay inside. Holly and Viola walked around the perimeter in opposite directions in the hope that Yury would still be tracing their movements on his own wristband back at the lander. The area inside the wall was slightly larger than the Karrier.

  “Will you give me a foot up?” Viola asked Dante.

  “Hold up,” Holly said. “There is no way you’re climbing up there until I know what’s on the other side. If you fell in…”

  “I’ll go,” Dante offered.

  Holly nodded and helped him up.

  “Be careful up there,” Viola pleaded, perhaps sounding a little too concerned for Holly’s liking.

  Dante shuffled onto his feet at the top of the wall and stood upright. “Holy shit…”

  “What?” Holly and Viola asked at once.

  Dante held his hand out for Holly, to help her up. “It’s one hundred percent safe,” he said, his eyes wide in something between confusion and amazement.

  “You first,” Holly said to Viola. “I’ll be right behind you in case you slip.”

  As soon as Viola had a solid footing on the wall, Holly climbed to join her via a protruding rock a few steps away.

  “There are three different kinds of plants,” Viola said, somewhat spoiling the surprise.

  Dante said something to Viola too quietly for Holly’s ears, but a few seconds later she had her own view of what they were talking about.

  As the girl had said, there were indeed three different kinds of plants. They didn’t look like any plants Holly was familiar with, but the plants themselves weren’t what stood out. What stood out like a sore thumb was something more specific: the arrangement of the plants.

  The perfect rows; the neat divisions; the irrefutably non-random and non-natural layout… there was no mistaking the sight before Holly’s eyes.

  “Those aren’t just plants,” she said, already considering the game-changing implications of her next three words before she’d even spoken them. “Those are crops.”

  forty-one

  However distracted Holly’s mind had been by the urgency of the group’s rescue hopes, there had never been any real doubt that the zonal lines spread across her mysterious host planet indicated some kind of intelligent intervention.

  But this new discovery — this discovery of agriculture, no matter how small-scale — went far beyond an indication of intervention. This discovery suggested nothing less than a relatively recent colonial presence on the ground.

  “We’re not lost!” Viola exclaimed. “I mean, I guess we’re still lost, but someone knows where we are… because someone has been where we are!”

  Holly nodded passively as she took in the details of the crop placement. The ground was pristine, leading her to wonder about its composition and what kind of life was going on down there at the levels unreachable by Yur
y’s limited equipment in the lander. With so much else going on, studying the planet’s soil had become a forgotten priority even once the Karrier, which housed the equipment necessary for analysis, had been reached.

  “I don’t know,” Dante said.

  What Holly knew, judging by Dante’s voice, was that something was on his mind. She stayed quiet until he finished the thought.

  “This is a pretty obvious thing to say,” he went on, “but those don’t look like any crops I’ve ever seen. They’re not as weird as some of the plants we’ve seen here, but this stuff doesn’t grow on Earth. What I’m trying to say is: these aren’t human crops. Maybe someone didn’t plant them… maybe something planted them, and maybe we’re standing on its territory.”

  Viola immediately turned to Holly, waiting for her reaction.

  “If things go to plan, we’re going to be out of here in a few days, anyway,” Holly said. “And if they don’t, I’d rather have this fallback than not have it. Because in terms of us being hopelessly isolated or not, it doesn’t really matter who planted these crops. All that matters is that these crops aren’t going to harvest themselves.”

  “It’s not a very big field,” Viola said, apparently not overly panicked by Dante’s talk of standing on something’s territory. “Like, why wouldn’t they be growing this stuff all over the place? This much wouldn’t feed many people for long.”

  “I don’t think this is for sustenance,” Holly said. “Like you just said: it’s not enough. This could be a test site to see if stuff will grow in certain conditions. Maybe in certain zones? I reckon that if Spaceman’s drones had all made it back, we would have images of more of these crop areas, all over the planet. We just haven’t run into any until today. It’s a big place.”

  Without announcing his intention, Dante suddenly jumped down into the small field of crops. He landed safely. “Pass me some gloves and three sample containers,” he said. “I’m going to take some cuttings back to Spaceman. He knows a lot more about plants than we do.”