Peter had travelled to Rusev’s funeral on the Venus station at Viola’s absolute insistence while she remained at home with Katie, who having been born several weeks early was far too small to travel such a distance, and that had been the last time he had seen any of Holly, Grav, Robert or Bo in the flesh.
The fact that Katie’s birthday shared a date with Rusev’s death made it a difficult time of year for the Ospanovs since public attention on the grand Kosmosphere project Rusev had set in motion in her final year always peaked on this anniversary. As public figures with so much history with Terradox and Rusev more generally, both Viola and Peter typically had to attend events on Katie’s birthday as representatives of the Kosmosphere project, and this year was no exception. In fact, this year was a very special one.
Each previous anniversary had brought into sharp focus the relatively imminent launch of an embryonic romosphere, similar in many respects to Terradox itself, which would expand to something approaching a planetary scale before carrying a large and varied human population outwards on a one-way trip to the stars. More of a mobile Earth than a spaceship in any kind of traditional sense, the Kosmosphere would be powered by a large romotech reactor in its core and propelled via similar principles, albeit massively scaled up, to those which propelled the toy ball Katie and Patch had been throwing around all morning.
Today, however, marked a very special day. For today wasn’t just any day; today was launch day.
In a matter of mere hours, Ivy ‘Holly’ Wood would officially launch from Terradox the painstakingly developed embryonic romosphere which would ultimately become the Kosmosphere. All being well, the Kosmosphere would expand slowly as it ventured outwards to the orbital position where it would remain until its ultimate departure three years after launch. The expansion would pick up pace once the Kosmosphere reached that orbital position, before stopping exactly two years after launch by which point it would be considerably larger than Terradox.
As the four figures before her suddenly appeared large and lifelike, Viola tried to imagine what must have been running through Holly’s mind as the launch arrived. With the physical development of the embryonic romosphere having occurred on Terradox, Holly was ultimately responsible for its success. And given the level of public interest in the project and just how much hope for humanity’s future was wrapped up in it, the pressure was without precedent.
“Uncle Bo!” Katie yelled, delighted by the projection. “Grandad!”
“And Holly and Grav,” Viola added, fighting back a tear. They were almost too real, even before they began to speak. It saddened her greatly that her brother and father had never seen her four-year-old daughter in the flesh, and the convincingness of their projections, along with Holly and Grav’s, only made this feeling stronger.
“Happy birthday, darling,” Robert Harrington said, waving across the room. The distance between Earth and Terradox made live conversations impractical due to the unavoidable communications delay, but when recordings were this immersive no one felt like they were missing out.
“Thanks, Grandad,” Katie smiled. “Hi, Uncle Bo!” she added, temporarily forgetting that they couldn’t see or hear her in the same way she could see and hear them.
Birthday greetings followed from Bo and then from Holly and Grav, who continued to run day-to-day operations on Terradox and who missed Viola and Peter just as much as was true in reverse.
“I asked your daddy to make sure my gift was the first one you opened,” Robert continued with a smile, “so I think you’ll already have seen it. I wanted him to see it before he has to head off to do his speech. I hope you liked it!”
“I love it!” she replied, again either thinking he would hear her or too happy to care that he wouldn’t.
Bo stepped forward next and told Katie that his gift was in blue wrapping paper. She hurried under the table and emerged with a large blue box, which she opened to unveil a complex-looking model rover building kit. The recommended age was 12 and over.
“Vintage Bo,” Viola laughed.
“He tries,” Peter said, trying not to laugh along.
“Which one is from you, Holly?” Katie asked, this time confirming that she really had forgotten that they couldn’t hear. The projections were so convincing that no one could blame her.
“The next one is from both of us,” Grav said, his staccato and contraction-free Serbian accent bringing a wide smile to Peter’s face.
“The paper has rocket ships on it,” Holly added.
Katie dove under the table again, this time asking Patch to help in her search for the right gift.
Viola took the opportunity to wipe away a tear that had escaped upon hearing Holly’s voice. It was always an emotional date, but the imminence of the Kosmosphere’s launch amplified everything even further. The Ospanovs and Hawthornes — previously sent home from Terradox — were all going to the Kosmosphere as soon as it was ready, and Viola took solace in the fact that she would be reunited there with her brother Bo and her father Robert. But just like the date inevitably reminded her that she would never see Rusev again, the sight of Holly and Grav, who were both staying on Terradox rather than venturing starward on the Kosmosphere, reminded Viola that she would never see either of them again, either.
Peter, noticing Viola’s sadness, held her hand and whispered that he had something that would cheer her up. “Trust me,” he said. “You’ll love it!”
“Got it!” Patch yelled from under the table. He handed the wrapped gift to Katie and watched on as she ripped away the rocket-ship paper.
“What does it say?” she asked, holding a T-shirt towards her parents.
Both laughed. “Commander in training,” they said in unison, reading the words from the centre of a design which faithfully imitated that of a standard-issue Rusentra EVA suit.
“That’s the closest she’ll ever get to wearing one of those suits,” Viola said quietly to the Hawthornes as they sat to her left, chuckling along.
Having remotely paused the recording while the kids looked for the present, Peter was keen to get it going again. He had to leave for his annual public appearance much earlier than Viola did for hers, since he was once again set to lead the world’s main Russian language ceremony which appropriately took place in St Petersburg. Born in Kazakhstan, Peter had grown up fluent in Russian and was received as a returning hero at these events, during which the late space pioneer Yury Gardev was always honoured with particular emotion.
Peter smiled as he saw Katie and her best friend Patch looking back under the table at the rest of her presents. This Ospanov family home in the sedate environs of New London was a far cry from the one Peter had grown up in during the turbulent days of the Global Union’s much-resisted reign, and he was only too happy to see his daughter grow up having all the things he hadn’t.
He had however raised a concern to Viola a year or so earlier that things could be in danger of being too comfortable for everyone, and he felt that this might be more of a concern in the future and particularly if they were to have a son, quoting the age-old mantra that luxury and comfort could breed weakness and complacency. He made it clear that he wasn’t suggesting a preference for raising a child Spartan style — leaving it on a mountaintop to see if it would make it home alive — but instead that he worried that insulating children from any challenges or even temporary moments of lack was something to be wary of. Having grown up seeing things he would never wish on anyone, Peter said these concerns weren’t just about character building for its own sake, but rather regarded readiness; because however safe and friendly a place might seem, he knew only too well that trouble could be closer than anyone thought.
Viola understood these and other related fears, but she considered them more broadly in terms of the Kosmosphere’s future society. The free availability of food, shelter and other essential resources — for adults as well as children — would create a post-scarcity society of a kind untested for any great length of time. The Terradox colony w
as the closest analogue, but researchers and their families moved there knowing that they would be sent home if they didn’t contribute productively. On the Kosmosphere, moving further and further from Earth on its one-way course, such an incentive wouldn’t be present.
“Five seconds,” Peter said, quite loudly.
“Until what?” Viola asked. She counted down in her head.
“There’s one more,” her father Robert called from the projection area in front of the viewing wall.
Viola turned to Peter and mocked an angry expression. “You weren’t supposed to watch this before the rest of us.”
Peter shrugged. “I like to make sure things are working as they should.”
“Katie,” Robert said, his voice firmer. “I have one more present.” He then held his right hand forward, moving it from behind his back, and held out a small box wrapped in green paper.
Katie looked on, confused.
“Look under the table for a green box,” Viola said. “Grandad means that he wrapped another one in that kind of paper. It must be in there with the others.”
“Hmm, I’m not so sure…” Peter said, looking away from Viola as he delivered a signal in the form of a wink.
Over in the projection area, Robert reached backwards and touched the viewing wall. In an instant, the backdrop of Terradox vanished and the projected figures disappeared.
At least, three of them did.
As Viola’s jaw hit the floor and Katie’s confusion doubled, Robert Harrington stepped forward. “Happy birthday, darling,” he said to Katie, echoing his initial greeting.
Peter looked around the room at the shocked faces — Vic and Kayla Hawthorne were almost as stunned as Viola — then tapped Katie on the shoulder. “Go and say hello,” he encouraged her.
Katie still didn’t quite get it, but at this point Viola leapt from her chair and ran towards her father. Almost frightened to believe it was real, she then tightly hugged him for the first time in more than four years.
“How are you here?” she asked through tears of joy, parting only to let Katie in as the little girl finally realised that Robert wasn’t a projection after all.
“I came in on a cargo ship last night,” he explained. When Katie reached him, he crouched to her level. He kissed her on the forehead and handed her the small gift in his hands, resisting the strong urge to tell her she had her late grandmother’s eyes. As true as that was — and it was the truest thing he had ever known — saying it out loud would likely have unnecessarily upset Viola on what was already an emotionally charged day for everyone.
Little Katie was lost for words, too surprised to be as talkative to Robert as she had been minutes earlier — back when at least part of her mind had ‘known’ that he wasn’t really there.
“I can’t believe you pulled it off,” Peter said to Robert. “I was struggling to keep a straight face!”
Vic and Kayla Hawthorne rose to their feet beside Peter, waiting their turns to greet Robert having known him during their own time on Terradox.
Viola shot a look of faux rage at Peter for being in on the trick, then turned back to her father. “So how long are you here?” she asked. “When are you going back to Terradox?”
At that point, Robert Harrington surprised everyone one more time:
“I’m not.”
two
After four years of intensive flight training, Chase Jackson could dodge the countless obstacles in the sky over Terradox without batting an eyelid. His hands and eyes were one, like a pianist delivering a note-perfect concerto.
The narrowing pathways and pop-up obstacles were randomised during each test flight, with all of them digitally projected rather than actually present. Their convincingness was total, however, and the consequences of any physically harmless ’crash’ could be grave for Chase’s career progression.
Speed was of the essence today more so than usual, with only a few minutes remaining until a much-anticipated ceremony began at Terradox’s revamped Romotech Production Zone. This ceremony at the RPZ would conclude with the launch into orbit of the embryonic romosphere which had been painstakingly designed over the last few years and which would ultimately expand to a colossal size. The Kosmosphere, as it would remain known only until Holly revealed its name at the ceremony, would become Chase’s home in just three years’ time.
Chase didn’t know if it would be his home forever — like many others, he held deep hopes that the Kosmosphere would become a launching point for greater and grander exploration of the solar system and beyond — but he knew there would be no coming back. He would miss Terradox and those who stayed behind, just as he already missed Earth and the overwhelming majority of humanity who remained there, but Chase Jackson was not a man to shy away from adventure.
His punctual presence at the launch ceremony was crucial given that he had been advertised as the guest of honour. Holly was going to be the one to initiate the launch, as Ekaterina Rusev had explicitly insisted, but Chase’s position as the best known public figure who was currently on Terradox but set to depart for the Kosmosphere made it symbolically important for him to be at Holly’s side. Viola, Peter and now Robert Harrington were all on Earth, leaving only a few well known faces who had remained on Terradox to date but would depart in three years. Everyone knew by now that Holly herself was far too attached to the Terradox colony to quite literally jump ship, but she had nothing but support for the Kosmosphere project.
All eyes were on the launch ceremony — on Earth and the Venus station as well as on Terradox — and symbolic continuity was important.
That was what Chase had been told, anyway, but even without such an invitation he wouldn’t have missed the launch for the world.
His aircraft, a small two-person plane known as a Wasp, had a considerable distance to cover in the next few minutes. Timekeeping had never been Chase’s strongest suit, and a stubborn determination to score a flawless run in a training flight through Terradox’s most challenging conditions was in danger of making him late.
Wasps like this were often used on Earth for flying low over population centres where regulations — archaic regulations, in the eyes of many — prohibited autonomous flights. Human-piloted planes and spacecraft were now few and far between in any other non-training scenarios, but everyone understood that the endless possibilities of what the Kosmosphere’s pioneers might one day face in terms of missions or technology-related challenges meant that retaining the ability to manually perform complex flight-related functions was crucial.
There was extra oomph in the movement of Chase’s Wasp today due to its race against the clock. Even through the joyous rush of acing his Hell Run, he now wished he’d put it off until after the ceremony.
The hardest part of a flight through the so-called Hell Run was always the almost-impossibly strong winds which had been created to push trainee pilots to the limit. Despite their intensity, however, Holly never hesitated to tell Chase that these winds weren’t a patch on what her karrier had faced during its unplanned manual descent on the out-of-control Netherdox romosphere. Going by what he had heard from others who were with Holly during that mission, he didn’t doubt this statement for a second.
Regardless, Chase had today achieved his target of his first flawless Hell Run and wore an appropriately wide smile as he dodged the final few comparatively unchallenging obstacles that littered the sky in his present position.
He was currently passing over the Primosphere, one of the colony’s largest research zones and one which was now covered by an enormous dome. Few had much of an idea of what went on inside, but Chase’s position in the colony’s hierarchy — not to mention his ongoing relationship with Nisha Kohli, whose father Romesh now ran the whole Primosphere division — meant that he knew a lot more than most. He knew that Romesh had overseen serious breakthroughs which were rewriting humanity’s understanding of some core biological and evolutionary truths, and he knew that at the core of it all lay a mysterious organism known onl
y as Nancy.
With a name originating from the fact that the third variation of a ninth experiment was the first to bear fruit — experiment ‘9-C’ was quickly corrupted into the near-homonymous ‘Nancy’ — Nancy was a point of sometimes contentious interest among those with a say in the colony’s administration.
Romesh dodged direct questions even from his immediate family, but Chase knew enough to feel one part intrigued and one part troubled every time he flew over the domed Primosphere. For within that artificial atmosphere designed to mimic primordial Earth, Nancy had supposedly come into being via abiogenesis and had since proceeded to develop into an increasingly complex and unfamiliar life-form. Chase wasn’t quite sure if ‘develop’ was the best word, or if something like ‘evolve’ or ‘mutate’ may have been more appropriate; and nor did he know how much of Nancy’s development had occurred autonomously and how much had been prompted by Romesh’s deliberate manipulation of its surroundings.
‘Its’ surroundings?… Chase pondered as he watched the Primosphere pass underneath his feet. Or should that be ‘her’ surroundings?
All Chase knew was that Nancy was by now a mature organism having been closely monitored since his own days as the subject of an experiment, way back during the ill-fated isolation test conducted in the Little Venus training zone he was about to fly over.
Though much had changed in and around Little Venus, the site of a near-disaster four years earlier, the zone was still used for its initial purpose of training astronauts. Although currently empty while everyone attended the launch ceremony, the entire area was typically teeming with both trainers and trainees.
Of late, Chase had worn both hats; and although he still had a lot to learn from Holly before any trainee would look at him the same way they looked at her, for the last year he had been assisting in passing on his own knowledge of what was needed in an astronaut. While he had never participated in a real exploratory mission — a point some raised, albeit quietly — Chase had logged far more training and simulation hours than anyone else in a position to offer such assistance.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 87