The door was located in a corner, and there was nothing else on the wall it was built into.
The final wall housed a storage unit of sorts, with sixteen square compartments.
Fifteen were closed with small doors which were evidently hinged yet contained no visible locking or unlocking mechanism. Holly assumed they were magnetic and likely linked to the same unseen power switch as the control console.
The sixteenth compartment had no door and housed precisely what she was looking for: a shoebox-sized container helpfully marked with the universally understood red cross symbol.
“This is all we need right now, anyway,” she said, lifting it down from its position at the far right of the top row. The box was heavier and deeper than she expected, but she managed to lower it gently enough to avoid damage.
“Why do we need that?” Bo asked.
“We need the antidote,” Holly said. “Dante… well, Dante has the same kind of injury you did — from the same kind of thorn — and we need to give him the antidote or he’s going to die before he tells us why we’re here.”
Bo stepped back. “You got him with one of the plants? On purpose?”
Holly didn’t say anything.
“That was a good idea,” the boy went on. “It made sense to think the antidote was in here, and he had to give you the code or he couldn’t get it! Smart.”
“The antidote he brought for you didn’t look like any of these,” Holly said, sifting through tubs and bottles and boxes of various emergency medicines and remedies.
With the map folded under her arm, Viola walked over to the first-aid box. “That’s because he disguised it as his own anti-allergy stuff,” she said. “Remember? And the ointment he used was probably just for show. Whatever he injected… that’s what we need.”
“Here!” Holly yelled joyously. She lifted out a pack of three filled but unlabelled syringes. They were inside an opened case with space for four. “This has to be it.”
“What about these other drawers?” Bo said. “Or shelves… whatever they are.”
“We’ll come back,” Holly promised.
“Right,” Viola said. “Because if we want Dante to tell us how to open them, he needs to be alive.”
Bo ran to the door. “Okay, let’s go.”
“I can’t believe you jagged him with one of those plants,” Viola said. “That is badass.”
“Thanks,” Holly said, pulling Viola back to whisper the next part. “But it wasn’t me; it was your dad.”
fifty-three
“Take the map inside to Yury,” Holly said to Bo, putting him down outside the lander having again carried him during the exhausting run back from the bunker.
Viola, waiting patiently having arrived back a full minute before them, handed Bo the carefully folded map.
Holly’s body language silently offered Viola the choice of either going into the lander with Bo or following her into the extension.
Unsurprisingly, the girl stuck with Holly. They hurried to Dante’s makeshift holding cell, where he was lying deathly still as the effects of the thorn’s poison set in. Robert — the inflictor — stood over him, expressionless.
Holly wasted no time in injecting the antidote directly on the site of Dante’s puncture wound, as Dante had to Bo’s.
And as had been the case with Bo, the antidote acted quickly; Dante groggily groaned and blinked his eyes open. He didn’t speak or display any overt signs of anger. Holly couldn’t tell whether this was a sign that he had surrendered to the helplessness of his situation or whether he was only temporarily subdued by the poison vs antidote battle which was currently raging in his thigh.
While Dante stared dumbly up at the extension’s metallic ceiling, Robert turned to Holly and Viola. “So… what else was in there?”
“A lot of locked drawers,” Holly said. She didn’t care that Dante might have been listening; he already knew what was inside the bunker, anyway. “Well, not exactly drawers. More like small doors to compartments on a shelving unit. They’re hinged and I think the locking mechanisms are magnets controlled by a button somewhere, but we could almost certainly brute-force our way in.”
“How many doors?”
“Fifteen. The sixteenth compartment had no door, just the first-aid kit.”
“And there’s a big control console,” Viola added. “Like inside an old submarine. Screens, buttons, everything. It’s all turned off, but there must be a switch somewhere.”
“Was there a radio?” Robert asked. “It may be a communications bunker.”
Holly had thought of this when she first saw the console, and it did seem likely that the bunker would have some kind of communications system. She had kept it to herself, deciding there was no sense in getting the children’s hopes up prematurely. But now that Robert had put the idea out there, she offered a cautiously optimistic response: “I don’t know for sure, but it’s definitely possible.”
Robert’s eyebrows rose. “Did it look like there might be a radio in the console?”
“Maybe,” Holly said.
He clapped his hands together. “So what are we waiting for? Yury can come out here for guard duty and we can go—”
“No.”
Robert’s expression, excited just a moment earlier, suddenly fell. “No what?”
“We’re not going back inside the bunker until Rusev and Grav get back here,” Holly said. “We don’t know what they’ve managed to do: they could have fixed the power, looked at the cameras to see what Dante did in there, maybe even fixed the radio and contacted the station. And we also don’t know what Grav might have found.”
“What do you mean? What’s he looking for?”
“Nothing in particular, but he said he would go through every inch of Dante’s room and track his movements in the hours before the impact. There’s bound to be a clue. And we can’t just go rampaging through the bunker without them; we could accidentally break something or — and this might be way worse — we could accidentally activate something.
Robert sighed. “But time is against us.”
“We brought back a map,” Viola chimed in. “That was the only thing that wasn’t locked away. Yury and Bo are looking at it, so we could all help out with that until Rusev and Grav get back. Because Holly’s right: if we rush, we might do something we regret. Something we can’t undo.”
“Okay,” Robert said, walking out of the holding cell as he spoke. His demeanour had lifted at the mention of a map, and Viola’s interjection had evidently been enough to sway him towards Holly’s side of the argument. “So when are we expecting them back?”
Holly and Viola followed him out. Dante wouldn’t have been fit to go anywhere in his current state even if he wasn’t so decisively restrained, so there was no real need for a guard.
“There’s not much light left,” Holly said as they exited the extension. “If they don’t leave the lander in the next hour, they won’t be here until tomorrow. It’s way too cold and way too far for them to set off at night.”
“Jesus,” Robert groaned. “Tomorrow?”
Holly spoke in a more upbeat tone: “If they’re still there and still busy, it’s probably good news.”
fifty-four
In the lander, Yury and Bo were busy at work lining up the bunker’s huge paper map with Yury’s own digital composite attempt. He called the entering trio over with his hand and pointed them to a few areas of interest he had already identified.
“This is the bunker,” he said, tapping a small rectangle in the very centre of the map and focusing closely on the area around it.
Holly scanned the map more generally. The sight of a lone body of water some way across the map brought back a distant memory of the beautiful sandy beach she’d found three long days earlier. But the fact that the beach looked closer to the edge of the map than the “you are here” centre point suggested something else.
“This place is a lot smaller than we thought,” Holly said.
“Exa
ctly what I was thinking,” Yury agreed. “Unless, of course, this is only one section.”
In the top left of the map there was a large irregular shape denoting a structure of some kind. It lay beyond a tiny square which corresponded perfectly with Yury’s approximation of the spot where Dante had led Holly and Viola to find the walled-off crops. None of the group had ventured beyond that point, leaving the irregular structure as the greatest remaining cartographic mystery.
When everything from Yury’s homemade map had been placed correctly, including his approximations of some of the zonal grid lines which Holly and Viola had walked along in opposing directions for just that purpose, attention turned to making sense of the alphanumeric codes in each of the square zones.
“Could someone turn the light on,” Yury requested.
Holly rose to do so. Daylight was fading fast, and she was beginning to think that Rusev and Grav wouldn’t be back until the morning.
But lo and behold, when she looked out of the window before sitting back down, she saw them approaching in the distance.
“They’re outside,” she excitedly announced. “I’ll go out in case they need help carrying anything.”
“I’ll come, too,” Viola said.
Holly shook her head, more harshly than intended. “It’s okay. They’ll be here in a minute, anyway.”
Viola didn’t argue. “Uh, yeah, okay.”
Fifteen minutes was probably a better estimate of how long it would take for Rusev and Grav to reach the lander, and Holly wanted to find out what had happened at the Karrier before anyone else did. If the news about the radio was good, it wouldn’t matter who heard it when. But if the news wasn’t good, a deft touch would be needed to deliver it; a defter touch than Grav could manage, for sure.
As Holly ran across the lander’s long shadow on her way to meet them, her mind buzzed with the countless questions and things she wanted to ask and tell them. She was sure they would feel the same way, but as she grew closer to them she became less optimistic. Neither Rusev nor Grav looked desolate, but neither’s expression suggested that they’d met success in their efforts to fix the radio and contact the station.
When they finally came face to face, no one spoke. The silence only lasted a second or two, but to Holly it felt a lot longer.
“Well?” she said.
Grav replied with a slight but decisive shake of his head. Still, though, there was no dejection.
Another silence circled, this one longer than the first.
Holly broke it again: “We got the code. Well, Robert did.”
“Robert?” Rusev echoed incredulously. “How?”
Holly gave them a very quick rundown of what had happened, including the part when she and the kids had confirmed the code’s veracity by using it to enter the bunker. “The only thing that wasn’t either locked away or turned off was a map,” she said, “and it shows some pretty big buildings in an area where none of us have been.”
Rusev nodded. “Okay, good. Well, we fixed the power in the Karrier’s control room.” She paused for a deep breath. “But the radio is not going to be something we can fix.”
“Dante broke it,” Grav added. “I looked at the camera footage once the power was back. Like you thought, he messed around under the hood before you and Viola went in. The transmitter is fried. He cut the power, too, but we cannot fix the transmitter like we fixed that.”
Holly rubbed her temples in an effort to stay composed. “So you’re telling me it’s impossible to use the radio? Impossible?”
“The transmitter is damaged beyond repair,” Rusev confirmed.
“So why aren’t the two of you more upset?” Holly asked, bemused rather than accusatory. They had already had a while to come to terms with it — she knew that — but that didn’t explain how calm they seemed.
“Because we found something else,” Grav said. “This was in his bed, hidden between the mattress and the sheet.”
Holly tentatively held out her hand to receive the brown envelope. “D. PARKER” was handwritten in blue ink in the bottom left corner, identifying the original recipient as Dante. She opened the envelope and removed the four or five sheets of tightly folded paper, each of which had typed text on both sides.
The front sheet contained only two words, filling the centre of the page in large print, bold and underlined: “Terradox Primer.”
“What the hell is Terradox?” Holly asked.
Grav looked all around. “That is what they call this place.”
fifty-five
Terradox.
The planet they were stranded on — or the romosphere they were stranded on, as Dante had insisted on putting it — finally had a name.
Holly turned the cover page and started reading. The others were inside poring over an illuminating map, but that was nothing compared to the document Grav had found which she now held in her hands: Dante’s field book.
Her eyes devoured the text, continuing past the questions which arose and were pushed to one side for now.
The first major revelations came just a few lines down, in the form of a step-by-step checklist of actions Dante had been instructed to follow. What Holly discerned was that Dante had been given some kind of handheld device, referred to only as “the transceiver”, which alerted him when Terradox was within the Karrier’s vicinity. At that point, after Dante pressed a button to initiate the next stage, Terradox began to attract the Karrier towards it.
“That is when everything went to shit in the control room,” Grav said, seeing which part Holly was reading. “When all of my readouts started going crazy.”
Holly then read a sentence about the Karrier being within Terradox’s vicinity “in accordance with the pre-programmed path modifications”; modifications which Dante had evidently made shortly before the Karrier’s final launch from Earth. Like the snake that he was, Dante had made good use of the unrestricted access he enjoyed while the Karrier was docked and Grav was off duty.
But the next sentence suggested that Dante had failed in one aspect: he had been supposed to “sufficiently reduce the romobot cloak density to ensure safe passage”. Holly was relatively unsurprised that the severity of the Karrier’s impact with the ‘romobot cloak’, which blocked both Terradox’s external visibility and its gravitational pull, had been unplanned; the impact was so severe, she couldn’t imagine anyone would have taken the risk of bearing it on purpose.
What came next was a more unsettling series of instructions for how Dante should deal with the Karrier’s other passengers. Yury Gardev and Ekaterina Rusev were to be kept alive “at all costs”, with the “strategic importance” of this point stressed very clearly. It continued: “Ivy/Holly Wood is preferred alive. Goran Vuletic is to be covertly eliminated as soon as possible.” Dante was then instructed to use discretion in dealing with the Karrier’s paying passengers, whose identities were unknown to the primer’s author.
There were short bullet-point lists for each of the four named survivors. These points advised Dante, among other things, that Grav was “dangerous and committed” while Holly was “potentially receptive to reason.”
The instructions then shifted to methods by which Dante could most effectively foster suspicion within the group of survivors, which was a tactic to be deployed only if he felt that fingers might soon be pointed at him. One explicit suggestion was to guide certain group members to “open-air growth test sites” where the Grow-Lo-like artificial soil could be used to shift suspicion directly towards Rusev.
Holly felt sick, but she couldn’t stop reading.
The following page shifted from intra-group manipulation tactics to information that looked more objectively pertinent.
Under the heading “MANDATORY DATA TRANSFERS”, Dante had been instructed to send an “I am here” signal at an agreed upon time on the day of the crash. The next sentence, in parentheses, told him to encourage the group’s inevitable desire to explore the surface and to insist upon choosing a direction of travel w
hich would take him where he had to go, and, naturally, to insist upon going alone. It also stated that further data transfers would be required on days five and twelve.
“This is day six, right?” Holly said.
Rusev nodded. “Counting the day we landed as day one, yes.”
Holly skimmed a dense paragraph containing detailed instructions on the steps Dante would need to follow to “reduce zonal blending” on day eleven.
The following paragraph then reaffirmed the importance of the three mandatory data transfers with the most troubling revelation yet: should Dante fail to initiate the third and final data transfer on day twelve, now just six days away, it would be assumed that his mission had been compromised or that he had suffered an accident. “In such an instance,” the primer read, “the romosphere will be poisoned to neutralise any and all potentially hostile survivors. The primary cost of your failure will be a delay in our launch. The personal cost will be your life.”
Immediately upon reading this, Holly couldn’t understand why Rusev and Grav weren’t as terrified as she was. Relative to the complexity of maintaining a perfectly habitable environment within the Terradox romosphere, she knew that disrupting the balance to poison the air would be an absolute triviality.
Did Rusev and Grav think that they could initiate the data transfer? Did they think they could coerce Dante into doing so?
And then came the other question raised by this alarming paragraph. This was the one Holly chose to vocalise: “What launch?”
“They can only be talking about a journey to here,” said Grav, who had evidently already considered this. “It makes sense: they must have wanted Dante to check the air and the rest of this place to make sure it was habitable before more of their people come, and they probably realised they could kill two birds with one stone by getting one of their guys on the ground and grounding us at the same time.”
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 24
