Terradox Beyond

by Craig A. Falconer

  Viola wasted no time in fetching a change of clothes from Peter’s wardrobe — Pavel was several inches shorter than Peter but similarly built, so they would do the job until he got home — but she didn’t take them straight through to the bathroom.

  Pavel was in the shower, anyway, so she sat down on the bed and pressed a button on her wristband while holding it towards the viewing wall on the far side of the bedroom.

  A live news feed filled the wall. Its content filled her with fear.

  They were only talking about one thing: an assassination attempt on Peter Ospanov, the second in eleven days. Viola saw the city streets behind the reporter, locked down, and listened carefully to the headline version of the story: “… no casualties other than the two foiled assassins who were deflected by Mr Ospanov’s bodyguard.”

  Viola instinctively looked in the direction of the bathroom, as though two walls weren’t in the way. She thought of Pavel, covered in more blood than she had ever seen in her life, and couldn’t help but think that ‘deflected’ was one hell of a euphemism.

  “I think it's time we start holding to account the politicians who have legitimised the braindead conspiracy theories that lead to this kind of radicalisation,” said a talking head in a news studio as Viola stared blankly towards the bathroom. “We had already seen knives and bombs, and today we’ve seen machetes on the streets of New London. How long until more sophisticated methods rear their heads?”

  Viola tapped her wristband to kill the feed. She sat in silence until she heard the shower turn off, then carried the clothes to the bathroom door and knocked.

  Pavel opened it no more than necessary, revealing only his head. His face was clean, but he could clearly see that Viola’s now bore the weight of knowing what had happened.

  “This house is the safest place in the world,” he said, solemnly but firmly.

  Viola handed him the clothes and nodded distantly, hoping he was right.

  eight

  It was difficult for Chase Jackson not to feel slightly embarrassed as he gazed up at a large screen playing a three-minute montage of the significant training progress he had made over the last six years.

  More than anything else, the footage made Chase realise how much he had aged. The fresh-faced 22-year-old who had excitedly stepped into the Isolation Kompound was still the same on the outside, but his hairline had receded young and the skin under his eyes had darkened.

  Holly, standing before him, put this down to the stress of the incredible pressures that had been put on Chase, the face of a generation who had seen unprecedented attention and hope dumped on his shoulders. He had borne this weight selflessly and as well as anyone could have expected, but the last six years had very clearly taken their toll.

  The gathered audience of around a hundred onlookers was far smaller than the crowd that had packed the temporary grandstands at the RPZ when he last stood in this spot as Holly launched Arkadia into orbit. Every one of them knew that he himself was set to blast off from Terradox the very next day and travel to Arkadia, now fully expanded, to conduct a thorough mission involving the delivery of recently developed instrumentation and the gathering of detailed atmospheric data which was only possible with such instrumentation. He would be back before too long and many of them would join him for the final one-way trip in a year’s time, but today they were gathered for a formal graduation ceremony.

  Chase wasn’t the only individual whose progress was being recognised in this ceremony, but his graduation was unquestionably the highest profile. Seven years had passed since Holly handpicked Chase for participation in an isolation test she hoped would prove his viability as a future mission captain, and in those seven years he had done nothing but justify her faith.

  Having already spoken extensively before introducing the montage, Holly needed few words to symbolically pass the torch to Chase. “Arkadia and its citizens will be in safe hands,” she said, placing a cap on Chase’s head to go along with the rest of his formal uniform. “The hands of Commander Chase Jackson.”

  The families and friends in the audience applauded as Chase shook the hands of the three stalwarts at the podium: Holly, Grav, and the rarely present Dimitar Rusev who had insisted upon flying in from the Venus station for this ceremony. Grav’s handshake was the firmest and most prolonged by far, and a slowly spreading grin confirmed that he wasn’t going to let go without a fight.

  “That’s how you want it?” Chase laughed.

  Holly rolled her eyes.

  Grav put his left hand behind his back, challenging Chase to do the same, and the two proceeded to engage in a minute-long squeezing contest — for lack of a more established term — in which each tried to force the other to quit before their own hand gave way.

  Chase gritted his teeth and tried to block out the pain, feeling like his hand was a berry and that Grav was a gorilla trying to crush it.

  “Come on, boy, I am an old man!” Grav said, displaying an unsettling lack of effort.

  Just as it started to look very much like it was only a matter of time until Chase’s hand fell, the tide rapidly turned. Grav let out a grunt as his right arm grew shaky, then waved his left hand in surrender just seconds later.

  Chase looked down at his own bright-red hand, which felt extremely raw, and he was more than a little surprised when Grav used his own reddened right hand to pat him on the back twice.

  “Credit where it is due,” Grav said, loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  Chase stood momentarily conflicted, suddenly sure that Grav had let him win and feeling simultaneously patronised and thankful that Grav — a man’s man if ever there was one — had opted to publicly humble himself for Chase’s benefit.

  As the audience jovially cheered both competitors and Holly introduced the next graduate, Chase lingered momentarily at Grav’s side.

  “You gave me that win,” he said.

  Grav didn’t deny it. “I’ve only ever lost once,” he whispered in reply.

  “To Peter?” Chase asked, confident in his guess and struggling to think of anyone else whose grip could compete with the force he had just felt.

  Grav gave a barely perceptible half-nod. “To Peter.”

  Chase quietly made his way to his parents and Nisha to watch the rest of the ceremony. His father Christian congratulated him on the win — “I knew you had it in you!” — while his mother Jillian was congratulatory of his well-earned Commander designation rather than his victory in the aftershow.

  Nisha, meanwhile, was more than a little concerned about the deep imprints that Grav’s improbably thick fingers had left on the back of Chase’s hand.

  “Why would you do that when you’re flying to Arkadia tomorrow?” she asked, her tone one of concern rather than nagging. “Look at your hand!”

  “You should see the state of his,” Chase joked, feigning machismo.

  Nisha laughed under her breath.

  Holly, looking up at them, was happy to see Nisha look happy. It hadn’t been plain sailing for her over the last two years, and everyone knew that she and Chase were back together rather than still together.

  For the sake of collective morale their split had initially been kept under wraps, with Nisha having long struggled with Chase’s accidental position as a media figurehead and her own restless discomfort with life on Terradox.

  Nisha had gone through a very tough time for several months, coming very close to asking her family if they would be willing to return with her to Earth rather than stay on track for a move to Arkadia.

  Fortunately, a strong support network had stepped up to the plate. One individual who had since contributed greatly to rebalancing Nisha’s mindset was none other than Chase’s mother, of all people: Jillian Jackson, the colony’s leading psychologist.

  Even when Nisha temporarily moved out of the home she shared with Chase, a move which came out of her general need for space rather than any specific disagreement or argument, Jillian remained a neutral figure, confidante and s
ounding board. It was Jillian who argued that covering up the split would have been a terrible idea, disagreeing with the ‘experts’ who insisted that it was crucial to protect the good news story of a relationship that had blossomed in the hellish confines of Little Venus’s Isolation Kompound.

  There was no denying that many on Terradox and even more so on Earth were hugely invested in Chase and Nisha — or Chisha, as elements of the media had come to know the pairing — but Jillian was firm in her insistence that the couple’s mental wellbeing was infinitely more important than the vicarious feelings of their distant fanbase.

  When Chase eventually had to publicly comment on the growing rumours, in words that were his own but which had been cleared by PR experts, the tearful reactions of fans on Earth mirrored those which had greeted the news of the break-up of successful boybands and other music acts of the past.

  On Terradox, meanwhile, Chase threw himself further and deeper into his work. Despite this, he still couldn’t help but notice that people were treating him differently, as though someone close to him had died. He didn’t see much of Nisha for several months — their work tasks rarely overlapped — and he never pressed his mother for an insight into what Nisha was telling her during their increasingly frequent sessions.

  Holly and other high-ranking colonists did all they could to help Nisha through her rough patch, primarily because they cared about her in a personal sense but also because they were desperate to ensure she remained on track for Arkadia, where her peerless knowledge of the propulsion system she’d helped to design would be much needed.

  But one person more than any other was responsible for Nisha’s continued presence, her emotional stability and most recently for her grudgeless and seamless reunion with Chase. That person, not even present on Terradox, had been recommended by Jillian as a useful point of contact. And through long written communications and occasional voice messages, Viola Ospanov had tapped in to the similar feelings that had almost derailed her own life on Terradox six years earlier, ultimately succeeding in keeping Nisha’s head above the water.

  No one else would ever know exactly what Viola said, but Nisha was open in telling her close friends and family that it had been Viola’s words that made the difference.

  Everyone from Dimitar and Holly to Chase and Jillian took turns to thank Viola profusely for her intervention, but she knew that they would have all done the same and more for her.

  That kind of teamwork and mutual assistance was what made Terradox great, and it was why Viola herself couldn’t wait to travel to Arkadia and start building a society around the same principles.

  Next to graduate during the ceremony, which was more symbolic than anything, was none other than Viola’s brother: Bo Harrington.

  As requested, Bo wore a lightweight pressure suit without complaint and didn’t feel at all awkward despite being surrounded by a crowd of smartly dressed onlookers.

  That was Bo to a tee, Holly thought; always willing to do what was asked, and often oblivious to subtle social conventions.

  Bo had completed his basic flight and fitness training almost a year earlier, but he understood why the public recognition had been held off until today. Always a man of few words, Bo collected his cap — a different colour from Chase’s Commander cap — and returned to his spot in the audience with minimal fuss. He stood beside Lisa Croft, his own longterm partner of almost three years, but when Holly looked up at them her thoughts were far less cheery.

  For unlike Nisha and Chase, Bo and Lisa were doomed by circumstance; the Croft parents, both employed in the colony’s medical research vision, had opted to stay on Terradox.

  Lisa couldn’t even consider leaving her young twin brothers behind and her parents wouldn’t consider a change of heart, but she and Bo had decided to make the most of the year they had left rather than cut their relationship short to make his departure easier when the time came.

  At no point had Lisa even asked if Bo might change his mind; it had been made up since the moment Dimitar first mentioned the idea of a Kosmosphere, and he had long since come to see Arkadia and the opportunities it presented as the reason he’d been born.

  Bo and the rest of the audience stayed for the rest of the relatively short ceremony, applauding at all the right times. The penultimate graduate was Bradley Reinhart, the young communications officer who had made an unplanned spectacular entrance to the launch ceremony at the same site two years earlier.

  Holly made reference to that moment, drawing laughter as she reminisced, and Bradley took the playful ribbing in the intended spirit. His training would be put to good use in the coming days when he was set to lead the team communicating with Chase during his flight to Arkadia.

  Last up was the only individual who would join Chase on his imminent trip, and one whose future had led to a prolonged and spirited debate: Rachel Berry.

  Rachel, a quietly hyper-effective and greatly respected engineer, had begun her Rusentra career working under Robert Harrington way back when he led the Venus station’s Habitat Management division. Robert’s recommendation soon helped to earn her a highly sought-after position in the station’s Craft Management division, and Rachel’s good work led to her promotion to Head of that division within just a few short years.

  Shortly after the plans for a Kosmosphere were formally approved, Holly recruited Rachel to lead a new Craft Management division on Terradox. Many individuals on the station hadn’t taken kindly to this, and in more recent times Holly had come to understand just how it felt to have such an excellent worker snatched away. This was because Robert, from his temporary home on Earth, had since talked Rachel into signing up for a one-way trip to Arkadia.

  Holly did her best to convince Rachel to stay, and when that course of action failed she shifted her attention to Robert and all but begged him to recruit someone else in Rachel’s place. Having already lost Robert and with Nisha and Bo soon to follow, Holly knew that Terradox would be without many of its keenest minds in just a year’s time. Adding Rachel to that list would leave an even larger hole to fill, she said, but Robert was not for backing down.

  Unrelenting, Robert argued that Holly would always have access to billions of potential Rachels on Earth, just a few hundred million miles away from Terradox. Arkadia, on the other hand, would only have whoever made the trip — at least until the next generation was born and raised. Arkadia needed the best of the best, he insisted, and nothing else would do.

  Holly bore no grudge towards Robert and certainly no ill feelings for Rachel, who had always been a model professional and remarkably quick to learn and apply whatever was asked of her.

  “You earned it,” Holly said, handing Rachel her cap.

  Robert and the rest of the future Arkadian population were getting a top-quality recruit in Rachel. But Holly knew that the challenge Robert had experienced in securing her services was absolutely nothing compared to what he was having to deal with on Earth…

  nine

  At long last, the provisional list was out.

  Everyone who had applied for a place on Arkadia now knew their fate, with the vast majority left disappointed but nevertheless pleased for the lucky few of their friends or family members who had been more fortunate.

  No precise selection criteria had ever been published; and while this had done nothing to prevent certain accusations being levied at the committee, it at least ruled out any drawn out appeals or complaints for those unsuccessful applicants who saw themselves as more qualified than some who had made the cut. Despite enjoying broad support from governments and public bodies of all kinds due to the overwhelming benefits of applied romotech, the Arkadia project was ultimately a private one and thus Rusentra was under no obligation to justify its selections.

  Cynics claimed that the list reveal had been tactically held back until after the latest Day of Gratitude so as to avoid the potential for angry or even violent scenes caused by jilted ‘rejects’, as some unsuccessful applicants had termed themselves. Th
is theory was so obviously true that no real effort was made to deny it, but even this sensible decision to delay the announcement hadn’t been completely successful in preventing protests during Viola’s annual Day of Gratitude address.

  The number of protesters was tiny but their voices were loud, and over the last two years such anti-Arkadian sentiment had become background noise that the content and excited majority had learned to tune out and live with.

  The Day of Gratitude had passed with no major violence, in New London at least, but the acute tension of the day had led to Katie Ospanov stating out loud for the first time that she wished her birthday was on a different day.

  “Me too, sweetheart,” Viola had said, seeing no sense in lying.

  Two weeks later, the family were all present at Patch Hawthorne’s sixth birthday party. Both children had grown many inches taller since Arkadia was launched, naturally enough, while Arkadia itself had expanded to many thousands of times the size of the embryonic romosphere that was carried into orbit by a Super Ferrier as all of humanity watched on.

  Pavel Mak, a loyal security guard who was by now a friend of the Hawthornes as well as Ospanovs, was present with his baby Sophie, a child who hadn’t been born or even conceived at the time of the launch.

  He certainly looked a lot more presentable than he had just a day earlier when he turned up in a bloody mess at the Ospanovs’ front door, mere minutes after dealing with two would-be assassins who failed in an attempt to take out Peter.

  The assassination attempt had since been illuminated to the extent that all of the adults in the room, and pretty much everywhere else, had seen clear video footage of the incident. The footage showed Peter and Pavel being jumped by a pair of self-styled radicals who opposed the Arkadia project and had never even applied for places, although public decency laws saw to it that the messiest moments were blurred out.