In the hour while the backup rover battery charged, Rusev explained that she was now in direct contact with the crew of the Karrier en route to Terradox. The changeover had carried an element of necessary risk, she said; the radio module’s connection with the station had to be terminated so that the radio on the rescue Karrier could seek to establish its connection to Rusev. None of this would have been a problem if the core radio module had still been surrounded by the rest of the Karrier’s complex control console, but in the end the potential difficulties never materialised.
The rescue Karrier remained in full contact with the station as well as with Rusev. This was infinitely preferable to the alternative option of maintaining the direct Terradox-to-station connection and relying on the station to pass messages to the Karrier, since the potential difficulty of timing the Karrier’s entry through Terradox’s physical cloak would require a level of precision that would have been impossible with a time lag of more than a few seconds. With Rusev talking directly to the Karrier as it drew near, there would be no meaningful lag at all.
Yury enjoyed a brief chat with the Karrier’s crew, who were all delighted to hear his voice, but the slowly shrinking time lag made back-and-forth conversation difficult.
When the backup battery was fully charged, Holly’s trio departed. Grav stayed with Rusev, happily catching up with the rescue Karrier’s security officer who he’d known for a long time.
With a detailed map, a straight line of travel and a rover which could tackle all terrain before it with no trouble, the drive to New Eden could hardly have been simpler.
The journey was quick and comfortable, with the rover showing no reaction when it crossed even the most visible zonal thresholds.
“Has your pacemaker been alright since that day when it wasn’t?” Viola asked, leaning forward to talk to Yury.
Amidst everything else that had been going on, Holly felt guilty to have completely forgotten about Yury’s difficulty that day. Even today, before taking him out in a rover across more than a handful of zones, it hadn’t crossed her mind.
“That line is thicker than the others,” he said, pointing to the folded map that lay on his knee. “The fallen drones you found were all along offshoots of the same line. I’ve crossed between plenty of zones with no ill effects and the ones we’re crossing today are all shown as regular lines on the map. We have nothing to worry about on that front.”
Holly wished she could share his confidence, but now that the issue was in her head she couldn’t get it out. She stayed largely silent while Viola and Yury talked amongst themselves for the rest of the way. It was their first real long conversation, with questions going both ways and seemingly nothing off the table. Yury flat-out asked Viola what she knew about her late mother’s work and, after answering honestly that she’d never paid much attention, Viola asked Yury if he and Rusev were “just friends, or what?”
The old man laughed heartily. “Friends and colleagues,” he said.
A narrow but very long rock formation, almost resembling a great wall, passed on the right and informed the trio that they were extremely close to their destination.
The landscape around the rover was now lush; by far the lushest they had encountered. The trees looked familiar, resembling Earth-like palms. The ground was covered in short grass reminiscent of the modified kind which graced the gardens of the rich on Earth, hardily engineered to require extremely low amounts of water and to cease growing at its ideal length.
“We’re in the same zone as New Eden,” Yury said.
“I think we might already be in New Eden,” Viola said, looking out at the perfect vistas. “The buildings might just be one part of it.”
Holly continued forward, her anticipation building. She soon saw a vague shape come into view up ahead; before long, the clear outline of a large white building emerged.
Utterly isolated and nowhere near as large or oddly-shaped as the map suggested, the still-imposing white house looked like something from an antebellum plantation.
Holly drove to the point where the grass ended and the paving began, within a stone’s throw of the grand building.
There was no question whether or not they were going inside, but there were plenty of questions over what they might find.
“Well,” Yury said, opening his door and stretching his stiff legs. “Welcome to New Eden.”
seventy
The sound of birdsong and chirping crickets greeted Holly as she stepped out of the rover and towards the house.
There were no birds and no crickets.
Impressive water features flanked the building, with the sound of the fountains adding to the ambience. The faux-natural sounds of New Eden had a subconscious soothing effect. Prior to this, the only sounds Holly had ever heard outdoors on Terradox were gentle waves lapping on the sand at the beach in one of the so-called Tourist Zones and the occasional breeze rushing past her ear.
“How did they build it?” Viola asked, staring up at the perfectly painted house, complete with a rocker on the porch and an opulent balcony above it. “Like, I know the general idea of embryonic romotech… with the self-replicating romobots and the intricate designs pre-programmed to every tiny detail and all that stuff; we covered it twice in school. And I’ve seen the videos of stuff being built like that on Earth, but here? Where’s the material coming from? The actual matter?”
Holly was glad Viola was looking at Yury when she asked these questions.
“There may well have been some boots on the ground before ours,” Yury said, “so we can’t say for sure that certain materials weren’t brought after the initial expansion. But even then, the sheer mass of Terradox — the rocky ground, the water, the peaks — it’s all so far beyond what I would have thought possible.”
Viola shrugged and stepped towards the door. If the movement of her hand was anything to go by, her first instinct was to knock. She stopped herself and tried the door. It opened.
Having half-expected the building to be an empty shell, Holly stood open-mouthed in the doorway as her eyes took in every opulent inch. A grand staircase, richly carpeted in the centre, led up to the second floor.
Yury and Viola, apparently less awed, hurried inside and tried every door they could see. Yury walked more freely than Holly had seen for a while. Every door he tried was locked. Viola’s doors were no kinder but, undeterred, they both ventured upstairs. Holly followed, and by the time she reached the top they had both stopped beside the same door. Holly saw the engraving on its golden plaque: R. MORRISON.
“If this one’s locked, we’re breaking it down,” Viola said.
No one disagreed.
seventy-one
Viola almost fell forward as the knob turned and the door unexpectedly opened. Holly and Yury stood beside her at the threshold.
The word eerie could not begin to describe the room before them.
A large mahogany desk dominated the floor, filling much of the space between the door and a broad window which looked out towards the landscaped rear gardens. Despite the aged-looking carpet and the power of the sun shining through the window, the room contained absolutely no smell; it didn’t smell like an old room and it didn’t smell sterile. It smelled like nothing.
The surface of the desk was uncluttered; clear but for a nameplate, a silver letter-opener and a large paperweight.
“Did he grow up in a house like this?” Yury asked, his tone suggesting that he didn’t really expect Holly to know but thought it was worth asking anyway.
She shrugged and turned towards the large bookcase to their left. Four of its five shelves were empty. In the middle of the fifth, one book stood proudly facing forward: Harriet Brock’s infamous work, The Great Reset.
The peace-shattering noise of a glass-shattering impact tore Holly’s attention from the book. She turned to see Viola standing at the desk, which was now one paperweight short, and staring indifferently at the crack she had just made in the window.
“There’s
an empty plant pot in the corner,” Holly said.
Viola grinned, lifted the pot, and hurled it through what was left of the window. “What about this chair?”
Holly told her to go for it, then walked over to help when it proved too heavy for the girl to lift on her own. Together, they unceremoniously threw it out of the hole where the window used to be, taking most of the pane-holding wooden beams with it.
What at a glance appeared pointlessly destructive was in fact mildly cathartic.
After picking up the Brock book for safekeeping and leaving Viola in Morrison’s room to expel some pent-up rage as Yury approvingly watched on, Holly proceeded to smash through each of the house’s other doors one by one. Without exception, every single room was completely empty.
Holly couldn’t deny it: she had hoped and expected to find a whole lot more. “Not built yet” was the only answer she could think of to Viola’s earlier question: “Where are the rest of the buildings we saw on the map?”
But then, from the window of an empty second-floor room overlooking the parked rover, Holly saw a familiar looking and semi-hidden stairway.
“There’s something underground,” she yelled, running back to Morrison’s room. “I saw stairs behind the rover. They look just like the stairs to the bunker.”
Viola stopped scraping angry messages on the wall with the letter-opener. The bookshelf and desk were both lying on their sides and most of the carpet was ripped up. She worked fast; Holly had to give her that.
“Let’s go,” the girl said.
Yury grimaced slightly and rubbed his knee as he took his first step out of the room, but, as proud and as stubborn as ever, he declined Holly’s offer of assistance.
After hurrying ahead, Viola stopped at the front door when Holly yelled the order. She was good at following orders; Holly had to give her that, too.
Up close, the stairway looked exactly like the one at the bunker. The only difference was the lack of a security keypad. Holly pushed the door lightly to check that it would open. It did, but she hesitated.
“What’s wrong?” Viola said.
Holly inhaled slowly and deeply. “I just think… maybe we shouldn’t all go in at once.”
Yury nodded in firm agreement. “I’m happy to be on either side: in or out.”
“Well I’m going in,” Viola insisted. “With Holly. Right, Holly?”
Still, she was hesitant.
“Seriously, what’s the worst thing that could be in there?” Viola asked, getting impatient.
“I don’t know,” Holly said, taking one more deep breath before pushing the door open. “That’s the point.”
seventy-two
As the door swung open, a long corridor illuminated before Holly’s eyes. She stepped in ahead of Viola.
The corridor’s off-white walls and shiny floor brought to mind a hospital.
“I think these hallways and whatever else is down here are going to be the shape of the structures on the map,” Viola said.
“I was thinking the same,” Holly replied.
The corridor was so well-lit and spotless as to be positively eerie, evoking a strong feeling that someone else was there. They weren’t, of course, and after a few more steps on the flawless shining floor Holly couldn’t help but liken the atmosphere to that within one of Roger Morrison’s soulless and staff-free self-cleaning “smart hotels”, so favoured by the rich on Earth.
The first door Holly reached was on the left. She opened it — no lock — and led Viola into a second corridor. This one had doors on both sides at very regular intervals. Holly again opened the first on the left, then led Viola into a surprisingly large room with two beds and a small en suite bathroom. It really was like one of Morrison’s hotels.
They left the room without saying a word and tried the next door. Its size and layout were identical to the first’s. They then continued along the corridor until the end, counting the doors and opening one every so often to confirm it was a bedroom.
“How many people was he bringing here?” Viola asked.
“This corridor has sixty rooms with two beds in each,” Holly said. “But how many corridors are there?”
After returning to the main corridor from this offshoot, Holly tried the first door on the right. Despite being made of a completely different material than the others — something which either was or convincingly resembled real hardwood — this door was also unlocked.
“What’s inside?” Viola asked, respecting Holly’s request to stay back.
Holly’s eyes darted around the cavernous hall. Its lights slowly came to life, evidently reacting to her opening of the door, and they soon revealed a huge and largely empty circular room with what looked like display cases running along the walls. There were also several free-standing displays dotted around the floor. “It looks like a museum,” she said, almost inflecting it into a question. “Tell Spaceman to come inside.”
Viola walked the few paces back to the exterior door and passed the message on. A minute or so later, she and Yury joined Holly in the bizarre room.
From inside, there were no doubts: it was some kind of museum. A helpful arrow on the floor indicated where “The story of Terradox” began. Within the display cases, models and infographics laid out Morrison’s narrative.
Construction of the Terradox “backup site” began when Morrison realised that peace on Earth was no longer a tenable hope, it claimed, with Terradox intended to “safeguard humanity’s future against the threat of vindictive human action or unsurvivable natural events.”
By the fourth of the six main displays, Yury asked the obvious question: “Who the hell is this crap for? Everyone who was going to come here would have come here with Morrison. Why does he need propaganda?”
Neither Holly nor Viola had the first idea.
As Yury walked towards one of the free-standing displays in the room’s centre, all of which were interactive if the notices on the floor in front of each were to be believed, Holly and Viola continued to the next main display.
“It’s the craft!” Holly called.
Yury hurried to rejoin them, grimacing slightly as his knee protested the sharp turn. Sure enough, he saw that the display case contained a large and detailed scale model of an undeniably impressive spacecraft.
Holly moved along to the final display while Yury took in the stunning model craft.
In place of a model, the final display featured a map and several photographs. “Yury,” Holly said, urgency in her voice. “Launch site!”
His head shot round, instantly abandoning the previously enthralling craft. “Where is it?”
“It says… Queensland.”
“His old site? The Far North Queensland development site?”
“What development site?” Holly asked.
“Ah, that’s right,” Yury said, “he closed it before you were ever involved with him. That place is supposed to have been out of commission for a long time, ever since he moved his space operations out to the island he built. No one thought he was serious about space back when he had the mainland research base; it was just a site he bought out from one of the boom-and-bust firms.”
“So does this, like, mean anything?” Viola chimed in.
“We know where the ark is,” Yury emphasised. “Morrison will try to lie and dismiss our testimony and samples and our photographs of this place, but this ark exists… on Earth… right now. A lot of people would believe us, but not everyone. Now we can tell them all where to find the proof. He can’t hide it.”
Viola didn’t look convinced. “But he is hiding it. And he’s been hiding it for… how long?”
“This is big,” Yury said. “Trust me on that. And this was worth coming out here for; you can trust me on that, too.”
Holly made sure to get clear photographs of the map as well as the ark and every line of text in the display cases. “Anything good in the smaller displays?” she asked Yury.
“Empty. Just a card in each that says Coming
Soon.”
Despite Yury’s statement that the discovery of the ark’s location was enough to render the trip to New Eden worthwhile, he was understandably keen to search the rest of the underground base before returning to the others at the lander. This took far less time than expected and yielded only one further surprising discovery.
Before that came another three secondary corridors leading to another 180 double bedrooms. This meshed well with an infographic Holly had seen back in the museum, which referenced room for “almost 500 carefully chosen evacuees.”
The final surprise came after the last of the residential corridors, when Holly opened an inconspicuous door and gazed uneasily around the room before her.
“What is it?” Yury asked, following close behind.
Holly tore her eyes from the pastel coloured walls and turned to face him. “A nursery.”
seventy-three
The large square room contained precisely fifty narrow cribs. Half were fitted with pink bedding and half with blue. The room was decorated like a typical nursery, all pastel walls and smiling cartoon animals.
One sole poster set the nursery apart from what could have passed for an innocent room on Earth: on it, a young nurse held a happy child above the caption “Healthy seeds for a healthy future.”
“Fifty’s not enough,” Holly said, ignoring the inherent creepiness of the room and focusing on what she saw as an important point. “You can’t start again with five hundred adults and fifty babies. Not even close.”
“This is just for the first fifty,” Yury said. “He’ll have a diverse genetic stockpile of, you know… samples. I know we have the same at the station, in case there ever is an extinction level event on Earth. It wouldn’t be much of a backup if we didn’t. Besides, who’s to say that this isn’t one of ten sites on Terradox, or that Terradox isn’t one of ten romospheres in our solar system?”
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