Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  No one else spoke for a few seconds as everyone tried to make sense of what had just been revealed.

  Robert inhaled sharply and gestured with his hand as though he was about to speak, but nothing came out. With a perplexed expression, he tried again. “So, to be clear…” he said, addressing his forthcoming question to no one in particular, “is the implication that Morrison and the GU are actively hiding this planet? Because if they are… A) why are they hiding it? And B) where did it come from?”

  Yury was the first to begin climbing the stairs, unilaterally deciding there was no sense in standing beside the door. The others followed, with Bo making a comment about the possibility of blowing the door open with some kind of IED and Grav telling him it wasn’t such a bad idea.

  Holly wanted to see the other side of the door, whatever it took, but for now she was racking her mind for any logical answers to Robert’s questions. Where had the planet come from, and what the hell did Morrison want with it?

  As Rusev reached ground level, she answered Robert with another question: “Do you know anything about Harriet Brock?”

  “I know of her,” he replied. “I know that Brockian economics focuses on predicting the nature of a post-labour world, and I know she went off the deep-end towards the end with the whole Great Reset thing. But beyond those headlines, I couldn’t tell you much else.”

  Viola stopped abruptly. “Ewww… I know this stuff from school. That exact old book: The Great Reset. We had to read it last year. Brock had this whole thing about people being seeds who have to be responsibly cultivated.” The girl paused and shook her head; it came across as an unusual head-shake, one of uncomfortable realisation as everything fell into place in her mind. “Brock’s big thing was genetic intervention, and the thought experiment she kept using was about what would happen if humanity had to evacuate to a new planet. She said we would have limited capacity on the spaceships and that the human seeds we chose to send wouldn’t be picked at random, so why should we leave the future genetic makeup of Earth’s population to chance when we know its resources are just as finite as whatever new planet we might find. I got my best grade in years for that paper because I actually cared about it… you know, because it was so much bullshit. Our teacher hated it, too.”

  Based on her typical indifference to schoolwork, Robert was so surprised by the depth of Viola’s answer that he didn’t even admonish her language.

  “What does Brock have to do with Morrison?” Holly asked, aiming the question at Rusev. “Why did you bring up her name?”

  “Because Morrison has been obsessed with her work since he was a child,” Rusev said. “We had moles in his operation, just like he had moles in ours, and every single one of them mentioned the obsession with Brock. He tested his assistants’ knowledge of her principles and made them read up on it all if they didn’t score well enough. One described his interest in Brock as ‘beyond religious’. His business policies have always gone hand-in-hand with Brock’s economic theories, and with the famine and everything else so clearly pointing to deliberate depopulation…”

  Viola replied: “You actually think he’s going for a Reset?”

  “I don’t like what I think,” Rusev said, looking at the ground as she spoke, “because I think he’s going to bring the chosen few here. I think they’re testing this place. With the crops you saw, with the climate zones that fit in well with the advanced weather manipulation we know he’s been working on for so long, and with everything he’s been doing on Earth, I think an evacuation is imminent. Probably temporary and probably justified by some disaster he cooks up, but I hate to think what’s going to happen to everyone left behind.”

  “Kind of like when your house gets fumigated and you go to live somewhere else for a few days so that the fumes kill the bugs but not you?” Bo asked, cutting through the euphemisms with his inimitable childlike clarity.

  Rusev nodded. “Exactly. And as for here, we know he boasted about a huge breakthrough in gravity shielding but never openly did anything with it. Between that and some of the effectively invisible romotech applications that are already in use on Earth, at least we’re getting an idea of how he kept this place hidden… even if we still don’t know what it is, where it came from, and how he found it before anyone else.”

  “That’s it!” Holly exclaimed, turning instinctively to Dante as the realisation hit her. “Morrison didn’t just find this place and he didn’t just hide it. He made it. This isn’t a planet. We’re standing on a man-made satellite.”

  forty-six

  As Holly’s words sank in, Dante’s eyebrows visibly lowered. “Satellite?” he echoed. “But how could he possibly—”

  “Embryonic romotech,” Rusev said, taking the words from Holly’s lips and delivering them in a eureka-like tone. “Expanding outwards from the core with self-replicating romobots feeding off the sun. He’s demo’d the tech in public, with the bots programmed to form complex structures and designs. I suppose it’s just about feasible that he could have started with an embryonic structure small enough to launch without anyone noticing.” She looked pensively to the sky. “Then all it would take is an artificial atmosphere, some terraforming, plenty of data gathering devices to track conditions, and maybe a few boots on the ground to make sure everything is in order. I think Holly might be right: this could be his version of our Venus station.”

  “What if we’re the boots on the ground?” Dante asked, suddenly buying the man-made theory and immediately worrying about it. “If all this stuff is true, maybe they did something to make us crash here. Maybe we’re the guinea pigs. Maybe they’re watching us right now.”

  The group proceeded towards the lander and extension, with all memories of their planned return to the crops now distant. Dante’s words about standing on someone or something’s territory had taken on a new significance now that all signs pointed towards that territory belonging to Roger Morrison and his GU cronies.

  The discovery of the MXE initials and logo on the door’s keypad also destroyed all prior hope that whoever might return to harvest the crops would be peaceful.

  Now, as far as the group’s survival went, it truly was radio or bust.

  “The plan hasn’t changed,” Holly said, meditating on that point and seeking to lift the encircling dread. “We’re still going to fix the radio and we’re still going to walk onto the station; all of us.”

  Bo nodded a few times, showing enough to convince Holly that he had a hint of positivity left in him. Viola, on the other hand, looked as though she had accepted her fate.

  Holly subtly stepped to the side of the group and signalled for Viola to hang back slightly. Trying a different tack, she laid out a promise in simple terms: “You’re not going to die here.”

  Viola tried to force a brave smile.

  Holly then put a hand on the girl’s back and urged her to resume walking. “I’m going to make sure you reach that station,” she said, “if it’s the last thing I do.”

  forty-seven

  Holly awoke in the middle of the night and stood up to get a drink from the extension’s sparse supplies shelf. In the gentle glow of her shared bedroom’s nightlight, she saw that Viola’s bed was empty.

  Probably in the bathroom, she thought. She looked down at her wristband to be sure, then instantly dashed back towards her own bed to get her shoes.

  Viola was outside, she was moving, and she was getting further away. In another twist that somewhat assured Holly of Viola’s safety but introduced anger in worry’s place, the tracking dot representing the girl’s movement was headed towards another out-of-place dot: Dante’s.

  Holly cursed his name under her breath and quickly threw on some outdoor clothes. With all that had been going on, this was the last thing anyone needed. Holly’s disappointment in Viola didn’t extend to anger — she was young, and Dante certainly had his charms — but the anger she felt at Dante was the kind that threatened to boil over when she found him.

  Outside, the
stars shone down in full force, defeating the worst of the darkness if not quite illuminating Holly’s way. She ran with a flashlight in her right hand, pointed downwards, and frequently checked the distance on her left wrist to make sure she was going in the right direction.

  It looked increasingly obvious that Viola was going to meet Dante in the well-lit and private area between the bottom of the stairway and the locked door. Holly proceeded quietly; she had no intention of sneaking up on them doing… whatever they were doing… but she also didn’t want to unnecessarily awaken and worry anyone else by screaming names into the darkness.

  As the distance between Holly’s wristband and Dante’s continued to steadily decrease, she suddenly noticed that Viola’s dot had stopped moving a very short distance from its expected destination. For the final few minutes of Holly’s approach, this remained the case.

  It didn’t make sense, but she wouldn’t have to wait long for an answer.

  When Holly’s flashlight landed upon the edge of the dangerous patch of plants — a genuine barrier, as Bo had insisted all along — her beam of light was intersected by another.

  Holly followed it and saw Viola, standing alone at the top of the stairway. As quietly as she could, and being careful to stick to Grav’s makeshift path to avoid the deadly plants, Holly walked over.

  “Well?” she said. One word was enough.

  “I woke up and saw that Dante was outside,” Viola whispered, talking more quietly than Holly thought necessary. “He was right outside, not moving. And I couldn’t sleep, so I went to see him. But by the time I got my shoes and everything, he was gone when I got outside.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me? I would have looked for him.”

  “I wasn’t going anywhere! It wasn’t until I got outside that I knew he’d left. Then I saw him moving, so I followed, but I couldn’t keep up. He’s fast. But it wasn’t long until he stopped moving, so I kept going to see where he was. I didn’t mean to end up here, I just wanted to know what was going on. I still want to know what’s going on. Do you think this means that Dante—”

  Holly silenced Viola by pushing an urgent finger against her lips in response to the sound of movement at the bottom of the stairs. She then told the girl where to stand — to one side of the stairs, slightly behind them — and made it abundantly clear that she was to keep her mouth firmly shut.

  Viola switched off her flashlight, following another silent order, and stood perfectly still.

  Holly walked to the top of the stairs, her own flashlight still shining brightly, and came face to face with Dante as he took his first step up.

  “Holly!” he yelped. “What are you… uh… I’ve been trying every code I could think of. No luck.”

  “But I just heard you close the door.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Dante,” she snapped. “I literally just heard—”

  “I’ve been banging on it. Trying to get inside! Come on, Holly… I know there’s a lot going on, but you sound crazy right now.”

  “Shut up! Everything you say is a lie.”

  Dante exhaled sharply and dismissively through his nose then gave a defiant shrug; busted, but unwavering. He walked up the stairs. “Not everything, Holly. Remember when I said that I thought someone wanted us to land here?”

  “You? You’re working with Morrison?”

  “And the penny drops!” he said, now smiling broadly and miming sarcastic applause. “What gave it away?”

  Holly took several steps backwards as Dante continued towards her. She rolled her sleeves up and raised her fists.

  “You’re going to fight me?” he chuckled.

  However tough Dante wanted to act and however much smack he wanted to talk, Holly knew he must have known there would only ever be one winner.

  Whatever inherent combat advantages Dante may have had in terms of skeletal structure and bone density were more than cancelled out by Holly’s well-earned advantages in terms of physical training and life-or-death experience. But perhaps most importantly, though Dante wasn’t exactly scrawny, he was soft.

  A lot of words had been thrown at Holly throughout her life; soft was not one of them.

  “Put your hands behind your back,” she ordered.

  “Okay,” he said in sarcastic agreement. “Just because you said.”

  “Dante, I swear to God: if you don’t cooperate right now…”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “This stand-off won’t end well for you,” Holly said.

  “Oh… so you’re going to kill me? Killer Holly’s going to strike again?”

  “You’re a rat,” she spat at him. “You’re a fucking traitor.”

  “So do it!” Dante challenged, making a point of looking down the stairs towards the locked door. “Kill the traitor. Then what?”

  Part III

  forty-eight

  Holly and Dante stood face to face, just a few paces clear of the stairway. Holly had stepped back when Dante climbed up, subconsciously striving to avoid or at least delay the looming confrontation.

  “Why?” she said, asking the only question on her mind. There were countless offshoots — why this and why that — but the most general form rose to the top.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you want us to land here? What the hell is going on?”

  Dante smirked in lieu of an immediate answer. His gloating expression brought a flood of realisations to Holly’s mind as the new context illuminated his previous obstructive behaviour.

  She thought back to his early attempts to make her suspicious of Robert and Viola on the Karrier, followed by his later attempts to make her suspicious of Rusev. She recalled the countless times he had been so reluctant to explore and had tried to stop others from doing so, and the fact that he always insisted on accompanying Holly whenever and wherever she went.

  Holly also saw new relevance in his insistence on choosing his initial search direction when he and Grav split up to look for Holly’s lander on the first day: his search area had encompassed the site of the bunker, at once both ensuring that Grav wouldn’t stumble upon it and ensuring that the area was recorded as barren on Yury’s map.

  She then recalled the group’s first night after reuniting, when she saw Dante outside the lander and he pretended that his motive for removing his wristband was to deliberately trigger her alarm as a way of drawing her outside to talk. It now seemed obvious that he had been planning to sneak away to the bunker and only turned on his usual charm as a diversion tactic. Come to think of it, Holly thought back, he’d even been wearing his heavy walking boots that night. His effortless lies, however obvious they now seemed, had worked.

  Dante had been playing everyone from the start, but no one more so than Holly.

  She wanted to lash out and needed no invitation. On the contrary, it took everything she had to hold back and try to keep the calm head she needed to make sense of what was happening and deal with it responsibly.

  “Tell me why!” she yelled.

  “What’s done is done,” Dante said, still smirking. “And trust me, Holly: this is done.”

  “You’re going to tell me everything.”

  “I’m going to tell you nothing.”

  “Dante, either you’re going to give me that entry code or I’m going to take it.”

  His smirk faded, replaced by a new intensity. “I’ll die before I give it up.”

  “That can be arranged,” Holly shot back.

  “So do it. Do to me what you did to Sarah and Gianfranco.”

  The first thing in Holly’s mind — the only thing — was Gianfranco’s face. His was a name she hadn’t heard in a while, but his was a face forever etched in her memory.

  After several seconds spent trying to blink the memory away, Holly began to wonder how Dante knew these names; she had certainly never shared them with him. This confusion faded as quickly as it had arrived as the rational part of her mind pointed out that Sarah and Gianfranco were the only two
people to have died while working within Morrison’s space program, and Holly knew she’d told Dante enough of what happened for him to be able to piece it together.

  “I don’t see any shards lying around,” Dante went on, “so you won’t be able to slit my throat like you did to Sar—”

  “I did not slit her throat,” Holly boomed, cutting him off in a furious tone. Though there may have been more pressing matters at hand, Holly could not allow Dante’s characterisation of the incident as a cold-blooded execution rather than an instinctive and reluctant act of self-defence to stand. “I warned her to stay back, she lunged forward, I caught her neck.”

  Dante nodded sarcastically. “If you say so.”

  “Wait… how did you know about the shard at all?” Holly asked. She had definitely not told Dante or even Rusev any of this part, and as far as she knew no one outside of Morrison’s inner circle knew the full details.

  Dante answered flatly: “I’ve seen the footage. Roger showed it to me.”

  The fact that Dante was apparently on first name terms with Roger Morrison sent a slow shiver down Holly’s spine.

  “That’s right, I’ve seen the whole thing. So with no shard, what’s the plan? Strangle me like you strangled Gianfranco… an innocent guy who was standing in your way?”

  “He was trying to kill me! If you’ve seen the tapes, you must have seen that. He was plotting to suffocate me so I didn’t waste his resources. He was the one who told Sarah to hold me down and he was the one who slashed at me first, when I heard what he was planning. He’s the reason I’ve got one eye, Dante! He was the fucking maniac who failed two of his three psych tests and still got chosen for the mission because Morrison liked him.”

  “He was my uncle,” Dante scowled. “That’s what he was. That’s who he was. And he was innocent.”