Dante stepped in at this point, making clear that the area Bo was talking about was part of the area he had swept on the first day while looking for Holly’s lander. “The footsteps are what’s left of mine after four day’s worth of dust being blown around,” he said. “I did see some plants — I told everyone that right away — but it didn’t look like they were arranged in any kind of weird way. This place is weird as hell, no doubt, but there’s nothing to see there.”
Now that he knew about the lines, which accounted for localised variation even if they didn’t truly explain it, Bo quietly accepted that there was no good reason to be suspicious about the plants.
After an unappetising but efficient breakfast of dissolved nutrition powder, Holly set off with Dante and Viola. She hoped to be back at around the same time as Rusev and Grav, who by now had a head start of several hours.
Holly led her trio along the straight-line course set out by Yury. They encountered nothing of note for over an hour, until Viola spotted a barely discernible change of colour along a thin strip of ground underfoot.
As though it was necessary to do so, Holly moved her arm across the threshold to confirm that it was indeed a zonal marking. She then walked fifty paces along the line in one direction while Viola did the same in the other. Both paused before returning. This move, as odd as it looked, would allow Yury to mark the line on his map as he tracked their relative distances from the lander like a hawk courtesy of his own wristband.
With Bo’s condition now stable, Dante had since resumed wearing his own wristband. Grav and Robert, like Bo, currently wore no wristbands. Five had to stretch between the group’s eight members, with the current spread designed to ensure that each travelling group was covered and that Yury’s steady location could act as a ‘home base’ reference point.
“There’s nothing up ahead,” Dante said. “We’ve mapped the line, which is what Spaceman wanted, so we know this zone is pretty big. We also know the whole area is pretty flat, which is what I wanted to know. So unless either of you can see a reason to keep going this way…”
Holly looked down at her wristband. Its display told her that Rusev and Grav had recently begun their journey back from the other lander. “We still have a few hours to kill,” she said.
Dante shrugged and scoured the landscape, barren even by the planet’s usual standards. “What about that, then?” he asked, pointing towards a fairly distant rock formation which was the only potential point of interest in sight. “We followed Spaceman’s route all the way to the line, exactly like he wanted, so can we at least switch course now and check that thing out? It looks pretty big.”
“We might find something cool,” Viola chimed in, giving Holly her best “please can we go?” eyes without resorting to actual begging.
Viola’s curiosity had led to useful discoveries in the past, Holly considered, and it did make a welcome change for Dante to be the keenest to explore. She eventually answered in the affirmative by holding her hand out towards the rocks.
On the way to the rocks, Holly left most of the talking to Dante and Viola, who were much chattier today than they had been previously. She assumed, quite understandably, that this was in no small part down to the gratitude Viola felt for the selfless risk Dante had taken in running all the way to the Karrier and back to save Bo’s foot.
It quickly became clear that the rock formation was both smaller and closer than the trio had originally thought; before too long, they were close enough to see that what had looked like a wall-like rock-face was in fact just one side of a conspicuously square rocky wall.
The wall itself was ragged and uneven in height and depth, but the shape of the perimeter was there for all to see.
“Is it just me…” Dante began, “or do those edges look like more of those right angles that nature doesn’t make?”
“There are rock formations on Earth that you would never believe aren’t man-made,” Holly said, trying to manage expectations.
Her efforts did little to quell the vocal speculation, which ceased only when they stood directly in front of the wall and silent wonder took over.
The low-point of the enclosing wall stood several inches higher than Holly and Dante, giving them no way of knowing what lay inside. Holly and Viola walked around the perimeter in opposite directions in the hope that Yury would still be tracing their movements on his own wristband back at the lander. The area inside the wall was slightly larger than the Karrier.
“Will you give me a foot up?” Viola asked Dante.
“Hold up,” Holly said. “There is no way you’re climbing up there until I know what’s on the other side. If you fell in…”
“I’ll go,” Dante offered.
Holly nodded and helped him up.
“Be careful up there,” Viola pleaded, perhaps sounding a little too concerned for Holly’s liking.
Dante shuffled onto his feet at the top of the wall and stood upright. “Holy shit…”
“What?” Holly and Viola asked at once.
Dante held his hand out for Holly, to help her up. “It’s one hundred percent safe,” he said, his eyes wide in something between confusion and amazement.
“You first,” Holly said to Viola. “I’ll be right behind you in case you slip.”
As soon as Viola had a solid footing on the wall, Holly climbed to join her via a protruding rock a few steps away.
“There are three different kinds of plants,” Viola said, somewhat spoiling the surprise.
Dante said something to Viola too quietly for Holly’s ears, but a few seconds later she had her own view of what they were talking about.
As the girl had said, there were indeed three different kinds of plants. They didn’t look like any plants Holly was familiar with, but the plants themselves weren’t what stood out. What stood out like a sore thumb was something more specific: the arrangement of the plants.
The perfect rows; the neat divisions; the irrefutably non-random and non-natural layout… there was no mistaking the sight before Holly’s eyes.
“Those aren’t just plants,” she said, already considering the game-changing implications of her next three words before she’d even spoken them. “Those are crops.”
forty-one
However distracted Holly’s mind had been by the urgency of the group’s rescue hopes, there had never been any real doubt that the zonal lines spread across her mysterious host planet indicated some kind of intelligent intervention.
But this new discovery — this discovery of agriculture, no matter how small-scale — went far beyond an indication of intervention. This discovery suggested nothing less than a relatively recent colonial presence on the ground.
“We’re not lost!” Viola exclaimed “I mean, I guess we’re still lost, but someone knows where we are… because someone has been where we are!”
Holly nodded passively as she took in the details of the crop placement. The ground was pristine, leading her to wonder about its composition and what kind of life was going on down there at the levels unreachable by Yury’s limited equipment in the lander. With so much else going on, studying the planet’s soil had become a forgotten priority even once the Karrier, which housed the equipment necessary for analysis, had been reached.
“I don’t know,” Dante said.
What Holly knew, judging by Dante’s voice, was that something was on his mind. She stayed quiet until he finished the thought.
“This is a pretty obvious thing to say,” he went on, “but those don’t look like any crops I’ve ever seen. They’re not as weird as some of the plants we’ve seen here, but this stuff doesn’t grow on Earth. What I’m trying to say is: these aren’t human crops. Maybe someone didn’t plant them… maybe something planted them, and maybe we’re standing on its territory.”
Viola immediately turned to Holly, waiting for her reaction.
“If things go to plan we’re going to be out of here in a few days, anyway,” Holly said. “And if they don’t, I’d rathe
r have this fallback than not have it. Because in terms of us being hopelessly isolated or not, it doesn’t really matter who planted these crops. All that matters is that these crops aren’t going to harvest themselves.”
“It’s not a very big field,” Viola said, apparently not overly panicked by Dante’s talk of standing on something’s territory. “Like, why wouldn’t they be growing this stuff all over the place? This much wouldn’t feed many people for long.”
“I don’t think this is for sustenance,” Holly said. “Like you just said: it’s not enough. This could be a test site to see if stuff will grow in certain conditions. Maybe in certain zones? I reckon that if Spaceman’s drones had all made it back, we would have images of more of these crop areas, all over the planet. We just haven’t run into any until today. It’s a big place.”
Without announcing his intention, Dante suddenly jumped down into the small field of crops. He landed safely. “Pass me some gloves and three sample containers,” he said. “I’m going to take some cuttings back to Spaceman. He knows a lot more about plants than we do.”
Holly handed Dante what he requested, seeing little point in rebuking him for jumping down. She gave him four containers rather than three; “one for the soil.”
But after collecting a sample from just one of the three kinds of plants, Dante noticed something odd about the ground underfoot. “It feels springy,” he said, keeping Holly up to speed with his thoughts as they came. He then crouched down and scooped up some soil from the narrow strip between the different crops. His back was turned to Holly and Viola, but they both saw him removing his right glove.
“Don’t touch it,” Viola yelled. “You don’t know what that stuff could be!”
Dante turned around and looked only at Holly. “This isn’t soil,” he said, struggling to say the words. His face whitened with worry.
“What are you talking about?” Viola asked. “If it’s not soil, what is it?”
Still staring at Dante, Holly remained silent. Her stomach was in her mouth — even worse than she’d felt upon seeing Bo’s foot the previous night — because she already knew what Dante was getting at.
“It’s artificial soil,” he said, running it between his fingers to demonstrate the material’s variable consistency. “And not just any artificial soil. I’d know this spongey feeling anywhere.”
Holly climbed down and picked up a handful. Seconds later, she threw it at the wall in an uncharacteristic outpouring of anger. “He’s right,” she said to Viola. “It’s Grow-Lo.”
“The crops already told us that someone had been here before,” the girl replied, “so why is this Grow-Lo stuff such a big deal? Did Morrison invent it or something?”
Holly finally looked up and met Viola’s eyes. “No,” she said. “It’s Rusev’s.”
forty-two
Hurrying back to the lander with several samples of mysterious crops and what Holly and Dante confidently identified as Grow-Lo, the hardy artificial soil developed by scientists at Ekaterina Rusev’s Rusentra corporation, the trio barely spoke.
Over the previous few days, the feel of Grow-Lo on Holly’s fingertips had been a relaxing sensation during brief moments spent caring for the resilient potted plant with which she had shared so many trips to and from the Venus station. Today, the feelings evoked by her unexpected discovery of the same substance could hardly have been more different.
Viola had asked for immediate clarification of what the Grow-Lo discovery meant, and Dante’s answer only served to raise even more questions in her mind: “Don’t ask me for details of this idea or for any motive that makes sense,” he said, “because I can’t see one. But I’m starting to think that Rusev wanted us to land here.”
That Holly didn’t dismiss this point out of hand spoke volumes.
“So we can’t trust Rusev?” Viola asked her.
“I don’t know what any of this means,” Holly replied, more gruffly than normal. “But I’m going to do whatever it takes to keep your family safe.”
Again, Viola could read more into what Holly didn’t say. “What about Grav?” the girl pushed. “And Yury?”
“Spaceman is one hundred percent with us,” Dante jumped in.
Holly glared at him. “So’s Grav.”
Dante bit his tongue but slightly shook his head several times, as though trying to make sure neither of them missed it.
Holly was glad of the silence that surrounded the remainder of their return journey; not because it gave her a chance to think, but because no amount of thinking could help her answer the kind of questions that Viola had understandably been asking.
Holly broke a long silence much later to announce that, according to the wristband data, Rusev and Grav had just reached the lander.
Viola spoke next, just a few minutes later. “Holly?” she said, her voice higher and somehow lighter than normal.
“Yeah?”
The girl paused for a few seconds, evidently reconsidering whether to voice her thought. “You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but…”
“Spit it out.”
After one final hesitation, Viola did: “Have you ever killed anyone?”
Dante stopped dead on the spot in response to the totally unexpected question, but soon resumed walking when he saw that it hadn’t knocked Holly out of her stride.
“Only in self-defence,” Holly said, looking straight ahead and answering without emotion.
“How many people?”
“Just once,” Holly answered, dodging the question slightly and automatically, as her mind often did.
Viola hesitated for long enough to indicate that she’d picked up on the dodge, so Holly saved her the trouble of a follow-up:
“Two people. I’m not going to stand here and say they deserved it, because none of us should have been in that situation, but they came at me with intent to kill.” Holly then pulled her collar outwards, tearing some stitching in the process, to show Viola the raised scar that ran several inches down her left shoulder.
The first time Dante had seen the scar, he lightheartedly likened it to a split in a still-growing tomato. There was nothing so lighthearted about Viola’s wordless response as her expression made clear that she regretted broaching the topic in the first place.
“It was Morrison’s fault,” Dante said. “The situation Holly was in.”
“That’s enough about it,” she said firmly. The details were nothing to be ashamed of but the last thing she wanted to do right now was introduce into Viola’s mind the rabbit-hole idea that a group could be tricked into thinking they’d crashed on an alien planet, as Morrison and the cronies at the top of his space program had done to Holly and her unfortunate colleagues all those years earlier.
“Sorry,” Dante mumbled. “I was just trying to tell Viola that you have as good a reason as anyone for wanting to bring Morrison down. Personally, I mean; beyond all the shit the GU is doing.”
“What’s your reason?” Viola asked him. “You know mine.”
Dante nodded in understanding. “Let’s just say the GU took someone close to me, too, then tried to cover it up.”
“Who?” Holly asked. “How come I’ve never heard about this?”
“Everyone has a thing they don’t want to talk about. This is mine.”
Holly respected Dante’s position but couldn’t help but feel slighted that he’d kept it all from her, both personally and in the context of their Earth-fleeing trip to the Venus station.
Just as the lander loomed near and Holly’s mind began to focus sharply on how she was going to confront Rusev about the discovery of her company’s artificial soil, an infuriating and disconcerting distraction presented itself.
Shuffling towards the trio as quickly as he could from another position roughly as far from the lander as she was, Holly saw Bo.
“For fuck’s sake,” she cursed, sounding far angrier than she had at any point in the day so far and catching Viola off-guard with the uncharacteristicall
y blue language. “How difficult is it to keep him inside for a few hours?”
Moving as quickly as his feet would take him, Bo reached them in no time.
“Where have you been?” Viola snapped at him, immediately assuming her natural big-sisterly role.
Bo took several gulps of air, trying to catch his breath. “I was at the plants. You know, where my—”
“You went back to the plants that messed up your foot? Where the hell is Dad?”
“I wore my big boots so the plants couldn’t hurt me. And Dad is still sleeping. He was up all night watching me, so he—”
“Get back inside before he wakes up,” Holly ordered, interjecting to make the point. “He doesn’t have to know that you—”
“Everyone be quiet!” Bo blurted out. “Be quiet and listen to me: I found something. The plants are guarding something, just like I thought. In the middle of the patch, there’s a gap. You have to come and see it. There are stairs… to a door. I think it’s a bunker. Seriously, come on… I’ll show you!”
“Is there any writing on the door?” Viola asked, maintaining impressive focus as Holly and Dante stared dumbly at each other in the wake of Bo’s startling revelation.
“Yeah,” Bo said. “Human writing.”
“English?”
“I don’t know, it’s just initials. It says CB-1.”
The children looked at Holly and Dante for clues.
“Does that mean anything to you?” Dante asked.
Holly shook her head.
“Me neither.”
“So what are we waiting for?” Bo asked, almost shaking with excitement. “Let’s go.”
“We need to go inside first,” Dante said.
“Why? To tell Rusev and Grav and Spaceman what I found?”
“No,” Holly barked. “You’re not going to say a single word, and no one is going to mention this door until I say so. Is that clear? If it’s not, you can wait outside.”
Dante and Viola both gave slight nods; neither particularly wanted to be the one to confront Rusev about anything, so leaving it to Holly was their natural preference.
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