Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  “I didn’t mean to get stuck,” Bo said before she set off. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, but that’s exactly why you don’t touch anything and don’t do anything stupid; things can happen that you don’t mean to happen.”

  Bo rolled up his sleeves, reacting to a slight change in temperature that Holly thought she’d noticed a few minutes earlier. It was hard to tell how much was atmospheric and how much was down to walking with such a heavy load, but she definitely felt hotter now than before. She took a drink of water and forced Bo to have some, too.

  As the boy drank, the high-pitched alarm on Holly’s wristband began to sound. She looked down at the display expecting to see that Dante had taken his off again, no doubt complaining of an itchy arm or some such nonsense. Instead, she saw something far more concerning.

  One of the dots — the one representing Yury — was flashing orange.

  “Run behind me,” Holly said to Bo. She pressed a button on her wristband to silence the alarm. “As fast as you can.”

  On looking up, she immediately saw that Viola and Robert had already left their positions and moved towards Yury’s. She sprinted over and soon came close enough to see Grav, Robert and Viola all standing over him.

  “Spaceman!” she yelled.

  When Robert turned towards her, the look on his face said it all.

  twenty-eight

  “What happened?” Holly asked.

  Before an answer came, she lowered herself to talk to Yury. He was on the ground and breathing slowly and deliberately as per Grav’s instructions. Grav was on the ground, too, making sure Yury’s body didn’t fall flat.

  Instinctively, fearing that Yury may have walked into or past an unseen source of some kind of harmful interference, Grav had already gently pulled the old man’s body back several metres from the furthest of his footprints.

  The dot on Holly’s wristband which represented Yury, previously flashing orange, remained steady during the few seconds she glanced at it.

  “Is it your heart?” she asked. “Your pacemaker?”

  Yury nodded several times, until Grav told him to stop moving too much. “Sometimes… it misbehaves,” his voice croaked. “Nothing… to worry about.”

  The deep breaths Yury took between words, combined with his unconvincing tone, suggested to Holly and everyone else that this was a rarer and more serious occurrence than he was trying to suggest.

  “Just sit there and relax,” Holly said.

  She knew that what Yury called a pacemaker was far more advanced than the kind her grandfather had needed when she was a small child, but she also knew that it was far from the cutting edge of modern medicine. She knew Yury had repeatedly refused Rusev’s offers to fund a fully synthetic transplant, and she could only imagine how Rusev would react to learning of the difficulties now arising from Yury’s famous stubbornness.

  “I’m fine,” he said, his voice growing more forceful as he inelegantly shuffled to his knees and slowly rose to his feet with some help from Holly and Viola. He pointed to his own wristband. “See? Stable. Now, everyone back to their positions.”

  “You are not going any further,” Grav said. “No way.”

  “Grav, it’s not for you to deci—”

  “Listen, Spaceman,” Grav interrupted, unbudgingly staring into his eyes. “This is not a discussion. If I have to carry you back, I will.”

  “I’m fine,” the old lion insisted, equally unbudging.

  Grav looked to Holly for support.

  Holly, knowing that Yury would likely be more receptive to an argument framed in terms of what was best for the group rather than what she thought was best for him, replied with that in mind. “You would be a liability,” she said. She had to force these words out and managed to do so upon reflection that Yury’s wellbeing was more important than his feelings. “If we kept going, you would only slow us down. It’s better for everyone if someone takes you back to the lander.”

  “I will take him,” Grav said, mainly to Holly. “The rest of you can keep going. If I do actually have to carry him at any point, I can do so. We really cannot afford to keep walking for an hour then going back to the lander. We need a real search.”

  “I certainly won’t allow something so trivial as this to derail the whole search,” Yury agreed. “And I won’t allow myself to become a liability.”

  All the liability talk brought something else to Holly’s mind. “Robert,” she said, catching his attention. “Maybe you and Bo should go back, too. It’s going to be a long day, and he’s been on his feet a lot already.”

  “Why do I have to go back?” Bo complained, gesturing towards Viola. “I can walk further than her!”

  “Shut up,” Viola snapped back.

  Holly glanced towards the rock formation where Bo had managed to get stuck just a few minutes earlier. She didn’t have to say anything; the expression on her face when she looked back at Bo told him that he was being dismissed because she couldn’t count on him to follow basic orders.

  There was a lot of truth in Holly’s words that it would be a long day, and she knew that Bo quite likely would begin to slow the group down as it wore on. But there was also an important secondary benefit of showing Bo that disregarding basic safety instructions would not be tolerated.

  The fact that Bo didn’t bemoan the unfairness of Holly’s suggestion after she silently conveyed that his episode at the rocks was to blame told her that he really didn’t want Robert to know about it. Robert certainly didn’t strike her as an aggressive disciplinarian bent on instilling fear in his children, so Holly could only assume that Bo didn’t want to disappoint him.

  “I wouldn’t be comfortable going back without Viola,” Robert said.

  “Why?” the girl asked. “I’m seventeen! Besides, I’ll be safe with Holly.”

  Holly held Robert’s unsure eyes. “She will. I promise.”

  Robert sighed. He didn’t speak, but it was a clear sign of concession.

  No one mentioned Dante in this discussion over Viola’s safety. He didn’t look slighted, which Holly took as an indication that he understood that his on-board title of “secondary chaperone” had merely been something Rusev concocted to give him a purpose en route to the Venus station, where his real work as a technician would begin.

  After a quick farewell, which largely revolved around Robert annoying Viola with orders to be careful and Holly annoying Yury with orders to rest when he got back to the lander, the two groups went their separate ways.

  “Actually, Grav,” Holly called after only a few steps. “Can Viola have your wristband until we get back? It makes sense for the people who are outside to have them.”

  He shrugged. “Sure.” Holly’s alarm beeped when he removed his wristband and continued until he reached Viola and handed it to her.

  “This thing’s pretty cool,” Viola said a few minutes later, pressing buttons and tapping options she didn’t understand once the wristband was securely attached. “Woah… what was that?”

  “What was what?” Dante asked, taking the words out of Holly’s mouth.

  Viola, having stopped on the spot, pointed to her wristband. “The screen flashed white then went black for, like, half a second.”

  Holly walked the few steps back to her. “Mine seems… huh? It just flashed! Dante, come here.”

  “What for?”

  “To check your wristband, obviously,” Holly said.

  He walked over and nodded indifferently when he reached them. “Yeah, it flashed. Probably magnetism or something. We could be standing at a pole for all we know.”

  Holly and Viola looked all around. Apart from the foursome fading into the distance and a few rock formations, there wasn’t much to see.

  “Look at the ground,” Viola suddenly said, her voice animated. “Look at the little bits of grass!” She raised her right arm and bent it at the elbow several times to signify a barrier. “The whole way along, there’s no more grass on that side. I mean, it’s
not like the ground is covered on this side, but there’s literally none on that side.”

  Holy shit, Holly thought. She’s right.

  “Could a pole do that?” Viola asked Dante, genuinely curious.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But the difference in the grass could be caused by something simpler. Maybe an underground river making that area more fertile? I don’t know.”

  Viola wasn’t convinced. “Don’t you think it’s more than a little bit weird that we’d find a line like this exactly where Spaceman’s pacemaker started acting up and exactly where the wristbands go blank? You really think an underground river is causing that?”

  “Maybe.”

  Holly turned in the opposite direction and looked to see whether the pattern of grass only growing past a clearly defined point would continue that way. She squinted her eyes, crouched down, and looked closely at the ground under her feet then more distantly towards the horizon. There was only one conclusion.

  “Dante,” she said, “there’s definitely a line.”

  Viola looked at Holly. “So what does it mean? Where do you think it goes?”

  “I don’t know where it goes,” Holly said. “But if whatever’s causing this line really did mess with Yury’s heart, it means this planet’s even more dangerous than we thought.”

  twenty-nine

  Unanimously, the trio decided to follow the line rather than cross over and continue past it. For one thing, they expected it to lead somewhere. And for another, while the side they were on was definitely safe, they couldn’t be sure of the effects of being on the other side for any prolonged period of time.

  Standing on the safe side of the line and facing straight ahead, Dante suggested that they turn right and follow it that way.

  “That’s the general direction of the beach,” Holly said. As she spoke, she was crouching to the ground and taking photographs of the visible straight line.

  “Yeah,” Viola chimed in. “We pretty much went that way this morning.”

  “And I went the other way on the first day,” Dante retorted, “when I went out looking for your lander.”

  Holly gestured impatiently with her hands. “Exactly! You went that way, alone, while you were focusing only on finding the lander. Five of us went towards the beach this morning, and we were paying attention to everything. There’s obviously more chance that you missed something than that we all did.”

  “I just think that we should—”

  “Dante, we’re going this way. If you want to go that way, fine. To be honest, I would rather you did. You can look after yourself, and we would cover more ground in the same time.”

  He shook his head. “I know you must think I keep being obstructive, but you keep being cavalier. We have to stick together. Imagine if Spaceman had been on his own when… you know. I know we need to find the Karrier, Holly, but we need to stay alive first.”

  “So you’re coming with us, then?” she asked, now struggling to mask her agitation.

  Dante looked to the ground and nodded curtly, with an expression suggesting that he had something on his lips but knew better than to say it.

  With the atmosphere somewhat strained, they set off.

  “So what’s the deal with these wristbands, anyway?” Viola asked no one in particular. “What’s the range like?”

  “Huge,” Dante said. “These are good pieces of tech.”

  “And they work like a map? Like, we can tell where everyone else is?”

  “We can tell how far away they are,” he said. “But the wristbands are designed for use in closed environments, like the Karrier or the Venus station. Those environments have static points so the layout can be mapped out, and everyone’s location is overlaid on the map. You can basically think of it as triangulating the signal. But out here, we have nothing like that. See: right now we can see how far away Spaceman is but we don’t know where. But if we were to take a few steps in one direction and he got further away, we’d know we were going the wrong way. Assuming he’s not moving around, obviously. So it’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing.”

  Holly was glad to see and hear Dante acting like himself now that the subject of something semi-technical had come up. She thought about the point he’d made about her being too cavalier rather than him being too cautious, and on reflection she could see both sides. She and Dante used to make a good team; as long as they could tone down their arguments into discussions, she knew they could do so again.

  “And we’ve already seen how the wristbands track your vital signs,” she added, augmenting Dante’s points about their value. “Without that, I wouldn’t have known Spaceman was in trouble until whenever I might have noticed that everyone else had gone to check on him.”

  “I guess. So what about voice comms?” Viola asked.

  “Not out here,” Dante said.

  “How come one thing works and not the other? Why can we have distances but no comms?”

  “Totally different protocol,” he said. “It would be the same on Earth as it is here; the wristbands’ voice comms only work in the closed environments they’re designed for, like the Karrier or the station.”

  After twenty minutes of walking along what they’d come to think of as the safe side of the still discernible line, Holly was beginning to wonder how much longer they should continue.

  Another fifteen minutes later, her decision to keep going was vindicated.

  “Is that one of the drones?” Viola asked.

  Within a few more steps, the shape of the object up ahead came into focus.

  “I think so,” Holly said. “We might be able to recover the footage and see everything it flew over, right Dante?”

  “Not if it’s fried,” he said. “And it looks like it fell out of the sky when it hit this line, so my money’s on fried.”

  Holly picked up the fallen drone as soon as she reached it. “We might as well take out the storage strip and bring it back to Spaceman. It might be okay.”

  Agreeing that it was worth a try, Dante opened the side panel and removed the storage strip. He put it safely in his pocket.

  “Why not take the whole thing?” Viola asked.

  “I am,” Dante said. “It’s just that if it has been fried, it’s better to let the contacts settle for a while. You know, discharge.”

  The girl shrugged. “You’re the expert.”

  “So they say. But for the record, I’ll be surprised if we can recover anything from this.”

  “There is a chance, though,” Holly strived to emphasise. “So we’ll walk a little further along the line, because whatever is causing this line is also killing the drones. The more drones we find, the more complete the map we could put together if we can recover anything.”

  Dante had no complaints and Viola was keen, so they continued forward. But rather than another drone, their next discovery was even more enticing: a second line.

  This line, even more visible than the first thanks to a greater concentration of grass on the far side and its continued absence on the safe side, diverged from the other at a 90-degree angle. The first line continued into the distance.

  Dante did what the others were thinking about and stretched his left arm across the line. Predictably but no less disconcertingly, his wristband’s screen flashed.

  “We’re staying on this side of the new line and following it for a while,” Holly unilaterally decided.

  “That’ll take us to almost exactly where I looked on the first day,” Dante said.

  “It’s also the general direction of the lander,” Holly said. “For an hour or so, we’ll be getting closer to home if we follow this line. After that, if we haven’t found anything, it won’t take long to get back.”

  “Fine,” he said, unenthused.

  With their pace quickened by a focused sense of purpose, it took the trio just over thirty minutes to reach the next line. It was perpendicular to the one they were following and parallel to the first, which strengthened Holly’s as yet unshar
ed theory that Viola’s keen eye had discovered some kind of zonal grid.

  Viola then gasped, capturing both Dante’s and Holly’s attention. “Clouds,” she said.

  Sure enough, Holly looked up and saw them. The presence of clouds was no surprise given that Rusev and Grav had already seen snowfall, but there was something about them no one had expected: the clouds overhead, like the grass underfoot, stopped dead on the line.

  The incredible visual effect was heightened by the fact that the clouds respected both perpendicular lines.

  “It’s like they’re in an invisible cage,” Viola thought out loud. “A box or something.”

  “That just can’t be possible,” Holly said, struggling to believe her own eyes and responding to the sight rather than Viola’s specific comments.

  Viola then looked back down and into Holly’s eyes. “They’re weather zones, right? Climate zones? That must be how there’s so much difference in the environment over distances that aren’t big enough for there to be those kinds of differences. Right?”

  “I don’t know,” Dante said, before Holly had a chance to reply.

  Viola ignored him and kept talking to Holly. “That must be how we can be in a desert canyon, then on a plain, then at a beach… and how Rusev and Grav can leave the lander and end up in a snowstorm after walking for less than two hours. I mean, it has to be something to do with these lines.”

  Holly could only nod dumbly; Viola had verbalised it at least as well as she could have.

  “But the wristbands work on both sides,” Dante said. “There’s interference at the lines, but the wristbands are fine once you’ve crossed. So these lines aren’t marking discrete zones.”

  “All I know is what we learned in school,” Viola countered, “and that was that nature doesn’t do straight lines or right angles. That’s supposed to be how you can tell when forests and fields have been cultivated and stuff like that: if you see right angles, it’s probably not natural. So if these lines aren’t natural…”