Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  “Wait,” Dante exclaimed, raising his hand to point across the line. “Look at the ground over there. It looks like it could be a cliff-edge. A sheer drop.”

  “Think we should check it out?” Viola asked.

  “Definitely,” he replied. They both looked to Holly.

  She hesitated. “I don’t know about crossing this line.”

  “We’ve probably been crossing lines all day,” Viola said. “We just didn’t know it. If we were on the other side of this line, we’d think that was the safe side and we’d be worrying about crossing to this side. That does look like a cliff, and who knows what could be down there?”

  Viola was so much more forthright when Robert wasn’t around, she almost seemed like a different person. But again, Holly saw the sense in her argument.

  “We can check it out and then come right back,” Dante suggested, chipping away at Holly’s reserve. “Even you have to say that’s a fair compromise. And it is two against one.”

  “Okay,” Holly said. “But not because it’s two against one — this isn’t a democracy — and not because I want to compromise. We’ll check it out because what Viola said makes sense.” She said this not out of pettiness but rather to give credit where it was due and to gently remind Dante that it was not his place to disregard her decisions.

  The grass underfoot and cloud cover overhead grew denser in tandem as the trio walked the few hundred metres to the cliff-edge Dante had correctly identified.

  When Holly reached the edge and looked down, she had never been more thankful for Dante’s recalcitrance or Viola’s persuasiveness.

  Without them, she wouldn’t have crossed the line.

  Without them, she wouldn’t have seen what was lying at the bottom of the grass-covered valley below, badly damaged but structurally intact.

  Without them, she wouldn’t have found the Karrier.

  thirty

  “It’s in one piece!” Viola yelled excitedly. “That means the radio might be okay!”

  “We’ll see,” Dante said. His tone, though certainly less enthusiastic than Viola’s, sounded fairly confident to Holly’s ears.

  Holly didn’t say anything at first. She had quietly hoped that the Karrier might have avoided further damage after its initial collision with whatever had been cloaking the planet, since the planet’s uncannily Earth-like atmosphere would have meant that a fully functioning Karrier — fuel permitting — might have been capable of taking off and achieving escape velocity as it would on Earth.

  One downward glance put this hope to rest; the Karrier was going nowhere.

  Not only did the damage rule out the faint hope of a take off, it also left Holly doubtful there would even be any power to test the radio. Even the possibility of a test depended on another sizeable assumption: that the equipment in the control room hadn’t also been physically damaged beyond repair.

  The longer Holly looked at the Karrier, the more its condition didn’t make sense.

  “It shouldn’t have landed like that, though, right?” Viola said, talking to Dante as Holly continued to stare down at the grassy valley below.

  “It doesn’t look like it landed at all,” Dante said. “It looks like it crashed.”

  This snapped Holly out of her focus. She turned to Dante with a thoughtful look on her face. “Yeah… but if it had fallen dead out of the sky, it would be in pieces. I don’t understand how it’s halfway between fine and destroyed. It obviously had power during the descent or it would have crashed with way too much force to survive as well as it did. But the fail-safe landing gear is hardwired to deploy when it’s descending. I could understand if the gear hadn’t managed to protect the Karrier fully, but it looks like it wasn’t even deployed. I don’t get it.”

  Dante shrugged. “You heard what Grav said right before the first impact: the systems in the control room were going crazy. And that was before the impact messed everything up even worse. We saw the state of the utility room, and the control room is probably the same.”

  “Are there any ground vehicles inside?” Viola asked, abruptly changing the subject as soon as the new thought entered her mind. “And if there are, do you think they might be okay?”

  Dante shrugged. “I doubt there are any.”

  “Same,” Holly said. “We didn’t expect to land and there isn’t much need for any at the station, so there’s almost certainly none. I haven’t seen all of the cargo bays, though, so you never know. It would sure make things easier if there were.”

  “But we need to remember that there are dangerous virus samples,” Dante said in an unusually firm tone. “They’re in cold storage — well, it’ll only still be cold if there’s power — and even if the vials were somehow broken by either of the impacts, they’re sealed inside a vault which would be the last thing to fail. But… there’s always a chance. So I think, when we get down there, you two should stay at a safe distance until I’ve been inside to make sure the vault is intact. When I know it’s safe, I’ll tell you right away and we can gather everything we want to take back to the lander.”

  “What do you mean ‘when we get down there’?” Holly said. “Surely we have to tell Rusev and the others? If someone else had found the Karrier, we’d want them to tell us before they touched it.”

  Dante glanced at his wristband. “Holly, we’re two hours from the lander. If we don’t go in now, we won’t be back today. And whatever condition everything is in, it’s not going to get better.”

  “What’s the advantage of going back first?” Viola said to Holly, genuinely asking.

  “EVA suits,” Holly said. “If the secure vault is damaged and Dante goes in without a suit, he’ll be exposed.”

  “Look at the Karrier,” he replied, holding his arm out. “The vault is designed to stay closed. It’s hardier than the exterior, so if the exterior survived direct contact with the ground and whatever we hit up there, it’s pretty safe to say that the vault survived, too.”

  He was right, Holly quietly conceded, but she would have had less difficulty agreeing out loud had his sudden shift from hyper-conservative to hyper-keen not caught her off guard. She sighed. “Okay. You can go inside as long as you understand the consequences.”

  “What consequences?” Dante asked.

  Holly held his eyes. He knew a lot more about the structure of the vault than she did, so she tested his confidence in its integrity by plainly stating the stakes: “If the vault is damaged, you’ll be quarantined on the Karrier until rescue arrives. And when it does, you’ll be left here.”

  Dante grinned; even before his words about the “zero percent chance” of the vault being damaged, Holly knew he was sure.

  “So how long do you think will it take to get down there?” Viola asked, rejoining the conversation after listening with interest to the vault discussion.

  Holly scanned the contours of the cliff and spotted an easy but winding route down to the valley. She pointed to it. “Maybe five minutes to get round there and another ten to get down,” she said.

  Dante nodded in agreement with the estimates.

  “What about the lines?” Viola asked, directing the question at Holly. “You don’t mind crossing them?”

  “We’d have to cross them eventually. As long as you want to go?”

  “Oh, totally!” the girl insisted.

  The trio set off at a quick pace and crossed two intersecting visible lines on their way to the easiest path down to the valley. All said, they were standing within a stone’s throw of the Karrier after just twenty minutes.

  “This is close enough,” Dante said. “Stay here until I come back out and tell you it’s safe. If I don’t…”

  Holly nodded to tell Dante he didn’t need to finish the sentence. They both knew that if he didn’t come back, it would be for a reason that would make it extremely foolish for anyone else to go inside to help him without an EVA suit. Both displayed confidence it wouldn’t come to that, but Holly didn’t feel quite as relaxed about it as Dante
did.

  “I’ll be fine,” he insisted as she hugged him tight. Viola laughed as he rolled his eyes over Holly’s shoulder.

  Dante then walked towards the Karrier. The first good sign came when the door opened at his request. “Power’s working,” he yelled back to them.

  “Be safe,” Holly yelled back.

  As her words echoed in the valley, Dante disappeared inside.

  thirty-one

  After just over two minutes, Holly already felt like Dante was taking too long. All he was supposed to do was check the vault and report back that it was still safely intact, and that shouldn’t have taken much more than a minute.

  Every passing second heightened Holly’s concern that perhaps the vault wasn’t intact, until Dante suddenly appeared at the door and waved casually to call her and Viola forward as if there had never been any doubt.

  Viola ran ahead but stopped at the door in response to Holly’s order.

  “The three of us are going to stick together when we go inside,” Holly said. She turned to Dante. “What were you doing, anyway? Did you take a look in the control room?”

  He shook his head. “I was just making absolutely sure the vault was intact. It is, and since there’s still power I was able to look at the screen on the door to see inside through the internal camera. All the vials are in place and in one piece. So even if the vault had been unsealed, we’d still have been fine. As it is, we’re double safe.”

  Holly stepped inside, asking Viola to stay behind her and telling Dante to follow in third position. They both obliged.

  The floor of the corridor, automatically illuminated in their presence by the overhead lights, was irritatingly sticky. A faint and hard-to-place smell filled the air. Taking the sticky green floor as a clue, Holly correctly assumed it came from the algae water which had flowed out from the utility room’s dining machine after the initial impact.

  Upon passing the utility room on the way to the radio-housing control room, Holly decided to look inside. It was exactly as she and Dante had left it; no better, no worse. The only difference was that the light, which had been flashing amber when Holly evacuated towards the Harringtons’ lander, was once again its more welcoming steady white.

  “Is that the machine that turns algae into food?” Viola asked, pointing to the huge object which dominated the room’s floorspace.

  Holly said yes, although all the machine really did was shape the algae into something resembling real food, with some eerily convincing colourings and flavourings added to complete the effect.

  “So… can we fix it?” the girl continued.

  Holly and Dante shared a look then both crouched down to assess the damage. They had both seen and felt the colossal machine being ripped from its wall-brace, but they noticed only now that it hadn’t fallen far enough to be disconnected from the Karrier’s power circuit.

  “I think it depends on two things,” Dante said. “One: whether all the tanks leaked, or just a few of them. And two: whether being on its side for three days has messed with the internal balance, or whatever. Rusev will know. There’s no way the three of us could lift it, so we’ll have to wait until tomorrow when Grav and the others are here.”

  “That thing has tanks inside it?” Viola asked.

  “Yeah. This model has six independent tanks,” Dante replied, air quoting the word tanks to indicate that he was simplifying things for her ease of understanding. He then walked over to the far corner of the utility room and picked up a very large screwdriver which he used to remove the machine’s top panel — currently the front panel — with effortless ease. “Hmmm. I can only see three of the tanks from here, but two of them are fine. One is cracked and empty, so that’s where all the green water came from.”

  “Do we need them all?” Viola asked.

  Dante blew air from his lips. “Honestly… I don’t know much about the algae itself. All I know is that it’s quick growing and that the tanks are set up so there’s always supposed to be some ready and some growing. But if Rusev thought that one six-tank machine provided sufficient redundancy for the whole Karrier, I’m pretty sure two tanks would do. For all we know, five out of the six could be fine… but equally, for all we know, the whole machine might be broken and unfixable. Until we can stand it back up, we won’t know for sure.”

  “Okay,” Holly said, having heard enough. It was a nice surprise that the machine was potentially fixable, but that wasn’t the most important thing right now. “Let’s take a look at the radio then get some of the luggage and head back. It’s not going to be light outside forever.”

  Dante stepped into the corridor first and led the way to the control room, with Viola right behind him and no objection from Holly. They all stopped at the door, side by side.

  “This is it,” Dante said, as if the moment needed any more tension. He pushed the door open and stepped inside. “Oh, shit.”

  thirty-two

  “Why is the light not coming on?” Viola asked. It was the obvious question, but Holly thought the answer was obvious enough, too.

  “No power,” Dante said. “It’s the whole room. The instruments, the screens for Grav’s security feeds, the lights… the whole room has no power.”

  “Does that makes sense?” Holly asked him. “Based on what you know about how the Karriers were designed, does it make sense for one room to have no power while the others are fine?”

  “Not really.”

  Viola groaned. Holly and Dante both turned to see the girl standing at the room’s threshold with her head in her hands.

  “This isn’t the worst thing we could have found,” Dante said, his voice just natural enough to convince Holly that he wasn’t over-stretching too much to assuage the girl’s fears. “It would have been worse if I found the radio operating but not cooperating, if you know what I mean. That way it would have been kaput. This way, if the power could be restored to—”

  “You think you can fix it?” Viola asked, interrupting Dante’s explanation as abruptly as it had interrupted her hopelessness.

  “Uh, well, between me and Rusev, there’s a chance.”

  Viola’s face lit up. “So that’s a yes?”

  “It’s not a yes.”

  “So it’s a maybe?”

  Dante paused, flicking his eyes to Holly and then back to Viola. “Let’s call it a potential maybe. But like I was about to say, I need to talk to Rusev. It’s just like the dining machine: she knows more about her stuff than anyone. I’ll bring her out here first thing tomorrow and see what we can do.”

  Viola nodded firmly, clearly eased by Dante’s words.

  “We should get going,” Holly said. “We’ll take as much stuff as we can carry.”

  In her sleeping quarters, Holly beamed with childlike delight at the sight of her suitcase. Viola had been kind enough to share some clothes with her over the last few days, as Robert and Yury had with Dante and Grav, but it wasn’t the same. After quickly changing into a fresh outfit, Holly surprised Viola and Dante by returning to the corridor without her suitcase.

  “We’ll get mine, yours, and Grav’s tomorrow,” she told Dante. “Robert’s and the kids’ today. After you get changed, pick some clothes out of Grav’s case for him to wear tonight. Don’t worry, I’ll tell him it was me.”

  “But I need my stuff,” Dante said.

  “Dante, as a chaperone it’s your job to make your passengers as comfortable as possible. And as a secondary chaperone, it’s your job to follow my instructions. You’re going to take Bo’s suitcase. If you feel that you can carry some of your own luggage, too, then by all means: feel free. Okay?”

  An uncomfortable silence filled the air for several seconds. Holly’s real reason for wanting to recover the Harringtons’ luggage first was that Robert and Bo’s suitcases each contained an important video. Following Rusev’s order not to tell anyone about the video of Olivia Harrington sharing her fears just hours before her death, Holly opted to play the seniority card to justify her decision
.

  Dante shuffled off towards the passengers’ luggage area without saying a word. Holly couldn’t believe the size of Viola’s suitcase, which contained everything she was bringing to the station but hadn’t been able to fit in the smaller case she’d kept in the lander. Bo’s case was much smaller, as was Robert’s.

  Dante lifted Bo’s case and broke into a tension-killing smile. “I’m glad you decided I had to carry this one and not Viola’s,” he said.

  Viola looked at Holly. “Would you mind if I took my dad’s and you took mine? I don’t think I could carry mine the whole way and a lot of the ground is too rocky for the wheels.”

  Holly dreaded lifting the girl’s suitcase but was relieved to find that it wasn’t nearly as heavy as it looked. “No problem,” she said.

  Dante led the way outside, with Bo’s small case in one hand and a bag of his own things slung smugly across one shoulder.

  Once they had reached the top of the familiar cliff-edge and set off towards the lander, Holly gestured for Dante to slow down for a few seconds until Viola was just out of their earshot.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Don’t bullshit me here,” Holly said. “Okay? I want you to be real. What’s the percentage chance that you and Rusev can fix the power?”

  He didn’t hesitate: “I’d say 60. Something like that.”

  “And if you manage that, what’s the percentage chance that the radio will work?”

  “Probably about 60,” he said. “Again.”

  Holly thought for a second. “60 percent of 60 percent? So 36 percent? You’re telling me there’s a 64 percent chance we won’t be able to make contact with the station?”

  “Listen, Holly: if you’d asked me for our chances this morning, I wouldn’t even have given you a number. The least likely thing was finding the Karrier in one piece, and we just did that. My numbers are obviously just estimates, but we’re not talking one in a million here. We’re talking one in three.”