Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  Rusev crouched to the ground, head in hands. Yury groaned and spun his chair away from the screen, turning towards the rovers which had provided a long-forgotten momentary respite of positivity and excitement just a short while earlier. Grav placed a hand on Holly’s shoulder. Viola and Robert were directly behind Holly; she didn’t really want to see their expressions.

  “I don’t get it,” Bo said, his voice unusually resonant in the silence. “What’s going on?”

  Holly considered how to say it. There was no easy way, that was for sure. As she turned to Bo, Viola saved her the trouble.

  The girl crouched down to her brother’s height; there may only have been six years between them, but at times like this Bo’s stunted growth and Viola’s long legs made them look a generation apart. “If we do the data transfer in six days,” she said, talking very softly, “Morrison and his people will abandon Earth and everyone left behind will die.”

  “So we just won’t do it, then,” he said. “Right, Dad? Right, Holly? We’re not going to let all of those people die.”

  “Bo,” Viola whispered, holding both of his shoulders and staring into his eyes. “If we don’t do the transfer, we all die.”

  fifty-eight

  The group faced a horrifying choice: doom themselves, or doom the entire population of Earth.

  If the next data transfer didn’t go through at the scheduled time, poison gas would destroy all human life on Terradox. And if the transfer did go through, a “tremendous” sonic pulse would destroy all human life on Earth.

  “If we save ourselves, they’re still coming,” Rusev said. “We would only be delaying the inevitable.”

  Robert’s head shot towards her, like a prey animal reacting to the sound of a twig snapping underfoot. “And if we sacrifice ourselves, they’re still coming! Read the message: all we’d be doing is delaying their evacuation and ‘cleansing pulse’… we wouldn’t be preventing anything.”

  “We can hide,” Grav suggested, largely ignoring the two previous comments and speaking in a defiant and angry tone while the majority of the bunker’s occupants were overcome with dread and helplessness. “If we do what we have to do to survive the next week, we can hide until they arrive and then catch them by surprise.”

  Holly closed her eyes tightly and sighed. “Grav… there are seven of us. Two kids, two seniors, Robert… and us.”

  “Holly is right,” Yury interjected. “There are seven of us. We are weighing seven lives against four billion. There is no debate. If we act to save Earth, any number of things could torpedo Morrison’s plan before his next launch window. This is not a time for selfishness.”

  “That’s not at all what I was getting at,” Holly replied, snapping at him with an uncharacteristic glare. “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  “But you’re right that there’s no debate,” Robert said, addressing Yury in an even firmer tone than Holly had seconds earlier. “Because if you think I’m going to watch my children die to satisfy your sense of goddamn utilitarian ethics…” he trailed off. “I’m with Grav: we keep ourselves alive now and worry about later when it comes. At least we’ll have a later.”

  “For how long?” Yury pushed.

  “Enough!” Holly yelled. “Everyone just shut up. Turning against each other isn’t going to help.”

  More than any of the others, Holly knew how quickly a group dynamic could breakdown and turn sour — even deadly — when hopelessness struck. This lose/lose situation was a whole lot more real than the one she’d faced when she and her former colleagues at Morrison Astronautics were tricked into believing they were utterly stranded on a barren planet, and all-too-familiar cracks were already appearing in her current group’s previously united makeup.

  “I’m going to talk to Dante,” she said. “Robert, I want you to stay here so I know that no one is going to make any unilateral decisions to begin any data transfers.” Holly knew she risked offending Yury with this inference, but she didn’t have time to worry about anyone’s feelings.

  “I can do that,” Grav offered. “Robert, take your kids to bed.”

  Robert nodded. His body language screamed “broken man”, but his expression remained as stoic as he could muster. Holly understood why he trusted Grav; it wasn’t simply a case of trusting him or taking his word, but rather a realisation of the self-evident fact that Grav would never surrender to Roger Morrison or anyone else.

  “I’m leaving, anyway,” Yury said. If he was hurt or angered by their implications, he hid it well.

  Grav shrugged. “I am still staying.”

  Rusev shook her head at Grav, angered by his tone. She bit her lip and turned to Viola and Bo. “Goodnight,” she said.

  “’Night,” they both replied, meekly and automatically.

  Yury and Rusev left the bunker without another word.

  Grav gave Bo a light punch on the arm. “Get some sleep, huh? We will all be thinking more clearly in the morning.”

  “You should close the roof,” Bo said, pointing up to the open section above the rovers. “It’s going to get colder.”

  “Always thinking,” Grav said, ruffling Bo’s hair before walking over to the button which controlled the roof’s opening and closing mechanism.

  Holly had never seen this gentle side of Grav before the crash, but he wore it well. “I’ll be back later,” she said.

  Grav raised a half-hearted thumb.

  Robert, Viola and Bo filed out of the bunker.

  “Fucking Morrison,” Grav muttered.

  Holly paused at the door for a few seconds then stepped outside and closed it.

  Fucking Morrison.

  On the way back to the extension, guided by flashlights to assist the night’s brilliant stars, Robert moved close enough to Holly to speak without the children hearing.

  “If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have said there was literally nothing I would put past Morrison,” he said. “At Olivia’s funeral, he shook my hand and looked in my eyes and told me he was sorry for our loss. And if I hadn’t already known beyond reasonable doubt that his orders had caused our loss, I would have believed him. Stopping myself from lashing out that day is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but I did it because my children would have been in immediate danger if he had the slightest clue that I knew he was behind it.”

  “He’s a monster,” Holly said.

  “Right. But like I said, I thought there was nothing I’d put past him. But this? A literal Reset? Using this place as a refuge while he cleanses Earth? That’s not just inhuman… it’s demonic.”

  Demonic wasn’t a word Holly’s mind would have naturally gravitated towards, but she could hardly disagree with it.

  “The irony is almost too painful to bear,” Robert went on. “I forced my children to flee a planet Morrison controlled, and in the end I brought them to a planet he built. We’re in more danger here than we ever were on Earth. Whatever danger we were in at home, we were never the touch of a button away from being fumigated like vermin.”

  “If we hadn’t landed here, his demented ‘cleansing pulse’ would have gone ahead and this time next week you wouldn’t have been alive enough to wonder what if,” Holly replied. She sympathised with Robert, but no one had any time for regrets. “But if we focus on what matters, it’s obvious that Dante must know something else that can help us. He has to know something.”

  Robert replied flatly: “Give me five minutes and we’ll find out.”

  “Let me try reasoning with him first. As long as we can assume that he doesn’t want to die, there must be some scope for reason.”

  “I don’t like assumptions,” Robert said. He moved slightly away from Holly again, towards the children, indicating that the conversation was over.

  When they all reached the extension, Holly once again approached Robert and repeated her request for a chance to reason with Dante before he progressed to other methods. It was less of a request than a courtesy — Holly was in charge, when it came down t
o it — but Robert agreed and walked past Dante’s makeshift holding cell towards the bedroom he shared with his son.

  “I want to come with you,” Viola said, speaking her first words for a long time. The statement was firm and plain; Holly saw no reason to dismiss it.

  Dante was lying awake on the bed, evidently past the worst of his thorn-induced difficulties. His head turned towards Holly and Viola when he heard them enter, but he quickly returned his gaze to the ceiling.

  “We know everything,” Holly said. “Grav found the primer and we’ve been inside the computer system. We saw the note Morrison wrote after your last data transfer. We know the choice we have.”

  Dante coughed twice and sat up gingerly, still feeling the after effects of the antidote. “So you know there’s no way out of what’s coming? You know there’s no right answer?”

  “If we die, you die,” Viola said.

  As a demented grin spread across Dante’s face, Holly began to think Robert was right and that reason and rationality might be too much to expect.

  Dante looked directly at Holly. “Kind of ironic, isn’t it? You already proved you can take multiple lives to save your own. The question is: can you do the opposite?”

  fifty-nine

  “You did this for a ticket to Terradox,” Holly said, trying one last time to reason with Dante. “Right? The only way to survive was to defect, because Morrison’s plan is to wipe out everyone on Earth and then — presumably, since he wants Rusev alive — to make his move against the station. But if you just lie there and smile to yourself about how dead the rest of us are, what good is that going to do you? What good will it do you when we don’t initiate the next transfer and he poisons the atmosphere? You’re a pawn, Dante. He’s using you.”

  Dante shrugged, as much as he could with both hands restrained. “Rather him than you.”

  Holly looked at the ground. She tried to gather herself before her last play: a desperate bluff.

  “You know something, Dante? If you were as smart as you think you are, you would have made sure you cut the Karrier’s power before you let the cameras catch you trying to fry the radio. Now we know exactly what’s stopping us from contacting the station, and Rusev is already on it. She told me the radio will be operational again within hours. And now that we know that Morrison Electric’s communications protocols really are miles behind Rusentra’s — the warnings on the computer make that clear enough — we know he won’t be able to detect our signals. And we know they don’t get any data from this place outside of the scheduled transfers, so we know they wouldn’t see a rescue crew approaching from Venus.”

  Dante said nothing, but Holly saw him gulp.

  “We also now know how to reduce the strength of the barrier you were supposed to let the Karrier pass through unscathed. So after we talk to the station in the morning, the rescue crew could be here on the ground in three or four days. You know… less than six.”

  “She’s not fixing that transmitter,” he muttered. “No way.”

  “Yeah,” Holly said in a sarcastically deflated tone. “I mean, it’s not like she’s an expert or anything.”

  On that note, Holly made a swift exit, taking a gentle hold of Viola’s arm to ensure she followed.

  “What was the point of that?” the girl asked, genuinely curious as they entered their shared bedroom.

  “To gauge his reaction. They really can’t trace our signals. The radio really is all that’s standing in our way.”

  “Didn’t we already know that, though?”

  “Rusev assumed it,” Holly said. “But that’s different from knowing.”

  “Yeah, but… how does it help?

  Holly didn’t have an immediate answer to this, but Dante had been sufficiently rattled that her mind was able to momentarily push aside the stakes and the deadline in favour of pursuing some kind — any kind — of potential solution.

  For the next ten minutes, Holly and Viola sat silently.

  Robert didn’t pass the doorway on his way to Dante, and Holly knew why; Bo’s sobbing resonated through the extension, along with Robert’s attempts to soothe his mind. Viola looked like she was going to cry, too, but she somehow held it together.

  When Viola grew tired of sitting quietly, she rose from her bed and carefully watered Holly’s potted plant.

  Holly watched on as the resilient girl took care of the resilient plant. Then, all of a sudden, she sat bolt upright on her bed.

  “What?” Viola asked, unsure whether it was a good or a bad sign.

  The open-mouthed half-smile on Holly’s face when she turned around strongly suggested good, and the six words which followed sealed it:

  “I think I have an idea.”

  sixty

  With Viola at her side, Holly wasted no time in sharing her germ of an idea with Rusev:

  “Dante broke our transmitter and the bunker obviously has one. I don’t exactly know the differences between antennae and transmitters and receivers or anything else, but is there any way we could use our radio with the bunker’s transmitter?”

  Rusev, who was sitting at the table with Yury, didn’t roll her eyes or tut at the stupidity of the idea. Given how little time Rusev normally wasted with politeness, and given the unusually time-sensitive nature of this high-stakes situation, Holly took this as a good sign. She continued:

  “What I mean is: could we gut the radio from the Karrier and, I don’t know, link it or connect it to whatever physical transmitter there is inside the bunker? Because if it’s physically possible to disconnect the bunker’s console from its transmitter, it’s not like that would be flagged up on Earth; there’s zero uplink or comms between Terradox and Earth apart from scheduled transfers and distress signals, so it wouldn’t trip an alert or anything.”

  “A radio is a radio,” Viola chimed in excitedly. “Right?”

  Rusev rose and walked to the window where she stood in thought for several seconds. “It’s not exactly going to be ‘plug and play’,” she said, gazing into the night, “but there is a detailed guide for repairs and modifications to the bunker’s console…”

  With Rusev still looking outside, Holly and Viola turned to each other in response to her cautiously optimistic reply. They both smiled.

  “We only have five and a half days,” Yury said. “What good does contacting the station do if we still have to make the same choice: sacrifice ourselves, or sacrifice Earth?”

  Rusev finally turned away from the window. “We were only three days away from the station when we crashed. Allowing a day for a small crew to stock the surviving Karrier for a short but unplanned mission, that leaves us with a day and a half. A day and a half to disconnect the radio console from our Karrier, connect it to the bunker’s transmitter after disconnecting the bunker’s console, and successfully contact the station. Not to mention the walk to and from our Karrier, which would have to wait until morning since it could be extremely cold out there at night…”

  “We can drive,” Holly said. “You saw the rovers. Even if it takes thirty minutes to get one outside and learn how to use it, then another thirty minutes to get there, that still saves us an hour. If we leave now and whatever you have to do at the Karrier is easy, we could be back in the morning and have a whole day to try the next step.”

  Viola was nodding in support. “Holly’s right. And even if you can’t quite fix it in time for a crew to get here in five and a half days, as long as you fix it before then we’d still be able to tell the station what’s going on and they could try to send the news back to Earth. Maybe no one would believe it, but at least we’d be giving them a chance.”

  “Exactly,” Holly said. “But the best case scenario is that you hook our radio up to their transmitter, we call the station, and help gets here in time. If we’re safely on the way to the station, it doesn’t matter if the air here gets poisoned. We won’t need to initiate the transfer, which means Morrison’s evacuation and ‘sonic cleansing’ will be delayed. And from the station
we can transmit our hard evidence to Earth about everything Morrison has done. That was already the plan, back when the only things you knew about were his role in the famine and maybe his link to Devastation Day. Now we have proof of a hidden planet and his express intent to eliminate billions of people. If this works, it does everything. We live, he falls.”

  Rusev walked away from the window and continued past the table with a blank expression on her face.

  “What are you doing?” Holly asked.

  Rusev didn’t look back. “Getting our EVA suits,” she said. “If the rover breaks down, we’re going to need them.”

  sixty-one

  Holly and Viola hurried across the very short distance to the extension to tell Robert of the plan.

  After Viola told Robert that they were going to the Karrier with Rusev — Viola’s presence on the trip was news to Holly, but not unwelcome — Holly quickly explained that Rusev planned to “remove the whole radio console and bring it back to the bunker” before attempting to use it in conjunction with the bunker’s transmitter to contact the station. This untechnical and somewhat stilted explanation wasn’t simplified for Robert’s benefit so much as it was limited by Holly’s own understanding of the specifics.

  Bo didn’t ask to go along, but his gloom lifted at the news of a plan. At this stage, as Robert vocalised, any hope was better than none and anything was worth trying. He wished them well and told Viola to be careful. Holly appreciated the trust Robert now frequently showed, both in her ability to keep Viola safe and in the girl’s ability to take care of herself.

  Holly had suggested that Rusev could wait at the lander for the rover, saving her the fifteen-minute walk to the bunker which Holly and Viola could run in five, but Rusev insisted on looking over the console’s radio repair guide and information about the rovers before setting off. She was satisfied with what she read and, with Grav just as enthused about the plan as Holly had expected, they proceeded to raise the rovers’ platform to the surface at the touch of a button and drive one forward before re-lowering the other on the platform and closing the roof once more.