“When did you last eat?” Grav asked out of nowhere.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Well, I sure as hell am. Where do the tourists eat?”
Holly turned around and pointed the way.
Grav pointed to his leg, signalling that he couldn’t walk by himself.
“Fine,” she said, putting an arm around his neck and helping him along.
They proceeded slowly towards the cafeteria, through several doors and down a small flight of stairs.
“This is the last I will say about it, Hollywood, but what I cannot ignore is that you continued into the bunker immediately after it happened, and you did the necessary job. If that is not strength…”
“Did Boyce ask you about our plan while he was, you know…”
“Of course.”
“And you said nothing,” Holly said.
“Of course! I could not sell everyone out. We both had to do what we had to do, Hollywood; not without pain and difficulty, but through pain and difficulty. That was the price that had to be paid, and we were the ones who had to pay it.”
In his own way, Grav finally got through to Holly.
The guilt wouldn’t fade as easily as he seemed to think — they were built differently in that way, as well as many others — but his unconventional attempts to lighten her load had begun to work, a little at least.
sixty-seven
In the relaxed and low-key surroundings of the Terradox Resort’s casual cafeteria on the lowest level of the New Eden hotel complex, Holly quickly found an appetite after too many days with too little food.
A small handful of tourists trickled in for something to eat after a while but the vast majority made use of the self-serve algae machines in the residential corridors above. One of the three families present walked over to Holly and Grav and thanked them personally, explaining that they had been kept in the nursery and heard the news from Sakura Otsuka.
Holly quickly excused herself after talking to the children for a few moments, realising that Sakura would have no idea where she and Grav had gone. Unsurprisingly, Sakura had returned to the rover — the obvious place to go — and was waiting for Holly to show up.
“There you are,” she said, not sounding angry or annoyed. “Where did you go?”
“The cafeteria,” Holly answered. “Grav was hungry. Do you want anything to eat?”
Sakura answered by standing up.
Holly stepped into the rover to briefly relay the situation to the Rusevs in the Karrier and indirectly to Viola in the bunker: everything had gone well, as they had no doubt seen, and the group in New Eden were now going for breakfast. Ekaterina Rusev thanked and congratulated Holly and asked if she still wanted to go ahead with a certain long-planned ceremony which was scheduled for noon.
“Absolutely,” Holly said. “We’ll all be there.”
She then walked back into the underground complex with Sakura and rejoined Grav, entering a cafeteria which contained even fewer people than it had when she exited five minutes earlier.
Grav continued to eat quietly and consistently — where the hell he put it all, Holly would never know — and Sakura fixed herself a plateful of uncannily realistic spaghetti bolognese.
Shortly after the final family of tourists present in the cafeteria left, Peter Ospanov entered — alone.
“Don’t worry,” he said, preempting the obvious question. “He’s in a cell in the security area they have for unruly tourists. He’s fully restrained inside a locked cell, inside a locked room behind another locked door. The only thing I found out is what we already suspected, but it is worth knowing for sure: everyone here would have been killed if we hadn’t stopped him. He was going to implode the whole romosphere once he’d finished with the public spectacle of your executions, killing himself and every single tourist.”
It didn’t make any tangible difference, but Holly took some degree of comfort from the confirmation that her sadly necessary action outside of the bunker had indeed prevented hundreds of deaths. If she had hesitated long enough for Remy to call Boyce, no one would have made it home — CeCe, DeeDee and Cherise included.
“Obviously the main thing is the people,” Sakura said in reply, “but part of me kind of feels like this place was worth saving, too. None of the photos or descriptions I’ve seen and read come close to showing the potential you feel when you’re actually here. Terradox could be anything. It sounds corny, but imagination is pretty much the only limit.”
Grav momentarily stopped shovelling tastefully presented algae into his mouth. “Strongly disagree,” he said, still chewing. “If it was up to me, this place would go boom the second everyone is safely past the outer cloak. Terradox is a product of the worst of humanity’s past: obsessive greed and selfish power. The Venus station is the future.”
“I’m with Sakura,” Holly chimed in. “Grav, Terradox could be a bigger version of the station. Imagine a research station with independently controlled climate zones and practically no spatial limits. The scientific discoveries and new technologies made in a place like this could be things we’ve never even dreamed of.”
Grav sat back in his chair. “Tell me your dreams. Your dreams for Terradox. Blank slate… what do you want to see here?”
Holly blew air from her lips in thought. “I want to see Terradox as a bustling hub for a reinvigorated space program looking to the stars. I want to see national and international science teams working on all kinds of projects; difficult projects with big aims that will benefit the whole of humanity, not just satisfy accountants and shareholders. I want it to be the Venus station but bigger. The station… but better.”
Before anyone could reply, an unseen overhead speaker crackled to life.
“Hello?” Ekaterina Rusev’s voice boomed into the near-empty cafeteria. “I hope I have the right speaker.”
“She heard you badmouthing the station,” Grav joked under his breath. “You are in trouble now…”
Rusev continued: “I have a message for Holly, which is that I need you to join me in the Karrier as soon as possible. I only need you for this.”
“What’s going on?” Peter asked whoever was listening.
“Don’t worry, there is no problem,” Rusev went on. “We just have something very important and potentially time-sensitive to discuss.”
The overhead speaker crackled again before falling silent.
“I have literally no idea,” Holly said, rising to her feet as everyone stared at her for an answer. “Honestly. I’ll take the TE-500 and anyone who’s not ready to leave yet can drive back in the VUV when they are.”
“I will stay for now,” Grav said. “I will finish up here and then I want to see Boyce with my own eyes. I trust your competence, Peter, but it would be foolish for me to leave without double-checking the security situation in and around the holding cells; something tells me they were built for drunk tourists rather than maniacs like Boyce.”
Peter shrugged and rose to his feet. “Fine by me. There’s something I need to take care of and I want to see Viola, anyway, so I’m going with Holly.”
“Sakura?” Holly said.
“I’ll help Grav along to the holding cells then drive us back in the rover,” she replied. “I don’t mind.”
“You are sure?” Grav asked.
Sakura nodded.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Okay,” Holly said, mainly to Grav. “You have plenty of time, but make sure you leave early enough to get back by 11:30 at the latest.”
“What’s happening then?” Sakura asked, curious.
Grav tipped his head back slightly and said “aah,” remembering what day it was.
“At noon, we’re going to officially open the Yury Gardev Memorial Garden,” Holly explained. “It will no longer be televised or even filmed, but we’re still doing it. This ceremony is the main reason I agreed to come here for the Resort’s anniversary in the first place, and there’s no way an asshole like Boyce is getting in the
way. You’ll definitely be back for it, right?”
“I would not miss it for the world,” Grav said, meaning every word. “See you then, Hollywood.”
sixty-eight
On her short walk to the touring vehicle, Holly noticed that the bodies of Boyce’s two fallen accomplices were gone.
“Where did you put them?” she asked Peter.
With Earth-based intelligence agencies still coming up short in their efforts to decisively determine the true identities of the accomplices, who were by now naturally surmised to have been GU loyalists posing as two TMC guards whose identities they had assumed in much the same way that Boyce had assumed Chandler Rutherford’s, it was crucial that the bodies would be available for forensic analysis.
“I took them to the medical centre,” Peter answered. “It was not for me to decide that they did not deserve such a dignity. I also moved the tourist guard from inside the other vehicle; the man who shot Grav and was later killed by Boyce. Some of the staff members from the medical centre — Terra Docs, as they are known — have already returned to work, caring for tourists who have fallen ill from the stress and malnourishment of the last four or five days. I made sure that no tourists saw what I was doing.”
“Is that what you need to take care of back at the bunker? The bodies?”
Peter nodded. “Grav is hurt. Injured, he would tell you, but either way he is not fit to carry his own weight, much less anyone else’s.”
“I’ll help as soon as I’ve finished up with whatever Rusev wants to talk about so urgently. You shouldn’t have to do it yourself.”
“Thank you,” Peter said.
Holly appreciated his straightforwardness — no half-meant “you don’t have to” — and she was sure that whatever Rusev needed wouldn’t take too long.
Climbing into the TE-500, Holly took in her bizarre surroundings one last time. From the perfect-length grass and picturesque palm trees to the piped-in sounds of crickets, and from the water features flanking the imposing house Roger Morrison intended as his own to the hidden subterranean hotel complex, there truly was nowhere else in the universe quite like New Eden.
The vehicle took off with no complications, and Holly was only too glad to leave behind the one area of Terradox which had always given her the creeps more than any other.
Rusev’s insistence that Holly had not been summoned to deal with a problem but rather to discuss something time-sensitive made this flight far more relaxed than the outward leg, taking place as it had in the middle of a life-or-death mission.
The lack of guards on the ground was as conspicuous as it was welcome. Holly pointed a few things out to Peter, who had never had the pleasure of such a flight. She pointed towards the valley where she and the Harringtons had landed four years earlier, and then showed him the direction of the other lander which Grav had led them towards under the baking artificial sun. Telling Peter about the habitat extension module, which Yury had helped everyone construct and which Holly had slept in with the Harringtons, brought back some surprisingly warm memories.
“I can’t even imagine how it must have felt,” Peter said. “Being here but not knowing where here was. Not knowing what here was.”
“It was interesting,” Holly said with a slight laugh, downplaying it more than a little.
Before long, the trusty K-3 model Karrier came into view. It had been through almost as much as Holly and her group over the last week or so, but unlike them it didn’t look any worse for wear.
Holly landed the TE-500 without any problems.
“The other VUV is here,” Peter said, pointing to the currently uncloaked rover. He hurried out of the touring vehicle. “Viola must be here.”
Holly wasn’t sure about that; all the rover’s presence meant for sure was that Bo was back, and she thought it fairly likely that one of Viola or Robert would have stayed behind in the bunker until Holly or Grav directly told them it was okay to leave it unattended.
Peter ran inside ahead of Holly and by the time she entered she could already hear Viola’s voice.
Viola embraced Holly after Peter. “Thanks for believing I could do all that stuff with the drones and the headsets,” she said.
“Thanks for doing it!” Holly replied with a warm smile. She then spotted Bo. “And you… all these years working in the rover division sure paid off. We couldn’t have done any of this without those VUVs. Hundreds of people are still alive and this romosphere is still here because of that tech. Good work.”
“We have a good team on the station,” Bo said, humble as ever.
Ekaterina Rusev stood over his shoulder. She looked happy to see Holly but keen to get on with the discussion she had called her back for.
Holly excused herself from the entrance area for a few minutes and followed Rusev towards the control room.
“Congratulations,” Rusev said, “and thank you. This was not an easy mission.”
“We all played a part. Where are all the tourist guards, though? The ones who were outside?”
“They’re in the utility room with Dimitar.”
Holly felt a tinge of guilt for completely if momentarily forgetting about Dimitar. “So he’s not part of this discussion we need to have?” she asked.
“No,” Rusev said, shaking her head and holding out a hand to allow Holly into the control room first. “I don’t want him to hear this.”
sixty-nine
“The TMC’s board of control is in serious trouble and they know it,” Rusev said, wasting no time as soon as the door swung closed. “This is more than a PR disaster; it’s an unsurvivable PR catastrophe. We’re obviously already seeing Earth’s citizens blaming the TMC for the security oversight of letting David Boyce board a Ferrier using an assumed identity, but we’re also seeing a lot of high-profile individuals insisting that the existence of Terradox itself is now a threat which can’t be justified no matter how much tourist income it generates.”
Holly responded by stating her growing suspicion very plainly: “Were you listening in on us in the cafeteria?”
“What? Of course not. Why, what were you talking about?”
“This,” Holly said. “Seconds before you asked me to come here, Grav said that he wants to see Terradox destroyed and Sakura and I both said that we think it’s worth saving. I said it could be home to all kinds of scientific research and even be a key site for a new space program. Basically like a bigger and better version of the station, with way more space and way less technical limitations.”
Rusev was now smiling widely. “I didn’t hear any of that, Holly, but I’m glad to hear it now. You see, I’ve already spoken to the TMC chairman a few times since you took down Boyce, and he wants to bring you in. He knows that a full-scale clear-out and rebranding is necessary if the TMC has any chance of surviving this mess, and he wants to use your image and goodwill to get people back onside. I’m sure he also wants you to provide more than that — to be heavily involved in the day-to-day management of whatever comes next — but he was most explicit about the benefits of your public image. Is that something you might be interested in?”
“No,” Holly said.
“No?”
“No. I’m not interested in being anyone’s mascot. I would only take a role like that if it came with real decision-making power, because I think I know this place a lot better than any of the suits at the TMC.”
“That’s fair,” Rusev said. “Personally, I’m not sold on any of it, anyway.”
“Any of what?”
“Allowing Terradox to exist. I know that you think it’s worth saving, but why? Some attachment that comes from the fact that we discovered this place? That you were the first of us to ever set foot on the surface? I just don’t see it. I’m with the people saying that the tourist income doesn’t justify the inherent risk.”
“To hell with the tourist income!” Holly said, raising her voice but not quite yelling. “Think of the old twentieth-century space stations that were used to observe how all
kinds of things would act and behave in microgravity. That’s not even one millionth of one per cent of the kind of stuff we could do here. Each zone can be its own huge laboratory, meaning we can simulate any number of atmospheric environments at once. Bo talks about eventually building vehicles fit for a manned exploration of Venus and one day maybe even EVA suits fit for Venus, right? Well, this is the place to test all of that. We take Terradox for granted because of all the shit that’s gone down here and some people hate it because of who made it. Fine. But you don’t have to give Morrison credit for anything to recognise that this place is the ideal site for scientific experimentation. I mean, there are dials and buttons in the bunker that let us manipulate gravity, air pressure, temperature, humidity… almost anything you can think of except for radiation. No scientists outside of the GU’s inner circle could have even dreamed of any of that five years ago. And now we’re going to destroy it all because the existing security isn’t good enough? Because we don’t like the guy who made it? Because it’s not politically expedient to take a nuanced position on anything anymore?”
“Okay, Holly…”
“I’m not finished,” Holly interrupted. “The potential doesn’t only exist for testing and developing new tech. The ability to alter atmospheric conditions in individual zones makes Terradox the perfect location for a training base for simulating all kinds of challenging extraterrestrial environments. So if whoever survives at the TMC wants to dial me in on decision-making and use my image to inspire and recruit a new generation of astronauts, that could be something I can get behind.”
“Okay, Holly…” Rusev repeated, smiling this time. “What I was about to say was that you passed.”
“Passed what?”
“The interview. I intend to make an offer to acquire Terradox, and I want you at the centre of my plans. I want you to be the face of my bid, just like the TMC board wants you to be the face of their rebrand, but I want to give you a much greater say on everything that happens here than they ever would.”
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