“We should get on with the atmospheric tests,” Viola suggested. “Do you still want us at the windows?”
Holly said yes and stepped in front of the lander’s control panel once again. Viola and Robert soon confirmed that the ‘circles’ on the ‘legs’ at their respective sides had opened to expose the lander’s recessed instruments to the external atmosphere.
From there it was a waiting game for several minutes until the array of digital readings first appeared and then stabilised. Across several rows of readings detailing everything from air composition and gravity to wind speed and radiation, Holly saw nothing but green text and green numbers.
If the numbers were to be believed, the oxygen level outside was actually better than it was in the lander. Such numbers were good. Almost too good.
In the face of these universally Earth-like readings, Holly could only think of two realistic possibilities. The first possibility was that something in the system was broken, causing it to display ideal rather than actual data. The second brought Holly’s focus too close to the harrowing memories of what happened during an ill-fated psychological test in which she and several others were expertly tricked into thinking their vessel had crashed in an inhospitable landscape when really they’d been dropped in a controlled environment to be monitored like lab rats by Roger Morrison and his demented cronies.
“Green means good,” Viola said, looking at the readings over Holly’s shoulder. “Right?”
Holly measured her words. “If these readings are correct, we won’t even need our suits.”
“For what?” Robert butted in. “You can’t seriously be suggesting that we leave the lander?”
“It’s not a suggestion,” Holly replied firmly. “This isn’t a debate.”
“But Goran will be looking for us. And your other colleague. Dante, was it?”
Robert’s incidental choice of word — was, rather than is — carried more weight than he realised.
But Holly, knowing that spreading grief and hopelessness among the Harringtons would make her job of keeping them alive even harder than it already was, stuck with her decision to keep quiet about the red dots on her wristband which told her that the other lander’s four passengers hadn’t made it.
“We’ll walk in a straight line and mark the ground as we go,” she said. “If they are looking, that increases their chances of finding us. And if we can find the Karrier, there might be supplies we can salvage… maybe even the radio.”
Robert’s tense expression spoke for him.
“I’m going outside to do some tests first,” Holly announced. “If my suit’s readings match up with the lander’s, we’ll know they’re right. I expected the temperature and solar radiation levels to be far too high and for the air to be unbreathable, but that’s not what the initial readings suggest. That’s why I’m going to go outsi—”
“No,” Robert interrupted.
“What?”
“No! You can’t leave us in here. What if something happens to you? We’d be left with no chance of surviv—”
Holly shushed him sharply, annoyed less by his concerns than his decision to voice them so audibly in front of the children.
Bo in particular looked far more frightened than he had moments earlier.
“Will you help me get my suit on?” Holly asked him, trying to settle his mind by including him in the process.
The boy’s expression lifted immediately.
“Do you need me to do anything?” Viola asked, looking and sounding younger now than ever before. Holly had even more difficulty placing Viola’s age than Bo’s, thanks largely to the huge difference between how she looked today without the makeup and how she’d looked on the few previous occasions when their eyes had fleetingly met. If pushed, she would have guessed 16.
“Not right now,” Holly said, “but I will.”
Having explained the procedure for safely exiting and reentering the lander, which required no assistance from anyone else, Holly stood before the Harringtons in an EVA suit and instructed them to stay beside the control panel and the nearby windows.
She held her hand out for Bo to high-five then walked across the lander towards the inner air lock. She stopped at the threshold and spoke for the first time since putting her helmet on:
“Can you hear me?”
Bo and Viola smiled, surprised by the volume and clarity of the words which rang from unseen speakers above them.
“Good,” Holly said, taking their smiles as a yes. “Wish me luck…”
nine
Holly stepped through the door into the lander’s air lock and descended the ladder. The door above then sealed itself shut, cutting her off from Robert and the children.
She now stood in front of the lander’s outer hatch, beyond which lay the desolate landscape of a planet which quite simply should not have been there.
As the hatch began to open, Holly braced herself for gusting winds. None came.
Score one for the readings being accurate, she thought.
In the silence of her suit, Holly felt her heartbeat quicken and her breathing deepen; but this time, these involuntary responses were borne of excitement rather than fear.
Whatever this place was, Holly only now realised the magnitude of what was about to happen: in mere seconds, she would become the first person to ever set foot on it.
A faint but stubborn hope remained that Dante and the others had only appeared as red-for-dead dots on her wristband due to an innocuous system fault, and she would have happily given up the honour of setting foot on the planet first if it meant that one of them already had.
“I’m about to touch down,” she said, suddenly remembering that the Harringtons would be anxiously awaiting updates from their safe position inside the lander. “I’ll be in front of the window soon.”
Stepping forward to the shorter ladder which would take her to the rocky ground below, Holly got her first real view of the surrounding landscape.
If the scene before her had been a photograph, she would have had no trouble believing that it had been taken somewhere on either Earth or Mars.
The sky was a blue better described as faint than light, as though its saturation had been dialled down. Though Holly didn’t look directly at it for obvious reasons, the same seemed to be true of the sun.
There were no clouds.
No birds.
No plants.
On the ground, the rocky terrain continued all the way to the horizon, flat but for a single mound in the distance. The mound’s height and distance from the lander were difficult to judge, but Holly was glad of the potential opportunity it presented to gain a much better vantage point from which she would hopefully spot either the other lander or the fallen Karrier itself.
Facing inwards, she descended the short ladder and paused on its final rung.
“One small step for me…”
Dust scattered under Holly’s feet as she touched down on the virgin planet’s reassuringly firm surface.
Though her initial steps were laboured, she did not jump to any assumptions that this was due to a discrepancy between the data gathered by the lander’s instruments and the actual environmental gravity; after all, she had grown rather accustomed to the Karrier’s artificial gravity over so many cargo missions within the last six months.
Readings on the HUD inside her helmet quickly confirmed that the lander had been correct about the air composition, the temperature, and a handful of other important data points, all of which were within hospitable limits. Some veered towards Earthly extremes — primarily the low humidity — but Holly had been in deserts before.
As had been the case inside the lander, the HUD readings told Holly that the oxygen concentration in the air outside was better than it was inside the carefully controlled environment of her suit.
Holly knew that the suits’ life-support systems couldn’t be counted on to make it to the top of the mound and back, and she knew that Robert would never allow the children
outside at all unless he knew it was safe. With these two thoughts in mind, she took a dozen or so heavy steps until she faced the window where the Harringtons were standing. From there, she spoke to Robert directly:
“All the readings are fine. I’m going to remove my helmet to show that the air is breathable.”
Robert waved his hands to warn her off what he considered a reckless idea. Viola’s expression gave little away. Bo beamed an excited smile and held two thumbs up.
Holly completed the several steps necessary to remove her helmet. Before lifting it off fully, but after exposing herself to the external atmosphere, she took a deep breath. Only one word could describe the taste of the air: dry.
That such a mundane word was on her mind — rather than something like “acidic” or “metallic” — calmed Holly even further.
The Harringtons didn’t yet know that Holly had breathed the planet’s air. Had they been Grav and Dante instead of three worried civilians, she would have lifted the helmet and proceeded to clutch her throat in mock suffocation. But they weren’t, so she didn’t.
She calmly removed the helmet and held it under her right arm, cutting the dashing figure of a headless ghost.
“See?”
The Harringtons couldn’t hear without the aid of the helmet’s microphone to pick up Holly’s speech, but they knew what she’d said.
As Bo disappeared from view, Robert wore a sterner expression than Holly deemed appropriate given the welcome and surprising development that the planet’s air was breathable.
“Where’s Bo?” she shouted up to Viola, over-enunciating to ensure her lips were easy to read.
The girl glanced backwards and laughed before mouthing a reply: “Packing his stuff.”
ten
Upon Holly’s return to the lander, Robert’s body language made clear that he still had serious reservations about the plan to venture outside.
“We can’t just sit in here and hope someone comes,” she said, alone with the knowledge of how unlikely it was that anyone would.
“But why do we all have to search? It strikes me as a colossal waste of energy. We could stay here while you go looking.”
“Not an option,” Holly said.
“Why?”
“Let’s say it takes an hour to reach that mound. And let’s say when we reach the top, we spot Rusev’s lander or the Karrier a further two hours away. If we all go to the mound now, that whole journey would take three hours.”
Robert sighed slightly, seeing what she was getting at.
She continued anyway: “But if I go alone, I would have to come back to get the three of you, and then we would all have to walk the whole way. It’s three hours versus six. I’ll keep an eye on the sun to make sure we don’t get caught out in the dark, but I don’t want to be out there any longer than we have to.”
“She’s right, Dad,” Bo chimed in, still stuffing as much as he could into an already bulging backpack.
Holly leaned in closer to Robert. “Is it him?”
Robert shook his head to dismiss the thought. “He’s perfectly ambulant. That’s not the issue.”
“So what is?”
“Water; exposure; sunset; fauna… how many do you need?”
These were sensible enough concerns, so Holly addressed them one by one. Appropriate clothing, an emergency canvas shelter and paying attention to the sky would sufficiently reduce the potential problems of exposure and sunset, she said, while the presence of aggressive fauna was a remote but admitted possibility. Holly took care to speak very quietly as she impressed upon Robert that his family would be in hopeless trouble if she went alone and fell victim to such fauna while they watched from the lander, meaning that their presence at her side posed little extra risk.
The issue of water — Robert’s primary concern — troubled Holly least of all. As she explained, the lander functioned as an emergency habitat and had extremely efficient water-reclamation abilities. She also stressed the obvious benefit of being surrounded by a compositionally Earth-like atmosphere.
“What about access to water while we’re out there?” Robert asked.
“We won’t be out for long. And trust me: I’ll bring more than we need.”
Robert swallowed hard. “Okay.”
“Three rules,” Holly boomed in an upbeat tone, clapping her hands together to capture everyone’s attention. “One: the Karrier was carrying some extremely volatile cargo, including virus samples for vaccine development, so you can’t just run up to it as soon as it comes into sight. Two: watch your footing at all times. Three: Do not… touch… anything.”
“Anything else?” Bo asked like an attentive student.
“Yeah. If anyone wants to use the bathroom, now would be the time.”
While the Harringtons changed into the kind of warm-weather clothes Holly recommended, she checked on the condition of the potted plant she had rescued from the doomed Karrier seconds before it and the lander parted ways.
She didn’t know exactly what kind of plant it was — an edible herb, most likely — and she had never bothered to ask anyone. Her attachment to the plant, such as it was, came from the daily waterings she’d given it during the six-month period in which she’d covered hundreds of millions of miles with no other consistent company. Grav had been present onboard for as long as Holly, of course, but his preference for quiet privacy meant that they’d often gone several days without even seeing each other.
And though the plant’s absolute dependence on Holly’s attentive care bred her initial attachment to it, she had since come to see it as a lot more than something she had to water every night. For in this time of such uncertainty and difficulty, Holly came to view the plant — as crazy as she knew this would sound to anyone else — as something of an inspiration. The plant didn’t care that it was confined to a tiny pot or exposed to only the utility room’s artificial light; in defiance of its surroundings — even more restrictive than Holly’s own — all it wanted to do was keep growing. All it wanted to do was live.
Glad to see that the plant had suffered no real damage, she carefully picked up scattered pieces of soil from the inside of her backpack and placed them all on the area around the plant’s roots and patted it down tightly. This exceptionally hardy Grow-Lo soil, another innovation engineered by Rusev’s firm many years earlier, could pass for the real thing to most untrained eyes. Holly was by now used to its slightly spongey feel, but this was certainly less passable as real than its appearance.
“We’re ready,” Robert announced from the other side of the lander.
Holly gently placed the plant in the large backpack which was already near its capacity thanks to the all-important water containers she had filled via the lander’s cooler moments earlier. She then rose to her feet, typed a security code to open the door to the lander’s air lock and ushered the Harringtons through it.
Each family member carried their own limited provisions and chosen belongings. As the group’s self-appointed water carrier Holly bore by far the greatest weight, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle.
“Whatever this place is,” Bo began, his voice overflowing with excitement, “we’re going to be the first people to walk on it. Think about it: a whole planet to ourselves!”
Holly and Viola chuckled slightly at the boy’s positivity. Already, Holly could tell that whatever medical condition Bo was battling hadn’t stripped him of his spirit; since moments after their touchdown, his eyes had been wide with wonder and his speech brimming with excitement and superlatives.
“And while we are walking,” Holly said to him, “I want you to mark the dusty ground with your heel. That way we’d be able to follow the path back to the lander even if it got dark quickly and our flashlights could only see a little way ahead. It also means that anyone else who might find the lander while we’re out would know which way we’ve gone.”
There was certainly a degree of practical utility in this suggestion, but Holly’s prime motivation was giving
Bo something to do. She encouraged him to take the lead in descending the long ladder to the outer hatch.
“Can I be first to go outside, too?” he pleaded.
“Hmmmm…” Holly said, pretending to think about it.
“Please?”
After struggling her way down the ladder with a tall backpack full of water, Holly initiated the opening of the outer hatch. While it opened, she turned to Viola. “What do you think, should we let him go first?”
Bo looked up at them like a dog waiting for a treat.
“I guess,” Viola said, ruffling her brother’s shaggy hair.
“Yesss!”
Robert’s eyebrows remained furrowed, his gaze focusing solely on the mound in the distance as the hatch opened and Bo scampered to the short ladder.
The dry-tasting air hit Holly’s lips again. No one else seemed to notice; she knew that they would be feeling the same things she had less than an hour earlier, when the surprising normality of the atmosphere had sunk in after her first few tentative sips of air. It was one thing to know from the readings that the air was breathable and the temperature relatively comfortable, but it was something else to feel it.
“Wait at the bottom,” Holly called to Bo. “Don’t even think about moving.”
Viola went next, followed by Robert.
Holly then entered a numerical code on the lander’s security lock and loudly shared it with the Harringtons once more, for use “in the extremely unlikely event” that anything happened to her and they needed to get back inside.
“Where the hell are we?” Viola asked, slowly taking in a panorama of the inexplicable alien world.
“Language,” Robert snapped.
“Sorry,” the girl said, before turning back to Holly. “So yeah… where are we?”
Holly tilted her head towards the imposing mound. “On the way to find out. The view from that mound will tell us something, whatever that something might be.”
“I’ll lead,” Bo said.
He set off at a good walking pace. Holly and Viola followed as a pair some twenty paces behind him, with Robert bringing up the rear.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 5
