Terradox Beyond

by Craig A. Falconer

  Terradox Beyond

  Craig A. Falconer

  Terradox Beyond

  © 2019 Craig A. Falconer

  This edition published February 2019

  The characters and events herein are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Reader’s note: Terradox Beyond was written, edited and produced in Scotland. As such, some spellings will differ from those found in the United States. Examples of British English include using colour rather than color, organise rather than organize, and centre rather than center.

  At the author’s request, this book has been made available free of all DRM.

  Contents

  Books by Craig A. Falconer

  Part I

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  Two years later

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  Two weeks later

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  Part II

  One year later

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  Part III

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  thirty-four

  thirty-five

  thirty-six

  thirty-seven

  thirty-eight

  epilogue

  Author’s Notes

  Books by Craig A. Falconer

  Not Alone

  Not Alone: Second Contact

  Not Alone: The Final Call (May 2019)

  Terradox

  The Fall of Terradox

  Terradox Reborn

  Terradox Beyond

  Funscreen

  Sycamore

  Sycamore 2

  Sycamore X

  Sycamore XL

  For Ben,

  again.

  Part I

  one

  “Watch out for your cake!” Viola Ospanov called.

  Her daughter Katie heeded the warning and stopped as abruptly as she could, mere inches from the multi-tiered birthday cake which dominated their dining room table. The cake, carefully crafted to resemble a castle more medieval than fairytale, bore four tall candles.

  “Patch, keep that ball away from the table, okay?” Kayla Hawthorne chimed in.

  Like Katie, Patrick Hawthorne was four years old. And just like Katie, he was also the sole reason that his parents no longer lived on Terradox.

  Viola and Kayla, two mothers bound by a common situation no one else could relate to, had become best friends since their simultaneous pregnancies necessitated a shared and unplanned one-way trip back to Earth. Their husbands had already been close even before then, with Vic Hawthorne having worked for Peter Ospanov during the latter’s time as Terradox’s Head of Security, and their children were now almost inseparable.

  During what occasionally felt like a drawn-out purgatorial period between life on Terradox and what was coming next, the Hawthornes and Ospanovs were endlessly glad to have each other for company.

  The children playfully ambled over towards the couch at the other side of the Ospanovs’ expansive living room, remaining utterly transfixed with the only gift Katie had opened so far. This was understandable given that the gift in question was the most technically advanced toy ever produced — a prototype so cutting edge that it didn’t even have a name. It came courtesy of Robert Harrington, Katie’s grandfather and the Terradox colony’s Head of Habitat Management, who’d had to pull all kinds of strings to gain authorisation for the gift.

  The gift itself hadn’t actually been sent to Earth in a technical sense; instead, the precise instructions for its fabrication were sent to Earth’s Romotech Production Zone, where the toy was fabricated before being transported to the Ospanovs’ New London home by a maximum security courier.

  Some of the security-related hoo-ha struck everyone as overkill for what was after all a children’s toy, but there were good reasons that powerful romotech was kept under close guard. The toy would never be commercially available on Earth due to restrictions on invisibility cloaks, for one thing, and the best Robert had been able to do was secure authorisation for a manufacturing run of one sole item.

  The toy was a ball like no other, capable of not only vanishing and reappearing on command but also of being directed by the mere flick of a finger. As with all other items which could be rendered invisible by a romotech cloak, the ball’s surface was surrounded by a multitude of omnidirectional cameras. Coupled with the presence of tiny screens, in layman’s terms, this allowed the observer to effectively see through the object. This worked particularly well for items as small as the ball in question — no larger than an apple — and the cameras performed a dual function in also tracking the movement of the user’s finger to determine which direction it should move. The ball’s ‘touchless throw’ technology was the most evidently groundbreaking aspect of its design, but the romokinetic propulsion which enabled this feature had implications stretching far beyond the field of children’s toys.

  Katie, far too young to think or care about anything other than how cool her new toy was, once again lifted her index finger and drew slow circles in the air. The ball danced to her tune before following the backwards movement of her finger and moving gradually towards her face.

  “Make it disappear again,” Patch suggested, impatient in his excitement.

  With a look of anticipation on her face, Katie brought together the tips of her middle finger and thumb. Immediately, the ball disappeared. This was less impressive to the adults in the room than it had been the first few dozen times, but Katie and Patch gasped in excitement all over again.

  The ball hovered in the air and couldn’t be moved via a touchless throw for as long as it remained invisible. This was a built-in safety feature, like the fact that the ball couldn’t be used at all anywhere other than inside the address it was registered to.

  A pile of unopened gifts remained untouched as the children played with the ball for another five minutes. The game came to a sudden end when young Patch, overexcited, thrust his index finger forwards far too quickly and sent the ball hurtling towards a decorative vase on the Ospanovs’ mantlepiece. Fortunately for the vase, it was protected by a romotech cloak of its own; not a visual cloak, but rather a physical barrier which prevented anything from passing at high speed. A human hand would have been allowed through to pick the vase up, of course, but the cloak guarded against any accidental impacts from other objects. This kind of romotech childproofing wasn’t yet publicly available but was expected to hit the market soon. It wouldn’t be cheap and the cloaks would be installed only by trained professionals, but many hoped this would be the first step in the democratisation of a technology with almost infinite potential to make life easier for all kinds of people in all kinds of ways.

  In the Ospanovs’ living room, meanwhile, Patch’s errant touchless throw collided with the protective cloak in front of the vase and bounced back as though it had hit a wall. Viola reacted quickly to catch it before it might have collided with something that wasn’t cloaked, then put it down and told the children that was enough for now.

  They complained, predictably, but soon relented when Viola pointed them towards the s
till-unopened gifts under the table.

  The unusual custom of placing gifts under a table rather than on open display had begun just over two years earlier, on Katie’s second birthday, when she had insisted on carrying each gift to the table in her own home before opening it so that she was the first to see what was inside the wrapping paper. Patch had followed her lead on his own second birthday a few weeks later, and their parents had all found it so funny that they saved the children the trouble of carrying the gifts to the table next time round and placed them there themselves.

  The original pattern now worked in reverse — Katie would collect the gifts from under the table and bring them into the open before unwrapping them, as Patch would on his own upcoming birthday — but it was an amusing little custom their parents wanted to hang on to for as long as they could.

  “Katie,” her father Peter said from the far side of the room. “Why don’t you start with the gifts from Terradox? That way we can all watch the recording before I leave for my flight.” He glanced at his wristband. “I don’t have long.”

  Katie’s eyes lit up. “Did they make a new message for me?”

  “They sure did,” Peter smiled, heading towards the viewing wall to get everything ready. “Okay, I’ll need you all to gather around the table. The 3-D projection won’t work if you’re too close.” After pressing a button on the wall he then disappeared behind a jet black floor-to-ceiling screen. This would have been startling if they hadn’t seen it before, but no one batted an eyelid. Peter meanwhile worked quickly to set everything up for the recording to be played. He stepped back through the opaque cloak and joined the others at the table just a minute or two later.

  “Here we go,” Viola said, bouncing Katie on her knee.

  The black cloak then faded, revealing an uncannily convincing 3-D backdrop on the viewing wall and four unbelievably realistic human figures between the wall and the now-transparent cloak. The projection technology was truly remarkable and made it seem as though the four people in the recording truly were present in the room.

  Katie had never met these faraway friends and family, nor anyone else residing on Terradox. She was also too young to fully understand why the woman she was named after never sent an annual recording of her own — too young to understand that a sad twist of fate had seen Ekaterina Rusev succumb to a mercifully short battle with an untreatable illness just hours before Katie’s birth.

  Viola had sensed that something wasn’t right in Peter’s demeanour, or that of the doctors, but at his insistence everyone agreed to keep the news from her until after the birth for obvious reasons. Peter put his unusual quietness and paleness down to the excitement of becoming a father and the doctors were all professional enough to let nothing show, and the strength of Viola’s understandably emotional reaction to learning of Rusev’s passing had proven Peter wise in his decision to hold off on breaking the news until their baby was safely in his arms.

  Peter had travelled to Rusev’s funeral on the Venus station at Viola’s absolute insistence while she remained at home with Katie, who having been born several weeks early was far too small to travel such a distance, and that had been the last time he had seen any of Holly, Grav, Robert or Bo in the flesh.

  The fact that Katie’s birthday shared a date with Rusev’s death made it a difficult time of year for the Ospanovs since public attention on the grand Kosmosphere project Rusev had set in motion in her final year always peaked on this anniversary. As public figures with so much history with Terradox and Rusev more generally, both Viola and Peter typically had to attend events on Katie’s birthday as representatives of the Kosmosphere project, and this year was no exception. In fact, this year was a very special one.

  Each previous anniversary had brought into sharp focus the relatively imminent launch of an embryonic romosphere, similar in many respects to Terradox itself, which would expand to something approaching a planetary scale before carrying a large and varied human population outwards on a one-way trip to the stars. More of a mobile Earth than a spaceship in any kind of traditional sense, the Kosmosphere would be powered by a large romotech reactor in its core and propelled via similar principles, albeit massively scaled up, to those which propelled the toy ball Katie and Patch had been throwing around all morning.

  Today, however, marked a very special day. For today wasn’t just any day; today was launch day.

  In a matter of mere hours, Ivy ‘Holly’ Wood would officially launch from Terradox the painstakingly developed embryonic romosphere which would ultimately become the Kosmosphere. All being well, the Kosmosphere would expand slowly as it ventured outwards to the orbital position where it would remain until its ultimate departure three years after launch. The expansion would pick up pace once the Kosmosphere reached that orbital position, before stopping exactly two years after launch by which point it would be considerably larger than Terradox.

  As the four figures before her suddenly appeared large and lifelike, Viola tried to imagine what must have been running through Holly’s mind as the launch arrived. With the physical development of the embryonic romosphere having occurred on Terradox, Holly was ultimately responsible for its success. And given the level of public interest in the project and just how much hope for humanity’s future was wrapped up in it, the pressure was without precedent.

  “Uncle Bo!” Katie yelled, delighted by the projection. “Grandad!”

  “And Holly and Grav,” Viola added, fighting back a tear. They were almost too real, even before they began to speak. It saddened her greatly that her brother and father had never seen her four-year-old daughter in the flesh, and the convincingness of their projections, along with Holly and Grav’s, only made this feeling stronger.

  “Happy birthday, darling,” Robert Harrington said, waving across the room. The distance between Earth and Terradox made live conversations impractical due to the unavoidable communications delay, but when recordings were this immersive no one felt like they were missing out.

  “Thanks, Grandad,” Katie smiled. “Hi, Uncle Bo!” she added, temporarily forgetting that they couldn’t see or hear her in the same way she could see and hear them.

  Birthday greetings followed from Bo and then from Holly and Grav, who continued to run day-to-day operations on Terradox and who missed Viola and Peter just as much as was true in reverse.

  “I asked your daddy to make sure my gift was the first one you opened,” Robert continued with a smile, “so I think you’ll already have seen it. I wanted him to see it before he has to head off to do his speech. I hope you liked it!”

  “I love it!” she replied, again either thinking he would hear her or too happy to care that he wouldn’t.

  Bo stepped forward next and told Katie that his gift was in blue wrapping paper. She hurried under the table and emerged with a large blue box, which she opened to unveil a complex-looking model rover building kit. The recommended age was 12 and over.

  “Vintage Bo,” Viola laughed.

  “He tries,” Peter said, trying not to laugh along.

  “Which one is from you, Holly?” Katie asked, this time confirming that she really had forgotten that they couldn’t hear. The projections were so convincing that no one could blame her.

  “The next one is from both of us,” Grav said, his staccato and contraction-free Serbian accent bringing a wide smile to Peter’s face.

  “The paper has rocket ships on it,” Holly added.

  Katie dove under the table again, this time asking Patch to help in her search for the right gift.

  Viola took the opportunity to wipe away a tear that had escaped upon hearing Holly’s voice. It was always an emotional date, but the imminence of the Kosmosphere’s launch amplified everything even further. The Ospanovs and Hawthornes — previously sent home from Terradox — were all going to the Kosmosphere as soon as it was ready, and Viola took solace in the fact that she would be reunited there with her brother Bo and her father Robert. But just like the date inevitably reminded her tha
t she would never see Rusev again, the sight of Holly and Grav, who were both staying on Terradox rather than venturing starward on the Kosmosphere, reminded Viola that she would never see either of them again, either.

  Peter, noticing Viola’s sadness, held her hand and whispered that he had something that would cheer her up. “Trust me,” he said. “You’ll love it!”

  “Got it!” Patch yelled from under the table. He handed the wrapped gift to Katie and watched on as she ripped away the rocket-ship paper.

  “What does it say?” she asked, holding a T-shirt towards her parents.

  Both laughed. “Commander in training,” they said in unison, reading the words from the centre of a design which faithfully imitated that of a standard-issue Rusentra EVA suit.

  “That’s the closest she’ll ever get to wearing one of those suits,” Viola said quietly to the Hawthornes as they sat to her left, chuckling along.

  Having remotely paused the recording while the kids looked for the present, Peter was keen to get it going again. He had to leave for his annual public appearance much earlier than Viola did for hers, since he was once again set to lead the world’s main Russian language ceremony which appropriately took place in St Petersburg. Born in Kazakhstan, Peter had grown up fluent in Russian and was received as a returning hero at these events, during which the late space pioneer Yury Gardev was always honoured with particular emotion.