Holly knew that the suits’ life-support systems couldn’t be counted on to make it to the top of the mound and back, and she knew that Robert would never allow the children outside at all unless he knew it was safe. With these two thoughts in mind, she took a dozen or so heavy steps until she faced the window where the Harringtons were standing. From there, she spoke to Robert directly:
“All the readings are fine. I’m going to remove my helmet to show that the air is breathable.”
Robert waved his hands to warn her off what he considered a reckless idea. Viola’s expression gave little away. Bo beamed an excited smile and held two thumbs up.
Holly completed the several steps necessary to remove her helmet. Before lifting it off fully, but after exposing herself to the external atmosphere, she took a deep breath. Only one word could describe the taste of the air: dry.
That such a mundane word was on her mind — rather than something like “acidic” or “metallic” — calmed Holly even further.
The Harringtons didn’t yet know that Holly had breathed the planet’s air. Had they been Grav and Dante instead of three worried civilians, she would have lifted the helmet and proceeded to clutch her throat in mock suffocation. But they weren’t, so she didn’t.
She calmly removed the helmet and held it under her right arm, cutting the dashing figure of a headless ghost.
“See?”
The Harringtons couldn’t hear without the aid of the helmet’s microphone to pick up Holly’s speech, but they knew what she’d said.
As Bo disappeared from view, Robert wore a sterner expression than Holly deemed appropriate given the welcome and surprising development that the planet’s air was breathable.
“Where’s Bo?” she shouted up to Viola, over-enunciating to ensure her lips were easy to read.
The girl glanced backwards and laughed before mouthing a reply: “Packing his stuff.”
ten
Upon Holly’s return to the lander, Robert’s body language made clear that he still had serious reservations about the plan to venture outside.
“We can’t just sit in here and hope someone comes,” she said, alone with the knowledge of how unlikely it was that anyone would.
“But why do we all have to search? It strikes me as a colossal waste of energy. We could stay here while you go looking.”
“Not an option,” Holly said.
“Why?”
“Let’s say it takes an hour to reach that mound. And let’s say when we reach the top, we spot Rusev’s lander or the Karrier a further two hours away. If we all go to the mound now, that whole journey would take three hours.”
Robert sighed slightly, seeing what she was getting at.
She continued anyway: “But if I go alone, I would have to come back to get the three of you, and then we would all have to walk the whole way. It’s three hours versus six. I’ll keep an eye on the sun to make sure we don’t get caught out in the dark, but I don’t want to be out there any longer than we have to.”
“She’s right, Dad,” Bo chimed in, still stuffing as much as he could into an already bulging backpack.
Holly leaned in closer to Robert. “Is it him?”
Robert shook his head to dismiss the thought. “He’s perfectly ambulant. That’s not the issue.”
“So what is?”
“Water; exposure; sunset; fauna… how many do you need?”
These were sensible enough concerns, so Holly addressed them one by one. Appropriate clothing, an emergency canvas shelter and paying attention to the sky would sufficiently reduce the potential problems of exposure and sunset, she said, while the presence of aggressive fauna was a remote but admitted possibility. Holly took care to speak very quietly as she impressed upon Robert that his family would be in hopeless trouble if she went alone and fell victim to such fauna while they watched from the lander, meaning that their presence at her side posed little extra risk.
The issue of water — Robert’s primary concern — troubled Holly least of all. As she explained, the lander functioned as an emergency habitat and had extremely efficient water-reclamation abilities. She also stressed the obvious benefit of being surrounded by a compositionally Earth-like atmosphere.
“What about access to water while we’re out there?” Robert asked.
“We won’t be out for long. And trust me: I’ll bring more than we need.”
Robert swallowed hard. “Okay.”
“Three rules,” Holly boomed in an upbeat tone, clapping her hands together to capture everyone’s attention. “One: the Karrier was carrying some extremely volatile cargo, including virus samples for vaccine development, so you can’t just run up to it as soon as it comes into sight. Two: watch your footing at all times. Three: Do not… touch… anything.”
“Anything else?” Bo asked like an attentive student.
“Yeah. If anyone wants to use the bathroom, now would be the time.”
While the Harringtons changed into the kind of warm-weather clothes Holly recommended, she checked on the condition of the potted plant she had rescued from the doomed Karrier seconds before it and the lander parted ways.
She didn’t know exactly what kind of plant it was — an edible herb, most likely — and she had never bothered to ask anyone. Her attachment to the plant, such as it was, came from the daily waterings she’d given it during the four-month period in which she’d covered hundreds of millions of miles with no other consistent company. Grav had been present onboard for as long as Holly, of course, but his preference for quiet privacy meant that they’d often gone several days without even seeing each other.
And though the plant’s absolute dependence on Holly’s attentive care bred her initial attachment to it, she had since come to see it as a lot more than something she had to water every night. For in this time of such uncertainty and difficulty, Holly came to view the plant — as crazy as she knew this would sound to anyone else — as something of an inspiration. The plant didn’t care that it was confined to a tiny pot or exposed to only the utility room’s artificial light; in defiance of its surroundings — even more restrictive than Holly’s own — all it wanted to do was keep growing. All it wanted to do was live.
Glad to see that the plant had suffered no real damage, she carefully picked up scattered pieces of soil from the inside of her backpack and placed them all on the area around the plant’s roots and patted it down tightly. This exceptionally hardy Grow-Lo soil, another innovation engineered by Rusev’s firm many years earlier, could pass for the real thing to most untrained eyes. Holly was by now used to its slightly spongey feel, but this was certainly less passable as real than its appearance.
“We’re ready,” Robert announced from the other side of the lander.
Holly gently placed the plant in the large backpack which was already near its capacity thanks to the all-important water containers she had filled via the lander’s cooler moments earlier. She then rose to her feet, typed a security code to open the door to the lander’s air lock and ushered the Harringtons through it.
Each family member carried their own limited provisions and chosen belongings. As the group’s self-appointed water carrier Holly bore by far the greatest weight, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle.
“Whatever this place is,” Bo began, his voice overflowing with excitement, “we’re going to be the first people to walk on it. Think about it: a whole planet to ourselves!”
Holly and Viola chuckled slightly at the boy’s positivity. Already, Holly could tell that whatever medical condition Bo was battling hadn’t stripped him of his spirit; since moments after their touchdown, his eyes had been wide with wonder and his speech brimming with excitement and superlatives.
“And while we are walking,” Holly said to him, “I want you to mark the dusty ground with your heel. That way we’d be able to follow the path back to the lander even if it got dark quickly and our flashlights could only see a little way ahead. It also means that anyone else who might find
the lander while we’re out would know which way we’ve gone.”
There was certainly a degree of practical utility in this suggestion, but Holly’s prime motivation was giving Bo something to do. She encouraged him to take the lead in descending the long ladder to the outer hatch.
“Can I be first to go outside, too?” he pleaded.
“Hmmmm…” Holly said, pretending to think about it.
“Please?”
After struggling her way down the ladder with a tall backpack full of water, Holly initiated the opening of the outer hatch. While it opened, she turned to Viola. “What do you think, should we let him go first?”
Bo looked up at them like a dog waiting for a treat.
“I guess,” Viola said, ruffling her brother’s shaggy hair.
“Yesss!”
Robert’s eyebrows remained furrowed, his gaze focusing solely on the mound in the distance as the hatch opened and Bo scampered to the short ladder.
The dry-tasting air hit Holly’s lips again. No one else seemed to notice; she knew that they would be feeling the same things she had less than an hour earlier, when the surprising normality of the atmosphere had sunk in after her first few tentative sips of air. It was one thing to know from the readings that the air was breathable and the temperature relatively comfortable, but it was something else to feel it.
“Wait at the bottom,” Holly called to Bo. “Don’t even think about moving.”
Viola went next, followed by Robert.
Holly then entered a numerical code on the lander’s security lock and loudly shared it with the Harringtons once more, for use “in the extremely unlikely event” that anything happened to her and they needed to get back inside.
“Where the hell are we?” Viola asked, slowly taking in a panorama of the inexplicable alien world.
“Language,” Robert snapped.
“Sorry,” the girl said, before turning back to Holly. “So yeah… where are we?”
Holly tilted her head towards the imposing mound. “On the way to find out. The view from that mound will tell us something, whatever that something might be.”
“I’ll lead,” Bo said.
He set off at a good walking pace. Holly and Viola followed as a pair some twenty paces behind him, with Robert bringing up the rear.
“That thing looks pretty far away,” Viola said after a few quiet minutes. “I’d say more than an hour, even at the speed he’s going. How long does it usually take to reach the horizon?”
“The eye-level to sea-level horizon on Earth is around an hour’s walk at a leisurely pace,” Robert said, slightly quickening his own pace to draw level with them. “But, naturally, elevation changes that greatly; looking up at or down from a mountain, for example, you could see a lot further.”
“And the moon’s horizon would appear twice as close as Earth’s,” Holly said, “so without knowing the size of this place we can’t really tell. But even if it takes us a few hours to reach the mound, that would be fine. The sun hasn’t moved much; definitely not enough to suggest it’ll be pitch dark anytime soon.”
Bo’s voice, now coming from slightly less than twenty paces ahead, interrupted Holly’s thoughts: “Guys, guys! I found something on the ground!”
Everyone rushed to reach him.
“What is it?” Viola asked, keeping pace with Holly.
“I don’t know… but it’s made of metal.”
eleven
“Don’t touch it,” Holly yelled as she rushed to see what Bo had found.
“I wasn’t going to!”
She arrived and crouched down. The thin piece of metal was no more than a few inches long and lay beyond Bo’s furthest footprints, indicating that he hadn’t uncovered it by disturbing the dust.
“It’s ours,” Holly said after a very brief inspection. “From the underside of the lander. There’s a lot going on when these old landers get ready for touchdown; a lot of different stages and a lot of vibration. We might find bigger pieces than this.”
Everyone accepted the answer.
“From now on we walk together,” Robert announced.
Holly nodded in support, glad that he was getting involved.
The group proceeded shoulder by shoulder, walking in silence until Viola unexpectedly addressed a question to Bo: “You don’t think any of this has anything to do with that Nibiru thing, do you?”
“What Nibiru thing?” Holly butted in.
“I paid him to write a physics essay for me about some made-up planet,” Viola explained. “I didn’t know it was made-up until I got an F and the teacher said it would have been an A for creative writing.”
“You paid him to write an essay?” Robert scolded. He then turned to Bo. “And you took the money?”
“It wasn’t much,” Bo said. “But anyway, the basic idea was that all the crop failures and natural disasters might have been caused by a hidden planet passing close to Earth.”
Two hours ago, Holly would have dismissed such a theory out of hand. Now, though, she took it seriously enough to focus on specific holes. One in particular jumped to the front of her mind: “What about its gravity? If it passed close enough to affect Earth, scientists would have known all about it.”
“Something could be, I don’t know, cancelling out the external gravity,” Bo said, shrugging in acknowledgement that he didn’t know much about the terms he was using or even whether they were the right ones. “Maybe the same forcefield that makes it invisible? Or maybe not. I didn’t say anything about gravity being what caused the problems. It could have been magnetic interference, or maybe some kind of interference we don’t even know about yet. Because there are a lot of things we don’t know about.”
“You can say that again,” Holly said. The idea of an external force causing the famine didn’t exactly fit with Bo’s mother’s well-publicised discovery that the catastrophic famine appeared to have been deliberately engineered, but she admired his inquisitiveness. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Eleven.”
Holly said nothing. Before learning how well-spoken and deep-thinking Bo was, she had previously assumed him to be around eight and would have been less surprised to hear him say six.
“Tell her the other thing, too,” Viola said, nudging Bo’s shoulder. “About the interview.”
Holly was all ears.
“I don’t know how much this means,” Bo said, “or even if it means anything, but it is kind of weird. We covered Devastation Day in my history class a few months ago, and before the topic started I looked at V’s old stuff to get an idea of what we’d be covering.”
“He’s a nerd,” Viola tossed in.
“Shut up! So anyway, her textbook had a video about the attack at the MXA space base. You know, Morrison Astronautics, where he built all his prototypes and everything? But then when I watched the same video in my own textbook once it got updated with the class material, part of the video had changed.”
Holly had already been interested; now, she was absorbed. “Which part?”
“An interview,” Bo said. “In V’s textbook, a security guy says there was a warning call an hour before it happened. But in my textbook, there’s a new interview with the same guy and he says the warning came ten minutes before it happened. If you were the guy who took that call, how could you forget? And why did they reshoot that interview but none of the others?”
They were good questions. It was good information. If the GU’s Education Board really was tampering with textbooks to make slight adjustments in the narrative, that spoke to the likelihood of further attempts to actively spread disinformation.
“There are two more things I don’t like,” Bo said, reading Holly’s face and taking the opportunity to empty his mind of the thoughts.
A lot of theories were coming out at once, but Holly was keen to hear everything and try to isolate the parts which made some kind of sense. “Go on…”
“Years before anything happened, Morrison invested in a firm that w
as working on weather manipulation. Like, for military stuff. And this was more than just cloud-seeding or anything like that. The thing I read said this was about catastrophe-level storms and earthquakes. Tectonic induction, or something. Fast-forward ten years and there are disasters all over the place. Then fast-forward again and suddenly Morrison is in charge. I’m just saying.”
“What’s the other thing?” Robert asked, surprising everyone with his non-dismissive tone. Bo’s theories couldn’t all be true — the disasters couldn’t have been caused by both interplanetary interference and terrestrial weather manipulation — but they were certainly food for thought.
“It’s a quote from Morrison,” Bo said, “from his autobiography. Something about humans being parasites.”
Holly cleared her throat. “‘The great majority of humans are nothing more than parasites surviving on the fungus which grows in the shadow of giants.’ Was it that one?”
“Uh, yeah. Have you read that book, too?”
“No,” Holly said. “I just know how much of an asshole he really is.”
After a few minutes of steady progress with no further conversation, Robert gently touched Holly’s arm in an effort to slow her down. She caught on and slowed slightly until the two of them were far enough behind the children to be out of earshot.
“That’s the first I’ve heard about any of what he just said,” Robert explained. “What do you think?”
“About which part?”
“The textbook. What’s the implication? That Morrison destroyed his own facility?”
“I wouldn’t put anything past him,” Holly said. “Would you? I mean, I don’t want to be insensitive, but surely after what happened to Olivia you more than anyone know what he’s capable of?”
Robert nodded slightly; ruefully. “And what about the other thing? The idea of another planet — this one, I assume — causing problems on Earth. Do you think there’s anything in that?”
Holly shook her head. “I very much doubt it.”
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