Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  “See you in the morning,” Rusev said, intrigued by the news of a newly discovered drone. She and Dante bid farewell to Holly and the others and reentered the lander for the night.

  “I knew Morrison was a piece of shit…” Grav mused as he entered the extension with Holly and the Harringtons. “But this?”

  “His time will come,” Robert said.

  Holly let Grav through the door first and put her hand on his shoulder. “Sooner than he knows,” she said. “And he’ll never see it coming.”

  thirty-four

  Just minutes after entering the extension, Bo walked into Grav’s bedroom with a broad smile on his face. Holly and Viola were already there, sitting on Grav’s bed and filling him in on every little detail of what they’d seen at the Karrier.

  Bo held what looked like a remote control in his right hand, while his left arm was outstretched; palm up, but empty.

  Or so they thought.

  “This is the invisible ball I was telling you about,” Bo said.

  Grav chuckled heartily. “Kid, how stupid do I look?”

  When Bo pushed the red button on the remote control with his thumb, Grav’s mouth fell open.

  “Pretty stupid,” Bo laughed. A jet black ball lay in his left palm, roughly the size of a large orange.

  Grav jumped to his feet and crouched down until his eyes were level with the ball. “How?” was all he said.

  “There are basically cameras all the way around,” Bo said. To Holly, it sounded like he was explaining as best he could rather than dumbing it down for Grav’s benefit. “And the whole thing is kind of like a 3D wraparound screen. The side you’re looking at shows the view from the outward-facing camera on the other side, so it looks like there’s nothing in between.”

  “But…” Grav struggled to verbalise his awestruck confusion. “How the hell could I see your hand? It is in your hand — touching your hand — so the view from the cameras at the bottom is not the same view as we have looking down.”

  Viola interjected with an answer. “I don’t know how to say this and have it make sense, but I think there are sort of, like, rings of 360-degree cameras going the whole way in to the centre. They all point in every direction and they can more or less — and this is the part that won’t make sense — they can more or less see through each other. So the ones near the top do get a view of Bo’s hand. Then the processor thing that’s inside there somewhere makes a composite image and displays it on the wraparound screen. My mum told me that. Everyone at her work who had kids got one of these as a Christmas bonus last year, to keep them happy. I think people who didn’t have kids got something pretty fancy, but probably not as cool.”

  “And this was when she worked for MXP, Morrison’s big pharma firm?” Grav asked.

  Viola nodded. “Yeah, just last year. This is cutting-edge romotech.”

  Holly wasn’t surprised to hear that. But while she’d seen some incredible applications of romotech in the past, none had been in person. To see a physical object disappear so convincingly was nothing short of astounding.

  Grav then asked Bo’s permission to hold the ball. As soon as it was in his hand, Bo made it vanish again by pressing the red button. Grav smiled like he was the child who’d just received the ball as a gift, instantly forgetting about all of his old toys and all of his present concerns.

  “Make it visible again,” he said to Bo, “then I will throw it up in the air, and before it falls you can make it invisible and I will try to catch it.”

  The two proceeded to play invisible catch for the next hour, tiring each other out to the point of exhaustion. Viola gladly assumed the role of impartial adjudicator in ensuring that each player was throwing the ball high enough, and eventually she had the idea for a new game in which she threw the invisible ball towards them and they competed to catch it.

  Holly watched with amusement for the first ten minutes or so then excused herself to talk to Robert. She spoke candidly about Dante’s estimate that they had a 36 percent chance of managing to contact the Venus station via the Karrier’s radio. To her surprise, Robert reacted very calmly.

  More than calm, he was placid.

  “Even if we don’t get through on the radio,” he said, “someone will find us eventually. Until then we have powder that our bodies think is food, we have water, we have air, and we have shelter. You might think I’m crazy for saying this, but my family is safer here than we were on Earth.” A grimly ironic grin crept across his face. “And even if being here means that we can’t reach the station, at least it means that Morrison can’t reach us.”

  With everyone else asleep, or at least silently settled for the night, Viola and Holly lay awake. When Viola asked Holly if she wanted to move her bed so they were both in the same room, Holly gladly accepted. She knew it was more of a request than an invitation, but she also appreciated that Viola was lowering her guard as much as she was seeking proximity for protection.

  Now that she had real hope of making contact, Viola had more questions about the station than ever. Holly gave straightforward answers to them all, walking a tightrope of trying to keep Viola’s thoughts positive while trying to downplay the absolute necessity of successful radio contact. Despite Holly’s subtle efforts to this end, Viola seemed to have reached a state of mind in which the only question left about the rescue mission was how long it would take to arrive.

  Most of the girl’s questions about the station were borne of her excitement to see it — and smell it, if her frequent references to the mildly lavender-scented filtration system she’d heard about were anything to go by — but eventually she voiced a concern related to rumours of forced labour.

  Holly quickly dismissed such rumours as GU propaganda. She knew for a fact it wasn’t true but reassured Viola by saying that even if there were certain smaller things that most station citizens had to adhere to, Viola would never be forced or likely even asked to do anything she didn’t want to do. “Because even if you weren’t Olivia Harrington’s daughter,” she said, “you’re going to walk in with Rusev and Spaceman. Trust me: no one will so much as look at you the wrong way.”

  To Viola, life on the station didn’t sound too bad at all. “Are there any animals?” she asked. “Not for eating, I mean.”

  Holly nodded. “There’s no livestock, though; it’s just not efficient. I think there might be some rodents for testing the toxicity of experimental materials and stuff like that, I don’t know.”

  “But no pets?”

  “A family of passengers brought four dogs on my second journey, all female puppies. So unless there are frozen dog embryos or whatever they’d need — or unless you can get a mouse or something — those are the only pets we’ll ever have.”

  Viola sat bolt upright on her bed. “Four dogs? Real dogs?”

  “Real as real can be.”

  “I actually cannot wait to get there,” Viola said, and that was all.

  Holly was momentarily surprised by the level of Viola’s excitement and incredulity until she realised how young the girl must have been when the GU’s pet ban came into effect and the private ownership of dogs and cats was outlawed. Due to the chronic food shortages during the famine, it was deemed unacceptable for resources to be diverted towards non-human mouths. The campaign appealed to notions of equality, decrying in familiar terms that the dogs of the rich were better fed than the children of the poor.

  Though it seemed trivial compared to some GU laws, Holly subscribed to the commonly shared notion that the pet ban had been a deliberate attack on morale. This theory held that the ban was a demoralisation tactic used to remind would-be anti-GU resisters of how desperate the food situation was; so desperate, indeed, that they could no longer keep pets.

  In the eyes of Holly and others with reason to think the worst of the GU and particularly the influence of Roger Morrison — who was a key player even in those days, years before he assumed formal power — the ban accomplished its machiavellian goal. For rather than elici
t further resistance, the ban bred despondence and helplessness.

  It warmed Holly’s heart to see that Viola now so clearly felt the opposite of despondent and helpless. The girl fell asleep quickly, if her steady breathing was anything to go by.

  Holly’s mind inevitably turned back towards the looming question of whether or not the radio would work. Whenever doubts crept in, she focused on the point that she would have chosen no two people for the job over Dante and Rusev: one was an excellent technician and the other someone who knew more than anyone else about the inner workings of her Karrier.

  Other doubts soon crept in, primarily over if and how the potential rescue team would be able to replicate the impact that brought the planet into the first Karrier’s view without also replicating its loss of control and ultimate crash-landing. The people on the station were the smartest people alive, so the rational part of Holly’s brain tried to reason that they would find a way. But lying on a narrow bed while stranded on a planet that shouldn’t exist, reason and rationality were in short supply.

  Unable to sleep, Holly tiptoed out of the extension and into the night’s refreshingly cold air. Half hoping to have seen Dante and too tired to have realised that her wristband showed that he was still in the lander, she was disappointed to find nothing but empty darkness.

  She sat on the ground for several minutes, trying to make sense of the fullest silence she’d ever known. It was a phenomenal kind of silence, matched in totality only by the darkness that came when she switched off her flashlight.

  The lack of stars contrasted greatly with the previous evening, which made Holly wonder about the apparent climate zones that she had discovered with Viola and Dante earlier in the day. She didn’t know whether the blanket cloud coverage where there had previously been none suggested that the zones operated wholly independently of each other, or whether it suggested that some clouds could in fact move between zones, perhaps at certain time intervals.

  Not only could Holly not think of any answers, she didn’t even really understand the questions she was asking herself. Considering her experiences on this crazy planet over the last few days, she couldn’t help but laugh at the thought that she once believed it might have been Earth.

  As her mind settled, the absoluteness of the surrounding darkness and silence became slightly unnerving. Before long, she returned inside.

  The warmth of the extension immediately made her realise how cold it had been outside, bringing back countless memories of getting into vehicles on cold days and shivering incessantly despite it being much warmer inside than out.

  Viola’s faint nightlight likewise made Holly appreciate just how dark it had been, and the girl’s gentle breathing made her appreciate how otherwise silent it still was. Viola’s reassuring presence also brought home not only how lonely Holly had felt a few moments earlier, but also how lonely she’d been for so long on the Karrier.

  The group was still stranded on this inexplicable planet, but they weren’t alone. All eight of them arrived together and all eight would leave together. Ensuring that they arrived safely at the Venus station was Holly’s job and remained her sole mission. She had come to care deeply about the Harringtons — a turn of events she never expected before the crash — and this only served to make her even more determined.

  Ideally, this would be the group’s last night before contact with the station. After that there would, ideally, be only a few more nights until rescue arrived. Of all the nights to come, this one was rife with the most uncertainty.

  Holly’s mind then turned to the people on the station, who she knew would probably be mourning the loss of the Karrier, its cargo, and its crew. While expecting that a certain level of distress would be felt over her own apparent death, she could hardly imagine how everyone must have been taking the loss of not only Rusev, their undisputed and tremendously respected leader, but also the universally adored Yury Gardev, a man who had spent his career serving science and international cooperation before risking ostracism by rallying against what he saw as latent totalitarianism within the then-fledgling Global Union.

  For some reason, these considerations lifted Holly’s mood. She wanted to be strong not only for the family under her charge but also for everyone on the station who would be unspeakably relieved and overjoyed when contact was made.

  Holly’s group of eight was not alone, she realised; they were merely temporarily isolated. Semantic or not, this distinction made a difference in Holly’s exhausted mind.

  Within a few minutes, the night’s concerns faded into slumber.

  Day Four

  thirty-five

  Holly awoke to the sound of the morning alarm she had set on her wristband the previous night. An overhead light was already shining down upon her, and it took her a few confused moments to remember that she’d moved her bed into the same room as Viola’s.

  “Morning, sleepy head,” Viola said, briefly looking away from her handheld mirror. She then continued to apply what Holly still couldn’t help but consider an obnoxious amount of eye makeup. Viola’s long blonde hair was also back to being so straight it looked sharp, and, all considered, she looked more like the woman Holly and Dante had once assumed to be Robert’s wife than the fresh-faced girl they’d seen on the fake travel card.

  “We’re only going to the Karrier,” Holly said.

  “I know,” Viola replied, not breaking her concentration.

  “So why are you doing all that? No one else is going to see us.”

  This time Viola stopped and turned to face Holly. “I know this sounds stupid,” she began, her voice hesitant. “Probably something a shrink would say… but, I dunno, this is like the one thing I can always control. It turns out exactly how I want, every time.”

  “That’s not stupid,” Holly said, meaning it. She grinned slightly as she stood up. “But it does sound like something a shrink would say.”

  Viola laughed and got back to the finishing touches. “Shut up.”

  A loud and urgent shushing noise then greeted Holly as she stepped into Grav’s room to wake him up. With the light already on, she saw Bo crouching next to the bed, placing his disappearing black ball on the floor. When the ball was in a spot where he expected Grav would put his foot, Bo pressed the red button on his remote control to make it vanish.

  Bo walked to Holly’s side in the doorway. “Watch this,” he whispered. He then cleared his throat and screamed Grav’s name.

  Grav jumped up, frantically throwing his thin bed-sheet to the ground.

  “Quick, come and see this!” Bo yelled.

  Holly fought to keep a straight face as Grav began walking across the room. He slipped on the invisible ball as though it was a cartoon banana skin, falling flat on his backside. Holly’s straight face deserted her; both she and Bo burst out laughing.

  Bo immediately made the ball reappear, causing the vexed confusion on Grav’s face to be replaced by a “you got me” grin.

  “You are both going to pay for that,” he laughed.

  When the group left the extension to rejoin the others in the lander, Bo brought his ball so that he’d be able to show Yury and play with it while everyone except them and Robert made the trip to the Karrier.

  Yury was suitably impressed by the ball and did a better job than Rusev of pretending he wasn’t already familiar with the technology. Dante expressed even more amazement than Grav had when he first saw the ball. He asked the same kind of questions; Viola gave the same kind of answers. Rusev confirmed that the girl was right about most aspects of the technology but went on to clarify some specifics about the composite image processing in terms that only Dante seemed to understand.

  The talk of images reminded Holly of the drone she’d stumbled upon the previous day, an exciting-at-the-time find which had been wholly eclipsed by the discovery of the Karrier just minutes later. When she asked whether any of the drone’s mapping data had survived, Yury shook his head solemnly.

  After a few glasses of nutrition p
owder, which again led to Viola expressing her hope that the dining machine would be fixable, Yury, Robert and Bo wished the others well and waved them off. Robert quietly asked Holly to keep Viola in her sights at all times. Rather than tell him that Viola could take care of herself — which she fully believed — Holly promised that she wouldn’t take her eyes off the girl and reminded Robert that he could keep tabs on their relative locations via Yury’s wristband.

  Holly, Dante, Yury and Rusev all wore their own wristbands, while Viola still had Grav’s. This allowed everyone who was going to the Karrier, apart from Grav, to track each other’s locations and vital signs. Yury’s wristband, from the safety of the lander, would allow the walking group to keep abreast of their covered distance and also keep them informed of the old man’s condition, which still concerned Holly despite having been perfectly stable since shortly after he crossed one of the zonal lines the previous afternoon.

  Those lines, the photographs of which had been thoroughly reviewed along with those of the Karrier once Holly’s wristband synced with the screen on the lander’s table, were the group’s sole topic of conversation for most of the walk to the Karrier. Rusev and Grav remained intensely interested in everything the previous day’s trio of explorers had to say.

  Holly gave Viola credit for identifying the first line by noticing a pattern in the growth of grass on each side, which ultimately led to the discovery of intersections and the realisation that clouds respected the lines in the air just as neatly as plants did on the ground. Rusev described the phenomena as “extremely bizarre” and “difficult to ascribe to any natural forces we’re aware of.” While those thoughts weren’t exactly new to Holly, Rusev’s wording underlined the obvious question raised by the zones: if they weren’t natural, what were they?