Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  Holly handed Dante what he requested, seeing little point in rebuking him for jumping down. She gave him four containers rather than three; “one for the soil.”

  But after collecting a sample from just one of the three kinds of plants, Dante noticed something odd about the ground underfoot. “It feels springy,” he said, keeping Holly up to speed with his thoughts as they came. He then crouched down and scooped up some soil from the narrow strip between the different crops. His back was turned to Holly and Viola, but they both saw him removing his right glove.

  “Don’t touch it,” Viola yelled. “You don’t know what that stuff could be!”

  Dante turned around and looked only at Holly. “This isn’t soil,” he said, struggling to say the words. His face whitened with worry.

  “What are you talking about?” Viola asked. “If it’s not soil, what is it?”

  Still staring at Dante, Holly remained silent. Her stomach was in her mouth — even worse than she’d felt upon seeing Bo’s foot the previous night — because she already knew what Dante was getting at.

  “It’s artificial soil,” he said, running it between his fingers to demonstrate the material’s variable consistency. “And not just any artificial soil. I’d know this spongey feeling anywhere.”

  Holly climbed down and picked up a handful. Seconds later, she threw it at the wall in an uncharacteristic outpouring of anger. “He’s right,” she said to Viola. “It’s Grow-Lo.”

  “The crops already told us that someone had been here before,” the girl replied, “so why is this Grow-Lo stuff such a big deal? Did Morrison invent it or something?”

  Holly finally looked up and met Viola’s eyes. “No,” she said. “It’s Rusev’s.”

  forty-two

  Hurrying back to the lander with several samples of mysterious crops and what Holly and Dante confidently identified as Grow-Lo, the hardy artificial soil developed by scientists at Ekaterina Rusev’s Rusentra corporation, the trio barely spoke.

  Over the previous few days, the feel of Grow-Lo on Holly’s fingertips had been a relaxing sensation during brief moments spent caring for the resilient potted plant with which she had shared so many trips to and from the Venus station. Today, the feelings evoked by her unexpected discovery of the same substance could hardly have been more different.

  Viola had asked for immediate clarification of what the Grow-Lo discovery meant, and Dante’s answer only served to raise even more questions in her mind: “Don’t ask me for details of this idea or for any motive that makes sense,” he said, “because I can’t see one. But I’m starting to think that Rusev wanted us to land here.”

  That Holly didn’t dismiss this point out of hand spoke volumes.

  “So we can’t trust Rusev?” Viola asked her.

  “I don’t know what any of this means,” Holly replied, more gruffly than normal. “But I’m going to do whatever it takes to keep your family safe.”

  Again, Viola could read more into what Holly didn’t say. “What about Grav?” the girl pushed. “And Yury?”

  “Spaceman is one hundred percent with us,” Dante jumped in.

  Holly glared at him. “So’s Grav.”

  Dante bit his tongue but slightly shook his head several times, as though trying to make sure neither of them missed it.

  Holly was glad of the silence that surrounded the remainder of their return journey; not because it gave her a chance to think, but because no amount of thinking could help her answer the kind of questions that Viola had understandably been asking.

  Holly broke a long silence much later to announce that, according to the wristband data, Rusev and Grav had just reached the lander.

  Viola spoke next, just a few minutes later. “Holly?” she said, her voice higher and somehow lighter than normal.

  “Yeah?”

  The girl paused for a few seconds, evidently reconsidering whether to voice her thought. “You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but…”

  “Spit it out.”

  After one final hesitation, Viola did: “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  Dante stopped dead on the spot in response to the totally unexpected question, but soon resumed walking when he saw that it hadn’t knocked Holly out of her stride.

  “Only in self-defence,” Holly said, looking straight ahead and answering without emotion.

  “How many people?”

  “Just once,” Holly answered, dodging the question slightly and automatically, as her mind often did.

  Viola hesitated for long enough to indicate that she’d picked up on the dodge, so Holly saved her the trouble of a follow-up:

  “Two people. I’m not going to stand here and say they deserved it, because none of us should have been in that situation, but they came at me with intent to kill.” Holly then pulled her collar outwards, tearing some stitching in the process, to show Viola the raised scar that ran several inches down her left shoulder.

  The first time Dante had seen the scar, he lightheartedly likened it to a split in a still-growing tomato. There was nothing so lighthearted about Viola’s wordless response as her expression made clear that she regretted broaching the topic in the first place.

  “It was Morrison’s fault,” Dante said. “The situation Holly was in.”

  “That’s enough about it,” she said firmly. The details were nothing to be ashamed of but the last thing she wanted to do right now was introduce into Viola’s mind the rabbit-hole idea that a group could be tricked into thinking they’d crashed on an alien planet, as Morrison and the cronies at the top of his space program had done to Holly and her unfortunate colleagues all those years earlier.

  “Sorry,” Dante mumbled. “I was just trying to tell Viola that you have as good a reason as anyone for wanting to bring Morrison down. Personally, I mean; beyond all the shit the GU is doing.”

  “What’s your reason?” Viola asked him. “You know mine.”

  Dante nodded in understanding. “Let’s just say the GU took someone close to me, too, then tried to cover it up.”

  “Who?” Holly asked. “How come I’ve never heard about this?”

  “Everyone has a thing they don’t want to talk about. This is mine.”

  Holly respected Dante’s position but couldn’t help but feel slighted that he’d kept it all from her, both personally and in the context of their Earth-fleeing trip to the Venus station.

  Just as the lander loomed near and Holly’s mind began to focus sharply on how she was going to confront Rusev about the discovery of her company’s artificial soil, an infuriating and disconcerting distraction presented itself.

  Shuffling towards the trio as quickly as he could from another position roughly as far from the lander as she was, Holly saw Bo.

  “For fuck’s sake,” she cursed, sounding far angrier than she had at any point in the day so far and catching Viola off-guard with the uncharacteristically blue language. “How difficult is it to keep him inside for a few hours?”

  Moving as quickly as his feet would take him, Bo reached them in no time.

  “Where have you been?” Viola snapped at him, immediately assuming her natural big-sisterly role.

  Bo took several gulps of air, trying to catch his breath. “I was at the plants. You know, where my—”

  “You went back to the plants that messed up your foot? Where the hell is Dad?”

  “I wore my big boots so the plants couldn’t hurt me. And Dad is still sleeping. He was up all night watching me, so he—”

  “Get back inside before he wakes up,” Holly ordered, interjecting to make the point. “He doesn’t have to know that you—”

  “Everyone be quiet!” Bo blurted out. “Be quiet and listen to me: I found something. The plants are guarding something, just like I thought. In the middle of the patch, there’s a gap. You have to come and see it. There are stairs… to a door. I think it’s a bunker. Seriously, come on… I’ll show you!”

  “Is there any writing on the door?�
�� Viola asked, maintaining impressive focus as Holly and Dante stared dumbly at each other in the wake of Bo’s startling revelation.

  “Yeah,” Bo said. “Human writing.”

  “English?”

  “I don’t know, it’s just initials. It says CB-1.”

  The children looked at Holly and Dante for clues.

  “Does that mean anything to you?” Dante asked.

  Holly shook her head.

  “Me neither.”

  “So what are we waiting for?” Bo asked, almost shaking with excitement. “Let’s go.”

  “We need to go inside first,” Dante said.

  “Why? To tell Rusev and Grav and Spaceman what I found?”

  “No,” Holly barked. “You’re not going to say a single word, and no one is going to mention this door until I say so. Is that clear? If it’s not, you can wait outside.”

  Dante and Viola both gave slight nods; neither particularly wanted to be the one to confront Rusev about anything, so leaving it to Holly was their natural preference.

  Bo, still brimming with proud excitement but now also a healthy dose of confusion to boot, stepped in front of Holly at the lander’s entrance. “But why can’t I tell her what I found?”

  “Because,” Holly said, typing the lander’s security code over his shoulder. “We found something, too.”

  forty-three

  Yury was sitting in his usual chair in the lander while the recently returned Grav and Rusev talked him through their successful recovery of the components required to fix the radio. All three were utterly unaware that Bo had sneaked away, let alone that he had single-handedly discovered something that changed the whole context of the group’s battle for survival and rescue.

  “Anything exciting?” Yury asked, turning to face Holly as she walked in. “Aside from the lines. Good mapping on that front.”

  Holly answered by placing a sealed sample of Grow-Lo on the table, in a container roughly the size of a standard tin of food.

  “For soil analysis?” he asked.

  Holly opened the container and poured a small amount of the artificial soil onto the table. “Ask her,” she said, glaring at Rusev.

  Curious, Rusev approached the table. She saw what it was, with no need to feel it. “Why did you go back to the Karrier? And why did you bring this?”

  “We weren’t at the Karrier,” Dante said, stepping forward. Both Bo and Viola maintained their silence, as firmly instructed. “We found this in the middle of nowhere, inside a wall, with three different kinds of crops growing in it.”

  While Grav and Yury responded to these words with several natural and automatic questions, like “what kind of crops?” and “what do you mean, a wall?”, Rusev picked up a small amount of the soil and closely examined it.

  “No more lies,” Holly said. “Tell me what the hell is going on here.”

  Rusev’s expression didn’t waver even as everyone’s eyes bore into hers in search of a nervous twitch or similar tell. “Holly… right now, you know more than me. Take me to this wall. I need to see it.”

  “What you need to do is tell us the damn truth,” Dante snapped.

  “Take me there,” Rusev repeated, ignoring Dante in favour of the more controlled Holly.

  “There’s somewhere else we need to take you first,” Holly said. She turned to Bo and signalled for him to take over.

  Holly watched Rusev like a hawk to see how she would react to what Bo was about to say; the woman had already kept an impressively straight face when discussing the presence of her own brand of artificial soil on the planet, but the discovery of a nearby door which could and inevitably would be opened to reveal its secrets… well, that was something else entirely.

  Bo gulped. “Uh, I found a door to a locked bunker.”

  Rusev’s eyes widened reflexively. Holly didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed that she looked genuinely surprised rather than like someone who’d just been caught out or whose grand lie had finally been exposed.

  Yury stood up immediately. “Show me,” he said.

  Rusev nodded. “Let’s go. Everyone… right now. If there’s a door, we can open it.”

  Yury held Holly’s gaze for several seconds as he walked towards the lander’s exit. He didn’t have to say anything; whatever truth might have ended up coming out and whoever might have ended up being implicated, Holly knew in her heart that Yury was as in the dark as she was.

  Holly was last to leave. As she prepared to descend the ladder, Rusev stopped midway and looked up at her.

  “Holly, I won’t hold these suspicions against you, because I can’t explain why you found the Grow-Lo and I can understand why that raises a flag.”

  “Go,” Holly urged impatiently.

  Rusev sighed. “Sooner or later you’re going to realise that I have nothing to do with any of this… and the later that moment comes, the longer it’s going to take us to find out who does.”

  forty-four

  With a makeshift implement thrown together using a circular blade and a lightweight pipe from the lander’s storage area, Grav scythed his way through the patch of small but dangerous plants. He made a broad path to the centre.

  There, precisely as Bo had insisted, Grav found a hidden staircase.

  Bo and Robert had led the group to the patch, with Robert finding time on the way to tell his son that he was “more disappointed than angry” that he had sneaked away, let alone that he’d returned to such a dangerous area.

  No one criticised Robert for catching up on some sleep after the night he’d had, and Holly was too glad that Bo had made his discovery to stay angry at him for taking such a foolish risk.

  The anger rightfully lay with whoever knew what the hell was really going on, she thought, and the answer to that question lay on the other side of a wide metal door.

  Having seen what one of the surrounding plants had done to Bo’s foot the previous evening, Holly urged everyone in the group to take extreme care when following Grav’s laudably well-cleared path to the stairway. Grav remained there, waiting for the others.

  The twelve metallic stairs were steep, with no handrails for support. Holly and Viola assisted Yury on his way down then stood with everyone else in the flat area in front of the door. The flat roof overhead, providing more than sufficient headroom, was the same metallic grey as the stairs and the door. The area where the group of eight now stood accommodated them all with plenty of room to spare.

  The area was lit by a white light above the door. Aside from a small drainage hole in the ground — which raised its own questions — the only other thing anyone could see was the security keypad to the left of the door.

  “Go for it,” Rusev said, talking to Holly and signalling to the keypad. “I know you want to try.”

  Holly hesitated briefly then entered the familiar security code used for both of the landers and the Karrier. Nothing happened. She stepped back towards the rest of the group, feeling awkward but unapologetic.

  “After three?” Grav asked her.

  She nodded and stood next to him, ready to charge into the door with their combined strength.

  “Wait,” Dante said. “Let’s not be rash… we don’t know what could be in there. It could be booby-trapped to do something if anyone breaks in. There could be—”

  “If you’re worried, you can leave,” Holly said, maintaining a neutral tone.

  Dante stepped in front of her. “Holly, listen to me: I know you want to be in charge, but—”

  She cut him off. “I don’t ‘want to be’ anything, Dante. I am in charge.”

  Everyone was quiet.

  Grav then counted to three, at which point he and Holly threw their full force into the door.

  It didn’t budge.

  Neither suggested trying again; there had been zero give, and both knew that a second effort would be no more powerful than the first and could only serve to exacerbate the shoulder pain they were doing their best to hide.

  “Ma
y I?” Robert said, surprising everyone. “Take a look at the keypad, I mean.” He chuckled, slightly lifting the mood. “Not try to smash the door down.”

  “Please,” Rusev said.

  Holly and Grav parted to let him past.

  “What are you thinking?” Yury asked.

  “Well… with a mechanical keypad like this you can sometimes see a slight buildup of dust on the side of certain keys, which would tell you that they haven’t been pressed in a long time. But there are no clues like that here. Other than that we can only look for branding.”

  As the others watched on, more in hope than expectation, Robert crouched down and looked up at the underside of the protruding keypad. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket and shone it upwards.

  “M X E dash 4 1 0,” he said. “Model number, I assume? Then to the right of that, just M X E, then a tiny bird. Maybe a logo?”

  Holly, Grav, Yury and Dante were no longer looking at Robert. Now, they were sharing brief and shocked glances.

  “What’s MXE?” Viola asked.

  “Morrison Electric,” Holly said, almost choking on the taste of the words.

  Viola gasped. “Roger Morrison?”

  Holly nodded, almost in defeat.

  “Wherever or whatever the hell this place is,” Grav said, looking all around and then gazing up the stairway, “we are standing on GU property.”

  forty-five

  “A whole planet,” Grav muttered. “It is not enough for Morrison and his cronies to hoard healthy seeds while their famine starves half of the world? He also has to hide a whole fucking planet while telling everyone the world is too overcrowded?”

  Viola was shaking her head, in tandem with Grav. “If they have the resources to try to settle a whole new world, imagine how easily they could have cleaned up Earth.”

  “Exactly,” Grav said. “People always say there is no such thing as a perfect world but that there is always something better. All of Morrison’s bullshit proves that the opposite is just as true: however bad it gets, there is always someone ready to make it worse.”