Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  “He really does,” Robert confirmed, smiling slightly but far less excited by the subject than Bo.

  “Seeeee!” the boy taunted.

  “I will believe it when I see it,” Grav said. He turned to Holly. “You are not buying this, are you?”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Holly parroted. “No pun intended.”

  Robert eventually pried Bo away from his friendly argument with Grav and settled down for the night. Holly checked barely twenty minutes later, slightly concerned by the total silence, and found all three of the Harringtons fast asleep between their thin bed frames and even thinner blankets.

  Before retiring for the night, Grav’s final structural checks brought him into Holly’s room. He knocked three times and entered once invited. He looked down at her hardy potted plant as it sat safely on the floor, right-way-up on solid ground for the first time all day.

  “Not bad, Hollywood. All you need now is a video feed of the station and this place would feel like home,” he said, telling the closest thing to a joke that she’d ever heard from him.

  She smiled. “I try.”

  Grav’s expression and tone then sombered before his next comment: “I know why you did not go inside the station during any of our stopovers. But now… now that we are here… I wish you had seen it. Just once, Hollywood, I wish you had seen the view.”

  “I will,” Holly said, forcing out more positivity than she felt internally. “I will.”

  Grav completed his checks and left Holly alone for the night, offering a slight nod as he departed.

  Holly’s early attempts at sleep were thwarted by Grav’s snoring, which made its way through the doorway between his half of the division and Holly’s. She tossed and turned on her bed for a while, despite it being much more comfortable than she’d feared, but exhaustion led to sleep before too long.

  An unknowable amount of time later — between one and two hours, if she had to guess — a quiet but high-pitched alarm began to sound from her wristband’s speaker.

  Holly sat bolt upright and tapped the screen to reveal the problem: Dante’s vitals had flatlined.

  More in diligence than panic, she jumped out of bed to go and check on him. After the false alarm of the red-for-dead dots her wristband had displayed when she landed the previous day, she expected it to be nothing more than some kind of communication or connection problem. Despite these rationalisations, the number on the wristband’s screen which relayed her own heart rate leapt significantly as she hurried out towards the lander.

  Her heart rate began to stabilise as soon as the cool night air hit her skin and she saw Dante standing a few metres from the door.

  “Hell of a view,” he said, “huh?”

  With no moon and no surface-level light, the stars Holly saw when she looked up at the night sky were the brightest she had ever seen. The incredible view was of a kind she’d only seen in the heavily manipulated composite images which had come to be accepted as photography on Earth; the kind of view every human eye was impressed by but few were ever fortunate enough to behold for real. “Sure is,” was all she could say.

  “Well, I did always say I would take you somewhere nice.”

  Dante’s attempt at humour, or charm, or whatever it was, took Holly’s focus away from the heavens and brought it back to the present moment. “There’s something wrong with your wristband,” she said, remembering why she was there.

  “I took it off.”

  “Why? You know I always have my alarm activated.”

  Dante’s face was harder to read than normal, until it slowly broke into a red-handed boyish grin. “Maybe I wanted to see you.”

  “Go to bed,” Holly said. The words were sharp and firm. “Put your wristband back on and leave it on. Is that clear?”

  “Did I wake you? Sorry if I did… I didn’t think you’d be asleep yet.”

  Holly sighed. “Dante, please just go inside and put your wristband on. This is the last thing I need tonight.”

  “At least give me a few minutes to watch the stars,” he relented, pointing down to his heavy walking boots. “It’s such a nice night, it’s not even cold enough to really need these things.”

  “Fine, but no longer than that. The next time someone has to come out from the extension, it’ll be Grav. And he is asleep, so you probably don’t want to be the reason I have to wake him up.”

  “Grav? Message received,” Dante laughed, finding humour in what Holly meant as a real warning. Threat would have been too strong a word, but she had no time for his nonsense right now and knew that the G-word would spook him into behaving like an adult.

  She walked away without saying anything else.

  “You need to chill out,” Dante called after her. His tone was tinged with regret rather than anger. “We’re going to make it to the station, Holly. It’s just a matter of time.”

  She stopped at the door, faced him, and replied as convincingly as she could: “I know.”

  Day Three

  twenty-four

  “Holly, time to get up” Grav said, booming the first word loudly enough that she was awake in time to hear the rest.

  Grav woke Robert next, taking care to be no louder than necessary so that Robert could decide whether to let his children sleep a while longer. While Robert opted against that course of action and instead woke them up, Holly and Grav made their way into the lander to see the others. Unsurprisingly, Rusev and Yury were both wide awake and ready for the day. Equally unsurprisingly, Dante wasn’t.

  Yury, who immediately confirmed to Holly and Grav that this morning’s sunrise had come precisely 24 hours after the last, was already sitting at the table in front of a digital map he’d put together. The map was based around the aerial view provided by the only one of his drones which had successfully returned from their maiden voyage. Though this drone had since failed to return from its second excursion, Yury was grateful that it had at least given him something.

  Holly and Grav were able to identify the direction they had approached from the previous day, while Dante had already shown Yury the path of his initial exploration in search of Holly and the Harringtons. Yury reasoned that these data points would enable them to determine sensible routes to take in search of the Karrier. They both agreed.

  Holly liked seeing Grav interacting with Yury in the respectful way he was. Both were alpha males, with Yury something of a wise old lion and Grav the undisputedly stronger upstart. But rather than force Yury to the side or shun him as he might have, Grav continued to treat him as a king.

  “Are you coming out today?” Grav asked, clearly hoping that Yury would say yes. “We could pair.”

  “I would only slow you down,” Yury said. His tone was decisive; Grav didn’t push for a change of heart.

  Dante was soon roused by their voices and wasted no time in joining the discussion over optimal routes. Wearing his trusty yellow Rusentra polo shirt — as ever — he vehemently insisted that the group would be safer sticking together than splitting up like Holly and Grav were both suggesting. As his argument with Grav threatened to get heated, with Holly and the others opting to let it run its course rather than interfere, the arrival of the Harringtons diffused the tension.

  “Any ideas where we are yet?” Robert asked, wasting no time.

  “I’ve been thinking about alternate dimensions,” Dante answered, apparently unaware that Robert’s question had been directed squarely at Yury.

  Yury shook his head at Dante with mild annoyance. “For one thing, one of our drones picked up a view of Earth. For another… alternate dimensions? Don’t talk nonsense.”

  “So how come this planet can go undiscovered?” Bo asked in his usual curious way. “The more I think about it, the more I don’t understand how something so close to Earth and to the station hasn’t been noticed by all the smart people on both.”

  “There are things we don’t understand,” Yury said, very matter-of-factly but with a deliberate gentleness in his tone. “
It seems that this planet’s appearance and external gravitational effects are being cloaked, if you will, by some kind of field that’s beyond our current understanding. By our understanding I mean humanity’s understanding rather than our group’s understanding, but since we’re the only people who know this place exists I suppose those are effectively the same thing. One thing I know about whatever kind of cloak is up there is this: we got through it on the way in, and we’re going to get through it on the way out.”

  The upbeat end to Yury’s answer relieved Holly, who for several seconds had been worried about where his thought process was going. She could handle pessimism and knew that “realism” might be a more accurate term in the current situation, but she didn’t want the children’s hopes to fade.

  Relatively satisfied with Yury’s answer, Bo then took advantage of his first real time with Rusev by asking her every question he had about the Venus station over a tall glass of enlivening, if not refreshing, nutrition powder.

  Rusev was patient with the boy and fuelled his curiosity with descriptions of the several sub-orbital laboratories which floated in the Venusian atmosphere. She admitted that the surface explorations by heat-resistant rovers had been conducted partly in the hope of finding valuable and previously unreachable resources, which led to further questions from Bo about what kind of resources she hoped to find and how long she would keep looking.

  Rusev was equally candid about the terminology she used to describe the station itself, which Bo knew was really “three big spaceships joined together” rather than a purpose-built station. Though Rusev insisted that the three craft in question had been built for the purpose of docking together in Venus’s orbit, she admitted there was a psychological element behind encouraging others to call it a “space station” rather than a “mobile habitat” and tried to explain this to Bo by saying there were different connotations to having a house that can move and living in a vehicle.

  As Bo asked more questions about in situ production and Rusev’s plans for future asteroid mining missions, Robert’s questions about the map on the table reignited Dante and Grav’s temporarily paused dispute.

  This time, Holly quickly put an end to it. “We’re splitting up,” she said. “End of story.”

  “At least agree that we won’t walk for more than two hours in any one direction,” Dante said, speaking directly to Holly.

  “But we know the Karrier is no closer than that,” she replied, growing impatient with his obstructive concerns. “Look at the map! We’re in the middle — this lander is the middle — and that right there is the mound where we met Grav. That was a two-hour walk. Do you see the Karrier anywhere on this map? Do you see the Karrier anywhere inside a two-hour radius of this lander?”

  Dante looked at the floor and sighed. “I’m just saying: if two groups walk for three hours in opposite directions, we’re six hours apart. If something happens…”

  Holly wanted to scream at him that something already had happened; that they were stuck on a planet that shouldn’t exist, with no real food and no hope of ever leaving unless they were prepared to walk for as long as it took to find the Karrier. But with Viola and Bo now waiting for her reply, along with everyone else, she bit her tongue and answered diplomatically: “The decision’s been made, Dante. If you don’t want to join the search, no one is forcing you.”

  “I do want to search, I just don’t want to split up. But if that’s the way it’s going, I’m definitely going with you.”

  “And I’m going with my children,” Robert interjected.

  “Me and Rusev,” Grav suggested. “So that makes two twos and a three. Any objections?”

  After a few seconds, Viola surprised everyone by speaking up: “I don’t want to go anywhere without Holly or Grav.”

  Holly did her best to mask a sigh; not at Viola’s understandable desire for qualified protection, but rather because it — combined with Robert’s equally understandable insistence upon staying with his children — meant that there were only going to be two search parties.

  “We’re wasting daylight here,” Holly said, refocusing. “Is everyone ready to go?”

  Rusev handed Holly a well-stocked backpack. Holly endured harrowing flashbacks of her perilous minutes underwater as she put it on, this time neglecting to make use of every buckle. Once Grav and Dante also had their supplies on their backs, the two groups bode farewell first to Yury and then each other.

  Holly had all the faith in the world that Rusev and Grav were smart enough to take care of themselves and each other, so offered no advice beyond “good luck.”

  twenty-five

  Within thirty minutes of setting off, Holly and her group couldn’t see a large rock in any direction; while the landscape was still overwhelmingly dominated by a familiar shade of reddish brown, the ground was flat and relatively soft, as though it had received some fairly recent rainfall.

  Tufts of grass or something like it, yellowed by the sun, soon surrounded Holly’s feet as the reddish element of the colour palette shifted more towards green. Presented with a photograph of this new landscape, she could have readily believed it to be somewhere in North Africa. In the distance, off to the side, the ground was blanketed by grass and dotted with unusual trees and shrubs.

  “There are no animals,” Bo said. “Right? This is like one of those half-documentary-half-movie things I saw… you know, when they look at what Earth would be like without certain animals or without people or animals at all? Maybe this is that. Maybe we’re in a different dimension or something… an alternate reality where there are no animals so the plants got really weird.”

  “Spaceman’s drone got a picture of Earth,” Holly said, repeating the old man’s earlier answer to Dante in an effort to quell the grandest elements of Bo’s imagination. “We’re in a different place, that’s all; somewhere between Venus and Earth. Same dimension, same reality.”

  Dante seemed less excited than the Harringtons by the presence of so much plant life, which made sense given that his initial search for Holly’s lander had already led him past “weird looking trees” and grasslike shoots while theirs had been a desolate trek across a lifeless canyon.

  Holly used her wristband’s built-in camera to take photographs of every plant she encountered and also took physical samples of some of the most intriguing, being very careful not to make direct contact with any. This would at least ensure she got something out of the trek, even if — as was looking increasingly likely — the Karrier would not be found in this direction. In the face of severe doubts, Holly tried to stay upbeat; for all she knew, Grav and Rusev had already found the landing site and were talking to the Venus station over the perfectly intact radio right now.

  Up ahead, a long row of dark green hills dominated the horizon and didn’t look too far away. But with nothing interrupting the picturesque vista in any other direction, Holly couldn’t pretend to be unconcerned by the absence of the Karrier.

  The incline of the lowest hill looked gentle enough to climb with ease but the summit looked high enough to give an excellent view of what lay beyond; like the mound on the first day, she knew the view from the top would at worst confirm her suspicion and score out this area as the Karrier’s potential landing site.

  When Holly shared her plan to climb one of the hills and call it a day if they didn’t see the Karrier, Dante didn’t like the sound of it.

  “I don’t think it’s safe to go that far,” he said.

  “Feel free to turn back now,” Robert replied, taking the words out of Holly’s mouth and surprising her with his firmness. “But we’re going. We found Grav by climbing a mound that was almost as high as these hills, so who knows what we’ll see on the other side.”

  “It’s not even that far,” Bo chimed in.

  Holly didn’t know when Dante had become so risk averse and what part of ‘we have to find the Karrier if we want to stay alive’ he didn’t grasp. She made a mental note to talk to him about this when they got back to the
lander and the children weren’t listening.

  As the base of the hills grew nearer, the plant life grew ever stranger. There were quite likely dozens of places on Earth where Holly would be awestruck by the alienness of the local flora, but Robert, who spoke with a confidence suggesting he truly knew about such things, insisted that the plants on the ground were like nothing he had ever come across.

  There were countless shrubs and an abundance of bulbous trees with no visible leaves, but Robert’s attention was dominated by the array of fungi-like organisms which clung to some of the trees. Up close, the oddest of these looked more like jellyfish than the mushrooms and toadstools Holly usually thought of when she heard the word fungus. Robert insisted that their structure — with some of the “tentacles” branching horizontally away from the tree and then somehow supporting upwards growth in an apparent search for light — made no kind of sense in his mind. He advised Holly not to touch the organism she was nearest, even through her gloves. She heeded the warning; whatever the hell it was, it looked like something that belonged in a surrealist painting.

  Holly chuckled instinctively when she got near enough to the hills to notice that the steepest and rockiest of the row, which also looked to be the highest, had a cave-like opening on its face.

  “Too risky,” Dante said. By this point, his conservatism surprised no one.

  The others continued forward, carefully but decisively, in an unspoken understanding that they had to look inside.

  “It could be a tunnel,” Viola mused. “It might get us to the other side without having to climb.”

  “I thought the point of climbing was to get a good view from the top?” Dante said, replying to Viola but looking at Holly.

  “It’s both,” Holly said. “We’ll look — carefully — and then we’ll climb. It’s probably going to be another pool of water that’s collected after dripping through the cracks.”