“How’s it going with the connections?” Holly interrupted, walking forward quickly enough to avoid rousing any suspicion in Yury. She shared a few seconds of eye contact with Viola, who stayed quiet.
“Talk of the devil,” Yury said, as straightforward as ever. “We’re pretty much done here. The atmospheric regulator is largely redundant, but it’s up and running. This pipe is for power and this big one is for the water reclaimer. How about the divisions? Finished?”
“Grav’s working on it,” Holly said. “Dante wants to stay in the lander, so we need one less bed frame than we thought.”
“Are you staying in the extension with us?” Viola asked, butting in.
“Of course.”
“Good,” the girl said. A slight but natural smile made clear that she meant it.
twenty-three
Once the extension was complete, the whole group gathered in the lander for an evening meal of nutrition powder stirred in warm water. The children struggled with the flavour and, in Viola’s words, “grittiness” of the mixture.
The girl struggled with the off-putting appearance of the compressed cube of powder as much as she struggled with the taste and consistency of its end product; both with and without a few coffee grains to alter the flavour, it was the least palatable thing she had ever ingested.
“OMG,” she said after her first sip, as though she had forgotten how awful the same thing tasted earlier in the day. She then filled her cheeks with air and clenched a fist against her mouth to hide a burp or worse. “That is grim.”
Conversation revolved around the extension itself, as though a tacit agreement had been made to avoid mentioning how crucial the following day’s search for the Karrier would be. The extension had been divided into two main sections: one for the Harringtons, and one for Holly and Grav. There were dorm-like divisions within those sections, but they were less definite.
In jest, Robert made a passing comment about how the group was like a little global union of its own, with the three members of his English family in one section, the Bulgarian Rusev in the lander along with the Russian Yury and Greek-born Dante, and finally the American Holly and Serbian Grav in the other section of the extension.
As some chuckled in mild amusement, Yury cleared his throat. “International,” he said, very flatly. “Not global.”
“Same thing,” Robert replied.
Yury shifted in his seat. The look in his eyes was one Holly hadn’t seen in a while. “Robert, these things could hardly be more different. There are no nations in the Global Union. There’s no inter in a Global Union. There’s no interchange of ideas, there’s no interest in what works for different people in different places. There are plenty of totalitarian edicts and one-size-fits-all policies that don’t fit anyone, but there is no inter.”
“I didn’t mean anything political,” Robert said, sufficiently flustered by the intensity of Yury’s reply that his face had turned a deep shade of red.
“Good,” Yury said. “Because if you want to talk politics, talk to someone else. If you had told me or Holly twenty years ago that we would end up working with Ekaterina and her private for-profit space program, we would have laughed you out of the building. My politics are not Holly’s so I can’t claim to speak for her on everything, but trust me: neither of us would have entertained the notion of jumping in bed with the dynastic wealth of a family like the Rusevs. But here we are, Robert, because none of this has anything to do with politics. Here we are, Robert, because centralised power without representation only ever works out well for one group, and that’s the group that wields it. So forgive an old man who believes in a better world for labouring this point, but it’s one that has to be made: the distinction between an all-powerful global sovereign and an international society is not semantic and it is not political. This distinction is the distinction between tyranny and liberty. And this distinction, Robert… this I will talk about all day.”
After a few seconds of silence, Grav knocked back his second glass of nutrition powder and rose from his space on the floor. “Time to check the extension’s readings,” he announced.
This was done at the lander’s control panel, which also displayed data relating to the external atmosphere. Holly and Dante joined Grav to see the latest readings.
Although the outdoor temperature had dropped during the last hour and reached what Dante insisted was the previous night’s low, it remained significantly higher than the kind of figures Holly had seen in her lander. Such a difference in temperature — like that in humidity — was surprising given the relatively short distance between the two landers, but Holly was glad of it.
The most important readings were those concerning the extension, and the news on this front was good: the extension’s internal temperature and air composition had remained stable, perfectly in check with the lander despite the changes outside.
Holly and Grav retreated to the extension with the Harringtons a few minutes later, after saying their goodbyes to the others for the night and arranging to set out in search of the Karrier at first light.
While Robert was giving Bo his nightly injection and Grav was enjoying a modicum of privacy, Holly sat on the end of Viola’s sturdier-than-it-looked bed as the girl searched through a bag of clothes and took out everything that might have been loose enough to comfortably fit Holly’s more muscular frame.
After Holly thanked her for the options she presented, Viola moved the conversation in an unexpected direction. “So how old is Dante, anyway?”
“For you?” Holly said, making no effort to sound anything but stern. “Too old.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Good.”
Viola then lifted a shirt from the pile she’d given to Holly. “I don’t think you should wear this one,” she said.
“Why?”
Viola fought a smile as she delivered her punchline: “Green doesn’t suit you.”
Holly didn’t see the funny side. “Oh, this isn’t about me. When we get to the station, you can do whatever you want with whoever you want. You’re not a little kid; I get that. But we’re not on the station and until we are, it’s my job to take care of you. It’s also Dante’s job, so I’ll be clear here: if you did like him, you wouldn’t want to get him in trouble.”
“From who… my dad?” Viola asked, almost laughing.
“Well, yeah. Plus, you know, me and Grav. I don’t think Grav would be too happy to hear about Dante breaking Rule One with a 17-year-old he’s supposed to be protecting. He doesn’t like him as it is.”
“Whatever. I asked you for a number, not a lecture.”
Holly ignored Viola’s tone; her expression confirmed that the message had been received, and there was no sense in getting into a fight. She then heard Bo laughing loudly from the other side of the main division, which told her he was with Grav.
“Try to get some sleep,” she said to Viola. “And thanks for the clothes.”
“’Night,” Viola replied, half-grunting the word in a teenage tone Holly remembered from her own youth as the kind she used when she wanted someone to know she was still annoyed at them, but not enough for the silent treatment.
“’Night,” Holly said.
On the other side of the uncannily lightweight door between the extension’s two main sections, Holly found Robert and Bo trying to convince Grav of something.
“You think I am stupid?” Grav was saying, light-hearted in his exasperation.
“It’s true, it’s true!” Bo insisted.
Grav saw Holly come in. “Listen to this,” he said.
“I have an invisible ball,” Bo said, on cue.
“A what?”
“An invisible toy ball! It’s in the Karrier with our luggage. It’s the size of… I don’t know, an orange, maybe… and there’s a remote control that makes it invisible. Ask my dad.”
Holly was lost, wrongly assuming there was more to this discussion than the part she’d wandered in on. She looked at Robe
rt in anticipation of a subtle signal to let her know it was a joke at Grav’s expense.
“He really does,” Robert confirmed, smiling slightly but far less excited by the subject than Bo.
“Seeeee!” the boy taunted.
“I will believe it when I see it,” Grav said. He turned to Holly. “You are not buying this, are you?”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Holly parroted. “No pun intended.”
Robert eventually pried Bo away from his friendly argument with Grav and settled down for the night. Holly checked barely twenty minutes later, slightly concerned by the total silence, and found all three of the Harringtons fast asleep between their thin bed frames and even thinner blankets.
Before retiring for the night, Grav’s final structural checks brought him into Holly’s room. He knocked three times and entered once invited. He looked down at her hardy potted plant as it sat safely on the floor, right-way-up on solid ground for the first time all day.
“Not bad, Hollywood. All you need now is a video feed of the station and this place would feel like home,” he said, telling the closest thing to a joke that she’d ever heard from him.
She smiled. “I try.”
Grav’s expression and tone then sombered before his next comment: “I know why you did not go inside the station during any of our stopovers. But now… now that we are here… I wish you had seen it. Just once, Hollywood, I wish you had seen the view.”
“I will,” Holly said, forcing out more positivity than she felt internally. “I will.”
Grav completed his checks and left Holly alone for the night, offering a slight nod as he departed.
Holly’s early attempts at sleep were thwarted by Grav’s snoring, which made its way through the doorway between his half of the division and Holly’s. She tossed and turned on her bed for a while, despite it being much more comfortable than she’d feared, but exhaustion led to sleep before too long.
An unknowable amount of time later — between one and two hours, if she had to guess — a quiet but high-pitched alarm began to sound from her wristband’s speaker.
Holly sat bolt upright and tapped the screen to reveal the problem: Dante’s vitals had flatlined.
More in diligence than panic, she jumped out of bed to go and check on him. After the false alarm of the red-for-dead dots her wristband had displayed when she landed the previous day, she expected it to be nothing more than some kind of communication or connection problem. Despite these rationalisations, the number on the wristband’s screen which relayed her own heart rate leapt significantly as she hurried out towards the lander.
Her heart rate began to stabilise as soon as the cool night air hit her skin and she saw Dante standing a few metres from the door.
“Hell of a view,” he said, “huh?”
With no moon and no surface-level light, the stars Holly saw when she looked up at the night sky were the brightest she had ever seen. The incredible view was of a kind she’d only seen in the heavily manipulated composite images which had come to be accepted as photography on Earth; the kind of view every human eye was impressed by but few were ever fortunate enough to behold for real. “Sure is,” was all she could say.
“Well, I did always say I would take you somewhere nice.”
Dante’s attempt at humour, or charm, or whatever it was, took Holly’s focus away from the heavens and brought it back to the present moment. “There’s something wrong with your wristband,” she said, remembering why she was there.
“I took it off.”
“Why? You know I always have my alarm activated.”
Dante’s face was harder to read than normal, until it slowly broke into a red-handed boyish grin. “Maybe I wanted to see you.”
“Go to bed,” Holly said. The words were sharp and firm. “Put your wristband back on and leave it on. Is that clear?”
“Did I wake you? Sorry if I did… I didn’t think you’d be asleep yet.”
Holly sighed. “Dante, please just go inside and put your wristband on. This is the last thing I need tonight.”
“At least give me a few minutes to watch the stars,” he relented, pointing down to his heavy walking boots. “It’s such a nice night, it’s not even cold enough to really need these things.”
“Fine, but no longer than that. The next time someone has to come out from the extension, it’ll be Grav. And he is asleep, so you probably don’t want to be the reason I have to wake him up.”
“Grav? Message received,” Dante laughed, finding humour in what Holly meant as a real warning. Threat would have been too strong a word, but she had no time for his nonsense right now and knew that the G-word would spook him into behaving like an adult.
She walked away without saying anything else.
“You need to chill out,” Dante called after her. His tone was tinged with regret rather than anger. “We’re going to make it to the station, Holly. It’s just a matter of time.”
She stopped at the door, faced him, and replied as convincingly as she could: “I know.”
Day Three
twenty-four
“Hollywood, time to get up,” Grav said, booming the first word loudly enough that she was awake in time to hear the rest.
Grav woke Robert next, taking care to be no louder than necessary so that Robert could decide whether to let his children sleep a while longer. While Robert opted against that course of action and instead woke them up, Holly and Grav made their way into the lander to see the others. Unsurprisingly, Rusev and Yury were both wide awake and ready for the day. Equally unsurprisingly, Dante wasn’t.
Yury, who immediately confirmed to Holly and Grav that this morning’s sunrise had come precisely 24 hours after the last, was already sitting at the table in front of a digital map he’d put together. The map was based around the aerial view provided by the only one of his drones which had successfully returned from their maiden voyage. Though this drone had since failed to return from its second excursion, Yury was grateful that it had at least given him something.
Holly and Grav were able to identify the direction they had approached from the previous day, while Dante had already shown Yury the path of his initial exploration in search of Holly and the Harringtons. Yury reasoned that these data points would enable them to determine sensible routes to take in search of the Karrier. They both agreed.
Holly liked seeing Grav interacting with Yury in the respectful way he was. Both were alpha males, with Yury something of a wise old lion and Grav the undisputedly stronger upstart. But rather than force Yury to the side or shun him as he might have, Grav continued to treat him as a king.
“Are you coming out today?” Grav asked, clearly hoping that Yury would say yes. “We could pair.”
“I would only slow you down,” Yury said. His tone was decisive; Grav didn’t push for a change of heart.
Dante was soon roused by their voices and wasted no time in joining the discussion over optimal routes. Wearing his trusty yellow Rusentra polo shirt — as ever — he vehemently insisted that the group would be safer sticking together than splitting up like Holly and Grav were both suggesting. As his argument with Grav threatened to get heated, with Holly and the others opting to let it run its course rather than interfere, the arrival of the Harringtons diffused the tension.
“Any ideas where we are yet?” Robert asked, wasting no time.
“I’ve been thinking about alternate dimensions,” Dante answered, apparently unaware that Robert’s question had been directed squarely at Yury.
Yury shook his head at Dante with mild annoyance. “For one thing, one of our drones picked up a view of Earth. For another… alternate dimensions? Don’t talk nonsense.”
“So how come this planet can go undiscovered?” Bo asked in his usual curious way. “The more I think about it, the more I don’t understand how something so close to Earth and to the station hasn’t been noticed by all the smart people on both.”
“There are things we don’t unde
rstand,” Yury said, very matter-of-factly but with a deliberate gentleness in his tone. “It seems that this planet’s appearance and external gravitational effects are being cloaked, if you will, by some kind of field that’s beyond our current understanding. By our understanding I mean humanity’s understanding rather than our group’s understanding, but since we’re the only people who know this place exists I suppose those are effectively the same thing. One thing I know about whatever kind of cloak is up there is this: we got through it on the way in, and we’re going to get through it on the way out.”
The upbeat end to Yury’s answer relieved Holly, who for several seconds had been worried about where his thought process was going. She could handle pessimism and knew that “realism” might be a more accurate term in the current situation, but she didn’t want the children’s hopes to fade.
Relatively satisfied with Yury’s answer, Bo then took advantage of his first real time with Rusev by asking her every question he had about the Venus station over a tall glass of enlivening, if not refreshing, nutrition powder.
Rusev was patient with the boy and fuelled his curiosity with descriptions of the several sub-orbital laboratories which floated in the Venusian atmosphere. She admitted that the surface explorations by heat-resistant rovers had been conducted partly in the hope of finding valuable and previously unreachable resources, which led to further questions from Bo about what kind of resources she hoped to find and how long she would keep looking.
Rusev was equally candid about the terminology she used to describe the station itself, which Bo knew was really “three big spaceships joined together” rather than a purpose-built station. Though Rusev insisted that the three craft in question had been built for the purpose of docking together in Venus’s orbit, she admitted there was a psychological element behind encouraging others to call it a “space station” rather than a “mobile habitat” and tried to explain this to Bo by saying there were different connotations to having a house that can move and living in a vehicle.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 12
