Holly stepped inside, asking Viola to stay behind her and telling Dante to follow in third position. They both obliged.
The floor of the corridor, automatically illuminated in their presence by the overhead lights, was irritatingly sticky. A faint and hard-to-place smell filled the air. Taking the sticky green floor as a clue, Holly correctly assumed it came from the algae water which had flowed out from the utility room’s dining machine after the initial impact.
Upon passing the utility room on the way to the radio-housing control room, Holly decided to look inside. It was exactly as she and Dante had left it; no better, no worse. The only difference was that the light, which had been flashing amber when Holly evacuated towards the Harringtons’ lander, was once again its more welcoming steady white.
“Is that the machine that turns algae into food?” Viola asked, pointing to the huge object which dominated the room’s floorspace.
Holly said yes, although all the machine really did was shape the algae into something resembling real food, with some eerily convincing colourings and flavourings added to complete the effect.
“So… can we fix it?” the girl continued.
Holly and Dante shared a look then both crouched down to assess the damage. They had both seen and felt the colossal machine being ripped from its wall-brace, but they noticed only now that it hadn’t fallen far enough to be disconnected from the Karrier’s power circuit.
“I think it depends on two things,” Dante said. “One: whether all the tanks leaked, or just a few of them. And two: whether being on its side for three days has messed with the internal balance, or whatever. Rusev will know. There’s no way the three of us could lift it, so we’ll have to wait until tomorrow when Grav and the others are here.”
“That thing has tanks inside it?” Viola asked.
“Yeah. This model has six independent tanks,” Dante replied, air quoting the word tanks to indicate that he was simplifying things for her ease of understanding. He then walked over to the far corner of the utility room and picked up a very large screwdriver which he used to remove the machine’s top panel — currently the front panel — with effortless ease. “Hmmm. I can only see three of the tanks from here, but two of them are fine. One is cracked and empty, so that’s where all the green water came from.”
“Do we need them all?” Viola asked.
Dante blew air from his lips. “Honestly… I don’t know much about the algae itself. All I know is that it’s quick growing and that the tanks are set up so there’s always supposed to be some ready and some growing. But if Rusev thought that one six-tank machine provided sufficient redundancy for the whole Karrier, I’m pretty sure two tanks would do. For all we know, five out of the six could be fine… but equally, for all we know, the whole machine might be broken and unfixable. Until we can stand it back up, we won’t know for sure.”
“Okay,” Holly said, having heard enough. It was a nice surprise that the machine was potentially fixable, but that wasn’t the most important thing right now. “Let’s take a look at the radio then get some of the luggage and head back. It’s not going to be light outside forever.”
Dante stepped into the corridor first and led the way to the control room, with Viola right behind him and no objection from Holly. They all stopped at the door, side by side.
“This is it,” Dante said, as if the moment needed any more tension. He pushed the door open and stepped inside. “Oh, shit.”
thirty-two
“Why is the light not coming on?” Viola asked. It was the obvious question, but Holly thought the answer was obvious enough, too.
“No power,” Dante said. “It’s the whole room. The instruments, the screens for Grav’s security feeds, the lights… the whole room has no power.”
“Does that makes sense?” Holly asked him. “Based on what you know about how the Karriers were designed, does it make sense for one room to have no power while the others are fine?”
“Not really.”
Viola groaned. Holly and Dante both turned to see the girl standing at the room’s threshold with her head in her hands.
“This isn’t the worst thing we could have found,” Dante said, his voice just natural enough to convince Holly that he wasn’t over-stretching too much to assuage the girl’s fears. “It would have been worse if I found the radio operating but not cooperating, if you know what I mean. That way it would have been kaput. This way, if the power could be restored to—”
“You think you can fix it?” Viola asked, interrupting Dante’s explanation as abruptly as it had interrupted her hopelessness.
“Uh, well, between me and Rusev, there’s a chance.”
Viola’s face lit up. “So that’s a yes?”
“It’s not a yes.”
“So it’s a maybe?”
Dante paused, flicking his eyes to Holly and then back to Viola. “Let’s call it a potential maybe. But like I was about to say, I need to talk to Rusev. It’s just like the dining machine: she knows more about her stuff than anyone. I’ll bring her out here first thing tomorrow and see what we can do.”
Viola nodded firmly, clearly eased by Dante’s words.
“We should get going,” Holly said. “We’ll take as much stuff as we can carry.”
In her sleeping quarters, Holly beamed with childlike delight at the sight of her suitcase. Viola had been kind enough to share some clothes with her over the last few days, as Robert and Yury had with Dante and Grav, but it wasn’t the same. After quickly changing into a fresh outfit, Holly surprised Viola and Dante by returning to the corridor without her suitcase.
“We’ll get mine, yours, and Grav’s tomorrow,” she told Dante. “Robert’s and the kids’ today. After you get changed, pick some clothes out of Grav’s case for him to wear tonight. Don’t worry, I’ll tell him it was me.”
“But I need my stuff,” Dante said.
“Dante, as a chaperone it’s your job to make your passengers as comfortable as possible. And as a secondary chaperone, it’s your job to follow my instructions. You’re going to take Bo’s suitcase. If you feel that you can carry some of your own luggage, too, then by all means: feel free. Okay?”
An uncomfortable silence filled the air for several seconds. Holly’s real reason for wanting to recover the Harringtons’ luggage first was that Robert and Bo’s suitcases each contained an important video. Following Rusev’s order not to tell anyone about the video of Olivia Harrington sharing her fears just hours before her death, Holly opted to play the seniority card to justify her decision.
Dante shuffled off towards the passengers’ luggage area without saying a word. Holly couldn’t believe the size of Viola’s suitcase, which contained everything she was bringing to the station but hadn’t been able to fit in the smaller case she’d kept in the lander. Bo’s case was much smaller, as was Robert’s.
Dante lifted Bo’s case and broke into a tension-killing smile. “I’m glad you decided I had to carry this one and not Viola’s,” he said.
Viola looked at Holly. “Would you mind if I took my dad’s and you took mine? I don’t think I could carry mine the whole way and a lot of the ground is too rocky for the wheels.”
Holly dreaded lifting the girl’s suitcase but was relieved to find that it wasn’t nearly as heavy as it looked. “No problem,” she said.
Dante led the way outside, with Bo’s small case in one hand and a bag of his own things slung smugly across one shoulder.
Once they had reached the top of the familiar cliff-edge and set off towards the lander, Holly gestured for Dante to slow down for a few seconds until Viola was just out of their earshot.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Don’t bullshit me here,” Holly said. “Okay? I want you to be real. What’s the percentage chance that you and Rusev can fix the power?”
He didn’t hesitate: “I’d say 60. Something like that.”
“And if you manage that, what’s the percentage chance that the radio will wor
k?”
“Probably about 60,” he said. “Again.”
Holly thought for a second. “60 percent of 60 percent? So 36 percent? You’re telling me there’s a 64 percent chance we won’t be able to make contact with the station?”
“Listen, Holly: if you’d asked me for our chances this morning, I wouldn’t even have given you a number. The least likely thing was finding the Karrier in one piece, and we just did that. My numbers are obviously just estimates, but we’re not talking one in a million here. We’re talking one in three.”
Holly didn’t say anything.
“But with Rusev on our side,” Dante went on, “not to mention you, me, Spaceman, Grav… I’ll take those odds. And remember, that’s just for us being able to contact the station. Rusev thinks they might send a rescue team to where they last picked up our location before the impact. They could already be on the way.”
“What are you two doing back there?” Viola called, making Holly realise how far she and Dante had fallen behind.
“Just talking about you,” Dante yelled back, skilfully evading the fact that Holly — who was supposed to be Viola’s rock — was having doubts.
“Shut up,” Viola said.
Dante caught up with Viola first and quickly teased her into laughter.
Now more than ever, Holly was glad to have him.
thirty-three
At the end of a difficult walk, the lander finally drew near. All sprightliness from the relatively good news of the intact Karrier had been cancelled out by the weight of the luggage; and though it wasn’t quite dark yet, it would be very soon.
Having tracked the three dots approaching on Rusev’s wristband, Grav, Rusev, Robert and Bo were all watching from the window as the returning trio came into view. They then left the lander to assist with the luggage.
“We come bearing gifts,” Dante said as Bo arrived to claim his suitcase.
“Where is my stuff?” Grav asked.
Holly quickly explained that she’d prioritised recovering the Harringtons’ luggage first but had made sure to bring some of Grav’s clothes for him to change into until the whole group returned to the Karrier the next morning.
Grav accepted this more readily than Dante had and blinked several times as though realising he had glossed over what really mattered. “What kind of condition is the Karrier in? Did it touch down gently?”
“No,” Holly said. “It’s in one piece, so it seems like the descent was relatively controlled… but none of the landing gear deployed. The vault is fine and the dining machine might be fixable.”
“And the radio?” Rusev asked, arriving with Robert shortly behind Bo and Grav who had hurried ahead.
Viola jumped in to answer: “It’s a potential maybe.”
“A potential maybe?” Rusev echoed.
Holly saw Robert’s eyes dashing between her and Dante, clearly searching for nonverbal clues about their true confidence levels.
“That’s right,” Dante said. “You see, there’s no power in the control room. That could be something to do with the landing gear not deploying; the first impact might have damaged a node that’s knocked certain things offline. We didn’t have time for any real testing with the light starting to fade, so all we know is that the lights in the corridor, the utility room and the crew quarters were all operational, but that there was no power at all in the control room. And the vault was fine, like Holly said.”
Rusev rubbed her chin in thought. “And, assuming we can correct the power fault…?”
“The radio should operate,” Dante said. “The question then becomes whether it will cooperate. A lot depends on what kind of force obscured this planet until we collided with… whatever we collided with. We can potentially fix the power; and if we do, maybe the radio will work.”
Everyone waited for Rusev’s reply. “First light,” she said, after a long and pensive pause. “Yury will stay here with Robert and the children.”
“Why do I have to stay?” Bo complained.
“It’s a long walk,” Dante said, trying not to sound condescending. “There’s nothing to see, anyway.”
“But I’m going,” Viola said, glancing between Holly and Rusev, who she’d hardly spoken to. “Right, Holly?”
Literally caught in the middle, Holly looked at Robert. He shrugged, more eyebrows than shoulders. “I’d rather Viola came,” she decided. “We could do with the extra hands to help lift the dining machine.”
“By all means,” Rusev said. If she felt any annoyance over Holly’s answer, she hid it well. “In any case, I’m glad you made the selfless choice to bring their luggage back first.”
Holly knew exactly what Rusev was getting at — Robert’s video — but she merely nodded in reply, understanding why Rusev had opted to hint at it rather than say it outright.
Robert lifted his suitcase from the ground next to Viola and held it tightly against his leg, clearly also grasping what Rusev was getting at but somewhat less subtle in his understanding than Holly.
“I’ll come in to see you and Spaceman once everyone is settled with their things in the extension,” Holly said to Rusev.
“He’s fast asleep,” Rusev replied. “Don’t worry about it; Dante will tell me more about the Karrier and we can talk about it in the morning, on our way there. I know the lander’s facilities are slightly more accommodating than the extension’s, so you’re all free to come in to use the larger bathroom at any stage, but I do recommend settling down for the night as soon as possible.”
“Wait,” Bo said. He opened his small case and began rummaging through the contents. “Before we split up for the night, there’s something I want to show you. It should be in here somewh— aha! Here it is.”
“What do you have there?” Rusev asked as Bo brought the digital textbook towards her.
Bo swiped and prodded his way through various menu screens at lightning speed. “Okay,” he said after only a few seconds. “This page on the left is what was in the textbook for V’s class a few years ago — I added it manually to mine — and this page on the right is what was in the updated version that my class got.”
Holly stood next to Bo as Rusev read the text above and below the paused footage. The frames the two videos were paused on looked identical.
“This is an interview with the head of security at Morrison’s facility?” Rusev asked, confirming she had gleaned sufficient context from the short passages of text.
“Two interviews,” Bo said. “That’s the point: he says different things in each one, but they’ve tried to make it look like the same interview.”
“Sounds like it could be a glitch,” Dante said.
Bo shook his head insistently. “Just listen and watch. The guy is wearing the same clothes and everything, but if you zoom in on the newer video you can see that his eyes are baggier and there’s stubble on his chin. They were filmed at different times.”
“Play it,” Rusev said, beyond curious of what exactly she was about to hear.
In the first short clip, as Holly already knew from Bo’s description on the first day, the security officer stated that he received a warning call about the imminent Devastation Day attack an hour before it happened. In the second, which followed an otherwise identical script, the man said that the warning call came ten minutes before the powerful explosions.
“Doesn’t sound like a glitch to me,” Holly said.
“Or me,” Dante readily admitted. He, and everyone else, looked to Rusev.
After staring silently at Bo’s digital textbook for several seconds, Rusev crouched to his level and looked him in the eye. “Bo, this is an incredible find. Do you know what this means?”
“All the other warnings came about ten minutes before the attacks,” he said. “At the ancient wonders and everything. But there’s no way everyone could have been safely evacuated from the MXA facility in ten minutes. Not with the size of the place and the size of the explosions. So if everyone survived and this security guy somehow kne
w about the one attack that directly involved Morrison way before anyone else knew about any other specific attack…”
No one immediately filled the silence as Bo trailed off.
Eventually, Dante spoke next. “Listen… I hate Morrison as much as the next guy, trust me. But what are we saying here?”
“He did Devastation Day,” Bo said, childishly straightforward.
“Did is a strong word,” Rusev said. “But this tells us he was in on at least part of it, and the same group who claimed responsibility for everything else claimed credit for this incident, too. Morrison benefitted from everything that happened that day. And Dante, some of us already know how far he’ll go to get what he wants.”
Grav, who had neither heard Bo’s earlier account of this footage nor ever heard Rusev express her thoughts on Morrison’s potential role in Devastation Day so strongly, stood shaking his head in disgust. “If I ever set foot on Earth again, I am going to rip his heart out through his ass and shove it down his throat.”
“Can you keep this safe?” Rusev asked Bo, tapping the textbook and ignoring Grav’s understandable anger.
Bo nodded proudly. “I’ll keep it under my bed.”
Rusev ruffled his hair and turned towards the lander. “Everyone sleep well,” she said, authoritatively ending the discussion.
“There’s something else,” Holly said. “We found one of the mapping drones, lying beside what looked like a line on the ground. If its recordings are okay, we might get a better view from above. I’ll sync the images from my wristband to the lander now, too, so you can look over everything tonight and we’ll talk about what it means in the morning.”
Holly then signalled for Dante to hand over the drone’s storage strip to Rusev, which he dutifully did. Dante and Viola stayed quiet, evidently and correctly assuming that Holly didn’t want to get into a long and potentially unsettling discussion about the lines at this hour.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 16
