As Bo asked more questions about in situ production and Rusev’s plans for future asteroid-mining missions, Robert’s questions about the map on the table reignited Dante and Grav’s temporarily paused dispute.
This time, Holly quickly put an end to it. “We’re splitting up,” she said. “End of story.”
“At least agree that we won’t walk for more than two hours in any one direction,” Dante said, speaking directly to Holly.
“But we know the Karrier is no closer than that,” she replied, growing impatient with his obstructive concerns. “Look at the map! We’re in the middle — this lander is the middle — and that right there is the mound where we met Grav. That was a two-hour walk. Do you see the Karrier anywhere on this map? Do you see the Karrier anywhere inside a two-hour radius of this lander?”
Dante looked at the floor and sighed. “I’m just saying: if two groups walk for three hours in opposite directions, we’re six hours apart. If something happens…”
Holly wanted to scream at him that something already had happened; that they were stuck on a planet that shouldn’t exist, with no real food and no hope of ever leaving unless they were prepared to walk for as long as it took to find the Karrier. But with Viola and Bo now waiting for her reply, along with everyone else, she bit her tongue and answered diplomatically: “The decision’s been made, Dante. If you don’t want to join the search, no one is forcing you.”
“I do want to search, I just don’t want to split up. But if that’s the way it’s going, I’m definitely going with you.”
“And I’m going with my children,” Robert interjected.
“Me and Rusev,” Grav suggested. “So that makes two twos and a three. Any objections?”
After a few seconds, Viola surprised everyone by speaking up: “I don’t want to go anywhere without Holly or Grav.”
Holly did her best to mask a sigh; not at Viola’s understandable desire for qualified protection, but rather because it — combined with Robert’s equally understandable insistence upon staying with his children — meant that there were only going to be two search parties.
“We’re wasting daylight here,” Holly said, refocusing. “Is everyone ready to go?”
Rusev handed Holly a well-stocked backpack. Holly endured harrowing flashbacks of her perilous minutes underwater as she put it on, this time neglecting to make use of every buckle. Once Grav and Dante also had their supplies on their backs, the two groups bode farewell first to Yury and then each other.
Holly had all the faith in the world that Rusev and Grav were smart enough to take care of themselves and each other, so offered no advice beyond “good luck.”
twenty-five
Within thirty minutes of setting off, Holly and her group couldn’t see a large rock in any direction; while the landscape was still overwhelmingly dominated by a familiar shade of reddish brown, the ground was flat and relatively soft, as though it had received some fairly recent rainfall.
Tufts of grass or something like it, yellowed by the sun, soon surrounded Holly’s feet as the reddish element of the colour palette shifted more towards green. Presented with a photograph of this new landscape, she could have readily believed it to be somewhere in North Africa. In the distance, off to the side, the ground was blanketed by grass and dotted with unusual trees and shrubs.
“There are no animals,” Bo said. “Right? This is like one of those half-documentary-half-movie things I saw… you know, when they look at what Earth would be like without certain animals or without people or animals at all? Maybe this is that. Maybe we’re in a different dimension or something… an alternate reality where there are no animals so the plants got really weird.”
“Spaceman’s drone got a picture of Earth,” Holly said, repeating the old man’s earlier answer to Dante in an effort to quell the grandest elements of Bo’s imagination. “We’re in a different place, that’s all; somewhere between Venus and Earth. Same dimension, same reality.”
Dante seemed less excited than the Harringtons by the presence of so much plant life, which made sense given that his initial search for Holly’s lander had already led him past “weird looking trees” and grasslike shoots while theirs had been a desolate trek across a lifeless canyon.
Holly used her wristband’s built-in camera to take photographs of every plant she encountered and also took physical samples of some of the most intriguing, being very careful not to make direct contact with any. This would at least ensure she got something out of the trek, even if — as was looking increasingly likely — the Karrier would not be found in this direction.
In the face of severe doubts, Holly tried to stay upbeat; for all she knew, Grav and Rusev had already found the landing site and were talking to the Venus station over the perfectly intact radio right now.
Up ahead, a long row of dark green hills dominated the horizon and didn’t look too far away. But with nothing interrupting the picturesque vista in any other direction, Holly couldn’t pretend to be unconcerned by the absence of the Karrier.
The incline of the lowest hill looked gentle enough to climb with ease but the summit looked high enough to give an excellent view of what lay beyond; like the mound on the first day, she knew the view from the top would at worst confirm her suspicion and score out this area as the Karrier’s potential landing site.
When Holly shared her plan to climb one of the hills and call it a day if they didn’t see the Karrier, Dante didn’t like the sound of it.
“I don’t think it’s safe to go that far,” he said.
“Feel free to turn back now,” Robert replied, taking the words out of Holly’s mouth and surprising her with his firmness. “But we’re going. We found Grav by climbing a mound that was almost as high as these hills, so who knows what we’ll see on the other side.”
“It’s not even that far,” Bo chimed in.
Holly didn’t know when Dante had become so risk averse and what part of ‘we have to find the Karrier if we want to stay alive’ he didn’t grasp. She made a mental note to talk to him about this when they got back to the lander and the children weren’t listening.
As the base of the hills grew nearer, the plant life grew ever stranger. There were quite likely dozens of places on Earth where Holly would be awestruck by the alienness of the local flora, but Robert, who spoke with a confidence suggesting he truly knew about such things, insisted that the plants on the ground were like nothing he had ever come across.
There were countless shrubs and an abundance of bulbous trees with no visible leaves, but Robert’s attention was dominated by the array of fungi-like organisms which clung to some of the trees. Up close, the oddest of these looked more like jellyfish than the mushrooms and toadstools Holly usually thought of when she heard the word fungus. Robert insisted that their structure — with some of the “tentacles” branching horizontally away from the tree and then somehow supporting upwards growth in an apparent search for light — made no kind of sense in his mind. He advised Holly not to touch the organism she was nearest, even through her gloves. She heeded the warning; whatever the hell it was, it looked like something that belonged in a surrealist painting.
Holly chuckled instinctively when she got near enough to the hills to notice that the steepest and rockiest of the row, which also looked to be the highest, had a cave-like opening on its face.
“Too risky,” Dante said. By this point, his conservatism surprised no one.
The others continued forward, carefully but decisively, in an unspoken understanding that they had to look inside.
“It could be a tunnel,” Viola mused. “It might get us to the other side without having to climb.”
“I thought the point of climbing was to get a good view from the top?” Dante said, replying to Viola but looking at Holly.
“It’s both,” Holly said. “We’ll look — carefully — and then we’ll climb. It’s probably going to be another pool of water that’s collected after dripping through the cracks.”
/> In anticipation of a jet black cave, Holly asked Viola to lift the flashlight from her backpack. But as the group crossed the threshold, with Holly leading and Robert and Bo maintaining a safe distance, the darkness never materialised.
There was no pool of water and no evident cracks overhead. In the distance, it looked like there was a faint sign of light up ahead. This was confirmed very quickly as the end of the tunnel became visible.
“Called it,” Viola said, hurrying ahead until Holly called her back. They proceeded together, far ahead of the rest.
“The ground’s getting dusty,” Holly said.
Viola slowed down and took hold of the flashlight. “That’s not dust. I think it’s sand.”
A desert, Holly thought. Just what we wanted to find on the other side.
With the end of the tunnel in plain sight, Holly saw a huge jagged rock-face up ahead. She couldn’t yet see the ground outside. Continuing forward, she then gasped audibly.
“What?” Viola asked. She momentarily looked up at Holly, whose slight height advantage had allowed her to see the ground first.
And that was why Holly had gasped: there was no ground.
All around the base of the towering rock, which she now realised was just one of several, Holly saw nothing but shimmering water. The sight was spectacular; almost tropical. She hurried forward.
“Is that water?” Viola excitedly yelled as it came into her view a few steps later.
The tunnel’s path then began to slowly descend, changing their view and revealing the final and even greater surprise. At the end of the tunnel, before the brochure-ready crystal-clear blue and green water began, there was a broad stretch of fine white sand.
The panorama that met Holly when she took her final step out of the tunnel would have rendered her speechless on Earth. But here — wherever here really was — she was positively dumbfounded.
Waves rolled gently up the sand to Holly’s left and crashed more aggressively into the island-like pillars of rock straight ahead. She turned around to look up at the hills and was amazed to see that they stopped almost vertically, more like walls than the gentle slopes of the other side. The air felt drier and much warmer than it had minutes earlier, but she was aware this may have been down to the stuffiness of the tunnel’s interior clouding her perception.
Viola arrived at Holly’s side a few seconds later and interrupted these thoughts. Evidently overwhelmed by the sight and equal parts confused and excited, the girl said the only thing she could think of:
“Holly… why is there a beach?”
twenty-six
Robert, Bo and Dante caught up within a minute or so and reacted with precisely the kind of open-mouthed wonder Holly had expected.
“Woah!” Bo exclaimed, his eyes taking in the horseshoe shaped beach and crystal-clear water. “You don’t get this on the Venus station!”
Viola still looked just as excited. “I know, right? Why couldn’t our lander have touched down here instead of in that stupid canyon?” She then turned to Holly and asked if she could take off her shoes to walk on the sand.
Holly deferred to Robert, who replied with an unfocused nod.
The three adults stood pensively as the children stepped onto the sand at the tunnel’s opening and raced to the broadest section of the beach.
“Can we go in the water?” Bo yelled when they got there. Though his shouting voice lacked strength, it easily rose above the gentle sound of the water lapping on the sand.
“Absolutely not,” Robert boomed without hesitation, his focus apparently sharp enough to know a bad idea when he heard one.
As Holly watched Bo and Viola playing in the sand, she was glad that they remained able to enjoy the simple things; positives were few and far between in the group’s grave situation, so it was important to take them whenever they could be found.
“This place…” Robert went on, talking quietly to Holly and Dante, “… it has trees, grass, oxygen, water, space, manageable temperatures. If we make it to the station and tell people what we found, we could solve so many of Earth’s problems. This place could be a—”
“Why are those rocks so tall and narrow?” Dante interrupted abruptly, pointing to the pillars with a fully outstretched arm.
“Erosion,” Holly said, inflecting her answer somewhat in a clear sign that she didn’t really know. She turned back to Robert. “But that’s a good point about what this planet could offer if—”
“But why were those giant pillars left behind?” Dante pushed, once again proving too intrigued by that to care about the impoliteness of cutting someone off mid-sentence. “And how were they so tall in the first place?”
“I’m not a geologist, Dante,” Holly said. She saw Viola and Bo talking about something between themselves, and a few seconds later Viola called over to ask what the adults thought was on the other side of the ocean.
Dante stepped down onto the sand and replied as he walked towards the children: “It might not be an ocean. It could be a lake.”
“The tide looks too strong for a lake,” Robert replied, automatically following Dante. Holly joined them, too.
Dante, who had been conservative to the point of obstruction over the last few hours, then surprised everyone by crouching to the ground, dipping his finger in the shallow water, and tasting it. “Fresh,” he said. “No salt, no ocean.”
“On Earth,” Robert replied. “This planet doesn’t exactly fit the rest of our understandings.”
Dante shrugged. “You’re the one who just said the tide is too strong for a lake. That’s based on what you know about Earth.”
“I thought tides were something to do with the moon, anyway,” Viola said, joining the conversation as the adults reached the spot where she was now lying outstretched on the soft sand. “But I haven’t seen a moon. Has anyone else?”
“I think we all have more questions than answers,” Holly said. An unexpected tide and absent moon were certainly issues worthy of further consideration, but the broader wonder of having unceremoniously discovered an entire uncharted planet left little mental energy for immediately breaking down these latest discoveries. “The best we can do right now is take samples of everything and bring them back to the lander for analysis. We have good equipment to test the samples, and Yury and Rusev will have some ideas about the bigger picture.”
After taking several photographs of her surroundings from various angles using her wristband’s built-in camera, Holly removed her backpack and placed it on the sand; her strap-marked shoulders thanked her as she did so. She then took out some small expandable containers and handed one to each person. She asked Bo to collect dry sand from near the tunnel and Viola to collect some damp sand from near the slowly receding water. Dante, who had already touched the water, was given the instruction to collect a small amount while Robert was tasked with gathering as many different-looking rock fragments as he could find near the tunnel’s opening.
“Holly, there’s stuff that looks like seaweed,” Viola called out. “I dunno if I should touch it.”
Holly lifted out another container and walked over to take a look. It did look like seaweed.
“What do you think?” Viola asked her.
“We’ll take it. There might be a lot of it, and it might be edible.”
Dante, sealed water sample in hand, approached from a few metres away. “Even if it is, it can’t be more nutritious than Rusev’s packs of powder. And when we find the Karrier, we’ll have more packs than we’ll ever need. It’s not like we could shape and flavour this stuff like the machine does to the algae.”
“I never thought I’d look forward to eating algae,” Viola laughed, “but we really need to find the Karrier and fix that machine.” She pointed to the slimy seaweed in Holly’s container. “Because I’d rather drink the powder stuff every day for the rest of my life than eat that.”
“It’s worth taking a sample,” Holly insisted. She glared at Dante, silently urging him to stop being so pointlessl
y argumentative. In an effort to spare Viola any worrying thoughts, she chose not to remind them of Rusev’s comment the previous day: that the group’s priority in the event of failing to find the Karrier intact would become finding a local food source.
Holly handed the container to Dante and asked him to put it in his largely empty backpack with the other samples, since hers was already heavy enough thanks to the drinking water she’d been carrying since leaving the lander.
“Are we leaving?” Viola asked.
“Yeah,” Holly said. “Once we get back to the lander, depending on what Grav and Rusev have found, we’ll either head out in another direction or follow them to the Karrier. There’s plenty of daylight left.”
“Can we stay for five more minutes?” Bo begged as he handed his sample of dry sand to Dante. “Pleeease?”
“She’s the boss,” Dante said, tilting his head towards Holly.
“Five minutes,” she agreed; Bo was the group’s slowest walker, and Holly knew that keeping him upbeat would likely save more than five minutes over the course of the return trip to the lander.
The walk back past the bulbous trees and jellyfish-like fungi certainly felt quicker than the outward leg, with Bo thinking out loud about all the things he could do on the beach between the time they would call the Venus station for help and the time the rescue crew would arrive.
The boy’s chirpiness and positivity, though not quite contagious, did help to temper Holly’s crushing disappointment over not finding the Karrier. Yet another direction could now be crossed off Yury’s map of search routes, and the group’s lack of vehicles meant that they couldn’t travel any further than a half-day’s walk in any direction.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 13
