Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  Holly didn’t know where this uncle claim fitted in; she didn’t know whether it was part of Dante’s motivation for acting the way he was, nor even whether it was true. The one thing that she knew to be wholly untrue was the claim that Gianfranco had been innocent. It was so baseless that Holly could only conclude that any footage Dante had seen — if there even was any — must have been extensively doctored and misrepresented.

  “Why are we here, Dante?” she asked, now almost pleading for an answer. “I don’t care what happened fifteen years ago. What are we doing here?”

  “If there was a way to do this without landing here, I would have done it,” Dante said. This answer seemed instinctive rather than pre-planned; real, rather than rehearsed. “But this is where he needed someone. Someone he could trust, but someone she trusted, too.”

  “Rusev?”

  He nodded indifferently.

  “So… what… this is all about Morrison and Rusev? Whatever is going on here, I’m collateral? Spaceman is collateral? And the kids? Children, Dante. There were children on board!”

  He didn’t offer the defence she half-expected: that he only knew about Viola, who was pretty much an adult. He didn’t offer any kind of defence at all.

  Holly prodded him in the chest. “You’re a pawn in some game… some vendetta… and no one else even matters?”

  “Just listen to me, Holly, okay? This is how it had to be. It’s too late to undo anything, but it’s not too late for you to make a good decision. You hate me, fine. You hate Morrison, fine. But I know you can detach yourself from all this bullshit and do what it takes to survive. Everyone else is as good as dead. Everyone. If you kill me or lock me up or whatever else you’re thinking of doing, everyone is dead within a week. If you don’t, everyone is still dead. Either way, there’s no undoing what’s been done. But it’s not too late for you. It’s not to late for us.”

  “Us?”

  “Us,” Dante stressed. “They’re all going to die and it’s not going to be clean. But now, while they’re all asleep, we can make it clean. If you care about these people… if you care about the kids… this is the caring thing to do.”

  Holly stayed quiet, in sheer disbelief at how totally Morrison had corrupted Dante’s mind and heart.

  “You don’t even have to do anything,” he said, now nodding gently with warm eyes and placing a light hand on her arm like the conman he was.

  “Okay,” Holly said. “Fine. Just tell me what’s going on and show me what’s inside the bunker.”

  “No offence, Holly, but I can’t show or tell you anything until we see the next stage of the plan through.”

  “Which stage?”

  “Helping the others out. Helping them, you know, pass, without the pain they’ll feel when the time comes if we don’t do it now.”

  Holly said nothing. Even as part of an effort to coax information out of Dante, she didn’t know how to respond to this.

  “I’m not a monster,” he went on, his tone more upbeat than the words deserved. “Why else do you think I got the kid the antidote last night? I don’t want anyone to suffer any more than they have to. What happens to them isn’t my call, but what is my call — and your call — is how it happens. What is our call is whether they’re going to suffer any more than they have to.”

  “So why is what happens to me your call?”

  “The way you feel about Roger,” Dante began, once again disgusting Holly by using his first name, “it’s not mutual. He respects you. He wanted to get rid of you when everything happened with Sarah and Gianfranco, but his inner circle told him there was no way they could cover up your death. Too many people within the program already knew that two people were dead — not that you’d killed them, of course — but you were way too big a name to gloss over. You can cover up the deaths of two no-name astronauts like that…” Dante clicked his fingers… “but you? Back then? Princess Holly? People would have talked. Roger was always worried that you would talk, but the years went by and you never did. He told me how much he paid you to keep your mouth shut about the whole thing, so I know you can make decisions that make sense even if you don’t like them.”

  “I kept quiet because I killed two people, Dante. Whatever his ego wants to believe, he didn’t buy my silence.”

  “But still… you can make decisions you don’t like. And I know you don’t like this, but if you want to survive…”

  Even if Holly hadn’t been repulsed by Dante’s suggestions, the twitching of his right eye — his oldest tell — was so obvious that she would never have fallen for his lies. Not this time.

  Holly was his only obstacle, and she knew that he would strike to eliminate it as soon as she turned her back or otherwise let down her guard.

  She was almost offended by how little he obviously thought of her, and the words “how stupid do you think I am?” strove to escape her mouth. But she kept her cards close to her chest, knowing perfectly well that she couldn’t do anything until his guard was down.

  “I’ll never forgive you for making me do this,” she said, sighing and making sure that the words were filled with believable venom.

  Dante nodded and put on his best understanding face. His lies may have worked on someone else, but no one had more experience of consistently falling for and eventually seeing through them than Holly. “I was always going to give you a chance,” he said.

  “I’ll pretend I can believe that.”

  Dante opened his arms wide to clinch it with a hug. When Holly shook her head, he outstretched his right arm for a handshake.

  After a few convincing seconds of fake inner debate, Holly shook his hand. “I’m not going to die here,” she said.

  “It’s the right choice. The only choice.”

  Holly then squeezed tighter. “And neither are the kids.”

  Before Dante could react, verbally or physically, Holly spun him around and tossed him sideways down the stairs. This was no shove, but more like someone tossing a bag of sand or a doorman throwing a rowdy drunk to the kerb.

  Dante tumbled and groaned then hit the bottom with a thud that would have been sickening had it come from someone Holly still considered worthy of pity. The heavy landing left him crumpled like a sack in the flat area between the stairs and the door.

  Holly didn’t care how badly he might be hurt, but for a moment she prayed that he was still alive. Of all the things he had said in the last few minutes, the one she knew was true was that he would be worthless dead; after all, the bunker’s entry code was in Dante’s head and nowhere else.

  “Are you okay?” a gentle voice asked from the darkness beyond the stairway. Holly shone the flashlight and saw Viola, who had remained so flawlessly silent that Holly had momentarily forgotten about her.

  “Are you?” Holly replied.

  The girl nodded and stepped towards Holly then looked down the stairs. “Is he?”

  In the glow of the doorway’s inlet light, Dante’s stomach rose and fell. “He’s alive,” Holly said, literally sighing with relief. “Okay, right now I need you to go back to the extension and wake Grav. No one else. I’ll restrain Dante while you bring Grav out here, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I can’t stress how important it is that you don’t wake anyone else.”

  “Just Grav,” Viola confirmed. “Got it.”

  “And don’t tell him what happened. Just say that Holly said he has to come with you because there’s an emergency at the bunker that no one else can know about until he’s spoken to me. Don’t mention Dante. Got that? Tell him I made you promise not to tell him what happened, and that I made you promise to bring him but no one else. Okay?”

  “Get Grav and don’t tell him why, just that there’s an emergency at the bunker and you made me promise to bring him out here — just him — without explaining why. That’s everything?”

  “That’s everything. I wish I didn’t have to land this on you.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Viola said.<
br />
  Holly nodded and headed down the stairs towards a problem she could never have imagined having to face. She stopped after a few steps. “Viola,” she called.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I have your belt?”

  Viola returned to the stairway and tossed her belt down to Holly.

  “Thanks,” Holly said. “Stay strong.”

  Viola nodded and eyed Dante’s limp body, her eyes making clear that she knew she had the far easier task. “You too.”

  forty-nine

  Holly propped Dante up and bound his hands behind his back with Viola’s belt, looped and tied extremely tightly.

  After that, it was a waiting game.

  There were more than enough thoughts circling in Holly’s mind as she looked back over the previous few days for more clues which she could and should have spotted.

  When Dante groaned and shuffled a few minutes later, his waking up provided something of a respite from the thoughts which were as senseless and self-defeating as they were unavoidable.

  “Bitch,” he muttered.

  Holly didn’t even look at him.

  “You have no idea how big of a mistake you just made. Nothing is as it seems. Rusev is in on this… all of it.”

  “You’re full of shit,” Holly snapped. “You always were.” There was not only venom in these words, but also regret. The anger which tinged them was likewise aimed not only at Dante but also at herself, for falling for his bullshit one more time. Even now, caught red handed, he was still playing with her head.

  Holly reconsidered the syntax. Even now, after catching him red handed, she was still letting him play with her head.

  “Just shut up,” she said, wishing now that he was still knocked out.

  He ignored her and began to say a few words about Robert, then stopped abruptly and shifted to Grav.

  “You know something, Dante?” Holly cut him off. “When the lies you’re telling aren’t even consistent with themselves, it makes it a lot easier for me to spot them.”

  She walked to the top of the stairs, making it perfectly clear that the conversation was over.

  Ten minutes later, Dante broke the oppressive silence. “Hear me out, okay?” he said, raising his voice more than necessary because he couldn’t see beyond the top step and didn’t realise how close Holly still was. “Maybe not everything I’ve said is true, but—”

  “Shut up,” Holly said. This wasn’t the first time these words had escaped her lips, but this instance was the firmest yet. Holly felt less unsettled and less alone than she had a few seconds earlier, because Grav and Viola were now in sight.

  Grav was running as quickly as he could with Viola beside him. Holly had no doubt that the girl was holding back to keep pace and no more.

  Holly turned and looked down at Dante. “Save some of your bullshit for Grav.”

  Dante shifted and pushed himself against the door to make it to his feet. As good of a liar as he was, there was no masking his fear.

  “What is the big emergency?” Grav asked as soon as he arrived. He was panting heavily and wincing in what looked more like pain than mere tiredness; Holly knew he was far more used to resistance training than cardio, but she didn’t know he was this unaccustomed.

  Holly gave a half-nod to Viola, pleased that she’d followed the orders so dutifully. She then met Grav’s gaze and gestured towards the stairs.

  Grav stepped to the edge and looked down. “What the fuck?”

  “He’s a traitor,” Viola said.

  Grav focused intently on Holly. “A traitor?”

  Holly hesitated, having a good idea of what would happen when she confirmed it. She looked at the ground and nodded. “He was inside. He knows the code.”

  Instantly, Grav charged down the stairs and pressed Dante against the thick metal door. “Okay, asshole. There are two ways we can do this. There is the easy way, and—”

  From no more than a few inches away, Dante spat in Grav’s face.

  Holly held out an arm to stop Viola from going near the stairs; it struck her as a near certainty that things were about to get uglier than the girl could stomach.

  But to Holly’s amazement, Grav showed immense restraint in wiping the spit from his eye rather than caving in Dante’s skull.

  Grav then shrugged, almost nonchalantly. “Hard way it is.”

  Holly and Viola stood back as Grav marched Dante up the stairs.

  The look on Dante’s face suggested that he was all out of defiance; reality had set in.

  Viola looked at Grav. “Are you going to, you know…?”

  “No one is getting tortured,” Grav said. He then casually dislocated both of Dante’s shoulders. Dante screamed like a pig in a slaughterhouse as Grav pushed him to the ground and began dragging him back to the lander by his feet. “As long as they cooperate.”

  Day Six

  fifty

  Grav arrived back at the lander with Dante in tow, quite literally, as Holly and Viola hung back to avoid the worst of the traitor’s pained screams.

  Holly watched as Grav popped Dante’s shoulders back in place before entering the lander to get Rusev and Yury. That no one had been roused from their sleep by Dante’s screams was testament to the soundproofing of the lander and the extension.

  Dante was lying on the ground in a defeated fetal position when Holly and Viola reached him. Neither felt anything close to sorry for him, but that didn’t make it an easy thing to see.

  “Should I wake my dad and Bo?” Viola asked.

  “If you want to,” Holly said.

  Viola answered by going to get them.

  The sight of Rusev emerging from the lander reminded Holly of the following day’s plan for Rusev and Grav to return to the Karrier at first light to fix the power and try to use the radio to contact the Venus station. That plan seemed distant right now.

  “He was definitely inside the bunker?” Rusev asked Holly, wasting no time with small talk. “You saw him opening or closing the door?”

  “I heard him. I saw that he wasn’t at the bottom of the stairs, I heard the door opening and closing, and then I saw that he was at the bottom of the stairs. Viola was there, too.”

  Rusev then asked the obvious question of why they’d been there and Holly answered as briefly as she could, explaining that Viola noticed Dante was gone and went to see where he was heading before Holly noticed that they were both gone and did the same. “We caught him,” Holly went on, “I subdued him, I sent Viola back to get Grav, and here we are.”

  Robert was next to appear, exiting the extension alone and running over faster than Holly had ever seen him move. He rolled Dante onto his back and laid in with a few weak but all-out punches until Holly pulled him off and stepped in front of him.

  “You son of a bitch,” Robert growled at Dante. Viola and Bo emerged from the extension seconds later; Holly was glad they had missed it.

  “Did Grav try to make him talk?” Rusev asked, trying to focus amid the chaos.

  Before Holly could answer, Grav himself appeared at the lander’s entrance and told everyone that Yury wanted them all to go inside.

  Grav proceeded towards Dante and bound his legs with a length of cord from the lander. “You can save everyone a lot of trouble if you just tell me the code,” he said.

  “Fuck you.”

  Grav shrugged and led the rest of the group into the lander. Holly ushered Robert away from Dante, making sure he wouldn’t go back for a second bite at the cherry.

  Absolute silence filled the lander. Yury stood at the window, looking out towards Dante as the night’s darkness slowly began to lift. The rest of the group formed an unplanned semi-circle facing Yury. A veteran of more missions than he could count, Yury Gardev had seen a lot of things. This was not one of them.

  When the old man turned away from the window and towards the group, his eyes landed squarely on Ekaterina Rusev.

  “Why was Dante Parker chosen to travel on the Karrier’s final trip?” he asked her
in a very straightforward and unwavering tone.

  “He was a valuable member of our team,” Rusev said. “I thought he could play a very useful role at the station.”

  “Listen to the words I say,” Yury said, speaking a lot more firmly than before. “Why was he on this trip, the last trip? Why was he chosen for the same trip as me, as you, and as Holly? Why was he chosen for the same trip as our most valuable cargo, human and otherwise?”

  There was real tension in the air. The last thing Holly had expected Yury to do was grill Rusev.

  “We needed him on Earth,” Rusev replied. She spoke without hesitation and didn’t appear shaken, but Holly knew that Yury’s tone and line of questioning must have taken her by surprise, too. “He did a lot of work on the ground. He was in charge of the Karrier’s health checks before each Venus-bound trip, for one thing.”

  “So that explains how he did it,” Grav mused. “He must have messed with the control panel or the destination settings when he was doing the checks.”

  “That seems likely,” Rusev said.

  Yury blew air from his lips. He knew as well as Holly did that Rusev wasn’t lying. “So… motive?”

  No one spoke for several seconds, until Viola shared her thoughts. “When me and Holly were out with him, searching and mapping, a lot of the time he would argue with where Holly wanted to go. It was like he didn’t want us to find certain things. That’s not a motive, but… I dunno.”

  “It’s useful,” Yury said, clearly in charge of the discussion. “Thank you.” He looked at Holly, hoping she would add to it.

  “He’s said a lot of things in the last hour,” she began. “He’s tried to turn me against everyone except myself… and even then, he tried to turn me over to his side. He wanted me to help him.”

  Yury’s brow furrowed. “Help him with what?”

  Holly hesitated. She didn’t really want to say it in front of Bo, but after looking at the boy for a few seconds she decided he was tougher than his size suggested and deserved to know. “He said we’re all going to be dead very soon and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. He was trying to get me to help him kill you all in your sleep. He said, compared to what’s coming, that would have been the kindest thing to do.”