“What?”
She raised her gaze to meet Dante’s. “Her name is Jessica, but she’s his daughter.”
“No way.”
Holly nodded absently as her focus returned to the Tanners’ travel cards.
The photographs, both taken within the last year, showed two almost unrecognisable people. Norman was clean-shaven and well presented while Jessica’s hair was its apparently natural brown. Both looked fresh-faced, but Jessica’s heartbreakingly innocent smile made Holly wonder how she would fare on the isolated Venus station with almost no one else her own age.
Holly regretted her previous judgements about both of them and now understood why Norman seemed so tense; with a child in his care in an environment like this, she thought, who wouldn’t be?
Dante now stood at Holly’s shoulder, peering down at the photograph of Jessica. “Woah. Does it say how old she is?” he asked.
Holly looked at him in silence.
“I was just ask—”
“Listen to me,” she interrupted. “And listen well, because I’m only going to say this once: if you even think about it…”
There was no need to finish the sentence.
“Do something useful,” Holly added. “I’m going to bring them their food. They’ve been waiting long enough.”
“Why don’t we both go?”
“You heard what Grav said about giving them privacy until he comes to talk to us.”
“What Grav said?” Dante parroted with unconcealed contempt. “Since when does he give the orders?”
Holly ignored Dante’s pettiness; she knew that he and Grav had never seen eye to eye, and she had no desire to play peacemaker. Grav valued respect and saw Dante as “an obnoxious punk” who didn’t know the meaning of the word, a feeling he’d developed primarily during a minor argument which ended with Dante urging Grav to “quit it with the hardboiled hard-man act.”
Though Grav had turned the other cheek, and though Holly was hardly close to him despite the hundreds of millions of miles they’d travelled together, she had heard enough stories from Yury to know that Grav’s stoic detachment was anything but an act.
The most hard-hitting Grav stories came from the time period when his previous security work put him in direct confrontation with GU forces. Few who experienced such confrontation lived to tell the tale, but Grav had the scars to prove it; inside and out.
Standing in front of the algae machine waiting for Norman Tanner’s extra large all-day breakfast, Holly’s mind drifted to the similarly costly conflict between Rusev and GU bureaucrats over the algae itself.
When the distribution of Rusentra brand algae was first banned on Earth — with spurious health concerns cited as the reason — Rusev put it down to spite from her long-time rival Roger Morrison, a man who had enjoyed strong influence within the GU long before his formal rise to power. But when the famine struck and restrictions were tightened despite Rusev’s no-strings offer to produce mass quantities of the incredibly inexpensive algae and to make it available at cost, she began to question whether something more sinister was going on behind the curtain.
There were certainly no legitimate grounds for health concerns; Rusev had eaten nothing else for almost twenty years, while Holly had also been on an algae-only diet for several months and felt better than ever, her skin looking as youthful as it had when she was Jessica Tanner’s age and her muscle mass holding up well despite the Karrier’s limited exercise facilities.
A major and unsettling double-development on Earth just five weeks before the Karrier’s final departure strengthened Rusev’s suspicions. The first half of this development came in the form of a peer-reviewed research publication which claimed that multiple blight-stricken crops across several continents contained the same biochemical markers of what the paper’s lead author called “apparent genetic sabotage”. The second half came in the form of a bullet through that lead author’s forehead.
The suspicious death of Olivia Harrington, who worked within a pharmaceutical firm once controlled by Roger Morrison and still bearing his name, captured public attention so fully that an all-out media blitz was urgently concocted to reshape the narrative. Rusev told Holly she was certain that Morrison and his GU associates had directed their hydra-like propaganda machine to ensure that the public swallowed two convenient stories: that the famine-causing agricultural sabotage was the work of the terrorists who had been wiped out since bringing the world to its knees on Devastation Day, and that Harrington — the “heroic citizen” who brought the truth of the human-engineered famine to light — had been murdered in cold blood by an obsessed male colleague jealous of the recognition her work was receiving.
Desperate for any shred of evidence which could convincingly link the GU hierarchy to the engineered famine, Rusev had tirelessly tried to locate any of Harrington’s colleagues who might have known something. But if anyone did, they apparently knew better than to share it.
As Rusev expected, Holly had been quick to believe that Morrison and his GU cronies were capable of something so heinous.
Holly’s visceral hatred of Roger Morrison originated not from confrontation with either GU forces or GU policy, but rather during the regrettable two-year period she spent working for MXA, the space exploration arm of Morrison’s corporate empire.
After what Morrison had personally and purposefully put Holly through, she ached to see him fall.
Jessica Tanner’s meal appeared in the machine’s tray after slightly more than thirty seconds, a delay Holly could forgive given the intricacy of the grains of rice which lay in a neat pile next to the girl’s redundantly vegetarian lasagne.
“Do you want me to open the door?” Dante offered from his seat at the room’s small table.
“I’ll manage,” Holly said. “Thanks.”
From nowhere, an unexpected jolt then almost knocked Holly to the ground. She caught herself on the machine, spilling some of Jessica’s rice.
“What the hell was that?” Dante yelled.
“It’ll just be whatever Grav was fixing,” Holly tried to reassure him. “He maybe had to restart someth—”
A second impact, much harsher than the first, shook the entire room and sent Holly face-first into the table.
Disoriented and blurry-eyed, she saw various components of an all-day breakfast and a thousand perfect grains of rice scattered on the floor in front of her throbbing face.
A decisive third impact quickly followed, immeasurably more powerful than either of the others. Holly avoided the brunt of it courtesy of already being on the floor and well-braced against the table’s legs, but her good eye saw Dante being thrown into the wall on one side of the room while the impossibly heavy algae machine was ripped from the other.
The next sight she consciously registered was the countless perfect grains of rice being washed towards the door by a horrible flow of dark green algae water.
As the utility room’s light flashed amber, an ear-piercing alarm began to sound.
four
Holly lay under the table, curled in a ball in anticipation of a fourth impact which never came.
“Get up!” Dante yelled over the shrill alarm. Holly looked across the room and saw him crawling towards her, holding his ribs and wincing as he went. He shook her by the shoulder when he reached her. “Seriously, Holly, we have to get out of here!”
As Holly was about to reply — “and go where?” — her wristband’s blue notification light began to flash. If it beeped, she couldn’t hear it for the alarm. Holly pressed a button to answer the call and held the wristband against her ear.
“Holly?” Grav’s voice spoke. “Is Dante still with you?”
“Yeah. What the hell is going on?”
A different alarm was sounding in Grav’s security room. “We hit something big,” he said, raising his voice to be heard. “Or something big hit us. Listen to me: both of you have to get inside one of the landers right now. We are going down!”
Dante, wi
th his ear pressed against Holly’s to listen in as best he could, replied with the same questions that filled Holly’s mind: “What do you mean we’re going down? Are the life support systems failing? Is there structural dam—”
“I mean we are going down. Look outside!”
“We’re in the utility room,” Holly said, cursing its lack of windows. “Tell us what you’re looking at.”
“I am looking at the giant fucking rock that is pulling us towards it,” Grav snapped. “One minute there was nothing there, then right after the impact there was. It just… appeared. Out of nowhere! Whatever we just hit, there is no way the Karrier can land after that impact, so you have to get both of your asses in one of the landers. I am about to run to Rusev’s and I swear to God: I will initiate separation the second I get inside, so do not say I did not warn you.”
Holly and Dante scrambled to their feet. Both had a thousand questions about the giant rock Grav had just mentioned, but each knew that the other had no answers.
“We have to get to Rusev’s lander within ten seconds of Grav,” Dante said. “That’s how long the countdown will last once he initiates separation.”
Holly stood silently by the door. The pain around her swollen eye socket was drowning in an ocean of adrenaline, but her thoughts remained clear. “What about the Tanners?”
“What about Rusev and Yury?” Dante replied, positioning his body to sprint off in the direction of their lander. “And what about your face? Something could be broken.”
“I’m fine, and Yury and Rusev already have Grav! The Tanners will die if we abandon them.”
Dante rubbed his hands against his cheeks and shook his head frantically. “Holly… we have to stay together.”
“If we both go with the Tanners, we will be together,” Holly said. Deep inside, she knew that even a 100% guarantee of reaching the Venus station alive without the Tanners wouldn’t have been acceptable; the safety and near luxury of the station would be meaningless if she got there by abandoning her duty. She could never relax, never look at herself in the mirror, never sleep at night knowing that the people she’d been tasked with protecting were dead because she abandoned them. And then came the crux: “Dante, she’s just a kid.”
Dante’s reaction was not the one Holly hoped for. He took two quick steps towards her, held her face, and kissed her forehead. “Stay alive and stay in the damn lander,” he said, more firmly than he meant. “If anything can survive down there, wherever the hell ‘down there’ is, I will find you.”
With no time for a drawn-out farewell, Dante set off towards Rusev’s lander as quickly as he could.
Holly dashed back inside the utility room to save the only reachable possession she cared about: the small potted plant she had kept alive throughout her six months on the Karrier. Mercifully, she spotted it right away. Less mercifully, the pot’s fall from the shelf next to the dining machine had led to most of its life-giving Grow-Lo brand artificial soil spilling all over the floor.
“Shit,” she cursed under her breath.
After a few urgent seconds spent frantically gathering as much of the scattered soil as she dared, Holly’s spine stiffened at the sound of the robotic voice which abruptly replaced the alarm:
“Warning. Warning. Lander separation will commence in T minus ten.”
Holly reached across the floor for an empty backpack.
The speaker system relayed three deafening beeps.
She hurriedly placed her plant inside and zipped it up.
“Nine.”
Three more beeps.
Before the count of eight, Holly tossed the bag over one shoulder and started running.
five
Holly sprinted towards the Tanners’ lander, imagining all the way just what they must have been thinking and feeling as a voice told them that their cabin-cum-lander was about to separate from the rest of the Karrier with no one inside to help them.
The distance was never going to be a problem, even through the dull all-over pain Holly felt as she ran.
At the count of six, Holly saw the door. At the count of five, it opened.
“Get back inside!” she screamed.
Jessica Tanner, fully clothed but with a huge white towel covering her long blonde hair, stepped out before closing the door and waving her arms as if trying to warn Holly off. “Wait, we need—”
“This is not a drill,” Holly yelled forcefully from an ever-decreasing distance, as though the frantic expression on the girl’s face didn’t make clear that she already knew as much.
Solely focused on getting her safely inside the lander, Holly didn’t hear a word of the girl’s desperate reply.
The door at Jessica Tanner’s back, though firm, did not function as an external barrier, but rather served only to divide the cabin from the Karrier’s corridor and to give privacy to those inside. The end of the countdown — now at three — would not see this door lock. What the end of the countdown would herald was the descent of the lander’s impenetrable air-seal, in precisely the spot where Jessica was standing.
There would be no slow action-movie descent, allowing Holly to slide under the closing seal at the last millisecond. Instead, the seal would snap down in an instant. She would either make it or she wouldn’t.
None of this would have been a problem for Holly, now just a few paces away, had Jessica not taken a sideways step away from the door.
“Get back!” Holly begged.
“I need to get more syringes,” the girl replied, her English accent easily discernible now that her words were more audible at close range. “For his medicine!”
With no time for any distractions, Holly lunged at Jessica, grabbed hold of her practically weightless frame, pivoted towards the door and narrowly managed to direct their combined weight into it firmly enough to ensure that they broke through and fell inside the lander.
Made it.
After three more shrill beeps and the final second of the countdown, the thick metallic air-seal snapped into place.
Holly immediately jumped to her feet and looked out of the nearest window.
And there it was: impossibly close, from what seemed more like altitude than distance, she saw the rocky reddish-brown terrain of what the scale suggested could only be a planet.
Her mind battled her good eye, trying to make sense of the impossibility of what it was seeing. Holly knew roughly where the Karrier was relative to Earth and Venus, and everyone knew that there was nothing like this in between.
Dry land covered the surface for as far as her eye could see, but the limited visible curvature suggested that this area was only a small section of whatever celestial body she was looking down upon. The ubiquitous dry land at least made almost certain that the resilient lander would touch down without any catastrophic difficulties, meaning that Holly and the Tanners should theoretically survive until their resources were depleted.
Holly suddenly had the thought to use her wristband to check Dante’s position and make sure he had made it to Rusev’s lander. Though there would have been nothing she could have done otherwise — or perhaps because of that — Holly breathed a sigh of immense relief when four dots appeared on the rudimentary map, all safely inside the other lander and all flashing green to show that their wearers’ vital signs were good.
As Holly’s still-racing heartbeat settled to a level where she could no longer feel it in her eardrums, she became aware again of Jessica and Norman Tanner. Norman stood quietly by another window, a hand covering his mouth in anxious bewilderment, but Jessica was gesticulating wildly at Holly.
“Please unlock it,” the girl pleaded.
“There’s nothing on the other side,” Holly said, not knowing how else to explain it. “It’s an air-seal.”
“But his extra syringes are in the hold. We only had enough in here for the rest of the journey and he’s not suppos—”
“Can’t he re-use them?” Holly interrupted, talking to Jessica but turning again towards Norman, who wa
s still tuned out of the conversation as he glanced down at the impossible world below.
“He’s not supposed to keep using the same ones!”
“Hello?” Holly called, trying to snap the man out of his trance. Given how far away his focus seemed to be, she doubted he had ordered Jessica to attempt to gather extra syringes and hoped that the girl’s impression of their necessity was overblown. “Hello?! I’m talking to you. What kind of medicine do you take?”
The man’s head slowly turned towards Holly. He stared dumbly at her for several seconds, briefly opened his mouth like a fish trying to breathe air, then looked back outside.
“Not him,” Jessica said.
Holly’s gaze then followed Jessica’s to the far corner of the lander. When it stopped, her heartbeat intensified to all-new levels and her stomach knotted. Though there was no physical jolt to knock her off her feet, Holly felt this impact in her gut far more strongly than any of the previous three.
Because right there in the corner of the lander, peeking timidly over the top of a tightly-held white blanket, she saw the frightened eyes of a tiny child.
six
“There’s only supposed to be two of you,” Holly said, eventually managing to tear her gaze from the terrified boy in the corner and look back at his teenage sister, who seemed to be the only Tanner currently capable of speaking.
The girl lost her cool. “Why the hell would you do that? Do you even know what you’ve done?”
“Saved your life,” Holly replied. “We made it inside by one second! If I’d stopped to ask what you needed or to help you get it, neither of us would be standing here.”
“Did I ask you to save me?”
Holly sighed. She could have used some help from Norman as she tried to rationalise with his daughter, but he still stood impotently by the window. Clearly not built for crisis, Holly thought. What she wouldn’t have given to have Dante by her side…
“Stop it,” a weak voice called from the corner of the lander. “Stop arguing.”
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 3
