Holly and Grav had coexisted on the Karrier for six months with no hint of either hostility or cordiality. Each did their respective job, and that was it. Now, as Grav drew near and his emotionless face came into view, Holly wondered what news lay beyond his typically stoic expression.
Grav reached the base of the mound at the same time as the group, leading Bo to promptly leap into his arms. Grav held the boy in one arm and gave Holly a prolonged thumbs-up with his other hand.
After Viola ran in to hug Grav, Robert stepped forward to shake his hand. “Am I glad to see you,” he said, chuckling for the first time.
“Likewise,” Grav said, looking mainly at Holly. “All of you.”
Holly said nothing.
Grav exaggerated the effort required to free himself from the children’s warm welcome. “I am going to catch up with Holly for a few minutes. Does anyone want some food from my bag? It is real food, from my room.”
Robert exhibited as much keenness as his children.
“Okay. Give us a minute and then I will find it,” Grav said. He then walked over to Holly and stopped within inches of her face to speak quietly: “Is your lander intact, secure, airtight, and with functioning power?”
Holly replied with a question of her own: “Where’s Dante?”
Grav sighed and crouched to the ground. He lifted his bag from his shoulders. “The snacks are just coming, kids.”
“Answer my question,” Holly demanded, growing concerned.
Grav allowed a few seconds to pass. “What I can tell you for sure is that Rusev and Yury are safely in the lander.”
“That’s not what I asked. Where’s Dante? Where did he go?”
Grav looked down at his wristband. “There is still no data from his band. Mine, Rusev’s and Spaceman’s are now working, but not his or yours.”
Holly pulled her sleeve out of the way to reactivate the wristband she had earlier deactivated in an effort to conserve its power having long ago given up on finding anyone else alive during this excursion. Sure enough, as soon it as it came to life she saw Grav’s dot right beside her own while Rusev’s and Yury’s were together in a distant location. There was no sign of Dante.
“When did these start working?” she asked. “And where the hell is Dante?”
“Dante made a mistake,” Grav said, casually proceeding to shuffle through the contents of his large backpack in search of the snacks he’d promised the children.
Taken aback by Grav’s tone, Holly considered her next words carefully.
But before she said anything, the movement of Grav’s hand inside the backpack revealed something that raised her concern level from moderate to severe.
Grav immediately covered the yellow and red object and looked up, as though checking whether Holly had seen it.
The look in her eyes told him she had.
He rose to his feet. “That is not what it looks like.”
Holly said nothing and took two steps back. Because from where she was standing, it looked a lot like Dante’s shirt stained with fresh blood.
fourteen
Holly could more than handle herself in most confrontations. But face to face with Grav, who was at least as well trained and likely twice as physically powerful, she knew the outcome would be a matter of physics.
Grav threw a small bag of assorted snacks towards the children then put his hand on Holly’s shoulder and led her away. When he was confident the family were out of earshot, he stopped and faced her.
She kept as straight a face as she could.
“Listen,” Grav said, almost grunting the word out. “If I wanted to kill him, do you really think I would need to draw blood?”
Since everything Grav ever said tended to drip with this kind of bravado, Holly didn’t know what to read into the words. “So why the hell do you have his shirt?” she asked, mustering up the courage. “And why the hell is it covered in blood?”
Grav quickly glanced at the Harringtons to make sure they couldn’t see, then lifted his skin-tight black T-shirt to reveal a blood-stained bandage in the centre of his stomach. He lifted one side of the bandage without wincing. “Some of these rocks are pretty damn sharp. Did you trip, too? Your eye looks rough.”
“That happened on the Karrier,” Holly said, instinctively rubbing the badly swollen eye socket she’d forgotten all about.
“Lucky for you it was that eye.”
Holly nodded a few times then stopped abruptly. “Stop changing the subject. Why do you have Dante’s shirt?”
“It’s mine. Check the size.”
“So why did you try to hide it?”
Grav laughed slightly. “You are really going to make me say it? You are really going to make me say that I did not want you to know I was injured? Truly, it is nothing: a scratch and no more.”
This subtle choice of word — injured, rather than hurt — summed Grav up. She quietly checked the size of the yellow shirt, though she already believed him. Ever since Rusev told them it wasn’t necessary, neither Holly nor Grav had once worn their Rusentra branded shirts during what was supposed to be their final journey to the Venus station. Dante, a stickler for propriety who also lacked their seniority, had continued to wear his as though it remained mandatory.
“Fine,” Grav shrugged. “But I want you to know that I trust you. You want to know why?”
Holly hadn’t expected Grav to say anything like this. “Why?” she asked automatically.
“Because Spaceman vouched for you. Rusev did, too, but she has blind spots. Spaceman does not make mistakes. Anyway… tell me about the area around your lander. What is the landscape like on the other side of this mound?”
“Like this,” Holly said. “Barren. What about yours? Are there plants or anything?”
“There is something like lichen all around. No trees, though. No animals, either.”
“Any sign of the Karrier?”
Grav shook his head. “But neither of us have seen any smoke, so the landing gear might have kicked in. I do not know. The console was dead — totally non-responsive — but there is a chance that the automatic landing sequence may still have functioned.”
“Is there any chance it could reach orbit?” Holly asked, fearing she already knew the answer.
“No. Even if everything is perfectly intact, we do not have the fuel. What the Karrier can give us are its supplies and its radio. The radio is where your boy could finally prove himself useful. Like I said, the control panel was dead. But if he can fix the radio…”
“So where is he?”
“I do not know,” Grav admitted. “We split up to find you. That was my decision, but I let him choose which way he wanted to go. He chose wrong; that was his mistake. But I gave a strict instruction to mark his path and turn back after four hours, maximum. He is alive. I do not know where he is alive, but I know that much.”
Satisfied with this, Holly moved on to the other big question: “What about the crash?”
“I know no more than you.”
“Of course you do! I was in the utility room and you were looking out of the window. Were we being pulled in before you saw this planet, or did it not start until the planet appeared?”
“The second one,” Grav said, exhibiting more patience than normal. “It was as though we hit something that engaged… something. After the first impact, the pull was inescapable. All readings flatlined; the radio cracked with static; the Karrier lost all control of itself.”
Holly leaned in close and lowered her voice even further. “Is there any way someone could have messed with the controls before we left Earth? To change the destination or something?”
“Not that I am aware of, and certainly no one could have done so en route. No one was inside the security room at any point.”
“Well…” Holly said, raising her eyebrows. “You were.”
Grav’s expression changed in an instant. “Listen, Hollywood: if you have something to say to me, say it. I have to get these kids somewhere safe �
�� with or without you — so I do not have time for your guessing games. Tell me what you think is going on here.”
In Grav’s eyes, Holly saw impatience rather than secrecy or any fear of being uncovered. She considered the unlikely but stubborn thought that wouldn’t leave her mind, and she knew that no one who knew something like that to be true would be able to keep a straight face when called out on it.
“Spit it out,” Grav said.
Partly to test his reaction and partly to get it out of her mind, Holly finally said it: “I think we might be on Earth.”
fifteen
“You think we might be on Earth?” Grav echoed, his face contorting.
Holly stayed quiet. Though Grav’s immediate reaction didn’t seem like the reaction of someone whose secret had just been called out, she wanted to give it a few more seconds to be sure.
“Wait…” he said. “Do you think we could have passed through a wormhole or some crazy sci-fi shit like that?”
That sealed it. “Nothing like that,” she said.
“No,” Grav said, shaking away the idea. “I know we cannot be on Earth; the horizon is much too close. What could possibly make you think that this place — this… thing — is Earth?”
Holly hesitated before forcing the words out: “It’s just… they’ve done this kind of thing before.”
“What kind of thing?”
“They pretended to send a group into space then forced an emergency landing.”
Grav moved in closer and lowered his voice. “What the fuck are you talking about? Who did that?”
“MXA,” Holly said, now talking in a hushed tone even though the Harringtons were still working through Grav’s bag of snacks at too great a distance to hear her words. “You know, Morrison Astronautics? It went wrong, so they covered it up. He covered it up.”
“If he covered it up, how do you know about it?”
“I was there. It was an experiment to see how the group dynamic would react to a hopeless situation and certain death. They called it a psychological fitness test. This was fifteen years ago, not long after I left the public program. Everything outside our craft was fake. Simulated.”
It was Grav’s turn to have doubts. “A story like that would get out,” he said. “Too many people would have to know.”
“No one had anything to gain from talking because no one who was involved came out of it well. People died.”
“So why did you not talk? With a truth like that, why keep quiet?”
Holly hesitated again, this time for far longer, before sharing the part of the story that still kept her up at night. “The two people that died… they didn’t kill themselves.”
A twisted smile crept across Grav’s face. “Well, well, well. I did not think you had it in you.”
“I don’t.”
“Do not worry, Princess. Your secret is safe with me.”
Holly bit her tongue. Rusev and Yury both knew the whole story, but there was no harm in letting Grav think he had something over her. How he handled this perceived power would tell her a lot about him.
“I am guessing you chose to tell me this because you think the same thing could happen again,” Grav said. “But this is different. We know we were really travelling. How many trips have the two of us made? More than I care to remember. A few hours ago we were travelling through the same space we have both travelled through all those times before, right until we hit something and this shit-hole of a planet appeared from nowhere and pulled us in. These are the things I know, Hollywood. All of them. If you know something I do not, now would be the time to share it.”
“That man behind you,” Holly said, looking over Grav’s shoulder. “His name’s not Norman Tanner. You let three people board the Karrier with two fake travel cards. But luckily for you, your incompetence paid off.”
“What are you talking about now?”
“They needed fake cards to reach the launch site because that man is Olivia Harrington’s husband. Those are her kids. The girl’s tough and the boy’s smart. I think he has some info that the station could use; info that could help to bring Morrison and the GU down.”
Grav immediately left Holly and walked directly to Robert. “Is it true?” he asked, making no effort to keep his words from the children. “They killed her because the things she was saying about the famine being deliberately engineered were true?”
“Every word,” Robert said.
Grav put his hands on his head and ran them backwards and forwards against his roughly stubbled scalp. “I thought I knew what that scumbag was capable of,” he said, more to himself than anyone else. “But this? The famine has killed more people than every war in history. And for what?”
No one had an answer.
“We need to make a move,” Holly announced. “We can talk on the way, but we have to go. How far to Rusev’s lander?”
“I trekked for over two hours to get here,” Grav said, “but I set off fast, so it would probably take us at least three to get back there as a group. Looking at where the sun is now, I would say that is too long. The best thing to do is go back to your lander for the night then head out again at first light. I know that makes tomorrow’s trek a lot further, but we really cannot take the risk of being caught in the dark.”
“I agree,” Holly said, deliberately using these explicit words in an effort to present unity. “And since we don’t know exactly how long the night is going to be, it’s important that everyone gets some sleep as soon as we get back so we’re all ready to head out as soon as the sun comes up. Everyone on board with that?”
“Makes sense,” Viola said.
“My feet hurt,” Bo groaned. It was a groan of pain rather than complaint.
Grav stepped beside him and crouched down. “Want to sit on my shoulders, kiddo?”
Bo didn’t need to be asked twice.
Robert took Bo’s small suitcase while Holly offered to carry the even smaller bag he’d been carrying in his other hand. She asked Robert to place this small bag inside her backpack, making use of the space created by the first empty water container which had now been folded flat. Robert noticed Holly’s potted plant and carefully lifted it out.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Grav turned to see what it was then turned back to Holly, looking confused. “Did you take that from the utility room?”
She nodded, soon relieved that Grav didn’t push for an explanation as to why. It wasn’t that she was at all embarrassed or worried about what he thought; she simply wouldn’t have known how to answer succinctly.
“I’ll take it,” Robert said. “Bo’s bag could crush it, and I have some space in mine.”
Holly thanked him as he securely refastened her backpack. The significant weight of the group’s remaining water supply caused the shoulder straps to dig painfully into her skin, but past experience had taught her that it would feel even worse if she took it off and put it back on.
“Be careful with that,” Viola said to Holly. “His medicine’s in there.”
“Safest place on the planet,” Holly promised. Given the number of straps securing the backpack to her body — around her waist as well as over her shoulders — this was hardly an exaggeration.
Everyone then firmly agreed with Robert’s suggestion that it made sense to walk around the mound rather than over it, seeing as there was no longer any need for the elevated vantage point provided by the summit. The distance around was hardly any further than the distance over, Robert said, with the obvious exertion-saving benefit of having no elevation to contend with.
When the group reached the side of the mound, which took no more than five minutes, something entirely unexpected became visible.
“Woah,” Viola said, spotting it first. “Is that… an entrance?”
Sure enough, there was a ground-level gap in the side of the rocky mound. Its shape was irregular and natural-looking.
“It looks like a cave,” Grav thought out loud. He lifted Bo from his shou
lders and placed him on the ground. “Wait here; I will check it out.”
He proceeded keenly towards the opening.
“Don’t go in,” Holly called.
Grav ignored her and ducked his head to cross the threshold. “There is light coming from the top,” he yelled. “Holy shit, there is water! I am on a ledge and this whole place is full of water! It is right below me!”
Everyone ran in to see.
A surprising amount of light filled the cave, illuminating the even more surprising amount of water. Grav stood on an overhanging tongue-like protrusion.
“Get back,” Viola called to him.
“Huh? Why?”
“The ground is cracking!”
Holly responded to Viola’s words before Grav did, dashing forward and successfully pulling him back before the far end of the ledge crumbled into the water from a height of at least ten metres.
“Thanks,” Grav said.
“Get your goddamn head screwed on,” Holly barked at him, too angry at his recklessness to think about tempering her words for the children’s benefit.
“I did not know that was going to happen,” Grav said.
Before Holly could tell Grav that such uncertainty of outcome was precisely why he shouldn’t take stupid risks, a huge chunk of ground under her own feet suddenly gave way. This was a far bigger section giving way far more quickly than during the previous break-off, and the danger was immediately apparent.
Holly desperately and instinctively extended her arms and dug her hands and nails into the new edge. Though her fingers ached under the incredible tension, those on her right hand had a firm-for-now grip by the time Grav carefully lowered himself to the ground.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 7
