“Like Yury Gardev before us,” she boomed, overshooting in volume to ensure that her voice didn’t crack, “we are walking into this situation with open eyes and a readiness to do whatever is necessary to ensure the safety of innocent people caught in the middle of a madman’s crossfire. We will pass by a statue of Yury as we walk to the Karrier, and he will watch us on our way.”
“Cut,” Rusev said after a few silent seconds. She then placed a gentle hand on Holly’s back in an extraordinarily rare recognition of emotion, prompting Holly to clear her throat and step forward to avoid welling up. “I’ll get this footage to Earth,” Rusev continued, lifting the small camera from its tripod and setting off towards the station’s main communications hub.
Viola, who had written the Yury Gardev reference which almost made Holly choke up upon its delivery, approached her with an upbeat smile. “You can stop trying to look sad now, you know. The camera is gone.”
Holly couldn’t help but laugh.
“Seriously, though,” Viola said. “Remember when we left Spaceman behind on Terradox? We all thought he was dead, just like everyone on Earth probably thinks we’re dead now. But guess what? Spaceman came home, and so will we.”
Holly shook herself out of it, taking strength from Viola. She knew it wasn’t Viola’s role to comfort her — it should have been the other way around, if anything — and these thoughts were enough to shake off her temporary malaise.
“I know everyone says we look the same age,” Holly said with a grin, “but don’t forget that I was a TV star before you were born. I really can pretend to look sad when I have to.”
“I hate to break this to you,” Viola laughed, “but just because you’re now slightly less than twice my age, that doesn’t mean everyone has suddenly gone blind.”
Pretending to be annoyed, Holly put her hands on Viola’s shoulders and turned her towards the door. “Go and get your things and load them onto the Karrier. Everyone else, too,” she said more loudly. “It’s time. This asshole’s not going to disarm himself.”
forty-nine
Once everything was prepared and in place, David Boyce’s invited guests boarded their Karrier and departed for Terradox. Goran Vuletic and Peter Ospanov, specifically uninvited, joined them.
Safely tucked away in a double-locked cargo compartment, a small urn containing the ashes of Yury Gardev also made the journey.
The Karrier left the station with remarkably little fanfare due to a temporary lockdown of the entire area around the main entrance walkway. A handful of station staff waved the group off, including Rachel, the young Craft Management trainee who Holly had spent some time with shortly before Boyce threw a spanner in the works by cloaking Terradox.
Rachel waved between taking notes, and the fact that Holly could attach a name to this face made her think about every other nameless face she could see, each belonging to someone with their own role and their own hopes and dreams. A matter of hours earlier, Rachel had been like the others: a nameless face, a role-filling staff member, a number… just one of the 4,000-plus individuals who called the Venus station home. Now, by virtue of a short conversation, Holly naturally cared more about Rachel than she did about the still-nameless workers on either side of her.
This in turn brought to Holly’s mind the haunting images of David Boyce’s hostages: the countless young families who had no doubt looked forward to their trip of a lifetime for months only to have it turned into a nightmare; the countless children just as innocent as CeCe and DeeDee Bouchard; the countless mothers who loved those children just as much as Cherise Bouchard loved hers; the countless fathers just as worryingly absent from the second circle as Remy Bouchard…
Holly hadn’t had time to devote much thought as to why all of the working age men had been present in Boyce’s first broadcast but not in the second, let alone where they might be. She hoped they had been moved to a smaller off-camera location for a reason as innocuous as Boyce favouring a visual image which would best lend itself to the kind of “helpless women and children” media narratives which were so popular on Earth.
The alternative — that the men had been removed from the group because Boyce feared they might overwhelm his accomplices — was far more uncomfortable to think about, particularly given Holly’s uncertainty over exactly what “removed” might mean.
fifty
In the early stages of the journey, Dimitar came into Holly’s control room every now and then to engage in frustratingly delay-stricken conversations with Earth-based TMC personnel.
When one high-ranking official angrily asked why Dimitar had thrown the TMC under the bus by blaming their security forces for Boyce’s coup, he shared a disbelieving look with Holly before replying that his real views were a lot stronger than those he had aired in the broadcast. Dimitar then suggested that this particular official and his colleagues would be well advised to start seeking new employment ahead of the shakeup that was coming their way once their mess had been cleaned up.
Dimitar also spoke regularly with those currently in charge of the Venus station in the absence of both his mother and himself, ordinarily first and second in command. Holly didn’t know the other members of the Rusevs’ inner circle very well but she knew enough to know they would do a good job for as long as they had to; many had been with Ekaterina for decades, and Grav was only too glad to vouch for each and every one of them.
Viola brought Holly some food around halfway through the journey. It was redundantly vegetarian lasagne from the algae machine, as Holly had both expected and quietly hoped.
“Your cumulative distance record must be well and truly safe after the last week,” Viola said between bites. She drew a line with her finger in the air, taking it from an imaginary Earth all the way to the station, then to Netherdox and back, and finally onwards to Terradox.
Holly laughed and appreciated the sentiment. But in reality, Polo — her pilot for the initial trip to the station — was still comfortably ahead. The distance covered in her trips to and from Netherdox didn’t come close to a single one-way journey from Earth to Terradox, and Polo had been undertaking those return trips every few months for the last year.
On the rare occasions Polo had come up in conversation, Grav’s distaste was evident. In his eyes, Polo had a skill which would have made the Netherdox mission both easier and safer for all involved but selfishly chose not to use it. Holly wasn’t quite so harsh in her appraisal, understanding that Polo had a dependent family on Earth and couldn’t afford to take a risk on the magnitude of flying to an uncharted and unpredictable romosphere. She always kept this to herself, however, because a small part of her mind still couldn’t help but agree with Grav’s assessment.
With no further broadcasts from Boyce to mull over, Holly and Viola spent most of the rest of the journey watching various news broadcasts from Earth. Many of the reports began with a now familiar piece of footage which showed hundreds of citizens on a busy shopping street, all gazing up in fear at a giant advertising screen whose output had been taken over by an emergency public order feed. This feed, quite irresponsibly in Holly’s view, had displayed the first telescopic images of Terradox disappearing behind Boyce’s cloak, complete with a headline explaining the situation. The scenes of panic among the shoppers who knew that this meant Boyce had gained access to the romosphere’s control system were exactly the kind of thing that many in the media wanted to see. It was dynamite TV, which was all the news networks really cared about.
Interviews with members of the public and their elected leaders were far from unanimous in their support for the decision taken by Holly and the Rusevs to travel to Terradox in an attempt to free the hostages. No one knew of the plan to violently disarm Boyce and his accomplices, of course, so their opposition stemmed from a not uncommon viewpoint that the lives of several hundred wealthy tourists were not worth the lives of a handful of well-liked and important individuals.
At times in the past, Holly herself had previously fallen into t
he trap of seeing Terradox’s visitors as part of the same elite as those who Roger Morrison had planned to relocate before enacting his maniacal Great Reset plan to cleanse Earth of its overpopulation problem. An “us and them” mentality, already widespread before Revelation Day made clear just how far Morrison had planned to go, only increased among the billions of Earth’s citizens who lived on or below the breadline, many of whom quite understandably saw the Terradox Resort as exactly the kind of playground for the rich that Morrison had envisioned all along.
Holly saw a degree of nuance in that Morrison’s plans for a Great Reset had intended to relocate people of a certain type rather than people in a certain income bracket, and she knew from her brief presence on Terradox that many of its visitors were successful members of ordinary professions and the furthest thing from the kind of political fat cats and oligarchs who Morrison would have deemed worthy of a place on his greatest creation.
Aside from the hesitant many, some on Earth held views which were strongly and vocally opposed to the continued existence of Terradox for any purpose, let alone as a tourist resort. Such individuals believed that the moratorium on new applications of romotechnology didn’t go far enough and called for a total roll-back which included reverting Terradox and all other known romospheres to their embryonic states. Counter-arguments about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater had largely centred on the vast economic benefits of Terradox tourism, but there were also highly sound scientific arguments about the unique value of Terradox — the most expansive artificial environment in existence by an almost immeasurable distance — as a test site for any number of potentially groundbreaking theories and practical developments which could end up becoming great leaps forward to benefit humanity as a whole in as yet unimagined ways.
Following a firm and frank request from Ekaterina Rusev prior to her departure from the station, several of Earth’s largest corporate media conglomerates had vowed not to broadcast any further footage they received from David Boyce. Holly appreciated the sentiment behind this vow but saw little merit; whatever Boyce chose to share would be shared as an open broadcast, and people on Earth would see it one way or another.
With only a few hours until arrival, Grav entered the control room and offered Holly half of a sleeping pill, suggesting that she would need to be fully alert for the landing. Holly politely declined and truthfully insisted that she was fine.
“I’ll take it,” Viola said. “I haven’t slept since we left the station. Will I definitely wake up before the landing? I want to see it.”
Grav put the pill in his pocket.
“Why is it okay for Holly but not for me?” Viola complained.
Grav shook his head and left without engaging in a debate.
“Trust me: those things are way too easy to get used to,” Holly said. “He’s just looking out for you.”
There were no major developments until the proximity sensor light on the Karrier’s built-in cloak-passer turned from steady blue to flashing amber within a few seconds of the time Holly had predicted when plotting the journey before leaving. Despite Boyce’s full control of the entire romosphere, which meant that he could have effectively hardened the cloak to cause a lethal collision, Holly didn’t have the slightest concern about this part of the mission. It would have been a relatively clean and easy way for Boyce to get rid of them, but clean and easy wasn’t what he was going for. He wanted a spectacle of the grisliest kind: multiple public executions on the exact anniversary of the Terradox Resort’s grand opening. For a madman like Boyce, unspectacular and unseen deaths the night before the anniversary just wouldn’t cut it.
The light turned green exactly when Holly expected. This relieved the still-awake Viola, who hadn’t shared her confidence.
When Terradox suddenly appeared, dominating the entirety of Holly’s view as soon as it did, it was impossible for her not to think back to the frightened amazement she had felt during her first landing on the incredible surface and the surprising comfort she had felt during her second.
She tried to take the positive from the situation: this landing, however frightening what lay ahead might be, wouldn’t be as hair-raising as the stormy descent towards Netherdox.
She also considered that the Netherdox ground mission, roundly dismissed as a suicide mission by many on the station, had been wholly successful. There had of course been complications — the toxic gas entering the bunker, the adhesive moat, the pack-defence romodroids — but in the end, the mission hadn’t proven as horrendously difficult as feared.
The main difference now, however positively Holly tried to spin her current situation, was that she knew beyond doubt that the upcoming landing would be the easy part.
“Here we go…” Viola said, looking down with her own conflicted feelings of fear and optimism.
A new light flashed on Holly’s control console, signalling an incoming audio communication from Terradox. She tapped the button to let the message through.
“Glad you could make it,” boomed David Boyce’s smug voice, filling the control room via its unseen overhead speakers. “See you all soon!”
fifty-one
Holly ensured that all of the Karrier’s outgoing communications were fully disabled, aware of the danger of David Boyce hearing something of strategic importance. She was in no rush to land and sought to descend as slowly as possible without arousing too much suspicion, hoping to give the others enough time to use Sakura’s CamCard to gather useful live images from the ground.
After a minute or so during which the Karrier moved laterally more than it moved vertically, Holly sent Viola to find out why the others had given no update on the status and location of Boyce and his accomplices. Viola met Grav in the doorway before she made it out of the room.
“This fucking guy,” Grav said, walking straight to Holly with Peter and Bo close behind. “The men who were missing from the second broadcast, the male hostages…”
Holly took the CamCard from Grav’s extended hand and looked at the screen. Before looking, she feared the worst and fully expected to see a new pile of corpses. And though what she saw instead was far less disgusting than that, in cold strategic terms it was even worse.
In an aerial image showing the group’s designated landing site in the valley which housed Terradox Central Station, Holly saw at least a dozen armed men standing in a long and perfect line.
“He has turned the male tourists into guards,” Grav said. “He has armed them with the real guards’ weapons and instructed them to guard important areas. We do not have to ask why these men are obeying his orders because we already know that he has their families underground, being monitored by his two accomplices. These men have been coerced into doing his bidding.”
Standing at Grav’s shoulder, Peter Ospanov said nothing and looked the furthest thing from pleased to have been proven correct that this job would not be a clean one.
“We have located two more of these coerced tourist guards in two isolated locations where several zonal lines intersect,” Grav went on. “All of the tourist guards are wearing the real guards’ uniforms, hats included. I believe that Peter and myself can each disarm one of these isolated guards and disguise ourselves in their uniforms for long enough to create a plausible distraction to flush Boyce out of the bunker, at which point one of you — I suggest Holly — will enter the bunker. There may be a tourist guard in the way, as there is now, but these men are untrained civilians so she will be able to take him out of the equation quite easily. Needless to say, if the opportunity presents itself, Peter and I will be perfectly positioned to eliminate Boyce and his accomplices. Ideally, if our distraction is sufficient, we will flush Boyce’s trained accomplices out from their current positions very quickly.”
“No. I don’t like it,” Dimitar said, not mincing his words. “How do you propose disarming these men — what are we calling them, tourist guards? — before they call for help? We can see they have headsets which could call Boyce at the touch
of a button. How do you disarm them quickly enough to prevent that?”
“We sneak up from behind,” Grav replied.
Dimitar held his hands out, palms up, clearly unsatisfied. “And then what, shoot them in the head?”
“Put them to sleep,” Grav said. “No one is shooting an innocent man in the head, Dimitar. We put them to sleep, take their headsets, restrain them, put them in the VUV, make it invisible, and there we have it. Done.”
“But what’s the distraction?” Dimitar pushed. “What are you going to do to flush them out?”
“My idea is to say that we have heard something suspicious,” Peter answered. “Then we would say we saw someone, then perhaps we could say they started shooting at us. Grav had a different idea, but we agreed that it would have placed someone else in too much danger.”
Grav’s expression suggested that he hadn’t fully agreed with this.
“Well at least tell us!” Robert Harrington snapped from the doorway, with no patience for half-explanations or secret ideas.
As Peter shook his head slightly, Grav shared his idea. “I thought — just a thought — that if someone else, someone who is supposed to be here, came with us, Peter could report finding them sneaking around and ask for permission to interrogate. I would already have left the VUV and disarmed another guard, and since no one here knows Peter it makes sense for him to be the one to ‘find’ someone once he has disarmed his target. At that point, Boyce’s mind would be all over the place and he would either ask Peter to bring the intruder to him — in which case, we are in — or he would send his trusted accomplices to do the deed. In either case, we flush someone out and destroy Boyce’s focus. I do not think he would do anything drastic and I certainly do not think he would kill anyone; we all know he wants to do that publicly tomorrow, not privately tonight. Once Boyce is flushed out, our task will take minutes so there will be no time for serious pain and probably not even enough time for him to take the detainee inside.”
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 55