Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  Viola didn’t argue. “Uh, yeah, okay.”

  Fifteen minutes was probably a better estimate of how long it would take for Rusev and Grav to reach the lander, and Holly wanted to find out what had happened at the Karrier before anyone else did. If the news about the radio was good, it wouldn’t matter who heard it when. But if the news wasn’t good, a deft touch would be needed to deliver it; a defter touch than Grav could manage, for sure.

  As Holly ran across the lander’s long shadow on her way to meet them, her mind buzzed with the countless questions and things she wanted to ask and tell them. She was sure they would feel the same way, but as she grew closer to them she became less optimistic. Neither Rusev nor Grav looked desolate, but neither’s expression suggested that they’d met success in their efforts to fix the radio and contact the station.

  When they finally came face to face, no one spoke. The silence only lasted a second or two, but to Holly it felt a lot longer.

  “Well?” she said.

  Grav replied with a slight but decisive shake of his head. Still, though, there was no dejection.

  Another silence circled, this one longer than the first.

  Holly broke it again: “We got the code. Well, Robert did.”

  “Robert?” Rusev echoed incredulously. “How?”

  Holly gave them a very quick rundown of what had happened, including the part when she and the kids had confirmed the code’s veracity by using it to enter the bunker. “The only thing that wasn’t either locked away or turned off was a map,” she said, “and it shows some pretty big buildings in an area where none of us have been.”

  Rusev nodded. “Okay, good. Well, we fixed the power in the Karrier’s control room.” She paused for a deep breath. “But the radio is not going to be something we can fix.”

  “Dante broke it,” Grav added. “I looked at the camera footage once the power was back. Like you thought, he messed around under the hood before you and Viola went in. The transmitter is fried. He cut the power, too, but we cannot fix the transmitter like we fixed that.”

  Holly rubbed her temples in an effort to stay composed. “So you’re telling me it’s impossible to use the radio? Impossible?”

  “The transmitter is damaged beyond repair,” Rusev confirmed.

  “So why aren’t the two of you more upset?” Holly asked, bemused rather than accusatory. They had already had a while to come to terms with it — she knew that — but that didn’t explain how calm they seemed.

  “Because we found something else,” Grav said. “This was in his bed, hidden between the mattress and the sheet.”

  Holly tentatively held out her hand to receive the brown envelope. “D. PARKER” was handwritten in blue ink in the bottom left corner, identifying the original recipient as Dante. She opened the envelope and removed the four or five sheets of tightly folded paper, each of which had typed text on both sides.

  The front sheet contained only two words, filling the centre of the page in large print, bold and underlined: “Terradox Primer.”

  “What the hell is Terradox?” Holly asked.

  Grav looked all around. “That is what they call this place.”

  fifty-five

  Terradox.

  The planet they were stranded on — or the romosphere they were stranded on, as Dante had insisted on putting it — finally had a name.

  Holly turned the cover page and started reading. The others were inside poring over an illuminating map, but that was nothing compared to the document Grav had found which she now held in her hands: Dante’s field book.

  Her eyes devoured the text, continuing past the questions which arose and were pushed to one side for now.

  The first major revelations came just a few lines down, in the form of a step-by-step checklist of actions Dante had been instructed to follow. What Holly discerned was that Dante had been given some kind of handheld device, referred to only as “the transceiver”, which alerted him when Terradox was within the Karrier’s vicinity. At that point, after Dante pressed a button to initiate the next stage, Terradox began to attract the Karrier towards it.

  “That is when everything went to shit in the control room,” Grav said, seeing which part Holly was reading. “When all of my readouts started going crazy.”

  Holly then read a sentence about the Karrier being within Terradox’s vicinity “in accordance with the pre-programmed path modifications”; modifications which Dante had evidently made shortly before the Karrier’s final launch from Earth. Like the snake that he was, Dante had made good use of the unrestricted access he enjoyed while the Karrier was docked and Grav was off duty.

  But the next sentence suggested that Dante had failed in one aspect: he had been supposed to “sufficiently reduce the romobot cloak density to ensure safe passage”. Holly was relatively unsurprised that the severity of the Karrier’s impact with the ‘romobot cloak’, which blocked both Terradox’s external visibility and its gravitational pull, had been unplanned; the impact was so severe, she couldn’t imagine anyone would have taken the risk of bearing it on purpose.

  What came next was a more unsettling series of instructions for how Dante should deal with the Karrier’s other passengers. Yury Gardev and Ekaterina Rusev were to be kept alive “at all costs”, with the “strategic importance” of this point stressed very clearly. It continued: “Ivy/Holly Wood is preferred alive. Goran Vuletic is to be covertly eliminated as soon as possible.” Dante was then instructed to use discretion in dealing with the Karrier’s paying passengers, whose identities were unknown to the primer’s author.

  There were short bullet-point lists for each of the four named survivors. These points advised Dante, among other things, that Grav was “dangerous and committed” while Holly was “potentially receptive to reason.”

  The instructions then shifted to methods by which Dante could most effectively foster suspicion within the group of survivors, which was a tactic to be deployed only if he felt that fingers might soon be pointed at him. One explicit suggestion was to guide certain group members to “open-air growth test sites” where the Grow-Lo-like artificial soil could be used to shift suspicion directly towards Rusev.

  Holly felt sick, but she couldn’t stop reading.

  The following page shifted from intra-group manipulation tactics to information that looked more objectively pertinent.

  Under the heading “MANDATORY DATA TRANSFERS”, Dante had been instructed to send an “I am here” signal at an agreed upon time on the day of the crash. The next sentence, in parentheses, told him to encourage the group’s inevitable desire to explore the surface and to insist upon choosing a direction of travel which would take him where he had to go, and, naturally, to insist upon going alone. It also stated that further data transfers would be required on days five and twelve.

  “This is day six, right?” Holly said.

  Rusev nodded. “Counting the day we landed as day one, yes.”

  Holly skimmed a dense paragraph containing detailed instructions on the steps Dante would need to follow to “reduce zonal blending” on day eleven.

  The following paragraph then reaffirmed the importance of the three mandatory data transfers with the most troubling revelation yet: should Dante fail to initiate the third and final data transfer on day twelve, now just six days away, it would be assumed that his mission had been compromised or that he had suffered an accident. “In such an instance,” the primer read, “the romosphere will be poisoned to neutralise any and all potentially hostile survivors. The primary cost of your failure will be a delay in our launch. The personal cost will be your life.”

  Immediately upon reading this, Holly couldn’t understand why Rusev and Grav weren’t as terrified as she was. Relative to the complexity of maintaining a perfectly habitable environment within the Terradox romosphere, she knew that disrupting the balance to poison the air would be an absolute triviality.

  Did Rusev and Grav think that they could initiate the data transfer? Did they think
they could coerce Dante into doing so?

  And then came the other question raised by this alarming paragraph. This was the one Holly chose to vocalise: “What launch?”

  “They can only be talking about a journey to here,” said Grav, who had evidently already considered this. “It makes sense: they must have wanted Dante to check the air and the rest of this place to make sure it was habitable before more of their people come, and they probably realised they could kill two birds with one stone by getting one of their guys on the ground and grounding us at the same time.”

  Rusev didn’t argue with this suggestion. “And they didn’t just want to seize myself and Yury to use as leverage over the station,” she added. “They knew they could prevent all of our cargo from getting there and take out one of the station’s two remaining means of transport.”

  Holly tried to focus; it was so much to take in. “So are we going to do this transfer in six days? And if we can’t, are we going to try to force Dante to do it?”

  “It looks like we’re going to have to,” Rusev said.

  Grav took the primer from Holly’s hands and turned to the back page. “This tells us how to open the storage doors you were talking about,” he said, changing the subject. “It is perfect: you got the code but didn’t know how to get into the storage area. Meanwhile, we found out how to open the storage area but did not know the code. Now we can all go inside together and see what is there.”

  Holly looked at the diagram on the back page. It indicated the location of a hidden dial which would unlock the doors. The locks were magnetic, as she expected, and they were all controlled from a single point.

  No one had suggested going to the bunker before returning to the lander, from which the trio were now just a stone’s throw away.

  Holly took it upon herself to hurry ahead and break the news to the others. She did so gently but honestly, telling them that the Karrier’s transmitter had been deliberately damaged and could not be fixed to enable radio communication with the crew of the Venus station.

  “What’s that in your hand?” Viola asked.

  “The guidebook for Dante’s mission,” Holly said. “Grav found it. We have a problem — a big one — but we have a better chance of dealing with it now than we did this morning.”

  Yury, still seated, held his hand out to request the primer. “What kind of problem?” he asked as Holly handed it to him.

  She replied in the most straightforward terms: “If we don’t initiate a data transfer at the right time of day, six days from now, they’ll assume Dante’s mission has been compromised and they’ll poison the air to get rid of us.”

  No one said anything.

  “But the primer tells us how to open the storage doors inside the bunker,” Holly went on. “Whatever is in there is hidden behind a code and a separate lock. It has to be worth it.”

  Yury stood up slowly, grimaced, and wiggled his often troublesome knee until it cracked. “Okay,” he sighed, reaching for the lightweight jacket on the back of his chair. “Let’s go and see what we’re dealing with.”

  fifty-six

  The entire group, minus the now lucid but still restrained Dante, proceeded to the bunker as one. They took several powerful flashlights to combat the falling darkness and soon wished they had taken similar precautions against the falling temperature. The chill in the air was perfectly manageable, however, remaining quite comfortably above freezing and nowhere near the sub-zero temperatures that had surrounded Holly’s lander on the first night.

  Holly’s vague understanding of Terradox’s climate zones made this huge variation less hard to fathom than it had been at first, but it was still incredible to consider just how greatly conditions could vary in two areas so relatively close together.

  Thanks to Dante’s Terradox primer, which was widely discussed on the short journey, once inside the bunker they were able to open the locked compartment doors on the far wall’s storage unit.

  Rusev, Yury, Grav and Robert all spent a few moments examining the complex control console. The question of the console’s ability to communicate with Earth had already been answered by the primer’s repeated references to data transfers, but Robert nevertheless asked Rusev — who knew more about radio communications than anyone else, even Yury — whether she thought the console had a radio built in.

  “Of course,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “But it’s not going to be the kind that lets us choose who we talk to. Whatever this radio sends out goes to Earth; probably straight to Morrison’s office.”

  Holly, having already seen the console during her earlier search for the antidote, focused on opening the compartment doors. She turned the hidden dial underneath the main control console, causing each of the fifteen doors to emit a quiet click as their magnetic locks disengaged.

  But rather than the doors, everyone turned to face the vacant door-side wall. While the doors clicked, this wall had emitted a sound more like the release of pressurised air. Even more intriguingly, the wall itself had begun to separate like two sliding doors being opened from the centre. In the previously hidden annex sat two large rover-like vehicles.

  “Woah,” Bo said. He ran over to inspect them.

  Grav followed him. “How are you supposed to get these things outside?”

  “I think it’s a lift,” Viola said, crouching down. “You know, an elevator? Yeah. Yeah… look up! The ceiling opened, too.”

  Sure enough, when Holly stepped into the rovers’ annex and looked upwards, she saw stars.

  “This place is f…reaking crazy,” Grav said, moderating his language for the children’s benefit.

  “You just noticed?” Bo replied.

  Grav laughed. “Okay, so where is the button for the elevator?”

  “Let’s just do what we came here to do before we do anything else,” Rusev said, maintaining her focus while the others oohed and aahed over the futuristic-looking rovers. “Everyone pick one compartment to start with.”

  They all agreed and approached the storage unit. Bo took a floor-level compartment on the left, Viola took the one immediately above it, and Holly took the one at the top.

  “Mine is empty,” Holly said.

  Viola looked inside her chosen compartment. “So is mine.”

  “Mine, too,” Bo said.

  “Ah, shit,” Grav cursed, this time forgetting to moderate. “And mine.”

  Rusev closed her chosen door and moved to another. Five down, ten to go.

  “Mine isn’t,” Yury announced.

  Everyone crowded around him. Holly, never more glad to have heard any words spoken, saw what the old man was lifting out from his compartment: a binder.

  The binder was far larger than the looseleaf sheets of paper that comprised Dante’s primer, and it looked far more official. As Yury lifted the substantial file to the ground, Holly saw the heading “Emergency Survival Guide” written on the front above an unmistakable Morrison Electric logo.

  The words “for use in case of catastrophic power failure” ran underneath the logo.

  Robert told the rest of the group that every other compartment was definitely empty; whatever they could learn from this binder, it was all they would ever have.

  Within the next ten minutes, Holly and the others would learn almost everything they wanted to know… plus a whole lot more that they didn’t.

  fifty-seven

  At first, the emergency survival guide — a physical file to be used if or when the computer system became inaccessible — seemed to be concerned solely with returning that system’s functions.

  This would have been useful in itself, given that the initial troubleshooting checks indicated the location of the master switch and all potential points of failure, but Holly soon found an important nugget hidden amid the technical diagrams and more detailed instructions which followed.

  The binder’s contents had been divided amongst the group to expedite the first read-through. Viola, who had a section from ne
ar the back, spoke to reveal that she’d found a legend for the large map they had already taken to the lander.

  “The big building in the corner was in a zone marked 7C, right?” she began. “It says here that 7C equals New Eden. And it says that any zones beginning with 4 are Tourism Zones.”

  “The water was a 4,” Robert said. “The beach.”

  “So was the zone where I ran into thick snowfall,” Grav added. “But what the hell is it talking about, tourism?” He abandoned his pages and looked at Viola’s.

  Murmurs about the meaning and implications of the term “Tourism Zones” circled, but Holly remained single-mindedly focused on what she had found. After reading it twice to make sure she understood, she shared it with the others.

  “Okay,” she said, looking for a particular switch and then flicking it without asking for anyone’s permission.

  “Woah woah woah,” Robert said. “Hold on. Is that safe?”

  Holly turned briefly to Robert, nodded, then focused on Rusev. “There are explicit warnings about which actions would trigger a data transfer. For whatever reason, it sounds like they really don’t want any unnecessary data transfers.”

  “That’s because their communications protocols aren’t secure,” Rusev said. “I know it sounds dangerous to assume what kind of technology Morrison has when he’s been hiding… well, this… but we know from our moles that his people are extremely paranoid about their communications being intercepted and extremely bitter that they still can’t intercept ours. Again: I know it sounds dangerous to assume this. But as recently as a few months ago we were listening in on Morrison himself while he undertook one of those leisurely undersea voyages he’s so fond of. And if they had radio tech we couldn’t intercept, they’d be using it on Earth too.”

  Holly gave a half-nod of half-understanding; she was no expert on communication protocols or anything else like that, but Rusev didn’t sound like there were any doubts in her mind.

  “Anyway,” Holly said, “the data transfers aren’t something we can do by accident. It takes a series of deliberate steps, so it’s perfectly safe for us to look for answers on the rest of the system. Everything is stored locally.”