Holly settled quickly in the knowledge that sunrise would usher in the group’s last full day before the rescue Karrier’s arrival, necessitating final preparations for departure and the search for both Dante’s remote and the “better idea” sought by Yury.
Tomorrow, more so than ever, clear heads would be needed.
Day Nine
seventy-four
Grav was sitting comfortably at the lander’s table when Holly and Viola made their early-morning entrance after a brief but refreshing rest. Yury, always an early riser, sat across from him while Robert continued to snore gently from the other bed with Bo curled up on the floor beside it.
“Spaceman told me what you found and showed me the images,” Grav said. He clapped his hands together twice, rousing Robert and Bo. He then swiped through some photos on the table’s inbuilt screen and settled upon the display case detailing Morrison’s evacuation ark. “This thing in particular… this is big. Knowing the location of his launch site is huge.”
Flicking again through the photos, Grav joked about Viola’s “reorganisation” of Morrison’s office when the pictures of the fallout covered the table’s surface. She laughed for a second but eagerly swiped the images away before Robert and Bo made their way over to the table.
Bo asked the obvious question before Robert had the chance: “What did you find?”
Yury took over, recounting the events of the previous day while utilising the exploring trio’s photographic record to illustrate. The images of the museum captured Bo’s imagination. He and Robert both asked who the propaganda displays were intended for, as the trio had wondered at the time.
Yury set up his response by swiping to the next series of photos. “We think the answer lies here,” he said, looking down at the vacant nursery.
In the cold light of day, the nursery’s unnerving atmosphere came through the two-dimensional image more than Holly had expected. Still, though, the comfortable surroundings of the lander prevented the creepiness factor of the images from coming close to the feeling of standing inside the vast, cold, silent nursery; the whole ambiance had been beyond unsettling, and she was glad that the photos couldn’t come close to capturing it.
“Why is he planning for loads of kids to be born here?” Bo asked. “I thought this place was just a temporary refuge and they were going to go back to Earth after the Reset? Isn’t that his plan?”
“I think that is the plan,” Yury said, “because there are only a few hundred beds and we know that the ark could — and would have to — carry a lot more than a few hundred people. But I think Morrison wants to die here, because the above-ground house is surely for him. Brock wanted a human population of no more than half a million and Morrison probably wants the same, but even if he brought a few thousand on the ark along with frozen samples it would take a serious amount of time to rebuild to anything like that level.”
Viola chimed in: “So do you think the children who would’ve been born here would ever have gone to Earth?”
Yury shrugged. “I don’t want to say ‘breeding program’ when we’re talking about human beings, but that’s what this looks like. My own guess is that the children born here would have been taken to Earth at a certain age but it’s just that: a guess.”
Robert cleared his throat and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Do any of these details really matter at this point? Surely our focus should be on the order in which we’re going to release all of our evidence against him. Isn’t that where we are right now?”
“It was always Rusev’s plan to take him down with the truth,” Grav said. “We were going to do it from the station and she was confident even before we had proof of this place. The exact order—”
“And we have more stuff now,” Bo interrupted. “Like the footage I found — the footage that proves the GU education board have edited history to change the narrative about Devastation Day. That links him to it.”
“There’s something else Rusev and I already knew about that no one else does,” Yury said.
These words immediately piqued Holly’s curiosity. She exchanged a glance with Grav, who had known about the existence of Rusev’s takedown plan slightly before she had. His current expression made it clear that he truly didn’t know what Yury was talking about now.
“There’s a top secret GU division,” Yury went on. “A very small one, but it’s very well-funded. They call it CSP: Catastrophe Survival Preparation. Based on what we know now — i.e., Terradox exists — it seems pretty clear that the CSP division is a front for preparing the evacuation without raising alarm. It could be one of those situations where the vast majority of individuals working on it don’t know anything about the big picture. In fact, I’d say that’s almost guaranteed. We’ve seen a small number of leaked documents which discussed a regularly updated database of ‘genetically diverse and intellectually valuable individuals’ who know they’ve been chosen for salvation in the event of an imminent asteroid impact or similar civilisational threat. We know the list includes Morrison’s inner circle and is largely made up of GU employees along with a smaller number of handpicked individuals. The documents we’ve seen are intercepted invitations sent to some of those individuals. Both recipients lived in Queensland, which fits very well with what we’ve learned about the ark.”
No one said anything for several seconds until Grav, speaking in a far angrier tone than he ever had to Yury in the past, took the words from Holly’s lips: “Why the hell am I only hearing about this CSP shit now?”
Yury didn’t react, having evidently expected such a response. “There’s a reason Rusev is still alive,” he said, “and it’s because she lives by one simple rule: no one knows more than they need to at any given moment. Morrison is the same way, hence keeping his employees and even his close allies in the dark about everything except the specific things their jobs require. It’s nothing personal, it’s just sensible. Any chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Just look at Dante! If he had known everything, so would Morrison.”
Robert groaned. “So what about the order of the information we’re going to release? I don’t particularly care about who knew what when. We’re all here now and we need to be very clear about exactly what’s going to happen.”
“The CSP program,” Yury began, “the ark, Terradox, the Reset… all of that will be revealed last. The evidence we have regarding Morrison’s links to the deliberately engineered famine and to Devastation Day itself will create tremendous instability. There’s a two-pronged benefit to leading with those points: it will make neutral citizens extremely angry and distrustful towards Morrison and the GU at large, and it will ensure that they are paying attention when we deliver the final blows. There could well be riots before we even start dealing those biggest blows. When we expose the existence of this place and his plans for the Reset, there’s no way he can survive. Rusev has been thinking a lot about the order of the early reveals; Olivia’s research, our own evidence from earlier whistleblowers, all of that. She’s going to be ecstatic to hear about the ark’s location, because it will give protestors and resisters somewhere to gather. But the key thing — the crucial thing — is that our evidence will be curated and our releases timed, not dumped en masse.”
“About my wife…” Robert said. He began speaking to Yury, but then turned to Viola and Bo. “I only kept this from the two of you because I thought it could only make you feel worse, but I feel I should tell you now since you’re going to see it soon enough. Your mother recorded a video before leaving the house on the day it happened. She said she feared something bad would happen and that her colleague — who Morrison framed — shared her concern. She thought she’d been under surveillance since publishing the paper which hinted at the blight having been engineered in a lab, but she had no choice other than to go to the scheduled meeting. Her exact words were that she thought she was already in too deep and that running would put us all in danger. She went to work that day to protect you. To protect us.”
“She called me in the afternoon and said she loved me,” Viola said. “There was some made up reason for the call but she never ever normally said that, so I knew something was wrong.”
Robert had held up well during his description of his wife’s video, but his stoic facade cracked slightly in response to Viola’s story.
“Why haven’t I heard about this video?” asked Yury, rarely one for sentiment.
Grav, who’d known as little about it as Yury, suppressed a smug grin. “It is almost like Rusev was not kidding when she said that no one should know any more than they need to at any given moment.”
“But did anyone else know?” the old man pushed. “Dante, specifically?”
“Definitely not,” Holly answered. “I was there when Robert told Rusev about the video and she explicitly told us not to tell anyone else, at least until we recovered it from the lander. I didn’t tell anyone even after that, Robert didn’t tell anyone, and there’s less than no chance that Rusev would have told Dante.”
Viola was next to speak. Holly expected a reaction to the news that she had also known about the video and had kept it from the girl, but Viola surprised her by raising an unrelated and wise concern: “What if Morrison gets suspicious or concerned about the first leaks and does something to react, before the biggest bombshells drop?”
“There are two things to think about there,” Yury said, sounding very confident. “First, he isn’t leaving Earth until he knows Terradox is safe, and the data transfer which would tell him that isn’t scheduled until two full days after our Karrier leaves this place. That gives us more time than it will take. Second, right up until the final reveals, he’ll have no reason to think Terradox is under threat. We’re not even hinting at this place until we reveal it.”
“What do you mean reveal it?” Viola asked.
Yury stretched his shoulders. “Exactly what I said: we’re going to remove Terradox’s visual cloak. Holly is going to look for the remote Dante used before we crashed here. Assuming it has a good operational range and assuming it can control the visual cloak as well as the physical barrier, that could work very well. But we can’t bank on it being found or on those assumptions being correct. If it’s not found or doesn’t look like it could remove the visual cloak, there will be another way; I’m sure of that. I’m going to talk to Rusev to see if she or the rescue crew have any ideas on that front.”
“I’ll drive you to the bunker when I head out to look for the remote,” Holly said.
“Am I going with you?” Viola asked.
This subtle variation on the usual “can I go with you?” didn’t escape Holly, but by now she would have wanted Viola to accompany her even if two sets of hands and eyes hadn’t been so obviously beneficial for the task at hand. “Definitely,” she replied.
“What can I do?” Bo asked.
“I am staying here with you and your dad,” Grav said. “Do not worry, kiddo, we will find some way to pass the time.”
“The three of you could look through all of our photos,” Yury suggested. “Pick out the ones you think would be most impactful and we’ll be sure to use them.”
Bo smiled. “Cool.”
“Cool,” Viola echoed. She hugged Bo and kissed him on the head, eliciting an instinctive grimace as he wiped the kiss away. “Have fun. We’ll be back soon.”
“Take care,” Robert said.
Holly nodded. “Always.”
seventy-five
As Holly expected, Rusev proved delighted by the discovery of Morrison’s ark, the location of which would offer a natural focal point for the furious anti-GU protests the group hoped to catalyse in a matter of days.
Rusev was equally pleased to hear from Yury that he and the others had been discussing the optimal order for revealing their damning evidence against Morrison. Upon learning that Robert had told everyone about the video of his late wife expressing her well-founded fears that her life was in danger, Rusev apologised to Viola for keeping it from her. The girl shrugged it off.
Rusev’s positivity faded when the topic turned to Yury’s recent thoughts regarding the necessity of physically uncloaking Terradox in order to decisively prevent Morrison’s planned Reset by either forcing him to destroy the entire romosphere or by offering Earth’s inhabitants the kind of undeniable physical proof needed to inspire an uprising.
From Rusev’s expression, Holly discerned that she had already wrestled with the question of whether anything short of uncloaking Terradox would be enough to ensure their ultimate success in toppling Morrison and the corrupt-by-design Global Union he sat atop.
“I think we have enough,” Rusev eventually said. “Cloak or no cloak… we have photographic proof of what we found here; we have every scrap of Olivia Harrington’s research as well as a record of her concerns; we have the blatant interview tampering Bo uncovered; and of course we have everything we had before we left Earth… and I was confident then. Now, we’re even more well-armed than we were before we crashed here. The negative, if you want to call it that, is that we now know exactly what we’re up against and how high the stakes truly are. So while our chance of success hasn’t necessarily fallen, the importance of our success has exponentially risen.”
Holly took the positives from Rusev’s reply and stated her intention to find the remote control mentioned in Dante’s primer, which would hopefully allow the group to uncloak Terradox after departing.
“There’s almost no chance you’ll find it,” Rusev said. “And if you do, there’s almost no chance it will work at any kind of meaningful range.”
“We want to try,” Viola chimed in. “I know we’ve already searched the Karrier since we found out about Dante, but we weren’t looking for this in particular. And about the range… surely it’s worth a shot? If we find it and it doesn’t work when we want it to, we won’t be any worse off than if we don’t find it at all.”
“Oh, you’re very free to search for it,” Rusev said, sounding perfectly genuine in her support and not at all condescending. “Don’t let me discourage you. Yury and I will triple-check every inch of this bunker. If we don’t find it, we’ll discuss other uncloaking ideas with the rescue crew in case one of them can think of another way. Everything on their end is going perfectly. The communications delay is way down and they’re on track to be here in around 28 hours.”
“That’s almost less than a day!” Viola excitedly replied.
“It’ll be less than a day by the time we get back here with the remote,” Holly said, turning towards the door to signify that it was time to get going.
“Good luck,” Rusev said.
Yury echoed the sentiment.
Holly and Viola’s journey to the cliff-edge above the Karrier’s grassy canyon felt uncomfortably comfortable; not quite routine, but not far from it.
“How many times is it now?” Viola asked as they stepped out of the rover to begin their on-foot descent. “How many times have we been here? Five?”
“I think this is four,” Holly said. “There was the first time we found it, the next day when we came back with Rusev and Grav, then the time we came for the radio module after we found out about Dante.”
“Seems like more. Oh well, at least we get some real food each time.”
Holly grinned at the description of Rusev’s dining machine’s artificially shaped and flavoured algae concoctions as “real food”. But in comparison to the cubes of nutrition powder the group had been subsisting on, she could hardly deny the pull of the machine’s vast array of passably convincing meal options.
Viola wolfed down two quick platefuls of her usual vegetarian lasagne before joining Holly in the search for Dante’s remote. They worked on opposite sides of each room, switching sides to be absolutely sure before progressing to the next.
Shortly into their search of the second room, Viola voiced a question she had been considering for a while: “Why does Morrison need Terradox, anyway? If the plan is to evacuate while his megasonic pulse thing ‘cleanses�
�� Earth, why can’t his chosen people just fly around on their spaceship for a while until it’s safe to go back?”
“This Reset he’s planning isn’t the only reason he built this place,” Holly said, “it’s just a good fit. Theoretically he could do what you said and orbit Earth until it was safe to return, but none of that really changes what we’re trying to do here. By exposing Terradox, we expose Morrison. That’s the only way to stop what he’s trying to do, not just delay it.”
Viola looked satisfied enough with this answer. “So why is he suddenly going for the Reset now? Did something change to make it more urgent?”
Holly gave an honest shrug. “I don’t know. He’s obviously been planning it for a long time, so this might always have been the timeline. He’s not getting younger; that’s for sure. And for someone with an ego like Morrison’s, it would be no good for his plan to succeed if he wasn’t there to revel in the aftermath. He doesn’t just want to make it happen, he wants to see it happen.”
The intensity of their searching made the time pass quickly, but Holly was far less disheartened to see that over six hours had passed without success than she was to reach the end of the final room empty-handed. “I’m sorry,” she said, sighing heavily as she sat down on the firm bed that had been her only private spot for so long. “I really thought we’d find it.”
“At least we looked,” Viola said.
Holly saw no sense in knocking Viola’s positivity so forced a smile and nodded as convincingly as she could. “Yeah. We tried.”
“It was always going to be practically impossible to find. I mean, Dante might have been an asshole but he wasn’t an idiot; he wouldn’t put it in the first place or the last place we would look. It could be under any rock on this whole planet or buried in literally any spot. I can’t think of anywhere else to look that makes more sense than picking a random spot on the map.”
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 31