“What do you mean reveal it?” Viola asked.
Yury stretched his shoulders. “Exactly what I said: we’re going to remove Terradox’s visual cloak. Holly is going to look for the remote Dante used before we crashed here. Assuming it has a good operational range and assuming it can control the visual cloak as well as the physical barrier, that could work very well. But we can’t bank on it being found or on those assumptions being correct. If it’s not found or doesn’t look like it could remove the visual cloak, there will be another way; I’m sure of that. I’m going to talk to Rusev to see if she or the rescue crew have any ideas on that front.”
“I’ll drive you to the bunker when I head out to look for the remote,” Holly said.
“Am I going with you?” Viola asked.
This subtle variation on the usual “can I go with you?” didn’t escape Holly, but by now she would have wanted Viola to accompany her even if two sets of hands and eyes hadn’t been so obviously beneficial for the task at hand. “Definitely,” she replied.
“What can I do?” Bo asked.
“I am staying here with you and your dad,” Grav said. “Do not worry, kiddo, we will find some way to pass the time.”
“The three of you could look through all of our photos,” Yury suggested. “Pick out the ones you think would be most impactful and we’ll be sure to use them.”
Bo smiled. “Cool.”
“Cool,” Viola echoed. She hugged Bo and kissed him on the head, eliciting an instinctive grimace as he wiped the kiss away. “Have fun. We’ll be back soon.”
“Take care,” Robert said.
Holly nodded. “Always.”
seventy-five
As Holly expected, Rusev proved delighted by the discovery of Morrison’s ark, the location of which would offer a natural focal point for the furious anti-GU protests the group hoped to catalyse in a matter of days.
Rusev was equally pleased to hear from Yury that he and the others had been discussing the optimal order for revealing their damning evidence against Morrison. Upon learning that Robert had told everyone about the video of his late wife expressing her well-founded fears that her life was in danger, Rusev apologised to Viola for keeping it from her. The girl shrugged it off.
Rusev’s positivity faded when the topic turned to Yury’s recent thoughts regarding the necessity of physically uncloaking Terradox in order to decisively prevent Morrison’s planned Reset by either forcing him to destroy the entire romosphere or by offering Earth’s inhabitants the kind of undeniable physical proof needed to inspire an uprising.
From Rusev’s expression, Holly discerned that she had already wrestled with the question of whether anything short of uncloaking Terradox would be enough to ensure their ultimate success in toppling Morrison and the corrupt-by-design Global Union he sat atop.
“I think we have enough,” Rusev eventually said. “Cloak or no cloak… we have photographic proof of what we found here; we have every scrap of Olivia Harrington’s research as well as a record of her concerns; we have the blatant interview tampering Bo uncovered; and of course we have everything we had before we left Earth… and I was confident then. Now, we’re even more well-armed than we were before we crashed here. The negative, if you want to call it that, is that we now know exactly what we’re up against and how high the stakes truly are. So while our chance of success hasn’t necessarily fallen, the importance of our success has exponentially risen.”
Holly took the positives from Rusev’s reply and stated her intention to find the remote control mentioned in Dante’s primer, which would hopefully allow the group to uncloak Terradox after departing.
“There’s almost no chance you’ll find it,” Rusev said. “And if you do, there’s almost no chance it will work at any kind of meaningful range.”
“We want to try,” Viola chimed in. “I know we’ve already searched the Karrier since we found out about Dante, but we weren’t looking for this in particular. And about the range… surely it’s worth a shot? If we find it and it doesn’t work when we want it to, we won’t be any worse off than if we don’t find it at all.”
“Oh, you’re very free to search for it,” Rusev said, sounding perfectly genuine in her support and not at all condescending. “Don’t let me discourage you. Yury and I will triple-check every inch of this bunker. If we don’t find it, we’ll discuss other uncloaking ideas with the rescue crew in case one of them can think of another way. Everything on their end is going perfectly. The communications delay is way down and they’re on track to be here in around 28 hours.”
“That’s almost less than a day!” Viola excitedly replied.
“It’ll be less than a day by the time we get back here with the remote,” Holly said, turning towards the door to signify that it was time to get going.
“Good luck,” Rusev said.
Yury echoed the sentiment.
Holly and Viola’s journey to the cliff-edge above the Karrier’s grassy canyon felt uncomfortably comfortable; not quite routine, but not far from it.
“How many times is it now?” Viola asked as they stepped out of the rover to begin their on-foot descent. “How many times have we been here? Five?”
“I think this is four,” Holly said. “There was the first time we found it, the next day when we came back with Rusev and Grav, then the time we came for the radio module after we found out about Dante.”
“Seems like more. Oh well, at least we get some real food each time.”
Holly grinned at the description of Rusev’s dining machine’s artificially shaped and flavoured algae concoctions as “real food”. But in comparison to the cubes of nutrition powder the group had been subsisting on, she could hardly deny the pull of the machine’s vast array of passably convincing meal options.
Viola wolfed down two quick platefuls of her usual vegetarian lasagne before joining Holly in the search for Dante’s remote. They worked on opposite sides of each room, switching sides to be absolutely sure before progressing to the next.
Shortly into their search of the second room, Viola voiced a question she had been considering for a while: “Why does Morrison need Terradox, anyway? If the plan is to evacuate while his megasonic pulse thing ‘cleanses’ Earth, why can’t his chosen people just fly around on their spaceship for a while until it’s safe to go back?”
“This Reset he’s planning isn’t the only reason he built this place,” Holly said, “it’s just a good fit. Theoretically he could do what you said and orbit Earth until it was safe to return, but none of that really changes what we’re trying to do here. By exposing Terradox, we expose Morrison. That’s the only way to stop what he’s trying to do, not just delay it.”
Viola looked satisfied enough with this answer. “So why is he suddenly going for the Reset now? Did something change to make it more urgent?”
Holly gave an honest shrug. “I don’t know. He’s obviously been planning it for a long time, so this might always have been the timeline. He’s not getting younger; that’s for sure. And for someone with an ego like Morrison’s, it would be no good for his plan to succeed if he wasn’t there to revel in the aftermath. He doesn’t just want to make it happen, he wants to see it happen.”
The intensity of their searching made the time pass quickly, but Holly was far less disheartened to see that over six hours had passed without success than she was to reach the end of the final room empty-handed. “I’m sorry,” she said, sighing heavily as she sat down on the firm bed that had been her only private spot for so long. “I really thought we’d find it.”
“At least we looked,” Viola said.
Holly saw no sense in knocking Viola’s positivity so forced a smile and nodded as convincingly as she could. “Yeah. We tried.”
“It was always going to be practically impossible to find. I mean, Dante might have been an asshole but he wasn’t an idiot; he wouldn’t put it in the first place or the last place we would look. It could be under any rock on this whole planet or bur
ied in literally any spot. I can’t think of anywhere else to look that makes more sense than picking a random spot on the map.”
Viola’s words about where Dante wouldn’t hide the remote gave Holly one last idea. Since she didn’t hold out much hope and the idea wasn’t a particularly pleasant one, she kept it to herself during their walk up to the rover and their drive back to the rest of the group.
Once back in the lander, with only a few hours of light to spare, Holly quickly told Robert and Bo that the search had come up short. They seemed entirely unsurprised and so expressed no real disappointment. Holly wasn’t sure how much they understood about the importance of uncloaking Terradox. Grav, who understood it very well, was clearly disheartened.
“Grav,” Holly said, “we should probably go and see how Rusev and Yury are doing.”
“I’ll come,” Viola said.
Holly shook her head gently and motioned towards Bo, who wasn’t looking, to tell Viola that she should probably stay with him for a while. The girl got the message.
Once outside with Grav, Holly wasted no time in getting to the reason why she hadn’t wanted Viola to accompany them.
“What?” Grav asked, reading her face.
Holly answered with a question of her own: “Where did you put him?”
“Dante? Why?”
“He might have hidden the remote somewhere on his person. I want to check.”
Grav placed his still-swollen right hand behind his back. “I will look.”
“It’s fine,” Holly said, “I can do it. Just tell me where you put him.”
“Hollywood… I really do not think you want to see him.” Grav’s shoulders slouched and his eyes fell to the floor; while he may not have been ashamed of what he’d done to Dante, he certainly wasn’t proud of it.
“Grav, I can handle—”
“No,” he interrupted. “You should not have to handle it. This is my mess… I will search through it.”
“Search every inch,” Holly said, not exactly disappointed by Grav’s insistence on doing the dirty work. “Pockets, waistband, shoes, body. For all we know, the remote could be tiny.”
Grav, slouching in the passenger seat as Holly drove towards the bunker, nodded passively. “I have done this kind of thing more times than I would like. You do not have to worry about me being thorough.”
At the bunker, Grav stayed in the rover and shifted over to the driver’s seat.
“You’re not coming in?” Holly asked.
“It is not getting any lighter,” Grav said. “And the body is not exactly a stone’s throw away.”
Holly closed the rover’s door and somberly waved him off before descending the stairway to the bunker.
Inside, Rusev and Yury greeted her with warm positivity.
“There’s a way,” Yury said, wasting no time.
“Slow down,” Rusev said. She turned to Holly. “Any luck?”
Holly shook her head. “Grav is still looking in a few places. He’ll be here soon, one way or the other. But what do you mean there’s a way?” she asked, shifting her focus to Yury.
“Well, I hope Grav isn’t going too far because together with the rescue crew we’ve come up with a plan that can’t fail,” the old man said.
“You have?”
“We have,” he beamed. “We’ll be able to uncloak Terradox anytime up to the scheduled data transfer, which gives us a full day to foster unrest with the evidence-based revelations before the actual revelation.” He paused and smiled. “I’m calling it Revelation Day.”
Holly felt strong regret at having sent Grav to search Dante’s corpse for something which was no longer necessary, but the happiness in Yury’s tone left her in no doubt that the new idea was a good one. “So what’s the plan?” she asked.
“It’s very straightforward,” Yury said.
There was a brief silence as Holly waited for he or Rusev to expand on this, but neither did. “Okay… so what is it?”
Rusev responded: “Yury is taking the lead with this, so it’s up to him to—”
“The rescue crew have a way to augment our little radio module here,” Yury interrupted. “A way to hook it up to this whole control console so we’ll be able to see and control everything from the rescue Karrier. We’ll check that the concept works before we leave, and the only possible obstacle after that is distance… but we already know that this radio and this transmitter can communicate all the way to the station, so that’s no real obstacle at all.”
Holly didn’t say anything at first. It sounded good; she couldn’t deny that. “So when you say we’ll check the concept before we leave, that means looking for the remote isn’t a waste of time, right? Because as far as we know now, there’s a small chance the concept won’t work?”
“It was definitely worth searching,” Rusev said. “As a contingency. Although this plan, well, the plan we have… it can’t really fail.”
Holly was glad to hear that — both parts. She desperately hoped the plan would work, of course, but she also didn’t want Grav to arrive with the remote only to hear that it was wholly unnecessary.
She spent the next thirty minutes hoping he would return with the remote in hand, indicating that his grisly task hadn’t been for nothing. But when he eventually came through the door, he immediately shook his head.
“Don’t worry about it,” Yury said. “We have a new plan.”
Holly mouthed the word “sorry” in Grav’s direction.
He shook his head slowly then relieved her by laughing. “So… tell me about this plan.”
Yury repeated what he had told Holly, almost word for word.
Despite the day having proven a failure in relation to her sole personal objective of finding Dante’s remote, Holly knew that the ultimate outcome — a confidence-inspiring plan that didn’t depend on the remote operating at a tremendous range — was for the best.
“How sure is everyone that this new plan is going to work?” Grav asked.
“I assure you,” Yury said, very gently, “beyond any doubt… beyond any concerns… beyond any fears you may have. I am telling you right now — with every possible assurance — that everything is going to work out. Trust me, my friend. Trust me.”
Day Ten
seventy-six
By late morning, the entire group had gathered in the bunker with their luggage and belongings in tow. Viola checked not once but twice that Holly had “definitely definitely” packed her well-travelled potted plant. They had never discussed why Holly cared enough to salvage it from their struggling Karrier in the first place, but Viola seemed to silently understand.
As everyone had hoped and expected, the communications delay which had been fading consistently since the rescue crew’s departure from the Venus station was now a thing of the past.
Holly listened keenly as the crew aboard the rescue Karrier reported on its imminent arrival. Her presence in the bunker, along with the rest of the group, not only enabled her to stay abreast of the crew’s progress but also ensured she was a safe distance from the designated landing site in the large grassy canyon where the group’s own Karrier had crashed nine long days earlier.
Excited anticipation turned to stomach-churning tension as the message rang clearly through the radio module’s speaker that the rescue crew believed they were now within the stated range at which entry procedures should begin. The bunker’s computer system had revealed this range as well as everything else Rusev had learned about the necessary steps to ensure a safe arrival. Dante’s failure to begin the procedure early enough during his initial sabotage had been the reason that he and everyone else had nearly died, and Rusev knew full well that the group’s hopes of leaving Terradox were entirely dependent upon her success in ensuring a safe entry this time around.
Grav ushered everyone away from the control console, leaving just Rusev and Yury.
Safe hands, Holly thought.
Rusev performed a downward gesture on the console’s large central touchpad
then spread her fingers and tapped twice.
If it worked, the romobots forming the exterior layer of Terradox’s cloak would separate at the correct section to allow the Karrier to pass, at which time they would immediately reform the impenetrable cloak by returning to their original configuration. Since the separation of the exterior layer could only be initiated by someone with access to the controls, the interior layer’s proximity sensors would then take over and cause its component romobots to automatically part and reform as the incoming vessel passed.
“You’re in,” Rusev announced, maintaining an impressively calm demeanour.
Safest hands in the universe.
As Rusev spoke, a graphic appeared on the console’s main screen to alert its operator that the entry procedures had been successfully initiated. The graphic consisted of a simple circular representation of Terradox surrounded by two concentric rings. The outermost ring, which the Karrier had already passed, was flashing green. The inner ring was static and red. A white dot, clearly representing the Karrier, moved steadily inwards towards the red ring.
“Fifteen seconds,” Rusev announced. “At most.”
Bo tugged on Holly’s arm. “Can we open the door to see the sky?”
Holly glanced at Robert. When he nodded, she led Bo and Viola to the door. Robert himself followed close behind, as did Grav.
“I would say five seconds,” Rusev said, speaking loudly for the incoming crew’s benefit.
Holly heard an excited exclamation ring through the speaker as she reached the stairs: “Oh my God! There it is!”
“They’re in!” Rusev yelled.
Bo, having ran ahead to the top of the stairs, gasped. “Look! They’re here.”
Holly and Viola reached the surface and gazed up at the overwhelming sight of the incoming Karrier.
Even without context, this would have been a stunning visual. But as the literal vessel of the group’s salvation descended towards the mysterious pseudo-planet they couldn’t wait to escape, it was without question the greatest thing that any of them had ever seen.
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