Grav cracked a half-smile. “Try me.”
“Okay, well… I get that we can break through the cloak because the new Karriers have a thing like Dante’s remote built into them, but if Netherdox is totally cloaked then how do we even know where it is? How are you tracking its movements and how do we know where we’re going? We didn’t know where Terradox was. We didn’t even know it was anywhere.”
“It is not a stupid question but there is a simple answer,” Grav said. “Back then, we did not know what we were looking for. As you suggest, we did not even know that we should be looking for anything. But now we do. The short answer is that we now have instruments which can reliably locate romotech objects and structures of all types. Such instruments existed prior to Revelation Day and were seized in the aftermath, but since then we have developed even better ones. Something small, like the invisible ball Bo brought from Earth, could be detected from a reasonable distance. But a much larger structure — a romosphere, for instance — can be detected at enormous distances. Enormous distances.”
After Grav answered a few less important questions and outlined some basic safety instructions, the majority of the group sat down on the utility room’s comfortable chairs.
“This isn’t so bad,” Peter Ospanov said, sitting next to Viola and placing a comforting arm around her neck.
“Walk in the park,” Bo added. “Right, Holly?”
“It’s doable,” she replied, forcing something resembling a smile as she excused herself to the control room for the final preparations.
nineteen
Holly stood pensively in the quiet and claustrophobic room where she would spend the entirety of the sleepless journey. She had spent some time in there overnight with Polo, the experienced pilot who had been the only individual to turn down an invitation from Grav to help out on the Netherdox mission. Holly had been keen to pick Polo’s brains about the differences between the new fleet of Karriers and the older ones with which she was so much more familiar, but she had been keen to do so without alerting Grav.
Peter Ospanov, second in command in Grav’s security division, had allowed Holly and Polo inside. Holly wasn’t sure whether Peter would have since told Grav about this, but she expected that the high level of surveillance Grav insisted upon in all areas of the station would ensure that he knew by now, either way.
Holly’s reason for opting to call Peter rather than Grav when she needed access to the Karrier was simply her knowledge that Polo would have been too intimidated to board the Karrier with Grav present, so obvious was Grav’s earlier displeasure with what he perceived as selfish cowardice on Polo’s part.
Some of the specific minor differences Polo pointed out between the old and new Karriers made Holly very glad that she’d asked for his help. Fortunately, it quickly became clear to her that every major change would make her job easier than it would have been in an older Karrier.
As Polo put it: “Now more than ever, these things really do pretty much fly themselves.”
Given that manually controlling the Karrier would only become necessary should conditions demand it, Holly understandably hoped that she wouldn’t need to fall back on her bygone Air Force training and previous Karrier experience.
Now that she was once more alone inside the control room, her mind turned towards the forthcoming approach to Netherdox; towards arriving at an invisible romosphere and knowingly flying straight into it. There had been a few thoughts on this theme over the last few days, firstly about how her landing on Terradox inside the tourist Ferrier was so much more upbeat than her previous landing and then how her arrival at the Venus station after learning of the Netherdox threat had been so much more downbeat than the many before it.
But this… this was unprecedented.
Holly had never been to Netherdox, of course, but nor had she ever knowingly flown straight into a cloaked romosphere.
In one sense she considered that the new Karrier’s crew, composed largely of the same individuals as the Terradox landing group, were now far better equipped to deal with whatever lay ahead than they had been during their unplanned stay on Terradox. Should they get through the gravity cloak unscathed, she knew that they would have powerful land vehicles to navigate the unknown terrain and a powerful Karrier to carry them home — two advantages that she would have given anything for on Terradox four years earlier.
On the flip side, there were so many potential points of failure that Holly wouldn’t have known which to think about even had she wanted to. The display panel which would soon contain countless readings and status reports would provide more than enough stimuli to keep her mind focused on the task at hand rather than any potential difficulties, she hoped.
On the camera feed above her main control panel, Holly saw a live image of Grav and Dimitar Rusev standing side by side at the Karrier’s main entrance. The seal was open and a vocal countdown heard throughout the Karrier announced that it would close in ten seconds. The two men stood looking out, and only when Holly flicked to an outward-facing camera did she understand why.
Ekaterina Rusev stood on the other side of the seal, flanked by the two members of Grav’s security team who would imminently take her to a secure location for the duration of the secretive Netherdox mission. Holly knew how dearly Grav had wanted some of his trusted staff to join him on the journey, but in his absence their presence on the station was absolutely necessary.
Rusev, the Venus station’s revered matriarch, looked so tremendously conflicted that no small part of Holly expected her to step across the threshold into the Karrier at the last second.
But such a step never came, and at the count of zero the Karrier’s air seal closed.
Holly quickly switched back to the inward-facing camera’s feed and saw Grav placing his hand on Dimitar’s shoulder. The last thing they had seen before the seal closed was Ekaterina Rusev holding up one hand, palm out, in a motionless wave of farewell.
“Please begin departure initiation,” an automated voice announced, only to Holly.
She gulped. Suddenly, it felt too real.
Holly placed her fingertips on the reader as instructed and gazed directly into the face-scanner. Green ticks appeared in place of the previous overlays, confirming that the first two identity checks had been successful.
Only one formality remained before the K-3 Karrier would roar into life and depart the Venus station for its necessary but treacherous voyage to the unknown surface of Netherdox.
“Ivy Wood confirming departure,” she said as firmly as possible, trying to keep her voice from cracking. “I’m ready.”
twenty
The Karrier maintained regular contact with both the Venus station and the Terradox Management Committee throughout its journey to Netherdox.
In an extension of his regular Venus-to-Terradox liaison role, Dimitar Rusev frequently joined Holly in the control room to communicate with the senior TMC figures he already knew well.
At Holly’s request, Dimitar also paid keen attention to the readings and basic operations of the control console in case something might happen on Netherdox which would render Holly and Grav unable to operate the Karrier on its return.
This necessary preparation for a worst-case scenario exemplified the mood of a journey full of the worst kind of anticipation; one in which the best outcome was not joy but merely relief. The group’s journey — only the first stage of their mission — did not present a situation in which they could win. They could certainly lose everything prior to reaching Netherdox, but the only prize for a successful journey would be entry into its inhospitable and hostile atmosphere.
In an effort to lift the mood, Dimitar reported to Holly the unsurprising fact that Bo Harrington was the most upbeat member of the group and the only one who did see another prize at the end of the journey: the prize of being, in Bo’s words, “the first people in the universe to see Netherdox with our own eyes.”
Holly remained in the control room for the entirety of the short
journey, insistent upon vigilantly observing the console at all times in case any unusual readings were displayed. There were no worrying readings and the only nascent problems she became aware of were interpersonal rather than mission critical.
Although the ever-upbeat Bo Harrington didn’t ask for permission to enter Holly’s control room at any point during the journey, his sister did.
“I had to talk to someone,” Viola said in reply to Holly’s question about the nature of the visit. “It’s about Sakura.”
Holly hadn’t known what to expect in Viola’s reply, but it wasn’t that. She spun her chair away from the console to face Viola. “What about her?”
“I don’t trust her.”
Holly spun back around.
“Hear me out,” Viola said. “She used to work for him. For Morrison. And now she’s with us?”
“Exactly: she’s with us. She gave us a lot of important data and now she’s with us. Trust me, there’s nothing to be suspicious about.”
“Holly, I’m not being suspicious. She literally worked at MXR. That’s not a suspicion, it’s a fact. How else do you want me to put it? She worked for the bad guys!”
“So did I,” Holly said. “Remember? I was in Astronautics instead of Robotics, but all of the money and all of the orders came from the same place.”
“You know as well as I do that it’s not the same. Sakura has already proven that she is willing and able to keep secrets to protect Morrison’s image; she knew that the whole story of how he invented romotech was bullshit but she kept quiet because that lie made her family a lot of money. Does that not raise any alarms? We all know what Rusev says: the reason she survived so long in opposition to Morrison’s empire was that she always ensured that no one on her team knew any more than they needed to. And Grav always tells Peter that he’s survived so long because he doesn’t give an ounce of trust to anyone who hasn’t earned a ton.”
Slowly, Holly turned to face Viola once more. “Grav trusts her,” she said. “Even if I hadn’t spent time with her on Terradox and on the way to the station, that would be enough for me. Grav trusts Sakura because he knows the level of risk she took when she leaked the MXR data directly to Rusev. Everyone who sets foot on the station is thoroughly vetted by Grav’s security team and they all have to be personally approved by him. I’ll admit that I had a blind spot with Dante, and so did you, but Grav saw something suspicious about him from the beginning. If he’d been in charge of security back then, Dante would never have gotten near a Karrier.”
Viola nodded slowly, as though soothed by Holly’s confidence. She didn’t push the issue any further and returned to the rest of the group only after fetching Holly a vegetarian lasagne from one of the Karrier’s algae machines.
As the journey continued, Holly took the fact that this had been the most troubling episode so far as a great positive.
Without her realising how quickly the time had gone by, each of the other trouble-free hours quickly faded into the past until only minutes remained on the console’s ETA display.
As had been decided in the minutes prior to departure from the station, the entire group but for Holly made their way into one of the Karrier’s emergency landers prior to the final approach.
In Holly’s mind it went without saying that if their chosen lander had to detach from the Karrier, their long-term chances of survival would essentially evaporate. She agreed to the idea at Grav’s suggestion, passively voicing her agreement that any kind of emergency landing in the event of the Karrier being damaged would at least leave the rest of the group with a remote chance of following through on his plan to reach the bunker and bring the romosphere’s erratic behaviour under control.
Since Grav made it clear to her that the prime driver behind this idea was to provide the others with a modicum of peace of mind during what would surely be the most stressful part of the journey, Holly kept to herself her knowledge that any event capable of incapacitating the main body of the Karrier would doubtless also destroy the emergency landers at each end.
It was supremely unlikely that any potential collision with the cloak would be of the same nature as that which occurred during her group’s approach to Terradox four years earlier, when Dante Parker was too slow to activate his manually operated cloak-passing device, leading to a localised impact which enabled the Karrier to pass through with significant damage. In short, Holly knew that any romobot cloak-on-Karrier collision this time round would mean that the Karrier’s automatically activated cloak-passer had failed completely, ensuring that the resulting collision would be instantly and decisively catastrophic.
Holly’s gaze was fixed on the console during the final seconds of the Karrier’s approach towards the still invisible Netherdox romosphere, focusing squarely on the light which signified the status of the built-in cloak-passer. The light had been a steady blue throughout the journey until it began to flash amber as the cloak approached. This meant that the cloak had been detected and that the cloak-passer was in the process of managing the Karrier’s safe entry.
In short, amber was good.
But despite focusing so closely on the light, Holly felt confirmation of entry before she saw it.
Fortunately, the strong physical sensation Holly experienced as the Karrier passed into Netherdox’s artificial atmosphere was not one of impact. Unfortunately, it was a sensation of significant unwanted movement.
Holly’s mind raced, analysing the increasingly worrying situation as tremendous winds — almost ludicrously strong, if the console’s readings were to be believed — buffeted the Karrier like a seagull in a hurricane.
While the light on the cloak-passer had by now turned a steady green to confirm that the Karrier was now inside Netherdox’s artificial atmosphere, many of the lights on the console had simultaneously turned red.
Holly saw even more red when she looked at the feed from the Karrier’s downward-facing camera. Disconcertingly dim even in the face of the Karrier’s immensely powerful floodlights, the thick noxious Netherdox clouds were immediately apparent.
These reddish clouds were visible in every one of the Karrier’s external feeds but clearly grew thicker as the surface neared. Dependable data from the mapping vessel which had previously breached the cloak suggested that these clouds, something of an internal cloak, would fade far above the romosphere’s surface.
But Holly knew that the surface was a long way down. She knew that this choking cloud coverage, along with the phenomenal winds that came with it, would get a lot worse before it got better.
A quiet alarm, a beep rather than a siren, brought Holly’s attention back to the central section of the console where a screen now warned her that the Karrier had failed to identify a suitable landing site.
It can’t see the ground, she thought to herself. She understood that the Karrier’s observational instruments extended beyond visual cameras but she also knew that it wasn’t quite so well equipped in that regard as the dedicated mapping vessel which had previously identified, through various distinct and sophisticated instruments, a reliable figure for the distance between Netherdox’s cloak and its surface.
As Holly mulled over her highly undesirable but equally inevitable next move, she was hastened by the sudden din of a much louder alarm and a pulsating amber light which began to flash overhead.
The Karrier was telling her in no uncertain terms that the current external conditions were a serious threat to its physical integrity.
There were no two ways about it: a manual landing was required, and it was required right now.
twenty-one
Holly tapped the console’s internal comms button and told the others as calmly as she could that they needed to make their way out of the emergency lander and back into the main body of the Karrier.
Over various calls of “Holly, are you okay?” and “what the hell is going on?”, Holly continued.
“We’re taking a pounding up here and the Karrier can’t identify a spot to land,” s
he explained. “There’s no choice: I’m going to have to try a manual descent. I have to disable the automatic controls.”
The other voices hushed, creating a momentary silence which was soon broken by Grav. “Listen to me, Hollywood… the difficulty of landing in conditions like—”
“You listen to me,” Holly cut him off, no time to worry about coming across as overly curt. “If I’m going to land this thing, I have to do it myself. When we only have one choice, difficulty doesn’t come into it.”
“I do not like this,” Grav sighed, less resistant but clearly still far from supportive. “Are you absolutely sure that there is no other—”
“Just shut up and get everyone back inside the Karrier’s main body,” Holly yelled. “If it’s easier to do this without the landers, we’re losing them. So hurry up and get out of there, and make damn sure everyone is holding onto something. We’re going to drop — fast — and then we’re going to stop dropping just as fast, as soon as we get through these clouds. Clear?”
“You heard her,” Grav barked to the others. “Go, go, go!”
“Thank you,” Holly said, though by the time she said it there was no one left in the lander to hear. As soon as the console’s personnel display confirmed that everyone was safely clear of the divider, she closed the seal between the lander and the rest of the Karrier and disabled all automatic controls.
Immediately, the Karrier stopped fighting against the immense side winds. Despite having braced herself, Holly very nearly fell out of her chair.
“We’re about to drop,” she screamed into the comms mic, hoping the others would hear it ahead of what was sure to be an even greater jolt when she pressed the button to give the Karrier maximum juice to plummet towards the surface of Netherdox in the hope of breaking through its treacherous and noxious upper atmosphere.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 43
