Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

She shrugged and turned towards the large bookcase to their left. Four of its five shelves were empty. In the middle of the fifth, one book stood proudly facing forward: Harriet Brock’s infamous work, The Great Reset.

  The peace-shattering noise of a glass-shattering impact tore Holly’s attention from the book. She turned to see Viola standing at the desk, which was now one paperweight short, and staring indifferently at the crack she had just made in the window.

  “There’s an empty plant pot in the corner,” Holly said.

  Viola grinned, lifted the pot, and hurled it through what was left of the window. “What about this chair?”

  Holly told her to go for it, then walked over to help when it proved too heavy for the girl to lift on her own. Together, they unceremoniously threw it out of the hole where the window used to be, taking most of the pane-holding wooden beams with it.

  What at a glance appeared pointlessly destructive was in fact mildly cathartic.

  After picking up the Brock book for safekeeping and leaving Viola in Morrison’s room to expel some pent-up rage as Yury approvingly watched on, Holly proceeded to smash through each of the house’s other doors one by one. Without exception, every single room was completely empty.

  Holly couldn’t deny it: she had hoped and expected to find a whole lot more. “Not built yet” was the only answer she could think of to Viola’s earlier question: “Where are the rest of the buildings we saw on the map?”

  But then, from the window of an empty second-floor room overlooking the parked rover, Holly saw a familiar looking and semi-hidden stairway.

  “There’s something underground,” she yelled, running back to Morrison’s room. “I saw stairs behind the rover. They look just like the stairs to the bunker.”

  Viola stopped scraping angry messages on the wall with the letter-opener. The bookshelf and desk were both lying on their sides and most of the carpet was ripped up. She worked fast; Holly had to give her that.

  “Let’s go,” the girl said.

  Yury grimaced slightly and rubbed his knee as he took his first step out of the room, but, as proud and as stubborn as ever, he declined Holly’s offer of assistance.

  After hurrying ahead, Viola stopped at the front door when Holly yelled the order. She was good at following orders; Holly had to give her that, too.

  Up close, the stairway looked exactly like the one at the bunker. The only difference was the lack of a security keypad. Holly pushed the door lightly to check that it would open. It did, but she hesitated.

  “What’s wrong?” Viola said.

  Holly inhaled slowly and deeply. “I just think… maybe we shouldn’t all go in at once.”

  Yury nodded in firm agreement. “I’m happy to be on either side: in or out.”

  “Well I’m going in,” Viola insisted. “With Holly. Right, Holly?”

  Still, she was hesitant.

  “Seriously, what’s the worst thing that could be in there?” Viola asked, getting impatient.

  “I don’t know,” Holly said, taking one more deep breath before pushing the door open. “That’s the point.”

  seventy-two

  As the door swung open, a long corridor illuminated before Holly’s eyes. She stepped in ahead of Viola.

  The corridor’s off-white walls and shiny floor brought to mind a hospital.

  “I think these hallways and whatever else is down here are going to be the shape of the structures on the map,” Viola said.

  “I was thinking the same,” Holly replied.

  The corridor was so well-lit and spotless as to be positively eerie, evoking a strong feeling that someone else was there. They weren’t, of course, and after a few more steps on the flawless shining floor Holly couldn’t help but liken the atmosphere to that within one of Roger Morrison’s soulless and staff-free self-cleaning “smart hotels”, so favoured by the rich on Earth.

  The first door Holly reached was on the left. She opened it — no lock — and led Viola into a second corridor. This one had doors on both sides at very regular intervals. Holly again opened the first on the left, then led Viola into a surprisingly large room with two beds and a small en suite bathroom. It really was like one of Morrison’s hotels.

  They left the room without saying a word and tried the next door. Its size and layout were identical to the first’s. They then continued along the corridor until the end, counting the doors and opening one every so often to confirm it was a bedroom.

  “How many people was he bringing here?” Viola asked.

  “This corridor has sixty rooms with two beds in each,” Holly said. “But how many corridors are there?”

  After returning to the main corridor from this offshoot, Holly tried the first door on the right. Despite being made of a completely different material than the others — something which either was or convincingly resembled real hardwood — this door was also unlocked.

  “What’s inside?” Viola asked, respecting Holly’s request to stay back.

  Holly’s eyes darted around the cavernous hall. Its lights slowly came to life, evidently reacting to her opening of the door, and they soon revealed a huge and largely empty circular room with what looked like display cases running along the walls. There were also several free-standing displays dotted around the floor. “It looks like a museum,” she said, almost inflecting it into a question. “Tell Spaceman to come inside.”

  Viola walked the few paces back to the exterior door and passed the message on. A minute or so later, she and Yury joined Holly in the bizarre room.

  From inside, there were no doubts: it was some kind of museum. A helpful arrow on the floor indicated where “The story of Terradox” began. Within the display cases, models and infographics laid out Morrison’s narrative.

  Construction of the Terradox “backup site” began when Morrison realised that peace on Earth was no longer a tenable hope, it claimed, with Terradox intended to “safeguard humanity’s future against the threat of vindictive human action or unsurvivable natural events.”

  By the fourth of the six main displays, Yury asked the obvious question: “Who the hell is this crap for? Everyone who was going to come here would have come here with Morrison. Why does he need propaganda?”

  Neither Holly nor Viola had the first idea.

  As Yury walked towards one of the free-standing displays in the room’s centre, all of which were interactive if the notices on the floor in front of each were to be believed, Holly and Viola continued to the next main display.

  “It’s the craft!” Holly called.

  Yury hurried to rejoin them, grimacing slightly as his knee protested the sharp turn. Sure enough, he saw that the display case contained a large and detailed scale model of an undeniably impressive spacecraft.

  Holly moved along to the final display while Yury took in the stunning model craft.

  In place of a model, the final display featured a map and several photographs. “Yury,” Holly said, urgency in her voice. “Launch site!”

  His head shot round, instantly abandoning the previously enthralling craft. “Where is it?”

  “It says… Queensland.”

  “His old site? The Far North Queensland development site?”

  “What development site?” Holly asked.

  “Ah, that’s right,” Yury said, “he closed it before you were ever involved with him. That place is supposed to have been out of commission for a long time, ever since he moved his space operations out to the island he built. No one thought he was serious about space back when he had the mainland research base; it was just a site he bought out from one of the boom-and-bust firms.”

  “So does this, like, mean anything?” Viola chimed in.

  “We know where the ark is,” Yury emphasised. “Morrison will try to lie and dismiss our testimony and samples and our photographs of this place, but this ark exists… on Earth… right now. A lot of people would believe us, but not everyone. Now we can tell them all where to find the proof. He can’t hide it.”
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  Viola didn’t look convinced. “But he is hiding it. And he’s been hiding it for… how long?”

  “This is big,” Yury said. “Trust me on that. And this was worth coming out here for; you can trust me on that, too.”

  Holly made sure to get clear photographs of the map as well as the ark and every line of text in the display cases. “Anything good in the smaller displays?” she asked Yury.

  “Empty. Just a card in each that says Coming Soon.”

  Despite Yury’s statement that the discovery of the ark’s location was enough to render the trip to New Eden worthwhile, he was understandably keen to search the rest of the underground base before returning to the others at the lander. This took far less time than expected and yielded only one further surprising discovery.

  Before that came another three secondary corridors leading to another 180 double bedrooms. This meshed well with an infographic Holly had seen back in the museum, which referenced room for “almost 500 carefully chosen evacuees.”

  The final surprise came after the last of the residential corridors, when Holly opened an inconspicuous door and gazed uneasily around the room before her.

  “What is it?” Yury asked, following close behind.

  Holly tore her eyes from the pastel coloured walls and turned to face him. “A nursery.”

  seventy-three

  The large square room contained precisely fifty narrow cribs. Half were fitted with pink bedding and half with blue. The room was decorated like a typical nursery, all pastel walls and smiling cartoon animals.

  One sole poster set the nursery apart from what could have passed for an innocent room on Earth: on it, a young nurse held a happy child above the caption “Healthy seeds for a healthy future.”

  “Fifty’s not enough,” Holly said, ignoring the inherent creepiness of the room and focusing on what she saw as an important point. “You can’t start again with five hundred adults and fifty babies. Not even close.”

  “This is just for the first fifty,” Yury said. “He’ll have a diverse genetic stockpile of, you know… samples. I know we have the same at the station, in case there ever is an extinction level event on Earth. It wouldn’t be much of a backup if we didn’t. Besides, who’s to say that this isn’t one of ten sites on Terradox, or that Terradox isn’t one of ten romospheres in our solar system?”

  “I don’t like it in here,” Viola blurted out. “Can we just take the photos and go?”

  Holly nodded. There was definitely something particularly unnerving about the sight of so many tiny cribs in such an unnatural and synthetic environment. Synthetic really was the best word, she thought; for Terradox as a whole, but for this haunting nursery more than anything else.

  The nursery proved to be the final room before they reached a door which looked like it led back outside but which was definitely not the one they came in.

  Holly opened it to find a stairway. She led the trio’s way to the top, where they emerged at the rear of the grand white house, below the window which had been thoroughly smashed during Viola’s explosive release of pent-up aggression.

  This sight raised a smile on the girl’s face which made Holly glad the stairway had led them here; trivial though it was in the scheme of things, Viola was now left with a better final memory of New Eden than her unsettling few minutes inside the vacant nursery.

  Darkness fell during the drive back to the lander, but the rover’s powerful headlights and excellent climate control system made the return leg of the journey as easy as the first.

  “I just don’t get it,” Viola said, shifting from her comfortable position to sit bolt upright. “How does something like this happen? How does someone like Morrison get in a position to do something like this?”

  “A little bit of knowledge and a whole lot of power,” Holly said, her tone less flippant than the words themselves.

  Yury nodded in agreement. “My own personal belief is that he was poisoned by Brock’s work and empowered by political circumstance,” he began. “It was as simple as that. He was not alone in feeling the pull of Brock’s words and his support for her later theories wouldn’t have been an issue if there hadn’t been a growing appetite for a one-world government even before he stirred the pot. But the thing to remember about Roger Morrison — the most important thing to remember — is that he truly is a rare kind of genius. A mind like his, so sharp in so many fields, comes perhaps once per century. And when a genius like that has the drive to achieve his goals and is granted the power to actualise his theories, well, the rest of us better hope that his goals align with humanity’s best interests. Unfortunately, this particular genius found a home in Brock’s theories during a difficult time in his childhood. A keen mind; distant parents; few friends; little faith in others. That story, it rarely ends well.”

  Shortly after this discussion trailed off, and despite its unsettling content, Viola fell asleep and remained peaceful for the rest of the drive. This left Holly and Yury to talk openly for the first time about their truest hopes and expectations.

  Holly refused to entertain any thoughts of failure in her own mind but listened willingly to Yury’s reservations. One thing he shared was her confidence that the rescue team would safely reach and land on Terradox without any real difficulty. The entrance procedure was laid out in explicit detail on the bunker’s computer system with step-by-step and foolproof instructions for how to begin the process of sufficiently weakening the target section of the romosphere’s physical barrier one “layer” at a time, resealing each once the incoming vessel crossed it before opening the next in order to prevent atmospheric leakage. The exit procedure was easier still, with the barrier automatically weakening in the same layered fashioned to allow the outgoing vessel to depart safely.

  Where Holly and Yury differed was their optimism, or otherwise, over what would come next.

  The Venus station’s long-planned exposé of Roger Morrison’s involvement in both Devastation Day and the crippling famine before it — an already firm case which had been strengthened even further by two distinct pieces of new evidence provided by Robert and Bo Harrington — seemed almost trivial compared to what had since come to light. But given the near-incomprehensible magnitude of what Morrison was planning, Yury told Holly that he could no longer envisage him going down with anything other than a bloody fight.

  “The plan as it stands is that we’ll be gone before the next scheduled data transfer,” the old man said. “Okay? That means the transfer won’t go through and Morrison’s Reset will be delayed. Postponed. Pushed back. Not cancelled. Not prevented. To prevent it, we have to bring him down.”

  Holly was listening.

  “But as long as he thinks Terradox is waiting for him and his GU cronies and whoever else he planned on bringing along, he’ll fight tooth and nail to stay in power. They’ll suppress all dissent. They’ll deny everything we say.”

  “But we have proof,” Holly said. “Not theories; proof. We can point everyone to the ark. We can show them all the photos of this place. We can tell them where this place is.”

  Yury was quiet for a few seconds before sighing gently. “Be honest with me here, Holly. Be honest with yourself. If you weren’t here and you didn’t know Rusev personally, would you believe it?”

  “Believe what?”

  “This! Terradox! That Roger Morrison built a planet. No one knows what a romosphere is, so planet is going to be the only word for it. Oh, and don’t forget… it’s invisible, too. And… and… the grand reveal is coming from the hand of Ekaterina Rusev, his only surviving old-time rival.”

  Holly said nothing.

  “I don’t mean to suggest that our situation is hopeless,” Yury said. “The ark is something he won’t easily be able to explain, for one thing. But if we want to decisively reveal Terradox to the world, we have to find a way to actually do just that. We have to find a way to uncloak this planet. To expose Terradox would be to expose Morrison so totally and so definitively that even he cou
ldn’t wriggle out of it. He either destroys Terradox when we reveal it, thus preventing a Reset, or he falls when undeniable visual proof leads to the world learning of his evil plans…”

  Holly finished the thought: “Thus preventing a Reset.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what about the remote control thing Dante’s primer mentioned?” she said, her expression brightening and her shoulders straightening as the idea hit her. “It said he used that to weaken the barrier as the Karrier approached, right?”

  “It did say that,” Yury said. Despite his non-dismissive words, the tone made it clear he was far from convinced that Holly’s idea was as useful as she thought.

  “Well I’ll find it,” she insisted. “Dante had it on board, so it has to be somewhere, and there might be instructions.”

  Yury shrugged. “It can’t hurt to look.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” Holly asked, her own tone less aggressive or confrontational than the choice of words might have suggested.

  “Not yet. But we have smart people and 36 hours to think of one.”

  When they finally reached and entered the lander, Yury first, he turned to Holly with a finger held to his lips as Bo and Robert slept soundly. A message from Grav lay on the table, stating that he was spending the night in the bunker with Rusev.

  Holly waved a silent goodnight to Yury and returned to help Viola out of the rover. The girl’s expression was so peaceful that Holly considered leaving her there, but she ultimately deemed it unsafe to bank on the rover maintaining a stable temperature throughout the night. Reluctantly, she woke her for the few steps to the extension.

  Viola didn’t speak as Holly led her inside; aided by the near total darkness and the absolutely total silence, the girl seemed to remain half asleep.

  Holly briefly considered going to the bunker after leading the exhausted Viola to bed but quickly decided against it. Rusev and Grav were both experienced enough to know that a few hours of sleep was a worthwhile use of time in any circumstance and was particularly necessary in times of crisis when alert decision-making capabilities were essential. Holly knew this, too, and she wisely decided to act upon it. The radio would awaken Rusev and Grav if an important message came through, in any case.