Terradox Beyond

by Craig A. Falconer

  What remained clear in the video was that Peter vehemently resisted Pavel’s calls to make himself invisible via his protective cloak, and Viola had been furious to see that Peter actually disabled his cloak for a few seconds in order to disarm one of the assailants while Pavel dealt with the other.

  In the end, Peter’s cloak was remotely re-enabled and his entire body rendered invisible against his own wishes in a move that infuriated him. He had since made it clear to Rusentra’s on-Earth security supervisors that he would kill anyone who ever again stepped in to stop him assisting Pavel or anyone else in a life-or-death situation, and the fact that he had made this vow in a calm voice many hours after the incident left all of those who heard it in little doubt that he was serious.

  Viola meanwhile begged Peter to think of her and Katie if any similar situation ever reared its head, although she did acknowledge that she understood his drive to help Pavel in the heat of the moment.

  “People talk about fight or flight,” he told her, “but let’s just say that where I grew up, they didn’t teach us to fly — and neither did Grav.”

  “Well let’s just say you’ve got a wife and daughter waiting at home,” Viola snapped back, “and if that doesn’t get through your head, let’s just say that this whole project would fall apart and all of those assholes would win if anything happened to you. Okay?”

  Peter fully understood where she was coming from but tried to explain that rationality didn’t come into it in such moments. In his words: “At times like that, it’s not even about survival. It’s about watching your friend taking on two armed men and knowing that if you don’t do something, he’s done. The beast takes over.”

  Viola was at least eased slightly by the fact that it had ultimately been the beast in Pavel who had brutally slayed the attackers with their own weapons, because it was more comfortable to think that Peter would be capable of such a thing than to have it proven.

  A more meaningful positive was that the public at large, as well as the media, had reacted to the assassination attempt with utter and unflinching condemnation. There had always been a handful of people who spoke against Arkadia for various reasons, but of late it seemed very much like the more militant fringe of anti-Arkadians had been legitimised by certain politicians who saw the issue as a vote-winner.

  Largely because there was always a lot of political currency in flat-out contrarianism, and with democracy firmly re-established on Earth after the fall of the GU, it made strategic sense for some parties to oppose the project in an effort to make upcoming elections about a single issue on which other more popular parties were atypically united in support.

  It wasn’t a complicated plan and didn’t have to pay off massively, only needing to secure the support of the 5% of voters uncertain about Arkadia while more mainstream parties fought over the other 95% of the electorate.

  In the midst of the petty political posturing there were also some legitimate concerns which were addressed as fully as possible but couldn’t be easily dismissed. One example regarded the inevitable ‘brain drain’ that would result from many thousands of Earth’s best minds all leaving for pastures new.

  Some long-term critics of off-Earth research criticised Arkadia as the new Terradox in this regard, while fringe voices jumped on the bandwagon to claim that the Terradox metaphor didn’t end there. In their eyes, the similarities didn’t begin with the recent colony but rather with Roger Morrison’s initial plan to abandon Earth having developed a new world as a refuge solely for his chosen elite.

  In the words of one prominent anti-Arkadian: “Even if they don’t eliminate us, they are deliberately weakening us.”

  Unfortunately, further damaging conspiracy theories naturally followed from this line of thinking, and before long some of those in mass circulation became intensely and unsettlingly personal about Viola’s family.

  It was at this point that anti-Arkadian concerns went from fairly reasonable to utterly unhinged, and while the most out-there theories were previously easily dismissed as nonsense, the recent attempts on Peter’s life had suddenly made them feel all too serious.

  So-called ‘bloodline theories’ were now rife, and evidently didn’t have to make any sense to gain tractions in some fringe circles. Desperate attempts to link well-known families like the Harringtons and Kohlis to powerful families of decades and centuries gone by didn’t have to be successful to make their mark, because speaking the words was enough to sow the seed of distrust.

  Had logic been required, the bloodline theories would have died immediately. For one thing, any suggestion that a group of ill-defined elites had long planned Arkadia as the home of an offshoot civilisation, and particularly one which held that the prominent individuals and families associated with Terradox had always been in on it, utterly ignored the point that Dimitar Rusev — Ekaterina’s only direct descendent and thus the end point of the primary bloodline — was staying behind on the Venus station.

  Similar was true of Chase Jackson’s parents, Christian and Jillian, who were set to stay on Terradox while their son headed to Arkadia. Undeterred by these facts, the lunatic fringe shifted gears to say that it wasn’t just about who was leaving for Arkadia, it was about who would continue to be absent from Earth, arguing at something of a stretch that Dimitar and the Jacksons’ continued absence from Earth was more telling than their absence from Arkadia.

  One conspiracy theory along this theme went further than the rest, and it was the one that drove susceptible anti-Arkadians into manic rages and drove people to do all they could to prevent the project from going ahead. In short, this was the theory that Earth’s remaining population would indeed be decisively eliminated once the chosen few departed.

  Because Roger Morrison had actually tried to do something very similar to this with his original plan to hide out with his cohorts on Terradox while Earth was cleansed of the unproductive masses, such theories, as crazy as they sounded, weren’t immediately discounted by everyone who heard them. Viola and the others knew from that experience that dismissing all theories out of hand could be dangerous in itself, but this was different; this wasn’t a case of people finding something, it was a case of people fabricating something.

  Needless to say, the evidence put forward by proponents of the bloodline theory was slim and flimsy to say the least. The supporting ‘evidence’ was in fact almost non-existent and rested largely upon the ‘discovery’ that there had been a viscount somewhere on Viola’s mother’s side of the family, several centuries ago.

  It didn’t seem to matter that the individual in question had died childless and relatively young, or even that the rank of viscount wasn’t a particularly high one. Illustratively, Viola’s own initial reaction of moderate surprise at the news was quickly followed by a shrug since she knew that Viscount was the second lowest of five peerage ranks — behind Duke, Marquess and Earl — to which most families were bound to have some distant connection if anyone was motivated to look back far enough into the past.

  Indeed, less than a day after the article was published containing this supposed scoop, rational observers found closer and more recent links to higher-ranking noblemen in the families of both the article’s author and the publication’s editor.

  The supposed ace in the anti-Arkadian pack, however, was a claim that Peter Ospanov was also of noble stock.

  The sole data point presented in support of this idea was that Peter, born in Kazakhstan, was a distant but direct descendent of very powerful Russian nobility. This claim, even flimsier than the other, came as more of a surprise to Peter and his surviving family in Astana than it did to anyone else.

  Some agitators claimed that Peter and Viola’s marriage had been arranged long in advance, even toying with the necessary side-theory that the entire discovery of Terradox and the fall of Roger Morrison had been mere sideshows in a centuries-long play. This particular strain of madness was too much of a stretch for almost everyone, and even the more radical of the prominent anti-
Arkadian politicians distanced themselves from it. In its place, they ’merely’ posited the theory that the Kosmosphere plan had been on the burner for years and was ultimately publicly revealed to coincide with the birth of Peter and Viola’s firstborn, who they hailed as the ordained leader of humanity’s elite offshoot.

  Citing the close timing of Katie’s birth and the announcement of the Kosmosphere as anything but coincidence, it took no great leap for some to state that the elites’ Arkadian departure wouldn’t occur should anything happen to Katie in the meantime. And while this was considered a despicable line of thought by an overwhelming majority, it was still given far more airtime than a more responsible media would have provided.

  The educated politicians who enabled such poisonous and potentially murderous rhetoric by failing to distance themselves completely from a broader bloodline theory they clearly knew was baseless were the people who disappointed Viola most of all.

  Peter, meanwhile, somehow managed to shrug it off in public while absolutely stewing about it in private. He saw claims of noble lineage as something of a slur, erasing the struggles his family had overcome for centuries and indeed erasing the countless deaths his young eyes had witnessed at the hands of Roger Morrison and his GU forces.

  Those were and always had been the true elite, who Peter himself had more than once risked his life to take down. In reality, as he and those close to him knew, Peter had grown up with almost nothing in a region torn apart by conflict between Global Union militants and nationalist militias who saw the GU for what it was long before most of the rest of the world cottoned on.

  The people talking about his ‘noble blood’ and his family’s part in a centuries-old elite plan apparently didn’t know that Peter had been smuggled out of his homeland at the age of 13 towards the safe zone around Rusev’s base. Grav, who had recognised the name of Peter’s brother as that of a high-ranking figure in the regional resistance movement, had taken one look at the boy’s already above-average stature and personally enrolled him in a training program for security personnel. Peter excelled and soon found himself working on the station, and the rest was history.

  His parents and older brother, however, were not so lucky, perishing in a series of targeted bombing campaigns just months after his escape from the area. Grav hadn’t wanted to tell him what had happened but Rusev did, and that was that. Peter was remarkably restrained when he found out, distantly saying that he’d known it was coming, and if anything he was glad to hear their deaths came during a bombing campaign — he had heard the stories from Grav about what the GU’s ground forces had done elsewhere.

  But despite his ancestors’ struggles being erased by these bloodline theories, Peter was most angry about the conspiracies having brought his daughter Katie into the political arena.

  It took all of his restraint to keep this rage to himself, and a private discussion with Pavel and Vic Hawthorne just minutes before young Patch’s party began had at least allowed some of the anger to get out.

  “People want to talk about Katie being the end product of some special bloodline,” he spat into the air, fury dripping from the words, “as if she is somehow linked to fucking Morrison? They talk about this backstory, and what do they do… do they close their eyes at the parts of the story when three of that little girl’s grandparents have been murdered in cold blood by GU thugs and when the only surviving one — Robert — willingly put his life on the line to help us take out Boyce? They close their eyes and plug their ears when the story gets to that fucking part?”

  There was nothing the other men could say, and neither could even begin to imagine being in Peter’s position. Even prior to the sudden explosion of the ‘bloodline bullshit’, as he succinctly put it, Katie had been the focus of unsettling attention — some intended as positive and some clearly negative — from weirdos on both sides of the Arkadia debate.

  Viola and Peter had done all they could to give her as normal a life as possible and it was fortunately the case that almost everyone was more interested in Viola and Peter themselves. As Katie was now old enough to understand, however, she couldn’t leave her home without a protective romobot cloak.

  Until recently this had been because some friendly members of the public treated Katie like a young royal or the child of any ‘regular’ celebrity mega-couple, which was difficult enough when they tried to reach out and touch her, in some cases trying to cut a lock of her hair or something equally bizarre.

  But now that it was clear there were people out there who harboured altogether more devious intentions due to their idiotic swallowing of the bloodline lie, as far as Viola was concerned there was no such thing as being too safe.

  ten

  “Real wine,” Nisha Kohli said, proudly pointing to the two full glasses and the half-empty bottle on the table.

  Chase’s eyes widened in surprise at the picture-perfect scene before him. Their dining room looked like a fancy French restaurant, or at least his mental picture of one, and Nisha had really outdone herself.

  “This is amazing,” he said. “And I guess when it comes to getting wine like that, it’s all about who you know,” he quipped, referencing the fact that his botanist father was responsible for producing the sought-after wine in question, the only form of alcohol present on Terradox and one which was supposed to be destined for Earth where each bottle fetched astronomical sums.

  They sat down in good spirits.

  Chase gazed around at the immaculately plated meals and the pleasant mood lighting coming from overhead. “I hope you didn’t do all of this for me.”

  “The buttons didn’t push themselves,” Nisha said.

  He laughed heartily. “Well, if this is my last supper, you’ve made sure it’s a good one.”

  Nisha’s good spirits died in an instant. “Last supper? Why would you even say that?”

  “Relax… I was just messing around.”

  “Well don’t! You know I’m already worried. Would you say something like that to your parents?”

  Chase shrugged. “Listen, Nisha: there’s nothing to worry about. I’m not worried, and I’m the one who’s going.”

  “Exactly,” she sighed, “and I’m the one who has to sit here hoping you’re alright.”

  “No you won’t; we’ll be in touch all the time. One of us will be online 24/7, talking to Bradley and his team. They’re working out of the Little Venus Buffer and you can go in there whenever you want. Sure, the comms delay will creep in, but we’ll still be in constant communication. It’s not like we’ll be incommunicado and you won’t hear from me until I get home. This is pretty much the same deal as when I went to the station, except this time I’ll have someone else with me.”

  Nisha sat in quiet thought. It was true that Chase had flown solo to the Venus station several months ago, but that was nothing compared to the voyage ahead of him.

  Even with the upcoming trip timed to ensure that the journey from Terradox to Arkadia would be the shortest one possible within a window of the next several months, his return trip would still take four full weeks. Despite Chase’s best efforts to reassure her, Nisha couldn’t help but think she would spend every waking minute worrying about all the things that could go wrong. Already, it was starting to get her down.

  “We already know that Arkadia is ready for us,” he went on, still trying. “All the readings are perfect and we’ve seen the feeds from the cameras on the other side of the cloak. We’re just going out there to deliver some equipment and double-check everything. We’ll only be there for a few days and then we’ll be back in the Karrier to come home.”

  “But it’s not just a Karrier,” Nisha said. “You’re going to be racing around in a Wasp, too, aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t call it racing. But yeah, we’re taking two Wasps inside the Karrier.”

  “Why two Wasps? I thought you’re the only one who’s going to be flying.”

  “I am,” Chase said. “We’re taking two in case one breaks.“

/>   Nisha breathed slowly. “So what if the Karrier breaks?”

  Chase shrugged, his mind clearly untroubled by such concerns. “Karriers don’t break. Wasps don’t break in the air, either, but there’s a lot more going on when a Wasp takes off, so we’re taking two in case one of them won’t start. Two is pretty much as good as three, because barring some kind of catastrophic malfunction having two means Rachel has all the parts she’d need to get one of them going, at least.”

  “See, it’s that little ‘catastrophic malfunction’ part that has me worried,” Nisha sighed. “And above and beyond everything else, I still don’t understand why they’re only sending a two-man crew.

  “Two-person crew,” Chase said, exaggerating the emphasis. “Geez… get with the times, Kohli.”

  Nisha grinned slightly, but her expression quickly returned to one of concern. “But still… why just you and Rachel? It’s like they’re worried something might go wrong.”

  “Total opposite,” Chase said, dismissing this thought with a brisk shake of his head. “They’re so confident, they know they only need two of us. Are you worried because Holly isn’t going? My dad kind of felt like that at first — he thought Dimitar wasn’t letting her go because it was too dangerous. But then think about it, if they were worried about that, why would they send me? Okay, I’m not Holly, but I’m not no one. They could have quietly sent someone else with Rachel if they wanted to, because Rachel is qualified enough. The point is that they want this to be a big deal. And you know how they are with symbolism and all that stuff. Spaceman trained Holly and Holly was the first person to step on Terradox. Holly trained me, so they want me to be first to step on Arkadia, a place which was basically Spaceman’s idea. I’m the next generation. And when my dad spoke to Dimitar about that exact concern, Dimitar said the reason Holly isn’t going to visit Arkadia is that Holly isn’t going to live on Arkadia. It’s as simple as that. The whole point of the public graduation ceremony was to make it like some ‘passing of the torch’ thing, and having Holly visit Arkadia would run totally counter to that.”