Grav turned around in response to Viola’s call. Sickening dots of Dante’s blood were splattered across his face. As if pulled from a trance, he looked back at Dante’s lifeless body and wiped most of the blood from his own brow before dashing over to Robert.
Bo already stood over Robert, rhythmically rocking. It was hard to watch, but Holly put a hand on his back to try to offer some kind of comfort.
Viola was now on her knees at Robert’s side, begging Grav to tell her what she could do to help.
Grav pulled Robert’s shirt collar down to take a look at the wound. Holly noticed his shoulders slouch when he saw it, but he retained focus and asked her to hand him the medical box from the large storage unit.
“Dad!” Viola called as Holly fetched the box. “Dad! Can you hear me?”
There was no answer.
sixty-four
Robert was breathing — they knew that much, at least — but Grav remained visibly concerned by the level of blood loss.
After handing Grav the emergency medical box, Holly knelt beside them and saw the bullet wound just below Robert’s collarbone. It was bad, but she knew very well that it could have been so much worse.
As Grav worked to slow the bleeding, Holly couldn’t help but notice how horribly bloodied his right fist was.
“Is he going to be okay?” Viola asked. “Tell me he’s going to make it.”
Grav finished covering the wound. “He is going to be okay,” he said, almost convincingly. “But we have to get him back to the lander. He is going to need to rest and this first-aid kit is worthless.”
“Do you mean you want to take him in the rover?” Holly asked.
“Yes, this one,” Grav replied, pointing to the parked rover on the other side of Dante’s still motionless body. He walked over and dragged Dante out of the way, taking a few seconds to check for a pulse while he was there. He then opened the rover’s door and returned to Robert’s side. “Okay, help me get him into the back seat.”
Holly did as Grav suggested, and both were hugely relieved to see Robert wince and hear him groan under his breath as they carefully placed him inside the rover.
Viola now had her arm around Bo; of the two, she had evidently been far more convinced by Grav’s insistence that Robert would be okay. “Grav says he’s going to make it,” she said, explicitly making this point as she tried to soothe Bo, “so he’s going to make it.”
Bo didn’t react.
With Robert safely in the back seat, Holly insisted that she would drive him and the children back to the lander, with Bo and Viola sharing the front seat beside her. “You can take the other rover,” she said to Grav. “The one that’s outside. You’ll be able to carry Dante up the stairs, right? We obviously can’t leave him unattended.”
Grav hesitated then nodded very slowly, saying the word “right” several times. He turned to Viola and Bo. “You two should go outside and wait for Holly to drive the rover to the edge of the patch. We don’t know how much weight the elevator can take,” he said.
Viola followed the instruction without questioning it, taking Bo with her.
Holly knew that Grav had made up this fake concern on the spot — the elevator had already proven capable of lifting two fully loaded rovers, much less one — and she had a bad feeling she knew why.
“Are you really sure he’s going to be okay?” she asked, hoping she was wrong and that Grav wasn’t waiting to deliver bad news when the children weren’t present to hear it.
“Robert is going to be fine,” Grav said. He then covered his bloodied right hand with his left as though subconsciously hiding it. He looked straight at Holly, evidently forcing himself to meet her eyes, and spoke again: “But Dante is dead.”
sixty-five
“You killed him?”
Grav said nothing. He didn’t apologise and say that he hadn’t meant it; he didn’t deflect and say that Dante had brought it on himself; he didn’t try to reduce the impact of his actions by saying that Dante wouldn’t have been allowed to board the rescue Karrier anyway. All he said was nothing.
Holly tried to compose herself. “You’re going to clean this up on your own, but right now we need to deal with Robert. Press the button to lift the platform when I get in the rover, then close the roof and drive back in the other one. Quickly.”
“I am sorry,” Grav said. “But where the hell did he get a gun?”
“There was one in each rover,” Holly said. “We just found that out on our way to the Karrier. But if we’re going to start asking questions, how the hell did he get loose?”
Grav looked at the ground as he shook his head, clearly disgusted with his own carelessness. “I had to untie him from the bed in the extension to bring him here, but his hands were still bound. His hands were still bound in the rover we came here in and they were still bound in the second rover where I put him, but I did not tie him to anything inside. I did not see any way for him to free his hands or open the door, but he obviously—”
“Just press the damn button,” Holly interrupted.
Grav did so. The platform lifted, frustratingly slowly, and Holly proceeded to drive the rover over the patch of thorny plants to the safety of its edge where Viola and Bo were waiting. They got in, sharing the same seat.
Holly drove as quickly as the rover would allow. Robert shifted in the back seat, beginning to make noises that sounded more like “oww” than the earlier pained and animalistic groans. Viola and Bo turned to see him, and he reacted to Viola’s “Can you hear me?” with a nerve-settlingly affirmative mumble.
“Stay still and relax,” Holly told him. “Everyone is okay and we’re going to make sure that you are, too.”
No one asked whether Dante was included in Holly’s “everyone”; given the difficulty she would have had in answering tactfully without flat-out lying, she was extremely glad of this.
Robert’s eyes were open by the time the rover reached the lander, but Holly soon realised that she wouldn’t be able to get him up the ladder without Grav to assist. She sent Viola and Bo into the lander ahead of her and fortunately didn’t have to wait too long for Grav. He arrived without Dante. When Holly asked where the body was, “gone” was the only answer she got.
“Dante’s dead?” Robert asked, still inside the rover and still in great pain.
Grav was visibly pleased to hear Robert talking, whatever the words, and crouched down to see him. “Forget about Dante; he made his bed. What we are going to do is get you inside, okay? I am going to carry you on my back and you are going to lock your right arm around my neck. Can you do that? Holly will be right behind us.”
“I don’t know,” Robert replied. He inhaled sharply, feeling a sudden twinge. “Is the bullet still there?”
Grav helped him out of the rover. “Do not worry about any of that. The worst is over.”
Understandably, Rusev was waiting at the top of the ladder. Holly and Grav didn’t know how much the children would have told her but imagined that they would have been too concerned about Robert to mention anything about Dante’s condition. This, however, didn’t stop Rusev from asking the obvious question:
“Where’s Dante?”
At this point, while Grav helped Robert onto one of the lander’s beds, Holly made a unilateral decision to reveal the truth in front of everyone in the plainest possible terms. “Dead,” she announced. “Grav tackled him to the ground and he hit his head. He’s dead.”
In one grammatical sense, this euphemistic description was entirely true: Grav did tackle Dante to the ground, and then he — Grav — did hit Dante’s head… over and over and over again. The syntax of Holly’s answer may have implied that Dante hit his head on the floor or another surface, but the end result was the same. She didn’t yet consider the likelihood that the condition of Grav’s right fist — which was now more bruised than bloody — would raise further questions. For now, all that mattered was Robert; no distractions could be allowed to get in the way.
“And
the radio?” Rusev asked. “He didn’t damage that, did he?”
In one way, Holly admired Rusev’s instant focus on the radio. In another, she found the easiness of her shift slightly troubling. She shook her head. “It’s fine, sitting there waiting for us.”
Rusev’s body relaxed, the tension vanishing. “Okay. We should get going, then.”
This level of emotional detachment was too much for Holly. “I think we can wait until Robert is a bit more stable,” she said, quite firmly.
Rusev seemed to consider her words. “Time is quite decidedly against us, Holly.”
“Go then. I’ll be there soon. We’ve got both rovers, anyway.”
“Okay,” Rusev said. She picked up the two flasks that would see her through the day, praised Bo and Viola for being so brave, and set off.
Viola insisted upon watching as Grav extracted the bullet from Robert’s wound. Grav had already injected a potent and fast-acting analgesic which stopped Robert from squirming.
Bo insisted upon no such thing and chose instead to sit with Holly and Yury on the other side of the lander. He remained unusually but understandably quiet.
“Are you excited about the radio?” Yury asked him, speaking in a very gentle voice. Holly expected this from Yury, who was gentle to almost everyone; there was no surprise in seeing him act in such a manner, as there had been when Grav playfully ruffled the boy’s hair the night before.
“I don’t think it’s going to work,” Bo replied.
This did take Holly by surprise. Worry over his father’s condition was one thing, but Bo had previously been the most consistently upbeat member of the group when it came to evaluating their survival prospects.
Yury immediately asked Bo why he felt this way, saving Holly the trouble.
Bo shrugged. Without context it may have looked like a lazy shrug, but deflated would have been a better term. “Why do you think it will?”
“Three reasons,” Yury said. “It’s possible, it’s straightforward, and it’s safe.”
“How?”
“Well… it’s possible to make contact with the station because the people there are already looking and listening for a signal from this vicinity. This is where we went missing. Okay, we’ve been missing and silent for almost a week. But the station won’t give up on us that easily.”
Bo didn’t brighten, but nor did he argue. A welcome side effect of Yury’s attempts to lift the boy’s spirits was that Holly was hearing the old man’s reasons for optimism laid out more clearly than she had so far.
“And it’s going to be relatively straightforward because our radio setup from the Karrier does most of the work,” Yury continued. “The bunker’s dish facilitates the communication — it’s the necessary hardware, hidden within the plants a few metres beyond the stairway — but Ekaterina is very confident that it will work with our radio, which already has the station’s radio console as a pre-programmed target.”
“But how is it safe?” Bo pressed. That he asked this indicated his acceptance of the previous two points, which was reflected in Yury’s slight smile.
“Because Morrison isn’t listening. And even if he did, by some miracle, pick up a signal… communications between our radios are encrypted.”
“So you’re admitting that he could pick up something,” Bo said, still unconvinced. “And even if he couldn’t decipher it, wouldn’t he still know where it’s coming from?”
Yury turned his palms up in a casual shrug. “It doesn’t matter; he already knows we’re here. The Karrier was supposed to land safely, remember, so it would be plausible that Dante hadn’t yet had a chance to furtively destroy the radio and that it sent out an automatic distress call. But since Dante executed the previous data transfers, Morrison has no reason to think there are any problems. He knows Terradox can’t be seen, visited or escaped by anyone without changes to the cloak — which can’t happen without Dante’s remote device or access to the bunker — and he has absolutely no reason to think the cloak is in danger. No reason at all.”
At last, Bo seemed to buy it. “Can I come with you when you go back to the bunker?” he asked, turning to Holly.
“Of course you can,” she said. “We’re just going to wait a little while until we know that your dad is definitely okay.”
Bo, with a sudden sense of urgency, crossed the lander to check on Robert.
“Yes, all good,” Grav said, responding to a question Holly hadn’t heard. “He is going to be drowsy for a while with these painkillers, but we got it out okay and he has not lost a dangerous amount of blood. We are all good, kiddo.”
Holly and Yury shared a relieved glance, each sighing with relief.
“Grav says he’s stable,” Bo said, hurrying back to them. “Can we go now?”
Holly couldn’t help but laugh at how keen Bo had suddenly become to be present for the first attempt at radio contact. “In a few minutes,” she said. “Make sure you have some warm clothes and something to drink, okay?”
Bo gave her two thumbs up and busily rummaged through his small case for a zip-up jacket.
While Bo got ready, Holly checked on Robert. “Is he really as safe as you told Bo?” she asked Grav.
“Yes. He was lucky. Usual story… an inch or two the wrong way and he would have been gone. But yes, really: there are no major danger signs.”
“What do you mean no major danger signs?”
Grav shrugged, not quite dismissively but not far from it. “The wound is not as clean as I would have liked, but I do not think there is a chance of anything worse than a minor infection. And considering how it looked when he hit the floor, I will settle for that.”
Holly couldn’t disagree. “And you don’t mind staying with him, do you? I want to be there when—”
“Definitely,” he interrupted. “Go go go. Robert will be in safe hands.”
Holly nodded appreciatively and turned around. “Viola, are you coming?”
The girl looked down at her father and shook her head. “Look after Bo, okay?”
“Always,” Holly said, placing a warm hand on her back.
“And walk to the bunker,” Viola added. “That way we’ll have a rover. You know, just in case we need to reach you quickly.”
It was a good idea and the only smart thing to do.
Bo was disappointed when Holly told him he couldn’t help her drive because the rover was staying where it was, but she promised he could do so on the way back.
“I’ve got a better idea,” he beamed as they descended the ladder after saying their goodbyes. “When we make contact and the rescue crew comes to get us, how about you let me steer the Karrier back to Venus?”
Holly smiled. “We’ll see.”
sixty-six
Bo’s excitement grew with every step of the short walk to the bunker, along the route that his inquisitiveness had first discovered several days earlier.
Once there, he giddily typed in the code he still knew by heart — 2 8 2 8 0 2 — and walked inside with Holly.
They were greeted by the sight of Rusev sitting in one of the bunker’s two chairs, with the Karrier’s radio out of sight under the control console.
“Was there a problem hooking it up?” Holly asked straight away. “Do you need me to do anything?”
“It’s all hooked up,” Rusev replied. “Just finished. It has to sit down there because the main connection to the dish is only long enough to reach the part of the control console it was meant for. I haven’t activated it yet; I wanted to wait until you got here. Anyway, how’s Robert? Okay?”
Bo answered: “The bullet is out and Grav said he’s going to be fine. Drowsy, but fine. Grav has the right tablets in case any signs of an infection show up.”
“Excellent. Excellent.”
Holly, impressed by Bo’s succinct summary of Robert’s condition but impatient to get started, lowered herself to the ground for a better look at the exposed-looking radio which had been gutted from the Karrier. “So… how do we tur
n it on?”
“And how do we talk to them?” Bo asked. “There’s no keyboard or screen, unless we’re using this console… which we’re not, right?”
“We’ll be communicating by voice,” Rusev said, answering the second question first. “And as for switching it on, you should see a physical switch on the front there. Any time you like.”
Holly reached forward and flicked the switch. A small red light began to blink. “Now what?”
Rusev, now sitting on the floor along with Bo, breathed deeply. “Now we wait for that light to stop blinking and turn green. The radio is trying to connect to its counterpart at the station. I think from this location it’ll take forty or fifty seconds and then the same for the return signal, so we’re going to know within two minutes whether or not this is going to work.”
Holly looked down at her wristband. Without any question, these would be the longest two minutes of her life. After so many struggles over the past week, and with so much at stake over the next few days, it all came down to this. Weeks, days, hours and minutes gave way to seconds as the only relevant timescale.
After 93 seconds, the light turned green.
sixty-seven
“The small button to the right!” Rusev shrieked, almost overcome with joy. “Hold it to speak!”
Holly reached for the button. But before her finger got there, she heard a female voice she recognised from previous and less urgent communications. This voice, the greatest voice she had ever heard, resonated through the speaker on the front of the radio module.
“Grav?! Grav, do you read?”
Momentarily and understandably forgetting about the unavoidable time lag, Holly spoke over the voice. “It’s Holly,” she said, struggling to contain her emotions. “Holly and Rusev! Grav is with us but not right here. Spaceman, too. We need help.”
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 28
