Other doubts soon crept in, primarily over if and how the potential rescue team would be able to replicate the impact that brought the planet into the first Karrier’s view without also replicating its loss of control and ultimate crash-landing. The people on the station were the smartest people alive, so the rational part of Holly’s brain tried to reason that they would find a way. But lying on a narrow bed while stranded on a planet that shouldn’t exist, reason and rationality were in short supply.
Unable to sleep, Holly tiptoed out of the extension and into the refreshing cold night air. Half hoping to have seen Dante and too tired to have realised that her wristband showed that he was still in the lander, she was disappointed to find nothing but empty darkness.
She sat on the ground for several minutes, trying to make sense of the fullest silence she’d ever known. It was a phenomenal kind of silence, matched in totality only by the darkness that came when she switched off her flashlight.
The lack of stars contrasted greatly with the previous evening, which made Holly wonder about the apparent climate zones that she had discovered with Viola and Dante earlier in the day. She didn’t know whether the blanket cloud coverage where there had previously been none suggested that the zones operated wholly independently of each other, or whether it suggested that some clouds could in fact move between zones, perhaps at certain time intervals.
Not only could Holly not think of any answers, she didn’t even really understand the questions she was asking herself. Considering her experiences on this crazy planet over the last few days, she couldn’t help but laugh at the thought that she once believed it might have been Earth.
As her mind settled, the absoluteness of the surrounding darkness and silence became slightly unnerving. Before long, she returned inside.
The warmth of the extension immediately made her realise how cold it had been outside, bringing back countless memories of getting into vehicles on cold days and shivering incessantly despite it being much warmer inside than out.
Viola’s faint nightlight likewise made Holly appreciate just how dark it had been, and the girl’s gentle breathing made her appreciate how otherwise silent it still was. Viola’s reassuring presence also brought home not only how lonely Holly had felt a few moments earlier, but also how lonely she’d been for so long on the Karrier.
The group was still stranded on this inexplicable planet, but they weren’t alone. All eight of them arrived together and all eight would leave together. Ensuring that they arrived safely at the Venus station was Holly’s job and remained her sole mission. She had come to care deeply about the Harringtons — a turn of events she never expected before the crash — and this only served to make her even more determined.
Ideally, this would be the group’s last night before contact with the station. After that there would, ideally, be only a few more nights until rescue arrived. Of all the nights to come, this one was rife with the most uncertainty.
Holly’s mind then turned to the people on the station, who she knew would probably be mourning the loss of the Karrier, its cargo, and its crew. While expecting that a certain level of distress would be felt over her own apparent death, she could hardly imagine how everyone must have been taking the loss of not only Rusev, their undisputed and tremendously respected leader, but also the universally adored Yury Gardev, a man who had spent his career serving science and international cooperation before risking ostracism by rallying against what he saw as latent totalitarianism within the then-fledgling Global Union.
For some reason, these considerations lifted Holly’s mood. She wanted to be strong not only for the family under her charge but also for everyone on the station who would be unspeakably relieved and overjoyed when contact was made.
Holly’s group of eight was not alone, she realised; they were merely temporarily isolated. Semantic or not, this distinction made a difference in Holly’s exhausted mind.
Within a few minutes, the night’s concerns faded into slumber.
Day Four
thirty-five
Holly awoke to the sound of the morning alarm she had set on her wristband the previous night. An overhead light was already shining down upon her, and it took her a few confused moments to remember that she’d moved her bed into the same room as Viola’s.
“Morning, sleepy head,” Viola said, briefly looking away from her handheld mirror. She then continued to apply what Holly still couldn’t help but consider an obnoxious amount of eye makeup. Viola’s long blonde hair was also back to being so straight it looked sharp, and, all considered, she looked more like the woman Holly and Dante had once assumed to be Robert’s wife than the fresh-faced girl they’d seen on the fake travel card.
“We’re only going to the Karrier,” Holly said.
“I know,” Viola replied, not breaking her concentration.
“So why are you doing all that? No one else is going to see us.”
This time Viola stopped and turned to face Holly. “I know this sounds stupid,” she began, her voice hesitant. “Probably something a shrink would say… but, I dunno, this is like the one thing I can always control. It turns out exactly how I want, every time.”
“That’s not stupid,” Holly said, meaning it. She grinned slightly as she stood up. “But it does sound like something a shrink would say.”
Viola laughed and got back to the finishing touches. “Shut up.”
A loud and urgent shushing noise then greeted Holly as she stepped into Grav’s room to wake him up. With the light already on, she saw Bo crouching next to the bed, placing his disappearing black ball on the floor. When the ball was in a spot where he expected Grav would put his foot, Bo pressed the red button on his remote control to make it vanish.
Bo walked to Holly’s side in the doorway. “Watch this,” he whispered. He then cleared his throat and screamed Grav’s name.
Grav jumped up, frantically throwing his thin sheet to the ground.
“Quick, come and see this!” Bo yelled.
Holly fought to keep a straight face as Grav began walking across the room. He slipped on the invisible ball as though it was a cartoon banana skin, falling flat on his backside. Holly’s straight face deserted her; both she and Bo burst out laughing.
Bo immediately made the ball reappear, causing the vexed confusion on Grav’s face to be replaced by a “you got me” grin.
“You are both going to pay for that,” he laughed.
When the group left the extension to rejoin the others in the lander, Bo brought his ball so that he’d be able to show Yury and play with it while everyone except them and Robert made the trip to the Karrier.
Yury was suitably impressed by the ball and did a better job than Rusev of pretending he wasn’t already familiar with the technology. Dante expressed even more amazement than Grav had when he first saw the ball. He asked the same kind of questions; Viola gave the same kind of answers. Rusev confirmed that the girl was right about most aspects of the technology but went on to clarify some specifics about the composite image processing in terms that only Dante seemed to understand.
The talk of images reminded Holly of the drone she’d stumbled upon the previous day, an exciting-at-the-time find which had been wholly eclipsed by the discovery of the Karrier just minutes later. When she asked whether any of the drone’s mapping data had survived, Yury shook his head solemnly.
After a few glasses of nutrition powder, which again led to Viola expressing her hope that the dining machine would be fixable, Yury, Robert and Bo wished the others well and waved them off. Robert quietly asked Holly to keep Viola in her sights at all times. Rather than tell him that Viola could take care of herself — which she fully believed — Holly promised that she wouldn’t take her eyes off the girl and reminded Robert that he could keep tabs on their relative locations via Yury’s wristband.
Holly, Dante, Yury and Rusev all wore their own wristbands, while Viola still had Grav’s. This allowed everyone who was going to the Karrier, apart from Gra
v, to track each other’s locations and vital signs. Yury’s wristband, from the safety of the lander, would allow the walking group to keep abreast of their covered distance and also keep them informed of the old man’s condition, which still concerned Holly despite having been perfectly stable since shortly after he crossed one of the zonal lines the previous afternoon.
Those lines, the photographs of which had been thoroughly reviewed along with those of the Karrier once Holly’s wristband synced with the screen on the lander’s table, were the group’s sole topic of conversation for most of the walk to the Karrier. Rusev and Grav remained intensely interested in everything the previous day’s trio of explorers had to say.
Holly gave Viola credit for identifying the first line by noticing a pattern in the growth of grass on each side, which ultimately led to the discovery of intersections and the realisation that clouds respected the lines in the air just as neatly as plants did on the ground. Rusev described the phenomena as “extremely bizarre” and “difficult to ascribe to any natural forces we’re aware of.” While those thoughts weren’t exactly new to Holly, Rusev’s wording underlined the obvious question raised by the zones: if they weren’t natural, what were they?
Holly, Dante and Viola all easily remembered the route they’d taken from the Karrier back to the lander the previous evening and led Rusev and Grav to the cliff-edge with no complications.
Looking down at the grassy valley, Rusev and Grav both expressed their surprise at the Karrier’s relatively good condition; Holly hadn’t deliberately focused on the worst of the damage in her photos, but she had focused on it nonetheless.
“So where’s the quickest route down?” Rusev asked.
“That way,” Viola said, pointing to the path.
Rusev clapped her hands together. “Let’s get going, then,” she said. “We’ve got a radio to fix.”
thirty-six
After almost four hours inside the Karrier, Rusev and Dante told the others that the problem with the power in the control room was decidedly worse than they’d feared.
“It looks like there was a surge in the radio console itself,” Dante said. “The damage is physical, and we don’t have all the parts we need to fix it.”
“What about the two landers?” Holly asked, trying to grasp at some faint hope while Viola put her head in her hands and Grav maintained a laudably stoic front in the face of this terrible news. “Surely you can rip everything out of the one we don’t need? It has short-range radio to communicate with the EVA suits. There must be a way.”
“We hope so,” Rusev said, answering Holly but glaring at Dante. “What Dante should have been clearer about is that we don’t have the parts we need here. We should certainly be able to return power to the control room with parts from the other lander, and there is a chance — admittedly slight — that we can use components from the lander’s communications system to restore full radio function.”
“How slight?” Viola asked.
Rusev inhaled deeply. “If it’s possible, we’ll do it. We’ll start by taking what we need from the lander tomorrow. The distances involved mean it will be the next day before we can come back here to get to work, but this is going to be our sole focus. For now, we should probably make a move back to the others; they’ll be worrying about us.”
“Can we at least lift the algae machine and see if it works?” Viola said. “I haven’t eaten anything that’s not powder for days.”
“Good idea,” Rusev said. She took heart from the condition of the machine, which — just like the Karrier — was in better shape than she’d expected. Without having to open anything up, she affirmed that five of the six tanks remained intact and fully operational and that the digital readings on the side of the machine — unannotated numbers which meant nothing to anyone else — were all within the correct operating ranges.
When they knew that the machine was worth lifting, the group left the how to Grav.
After judging the weight by inching the machine from the ground with his fingers, Grav secured a strong rope around its upper section. He then handed one end to Holly before asking her to stand in the corner of the room against the wall from which the machine had been torn.
“This one is for you,” Grav said, holding the other end of the rope out for Dante. “Viola, you go with him. With all of you pulling as tightly as you can when I start lifting from the front, it should not be difficult.”
“I can assist,” Rusev said.
“It is okay,” Grav said. “Holly can take care of that side and these two should just about match her for strength.”
Dante didn’t say anything but was visibly irked by this slight, however true it might have been.
Within two minutes, the machine stood upright.
It was the kind of task Grav was built for, all shoulders and thighs, and the sight of him gradually moving his hands up the machine’s front panel as it straightened wasn’t a million miles from the strongman contests Holly had watched as a child, in which the competitors tried to flip heavy logs.
Grav high-fived Viola but was left hanging by Dante. He laughed it off and turned to his other lifting assistant. “Good job, Hollywood.”
“Let’s just check that it still works,” she replied, stepping towards the front of the machine.
“I want to press the button,” Viola said. She typed the three-digit code for her usual order of redundantly vegetarian lasagne and waited excitedly for it to appear on the tray. Holly didn’t know exactly how much of the girl’s excitement was related to the novelty of the machine and how much came from her desperate longing for something resembling food, but she confidently imagined it was mainly down to the latter.
The order appeared, perfectly shaped but utterly green.
“The colouring tray must have been knocked out of place,” Rusev said. She then tasted a tiny piece and nodded in relief. “Flavouring and texture are perfect.”
Viola began eating without delay.
The utility room’s table was soon covered with trays filled by Grav’s green steak, Holly’s green chickpeas, and Rusev’s green potatoes. Dante insisted he was content to stick with the nutrition powder since “it all comes from the same stuff, anyway.”
A warm meal wasn’t enough to lift everyone’s spirits to the hopeful levels of their morning departure from the lander, but Holly voiced her view that the day’s developments weren’t all that bad. Rusev seemed utterly confident that power would be restored to the control room with minimal fuss — a vast improvement on Dante’s ‘60 percent’ outlook — and it was certainly better to have identified a surge in the radio console as the source of the problem than it would have been to have found no hints at all. However difficult the problem was, Holly insisted that it was better to know what it was. She said all of this largely for Viola’s benefit, and the girl’s body language suggested that it worked; a little, at least.
As the group headed to the lander with their remaining luggage in tow, Viola raised the possibility that Dante and Rusev could return to the other lander instead, so that they would be able to go straight from there to the Karrier the next day. It was a good idea, but unfortunately there weren’t enough hours left in the day for anyone to reach that distant lander before dark.
“Neither of us know where that lander is, anyway,” Dante said. “To be safe, either Holly or Grav will have to lead the way tomorrow.”
As the group passed the extension and approached the lander, Holly was surprised that Bo and Robert didn’t come out to greet them. She paid attention to Yury’s dot on her wristband and discerned from his vital signs that he was almost certainly asleep. With that in mind, she briefly looked inside the extension to see if Robert and Bo were also in their own beds.
They weren’t.
“They must just be sitting in the lander,” Viola said.
They weren’t.
thirty-seven
“Yury,” Rusev snapped, shaking him awake. “Where are they?”
�
�Hmm?” he groaned, stretching and rubbing his eyes. “Who?”
“My dad and my brother,” Viola jumped in.
Yury looked around the lander, clearly surprised that they weren’t still there. “Uh, probably the extension.”
Holly hurried to the windows, checking one side and then the other. They were no where to be seen.
“How long have you been asleep?” Rusev asked, now flat-out angry at Yury.
He looked at his wristband. “Can’t have been much more than an hour; you had just set off on your way back. They were still here then, so they can’t have gone too far.”
“Did they mention anything about going outside?” Holly asked, masking her concern with a casual tone.
“They already went outside earlier on,” Yury said. “Playing catch with the ball for ten, maybe twenty minutes. They’ll have drifted a little bit without realising it. Robert’s a smart man; he wouldn’t do anything foolish. Not with the boy. He knows it will be dark soon, so he’ll be back in time.”
Holly cursed not having given Dante’s wristband to Robert or Bo; if she had, they would all know exactly how far away they were and could have located them with ease. As it was, they had no idea.
Grav put his hand on Viola’s shoulder and told her they would be back any minute. The girl nodded slowly, but her concern was there for all to see.
Dante sat down next to Yury and relayed the situation regarding the radio. Yury was encouragingly optimistic about the prospect of using components from the other lander’s communications system to fix the Karrier’s fried radio.
Grav stood at one window and Holly at the other. A few minutes into their lookout, Grav breathed an extremely audible sigh of relief. “Here they come.”
Holly and Viola hurried over. “Is my dad carrying him?” Viola asked, straining her eyes to see them in the distance.
“Looks like it,” Holly said. “Bo has walked a lot over the last few days. That’s why it was better that he stayed behind today.”
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