The Fall of Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  This time, Holly truly had no idea what Grav was talking about. She knew the meaning of the words and followed his explanation on an abstract intellectual level, but, considered as a whole, it made no sense. She asked the one question that underpinned every other: “Since when have you known about other romospheres?”

  “Years. Since before Morrison’s trial was supposed to begin, we have known about every project he was involved in. The expansion of these romospheres has been carefully tracked and we know their final intended masses. Like Terradox, all but one other stopped when they were supposed to. But this other… it did not. Well, it did. But for some reason its expansion has resumed, and at far greater pace.”

  “If you can’t reverse or halt its expansion, can’t you just destroy it?” Holly asked. This struck her as the obvious solution.

  “There have been discussions about various options, Hollywood, and this is where I need you to come in. I need you here to reason with those who will not listen to my reason. There is an important argument underway and I cannot win it on my own.”

  “What argument? About what?”

  Grav hesitated. “About whether Terradox and its current tourist population are worth saving.”

  “Wait…” Holly said. “What?”

  “According to the models I have seen, the current mass of the rogue romosphere and its proximity to Terradox already means that any detonations of sufficient force to destroy the target would necessarily emit sufficient energy and force to take Terradox down with it. Other models are more optimistic, but even those show that our window for safely destroying the rogue romosphere without posing an unavoidable risk to Terradox is a matter of days. I am being asked to be open-minded about the detonation option, but I do not believe that its proponents are as confident about Terradox’s safety as they claim. Some claim that damage to Terradox, should we proceed immediately, would not be certain or even probable. But I have spoken to people I trust, and those people tell me the opposite. It is a giant fucking mess, Hollywood, and I need you here yesterday to support my position.”

  “Who is on the other side of the argument?” Holly asked. “Who wants to risk so many innocent—”

  A voice cut Holly off. Immediately, she recognised it as Ekaterina Rusev’s. “If you are coming,” Rusev said, very bluntly, “you are coming today.”

  Holly’s headset then relayed the sound of a door being opened and quickly slammed closed.

  “We have one of the brand new K-3 Karriers stationed on Terradox,” Grav said. “You will leave today. The K-3s are significantly faster than the K-2s, so your journey should only last 35, perhaps 36 hours.”

  “Who else knows?” Holly asked, implicitly accepting her summons.

  “Very few.”

  “Viola?”

  “No. A few station-based experts, a few of my security staff, and some higher-ups at the TMC. No civilians. I know I do not have to tell you how important it is that this remains the case.”

  Still standing alone in the bunker with her finger pressed to her headset’s earpiece, Holly nodded as though Grav could see. “But Grav, before I leave, I need you to promise me one thing. Promise me this isn’t some elaborate way of getting me off Terradox so I don’t get hurt when Rusev orders a detona—”

  “Rusev will do nothing,” Grav interrupted in an almost unsuitably calm tone. “I have a plan, Hollywood. It will not be pleasant, for anyone, but it is necessary.”

  Before Holly could ask the obvious question — “What’s the plan?” — a flat electronic tone told her that Grav had ended the call.

  She opened the bunker’s door and came face to face once again with the guard who had been incessantly knocking throughout the duration of her call.

  “The tour is running late,” he said impatiently. “Hurry up.”

  “No,” Holly said. “I need to find a Karrier.”

  seven

  Holly ascended the stairs, quickly explaining to the confused guard that her plans had changed and that she was now needed on the station much earlier than previously thought. She remained as calm as possible, telling him that to avoid unforeseen scheduling conflicts she would have to leave for the station within hours to participate in an important ceremony.

  The guard called his superior for confirmation. After a few more calls up the chain, eventually someone with sufficient knowledge and authority agreed that Holly could remain at the bunker until a vehicle arrived to take her back to Terradox Central Station, where one of the new fleet of Karriers would soon be readied for her impromptu trip to the Venus station.

  Holly then approached the tourist-filled TE-500 and explained to the Bouchard family — primarily the girls — that she had to take care of something on the station. She promised to do everything she could to ensure she was back in time for the climax of the Anniversary Gala, but the girls were so excited by the news that their tour was about to take them to Terradox’s snowy peaks that they didn’t seem too upset by her departure. Holly stepped away when the tour guide received confirmation from an attendant guard that she was permitted to leave the group.

  Seconds later, Holly saw the tour group’s only other solo traveller walk purposefully into view from the obscured area behind the vehicle. The woman handed a headset to a nearby guard, explaining to the guide that she felt ill and would prefer to hitch a ride to New Eden on Holly’s imminent transport rather than rejoin the tour.

  The tour guide looked less sure now, but she once again received a curt nod from the guard stationed on the vehicle.

  To say Holly was confused would have been a major understatement.

  As the touring vehicle pulled away, its passengers waving happily to Holly as they went, the woman approached. She was much shorter than Holly, very trim, and wore glasses. Holly considered this last point very unusual given that corrective operations — safe and painless — were now almost always less expensive than glasses of any real quality.

  Neglecting to introduce herself, the woman began with a question: “So, what did Rusev tell you?”

  Holly was as surprised by the question as she was by the broad Australian accent in which it was delivered. This didn’t merely seem superficially at odds with what Holly had assumed to be the woman’s Japanese heritage, it also seemed ill-fitting with her general aura and it certainly didn’t match the faux-broken English she had used to communicate with the tour guide moments earlier.

  “Do you think something is wrong?” the woman continued, speaking again before Holly had a chance to formulate a reply to the first question. “Do they have intelligence of a specific threat? I felt like Rusev was keeping something back. There are so many guards here, I knew something had to be—”

  At last, Holly cut her off. “How about you stop talking and I ask the questions?”

  The woman eyed the young guard at the top of the stairs, apparently deciding that he shouldn’t hear this discussion. “We’re going to wait inside,” she told him, wasting no time in walking towards the locked bunker.

  The guard moved aside without complaint.

  “Why are you taking orders from her?” Holly asked, alarmed by the lapse in security.

  Perplexed, the guard paused for a second. “Uh, because she’s—”

  “Wait a minute,” the woman interrupted, gazing up over her shoulder as she neared the final step down towards the door. “You really don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “Why should I?”

  The woman stopped at the door and motioned impatiently towards the security keypad whose code she evidently didn’t know. She averted her gaze as Holly typed the code.

  Confusion was rapidly becoming Holly’s default state of mind for the day, and on this occasion she pushed the door open and walked into the bunker once more in the hope that its privacy would bring some answers.

  The door swung closed once they were both inside and safely out of the guard’s earshot.

  “Sakura Otsuka,” the previously unknown woman said, introducing herself with
a belated smile and an outstretched hand. “I believe you’re quite familiar with my father’s work.”

  eight

  Holly stood perfectly still, alone with Sakura Otsuka inside the same claustrophobic control bunker in which she had already made so many surprising discoveries and endured so many challenging moments. Without a doubt, the revelation that she was face to face with Yoshirou Otsuka’s daughter — let alone that Sakura was apparently in regular contact with Rusev — was up there with any of them.

  There had been some positive moments in the bunker, too, chief among them the moment Holly had shared with Rusev and Bo Harrington when their stranded group finally succeeded in making contact with the Venus station. The single most harrowing moment had no doubt been the occasion when snake-in-the-grass Dante Parker launched a botched attempt to seize control of the bunker, an attempt which ended with Robert Harrington lying on the floor with a bullet in his shoulder on one side of the bunker and Dante lying dead on the other.

  Holly remembered the floor turning red and the blood slowly flowing towards the spot in which she now stood. She did all she could to keep an open mind about Sakura, hoping that whatever the smartly dressed woman was about to say would be positive or at least helpfully enlightening.

  “I can imagine what you’re thinking,” Sakura began without prompt, “and I’m not going to stand here and lie to your face. Yes, I always knew about my dad’s role in the early stages of romotech’s development. Yes, I always knew where our money came from. And yes, I always knew why I got the job at MXR over some of the more qualified applicants who—”

  “You worked for him?” Holly interrupted. “You worked for Morrison?”

  Sakura shrugged. “Glass houses, Holly,” she said, her tone soft but her eyes firm. “Glass houses. But anyway, I knew. I also won’t lie to your face and pretend that I would have said anything about my father’s past if he hadn’t decided of his own accord that it was time to tell the truth. And there’s one last thing I want you to know that I won’t lie about: my father only publicly revealed his history with Morrison because the prosecutors already knew. He was getting ahead of the media cycle. None of this is to say that we did anything wrong, but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea here. He wasn’t trying to be a martyr and neither was I.”

  Holly took a second to digest this introductory statement. There had been no real need for Sakura to say any of it; Holly would have had no reason to doubt her if she’d said she didn’t know about her father’s history with Morrison or if she’d said that he brought the full truth to light out of guilt rather than to “get ahead of the media cycle.” And precisely because there had been no need for Sakura to divulge any of this, Holly couldn’t help but be more suspicious than confused.

  “And now you’re probably wondering why I told you all of that, right?” Sakura continued.

  With no time for any games, Holly lost what little patience she had left. “Enough. You’re going to tell me why you’re here and you’re going to tell me who you were speaking to through the headset,” she said, firmly enough to reestablish in no uncertain terms who was in control of the situation.

  “Ekaterina Rusev invited me,” Sakura said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “That’s the answer to both of your questions. Rusev invited me to work on the station. The original plan was for me to go there after the anniversary thing, when she went back with the others after coming here for the ceremony. And now, today, it was Rusev who called to talk to me. She ordered me to get on the K-3 with you tonight.”

  Holly replied automatically: “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It was a fifteen-second call and she didn’t say anything else.” Sakura spoke in a manner which left Holly in no doubt that this was the truth.

  Holly recalled her recent conversation with Grav, in which Rusev had briefly participated before noisily leaving the room. Given that Sakura’s call had just ended when Holly emerged from the bunker immediately after her own, the timing seemed to make sense.

  Satisfied with that, Holly moved on. “So you don’t know anything about why we’re leaving early?”

  Sakura shook her head. “Not a clue. I was supposed to keep my head down and blend in as a tourist under an assumed name until it was time to leave — there are no Earth-to-station trips for another few months, so this was the quickest way for me to get there — but Rusev was suddenly very insistent that I leave with you tonight. Speaking of which… do you know why we’re leaving early?”

  “My questions aren’t finished,” Holly said, believing what Sakura had told her so far but unsatisfied with the outstanding details and keen to get the full story before opening up. “What kind of work did you do at MXR? That’s Morrison Robotics, right?”

  “Yeah. Well, that was Morrison Robotics. As for what I worked on specifically, the short answer is AI.”

  “And the long answer?”

  “I led an experimental division, deep under the radar, working on applications of sociorobotic hierarchies. There was no romotech involved in any of our work, it was all conventional modern robotics and computing.”

  “Okay,” Holly said. “Now, let’s pretend I don’t know what any of that means…”

  Sakura laughed slightly, puncturing the tension. “Essentially, it boiled down to perfecting systems in which one individual — an alpha — gives dynamic orders to others around it who then blindly follow those orders.”

  “And when you say individual, you mean robot?”

  “In layman’s terms,” Sakura said. “But Rusev isn’t interested in any of the hierarchical stuff so much as she’s interested in standard AI development. Her team on the station are trying to build smarter rovers that can continue to operate remotely on Venus if they lose their connection to the station. From what I’ve been told, a lot of Rusentra’s communications systems have been getting damaged during the first stages of exploration. So, basically, she wants to make the rovers better at decision making so they can avoid danger. AI isn’t something that any Rusentra divisions have ever invested in very heavily, which is why they need fresh eyes and fresh ideas.”

  This made sense to Holly; frustration with the intelligence of the rovers which were sent down to Venus had been something Viola had mentioned during their semi-frequent chats, and her brother Bo’s direct involvement in the rover development team meant that Viola was privy to information most weren’t. “And that’s the whole reason you’re coming to the station?” she asked, still unsure as to why Sakura’s arrival was being hastened along with her own. “Rusev didn’t mention anything else?”

  Sakura shook her head. “Nothing at all, but I think it’s only fair that I get a chance to ask some of my own questions now. I’ve told you everything you want to know, haven’t I?”

  Holly shrugged in tacit agreement.

  “Okay,” Sakura said. “So why are we leaving early? What did Rusev tell you?”

  Holly tilted her head towards the bunker’s door. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  nine

  A passengerless TE-500 touring vehicle arrived within minutes to take Holly and Sakura to Terradox Central Station, the romosphere’s transportation hub where a Karrier would soon be ready to whisk them away to the Venus station. Sakura’s supposed illness and desire to be taken to the New Eden hotel complex had of course been a cover story for her leaving the tour group, as the high-ranking TMC officials who had dispatched this vehicle understood.

  During the first few moments of the drive, Holly considered what she knew. The first thing she knew beyond doubt was that Rusev had desired Sakura’s prompt presence on the station sufficiently to have her masquerade as a tourist in order to expedite her arrival. The second thing she could be sure of was that Sakura Otsuka, whoever her father may have been and however much that may have helped in the early part of her career, was clearly a sufficiently brilliant scientist to have excelled within the hyper-competitive environment of a Morrison-funded research
division.

  Given the extent of Rusev’s implicit trust in Sakura and given the fact that every minute of intelligent thought which could be geared towards tackling the imminent threat to Terradox could prove priceless, Holly made the easy decision to share the content of Grav’s call.

  An immense level of shock and no small degree of horror flashed across Sakura’s face when Holly first mentioned the existence of additional embryonic romospheres. It was immediately and abundantly clear that Sakura had known nothing of these romospheres; a professional actress could have been no more convincing.

  Sakura listened in rapt attention as Holly explained that she had been summoned by Grav rather than Rusev, apparently to assist in his attempts to pursue a solution to the problem of a rapidly expanding rogue romosphere which could imminently and gravely endanger the hundreds of innocent civilians on Terradox.

  Sakura, who had spoken only briefly to Grav and had no real personal relationship with Rusev, couldn’t for the life of her understand how she fitted in to this sudden departure.

  “Maybe Rusev thinks you know more about romotech than you really do?” Holly suggested. “Maybe she thinks you’ll have some insight into how to stop this rogue romosphere from expanding irregularly?”

  Sakura blew air from her lips. “I hope not,” she said, “otherwise she’s going to be disappointed when I get there.”

  Upon arriving in the ghost town that was Terradox Central Station, a far cry from the bustling hub of just a few hours earlier, Sakura came to a new conclusion. “Actually, it’s probably simpler than we think. I’m guessing this complication means that Rusev and the others won’t be coming to Terradox for the Anniversary Gala, right? And that would mean there wouldn’t be another ride to take me to the station. So if I didn’t go with you now, I wouldn’t be able to go at all.”

  This made a great deal of sense to Holly. And although it didn’t reduce the difficulty of the overall situation, having an answer to one relatively insignificant riddle felt a lot better than having no answers at all.