Rusev didn’t argue with this suggestion. “And they didn’t just want to seize myself and Yury to use as leverage over the station,” she added. “They knew they could prevent all of our cargo from getting there and take out one of the station’s two remaining means of transport.”
Holly tried to focus; it was so much to take in. “So are we going to do this transfer in six days? And if we can’t, are we going to try to force Dante to do it?”
“It looks like we’re going to have to,” Rusev said.
Grav took the primer from Holly’s hands and turned to the back page. “This tells us how to open the storage doors you were talking about,” he said, changing the subject. “It is perfect: you got the code but did not know how to get into the storage area. Meanwhile, we found out how to open the storage area but did not know the code. Now we can all go inside together and see what is there.”
Holly looked at the diagram on the back page. It indicated the location of a hidden dial which would unlock the doors. The locks were magnetic, as she expected, and they were all controlled from a single point.
No one had suggested going to the bunker before returning to the lander, from which the trio were now just a stone’s throw away.
Holly took it upon herself to hurry ahead and break the news to the others. She did so gently but honestly, telling them that the Karrier’s transmitter had been deliberately damaged and could not be fixed to enable radio communication with the crew of the Venus station.
“What’s that in your hand?” Viola asked.
“The guidebook for Dante’s mission,” Holly said. “Grav found it. We have a problem — a big one — but we have a better chance of dealing with it now than we did this morning.”
Yury, still seated, held his hand out to request the primer. “What kind of problem?” he asked as Holly handed it to him.
She replied in the most straightforward terms: “If we don’t initiate a data transfer at the right time of day, six days from now, they’ll assume Dante’s mission has been compromised and they’ll poison the air to get rid of us.”
No one said anything.
“But the primer tells us how to open the storage doors inside the bunker,” Holly went on. “Whatever is in there is hidden behind a code and a separate lock. It has to be worth it.”
Yury stood up slowly, grimaced, and wiggled his often troublesome knee until it cracked. “Okay,” he sighed, reaching for the lightweight jacket on the back of his chair. “Let’s go and see what we’re dealing with.”
fifty-six
The entire group, minus the now lucid but still restrained Dante, proceeded to the bunker as one. They took several powerful flashlights to combat the falling darkness and soon wished they had taken similar precautions against the falling temperature. The chill in the air was perfectly manageable, however, remaining quite comfortably above freezing and nowhere near the sub-zero temperatures that had surrounded Holly’s lander on the first night.
Holly’s vague understanding of Terradox’s climate zones made this huge variation less hard to fathom than it had been at first, but it was still incredible to consider just how greatly conditions could vary in two areas so relatively close together.
Thanks to Dante’s Terradox primer, which was widely discussed on the short journey, once inside the bunker they were able to open the locked compartment doors on the far wall’s storage unit.
Rusev, Yury, Grav and Robert all spent a few moments examining the complex control console. The question of the console’s ability to communicate with Earth had already been answered by the primer’s repeated references to data transfers, but Robert nevertheless asked Rusev — who knew more about radio communications than anyone else, even Yury — whether she thought the console had a radio built in.
“Of course,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “But it’s not going to be the kind that lets us choose who we talk to. Whatever this radio sends out goes to Earth; probably straight to Morrison’s office.”
Holly, having already seen the console during her earlier search for the antidote, focused on opening the compartment doors. She turned the hidden dial underneath the main control console, causing each of the fifteen doors to emit a quiet click as their magnetic locks disengaged.
But rather than the doors, everyone turned to face the vacant door-side wall. While the doors clicked, this wall had emitted a sound more like the release of pressurised air. Even more intriguingly, the wall itself had begun to separate like two sliding doors being opened from the centre. In the previously hidden annex sat two large rover-like vehicles.
“Woah,” Bo said. He ran over to inspect them.
Grav followed him. “How are you supposed to get these things outside?”
“I think it’s a lift,” Viola said, crouching down. “You know, an elevator? Yeah. Yeah… look up! The ceiling opened, too.”
Sure enough, when Holly stepped into the rovers’ annex and looked upwards, she saw stars.
“This place is f…reaking crazy,” Grav said, moderating his language for the children’s benefit.
“You just noticed?” Bo replied.
Grav laughed. “Okay, so where is the button for the elevator?”
“Let’s just do what we came here to do before we do anything else,” Rusev said, maintaining her focus while the others oohed and aahed over the futuristic-looking rovers. “Everyone pick one compartment to start with.”
They all agreed and approached the storage unit. Bo took a floor-level compartment on the left, Viola took the one immediately above it, and Holly took the one at the top.
“Mine is empty,” Holly said.
Viola looked inside her chosen compartment. “So is mine.”
“Mine, too,” Bo said.
“Ah, shit,” Grav cursed, this time forgetting to moderate. “And mine.”
Rusev closed her chosen door and moved to another. Five down, ten to go.
“Mine isn’t,” Yury announced.
Everyone crowded around him. Holly, never more glad to have heard any words spoken, saw what the old man was lifting out from his compartment: a binder.
The binder was far larger than the looseleaf sheets of paper that comprised Dante’s primer, and it looked far more official. As Yury lifted the substantial file to the ground, Holly saw the heading “Emergency Survival Guide” written on the front above an unmistakable Morrison Electric logo.
The words “for use in case of catastrophic power failure” ran underneath the logo.
Robert told the rest of the group that every other compartment was definitely empty; whatever they could learn from this binder, it was all they would ever have.
Within the next ten minutes, Holly and the others would learn almost everything they wanted to know… plus a whole lot more that they didn’t.
fifty-seven
At first, the emergency survival guide — a physical file to be used if or when the computer system became inaccessible — seemed to be concerned solely with returning that system’s functions.
This would have been useful in itself, given that the initial troubleshooting checks indicated the location of the master switch and all potential points of failure, but Holly soon found an important nugget hidden amid the technical diagrams and more detailed instructions which followed.
The binder’s contents had been divided amongst the group to expedite the first read-through. Viola, who had a section from near the back, spoke to reveal that she’d found a legend for the large map they had already taken to the lander.
“The big building in the corner was in a zone marked 7C, right?” she began. “It says here that 7C equals New Eden. And it says that any zones beginning with 4 are Tourism Zones.”
“The water was a 4,” Robert said. “The beach.”
“So was the zone where I ran into thick snowfall,” Grav added. “But what the hell is it talking about, tourism?” He abandoned his pages and looked at Viola’s.
Murmurs about the me
aning and implications of the term “Tourism Zones” circled, but Holly remained single-mindedly focused on what she had found. After reading it twice to make sure she understood, she shared it with the others.
“Okay,” she said, looking for a particular switch and then flicking it without asking for anyone’s permission.
“Woah woah woah,” Robert said. “Hold on. Is that safe?”
Holly turned briefly to Robert, nodded, then focused on Rusev. “There are explicit warnings about which actions would trigger a data transfer. For whatever reason, it sounds like they really don’t want any unnecessary data transfers.”
“That’s because their communications protocols aren’t secure,” Rusev said. “I know it sounds dangerous to assume what kind of technology Morrison has when he’s been hiding… well, this… but we know from our moles that his people are extremely paranoid about their communications being intercepted and extremely bitter that they still can’t intercept ours. Again: I know it sounds dangerous to assume this. But as recently as a few months ago we were listening in on Morrison himself while he undertook one of those leisurely undersea voyages he’s so fond of. And if they had radio tech we couldn’t intercept, they’d be using it on Earth too.”
Holly gave a half-nod of half-understanding; she was no expert on communication protocols or anything else like that, but Rusev didn’t sound like there were any doubts in her mind.
“Anyway,” Holly said, “the data transfers aren’t something we can do by accident. It takes a series of deliberate steps, so it’s perfectly safe for us to look for answers on the rest of the system. Everything is stored locally.”
Rusev scanned the pages Holly had just read, to make sure she hadn’t made any dangerous assumptions. Holly didn’t mind; better safe than sorry.
When Rusev was satisfied, she and everyone else gathered around as Holly sat in one of the bunker’s two chairs with Yury in the other and the binder itself now doing the job of propping the door open; again, better safe than sorry. They all watched as Holly navigated through the opening menus using the huge trackpad directly below the main screen.
The system’s layout was surprisingly and welcomely familiar, running on a variant of the commercial operating system developed by Morrison Electric with which almost everyone had some degree of experience.
“Troubleshooting,” Viola said. “Right there, see the icon?”
Holly clicked it.
Short of a recorded interview with Roger Morrison himself answering overt questions like “Why did you build Terradox?” and “What is your plan?”, the breadth and depth of information within the troubleshooting guide Viola spotted was the best thing anyone could have hoped for.
Morrison had obviously never expected anyone to enter the bunker, much less access its computer system, so there were no carefully worded terms or opaque language.
“Zonal Blending” was one of the first topics in the long list. Holly clicked it and the group scanned the text and images. As the term suggested, zonal blending related to the blending of climate and ground conditions between ordinarily discrete zones. The divisions could be firm, as when Holly and Viola saw clouds stop in a perfect line as though blocked by an invisible wall, or one zone’s conditions could taper into the next, meeting halfway. It was interesting, but hardly pressing.
The “Gravity Control” topic was much the same, explaining how the level of gravity experienced on Terradox’s surface could be altered by turning a dial. Interesting, but hardly pressing. Slightly more worth noting was the information on how to reduce the effects of Terradox’s “Exterior Gravity Cloak” to ease the approach of incoming vessels as Dante had failed to do with his hidden transceiver.
“Should I skip the next one?” Holly asked, hovering the cursor over the word “Geosimilarity”.
Rusev asked her to click it, so she did.
The topic outlined how to alter the day-night cycle on Terradox, which was set by default to mimic Earth’s. There was also an option to remove the “artificial skyscape” — news to everyone — in order to monitor approaching vessels or enjoy “a more authentic Terradox experience.” The guide stressed that such changes should only be made when everyone knew they were coming, since such a major kind of visual modification could prove extremely disorienting if it came by surprise. The option to bring forth a “fantasy sky” with a chosen number of moons and visible constellations excited Bo, but there was no time to look into it.
The news of the artificial skyscape made Holly wonder, briefly, whether solar rays penetrated through the planet’s romotech cloak. Given how well the group’s solar charging devices had operated since their landing, and given that the artificial skyscape could be removed to make the real sun visible, she assumed so.
The title of the next topic, the last in the current section, promised much: “Communications”.
In amongst the tips to solve specific problems, the group learned that any data transfer other than a single “permission-seeking distress signal” could only occur when security codes were entered near-simultaneously on both ends. The code was listed.
“There has to be a way around that,” Grav said. “If the hardware can talk to Earth, any software-based restriction or block can surely be overridden. Surely?”
“In theory,” Rusev replied. “But we don’t want to talk to Morrison, and there’s nothing in here about communicating with anyone or anywhere else.”
Grav shrugged. “Not yet. There might be.”
Holly continued scrolling with a new hope, faint though it was, that Grav might have been right and that there might really have been instructions on how to reroute communications signals.
The language used in the warnings against unauthorised data transfers grew stronger as Holly read on. The reason, stated explicitly, confirmed Rusev’s comments that Morrison was paranoid about “hostile Earth-based researchers” picking up on the signals. For that very reason, transfers were only permitted at narrowly specified times during which either: A) power outages would be used to block Earth-based equipment capable of intercepting the signal, or B) such equipment would be deliberately overwhelmed by gibberish signals to mask the communication with Terradox.
Rusev nodded in a touché kind of way as she read this. “That has happened. Not for a while, but it has happened.”
A link in the troubleshooting document offered to let Holly review information about recent transfers. Bearing in mind that it seemed impossible to accidentally trigger another transfer, Rusev authorised her to click it.
As expected, the screen revealed that a data transfer had taken place the previous day. Prior to that, another had taken place on the day the group landed. No earlier transfers were displayed.
This “Transfers” screen also stated that the next was scheduled for six days in the future: day twelve, just as Dante’s primer had instructed.
“Click that,” Rusev said. “Where it says Future Transfers.”
As soon as Holly clicked the link, the starkest warning yet appeared, black text set on a harsh yellow background:
“WARNING: UNSCHEDULED DATA TRANSFER MAY CAUSE REMOTE ELIMINATION! No emergency is greater than the risk of sending an unobfuscated message to Earth. Under NO circumstances is it permissible to attempt to override these timed restrictions. Even if you have reason to believe that the existence of Terradox is under threat, make NO attempt to circumvent the outgoing data restrictions. Unapproved communication with Earth WILL place Terradox under IMMEDIATE threat. Dependant on the assessed likelihood of discovery, THE ENTIRETY OF THE TERRADOX ROMOSPHERE MAY BE REMOTELY ELIMINATED IN RESPONSE TO SUCH A VIOLATION.”
“Wow,” Robert said. No one could think of anything to add.
Whatever remote elimination entailed — be it bombs or an off switch — everyone knew that whatever it took to destroy the artificial atmosphere which was keeping them alive was already in place.
“We definitely can’t risk trying to reroute a signal,” Robert said, essentially talkin
g to himself as everyone else stared at the alarming message on the giant screen.
“Just let this sink in for a second,” Grav then chimed in. “What are Morrison and his cronies more worried about than anything else? Terradox being revealed. It is right there in black and yellow. Big capital letters spelling it out: they would rather destroy Terradox than risk it being revealed. They would rather throw away all the work they have put into this ridiculous and incredible project than risk anyone outside of their club finding out that it exists. That is the kind of people we are dealing with here. Bona fide sociopaths.”
“The GU in its current form couldn’t survive a revelation like this,” Rusev replied. “They couldn’t survive the truth coming out that they’d created and hidden a habitable planet — or romosphere, whatever they want to call it — and wasted all these resources on it, probably public money, all the while they destroy and degrade Earth in every respect. Losing Terradox would set them back by who knows how many years. But if anyone found out about Terradox? They’d be finished.”
Almost instinctively, Holly’s finger directed the cursor to a small envelope icon. The harsh yellow light faded, replaced by a standard background with an anything-but-standard message:
“Parker -- Next T2E transfer WILL be the last. If atmos data comes through all good, evac will commence as planned and sonic geo-cleansing will begin 72 hours later, once the ark has travelled sufficient distance to evade the TREMENDOUS effects of the cleansing pulse.”
Holly gulped. “Is everyone seeing this?” She turned to look at them and saw faces contorting in horror.
“Ark?” Bo asked.
“There’s another page,” Viola said. “Look. Click that arrow.”
The remaining few lines of the note to Dante appeared, providing context to its horrific beginning: “Earth will SEIZE its opportunity to regenerate without humanity’s leeching while our settlers SEIZE the opportunity to refine ourselves. Your inclusion has been well earned and no further duties will be required of you. -- RoMo.”
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 25
