After a few minutes spent explaining the basic concept to the others and expressing his surprise to learn that the initial spark had come from Yury Gardev rather than Dimitar Rusev, Bo got around to answering Chase’s question and told him that it was something he hoped to see in the next few years.
“Few?” Chase asked, eyebrows raised in excitement. “Rusev said five or ten.”
Bo shrugged. “Or twenty. I said I hope to see it in the next few. A lot depends on the propulsion. And, uh, speaking of that… Nisha, some of the things you were given to work on while you were in the Kompound have a direct bearing on this, because extra-solar propulsion on this kind of scale is one of our main theoretical stumbling blocks at the moment.”
Nisha, having listened with keen interest, surprised both Bo and Chase with a positive reaction: “You know, I actually think this could be done. Like you’re getting at when you say extra-solar, the propulsion isn’t really a challenge until we reach a serious distance from the sun, because we know how efficiently an external romobot cloak can capture and utilise solar energy. I’ll dumb this down slightly, but all we’d need to do is apply some thrust from the romobots on one side of the sphere, depending on which way we wanted to go.”
“But it is a question of power,” Bo said. “Isn’t it?
“Well, yeah, but bear in mind that I was working on plans for an insulated reactor. It would be a relatively minor modification of what we already have inside the newest K-4 Karriers… almost a combination of that and the small-scale romokinetic propulsion that already moves the colony’s transport capsules. The modifications are small but big, if you know what I mean. They sound small, and they wouldn’t require much actual work, but getting it right isn’t easy. But… if it works, it works. The scale isn’t actually much of a stumbling block, because a huge sphere has a huge core — obviously — and a huge core can house a huge reactor.”
Chase nodded slowly, cautiously optimistic. “So what you’re saying is…”
“It’s viable,” Nisha said. “It’s viable that we could have a sphere the same size as Terradox which could be internally powered regardless of access to solar or stellar energy. Stellar energy would theoretically open new doors in terms of the speeds we could travel at, of course, but—”
“I like how you’re saying ‘we’,” Chase interrupted, grinning widely. “Don’t think I didn’t notice.”
“This would be the scientific endeavour of a lifetime,” Nisha replied. “Me, we, whoever… if it happens, I’m on it.”
“I’ll never understand you kids,” Viola said with a wry smile; they were only a few years younger than her, of course, but she very much meant the sentiment. “This place is paradise. Why would you ever want to leave?”
“Some people think Earth is paradise,” Chase said, “but we’re all here because we wanted more. There’s nothing wrong with this place, Viola, don’t get me wrong on that. But there’s nothing wrong with wanting more.”
“Well, speaking of Earth and speaking of more,” Peter chimed in. “Chase, have you gotten wind yet of the kind of media and entertainment offers you’re going to get? You’re going to be hot property — as hot as any of us would be, except maybe Holly or V. You could go down for a year or two and make more money than you’d need in a hundred lifetimes.”
“That’s the thing, though,” Chase shrugged. “You just said it yourself. I guess maybe I would be hot property, what with how popular the stupid show got while we were in the Kompound, sure, but Viola and Holly would be even hotter property and you’re not talking about how much money they could make. That’s because you know it’s not what they’re all about, and I’m the same way. I didn’t come here to get rich, and I’m not about to leave here to get rich, either.”
Peter nodded, liking Chase more with every passing minute.
“I came here to do things no one else has ever done,” Chase went on, slowly turning away from Peter to face Bo, “and to go places no one else has ever been. I came here to explore. So, Bo… like Nisha said: if you can build me a Kosmosphere, I’m there. Sign me up.”
“You guys are crazy,” Viola laughed.
“The heart wants what it wants,” Peter reflected. “After all, that’s how I lucked out with you!”
“So you want a Kosmosphere?” Bo asked, looking between Nisha and Chase.
“If you think you’re up to the job…” Chase said.
“Gentleman’s wager says I am,” Bo said, holding out his hand to make it official.
Chase shook it firmly and grinned in delight. “I want this — I want this bad,” he said. “So for once, I hope I lose!”
Bo glanced briefly at Viola, who was lovingly rolling her eyes at her brother’s endless quest for more, and then looked back to Chase.
“Don’t worry,” he winked. “You will.”
At the other side of the sprawling Botanical Gardens, Holly, Grav and Rusev ventured into Christian’s office after respectfully giving him a call to request permission.
The three had spent the last hour sharing their favourite Sakura stories, and her famously dry sense of humour and occasionally reckless work ambitions ensured there were more than enough funny tales to go around. She would be greatly missed.
Once inside Christian’s office, Grav wasted little time in opening his favourite drawer.
Four bottles greeted him.
“Oh, Christian…” Rusev laughed. She then held her palm out to refuse a glass, telling Grav that she hadn’t touched a drop for over fifty years and didn’t think her body would react well to it now.
Holly, on the other hand, made no such protestation.
Rusev ultimately filled her own glass with iced water from Christian’s drinks machine and led a toast as the trio looked outside at the younger generation laughing and chatting under the night sky. “This place is in good hands,” she said, raising her glass. “To Terradox.”
“To Terradox,” Grav echoed.
Holly took another look through the window at Peter and Viola Ospanov, at Chase Jackson and Nisha Kohli, and — perhaps most importantly of all — at the irrepressible Bo Harrington.
She smiled, widely and proudly. “To Terradox.”
epilogue
At the end of a pleasant evening, and with Rusev exhausted from a long day spent adjusting to Terradox after her arrival from the Venus station and an evening spent catching up with usually distant friends, Holly told everyone it was time to head home.
“I hate to be a party pooper,” she said, “but I promised Christian no one would be in here unless I was keeping a close eye. Even you guys…”
Everyone was too tired to mind, in any case, and most were surprised to learn just how late it was.
Holly shared a transport capsule with Rusev, who she had invited to spend the night in her home on the far side of Sunshine Springs, while Grav joined Peter and Viola since their residence was nearer his own.
Nearing her destination, Holly’s thoughts were interrupted by an incoming message alert on her wristband. It was a recorded voice message from the Health Analytics Office, requesting her immediate presence.
“Why immediate?” she asked Rusev, who had also heard the message.
“Call them and ask,” Rusev suggested. So call them Holly did.
Unfortunately, the staff member on the other end of the line insisted that she was unable to share anything over the communications network. She was however able to reassure Holly that the request was unrelated to her own tests from earlier in the day, which only intrigued her more.
Despite being so close to their destination, Rusev asked if she could go with Holly to find out what was going on. Holly readily agreed and changed the capsule’s course for the Health Analytics Office.
At the entrance, a nightshift worker greeted them and invited them inside. When she spoke, it was clear that she was the same person from the call a few minutes earlier.
“So what’s this about?” Holly asked.
“Come this
way, please,” the analyst said.
Holly and Rusev followed her down the corridor, as quickly as Rusev’s laboured walking would allow. Fortunately, the room they were heading for wasn’t far away.
The analyst opened the door and walked inside. “The results are on the screen,” she said.
Holly took one glance and immediately turned around. She walked back into the corridor and put her head in her hands.
“How sure?” Rusev asked.
The analyst was insistent: “Unfortunately, one hundred percent.”
Two official staff photographs filled the screen: one of Viola, the other of Peter.
Rusev re-read the words that Holly hadn’t even had to see and briefly closed her eyes.
She walked to the doorway and took one final look at the screen — “PREGNANCY CONFIRMED” — then joined Holly in the corridor.
“There has to be a way for them to stay,” Holly said. She said this more in hope than expectation, knowing that Rusev alone didn’t set the rules and that no one was bigger than this rule, the colony’s most important of all — not Kayla and Vic Hawthorne, and not even Viola and Peter Ospanov.
“There’s not,” Rusev sighed, placing a hand on Holly’s shoulder. “I suppose all we can do now is hope that Terradox’s loss will be the Kosmosphere’s gain…”
Terradox Beyond
Part I
one
“Watch out for your cake!” Viola Ospanov called.
Her daughter Katie heeded the warning and stopped as abruptly as she could, mere inches from the multi-tiered birthday cake which dominated their dining room table. The cake, carefully crafted to resemble a castle more medieval than fairytale, bore four tall candles.
“Patch, keep that ball away from the table, okay?” Kayla Hawthorne chimed in.
Like Katie, Patrick Hawthorne was four years old. And just like Katie, he was also the sole reason that his parents no longer lived on Terradox.
Viola and Kayla, two mothers bound by a common situation no one else could relate to, had become best friends since their simultaneous pregnancies necessitated a shared and unplanned one-way trip back to Earth. Their husbands had already been close even before then, with Vic Hawthorne having worked for Peter Ospanov during the latter’s time as Terradox’s Head of Security, and their children were now almost inseparable.
During what occasionally felt like a drawn-out purgatorial period between life on Terradox and what was coming next, the Hawthornes and Ospanovs were endlessly glad to have each other for company.
The children playfully ambled over towards the couch at the other side of the Ospanovs’ expansive living room, remaining utterly transfixed with the only gift Katie had opened so far. This was understandable given that the gift in question was the most technically advanced toy ever produced — a prototype so cutting edge that it didn’t even have a name. It came courtesy of Robert Harrington, Katie’s grandfather and the Terradox colony’s Head of Habitat Management, who’d had to pull all kinds of strings to gain authorisation for the gift.
The gift itself hadn’t actually been sent to Earth in a technical sense; instead, the precise instructions for its fabrication were sent to Earth’s Romotech Production Zone, where the toy was fabricated before being transported to the Ospanovs’ New London home by a maximum security courier.
Some of the security-related hoo-ha struck everyone as overkill for what was after all a children’s toy, but there were good reasons that powerful romotech was kept under close guard. The toy would never be commercially available on Earth due to restrictions on invisibility cloaks, for one thing, and the best Robert had been able to do was secure authorisation for a manufacturing run of one sole item.
The toy was a ball like no other, capable of not only vanishing and reappearing on command but also of being directed by the mere flick of a finger. As with all other items which could be rendered invisible by a romotech cloak, the ball’s surface was surrounded by a multitude of omnidirectional cameras. Coupled with the presence of tiny screens, in layman’s terms, this allowed the observer to effectively see through the object. This worked particularly well for items as small as the ball in question — no larger than an apple — and the cameras performed a dual function in also tracking the movement of the user’s finger to determine which direction it should move. The ball’s ‘touchless throw’ technology was the most evidently groundbreaking aspect of its design, but the romokinetic propulsion which enabled this feature had implications stretching far beyond the field of children’s toys.
Katie, far too young to think or care about anything other than how cool her new toy was, once again lifted her index finger and drew slow circles in the air. The ball danced to her tune before following the backwards movement of her finger and moving gradually towards her face.
“Make it disappear again,” Patch suggested, impatient in his excitement.
With a look of anticipation on her face, Katie brought together the tips of her middle finger and thumb. Immediately, the ball disappeared. This was less impressive to the adults in the room than it had been the first few dozen times, but Katie and Patch gasped in excitement all over again.
The ball hovered in the air and couldn’t be moved via a touchless throw for as long as it remained invisible. This was a built-in safety feature, like the fact that the ball couldn’t be used at all anywhere other than inside the address it was registered to.
A pile of unopened gifts remained untouched as the children played with the ball for another five minutes. The game came to a sudden end when young Patch, overexcited, thrust his index finger forwards far too quickly and sent the ball hurtling towards a decorative vase on the Ospanovs’ mantlepiece. Fortunately for the vase, it was protected by a romotech cloak of its own; not a visual cloak, but rather a physical barrier which prevented anything from passing at high speed. A human hand would have been allowed through to pick the vase up, of course, but the cloak guarded against any accidental impacts from other objects. This kind of romotech childproofing wasn’t yet publicly available but was expected to hit the market soon. It wouldn’t be cheap and the cloaks would be installed only by trained professionals, but many hoped this would be the first step in the democratisation of a technology with almost infinite potential to make life easier for all kinds of people in all kinds of ways.
In the Ospanovs’ living room, meanwhile, Patch’s errant touchless throw collided with the protective cloak in front of the vase and bounced back as though it had hit a wall. Viola reacted quickly to catch it before it might have collided with something that wasn’t cloaked, then put it down and told the children that was enough for now.
They complained, predictably, but soon relented when Viola pointed them towards the still-unopened gifts under the table.
The unusual custom of placing gifts under a table rather than on open display had begun just over two years earlier, on Katie’s second birthday, when she had insisted on carrying each gift to the table in her own home before opening it so that she was the first to see what was inside the wrapping paper. Patch had followed her lead on his own second birthday a few weeks later, and their parents had all found it so funny that they saved the children the trouble of carrying the gifts to the table next time round and placed them there themselves.
The original pattern now worked in reverse — Katie would collect the gifts from under the table and bring them into the open before unwrapping them, as Patch would on his own upcoming birthday — but it was an amusing little custom their parents wanted to hang on to for as long as they could.
“Katie,” her father Peter said from the far side of the room. “Why don’t you start with the gifts from Terradox? That way we can all watch the recording before I leave for my flight.” He glanced at his wristband. “I don’t have long.”
Katie’s eyes lit up. “Did they make a new message for me?”
“They sure did,” Peter smiled, heading towards the viewing wall to get everything ready. “Okay, I’ll need you all
to gather around the table. The 3-D projection won’t work if you’re too close.” After pressing a button on the wall he then disappeared behind a jet black floor-to-ceiling screen. This would have been startling if they hadn’t seen it before, but no one batted an eyelid. Peter meanwhile worked quickly to set everything up for the recording to be played. He stepped back through the opaque cloak and joined the others at the table just a minute or two later.
“Here we go,” Viola said, bouncing Katie on her knee.
The black cloak then faded, revealing an uncannily convincing 3-D backdrop on the viewing wall and four unbelievably realistic human figures between the wall and the now-transparent cloak. The projection technology was truly remarkable and made it seem as though the four people in the recording truly were present in the room.
Katie had never met these faraway friends and family, nor anyone else residing on Terradox. She was also too young to fully understand why the woman she was named after never sent an annual recording of her own — too young to understand that a sad twist of fate had seen Ekaterina Rusev succumb to a mercifully short battle with an untreatable illness just hours before Katie’s birth.
Viola had sensed that something wasn’t right in Peter’s demeanour, or that of the doctors, but at his insistence everyone agreed to keep the news from her until after the birth for obvious reasons. Peter put his unusual quietness and paleness down to the excitement of becoming a father and the doctors were all professional enough to let nothing show, and the strength of Viola’s understandably emotional reaction to learning of Rusev’s passing had proven Peter wise in his decision to hold off on breaking the news until their baby was safely in his arms.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 86