Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  Holly didn’t say anything.

  “But with Rusev on our side,” Dante went on, “not to mention you, me, Spaceman, Grav… I’ll take those odds. And remember, that’s just for us being able to contact the station. Rusev thinks they might send a rescue team to where they last picked up our location before the impact. They could already be on the way.”

  “What are you two doing back there?” Viola called, making Holly realise how far she and Dante had fallen behind.

  “Just talking about you,” Dante yelled back, skilfully evading the point that Holly — who was supposed to be Viola’s rock — was having doubts.

  “Shut up,” Viola said.

  Dante caught up with Viola first and quickly teased her into laughter.

  Now more than ever, Holly was glad to have him.

  thirty-three

  At the end of a difficult walk, the lander finally drew near. All sprightliness from the relatively good news of the intact Karrier had been cancelled out by the weight of the luggage; and though it wasn’t quite dark yet, it would be very soon.

  Having tracked the three dots approaching on Rusev’s wristband, Grav, Rusev, Robert and Bo were all watching from the window as the returning trio came into view. They then left the lander to assist with the luggage.

  “We come bearing gifts,” Dante said as Bo arrived to claim his suitcase.

  “Where is my stuff?” Grav asked.

  Holly quickly explained that she’d prioritised recovering the Harringtons’ luggage first but had made sure to bring some of Grav’s clothes for him to change into until the whole group returned to the Karrier the next morning.

  Grav accepted this more readily than Dante had and blinked several times as though realising he had glossed over what really mattered. “What kind of condition is the Karrier in? Did it touch down gently?”

  “No,” Holly said. “It’s in one piece, so it seems like the descent was relatively controlled… but none of the landing gear deployed. The vault is fine and the dining machine might be fixable.”

  “And the radio?” Rusev asked, arriving with Robert shortly behind Bo and Grav who had hurried ahead.

  Viola jumped in to answer: “It’s a potential maybe.”

  “A potential maybe?” Rusev echoed.

  Holly saw Robert’s eyes dashing between her and Dante, clearly searching for nonverbal clues about their true confidence levels.

  “That’s right,” Dante said. “You see, there’s no power in the control room. That could be something to do with the landing gear not deploying; the first impact might have damaged a node that’s knocked certain things offline. We didn’t have time for any real testing with the light starting to fade, so all we know is that the lights in the corridor, the utility room and the crew quarters were all operational but nothing in the control room was. And the vault was fine, like Holly said.”

  Rusev rubbed her chin in thought. “And, assuming we can correct the power fault…?”

  “The radio should operate,” Dante said. “The question then becomes whether it will cooperate. A lot depends on what kind of force obscured this planet until we collided with… whatever we collided with. We can potentially fix the power; and if we do, maybe the radio will work.”

  Everyone waited for Rusev’s reply. “First light,” she said, after a long and pensive pause. “Yury will stay here with Robert and the children.”

  “Why do I have to stay?” Bo complained.

  “It’s a long walk,” Dante said, trying not to sound condescending. “There’s nothing to see, anyway.”

  “But I’m going,” Viola said, glancing between Holly and Rusev, who she’d hardly spoken to. “Right, Holly?”

  Literally caught in the middle, Holly looked at Robert. He shrugged, more eyebrows than shoulders. “I’d rather Viola came,” she decided. “We could do with the extra hands to help lift the dining machine.”

  “By all means,” Rusev said. If she felt any annoyance over Holly’s answer, she hid it well. “In any case, I’m glad you made the selfless choice to bring their luggage back first.”

  Holly knew exactly what Rusev was getting at — Robert’s video — but she merely nodded in reply, understanding why Rusev had opted to hint at it rather than say it outright.

  Robert lifted his suitcase from the ground next to Viola and held it tightly against his leg, clearly also grasping what Rusev was getting at but somewhat less subtle in his understanding than Holly.

  “I’ll come in to see you and Spaceman once everyone is settled with their things in the extension,” Holly said to Rusev.

  “He’s fast asleep,” Rusev replied. “Don’t worry about it; Dante will tell me more about the Karrier and we can talk about it in the morning, on our way there. I know the lander’s facilities are slightly more accommodating than the extension’s, so you’re all free to come in to use the larger bathroom at any stage, but I do recommend settling down for the night as soon as possible.”

  “Wait,” Bo said. He opened his small case and began rummaging through the contents. “Before we split up for the night, there’s something I want to show you. It should be in here somewh— aha! Here it is.”

  “What do you have there?” Rusev asked as Bo brought the digital textbook towards her.

  Bo swiped and prodded his way through various menu screens at lightning speed. “Okay,” he said after only a few seconds. “This page on the left is what was in the textbook for V’s class a few years ago — I added it manually to mine — and this page on the right is what was in the updated version that my class got.”

  Holly stood next to Bo as Rusev read the text above and below the paused footage. The frames the two videos were paused on looked identical.

  “This is an interview with the head of security at Morrison’s facility?” Rusev asked, confirming she had gleaned sufficient context from the short passages of text.

  “Two interviews,” Bo said. “That’s the point: he says different things in each one, but they’ve tried to make it look like the same interview.”

  “Sounds like it could be a glitch,” Dante said.

  Bo shook his head insistently. “Just listen and watch. The guy is wearing the same clothes and everything, but if you zoom in on the newer video you can see that his eyes are baggier and there’s stubble on his chin. They were filmed at different times.”

  “Play it,” Rusev said, beyond curious of what exactly she was about to hear.

  In the first short clip, as Holly already knew from Bo’s description on the first day, the security officer stated that he received a warning call about the imminent Devastation Day attack an hour before it happened. In the second, which followed an otherwise identical script, the man said that the warning call came ten minutes before the powerful explosions.

  “Doesn’t sound like a glitch to me,” Holly said.

  “Or me,” Dante readily admitted. He, and everyone else, looked to Rusev.

  After staring silently at Bo’s digital textbook for several seconds, she crouched to his level and looked him in the eye. “Bo, this is an incredible find. Do you know what this means?”

  “All the other warnings came about ten minutes before the attacks,” he said. “At the ancient wonders and everything. But there’s no way everyone could have been safely evacuated from the MXA facility in ten minutes. Not with the size of the place and the size of the explosions. So if everyone survived and this security guy somehow knew about the one attack that directly involved Morrison way before anyone else knew about any other specific attack…”

  No one immediately filled the silence as Bo trailed off.

  Eventually, Dante spoke next. “Listen… I hate Morrison as much as the next guy, trust me. But what are we saying here?”

  “He did Devastation Day,” Bo said, childishly straightforward.

  “Did is a strong word,” Rusev said. “But this tells us he was in on at least part of it, and the same group who claimed responsibility for everything else claimed credit
for this incident, too. Morrison benefitted from everything that happened that day. And Dante, some of us already know how far he’ll go to get what he wants.”

  Grav, who had neither heard Bo’s earlier account of this footage nor ever heard Rusev express her thoughts on Morrison’s potential role in Devastation Day so strongly, stood shaking his head in disgust. “If I ever set foot on Earth again, I am going to rip his heart out through his ass and shove it down his throat.”

  “Can you keep this safe?” Rusev asked Bo, tapping the textbook and ignoring Grav’s understandable anger.

  Bo nodded proudly. “I’ll keep it under my bed.”

  Rusev ruffled his hair and turned towards the lander. “Everyone sleep well,” she said, authoritatively ending the discussion.

  “There’s something else,” Holly said. “We found one of the mapping drones, lying beside what looked like a line on the ground. If its recordings are okay, we might get a better view from above. I’ll sync the images from my wristband to the lander now, too, so you can look over everything tonight and we’ll talk about what it means in the morning.”

  Holly then signalled for Dante to hand over the drone’s storage strip to Rusev, which he dutifully did. Dante and Viola stayed quiet, evidently and correctly assuming that Holly didn’t want to get into a long and potentially unsettling discussion about the lines at this hour.

  “See you in the morning,” Rusev said, intrigued by the news of a newly discovered drone. She and Dante bid farewell to Holly and the others and reentered the lander for the night.

  “I knew Morrison was a piece of shit…” Grav mused as he entered the extension with Holly and the Harringtons. “But this?”

  “His time will come,” Robert said.

  Holly let Grav through the door first and put her hand on his shoulder. “Sooner than he knows,” she said. “And he’ll never see it coming.”

  thirty-four

  Just minutes after entering the extension, Bo walked into Grav’s bedroom with a broad smile on his face. Holly and Viola were already there, sitting on Grav’s bed and filling him in on every little detail of what they’d seen at the Karrier.

  Bo held what looked like a remote control in his right hand, while his left arm was outstretched; palm up, but empty.

  Or so they thought.

  “This is the invisible ball I was telling you about,” Bo said.

  Grav chuckled heartily. “Kid, how stupid do I look?”

  When Bo pushed the red button on the remote control with his thumb, Grav’s mouth fell open.

  “Pretty stupid,” Bo laughed. A jet black ball lay in his left palm, roughly the size of a large orange.

  Grav jumped to his feet and crouched down until his eyes were level with the ball. “How?” was all he said.

  “There are basically cameras all the way around,” Bo said. To Holly, it sounded like he was explaining as best he could rather than dumbing it down for Grav’s benefit. “And the whole thing is kind of like a 3D wraparound screen. The side you’re looking at shows the view from the outward-facing camera on the other side, so it looks like there’s nothing in between.”

  “But…” Grav struggled to verbalise his awestruck confusion. “How the hell could I see your hand? It is in your hand — touching your hand — so the view from the cameras at the bottom is not the same view as we have looking down.”

  Viola interjected with an answer. “I don’t know how to say this and have it make sense, but I think there are sort of, like, rings of 360-degree cameras going the whole way in to the centre. They all point in every direction and they can more or less — and this is the part that won’t make sense — they can more or less see through each other. So the ones near the top do get a view of Bo’s hand. Then the processor thing that’s inside there somewhere makes a composite image and displays it on the wraparound screen. My mum told me that. Everyone at her work who had kids got this as a Christmas bonus last year, to keep them happy. I think people who didn’t have kids got something pretty fancy, but probably not as cool.”

  “And this was when she worked for MXP, Morrison’s big pharma firm?” Grav asked.

  Viola nodded. “Yeah, just last year. This is cutting-edge romotech.”

  Holly wasn’t surprised to hear that. But while she’d seen some incredible applications of romotech in the past, none had been in person. To see a physical object disappear so convincingly was nothing short of astounding.

  Grav then asked Bo’s permission to hold the ball. As soon as it was in his hand, Bo made it vanish again by pressing the red button. Grav smiled like he was the child who’d just received the ball as a gift, instantly forgetting about all of his old toys and all of his present concerns.

  “Make it visible again,” he said to Bo, “then I will throw it up in the air, and before it falls you can make it invisible and I will try to catch it.”

  The two proceeded to play invisible catch for the next hour, tiring each other out to the point of exhaustion. Viola gladly assumed the role of impartial adjudicator in ensuring that each player was throwing the ball high enough, and eventually she had the idea for a new game in which she threw the invisible ball towards them and they competed to catch it.

  Holly watched with amusement for the first ten minutes or so then excused herself to talk to Robert. She spoke candidly about Dante’s estimate that they had a 36 percent chance of managing to contact the Venus station via the Karrier’s radio. To her surprise, Robert reacted very calmly.

  More than calm, he was placid.

  “Even if we don’t get through on the radio,” he said, “someone will find us eventually. Until then we have powder that our bodies think is food, we have water, we have air, and we have shelter. You might think I’m crazy for saying this, but my family is safer here than we were on Earth.” A grimly ironic grin crept across his face. “And even if being here means that we can’t reach the station, at least it means that Morrison can’t reach us.”

  With everyone else asleep, or at least silently settled for the night, Viola and Holly lay awake. When Viola asked Holly if she wanted to move her bed so they were both in the same room, Holly gladly accepted. She knew it was more of a request than an invitation, but she also appreciated that Viola was lowering her guard as much as she was seeking proximity for protection.

  Now that she had real hope of making contact, Viola had more questions about the station than ever. Holly gave straightforward answers to them all, walking a tightrope of trying to keep Viola’s thoughts positive while trying to downplay the absolute necessity of successful radio contact. Despite Holly’s subtle efforts to this end, Viola seemed to have reached a state of mind in which the only question left about the rescue mission was how long it would take to arrive.

  Most of the girl’s questions about the station were borne of her excitement to see it — and smell it, if her frequent references to the mildly lavender-scented filtration system she’d heard about were anything to go by — but eventually she voiced a concern related to rumours of forced labour.

  Holly quickly dismissed such rumours as GU propaganda. She knew for a fact it wasn’t true but reassured Viola by saying that even if there were certain smaller things that most station citizens had to adhere to, Viola would never be forced or likely even asked to do anything she didn’t want to do. “Because even if you weren’t Olivia Harrington’s daughter,” she said, “you’re going to walk in with Rusev and Spaceman. Trust me: no one will so much as look at you the wrong way.”

  To Viola, life on the station didn’t sound too bad at all. “Are there any animals?” she asked. “Not for eating, I mean.”

  Holly nodded. “There’s no livestock, though; it’s just not efficient. I think there might be some rodents for testing the toxicity of experimental materials and stuff like that, I don’t know.”

  “But no pets?”

  “A family of passengers brought four dogs on my second journey, all female puppies. So unless there are frozen dog embryos or whatever t
hey’d need — or unless you can get a mouse or something — those are the only pets we’ll ever have.”

  Viola sat bolt upright on her bed. “Four dogs? Real dogs?”

  “Real as real can be.”

  “I actually cannot wait to get there,” Viola said, and that was all.

  Holly was momentarily surprised by the level of Viola’s excitement and incredulity until she realised how young the girl must have been when the GU’s pet ban came into effect and the private ownership of dogs and cats was outlawed. Due to the chronic food shortages during the famine, it was deemed unacceptable for resources to be diverted towards non-human mouths. The campaign appealed to notions of equality, decrying in familiar terms that the dogs of the rich were better fed than the children of the poor.

  Though it seemed trivial compared to some GU laws, Holly subscribed to the commonly shared notion that the pet ban had been a deliberate attack on morale. This theory held that the ban was a demoralisation tactic used to remind would-be anti-GU resisters of how desperate the food situation was; so desperate, indeed, that they could no longer keep pets.

  In the eyes of Holly and others with reason to think the worst of the GU and particularly the influence of Roger Morrison — who was a key player even in those days, years before he assumed formal power — the ban accomplished its machiavellian goal. For rather than elicit further resistance, the ban bred despondence and helplessness.

  It warmed Holly’s heart to see that Viola now so clearly felt the opposite of despondent and helpless. The girl fell asleep quickly, if her steady breathing was anything to go by.

  Holly’s mind inevitably turned back towards the looming question of whether or not the radio would work. Whenever doubts crept in, she focused on the point that she would have chosen no two people for the job over Dante and Rusev: one was an excellent technician and the other someone who knew more than anyone else about the inner workings of her Karrier.