Rusev’s expression immediately softened, appearing to skip shock and jump straight to gladness. She focused on Robert. “We tried to reach you. We tried extremely hard to reach you. I’m glad you’re here — more than you could ever know — but there was no need for the secrecy.”
“With respect,” Robert said, “I felt that there was.”
“Either way, you’re here now. Hurry on up; we have a lot to talk about.”
Holly walked through the inner door and into the main section of the lander. She saw Yury huddled over a mapping drone, wearing not only his reading glasses but also a pair of headphones. She didn’t quite know why, but it explained why he hadn’t reacted to her arrival.
She knocked three times on the table in front of him. As soon as he saw her standing there, he removed the headphones and glasses and rubbed his face, covering his eyes with his palms for several seconds. When he moved them away, Holly thought she saw signs of relieved tears that had been stopped in their tracks.
“Holly,” he said, and it was all he said.
She sat down next to him. “I know the passengers weren’t all rich people paying their own way.”
Yury nodded in understanding; he didn’t look like a man who’d been caught out, and he made no effort to defend or explain himself.
“But there’s something you don’t know about the last batch,” Holly said.
“What do you mean?”
Holly tilted her head towards the door, where Robert and Bo had so far emerged from the ladder. “There are three of them, not two, and they’re Olivia Harrington’s family.”
“Truly?”
“Truly. And they know things, Yury. The kind of things Morrison doesn’t want people to know.”
When she finished speaking, Holly heard Rusev talking to Grav. She caught the gist of it: Rusev understood that things had worked out well, but Grav’s double failure of being conned by fake travel cards and allowing a stowaway to board the Karrier was a very serious matter. Like Yury with Holly seconds earlier, Grav made no effort to defend himself.
Yury tapped Holly’s leg to regain her attention. “I found something,” he said, talking quietly enough to suggest he meant the words only for her but loudly enough to suggest they weren’t a full-blown secret. “Or, to be more accurate, one of my drones found something.”
“The lander?”
“No.”
Holly’s shoulders slumped involuntarily. How was that possible?
“Nothing so promising, I’m afraid,” Yury went on. “But what the drone found silences a doubt that has been stubbornly testing my mind since we landed and, given your past experiences, one which has probably been testing yours even more. The sky-facing camera on one of the drones picked this up. Why only one, I don’t know. But here we have it.” Yury spoke these words in the authoritative tone Holly remembered from her time spent training under him.
She followed his finger to a screen on the table.
“I do not yet know where we are…” Yury said.
A small dot lay in the centre of the screen, growing larger as Yury spread his fingers on the touchscreen to zoom in. Holly had seen a similar image countless times on the panel next to her bed on the Karrier, and though the dot remained very pale and barely blue, its identity was unmistakable.
“… But I know for sure where we are not.”
Part II
twenty
The sight of Earth, captured from the group’s current and still unknown location, severed the last faint remnants of doubt in Holly’s mind.
In one sense, the death of these doubts liberated her mind to focus on executing the plan at hand. In another, it reinforced just how precarious the group’s situation was.
Lost somewhere between Earth and the Venus station, her inner voice whispered. Stranded on a desert island planet that shouldn’t even exist…
The plan, such as it was, consisted of three parts. One: survive. Two: find the Karrier. Three: use or fix the radio.
There was no discussion of a part four should part three become a problem, and certainly no alternative to part two. The group’s full focus was on the Karrier.
Yury’s sole surviving mapping drone, which failed to record any noteworthy sounds, had at least provided one clue as to the Karrier’s location. Before setting off in its line of travel, the drone had ascended straight upwards to an altitude which proved sufficient to pick up the conspicuous mound Holly had climbed with the Harringtons. Because this bird’s eye view presented no sign of the Karrier, Yury naturally concluded that it had to be further away than the mound.
This meant that in the best case scenario, it would take at least two hours of fairly brisk walking to reach the Karrier. In more grounded and less optimistic terms, there was no telling how long it might take.
Much like their mysterious host planet itself, Yury and Holly had a better idea of where the Karrier wasn’t than where it was. They knew for sure that it wasn’t in the direction the surviving drone had flown, and likewise that it wasn’t within an easily reachable distance in the direction of Holly’s lander or the direction of Dante’s initial search.
After Holly and Yury had finished discussing the lamentable extent of their current understanding of where they were and how they’d ended up there, during which time Rusev had been doing her best to make the Harringtons feel at ease within the busy lander, Rusev herself stepped towards the table and asked for everyone’s full attention.
“They’re already looking for us,” she announced firmly. “Even if we assume that this… planet… is still unobservable from outside whatever kind of barrier we passed through, and even if we assume that the Karrier itself dropped off the map at that moment, everyone at the station still knows where we were in the instant before it happened. Even if they don’t know where we are, they know where we disappeared.”
Holly noticed that Rusev focused primarily on the Harringtons as she said this, clearly keen to take the edge off their fears and helplessness.
Grav cleared his throat in a very deliberate manner. Rusev gave him what he wanted by extending a hand and inviting him to speak. “With respect,” he said, the tone less deferential than the words, “if you were on the station and something like this happened, are you really telling me that you would risk the only remaining Karrier to look for the other… which had just disappeared without explanation? Once we call for help, they will come. But before then? Speculatively?”
The look Rusev shot at Grav mirrored the one he got from Holly; neither could understand why he would voice something like this in front of the children, however much sense it might have made.
Rusev considered her words and then spoke calmly: “In almost any set of circumstances, no. But if the lost Karrier contained the cargo that ours does, then yes. Regardless of who was on board — even if it wasn’t Holly; even if it wasn’t Yury — and regardless of whether there was the slightest chance that anyone had survived, the recovery of our Karrier would be absolutely essential. Without this cargo, the Venus station can’t survive.”
“What was on board?” Grav asked. “What exactly was I guarding this time?”
“Important things,” Rusev said. Her tone made it absolutely clear that she was leaving it there.
Dante interjected at this point to ask about the group’s resources. Holly was glad he did so; the situation in regards to resources wasn’t as immediately dire as the Harringtons may have thought.
Answering Dante but really talking to the Harringtons, Rusev explained that both landers remained fully functional in terms of power supply and water reclamation. She didn’t have to tell them why such redundancy was so welcome. She also assured Dante that there were detailed maintenance instructions on the landers’ computer systems and two stocks of replacement components for the core power and water systems, which would make any basic repairs very straightforward.
Rusev stressed that water would not be a problem. The other lander contained a large reserve of its own, and Hol
ly’s group had of course already discovered a huge pool of harmless and presumably filterable water within the mound’s hidden cave.
But Rusev was confident none of that would be required; between this lander’s extremely efficient reclamation system and its ability to generate water from the Earth-like atmosphere outside, which was markedly more humid than that where Holly’s lander had touched down, water would be the least of their concerns.
“Shelter is obviously not a problem,” Rusev went on, satisfied that her lengthy water comments had convinced everyone that they were safe on that front. “We have two landers, but to avoid being divided by the distance between them or suffocated by proximity in here, we can construct the HEM in a matter of hours.”
“HEM?” Robert asked.
“Habitat Extension Module.”
Though unfamiliar with the concept, Robert nodded in a blunt kind of understanding of what the individual words meant. “And what about food?”
Rusev hesitated slightly. “We have cubes of nutrition powder and almost nothing else. There’s a small amount of coffee if anyone truly can’t stomach the taste of the dissolved cubes on their own, but I don’t recommend that mix. We have a sufficient number of cubes for now, but our absolute priority has to be finding the Karrier. There are more cubes in there than we could ever need — quite literally — and I’m hopeful that the dining machine will be recoverable.”
Holly and Dante shared a wordless glance; unlike Rusev, they had seen her algae machine being ripped from the utility room’s wall. The force with which it hit the floor left them unsure as to whether it would be salvageable even if the Karrier had touched down gently.
“What if we don’t find the Karrier?” Viola asked, voicing what everyone was thinking.
“In that event,” Rusev said, “or in the event that we discover the Karrier has been destroyed by an explosive or otherwise catastrophic impact, it will become our sole priority to find a local food source.”
“How realistic do you think that is?” Viola pressed, sounding more worried than she realised.
Yury interjected with a one-word answer: “Quite.”
“We can’t eat rocks,” the girl said.
“No we can’t,” Yury agreed, smiling slightly. “But although Holly tells me there was nothing but rocks around your lander, there is lichen outside this one. The air is far more humid here. While your lander insulated you against a murderously cold night, the temperature here remained comfortably above freezing. By any kind of climatic scale, the landers are in extreme proximity. So given the differences between their surroundings, who knows what kind of plant life could be supported in other areas? Dante has already seen trees — or at least something like them — and given what we already know about the air and soil composition, I firmly believe it’s quite realistic to imagine that abundant and edible plant life exists somewhere on this planet.”
“But that’s a fallback,” Rusev stressed. “Our focus is the Karrier. The nutrition cubes, the radio, the cargo…”
Grav clapped his hands together without warning, startling everyone. “This extension is not going to build itself,” he said. “And the day is not getting any longer.”
“He’s right,” Yury said, rising to his feet with a strained expression as his troublesome left knee resisted every inch of the way. “I’ve done this before. It’s not difficult, but it’s not fast.”
“Can I help?” Bo asked, speaking his first words since entering the lander.
Yury smiled broadly. “You’re helping whether you like it or not, little man,” he said, patting Bo on the head when he reached him. “Many hands make light work.”
“I’ll stay,” Rusev said. She sat down across the table from Holly, in Yury’s seat. “Someone has to stay inside, to guard against any potential problems with using the entry code to get back in. I can unlock the hatch manually from in here.”
Holly remained in her chair. “And I’ll be with you soon,” she told the rest of the group. “We just need to talk to Robert about something for a few minutes. Grav, could you keep a close eye on Viola and Bo while they’re helping with the extension?”
Robert looked as surprised as anyone, but Holly focused solely on Grav. She hoped he would take her very public request for Robert to stay — something that would inevitably raise questions as to why — as sufficient evidence that she had very good reason to make it. His quiet nod suggested that he did.
“They’ll stay where I can see them,” Robert said in a firmer tone than normal.
Holly held Robert’s eyes. When he didn’t budge, she shifted to Viola.
“I want to help build the extension,” Viola said almost immediately.
“Me too,” Bo added. “You can watch us from the window.”
“It’s only five minutes,” Holly said.
Robert let out a relenting sigh. “Stay within arm’s reach of Grav. No exploring,” he said, focusing firmly on Bo, who he evidently deemed more likely to behave irresponsibly. He then turned to Grav. “Arm’s reach.”
“Arm’s reach,” Grav echoed.
The lander then quickly emptied save for Holly, Robert and Rusev. Robert stood over the seated women. “Okay,” he said impatiently. “What do you need to talk to me about?”
“Roger Morrison,” Holly said.
“I’ve told you all I know,” he replied.
“Right. And I’ve told you all I know.”
Robert held his hands out, palms up in mild exasperation. “So why are we in here?”
Still talking to Robert, Holly turned to Rusev and looked intensely into her eyes. “Because she knows a lot more.”
twenty-one
“I know you have a plan to expose Morrison,” Holly said, still holding Rusev’s eyes. “And I think Robert’s family can help us with that — help us a lot — but first we need to fill him in on everything we know. And, at the same time, you need to fill me in on everything I don’t.”
While Ekaterina Rusev was certainly no Roger Morrison, she was nevertheless an extraordinarily wealthy and significantly powerful person in her own right.
Rarely did anyone speak to Rusev in the kind of tone Holly had just used; Robert watched on, suitably uncomfortable.
Rusev, on the other hand, remained entirely unflustered. “Do you know how he first came to prominence?” she asked, aiming the question at Robert.
“Romotechnology,” the man replied. “If the backstory he spins is true, he was a young theoretical physicist of some promise until he abandoned his research post and disappeared for several years. The version I’ve heard is that he then returned to the university one day and told everyone he’d found the key to changing the world and expected to unlock the door within a decade. That must have been thirty years ago. And the rest, as we know, is history.”
Holly could have done without the reminder of how long had passed since her first exposure to Morrison, the Australian magnate who now sat atop the GU pyramid. That first exposure had come when she saw his joyless face on the cover of a magazine almost thirty years earlier, and to this day she still remembered the headline: “Meet the man from down under who’s about to turn the world upside down.”
Holly remembered the headline because she remembered the article, and she remembered the article because every word of Morrison’s bold predictions had long since been proven prophetic. Even at the time, Holly viewed Morrison’s description of his breakthrough as “the most disruptive innovation there will ever be” as an odd thing to say; more typically, an arrogant upstart might proclaim his innovation the most disruptive in history. But in a point that was illustrative of his general outlook, Roger Morrison had paid little attention to bettering the past and instead focused his attention on dominating the future.
The breakthrough that made Roger Morrison’s name and changed the world forever was a material one. More specifically: romotechnology.
Romotechnology was a catch-all term somewhat egotistically coined by its famed proponent, encapsu
lating everything from self-replicating romobots to the bottom-up construction of complex objects they made possible. Usually shortened to romotech, the field dealt with the manipulation of matter on a level that all but a tiny few people couldn’t even comprehend. As Rusev’s algae machine used basic building blocks to create a convincing imitation of a real meal, romotech’s fundamental dexterity enabled the formation or construction of almost anything.
Given some of the extraordinary applications that were shown off shortly after the word romotech was first spoken in public, many observers quietly believed that Morrison — or perhaps his hidden associates — had been furtively perfecting the technology for far longer than the official story suggested.
In any case, the romotech revolution was far more centralising than any before it; for unlike the agricultural, industrial, informational and robotic revolutions, one corporation — one man — owned everything that made romotech tick. Another key differentiation, directly related to the first, was that the romotech revolution was not one of easily adopted ideas like crop rotation or assembly lines but rather one built on a fiercely protected proprietary breakthrough with built-in safeguards against any and all attempts at reverse engineering.
What countless other brilliant minds had discussed and attempted for well over a century, Roger Morrison had actually achieved.
In the decades-old magazine article which remained etched in Holly’s mind, he had promised that his romotech would clean the world’s oceans and purify its air as well as enable innumerable industrial and military advancements. Over the next few years, the environmental applications were predictably the slowest to materialise.
“And I presume you know how the Global Union first came to be?” Rusev said, inflecting this into a question for Robert.
“As much as anyone else knows,” he shrugged. “I know the general circumstances that created the need for something like the GU. The original GUTA came into being just before Viola was born. A few weeks, maybe a month.”
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 10
