“Want anything?” the girl asked.
“Yeah, whatever you’re having.”
“Vegetarian lasagne.”
Holly laughed gently at this, as tickled as ever by the inherent redundancy. “I’ll have a regular lasagne,” she said. “It’s all algae, so it doesn’t exactly make any difference.”
Viola handed her a plate with a playful shrug. “Agree to disagree.”
While waiting for her food to cool, Holly tapped and gestured on the table’s inbuilt screen until a vertically split view showed the Karrier’s current zoomed-in views of Earth’s pale blue dot on the left and of the ever-nearing Venus station on the right.
It was a wonderful sight. Holly had gazed upon the station so often, but now, for the first time, her final arrival could be measured not in weeks or days, but in hours.
“What are you smiling at?” Viola asked.
Holly swiped away the screen then picked up her fork and smiled even wider. “We’re almost there.”
Day Thirteen
eighty-three
“We’re almost there,” Viola said, gently shaking Holly’s arm to rouse her from a brief rest.
Holly sat up and looked at the estimated arrival time on her wristband. Sure enough, the hour scale was a thing of the past: they would be at the station within minutes.
During a quick visit to the control room, Holly learned that pre-GU politicians in North America, New London and elsewhere had begun to position themselves as post-GU authority figures. They were talking in terms of “the end of the GU project” and throwing around words like “transition” and “dissolution” while badmouthing Roger Morrison.
It didn’t matter to Holly or Rusev that these politicians were as self-serving as any others; what mattered right now was that Morrison was out of the picture and that no such self-serving politicians would ever again enjoy the same kind of unchecked global power that he once had.
Very few persistent instances of violence continued throughout the night as no notable pockets of GU personnel were any longer holding their ground. There were still mass demonstrations around the world but, happily, demonstrations was now a more apt term than protests.
The station came within sight of Holly’s naked eye soon after the pre-docking procedures began. She returned to the lander to watch the final approach with Viola, Robert and Bo. Grav, who had been pensively keeping to himself and quietly absorbing every fresh piece of news from Earth, soon joined them to take it all in.
Bo was tremendously excited by the details of the docking procedures and asked Holly and Grav countless questions about how specific things worked. Neither knew every answer, but the boy was satisfied with what he got.
For her part, Viola just wanted to get inside the station.
It looked prodigiously large at this proximity and angle, and certainly more than the sum of its parts.
Holly’s luggage lay at her feet as the reality began to sink in that this really was it: after so many journeys and so much doubt that this one would ever reach its destination, she was here.
When the Karrier’s final docking procedure began, Bo and Viola rushed to the other window for a better view.
Robert stepped towards Holly and Grav and spoke quietly. “I could never thank either of you enough for everything you’ve done for us,” he said. “Grav, we wouldn’t even have made it on board without your kindness. And Holly… from the day of the crash when you risked your life to save ours by coming to our lander, right up to now, I couldn’t have asked for any more. There were times when I didn’t know who we could trust, but that never included you. I always knew you were with us. Always.”
“That’s it!” Bo exclaimed as the Karrier gently shuddered to a total halt. “We’re here!”
Holly walked to their window and looked out at the welcoming sight of the Venus station. Aside perhaps from Terradox itself, this was without question humanity’s greatest space-related engineering feat. “Okay,” she beamed. “Let’s go.”
“After you,” Grav insisted, holding a hand towards the door. “All those times you did not go inside because you had not yet earned your place… they are all history. We made it, Hollywood. You earned it.”
eighty-four
Holly heard the waiting crowd before she saw it.
Scores of people lined both sides of the main entry walkway as she led her group out of the Karrier and into the station. Her ‘scores’ estimate quickly became hundreds when she saw the extent of the crowd further inside. Even in less awe-inspiring surroundings, this welcome party would have been an overwhelming sight.
“Imagine the reception Spaceman’s going to get!” Bo mused from his third-in-line position behind Viola.
Dimitar Rusev, Ekaterina’s only child and the man who had run the station in her absence, stepped forward to personally greet the new arrivals. The crowd’s cheers grew louder and louder with each warm handshake, hitting a near-deafening peak when Dimitar reached the end of the incoming group’s line and abandoned the formalities and instead wrapped his arms around his mother and lifted her from the ground in an emotional and once unexpected reunion.
Quite apart from the emotion of it all, and despite the fact that Holly had seen almost every inch of the station in one or another piece of footage, nothing could have prepared her for its grandeur. Every second of live station-cam she had watched to keep her spirits up during all the cargo and passenger runs over the last several months had utterly failed to do the Venus station justice, and she could not have been happier that this was the case.
The curvature of the walls was so slight, the ceilings so high and the light so perfect that Holly felt more like she was outside on Earth than inside one small part of a research station-cum-habitat orbiting Venus. She waved at members of the crowd as they cheered and applauded her group like returning heroes.
“Holly,” Viola said, tapping her on the shoulder.
She turned around. “Yeah?”
Viola was now tapping her own nose and smiling widely. “Told you.”
Holly sniffed the air and couldn’t help but laugh.
Lavender.
Day Fourteen
eighty-five
Holly almost had to pinch herself at the end of a relaxing and gratifying first morning inside Rusev’s incredibly impressive Venus station.
She walked around freely, surrounded by happy faces including many she recognised and many more who recognised hers and were keen to express their gratitude for the role she had played in both keeping her group of crash-survivors alive and in enabling the takedown of Roger Morrison and his corrupt Global Union to proceed so rapidly and decisively.
One particular source of pleasure was the station’s fully stocked gym which allowed Holly a real workout for the first time since leaving Earth. The vista from the enormous viewing window was unrivalled as its carefully filtered glass allowed gym-goers to gaze down at the splendour of Venus while they worked up a sweat.
There were very few children on the station and no one within four years of Viola in either direction. She and Bo had nevertheless settled into their new and exciting surroundings very quickly having made fast friends with the young family who had brought their illegal-on-Earth dogs to the station during one of Holly’s first chaperoning trips. Viola was overwhelmed by her first experience of the dogs — “real puppies!” — and even Bo couldn’t pretend not to be enamoured by their playful natures.
Holly was satisfied and a little proud that her long-suffering potted plant had survived its odyssey; the children were ecstatic that a litter of playful puppies had been waiting at the end of theirs.
While the children were off exploring, Holly caught up with Robert in the afternoon. “They’ll always have each other for company,” she said, responding to his concern about the lack of other children and wishing as an only child that she had been so lucky.
“More like have each other to annoy,” Robert said before recounting a heated argument they’d had before setting
off over who was responsible for a tiny food spillage in the family dorm’s common area between their individual rooms.
They returned, smiling, while Holly was still talking to Robert. “What are the plans for going back to Earth?” he asked. “This place is great…” he hastened to add, “I just mean, you know, going forward.”
“As soon as Rusev says it’s safe,” Holly replied. “Depending on how many people want to leave, it would either take a few trips on the Karrier or one trip on one of the station’s component spacecraft. This place is designed to be fully operational with just the two main parts, but I doubt too many people are going to leave; most of them were working and living here long before Rusev started ferrying important passengers and cargo.”
“But you’re definitely coming back with us?” Viola asked.
Holly lowered her eyebrows as if the question had caught her off guard. “Of course I am; a million per cent. Earth is home.”
“So what do you think it’s going to be like?” Bo asked. “Different governments in different countries?”
“Probably. But the next few years aren’t going to be easy. It’s not like the GU has been around too long for anyone to remember a time before it — maybe you guys, but not most of us — so it’s not quite a leap into the dark. And everyone now knows that a lot of the problems that led to the GU were artificially engineered to create the need for it. There are going to be some power vacuums, though… big ones in some places. That’s why I said it’s not going to be easy.”
“It’ll be a lot easier to get the world back on track now than it would have been if everyone was dead,” Viola said. “Anyway, I’m going to get something to eat. Does anyone want anything from the machine?”
Holly perked up. “I could eat,” she said.
“Two hundred choices, and they’re all algae…” Viola quipped, repeating the line Grav had taught her what felt like a lot longer ago than it really was.
“I’ll have whatever you’re having,” Holly said. “Which I’m guessing is going to be lasagne.”
“Vegetarian lasagne,” the girl qualified with a knowing grin. “Same for you?”
Holly laughed the freest laugh she had in a long time. “Fine,” she said. “Why the hell not.”
A few hours later, Holly lay peacefully on her bed in the dorm next to the Harringtons’.
She gazed at the screen panel on the wall at her bedside, configured for split-screen viewing with Earth on one side and Terradox on the other. Though hardly nostalgic of her time on the mysterious romosphere’s surface, she fully realised that decisively liberating the former from the GU’s grasp would not have been possible without unceremoniously crashing into the latter.
And though they didn’t yet know it, the 4.2 billion fragile souls on one side of the screen owed a tremendous debt of gratitude to the one brave man on the other.
After knocking loudly three times, Grav entered Holly’s room.
“Okay,” his deep voice boomed from the doorway. “It is time for me to go with the rest of the crew to get Spaceman. Are you sure you do not want to come?”
“I’m going to stay here with the kids.”
Grav raised his eyebrows. “But the record we share for most distance travelled… if you do not come, it will no longer be shared.”
“You can have it,” Holly chuckled. “Or you could stay here, too. The crew can take care of it.”
Grav crinkled his nose and shook his head slowly. “Their job is taking care of the Karrier and the journey,” he said.
“So what’s yours?”
“Well, Hollywood… I guess you could say that our stubborn old Spaceman is not going to chaperone himself.”
“Chaperone?” Holly laughed.
Grav winked before turning to leave. “Tough job, but somebody has to do it.”
Author’s Notes
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Table of Contents
Copyright
Books by Craig A. Falconer
Dedication
Part I
Day One
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
seventeen
eighteen
Day Two
nineteen
Part II
twenty
twenty-one
twenty-two
twenty-three
Day Three
twenty-four
twenty-five
twenty-six
twenty-seven
twenty-eight
twenty-nine
thirty
thirty-one
thirty-two
thirty-three
thirty-four
Day Four
thirty-five
thirty-six
thirty-seven
thirty-eight
thirty-nine
Day Five
forty
forty-one
forty-two
forty-three
forty-four
forty-five
forty-six
forty-seven
Part III
forty-eight
forty-nine
Day Six
fifty
fifty-one
fifty-two
fifty-three
fifty-four
fifty-five
fifty-six
fifty-seven
fifty-eight
fifty-nine
sixty
sixty-one
Day Seven
sixty-two
sixty-three
sixty-four
sixty-five
sixty-six
sixty-seven
Day Eight
sixty-eight
sixty-nine
seventy
seventy-one
seventy-two
seventy-three
Day Nine
seventy-four
seventy-five
Day Ten
seventy-six
seventy-seven
seventy-eight
Day Eleven
seventy-nine
eighty
eighty-one
Day Twelve
eighty-two
Day Thirteen
eighty-three
eighty-four
Day Fourteen
eighty-five
Author’s Notes
Terradox Page 34