Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  Dante shrugged, as much as he could with both hands restrained. “Rather him than you.”

  Holly looked at the ground. She tried to gather herself before her last play: a desperate bluff.

  “You know something, Dante? If you were as smart as you think you are, you would have made sure you cut the Karrier’s power before you let the cameras catch you trying to fry the radio. Now we know exactly what’s stopping us from contacting the station, and Rusev is already on it. She told me the radio will be operational again within hours. And now that we know that Morrison Electric’s communications protocols really are miles behind Rusentra’s — the warnings on the computer make that clear enough — we know he won’t be able to detect our signals. And we know they don’t get any data from this place outside of the scheduled transfers, so we know they wouldn’t see a rescue crew approaching from Venus.”

  Dante said nothing, but Holly saw him gulp.

  “We also now know how to reduce the strength of the barrier you were supposed to let the Karrier pass through unscathed. So after we talk to the station in the morning, the rescue crew could be here on the ground in three or four days. You know… less than six.”

  “She’s not fixing that transmitter,” he muttered. “No way.”

  “Yeah,” Holly said in a sarcastically deflated tone. “I mean, it’s not like she’s an expert or anything.”

  On that note, Holly made a swift exit, taking a gentle hold of Viola’s arm to ensure she followed.

  “What was the point of that?” the girl asked, genuinely curious as they entered their shared bedroom.

  “To gauge his reaction. They really can’t trace our signals. The radio really is all that’s standing in our way.”

  “Didn’t we already know that, though?”

  “Rusev assumed it,” Holly said. “But that’s different from knowing.”

  “Yeah, but… how does it help?

  Holly didn’t have an immediate answer to this, but Dante had been sufficiently rattled that her mind was able to momentarily push aside the stakes and the deadline in favour of pursuing some kind — any kind — of potential solution.

  For the next ten minutes, Holly and Viola sat silently.

  Robert didn’t pass the doorway on his way to Dante, and Holly knew why; Bo’s sobbing resonated through the extension, along with Robert’s attempts to soothe his mind. Viola looked like she was going to cry, too, but she somehow held it together.

  When Viola grew tired of sitting quietly, she rose from her bed and carefully watered Holly’s potted plant.

  Holly watched on as the resilient girl took care of the resilient plant. Then, all of a sudden, she sat bolt upright on her bed.

  “What?” Viola asked, unsure whether it was a good or a bad sign.

  The open-mouthed half-smile on Holly’s face when she turned around strongly suggested good, and the six words which followed sealed it:

  “I think I have an idea.”

  sixty

  With Viola at her side, Holly wasted no time in sharing her germ of an idea with Rusev:

  “Dante broke our transmitter and the bunker obviously has one. I don’t exactly know the differences between antennae and transmitters and receivers or anything else, but is there any way we could use our radio with the bunker’s transmitter?”

  Rusev, who was sitting at the table with Yury, didn’t roll her eyes or tut at the stupidity of the idea. Given how little time Rusev normally wasted with politeness, and given the unusually time-sensitive nature of this high-stakes situation, Holly took this as a good sign. She continued:

  “What I mean is: could we gut the radio from the Karrier and, I don’t know, link it or connect it to whatever physical transmitter there is inside the bunker? Because if it’s physically possible to disconnect the bunker’s console from its transmitter, it’s not like that would be flagged up on Earth; there’s zero uplink or comms between Terradox and Earth apart from scheduled transfers and distress signals, so it wouldn’t trip an alert or anything.”

  “A radio is a radio,” Viola chimed in excitedly. “Right?”

  Rusev rose and walked to the window where she stood in thought for several seconds. “It’s not exactly going to be ‘plug and play’,” she said, gazing into the night, “but there is a detailed guide for repairs and modifications to the bunker’s console…”

  With Rusev still looking outside, Holly and Viola turned to each other in response to her cautiously optimistic reply. They both smiled.

  “We only have five and a half days,” Yury said. “What good does contacting the station do if we still have to make the same choice: sacrifice ourselves, or sacrifice Earth?”

  Rusev finally turned away from the window. “We were only three days away from the station when we crashed. Allowing a day for a small crew to stock the surviving Karrier for a short but unplanned mission, that leaves us with a day and a half. A day and a half to disconnect the radio console from our Karrier, connect it to the bunker’s transmitter after disconnecting the bunker’s console, and successfully contact the station. Not to mention the walk to and from our Karrier, which would have to wait until morning since it could be extremely cold out there at night…”

  “We can drive,” Holly said. “You saw the rovers. Even if it takes thirty minutes to get one outside and learn how to use it, then another thirty minutes to get there, that still saves us an hour. If we leave now and whatever you have to do at the Karrier is easy, we could be back in the morning and have a whole day to try the next step.”

  Viola was nodding in support. “Holly’s right. And even if you can’t quite fix it in time for a crew to get here in five and a half days, as long as you fix it before then we’d still be able to tell the station what’s going on and they could try to send the news back to Earth. Maybe no one would believe it, but at least we’d be giving them a chance.”

  “Exactly,” Holly said. “But the best case scenario is that you hook our radio up to their transmitter, we call the station, and help gets here in time. If we’re safely on the way to the station, it doesn’t matter if the air here gets poisoned. We won’t need to initiate the transfer, which means Morrison’s evacuation and ‘sonic cleansing’ will be delayed. And from the station we can transmit our hard evidence to Earth about everything Morrison has done. That was already the plan, back when the only things you knew about were his role in the famine and maybe his link to Devastation Day. Now we have proof of a hidden planet and his express intent to eliminate billions of people. If this works, it does everything. We live, he falls.”

  Rusev walked away from the window and continued past the table with a blank expression on her face.

  “What are you doing?” Holly asked.

  Rusev didn’t look back. “Getting our EVA suits,” she said. “If the rover breaks down, we’re going to need them.”

  sixty-one

  Holly and Viola hurried across the very short distance to the extension to tell Robert of the plan.

  After Viola told Robert that they were going to the Karrier with Rusev — Viola’s presence on the trip was news to Holly, but not unwelcome — Holly quickly explained that Rusev planned to “remove the whole radio console and bring it back to the bunker” before attempting to use it in conjunction with the bunker’s transmitter to contact the station. This untechnical and somewhat stilted explanation wasn’t simplified for Robert’s benefit so much as it was limited by Holly’s own understanding of the specifics.

  Bo didn’t ask to go along, but his gloom lifted at the news of a plan. At this stage, as Robert vocalised, any hope was better than none and anything was worth trying. He wished them well and told Viola to be careful. Holly appreciated the trust Robert now frequently showed, both in her ability to keep Viola safe and in the girl’s ability to take care of herself.

  Holly had suggested that Rusev could wait at the lander for the rover, saving her the fifteen-minute walk to the bunker which Holly and Viola could run in five, but Rusev insisted on l
ooking over the console’s radio repair guide and information about the rovers before setting off. She was satisfied with what she read and, with Grav just as enthused about the plan as Holly had expected, they proceeded to raise the rovers’ platform to the surface at the touch of a button and drive one forward before re-lowering the other on the platform and closing the roof once more.

  Grav agreed that there was no longer any need for him to guard the bunker, if there ever had been, so he accepted the offer of a ride back to the extension where he would instead guard Dante.

  The rover was deceptively spacious, with room for four and plenty of space left over for the three EVA suits and other emergency supplies Holly grabbed from the lander before making a beeline for the Karrier’s crash-site.

  The drive passed quickly and without difficulty; the fully charged rover had an operational range that could have taken them to the Karrier and back a dozen times, while conditions inside remained pleasant even as the dashboard showed the outdoor temperature plummeting.

  The only real moment of excitement came when Viola accidentally discovered a loaded pistol within a small compartment she had expected to be a fold-out cup-holder. Holly, driving, ordered Viola to pass it forward to Rusev for safe keeping. She did so.

  The subject then turned to the Karrier’s important cargo, which Rusev had alluded to in the past without ever being pressed for specifics. Now, with around a quarter of the drive left, Holly finally asked for details.

  “We were carrying defensive weaponry,” Rusev said, “to protect the station. Ironically enough, we were aiming to create an impenetrable defensive ring of weaponised satellites. And one thing the station lacks are facilities for producing such weapons, so if we didn’t bring them now we would have remained exposed. The system would have been effective against threats that we knew of, but… well, given what they have here, it doesn’t take much of a leap to imagine that Morrison and the GU probably have significantly more advanced weaponry than our intelligence suggested. There’s nothing combustible in the cargo bays, though; they’re not that kind of weapons.”

  By the time the rover reached the familiar cliff-edge above the Karrier, where the trio had to leave the rover due to the rapidly descending path down, the outdoor temperature had fallen to a point which would have made the short walk impossible without their EVA suits.

  After putting on her suit, Holly also picked up a powerful flashlight to assist the group’s descent on relatively rocky terrain which would have been difficult to traverse using only their helmets’ night-vision capabilities.

  The grassy canyon, always quiet, felt extremely eerie without daylight to illuminate the area. Had it been on Earth, Holly would have expected to hear owls or wolves calling in the night.

  Once inside the Karrier, Rusev got right to work. She told Holly that disconnecting the radio — “the easy part” — was a one-person job, and suggested that Holly and Viola spend their expected two-hour wait triple-checking every nook and cranny of Dante’s quarters in case she and Grav had overlooked anything during their previous search.

  Viola begged to be permitted a meal from the dining machine before they started looking. Holly, as keen as ever to eat something that wasn’t a dissolved powder, enthusiastically agreed. Viola managed two full plates of her usual vegetarian lasagne; Holly didn’t even look at what button she was pressing when it came time for her own order, quickly devouring both portions of whatever kind of pastry-based dish the machine provided.

  “This bed is hard,” Viola pointed out after looking under Dante’s pillow. “It’s worse than the ones in the extension, never mind the ones in the lander.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I spent six hours a night on one of these things for six months straight!”

  “I kind of get now why you never went onto the station all the times the Karrier docked. I mean, it wouldn’t be easy to come back to a bedroom like this after seeing the inside of the station, and seeing the view, and smelling the air…”

  Holly laughed. “What is it with you and the smell of the air on the station?”

  “Bo told me about it. And then when I looked it up, I saw a video of a woman arriving and she kept going on about how great the smell was. Lavender, she said. Like a candle. Or like actual lavender, I guess.”

  “That might have just been one day,” Holly said. “Maybe they had just finished cleaning the floor with lavender-scented products.”

  Viola shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  After finding nothing in Dante’s room during their hour-plus search — unsurprisingly for Holly, since she knew how thorough Grav always was — they returned to the control room to check on Rusev’s progress.

  “Good timing,” Rusev said. “This is it.” She rose to her feet having just finished disconnecting the radio module.

  Holly wouldn’t have known how to describe it; it looked almost like an ancient computer tower with an open top and circuit board-like ‘layers’ inside. It was tall, reaching Holly’s knee, but fortunately wasn’t quite as heavy as it looked. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but she knew she could carry it up to the cliff-edge where they’d been forced to park the rover before descending on foot.

  A brief discussion ensued over whether they should wait until it was light outside. Rusev estimated that dawn was no more than an hour away, which prompted Holly to reply: “and every hour counts.”

  “Of course it does,” Rusev said. “But if you trip over a rock you can’t see and the radio breaks, nothing will count.”

  Holly conceded the point and impatiently watched the darkness fade. Rusev used the time to get something from the dining machine while Holly passed the time by showing Viola her own bedroom. She didn’t miss it.

  Eventually, the sun began its ascent. The wording of the information on the bunker’s computer left Holly unsure as to whether any of the sky they saw was real. Either way, the sunlight illuminating the vast canyon led to her suggesting to Rusev that the area would make a sensible landing site for the rescue crew they all so desperately hoped would be arriving very soon. “It would make it easy to load whatever cargo we want,” she said. “Because we couldn’t safely transport the virus samples on foot and I imagine the situation will be the same with the defensive weaponry.”

  Rusev nodded. “This is as good a place as any.”

  Though the early morning air remained very nippy, Holly proceeded without her EVA suit; given how precious her cargo was, she needed more dexterity and fine balance than even the most advanced suit could provide. Rusev and Viola suited up for the short ascent to the rover.

  Viola stretched out on the back seat as soon as they stepped back inside the vehicle. The radio module, on which every hope rested, sat securely on the floor beside her feet.

  “Settle a bet,” the girl said, tapping Rusev on the shoulder. “Is the air on the station scented?”

  “Yes. In some areas. The entrances, primarily.”

  “What’s the scent?”

  “Lavender.”

  “Ha!” Viola gloated. There was no rear-view mirror, so Holly didn’t see her sticking her tongue out in victory. The girl fell asleep shortly afterwards, understandably exhausted. It was going to be a long day for both Holly and Rusev, but both were glad to have an avenue to pursue.

  “She’s been lucky to have you,” Rusev said. “To keep her spirits up. The boy is different — he seems to keep himself up — but you have been good for her. I suppose we could say you’ve proven a very capable chaperone.”

  Holly laughed slightly at what Rusev had intended as more of a jovial truth than a full joke. “Viola is a lot stronger than she looks, though,” she said, insistent on pointing that out.

  The lack of a mirror meant that Holly had to turn to see her, which posed no risk given the barrenness of the majority of the rover’s route.

  She saw a faint smile on the sleeping girl’s face; surely indicative, Holly thought, of the growing hope in her heart.

  Day Seven

  si
xty-two

  Holly drove the rover straight back to the lander, in full agreement with Rusev that they should report to the others before heading to the bunker for what they desperately hoped would be a successful attempt to establish contact with the relatively nearby Venus station.

  To her surprise, only Yury was inside.

  “How did it go?” he asked Holly.

  “Where is everyone?” she replied.

  “Robert and Bo are still in the extension and Grav is back at the bunker. So how did it go?”

  “Who’s watching Dante?” Holly asked, again ignoring the question in favour of one of her own. “Robert?”

  “No, Grav.”

  Confused, Rusev couldn’t help but join the conversation at this point: “But you just said Grav is at the bunker.”

  “They moved Dante,” Yury began to explain. “He wouldn’t stop yelling and Bo couldn’t sleep. Grav wanted to go back to the bunker to guard the computer, anyway — you know how he can be when he gets an idea in his head — and he also wanted to keep an eye on Dante.”

  “Wait wait wait,” Holly said. “Dante is in the bunker?”

  Yury nodded like it was nothing. “With Grav. They locked him in the other rover. He’s still restrained, and Grav is right there. It’s not like he’s walking around or pressing buttons.”

  “And you thought this was a good idea?” Rusev asked.

  He hesitated. “I didn’t think it was a bad one. Why… is it?”

  “It’s just a surprise, that’s all.”

  Rusev then sat down and poured herself two flasks of hot coffee for the long and hopefully fruitful day ahead. While she did so, she finally answered Yury’s question about their progress. He reacted as expected, but Holly could tell that his hopes were lower than he was letting on.