Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  Many observers had long believed this to be the endgame of the GU project. Ekaterina Rusev was one of them.

  “One man has benefitted from all of this more than any other,” she now said to Robert, concluding a rundown which had contained little concrete information that he or Holly didn’t already know but which nevertheless provided much illuminating context. “I’m not fully convinced that someone as smart as Morrison would have risked unleashing a lethal virus when there’s always a chance of unexpected mutations which could render their own vaccines useless and endanger the inner circle. But unleashing a famine is much safer so long as you have your own isolated food supply; starvation is deadly, but it’s not contagious.”

  For her part, Holly was far from convinced that someone as maniacal as Roger Morrison wouldn’t risk unleashing a lethal virus. But Rusev’s doubts, however strong, evidently suggested there was insufficient evidence to nail him with that particular charge. Holly wasn’t overly concerned by this; there was enough evidence of enough wrongdoing to take Morrison down for good. He would pay for his heinous actions as a whole, she knew, even if certain specific aspects weren’t as provable as others.

  Rusev continued: “And if Olivia truly did discover evidence that the initial famine was deliberately engineered, it doesn’t take a great leap to imagine who might have been behind it.”

  Robert looked quietly at Rusev for several seconds and gulped deeply. Then, he spat it out: “There’s no might have been; Morrison was behind it. Before they killed her, she knew she was in danger.”

  Holly and Rusev looked at each other without speaking.

  He went on: “On the day she died — on the day they killed her — she recorded a video before she left the house. I’d already left for work, before you ask why I didn’t stop her. I wish I had been home to try to talk her out of going to that meeting, but I wasn’t.”

  “What kind of video?” Holly asked, seeing little sense in re-opening Robert’s guilt wounds by patronising him with a platitudinal “it wasn’t your fault” or “you couldn’t have done anything to stop it”.

  “She spoke about what she’d found, in stronger terms than the published paper, and she spoke about what she feared might happen at the meeting that day. She thought she was already in too deep and that the only way out was to go further in. It’s not proof that Morrison had her killed, but combined with the other evidence you already have…”

  Silence circled.

  “The children don’t know about the video,” Robert added. “It’s on a card inside my suitcase, which is in the Karrier with the rest of our luggage.”

  Rusev leaned back. “Until we find it, no one says a word. You don’t tell the children,” she said to Robert, before turning to Holly. “You don’t tell Dante. I won’t tell Yury, and no one will tell Grav. Until that video is right here in my hand, no one says a word.”

  “Why does it have to be a secret?” Holly asked.

  “Holly,” Rusev said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t know where we are or why we’re here, and neither do either of you.” She then flicked her eyes towards the window, where the others could be seen unpacking the materials for the habitat extension. “But part of me thinks that someone else might.”

  twenty-two

  Holly and Robert disembarked the lander in uncomfortable silence. They went their separate ways for now; Robert towards Grav and Bo, Holly towards Dante. Yury and Viola were still unpacking materials from a recessed storage compartment.

  The Habitat Extension Module, already referred to within the group simply as “the extension”, was relatively easy to construct. Less attention to detail was required than would have been the case on a planet with an inhospitable atmosphere, though Yury nonetheless took it upon himself to make sure that everything was done by the book. Given Yury’s personal involvement in testing identical extensions in extreme conditions on Earth, the others readily deferred to his experience and judgement.

  With far greater manual dexterity and manoeuvrability than they would have enjoyed had EVA suits been necessary, the group completed the extension’s physical assembly in under three hours. What may have seemed like a small victory did a lot to lift the group’s spirits, as focusing on something productive — and achieving it — offered a welcome respite from incessantly reflecting on the gravity of their wider situation.

  Bo was particularly impressed by the properties of the extension’s walls; having helped his father and Grav to unroll wide sheets of the material from a tightly wound coil, he couldn’t believe how sturdy it became when flattened out. “It’s like one of those things you slap on your wrist!” he excitedly proclaimed to Grav. “You know, the things that feel hard like a ruler but then roll into themselves when you slap them down?”

  “I guess so,” Grav chuckled. Grav, like Holly, didn’t know much more than the boy; the proprietary material had been created by one of Rusev’s companies decades earlier and similar technology was used within the Venus station to compartmentalise areas as necessary, but that was as far as their knowledge went. And while it had once been at the cutting edge of construction, even Rusev couldn’t deny that her lightweight and sturdy material now seemed archaic relative to the boundless possibilities of romotechnology.

  Grav’s trio then began work on the simple task of constructing interior divisions to act as semi-private sleeping areas. Bo chirpily commented that the top-down floor plan example packed with the materials made the inner walls look like the drawer dividers he’d used at home to separate differently coloured socks.

  Though the lack of windows made it feel smaller than it was, the extension had slightly more than twice the floorspace of the lander and would comfortably accommodate six. Holly and Dante stepped away from their completed section to help with the divisions.

  “One of you might as well help Spaceman,” Grav said. “He is already fixing the connections to the lander. You know, water reclamation and all of those things. We do not need five people for this part.”

  “I’ll go,” Holly volunteered.

  “Good,” Grav said. He then turned to Dante. “And you can make yourself useful by getting six bed frames from the storage recess.”

  “You’ll only need five,” Dante said, trying to ignore Grav’s condescension. “I’m staying in the lander with Rusev and Spaceman.”

  Holly stopped on her way out and looked at Dante. “Why?”

  “To keep an eye on them,” he said. “We don’t all need to be in here. Unless one of you two want to go in there?”

  “I am staying with the kids,” Grav said.

  Holly nodded. “Me too.”

  Dante clapped his hands together and set off. “Perfect. I’ll get the beds.”

  As Dante walked to one side of the lander to gather bed frames from the recessed storage hold, Holly followed two pipes from the extension towards the opposite side of the lander where Yury was connecting them to a previously concealed outlet.

  She heard Yury laughing merrily as he reached the end of a story. “And that,” he said, “is why they really call me Spaceman.”

  Viola laughed along before asking a new question: “So why does everyone call Holly, well, Holly?”

  Ears burning, Holly instinctively stopped where she was; just out of their view.

  “You’re asking the right man,” Yury said in a warm and upbeat tone, “because that name began on the first day I ever met her! I was overseeing the physical testing of our latest intake; for the public program, this is. There were no cameras inside, but the others all knew Holly was being followed by a film crew for the series they were making about the path from wannabe to astronaut. There was resentment because many thought she had been chosen for the wrong reasons. Appearance, marketability… things like this.”

  Holly took a few more steps around the lander until she saw Yury’s back.

  He continued: “They had seen the media promotions and formed their views, but apparently they had not read beyond the headlines.
They probably knew that she was as academically qualified as anyone else, but what they didn’t seem to realise was that she had been a very successful collegiate gymnast… as much of an athlete as anyone else in that room. So when it was her turn for something — I can’t remember exactly which exercise — one smart mouth called out: ‘You’re up, Hollywood.’ And then others started to join in. ‘Let’s see what you got, Hollywood.’ And on and on it went. You know, Hollywood this and Hollywood that.”

  Viola caught a glimpse of Holly over Yury’s shoulder but didn’t react. Yury, who had a habit of gesturing with his hands and looking down as he spoke, didn’t notice the temporary shift of focus in Viola’s gaze.

  “Long story short,” the old man went on, “she held her own in the exercises and ended up second out of seven in the aggregate results. I announced that Ivy Wood had placed second and then congratulated her. And she stood there with a straight face, did not miss a beat, and said: ‘Thanks, but you can call me Holly.’ And ever since that day, I always have.”

  “That’s a cool story,” Viola said, her words stilted by the awkwardness that came from knowing Holly was listening.

  “The story the show painted wasn’t quite true,” Yury said, still none the wiser. “They liked to put me across as a grizzled cosmonaut and Holly as the fresh-faced all-American girl next door, and they liked to pretend that we were closer than we were, because that kind of ‘odd couple’ dynamic is good for ratings. But, to me, she was just another rookie. It wasn’t until much later that we became close; when she finally came to Rusev. When I found out what happened to her when she went with Morrison’s program, I—”

  “How’s it going with the connections?” Holly interrupted, walking forward quickly enough to avoid rousing any suspicion in Yury. She shared a few seconds of eye contact with Viola, who stayed quiet.

  “Talk of the devil,” Yury said, as straightforward as ever. “We’re pretty much done here. The atmospheric regulator is largely redundant, but it’s up and running. This pipe is for power and this big one is for the water reclaimer. How about the divisions? Finished?”

  “Grav’s working on it,” Holly said. “Dante wants to stay in the lander, so we need one less bed frame than we thought.”

  “Are you staying in the extension with us?” Viola asked, butting in.

  “Of course.”

  “Good,” the girl said. A slight but natural smile made clear that she meant it.

  twenty-three

  Once the extension was complete, the whole group gathered in the lander for an evening meal of nutrition powder stirred in warm water. The children struggled with the flavour and, in Viola’s words, “grittiness” of the mixture.

  The girl struggled with the off-putting appearance of the compressed cube of powder as much as she struggled with the taste and consistency of its end product; both with and without a few coffee grains to alter the flavour, it was the least palatable thing she had ever ingested.

  “OMG,” she said after her first sip, as though she had forgotten how awful the same thing tasted earlier in the day. She then filled her cheeks with air and clenched a fist against her mouth to hide a burp or worse. “That is grim.”

  Conversation revolved around the extension itself, as though a tacit agreement had been made to avoid mentioning how crucial the following day’s search for the Karrier would be. The extension had been divided into two main sections: one for the Harringtons, and one for Holly and Grav. There were dorm-like divisions within those sections, but they were less definite.

  In jest, Robert made a passing comment about how the group was like a little global union of its own, with the three members of his English family in one section, the Bulgarian Rusev in the lander along with the Russian Yury and Greek-born Dante, and finally the American Holly and Serbian Grav in the other section of the extension.

  As some chuckled in mild amusement, Yury cleared his throat. “International,” he said, very flatly. “Not global.”

  “Same thing,” Robert replied.

  Yury shifted in his seat. The look in his eyes was one Holly hadn’t seen in a while. “Robert, these things could hardly be more different. There are no nations in the Global Union. There’s no inter in a Global Union. There’s no interchange of ideas, there’s no interest in what works for different people in different places. There are plenty of totalitarian edicts and one-size-fits-all policies that don’t fit anyone, but there is no inter.”

  “I didn’t mean anything political,” Robert said, sufficiently flustered by the intensity of Yury’s reply that his face had turned a deep shade of red.

  “Good,” Yury said. “Because if you want to talk politics, talk to someone else. If you had told me or Holly twenty years ago that we would end up working with Ekaterina and her private for-profit space program, we would have laughed you out of the building. My politics are not Holly’s so I can’t claim to speak for her on everything, but trust me: neither of us would have entertained the notion of jumping in bed with the dynastic wealth of a family like the Rusevs. But here we are, Robert, because none of this has anything to do with politics. Here we are, Robert, because centralised power without representation only ever works out well for one group, and that’s the group that wields it. So forgive an old man who believes in a better world for labouring this point, but it’s one that has to be made: the distinction between an all-powerful global sovereign and an international society is not semantic and it is not political. This distinction is the distinction between tyranny and liberty. And this distinction, Robert… this I will talk about all day.”

  After a few seconds of silence, Grav knocked back his second glass of nutrition powder and rose from his space on the floor. “Time to check the extension’s readings,” he announced.

  This was done at the lander’s control panel, which also displayed data relating to the external atmosphere. Holly and Dante joined Grav to see the latest readings.

  Although the outdoor temperature had dropped during the last hour and reached what Dante insisted was the previous night’s low, it remained significantly higher than the kind of figures Holly had seen in her lander. Such a difference in temperature — like that in humidity — was surprising given the relatively short distance between the two landers, but Holly was glad of it.

  The most important readings were those concerning the extension, and the news on this front was good: the extension’s internal temperature and air composition had remained stable, perfectly in check with the lander despite the changes outside.

  Holly and Grav retreated to the extension with the Harringtons a few minutes later, after saying their goodbyes to the others for the night and arranging to set out in search of the Karrier at first light.

  While Robert was giving Bo his nightly injection and Grav was enjoying a modicum of privacy, Holly sat on the end of Viola’s sturdier-than-it-looked bed as the girl searched through a bag of clothes and took out everything that might have been loose enough to comfortably fit Holly’s more muscular frame.

  After Holly thanked her for the options she presented, Viola moved the conversation in an unexpected direction. “So how old is Dante, anyway?”

  “For you?” Holly said, making no effort to sound anything but stern. “Too old.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Good.”

  Viola then lifted a shirt from the pile she’d given to Holly. “I don’t think you should wear this one,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Viola fought a smile as she delivered her punchline: “Green doesn’t suit you.”

  Holly didn’t see the funny side. “Oh, this isn’t about me. When we get to the station, you can do whatever you want with whoever you want. You’re not a little kid; I get that. But we’re not on the station and until we are, it’s my job to take care of you. It’s also Dante’s job, so I’ll be clear here: if you did like him, you wouldn’t want to get him in trouble.”

  “From who… my dad?” Viola asked, almost laughing.r />
  “Well, yeah. Plus, you know, me and Grav. I don’t think Grav would be too happy to hear about Dante breaking Rule One with a 17-year-old he’s supposed to be protecting. He doesn’t like him as it is.”

  “Whatever. I asked you for a number, not a lecture.”

  Holly ignored Viola’s tone; her expression confirmed that the message had been received, and there was no sense in getting into a fight. She then heard Bo laughing loudly from the other side of the main division, which told her he was with Grav.

  “Try to get some sleep,” she said to Viola. “And thanks for the clothes.”

  “’Night,” Viola replied, half-grunting the word in a teenage tone Holly remembered from her own youth as the kind she used when she wanted someone to know she was still annoyed at them, but not enough for the silent treatment.

  “’Night,” Holly said.

  On the other side of the uncannily lightweight door between the extension’s two main sections, Holly found Robert and Bo trying to convince Grav of something.

  “You think I am stupid?” Grav was saying, light-hearted in his exasperation.

  “It’s true, it’s true!” Bo insisted.

  Grav saw Holly come in. “Listen to this,” he said.

  “I have an invisible ball,” Bo said, on cue.

  “A what?”

  “An invisible toy ball! It’s in the Karrier with our luggage. It’s the size of… I don’t know, an orange, maybe… and there’s a remote control that makes it invisible. Ask my dad.”

  Holly was lost, wrongly assuming there was more to this discussion than the part she’d wandered in on. She looked at Robert in anticipation of a subtle signal to let her know it was a joke at Grav’s expense.