Holly glanced away, preferring to risk looking rude rather than welling up.
“Time to get going,” Yury said. “Get those kids to that station, Holly. That’s why you’re here.”
Holly blinked hard then turned back to face him. “Okay. And you definitely know what to press, right?”
“Well, it’s definitely one of these three buttons…” Yury joked.
She laughed. “Goodbye, Mr Gardev.”
“Stay strong,” he replied, slowly swivelling his chair around to face the console once more.
Holly came face-to-face with Grav at the bunker’s open door. Each knew exactly how the other felt, so neither said a word.
seventy-eight
The drive to the launch site was a less happy occasion than it should have been. Holly drove one rover with Robert in the passenger seat and his children behind, while Grav drove the other with Rusev and everyone’s luggage.
As Holly drove, she wasn’t sure whether Grav would stay diplomatically silent or whether he would currently be lambasting Rusev for supporting Yury’s decision to stay behind. She hoped for the former, since Rusev was closer to Yury than anyone else and had obviously only accepted his selfless offer as an absolute last resort.
Bo and Viola were quieter than Holly had ever heard them, barely making a sound until the sight of the waiting Karrier livened them up — particularly Bo — as they exited the rover and began the familiar descent to the grassy canyon below.
Holly watched as the rescue crew of four busily moved cargo from the group’s fallen Karrier into the rescue Karrier. She hadn’t directly asked Rusev for confirmation of whether the previously discussed defensive weapons system would be taken to the station, but the heavy lifting equipment and huge metal crates suggested so.
On the ground, the crew warmly greeted Holly and the rest of her group. She vaguely recognised two of the four as the chaperones who had been assigned to the other Karrier months earlier when she and Grav had assumed their own respective roles. The third and fourth crew members were more senior members of Rusev’s station command. Holly knew both of their faces and names but had never met them in person. Predictably, they both knew her and proclaimed how glad they were to finally meet her despite the circumstances. They also fawned over the children and thanked Robert for his strength, making sure he understood that the evidence he had provided — specifically his late wife’s explosive research into the origins of the catastrophic famine — would play a crucial role in the hours and days to come.
“Is this thing exactly the same as our Karrier?” Bo asked as he covered the final few steps towards the entrance.
“Yup,” Holly said. “Identical.”
“So we can sleep in the lander?”
“Sure can.”
Bo hurried inside. Viola ran forward to keep up with him, leaving Holly and Robert to enter last.
Though none of them, Holly included, had ever set foot in this Karrier, its familiar layout made the route to the emergency lander feel like second nature.
“This is where you rugby tackled me,” Viola said to Holly, feigning annoyance as they crossed the threshold from the main section of the Karrier into their makeshift accommodation.
“And that’s where Bo was hiding,” Holly replied, pointing to the corner. “How in the hell was that only nine days ago?”
“Time flies when you’re having fun,” Robert quipped.
Holly turned to see the man grinning as he placed his suitcase under one of the beds. Nine days earlier, she had been exasperated by how useless he seemed as she tried to ensure a safe touchdown while dealing with Viola’s anger and her own feelings of crushing helplessness. But now that she knew what Robert had gone through in the lead up to those moments, she not only regretted judging him so quickly but also had a newfound appreciation for his strength and courage. He had taken massive and selfless action to protect his children not once but twice: first by taking them off-Earth to evade the danger he wisely saw coming, and more recently by tackling Dante when he had a gun pointed at Bo.
Robert Harrington may have taken a while to prove himself, Holly thought, but he had sure as hell come through when it mattered.
After what seemed like no time, one of the senior crew members appeared at the door to tell everyone that take off was imminent.
“Are you staying with us?” Bo asked Holly. “Dad, can she stay with us?”
“She’s not a stray dog,” Robert grinned, still in jovial spirits now that escape from Terradox was so imminent.
“I’ll stay,” Holly said. She turned back to the crew member. “The seal between the compartments doesn’t have to close during take off anyway, right? We only did that during the passenger runs so no one was walking around.”
“That’s right, it’ll stay open,” the crew member replied before departing.
“You all remember what it felt like to take off from Earth, don’t you?” Holly asked. “I know it was a while ago.”
“Viola was crying,” Bo said.
“Only because I actually had friends who I was leaving behind,” she retorted.
Robert sighed and rolled his eyes. “Take away the danger and they fall right back into the old patterns.”
“That’s always the way it goes,” Holly said, quietly glad that everything felt so low-key.
An automated message then played through the lander’s speakers, instructing everyone to remain seated. The vibration kicked in seconds later. The Karrier’s launch procedure was far smoother than many Holly had experienced in simulations prior to her first real mission, but it still had some kick.
“’Bye, Terradox,” Bo said as the Karrier left the logic-defying surface.
“Good bloody riddance,” Robert added.
Holly was the first to stand in defiance of the automated order, a mere twenty seconds or so after take off when the worst of the intense vibrations had passed. She looked down as everything grew smaller and smaller. It was a surreal sight; one which was being carefully and thoroughly captured by sophisticated recording equipment mounted to the Karrier’s base.
Robert joined Holly at the window seconds later, prompting the children to follow.
“How will we know when we’ve definitely made it out?” Viola asked.
“It’ll disappear, dummy,” Bo replied.
Viola punched him in the arm, hard enough to show him she meant it but lightly enough to avoid leaving a mark.
As a whole, the visible areas of Terradox looked as rocky and barren as they had during the group’s initial unplanned descent. Holly hadn’t seen it “come out of nowhere” like Grav described, but she looked forward to seeing it vanish.
And then, just like that, vanish it did.
“Holy shit!” Viola said.
“Language,” Robert automatically chided as he gazed open-mouthed at the nothingness below.
Bo jumped onto one of the beds, claiming it as his own. He lay back and smiled. “Next stop: Venus.”
“That’s my bed,” Viola yelled.
Robert temporarily ignored their squabble and turned to Holly. “We made it,” he said. “We actually made it.”
“We sure did,” Holly said.
When Robert walked over to quell his children’s argument over which bed was whose, Holly sighed and gazed mournfully towards the perfectly cloaked romosphere.
Well, she thought… most of us made it.
Day Eleven
seventy-nine
Given the Karrier’s closed environment and artificial lighting, there had been no obvious division between night and morning. But when Holly glanced at her wristband after taking in the latest positive report from the station that the early stages of the group’s evidence-leaking plan were going down well on Earth, she saw that it was now the day on which everything rested: Revelation Day.
In theory, Holly had agreed to share a lander with Robert and his family for the return trip to the station while Rusev and Grav shared the other. In practice, she had spent
almost every second in the control room with Rusev, Grav and the two senior members of the rescue crew. Bo slept for a few hours here and there and Viola made the most of her proximity to the Karrier’s dining machine, but Holly hadn’t seen much of either of them.
Phase one of the leaks, orchestrated by Ekaterina Rusev but carried out by high-ranking members of her team aboard the Venus station, had so far gone better than anyone could have realistically hoped.
Any GU attempts to overwhelm receiving equipment with gibberish signals, which Rusev fully expected to come, would have proven futile for the simple reason that the station was communicating directly with friendly Earth-based operatives using uncracked transfer protocols. These earthbound communications originated from the station rather than the Karrier in order to avoid the remote but potentially fatal risk of the Karrier’s path being traceable from Earth, a development which would have revealed the group’s survival and escape from Terradox.
To further encourage the belief that she and the rest of the travelling group hadn’t survived, Rusev ordered her station-based team to include statements to the effect that her Karrier had failed to reach its destination and that, in keeping with the rest of the leaks, foul play from Roger Morrison was suspected. Rusev’s presumed death was cited as the reason for the explosive information being released now, a kind of dead man’s switch activated ten days after her last contact with the station. Rusev had candidly shared her thought process regarding this point with Holly, asserting with confidence that GU retaliation against the station was out of the question given that it would be seen as a self-evident admission of guilt in the eyes of a global population already reacting with growing fury to a series of appalling revelations which could never be pushed back under Roger Morrison’s rug.
The content of phase one focused on two issues: Morrison’s myriad links to the epoch-defining events of Devastation Day and Olivia Harrington’s research into the origin of the near-apocalyptic famine which preceded it. Olivia’s research, bravely smuggled to Rusev’s launch site by Robert and his children, spoke for itself. Only very limited excerpts had been widely published before high-ranking GU officials caught wind of the story and called her in for an unscheduled but supposedly routine performance review. Olivia’s documented fears about the real reason for this meeting, along with her suspicious death just minutes before its commencement, painted a vivid picture.
Olivia’s evidence was leaked alongside the Devastation Day evidence, which included Bo’s proof of interview tampering as well as witness testimonies and documentary evidence that the eco-terrorist scapegoats did not exist, had never existed, and had in fact been dreamt up during a meeting between Morrison and several of his inner circle. This evidence took the form of a defector’s written recollection rather than a decisive recording of Morrison talking about the plan, but it included so many hyper-specific and incriminating details that it really was the next best thing.
Once safely received on Earth, the data was forwarded to all major media outlets, with the famine-related evidence being distributed first. Rusev worked on the necessary assumption that at least one outlet — just one — would break rank over such an explosive story and that others would inevitably fall over themselves to play catch up once the cat was out of the bag. The GU sanctioned all media outlets, but in some regions — primarily North America, Eastern Europe and the British Isles — a well established pragmatic concession meant that several relatively prominent outlets remained privately owned and were merely overseen by the GU’s Department of Information rather than directly operated by agents of its bloated bureaucracy.
The proof of deliberate crop sabotage had been enough to get the media ball rolling, and the public reaction was so intense that by the time the shock-inducing Devastation Day leaks began to flow, groups of angry citizens who were already nearing breaking point had taken to the streets to make their voices heard. The largest early protest was at the GU’s Northern HQ in New London, just a few miles from Olivia Harrington’s home.
GU forces reacted slowly at first, but raids were soon ordered and carried out on the first media outlets to have covered the Olivia Harrington story. Rusev had foreseen this unavoidable collateral damage, expecting that the GU would initially assume that evidence was being fed to these outlets by sources on the ground. All that the raids accomplished was adding legitimacy to the very news which the outlets had been violently reprimanded for breaking. When the Devastation Day leaks spread like wildfire despite these outlets being out of commission, citizen unrest went global.
The impromptu gathering in New London rapidly grew in both numbers and intensity, ultimately spilling over into violent clashes. Security forces stationed at the demilitarised political compound at the centre of the protests, so used to implicit obedience through fear, were hopelessly overwhelmed by a rushing mass of furious protestors who quickly claimed the building as their own in a humiliating blow to the GU’s previously unquestioned authority.
At that point, Rusev and Holly alike knew there was no way the GU could ever come back from this. As it always went in times of oppressive political rule, the first crack in the system’s facade of total control showed the mass of disenfranchised citizens that they were not alone in their discontent and that there truly was power in their numbers. Proving this assumption correct, media outlets who had been too cautious to report on the initial leaks openly broadcast live footage of the still-growing anti-GU protests and reported on the earlier raids on their counterparts.
Little did anyone on Earth know, the grandest revelations were yet to come.
eighty
Phase two of the leaks began with the only thing phase one had lacked: an incriminating recording of Roger Morrison himself. This was part of the evidence pool that Rusev and her team had gathered for their pre-existing plan to breed anti-Morrison sentiment once they safely reached the Venus station; the plan Holly had known nothing about until Grav told her, and the plan which had become a whole lot more urgent now that the depths of Morrison’s depraved plot had become clear.
There were in fact two recordings. The first was an audio-only clip of Morrison bemoaning the socio-political necessity of “reining in the limitless applications of romotech’s current potential in order to avoid the catastrophic disruption that would result from putting too many hundreds of millions of bottom-feeding leeches out of work when their drone-like labour becomes as unnecessary as they are.”
This was a solid start — no one liked being discussed in such terms, and it would destroy Morrison’s artificially curated image as a champion of the common man — but it wasn’t enough.
Fortunately, what came next was.
The highest-ranking defector from Morrison’s inner circle, a relatively young man who had died in suspicious circumstances two years earlier just days after contacting one of Rusev’s confidantes in New London, had given his life for a decisive fifteen-second video clip in which Morrison casually stated his desire to witness a “Brockian population Reset” within whatever remained of his lifetime.
Although the footage didn’t catch Morrison saying he intended to catalyse or cause such a Reset, the context of the rest of the leaks meant that his desire alone was enough to seal his position as public enemy number one. The footage was accompanied by everything Rusev and her team had garnered about the GU’s euphemistically named Catastrophe Survival Preparation division, including the evacuation ark’s precise location in Far North Queensland as discovered during Holly’s speculative and fruitful trip to New Eden.
Combined with the evidence firmly linking him to the costly famine and the mass destruction of Devastation Day, Morrison’s explicit desire to see humanity culled to a tiny fraction of its current number made it easy for people to believe that the CSP division’s true purpose was to protect a chosen few during a destructive event that he and his cronies would deliberately bring about.
Although the relative isolation of the ark’s base prevented a mass gathering of protest
ors on the scale of those seen elsewhere — a factor Rusev had underestimated but which fortunately proved unimportant thanks to the sheer size and ferocity of those other gatherings — a moderately sized group of citizens did gather at the Far North Queensland site. Their presence, so quickly following the increasingly violent protests elsewhere, was enough to encourage many low-ranking site employees to flee. One of the protestors captured illustrative footage of GU employees in retreat; this single recording, as much as anything else captured during the already spectacular day, perfectly epitomised the collapse.
With phase two’s leaks sinking in and the attention of many media outlets now turning to the teased announcement of another reveal to come, Rusev passed the latest updates on to Yury via the Karrier’s radio connection to the Terradox bunker.
“So it’s time?” he asked. “Time to uncloak?”
Given how readily the previously leaked information had been believed and acted upon by Earth’s downtrodden citizens, a large part of Holly now strongly regretted allowing Yury to stay behind. Was the reveal even going to be necessary?, she wondered. On reflection she considered that it was; after all, there was no indication yet that Morrison would give up his throne without a fight. The time since the very first leak could still only be measured in hours, so there was no telling what kind of response might have been coming. And although the ark’s launch site had been fled by many GU employees, a well-armed security force had since sealed the perimeter. In short, there was no guarantee that the Reset wouldn’t still go ahead if Terradox remained a viable destination.
“In your own time, Yury,” Rusev replied. “And whatever happens, your sacrifice won’t be forgotten.”
There was of course a steadily growing two-way communications delay between Terradox and the station-bound Karrier, so everyone waited with bated breath for Yury’s next reply. Grav hurried out of the control room and returned very quickly with Robert and the children, who he thought deserved to be there to see and hear whatever came next. A screen in the control room focused tightly on Terradox’s location, relaying the image from the Karrier’s high-powered telescope. This image was naturally subject to the same lag as Yury’s speech, which meant that his countdown would be in perfect sync with the pictures.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 33
