Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  But when the reply did arrive, it was more than worth the wait.

  The reply from the TMC stated that Sakura’s CamCard, as they called it, was still operational since her officially scheduled departure date hadn’t yet passed. The reply included detailed instructions on how to unlock full administrator access to the photo-drone control panel via a series of gestures to be performed on the small touchscreen.

  Although only a few steps were required, the necessary sequence of specific actions was so elaborate that it could never have been guessed or accidentally engaged: pressing with two fingers for three seconds halfway up the left side, performing a three-finger swipe to the right, performing a triple one-finger tap then two slow-taps with four fingers, entering a passcode when prompted, and finally tapping in the bottom left corner rather than on the ‘yes’ button when asked to confirm that she was TMC personnel.

  Administrator access would allow the group to guide photo-drones to specific locations, a feature intended for instances such as when a large group of tourists were in an area with insufficient photo-drone coverage to capture focused images of many individuals at once. The photo-drones operated at an impressively high altitude and were very reflective so as to be difficult to spot. Design features which had been applied to ensure that the drones’ presence wouldn’t be invasive or even evident to most tourists now presented an excellent opportunity for crucial surveillance once the group touched down.

  As a special guest rather than a regular tourist, Holly hadn’t received a CamCard. But Rusev’s insistence that Sakura pose as a tourist prior to her move to the station — combined with the fact that Sakura had immediately placed her CamCard in her luggage and forgotten all about it — had now come up trumps.

  Rusev’s wristband beeped to announce the arrival of a message from Bo just as Holly and Sakura were about to leave. “The VUVs have been loaded onto the Karrier,” she said, reading the message and immediately relaying its content.

  Holly turned to Sakura. “Do you want to go and see?”

  “Definitely,” Sakura said. “But speaking of loading the Karrier, has someone unloaded everything? I’m thinking mainly of the piece of the romodroid Grav put in an isolation bay.”

  “Yes,” Rusev said. “That’s already been moved to a secure unit. It will be analysed in due course, but all hands are focused on our mission for now.”

  Sakura, glad to hear this, then set off with Holly towards the Karrier. This involved one of the longest point A to point B walks possible on the Venus station and Sakura wondrously took in the high ceilings and incredible views as they passed through several distinct sections which each had their own flavours and ambiences.

  “I get the feeling that I’m going to like living here,” she said, smiling like a child as they passed the large gym which offered incredible views of Venus through carefully filtered glass. Like the station’s early promotional literature had claimed, this really did strike Sakura as the way the future was supposed to look. “What about you? Are you definitely going back to Earth?”

  This question caught Holly off guard. Returning to Earth after the Anniversary Gala activities were concluded had always been her plan and still was, but after only a few seconds of thought she began to wonder why. There really wasn’t much keeping her there — no surviving family or meaningful relationships — and the station undoubtedly had its plus points, both in terms of the environment and the company.

  “I don’t know,” she eventually replied. “One thing at a time.”

  Security officers again parted to allow Holly and Sakura access to an ordinarily restricted area when they reached the docked Karrier. Holly called Bo via her wristband and within no more than a minute he appeared at the entrance to lead them inside.

  “Through here,” he said, opening the seal to the main cargo bay. He then pointed into the empty room. “Right there.”

  “Where?” Sakura said.

  Holly grinned. “Okay, I get it. Very good. But seriously, we walked all the way here to see them. Which bay are they in?”

  Bo held out his hand and pressed a button on a small key-like object in his right hand.

  Before Holly’s disbelieving eyes, two rovers appeared from thin air.

  “I told you they were practically invisible,” Bo said with a proud smile.

  “Press it again,” Holly said, her gaze fixed on the vehicles.

  Bo did as she asked, prompting the rovers to disappear in an instant. Holly approached them to inspect the effectiveness of the cloaking mechanism, looking far more closely than anyone would in normal circumstances. Despite very slight edge-warping imperfections on the wall and floor when she focused on the rovers’ outlines, Holly was blown away. As Bo had suggested, it wasn’t quite romotech but it was certainly the next best thing.

  “Is it this good when they’re moving?” Sakura asked.

  Bo answered with a practical demonstration, stepping inside and reversing the rover before slowly driving it forward to its original position. Although he had been moving slowly, Holly was once again greatly impressed; the barely discernible outline was no more visible than it had been when the rover was stationary.

  Between the CamCard and the VUVs’ surprisingly excellent cloaking mechanism, recent developments were making Holly feel a lot more positive than she had just an hour earlier.

  “They’re about to dock the landers if you want to check that out, too,” Bo said. “That hardly ever happens so it’s pretty cool to see.”

  Holly and Sakura accepted his suggestion and watched from the nearby staff-only viewing area as a huge flap-like section of the station’s exterior opened to receive the first of the landers as it was detached from the Karrier and carefully guided inside. This multi-stage procedure took a lot longer than Holly had imagined it would, but it held her attention as well as that of the crowd who had gathered to watch.

  Prior to the beginning of the docking procedure, Holly had identified a familiar face near the back of the crowd: Polo, the accomplished pilot who had taken her and Sakura to the station from Terradox before rejecting the invitation to join their mission to Netherdox. She knew that Polo would be as glad as anyone that the crew had made it home from Netherdox relatively unscathed, but when she raised a hand to acknowledge him, he responded only with a sheepish and forced smile before looking to the ground.

  Despite the evident fact that Polo was either ashamed or embarrassed by his earlier decision to remain on the station, Holly still couldn’t fully hold it against him. Polo had a young family on Earth, unlike the rest of the mission’s crew, which meant that he couldn’t afford to take extraordinary risks like venturing to a mysterious romosphere in the faint hope of halting its expansion — particularly not when Holly, though less accomplished, was a highly capable Karrier pilot in her own right.

  Inside the closed observation area where Holly now stood, she noticed an attentive young member of the station’s lightly staffed Craft Management division. The young woman took in every detail of what was going on in front of her and took careful notes as a more experienced man stood at her shoulder.

  Once both landers were docked, Holly briefly chatted with the young woman, learning that her name was Rachel and that she had recently moved into Craft Management from Habitat Management, where she had worked alongside Robert Harrington and impressed him enough with her work ethic to earn his recommendation for the recently posted and highly competitive opening in Craft Management.

  The Venus station was a small world, but it struck Holly now that she knew very few of its inhabitants personally. She had spent little time on the station and had always been busy, so conversations like this with staff members outside of her immediate circle were as rare as they were welcome.

  “What are you talking about?” Rachel suddenly said, pressing her headset tightly to her ear.

  As Rachel spoke, Holly saw many other staff members both inside and outside of the viewing area looking around as if checking that everyone else had re
ceived the same message.

  “What’s going on?” Sakura asked, speaking to both Holly and Rachel.

  Holly’s wristband began to beep. But before her finger reached the button, Rachel spoke again.

  “Terradox has gone dark,” the young woman said, barely able to contain her shock and fear. “Boyce has cloaked the whole romosphere. He’s in the bunker!”

  forty-eight

  The message on Holly’s wristband, sent to alert her of the terrible news that David Boyce had cloaked Terradox, came from Ekaterina Rusev. Despite this, her first instinct was to call Grav.

  Boyce’s decision to cloak Terradox was far less concerning than his ability to do so, confirming as it did the surprising fact that he knew the full system access and control codes and could thus modify anything and everything however he saw fit. The cloaking itself did present some practical issues, chiefly a total visual blackout which meant that nothing on Terradox could be observed, but Grav’s initial reaction mirrored Holly’s: the real issue was what Boyce might do next.

  Holly and Viola left a frantic scene in the staff-only viewing area where worried station employees were trying to focus on their many time-sensitive tasks despite the black cloud which had just cast a foreboding shadow over their efforts.

  In Grav’s security room, Ekaterina and Dimitar Rusev were already by his side poring over the last satellite images of Terradox captured before the cloak was enabled. The still images revealed that Boyce had entered the bunker alone having travelled on foot.

  Grav was first to look away from the satellite images when Holly entered the room. “Nothing has changed,” he stated very plainly, with no hint that he was saying so only to ease her evident concerns.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Rusev said.

  Dimitar, who had previously voiced his opposition to the general idea of a ground campaign to free the hostages but whose viewpoint had softened following Boyce’s most recent broadcast, looked more forlorn than anyone.

  Grav pointed to a map of Terradox, tapping repeatedly on the cliff-top above Terradox Central Station. “We are landing here. Boyce will be at the station waiting to greet us. If he is not — if he is in the bunker — that is still no problem. We will come up with a specific plan for that scenario, but in either case I will make my way to the bunker in one of the VUVs. If necessary, I can blow my way in and restrain Boyce before he has a chance to enter the final execution codes for any kind of catastrophic change. From there I can force him to order the guards to stand down. Nothing has changed.”

  “Our priority has changed,” Rusev said, very calmly. “We are travelling with the intention of freeing the hostages — if that wasn’t the intention, I would click my fingers and order a bombardment — but our sole priority on arrival has to be gaining control of the bunker by any means necessary.”

  “That is what I said,” Grav replied.

  Rusev hesitated. “There’s a distinction. We have two objectives: freeing the hostages and gaining control of the bunker. We have two objectives, but we have one priority.”

  “I fail to see any possible scenario in which we would have to choose one or the other,” Grav said. “Successfully gaining control of the bunker, if Boyce is inside, is how we will free the hostages. If Boyce is not inside the bunker, the plan stays exactly as it was ten minutes ago.”

  “Has anyone thought about how he got the codes?” Holly asked, shifting gears from the possible fallout to the root of the problem.

  “One of two ways,” Rusev sighed. “Either Boyce extracted it from the head of security before ordering his execution, or there is a mole inside the TMC. However distasteful it sounds, I fully hope it was the former. Investigators on Earth have so far found no links between Boyce and anyone at the TMC, but they are following leads based around the very recent discovery of a subterranean control bunker near Morrison’s primary residence in Queensland. We believe this is the bunker Morrison used to communicate with Dante four years ago, and also the bunker from which Netherdox was recently weaponised.”

  “But does anyone know why he would suddenly cloak Terradox now?” Sakura asked. “It seems… random.”

  Rusev shrugged and held an upturned hand towards Grav, inviting him to speculate.

  “To remind us that he is in charge,” Grav said. “To tell us there is no sense in looking for solutions when he can change the problem. He intended this as a demoralisation tactic. He views it as a power move; I view it as a desperate move.”

  Messages from political leaders on Earth began to reach Rusev during this impromptu meeting, delayed not only by the time it took them to reach the station but also by the time it took for the visual effect of the cloaking to physically reach Earth in the first place.

  Television news broadcasts from Earth, ever popular with station staff, filtered through a few minutes before the direct messages. The only suitable word for the global reaction to Terradox’s unexpected cloaking was panic, prompting Earth’s leaders to beg Rusev to record a reassuring message for the citizens whose airwaves were already being flooded with doom-mongering and as yet unfounded predictions that Boyce was preparing to use Terradox itself as a weapon against Earth.

  Rusev agreed without complaint to record such a message, knowing full well that mass panic was only one step from mass chaos and two from societal breakdown.

  Grav called Peter and the Harringtons to the security room to assist in drafting the message. Everyone’s input was important given the difficult balancing act of reassuring Earth’s population without revealing their hand to Boyce or saying anything which might put him on edge.

  Holly, well versed in communicating with the public courtesy of her former life as a TV star, insisted that the message had to feel natural and not overly produced or stilted. At her suggestion, the hastily written script was condensed into bullet points.

  The broadcast would not be live, which settled the nerves of Dimitar Rusev, the least experienced of the three individuals who would speak. Ekaterina Rusev and Holly would be doing most of the talking, in any case; Rusev was an accomplished and experienced speaker, while Holly had of course cut her teeth once upon a time as the shining star of a wildly popular TV show which chronicled the progress of several astronauts-in-training prior to the public space program’s unfortunate disbandment.

  Within twenty minutes of receiving the original request, Ekaterina Rusev was talking into a camera in Grav’s security room with her son Dimitar standing behind her right shoulder and Holly behind her left.

  Rusev began by stating that as regrettable and uncomfortable as it was, she had to take Boyce — “this opportunistic criminal” — at his word. She stressed that this was not based on a judgement as to the quality or content of his character, but merely a recognition that the hostages had been at his mercy for several days and appeared to have been fed and hydrated, if nothing else.

  “I am wary of disclosing anything which could further endanger the innocent lives already under threat,” Rusev said, “so I will say no more on that subject other than to say we have no responsible option but to comply with Boyce’s request that we personally travel to Terradox in exchange for the hostages’ safe release.”

  Holly stared intently into the camera and consciously held her shoulders high, fully aware that her every twitch and glance would be relentlessly pored over by supposed body language experts on news networks across Earth.

  “There is too much at stake here to play games or call bluffs,” Rusev continued. “To reiterate: our group has one clear goal and that goal is to ensure the safe release of the innocent hostages being held on Terradox. We will pay whatever price is necessary to succeed in this goal.”

  Dimitar Rusev then took over from his mother, nodding firmly as the cue sheet instructed. “An indefensible lapse of TMC security is to blame for this mess,” he said, “and I want to make it absolutely clear that those terrible failings are no reflection on any national or international security forces on Earth, none of which had a
nything to do with this. All boarding and passenger background checks for Terradox-bound journeys fall under the remit of the TMC’s on-site security operations, which have nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of the Earth-based security forces which have kept the world safe and free from terroristic destruction for the last four years.”

  While everything Dimitar said was true, this section of the message was included to preemptively defeat accusations of a hand-waving whitewash — accusations that both Holly and Ekaterina Rusev knew would have been rampant had their message been too upbeat or dismissive of the threat.

  “Rest assured that full investigations will begin the very second that the hostages are freed,” Dimitar went on. “Lessons will be learned and, as paradoxical as it may seem right now, Earth will be a safer place next week than it was last week. That is one thing I can promise you. Today and every day, in the face of cowardly threats to our way of life, it is the personal responsibility of each citizen to do their part to ensure that stability and order are maintained. Sacrifices are sometimes required to protect that which we hold dear, and we make these sacrifices willingly, in defiance of those who stand against us and the freedoms we cherish.”

  Holly left a slight pause before reading her part of the message, allowing Dimitar’s words to sink in.

  “And I want you all to know that no one is forcing us to do this,” she said. “I want you all to know that we are doing this because we choose to, and that we choose to do this because an attack on innocent people on Terradox is an attack on innocent people everywhere. No one, least of all the hostages themselves, should feel an ounce of guilt over the sacrifices we are choosing to make.”

  The pause Holly left before the final part of her message, unlike the first, was involuntary, prompted by the emotive content of the upcoming sentences and particularly the name she was about to evoke. She instinctively wiped her eyes with one hand, thinking less about how it looked than making sure she got through the final section of the script.