Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  twenty-nine

  Unanimously, the trio decided to follow the line rather than cross over and continue past it. For one thing, they expected it to lead somewhere. And for another, while the side they were on was definitely safe, they couldn’t be sure of the effects of being on the other side for any prolonged period of time.

  Standing on the safe side of the line and facing straight ahead, Dante suggested that they turn right and follow it that way.

  “That’s the general direction of the beach,” Holly said. As she spoke, she was crouching to the ground and taking photographs of the visible straight line.

  “Yeah,” Viola chimed in. “We pretty much went that way this morning.”

  “And I went the other way on the first day,” Dante retorted, “when I went out looking for your lander.”

  Holly gestured impatiently with her hands. “Exactly! You went that way, alone, while you were focusing only on finding the lander. Five of us went towards the beach this morning, and we were paying attention to everything. There’s obviously more chance that you missed something than that we all did.”

  “I just think that we should—”

  “Dante, we’re going this way. If you want to go that way, fine. To be honest, I would rather you did. You can look after yourself, and we would cover more ground in the same time.”

  He shook his head. “I know you must think I keep being obstructive, but you keep being cavalier. We have to stick together. Imagine if Spaceman had been on his own when… you know. I know we need to find the Karrier, Holly, but we need to stay alive first.”

  “So you’re coming with us, then?” she asked, now struggling to mask her agitation.

  Dante looked to the ground and nodded curtly, with an expression suggesting that he had something on his lips but knew better than to say it.

  With the atmosphere somewhat strained, they set off.

  “So what’s the deal with these wristbands, anyway?” Viola asked no one in particular. “What’s the range like?”

  “Huge,” Dante said. “These are good pieces of tech.”

  “And they work like a map? Like, we can tell where everyone else is?”

  “We can tell how far away they are,” he said. “But the wristbands are designed for use in closed environments, like the Karrier or the Venus station. Those environments have static points so the layout can be mapped out, and everyone’s location is overlaid on the map. You can basically think of it as triangulating the signal. But out here, we have nothing like that. See: right now we can see how far away Spaceman is but we don’t know where. But if we were to take a few steps in one direction and he got further away, we’d know we were going the wrong way. Assuming he’s not moving around, obviously. So it’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing.”

  Holly was glad to see and hear Dante acting like himself now that the subject of something semi-technical had come up. She thought about the point he’d made about her being too cavalier rather than him being too cautious, and on reflection she could see both sides. She and Dante used to make a good team; as long as they could tone down their arguments into discussions, she knew they could do so again.

  “And we’ve already seen how the wristbands track your vital signs,” she added, augmenting Dante’s points about their value. “Without that, I wouldn’t have known Spaceman was in trouble until whenever I might have noticed that everyone else had gone to check on him.”

  “I guess. So what about voice comms?” Viola asked.

  “Not out here,” Dante said.

  “How come one thing works and not the other? Why can we have distances but no comms?”

  “Totally different protocol,” he said. “It would be the same on Earth as it is here; the wristbands’ voice comms only work in the closed environments they’re designed for, like the Karrier or the station.”

  After twenty minutes of walking along what they’d come to think of as the safe side of the still discernible line, Holly was beginning to wonder how much longer they should continue.

  Another fifteen minutes later, her decision to keep going was vindicated.

  “Is that one of the drones?” Viola asked.

  Within a few more steps, the shape of the object up ahead came into focus.

  “I think so,” Holly said. “We might be able to recover the footage and see everything it flew over. Right, Dante?”

  “Not if it’s fried,” he said. “And it looks like it fell out of the sky when it hit this line, so my money’s on fried.”

  Holly picked up the fallen drone as soon as she reached it. “We might as well take out the storage strip and bring it back to Spaceman. It might be okay.”

  Agreeing that it was worth a try, Dante opened the side panel and removed the storage strip. He put it safely in his pocket.

  “Why not take the whole thing?” Viola asked.

  “I am,” Dante said. “It’s just that if it has been fried, it’s better to let the contacts settle for a while. You know, discharge.”

  The girl shrugged. “You’re the expert.”

  “So they say. But for the record, I’ll be surprised if we can recover anything from this.”

  “There is a chance, though,” Holly strived to emphasise. “So we’ll walk a little further along the line, because whatever is causing this line is also killing the drones. The more drones we find, the more complete the map we could put together if we can recover anything.”

  Dante had no complaints and Viola was keen, so they continued forward. But rather than another drone, their next discovery was even more enticing: a second line.

  This line, even more visible than the first thanks to a greater concentration of grass on the far side and its continued absence on the safe side, diverged from the other at a 90-degree angle. The first line continued into the distance.

  Dante did what the others were thinking about and stretched his left arm across the line. Predictably but no less disconcertingly, his wristband’s screen flashed.

  “We’re staying on this side of the new line and following it for a while,” Holly unilaterally decided.

  “That’ll take us to almost exactly where I looked on the first day,” Dante said.

  “It’s also the general direction of the lander,” Holly said. “For an hour or so, we’ll be getting closer to home if we follow this line. After that, if we haven’t found anything, it won’t take long to get back.”

  “Fine,” he said, unenthused.

  With their pace quickened by a focused sense of purpose, it took the trio just over thirty minutes to reach the next line. It was perpendicular to the one they were following and parallel to the first, which strengthened Holly’s as yet unshared theory that Viola’s keen eye had discovered some kind of zonal grid.

  Viola then gasped, capturing both Dante’s and Holly’s attention. “Clouds,” she said.

  Sure enough, Holly looked up and saw them. The presence of clouds was no surprise given that Rusev and Grav had already seen snowfall, but there was something about them no one had expected: the clouds overhead, like the grass underfoot, stopped dead on the line.

  The incredible visual effect was heightened by the fact that the clouds respected both perpendicular lines.

  “It’s like they’re in an invisible cage,” Viola thought out loud. “A box or something.”

  “That just can’t be possible,” Holly said, struggling to believe her own eyes and responding to the sight rather than Viola’s specific comments.

  Viola then looked back down and into Holly’s eyes. “They’re weather zones, right? Climate zones? That must be how there’s so much difference in the environment over distances that aren’t big enough for there to be those kinds of differences. Right?”

  “I don’t know,” Dante said, before Holly had a chance to reply.

  Viola ignored him and kept talking to Holly. “That must be how we can be in a desert canyon, then on a plain, then at a beach… and how Rusev and Grav can leave the lander and end up in
a snowstorm after walking for less than two hours. I mean, it has to be something to do with these lines.”

  Holly could only nod dumbly; Viola had verbalised it at least as well as she could have.

  “But the wristbands work on both sides,” Dante said. “There’s interference at the lines, but the wristbands are fine once you’ve crossed. So these lines aren’t marking discrete zones.”

  “All I know is what we learned in school,” Viola countered, “and that was that nature doesn’t do straight lines or right angles. That’s supposed to be how you can tell when forests and fields have been cultivated and stuff like that: if you see right angles, it’s probably not natural. So if these lines aren’t natural…”

  “Wait,” Dante exclaimed, raising his hand to point across the line. “Look at the ground over there. It looks like it could be a cliff-edge. A sheer drop.”

  “Think we should check it out?” Viola asked.

  “Definitely,” he replied. They both looked to Holly.

  She hesitated. “I don’t know about crossing this line.”

  “We’ve probably been crossing lines all day,” Viola said. “We just didn’t know it. If we were on the other side of this line, we’d think that was the safe side and we’d be worrying about crossing to this side. That does look like a cliff, and who knows what could be down there?”

  Viola was so much more forthright when Robert wasn’t around, she almost seemed like a different person. But again, Holly saw the sense in her argument.

  “We can check it out and then come right back,” Dante suggested, chipping away at Holly’s reserve. “Even you have to say that’s a fair compromise. And it is two against one.”

  “Okay,” Holly said. “But not because it’s two against one — this isn’t a democracy — and not because I want to compromise. We’ll check it out because what Viola said makes sense.” She said this not out of pettiness but rather to give credit where it was due and to gently remind Dante that it was not his place to disregard her decisions.

  The grass underfoot and cloud cover overhead grew denser in tandem as the trio walked the few hundred metres to the cliff-edge Dante had correctly identified.

  When Holly reached the edge and looked down, she had never been more thankful for Dante’s recalcitrance or Viola’s persuasiveness.

  Without them, she wouldn’t have crossed the line.

  Without them, she wouldn’t have seen what was lying at the bottom of the grass-covered valley below, badly damaged but structurally intact.

  Without them, she wouldn’t have found the Karrier.

  thirty

  “It’s in one piece!” Viola yelled excitedly. “That means the radio might be okay!”

  “We’ll see,” Dante said. His tone, though certainly less enthusiastic than Viola’s, sounded fairly confident to Holly’s ears.

  Holly didn’t say anything at first. She had quietly hoped that the Karrier might have avoided further damage after its initial collision with whatever had been cloaking the planet, since the planet’s uncannily Earth-like atmosphere would have meant that a fully functioning Karrier — fuel permitting — might have been capable of taking off and achieving escape velocity as it would on Earth.

  One downward glance put this hope to rest; the Karrier was going nowhere.

  Not only did the damage rule out the faint hope of a take off, it also left Holly doubtful there would even be any power to test the radio. And even with power, the possibility of a test depended on another sizeable assumption: that the equipment in the control room hadn’t also been physically damaged beyond repair.

  The longer Holly looked at the Karrier, the more its condition didn’t make sense.

  “It shouldn’t have landed like that, though, right?” Viola said, talking to Dante as Holly continued to stare down at the grassy valley below.

  “It doesn’t look like it landed at all,” Dante said. “It looks like it crashed.”

  This snapped Holly out of her focus. She turned to Dante with a thoughtful look on her face. “Yeah… but if it had fallen dead out of the sky, it would be in pieces. I don’t understand how it’s halfway between fine and destroyed. It obviously had power during the descent or it would have crashed with way too much force to survive as well as it did. But the fail-safe landing gear is hardwired to deploy when it’s descending. I could understand if the gear hadn’t managed to protect the Karrier fully, but it looks like it wasn’t even deployed. I don’t get it.”

  Dante shrugged. “You heard what Grav said right before the first impact: the systems in the control room were going crazy. And that was before the impact messed everything up even worse. We saw the state of the utility room, and the control room is probably the same.”

  “Are there any ground vehicles inside?” Viola asked, abruptly changing the subject as soon as the new thought entered her mind. “And if there are, do you think they might be okay?”

  Dante shrugged. “I doubt there are any.”

  “Same,” Holly said. “We didn’t expect to land and there isn’t much need for any at the station, so there’s almost certainly none. I haven’t seen all of the cargo bays, though, so you never know. It would sure make things easier if there were.”

  “But we need to remember that there are dangerous virus samples,” Dante said in an unusually firm tone. “They’re in cold storage — well, it’ll only still be cold if there’s power — and even if the vials were somehow broken by either of the impacts, they’re sealed inside a vault which would be the last thing to fail. But… there’s always a chance. So I think, when we get down there, you two should stay at a safe distance until I’ve been inside to make sure the vault is intact. When I know it’s safe, I’ll tell you right away and we can gather everything we want to take back to the lander.”

  “What do you mean ‘when we get down there’?” Holly said. “Surely we have to tell Rusev and the others? If someone else had found the Karrier, we’d want them to tell us before they touched it.”

  Dante glanced at his wristband. “Holly, we’re two hours from the lander. If we don’t go in now, we won’t be back today. And whatever condition everything is in, it’s not going to get better.”

  “What’s the advantage of going back first?” Viola said to Holly, genuinely asking.

  “EVA suits,” Holly said. “If the secure vault is damaged and Dante goes in without a suit, he’ll be exposed.”

  “Look at the Karrier,” he replied, holding his arm out. “The vault is designed to stay closed. It’s hardier than the exterior, so if the exterior survived direct contact with the ground and whatever we hit up there, it’s pretty safe to say that the vault survived, too.”

  He was right, Holly quietly conceded, but she would have had less difficulty agreeing out loud had his sudden shift from hyper-conservative to hyper-keen not caught her off guard. She sighed. “Okay. You can go inside as long as you understand the consequences.”

  “What consequences?” Dante asked.

  Holly held his eyes. He knew a lot more about the structure of the vault than she did, so she tested his confidence in its integrity by plainly stating the stakes: “If the vault is damaged, you’ll be quarantined on the Karrier until rescue arrives. And when it does, you’ll be left here.”

  Dante grinned; even before his words about the “zero percent chance” of the vault being damaged, Holly knew he was sure.

  “So how long do you think it will take us to get down there?” Viola asked, rejoining the conversation after listening with interest to the vault discussion.

  Holly scanned the contours of the cliff and spotted an easy but winding route down to the valley. She pointed to it. “Maybe five minutes to get round there and another ten to get down,” she said.

  Dante nodded in agreement with the estimates.

  “What about the lines?” Viola asked, directing the question at Holly. “You don’t mind crossing them?”

  “We’d have to cross them eventually. As long as you want to go?�
�

  “Oh, totally!” the girl insisted.

  The trio set off at a quick pace and crossed two intersecting visible lines on their way to the easiest path down to the valley. All said, they were standing within a stone’s throw of the Karrier after just twenty minutes.

  “This is close enough,” Dante said. “Stay here until I come back out and tell you it’s safe. If I don’t…”

  Holly nodded to tell Dante he didn’t need to finish the sentence. They both knew that if he didn’t come back, it would be for a reason that would make it extremely foolish for anyone else to go inside to help him without an EVA suit. Both displayed confidence it wouldn’t come to that, but Holly didn’t feel quite as relaxed about it as Dante did.

  “I’ll be fine,” he insisted as she hugged him tight. Viola laughed as he rolled his eyes over Holly’s shoulder.

  Dante then walked towards the Karrier. The first good sign came when the door opened at his request. “Power’s working,” he yelled back to them.

  “Be safe,” Holly yelled back.

  As her words echoed in the valley, Dante disappeared inside.

  thirty-one

  After just over two minutes, Holly already felt like Dante was taking too long. All he was supposed to do was check the vault and report back that it was still safely intact, and that shouldn’t have taken much more than a minute.

  Every passing second heightened Holly’s concern that perhaps the vault wasn’t intact, until Dante suddenly appeared at the door and waved casually to call her and Viola forward as if there had never been any doubt.

  Viola ran ahead but stopped at the door in response to Holly’s order.

  “The three of us are going to stick together when we go inside,” Holly said. She turned to Dante. “What were you doing, anyway? Did you take a look in the control room?”

  He shook his head. “I was just making absolutely sure the vault was intact. It is, and since there’s still power I was able to look at the screen on the door to see inside through the internal camera. All the vials are in place and in one piece. So even if the vault had been unsealed, we’d still have been fine. As it is, we’re double safe.”