Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  “Thank you,” Yury said. “Tell Holly and Grav it was an honour to serve with them.”

  “I’m here,” Holly said, momentarily forgetting about the delay. “We’re all here.”

  Yury began to count down from five.

  At four, Viola grabbed Holly’s hand and squeezed it tightly.

  “Three…”

  Bo watched through his fingers.

  “Two…”

  Holly’s eyes flicked to Rusev and Robert. Everything they’d all been through came down to this. Not days, not hours, not minutes, but an instant. It all came down to the press of a button in an underground bunker on a man-made planet; a press of a button by the finger of a man who was willingly risking his well-lived life for the good of the many. The result of his selfless decision — be it success or failure — was about to be revealed.

  “One.”

  eighty-one

  It was a stunning and humbling sight.

  One part marvel and one part monstrosity, the Terradox romosphere emerged from its cloak in one breathtaking moment and filled the control room’s large screen.

  “The computer is telling me it is done,” Yury said, relaying his experience on the surface, “but so far I am alive and well. Did it work?”

  “It worked,” Rusev said. Holly said it too, as did Bo in an extremely excited tone.

  Holly didn’t yet share his excitement. It had worked, and that was the main thing, but it was too early to celebrate Yury’s survival. Terradox was a lot closer to the Karrier than it was to Earth, from where it wouldn’t yet be visible.

  Terradox was neither large enough nor close enough to Earth to be observed with the naked eye, but with the grand uncloaking came an earthbound message from the Venus station informing amateur and professional skywatchers alike where they could locate the final piece of Morrison’s apocalyptic jigsaw. This message, personally drafted by and attributed to Ekaterina Rusev, who revealed herself to have survived Morrison’s sabotage after all, strove to make it perfectly clear that he hadn’t merely created and hidden a perfectly habitable planet but that he had in fact planned to use it as a refuge while he cleansed the Earth of its human population problem.

  Within twenty minutes of the reveal, during which time Yury asked the group to keep him abreast of important events and reactions on Earth, Holly finally allowed herself to revel in the reality that Morrison and his cronies must by then have known that Terradox had been uncloaked. In her mind, the fact that it hadn’t been immediately destroyed bode extremely well.

  The most dangerous moment had been the precise moment when Yury pressed the button, Holly knew, because there had been a reasonable chance that Terradox might have been rigged to self-destruct in a manner not forewarned in the bunker’s documentation. Now that neither this worst-case scenario nor the more likely prospect of a remote destruction as soon as the uncloaking filtered back to Earth had come to pass, a different kind of tension took over: the tension of not knowing when something bad might happen or indeed how bad it might be.

  Communications from the station soon told Holly and everyone else aboard the Karrier that media outlets on Earth had begun to show the first still images of Terradox. The images rapidly increased in both number and quality as every telescope on Earth was directed to the incredible — the impossible — celestial body which had just emerged from its cloak.

  Holly personally passed this update on to Yury. Like her, he began to breathe slightly more easily and took it as a sign that Terradox, and by extension his life, was no longer in immediate danger. “The truth’s out,” he said. “Blowing it up won’t change anything now.”

  A tangible sense of relief surged through Holly. As Yury stressed his view that having survived this long he was likely to survive a lot longer, Rusev met Holly’s gaze and nodded in agreement.

  “Everything’s working out,” Holly said to her. She didn’t inflect this into a question, although it partially felt like one.

  “It looks promising,” Rusev said, breaking into a rare and full smile. “I’ll say that.”

  Quite understandably, the next images of citizen unrest to arrive on the control room’s screen via the station were the worst yet.

  Worst or best?, Holly quietly mused.

  Countless media outlets were now openly and proudly recording their own footage of the ever-intensifying anti-GU protests and the ever-increasing numbers of GU employees fleeing their falling strongholds across the globe. All of this, not least the media’s open disobedience, would have been unthinkable just a day earlier.

  When Yury later reported his plan to sleep for a few hours, Holly decided to allow herself the same luxury.

  The floor of the lander she shared with the Harringtons may not have been the most comfortable surface she’d slept on in the last two weeks, but the rest it provided was the most peaceful by far.

  Day Twelve

  eighty-two

  Tumultuous scenes from Earth filtered through to the Karrier all night, as more and more GU premises were ransacked and claimed by various local and national resistance groups.

  Holly awoke to the headline that Roger Morrison had fallen in a so-called “bloodless coup” which involved desperate attempts by self-serving underlings and political rivals to distance the GU from his actions. Though their pleas fell on deaf ears, the footage of the ageing and silent Morrison sitting in the custody of the GU’s Vanguard Corps made it very clear that these weasel-like scoundrels had committed to the irreversible course of removing Morrison from power. This would have been something of a victory in and of itself, but Holly knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the whole GU was done for.

  Viola and Bo, both too young to have previously witnessed the fall of an authoritarian regime and both having been born into a world in which once iconic footage of historic popular uprisings around the world was universally banned, were in awe at the pace of the overnight developments on Earth. Rusev told stories of dictators’ statues being toppled as soon as the first cracks in their facades of power emerged while Grav did his best to explain just how precarious an order built on fear and suppression always was, speaking with more than a hint of joy in his voice as he insisted that a house of lies can never survive a purifying fire of truth.

  The children nodded like they understood, but it would take more than a few doses of historical perspective to subdue their amazement at seeing the only ruling force they had ever known resigned to history.

  Seeing Morrison, as frail as he was, paraded as a lone wolf by those he had once led elicited no mixed feelings in Holly; however old he was, he deserved to be held accountable for all he had done and all he had planned to do. More pertinently, everyone who had suffered at his hand deserved to see him held accountable. Holly also looked forward to seeing the expressions of his treacherous underlings when their time came.

  Indeed, individuals who assumed roles as leaders of many of the largest protests voiced their views — loudly backed up by the masses in front of whom they spoke — that the entire GU had been proven a corrupt and oppressive force; one which would no longer be tolerated.

  Whether they knew it or not, the weasels’ time was imminent. The tide hadn’t merely turned against the GU; a tsunami of truth was in the process of sweeping its world away.

  “So can we go back for him now?” Bo asked when he woke and saw just how decisively things had progressed overnight. “The danger has passed, right?”

  Robert immediately spoke to rule this out, saying that the only sensible course of action was continuing to the station and then sending another crew to rescue Yury. “We arrive tomorrow,” he stressed.

  Rusev affirmed this position. “But don’t worry,” she said to Bo. “He will be rescued. And soon.”

  In a long conversation Holly had with Yury in the late afternoon, amid her regular checks on the latest developments on Earth, he revealed that he had always been confident of surviving the uncloaking. The increasing communications delay made a back-and-forth cha
t difficult, but Yury explained that he had known Morrison wouldn’t destroy Terradox from the moment his eyes fell upon the grand white house at New Eden.

  “There’s a reason I let on that I didn’t expect to survive,” he said, “and it’s that you wouldn’t have let me stay if you didn’t know I was fully prepared to die. If you thought I expected to live, you would have told me it was too risky. I couldn’t express my position through rationality without expecting you to pick holes in it — I’ve known you long enough to know that! — so I kept my confidence to myself. Rusev shared it and followed the same line of thinking. She said that once Morrison’s cat was out of the bag, why would he kill the cat or burn the bag?”

  Holly didn’t feel misled and certainly not betrayed by Yury and Rusev’s selective truth-telling and she couldn’t begrudge their logic; if she had thought for a second that Yury’s decision to stay was at all based on any expectation of survival, she knew better than anyone that she would have tried to talk him out of it.

  For however long Holly watched the footage of GU buildings being overrun, she would never grow tired of it. She spent the evening revelling in the downfall of an organisation which was the furthest thing from a failed experiment in its supposed goal of global cooperation and had in fact been nothing more or less than the ultimate fantasy of a corporate and political elite tired of navigating national and international regulations and eager to entrench their own powerful interests. Everyday citizens — so often dismissed as leeches — weren’t even afterthoughts to such interests; they were, and always had been, obstacles. Now that the truth was out, those obstacles had reclaimed their streets and begun the process of reclaiming their lives and societies.

  Holly wandered into the utility room and found Viola ordering a meal from the algae machine.

  “Want anything?” the girl asked.

  “Yeah, whatever you’re having.”

  “Vegetarian lasagne.”

  Holly laughed gently at this, as tickled as ever by the inherent redundancy. “I’ll have a regular lasagne,” she said. “It’s all algae, so it doesn’t exactly make any difference.”

  Viola handed her a plate with a playful shrug. “Agree to disagree.”

  While waiting for her food to cool, Holly tapped and gestured on the table’s inbuilt screen until a vertically split view showed the Karrier’s current zoomed-in views of Earth’s pale blue dot on the left and of the ever-nearing Venus station on the right.

  It was a wonderful sight. Holly had gazed upon the station so often, but now, for the first time, her final arrival could be measured not in weeks or days, but in hours.

  “What are you smiling at?” Viola asked.

  Holly swiped away the screen then picked up her fork and smiled even wider. “We’re almost there.”

  Day Thirteen

  eighty-three

  “We’re almost there,” Viola said, gently shaking Holly’s arm to rouse her from a brief rest.

  Holly sat up and looked at the estimated arrival time on her wristband. Sure enough, the hour scale was a thing of the past: they would be at the station within minutes.

  During a quick visit to the control room, Holly learned that pre-GU politicians in North America, New London and elsewhere had begun to position themselves as post-GU authority figures. They were talking in terms of “the end of the GU project” and throwing around words like “transition” and “dissolution” while badmouthing Roger Morrison.

  It didn’t matter to Holly or Rusev that these politicians were as self-serving as any others; what mattered right now was that Morrison was out of the picture and that no such self-serving politicians would ever again enjoy the same kind of unchecked global power that he once had.

  Very few persistent instances of violence continued throughout the night as no notable pockets of GU personnel were any longer holding their ground. There were still mass demonstrations around the world but, happily, demonstrations was now a more apt term than protests.

  The station came within sight of Holly’s naked eye soon after the pre-docking procedures began. She returned to the lander to watch the final approach with Viola, Robert and Bo. Grav, who had been pensively keeping to himself and quietly absorbing every fresh piece of news from Earth, soon joined them to take it all in.

  Bo was tremendously excited by the details of the docking procedures and asked Holly and Grav countless questions about how specific things worked. Neither knew every answer, but the boy was satisfied with what he got.

  For her part, Viola just wanted to get inside the station.

  It looked prodigiously large at this proximity and angle, and certainly more than the sum of its parts.

  Holly’s luggage lay at her feet as the reality began to sink in that this really was it: after so many journeys and so much doubt that this one would ever reach its destination, she was here.

  When the Karrier’s final docking procedure began, Bo and Viola rushed to the other window for a better view.

  Robert stepped towards Holly and Grav and spoke quietly. “I could never thank either of you enough for everything you’ve done for us,” he said. “Grav, we wouldn’t even have made it on board without your kindness. And Holly… from the day of the crash when you risked your life to save ours by coming to our lander, right up to now, I couldn’t have asked for any more. There were times when I didn’t know who we could trust, but that never included you. I always knew you were with us. Always.”

  “That’s it!” Bo exclaimed as the Karrier gently shuddered to a total halt. “We’re here!”

  Holly walked to their window and looked out at the welcoming sight of the Venus station. Aside perhaps from Terradox itself, this was without question humanity’s greatest space-related engineering feat. “Okay,” she beamed. “Let’s go.”

  “After you,” Grav insisted, holding a hand towards the door. “All those times you did not go inside because you had not yet earned your place… they are all history. We made it, Hollywood. You earned it.”

  eighty-four

  Holly heard the waiting crowd before she saw it.

  Scores of people lined both sides of the main entry walkway as she led her group out of the Karrier and into the station. Her ‘scores’ estimate quickly became hundreds when she saw the extent of the crowd further inside. Even in less awe-inspiring surroundings, this welcome party would have been an overwhelming sight.

  “Imagine the reception Spaceman’s going to get!” Bo mused from his third-in-line position behind Viola.

  Dimitar Rusev, Ekaterina’s only child and the man who had run the station in her absence, stepped forward to personally greet the new arrivals. The crowd’s cheers grew louder and louder with each warm handshake, hitting a near-deafening peak when Dimitar reached the end of the incoming group’s line and abandoned the formalities and instead wrapped his arms around his mother and lifted her from the ground in an emotional and once unexpected reunion.

  Quite apart from the emotion of it all, and despite the fact that Holly had seen almost every inch of the station in one or another piece of footage, nothing could have prepared her for its grandeur. Every second of live station-cam she had watched to keep her spirits up during all the cargo and passenger runs over the last six months had utterly failed to do the Venus station justice, and she could not have been happier that this was the case.

  The curvature of the walls was so slight, the ceilings so high and the light so perfect that Holly felt more like she was outside on Earth than inside one small part of a research station-cum-habitat orbiting Venus. She waved at members of the crowd as they cheered and applauded her group like returning heroes.

  “Holly,” Viola said, tapping her on the shoulder.

  She turned around. “Yeah?”

  Viola was now tapping her own nose and smiling widely. “Told you.”

  Holly sniffed the air and couldn’t help but laugh.

  Lavender.

  Day Fourteen

  eighty-five

  Holly alm
ost had to pinch herself at the end of a relaxing and gratifying first morning inside Ekaterina Rusev’s incredibly impressive Venus station.

  She walked around freely, surrounded by happy faces including many she recognised and many more who recognised hers and were keen to express their gratitude for the role she had played in both keeping her group of crash-survivors alive and in enabling the takedown of Roger Morrison and his corrupt Global Union to proceed so rapidly and decisively.

  One particular source of pleasure was the station’s fully stocked gym which allowed Holly a real workout for the first time since leaving Earth. The vista from the enormous viewing window was unrivalled as its carefully filtered glass allowed gym-goers to gaze down at the splendour of Venus while they worked up a sweat.

  There were very few children on the station and no one within four years of Viola in either direction. She and Bo had nevertheless settled into their new and exciting surroundings very quickly having made fast friends with the young family who had brought their illegal-on-Earth dogs to the station during one of Holly’s first chaperoning trips. Viola was overwhelmed by her first experience of the dogs — “real puppies!” — and even Bo couldn’t pretend not to be enamoured by their playful natures.

  Holly was satisfied and a little proud that her long-suffering potted plant had survived its odyssey; the children were ecstatic that a litter of playful puppies had been waiting at the end of theirs.