The Fall of Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  Peter coughed, wordlessly calling for Holly to show herself. When she moved her head into Robert’s view, with a finger clasped to her lips to make sure he didn’t say anything, the man’s face lit up with boyish delight.

  “Viola,” Robert yelled into the dorm in his best fatherly tone. “There’s a delivery for you.”

  Holly stepped out and waited directly in front of the door. She had around half a second to notice how incredibly kind the years had been to Viola before the girl — now positively a young woman, contrary to Holly’s memories — realised who she was looking at.

  “Holly-oh-my-God-it’s-you!” Viola squealed, her delirious excitement almost merging the words into one. She rushed forward and charged into Holly with a hug that knocked them both to the floor, bounding into her with the force of a playful wolfhound that didn’t realise she wasn’t a puppy anymore.

  “Grav wants her alive,” Peter quipped as Viola lay on top of Holly, her head momentarily buried in Holly’s shoulder.

  Holly pushed herself up. “It’s nice to see you, too,” she laughed. “Where’s Bo?”

  “Working late,” Viola replied hastily, rising to her feet with a huge smile still etched on her face. “But how come you’re here? I thought you were on Terradox.”

  “I was, but there was a change of plan,” Holly said. “Rusev and Grav wanted me here to help with something before we all go to the Anniversary Gala.” Noticing that Viola and Robert had caught sight of Sakura, Holly then shifted the conversation along by briefly introducing her as a friend, using only her first name for now. “Anyway, they’re waiting for us so we really should get going.”

  Peter returned to Holly’s side, ready to accompany her to the station’s security centre as Grav had requested.

  “Sorry about knocking you over,” Viola said to Holly, “but you did do the same thing to me on the way to Terradox, so I guess now we’re even-steven.”

  Holly scowled in mock annoyance. “On the Karrier? That tackle literally saved your life! Don’t think I don’t remember that you owe me one.”

  “I guess you’re forgetting the time when I saved you from drowning in that cave on Terradox?” Viola shot back with an exaggerated wink. “See? Even… steven.”

  When Viola returned inside to resume whatever she’d been busy doing, her father Robert moved closer to Holly. “What does Rusev want you to help her with, anyway?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”

  Holly searched for a suitably non-committal answer.

  “Let me rephrase that,” Robert went on, “since you obviously wouldn’t have been brought here early if it was. Is everything going to be okay?”

  With Holly still stuck for a way to avoid the truth without lying, Sakura answered for her: “Ask us again in an hour, Mr Harrington. Hopefully we’ll have the answer you’re looking for by then.”

  twelve

  The route to the security centre took Holly along a short pathway she had never walked during her previous stay on the station. Unlike the expansive and airy main walkways, this zone felt very much like a typical indoor area in a modern corporate research facility on Earth. The overhead lighting was bright white and borderline harsh, contrasting greatly with the warm adaptive lighting in most other areas.

  But regardless of which areas Holly and most others preferred, the fact that standing on the station always felt so much like standing somewhere on Earth — indoors or out — never failed to impress her.

  What impressed her still more was that the station had been funded entirely privately and entirely honestly. Early investors and corporate backers naturally put forward the funds needed to make Ekaterina Rusev’s vision a reality with reasonable expectations of significant returns, and it was undeniably the case that many of those expectations had not been met. The station’s two largest outcome-based failings centred on its headline intention of serving as a base for fruitful exploration of the Venusian surface as well as a jumping-off point for the kind of asteroid-mining ventures which many saw as the greatest commercial opportunities in human history.

  But all of the investors whose business interests had survived the commercially oppressive GU years not only remained committed to the station’s cause, they were also tremendously grateful that Rusev had gone to such tireless lengths to protect the station and their investments in its success when Roger Morrison had relentlessly smeared her, both personally and professionally.

  Now that the station’s research teams had enjoyed full access to materials and human capital for four years since the GU’s fall, significant progress had been made on several fronts and hopes were now higher than ever that major breakthroughs relating to Venusian exploration were imminent. And although median predictions suggested that commercially viable asteroid-mining remained a further decade away, the station’s dedicated research team were streets ahead of their Earth-based competitors. The station’s track record of delivering tangible and profitable results in other fields of research and development spoke for itself, ensuring that fresh investment continued to pour in at record rates.

  Just as Holly began to wonder precisely where the security centre was, Ekaterina Rusev herself emerged from a nondescript door and set off in the same direction Holly had been walking, around twenty metres in front.

  “Mrs Rusev,” Peter Ospanov called.

  When the station’s resolute matriarch turned around, the only thought in Holly’s mind was that the four years since their last in-the-flesh meeting had been far less kind to Rusev than they had to the rest of the old gang. Everyone looked older, but Rusev looked old.

  She walked towards Holly, an initially glum expression slowly growing into something more resembling a smile with every step. “It’s good to see you, Holly,” she said. “Whatever brings us together, it will always be good to see you.”

  At closer range, Holly could now discern that Rusev’s hair hadn’t thinned and her skin hadn’t wrinkled nearly as much as had appeared to be the case from a distance. Instead, she now looked tired; dehydrated; unkempt. None of these were words that Holly or anyone else would have ever associated with Rusev, and the single word Holly’s mind settled on as more appropriate and more fitting than any other was haggard.

  “Are you okay?” Holly asked.

  Rusev hesitated for several seconds as though pondering a far more difficult question. Eventually, she shook her head in a slow, rueful manner and sighed heavily without speaking.

  “Maybe you should sit down?”

  “Right. We should all sit down,” Rusev said, regaining focus. She then qualified the word “all” by politely dismissing three of the four members of Holly’s security detail.

  Holly now stood outside what seemed to be the security centre with only Ekaterina Rusev, Sakura Otsuka and Peter Ospanov. She didn’t know how many more people would be waiting for her inside the room but felt very confident in assuming that Grav would be among them.

  “I’m glad you could make it,” Rusev then said, finally acknowledging Sakura’s presence. “Once this threat is eliminated, your AI expertise is going to fit in very well in our surface exploration division.”

  “And by ‘eliminated’ you mean ‘resolved’?” Holly said, inflecting the statement into a question. “Right?”

  Holly asked this with a specific thought in mind, recalling Grav’s explicit concern that Rusev’s favoured plan of physically destroying the rogue romosphere could have the collateral effect of gravely endangering the hundreds of individuals — the hundreds of innocent civilians — who were currently enjoying their touring experiences on Terradox, oblivious to any kind of danger.

  Though Rusev’s expression initially gave little away, her words soon set the tone for the imminent discussions:

  “Things have gotten worse since we last spoke,” she said, reaching to open the door and usher Holly inside. “Much worse.”

  thirteen

  Goran Vuletic — known on the station universally as Grav, just as he had been on Earth — rose to his fe
et as Holly entered the security centre which would now function as a meeting room. The table which dominated the room was his alone, with printed papers and digital readouts competing for space on its glass surface and no one else in sight.

  “Hollywood,” he said, his stoic manner holding up well even in the circumstances. “I knew I could count on you.”

  Holly acknowledged his comment with a slight nod, hesitant to over-commit before knowing exactly what kind of plan he was counting on her to support.

  As Sakura followed Holly inside and introduced herself to Grav, Holly watched his expression like a hawk. It dawned on her only now that Grav might not have known of Rusev’s request for Sakura’s early presence on the station, much less for her still unexplained presence in this highly sensitive meeting. To Holly’s relief, Grav shook Sakura’s hand and asked her to sit down. He was no more or less warm in his greeting than usual, which Holly took as a sign that he had been aware of and unopposed to Sakura’s expedited invitation.

  Although Holly already trusted Sakura, this further eased her mind; she trusted Grav’s judgement more than anyone else’s.

  “To recap what I told you,” Grav began, addressing Holly and wasting absolutely no time, “and to make sure everyone is on the same page: I told you that there is a rogue romosphere in dangerous proximity to Terradox. I told you that this romosphere has begun to expand irregularly and that if we did not act soon, Terradox would be consumed by this romosphere’s expansion before long. I also told you that using force to destroy this romosphere would physically endanger Terradox and that such danger would increase the longer we waited. All of this was accurate when we last spoke and all of this remains accurate at this stage.”

  “So what’s changed?” Holly asked, turning to Rusev. “What specifically has ‘gotten worse’ since we last spoke? Is it expanding even faster now than it was before?”

  “It’s not just the rate of expansion,” Rusev said, answering in Grav’s place since the question had been directly addressed to her. “It’s the path of travel. Unfortunately, the rogue romosphere’s orbital path has shifted significantly. To put it bluntly, the romosphere is on a collision course with this station. If unchecked, it will consume first Terradox and then us.”

  “So can someone just tell me our options here?” Holly asked, more desperate than impatient.

  Rusev nodded in understanding of her frustration. “Holly, this is where we are: even if we destroy the romosphere as soon as possible, Terradox will be firmly inside the fallout zone. That doesn’t guarantee collateral damage, but I won’t pretend it’s not a strong possibility. If we wait even one week longer, the romosphere’s current rate of expansion and direction of travel would place this station within the fallout zone. That is an outcome I will not allow to come to pass.” Rusev then raised a finger to preemptively silence an interjection before continuing. “We have two viable options: we can do something which would risk Terradox but save the station, or we can do nothing and doom both.”

  Holly sat in anxious silence, subconsciously pinching the skin of her forehead between her thumb and index finger. “So isn’t this pretty much where we already were?” she suddenly asked Grav, straightening her back in the hard chair. “Okay, doing nothing now endangers the station… but doing nothing was never a serious option, was it? Rusev wanted to deal with this thing ASAP, while it’s likely but not certain that Terradox will be collaterally destroyed. Right? And you wanted to do something else that she didn’t like. When is someone going to tell me about the something else?”

  Rusev shook her head and looked away.

  “Grav?” Holly said, starting now to get more than a little impatient.

  “Hollywood, the situation has become sufficiently urgent that I have reluctantly authorised the preparation of a destructive solution. That preparation began today. Fortunately — or unfortunately, depending on which side of my plan you fall — that solution will not be ready to implement for four or five days. This allows more than enough time to attempt my plan.”

  Holly held out her hands, palms upturned. “Which is…?”

  Grav sat in the chair at the head of the glass table and swiped away all of the data on its built-in screen. He tapped several menu buttons and eventually brought into view a technical-looking map.

  “What am I looking at?” Holly asked.

  “Netherdox,” Grav replied. “That is what they called this top-secret romosphere and this is how they mapped it. We have learned a few things from this planning map, which was seized prior to Morrison’s trial, and we have learned more from our own direct observations. What we know is that unlike Terradox, Netherdox was not designed to support human life. Unlike Terradox, every area of Netherdox is positively hostile to human life. We know there is no water. We know there is greatly insufficient oxygen. We know that the constant temperature is lower than anything ever recorded on Earth. But due to a photographically impenetrable coverage of noxious clouds, what we do not know is anything related to the composition of its surface.”

  Holly couldn’t hide her confusion. “Why do we care about its surface?”

  Grav double-tapped a small rectangular shape on the map of Netherdox, causing its size to increase enough for Holly to read the two words written within the shape.

  She immediately stood up, scraping her chair’s metal feet noisily against the floor. Her hands instinctively covered her mouth and nose as her head shook frantically.

  Unfazed, Grav zoomed in further still until the entire table was filled with the rectangular shape and the two words within it:

  CONTROL BUNKER.

  fourteen

  “No,” Holly said. “You can’t be serious.”

  “We cannot remotely reverse its expansion or correct its path from here,” Grav replied, wholly unmoved by Holly’s heartfelt and firmly expressed objection to his evident intention of entering the uninhabitable Netherdox atmosphere and touching down on the rogue romosphere’s unseen surface. “But if a team can get inside this bunker…”

  Rusev stepped in to fill the momentary silence: “Holly, I think you can see now why I objected to his plan. I will not be seen to support this mission, but nor will I stand in the way of any attempt to deal with the situation so long as the only lives threatened are those of the participating volunteers.”

  “I do not know what we will find and I cannot be certain of our success or survival,” Grav then admitted, speaking with a willingness that bordered on recklessness. “What I am certain of is that we have to try. I have already assembled a willing team of four. Myself, the courageous Peter Ospanov, and two knowledgeable expert members of the station’s staff whose precise skills will be required. Those staff members will be here soon, as will Polo — the pilot you just met — who I fully expect to participate as our fifth man. Our Karrier will leave tomorrow.”

  Holly looked around the room as though checking to see if she was the only one hearing this. “You can’t actually be serious? It’s a suicide mission!”

  No one else spoke. Grav’s expression didn’t waver.

  “Grav,” Holly went on, “please tell me you didn’t bring me here expecting me to support this? Tell me you didn’t bring me here to ask if I thought this was a good idea?”

  “Not quite, Hollywood.”

  “Good!” she said, speaking too soon.

  Deadpan, Grav then spat it out: “I brought you here to ask if you are coming with us.”

  Part II

  fifteen

  “Let me get this straight,” Holly said. “You want me to travel with you to an out-of-control romosphere which is categorically hostile to life and has a surface that no one has ever seen… all because an old planning map tells you there might be a control bunker? A control bunker which — if it’s even there — could be totally impossible to get inside, totally empty, or totally lacking power? That’s the plan?”

  Grav remained as difficult to read as ever, offering only a barely discernible shrug. “Unless you have a be
tter one.”

  “And what if we can’t land?” Holly continued, running through the most obvious protestations as they entered her mind. “Or what if the landing and the rest of the plan goes perfectly but we can’t take off again? What happens then?”

  “The mission would fail,” Grav replied, still deadpan. “But if we do not try, we fail by default.”

  “The difference being that failure by default won’t kill us!”

  Grav chose silence over further attempts to sell Holly on the idea. She recognised as soon as she spoke that she had left herself open to an obvious rebuttal that failure by default would endanger many lives, but much to her surprise the rebuttal never came.

  Deathly silence lingered for several seconds until Grav turned away from Holly and faced his security understudy, Peter Ospanov. “The mission continues as planned,” he announced. “Peter, bring me our rover technician and our final volunteer; it is time for the departure briefing.”

  These words brought even more questions to Holly’s mind, primarily how soon Grav planned to leave and who exactly his rover technician and final volunteer were. But as Peter left to gather the final two members of Grav’s dauntless crew, the previously quiet Sakura beat Holly to the punch with some questions of her own.

  “There are, uh, two pretty major things that I’m not clear on,” Sakura said, her eyes preparing to focus on Rusev while she voiced the first before moving to Grav for the second. “One: why am I here? And two: why do you want so many people to go to this other romosphere?”

  “I’ll field the first question,” Rusev said. “Given the situation, no one from the station will be travelling to Terradox for the Anniversary Gala. This means there will be no station-bound return journey and hence that the only way for you to reach us was for you to travel with Holly. That’s why you were rushed to the station. If you were asking why you’re here meaning inside this room, you’re here because you already know something has gone wrong with the original plan and Grav wanted you to hear the details.”