Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  The loneliness of space had provided only too much opportunity for guilt to build within Holly’s mind, and she consistently tried to remind herself that the Venus station was an important and worthwhile endeavour; a lifeboat for humanity which, while regrettably small, at least ensured that life would go on no matter how bad things got on Earth.

  There was always an element of ‘never say never’ in Holly’s thoughts about leaving Earth for the last time, but the Global Union’s collapse — a necessary precursor to any return — felt so far away that it would be foolish to even hope for it.

  With her final sweep of the Karrier almost complete in preparation for the VIPs who would be boarding imminently, Holly stepped into the utility room.

  “Son of a bitch…” she snapped, slamming the door behind her.

  Three dirty plates lay scattered on the table, and the fact that only one other person was on board settled the question of who was responsible.

  Grav, the Karrier’s brusque security officer, had left a mess like this behind him on only one previous occasion. Back then, during their first trip back from Venus, Holly had confronted him and made it clear that her duties of operating and maintaining the Karrier while chaperoning its civilian passengers to Venus did not extend to being his personal maid. He hadn’t done it again since — until now.

  This time, as Grav clearly knew very well, Holly had no choice but to take care of it. There was no obvious reason why her next batch of VIP passengers might want to look inside the utility room, but it had to be as spotless as everywhere else… just in case. She didn’t know whether this was Grav’s idea of a practical joke or a move borne of spite, but either way it was the last thing she needed

  For the longest six months of their lives, the two had travelled hundreds of millions of miles together without becoming either friends or enemies. They kept to themselves as much as possible during each return journey and rarely spoke more than a few words, which led Holly towards assuming that the intent behind his petty decision to leave a mess in the utility room was unlikely to be humorous.

  After gritting her teeth and dealing with the mess, Holly glanced at her wristband. With four minutes until landing, it was time to take her place in the control room. This was her favourite spot in the Karrier and where she would wait alone while its final cargo was loaded.

  For the upcoming and final trip to Venus, the passenger count had been limited to just five in order to maximise the space available for important cargo. Holly had spent much of her current journey refitting the Karrier’s interior to this end, first stripping out the old passengers’ quarters and then converting the emergency landers at each end of the Karrier into the new quarters.

  It irked Holly that some of the passengers she had been chaperoning to the station had bought their places rather than earned them, but she grudgingly accepted the rationale that their money was needed to buy crucial materials on Earth’s increasingly vast black market.

  Having to wait on far fewer rich passengers than usual was something Holly was looking forward to, and this thought had kept her spirits up during the often-exhausting refit.

  Grav hadn’t helped with any of it, but Holly hadn’t asked him to; a casual observer may well have noted that the two were as stubborn as each other, and they may well have been correct.

  Upon leaving the utility room, Holly caught sight of Grav standing impatiently close to the Karrier’s main entrance ramp. He was clearly keen to feel Earth beneath his feet, for some reason or another, and with almost four minutes until the landing she couldn’t let his nonsense with the plates pass without comment.

  “What the hell was that mess in the utility room?” she called along the corridor. “Right before Rusev comes on board and you know this place has to be ready, you want to show me who’s in charge? Is that it?”

  Grav said nothing.

  “Next time you want to send me some kind of message, I’m right here,” Holly added. “You’re a big boy, aren’t you? We don’t need these games.”

  At this, Grav grinned slightly before catching himself and returning to his default scowl. “Listen to me, Hollywood,” he called back, his Serbian accent as strong as ever. “If I wanted to send you a message, you would not have to ask what it was. Trust me on that.”

  Two

  Rusev

  Ekaterina Rusev sat quietly on the viewing platform at the edge of her Rusentra launch complex, the only remaining space port on Earth and a pale imitation of many that had come before it.

  With the incoming Karrier one of only two space-worthy vehicles left in her fleet — and with her fleet the only one not completely destroyed during Earth’s tumultuous recent past — it seemed likely that this landing and the launch to follow would be the last action the site would ever see.

  The Karrier approached as smoothly as ever, set to land autonomously with Holly’s expert hands ready to take over should any manual intervention prove necessary. It never had in the past and it didn’t today — the Karrier met the ground like a feather meeting grass.

  As the ageing matriarch of the Rusentra corporation, Rusev was ultimately in charge of the enormous research station orbiting Venus and thus ultimately responsible for the wellbeing of its 4,000 inhabitants. They would be safe and well whatever happened on Earth, but Rusev couldn’t easily push from her mind the fact that only one person in a million was so lucky.

  She was glad to be able to house any of them, but dearly wished it hadn’t come to this; the station had been conceived and engineered decades earlier as a research outpost, not the last-resort refuge from tyranny as which it would now serve.

  A handful of senior Rusentra officials watched along with Rusev as the Karrier touched down, but none would be making the trip. These individuals were the precious few who were trusted enough to work within the closed compound but had chosen not to leave Earth, almost universally because they had children for whom they deemed station life unsuitable. Rusev tried everything in her power to convince them of the far greater dangers that came with staying on Earth, particularly stressing that their employment history at Rusentra would be like bullseyes on their foreheads for the Global Union’s ruthless secret police.

  Everyone close to Rusev who had wanted to leave for the station was already there; it was barely a stretch to consider the station as a lifeboat, and like any good captain she insisted upon being last to board.

  Many within Rusentra openly wondered why GU supremo Roger Morrison had opted to allow station-bound launches to take place when blocking them would have been well within his physical power. Leading experts in multiple disciplines had fled to the station in recent months, keen to free themselves from the GU’s shackles, and in Rusev’s mind the theory that made most sense was that Morrison thought himself better off without this resentful intelligentsia.

  There was also a secondary reason, she posited, in that the apparent evacuation allowed Morrison to maintain a populist narrative that while the everyday people of Earth were pulling together in hard times, wealthy elites were abandoning them for pastures new.

  What no one outside of Rusev’s inner circle understood was that her departure to the Venus station was anything but an admission of defeat in a personal and corporate battle against Morrison that had long preceded his foray into politics. This was retreat, not defeat; and from a safe distance, plans were already afoot to bring Morrison down before it was too late.

  No one in the room resented Rusev’s imminent departure, nor that of her closest confidante: Yury ‘Spaceman’ Gardev. As a veteran of more missions than anyone could count and holder of the eternal distinction of being the first human born in space, Yury commanded respect like few others. His position at Rusev’s side did her public approval no harm at all, and news of his forthcoming arrival on the station had likewise raised morale among its inhabitants.

  Just moments after the Karrier safely touched down, Rusev saw its security officer emerge from the main entrance ramp. Grav had come well recommended
and had proven his worth over the past few years, earning his spot on the station and positioning himself as a likely candidate to head its security team before long.

  The urgency in his steps gave Rusev cause for mild concern, however, and she watched keenly as he greeted the ground security team and instructed them to start loading the pre-screened cargo. From there he headed directly towards the viewing platform. The security guard at its door let him through, naturally enough, and once inside he immediately offered to escort the two most important passengers of all to their hastily configured quarters.

  “I’m not going quite yet,” Rusev explained. “But is something wrong? You were moving with a lot of urgency out there. Part of me thought you were going to tell us something we don’t want to hear.”

  “I am here to report that there is nothing to report,” Grav said, speaking in his typical contraction-free staccato way. “We are all clear for general boarding, as soon as the cargo is loaded. But as I said, you can both board immediately.”

  “How’s Holly?” Rusev asked.

  Grav shrugged, surprised by the sudden change of subject. “Her usual self. Why?”

  “Is she coming out?”

  This time, he shook his head.

  “I didn’t think so,” Rusev said. “Anyway, our two paying passengers are due any minute now. I told them not to be early. I’ll be boarding soon, once I’ve finished a few things in here.”

  “I’ll be boarding now,” Yury announced to Grav, rising to his feet with no small effort. “I want to catch up with Holly before we take off; something tells me she could use a friendly face after so long with only yours to look at!”

  Grav forced a laughed before leading the old man outside towards the security cordon.

  Rusev watched from inside as Yury raised his arms to allow a quick pat-down, but Grav sent him on his way with a tip of the head.

  An armoured vehicle pulled up at the edge of the compound as Grav was returning to Rusev. When his instincts pulled him towards it, she knocked on the glass and called him back inside with several exaggerated hand gestures.

  “Those are our final passengers,” she said, stating the obvious as soon as Grav reached her side once more. “They’ve paid handsomely for their seats, so we’ll let them move at their own pace for now.”

  Grav nodded absently, looking outside in anticipation of his first sighting. “Who are they? With money like that — enough to pay for the last two seats — they must be known, no?”

  “Not really,” Rusev said. “They’re old money… English. And with the amount of old money they’ve given us for their seats, I want their ride to be as comfortable as possible. I need you to check them as thoroughly as you would check anyone else, of course, but they don’t need an escort to the cordon.”

  “What about Dante?” Grav asked, referencing the Rusentra engineer who would round out the tight group making the last planned journey to Venus. “Where the hell is he?”

  Rusev pointed to the vehicle. “I asked him to drive them here. I didn’t want any more people than necessary on site.”

  “I will guide him in to a safe parking spot,” Grav said, gazing at the car with narrow eyes and evidently taken aback that Rusev had placed so much faith in a man he found it difficult to even tolerate. “Call me when you are ready to board and I will unlock the cordon. Everyone else, it has been an honour serving as your security officer. Be well.”

  The few people around Rusev bid farewell to Grav, who they’d always seen as a highly competent individual if not a particularly likeable one.

  “Remember that this is only goodbye for now,” Rusev insisted to her assembled confidantes, trying to raise a mood that had perceptibly shifted with the car’s arrival.

  Her departure was now so imminent that the gravity of the situation had truly sunk in, and she dearly wished she could have believed her own words.

  Three

  Yury

  “Knock knock,” Yury Gardev said, announcing his presence at the control room’s open door.

  He stepped in and looked around, surprised to find it empty.

  “Who’s there?” Holly jokingly asked from a hiding spot behind the door.

  Yury’s face broke into a wide smile, the kind reserved for reunions after far too long apart. “Hollywood,” he beamed, affectionately using the nickname that had started as something of an insult when he first encountered her as a trainee astronaut some two decades earlier.

  “Spaceman,” she replied. “I heard you coming.”

  After a long and overdue hug, the old man sat down. He made a point of avoiding the pilot’s seat. “So tell me, how have you been holding up? It’s lonely up there… I know that better than anyone.”

  Holly took her seat next to him and thought over her reply for a few seconds. “It is,” she eventually said, seeing no sense in lying to Yury of all people. “I don’t have anyone left to miss, so I didn’t think I’d feel it as much as I did. But it’s not just the isolation, it’s the loneliness. Still… I’d sure as hell rather live in Rusev’s world than Morrison’s, so it’s a price I’ll pay.”

  “It was the loneliness,” Yury corrected. “I’m here now, and Rusev and Dante will be boarding in the next few minutes. You’re with friends now, Holly, and when we get to the station you’ll be surrounded by them. You’re a hero for what you’ve done here. I can only imagine how it must have felt, coming from where you’ve come from to end up waiting on rich passengers. But that’s the smallest part of this. You’re getting us safely to the station, and you’ve already delivered mountains of priceless cargo.”

  “Dante…” Holly said, as though she’d momentarily forgotten that another reunion was imminent. “How’s he been doing?”

  “I haven’t seen a lot of him, but I do know he’s very keen to see you,” Yury replied.

  Mercifully, Ekaterina Rusev arrived just in time to obliterate the brewing awkwardness. Neither Holly nor Yury had heard her approaching the control room, having been far too busy getting reacquainted.

  Holly rose to greet her, politely rather then deferentially.

  “I appreciate the sentiment,” Rusev grinned with a slight shake of her head, “but for goodness’ sake, Holly, we’re hardly strangers.”

  “It’s good to you see you again,” Holly replied.

  “Dimitar tells me you’ve still never set foot on the station,” Rusev said, referencing her only son who was in charge of things and would remain so until she arrived. “Grav has, but not you.”

  “My place on the station is my reward for getting every passenger there safely,” Holly replied. “That was our deal, and that’s been the light at the end of this tunnel. As for Grav…” she trailed off and shrugged, more disdainfully then dismissively.

  “I know he can be abrasive, but please try to get along,” Rusev said. “For my sake, okay?”

  Holly simply nodded, knowing there was no sense in getting into a discussion on this.

  Rusev beckoned Yury with a tilt of her head, encouraging him to join her in their makeshift but relatively comfortable quarters ahead of take-off. ”One more run, Holly,” she said. “Just one more run.”

  “And the station is the greatest place you’ll ever see,” Yury chimed in.

  Holly smiled for the first time in a while. She had watched countless hours of footage from the station’s cameras and knew how remarkable the futuristic surroundings were, but the excitement in Yury’s voice warmed her heart. He had seen all there was to see, and his almost childlike wonder over their destination ramped up her already high anticipation levels.

  “Everything you’ve been through, Holly… it’ll all be worth it,” Rusev said from the doorway. “I promise.”

  Four

  Grav

  Rusentra’s on-the-ground security team, having been ready and waiting to load the Karrier’s final cargo as soon as it touched down, finished their task in little under fifteen minutes. For fifteen more, they stood around talking to Grav — the leader w
ho was about to bid them farewell for the last time.

  The Karrier’s three final passengers remained in an armoured vehicle at Grav’s request, until an announcement from the Karrier hurried things along.

  “How long does it take to say bye?” Holly’s voice roared from the external P.A. system. “Rusev wants to go. Get on with your job out there.”

  Grav shook his head in disgust at the tone, and his anger only grew when his former underlings chided him to “do what she says” and ”follow the boss’s orders.”

  One thing anyone who knew Grav understood was that he wasn’t a man who lightly tolerated being undermined, and his irritation was particularly acute given that he had just been embarrassed in front of friends and colleagues he might very well never see again.

  He gestured towards the car and held out a single finger, clearly ordering its driver to emerge alone. Dante Parker, a Rusentra engineer who looked more like a hairdresser in Grav’s estimation, stepped out.

  “Gentlemen,” Dante said, drawing no reply. “Come on then, Grav, get the frisking over with. I know you don’t want to get in any more trouble with Holly…”

  This drew a reaction from the small posse of security officers, who hollered and roared with laughter that Dante of all people had gotten one over on Grav.

  It was bad enough being embarrassed by Holly passing on an order, but being publicly put down by Dante Parker was too much for Grav to take. Grav dragged him towards the security cordon and instructed him to raise his hands. He then walked behind him, leaned in close, and waited.

  When he was done waiting, he waited some more — right until the symptoms of Dante’s trepidation escalated from shaking limbs to a high pitched whimper: “If you’re going to do something, get it over with.”

  Grav stepped back and unlocked the cordon. “It’s coming when you least expect it, pretty boy,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Watch your step.”