Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  Holly sighed, evidently uneasy at the mere suggestion.

  “It’s been six years since the seven of you found Terradox,” Dimitar went on. “Or since you overcame Dante once he brought you there, if you want to be literal about it. Either way, it’s been six years since the seven of you exposed what Morrison was planning to do; six years since you exposed what he had already done in creating Terradox… a manufactured world with a breathable atmosphere, with distinct zonal boundaries, with switches and dials to control conditions like we’re changing a thermostat. I wouldn’t quite say we’ve come to take the tech for granted, but there is an element of that.”

  Holly couldn’t argue with this, and she stayed quiet to see where Dimitar was going.

  “But if you think back to those days before Terradox came to light, we had already seen the incredibly intricate buildings Morrison had constructed on Earth, and those used embryonic romotech, too, albeit on a smaller scale. Just like our algae machines use the building blocks of nutrition to create meals physically indistinguishable from the real thing, we knew back then that bottom-up romotech construction could use the building blocks of physical matter in a theoretically similar kind of way.”

  “I really don’t know what you’re getting at,” Holly admitted.

  “We’d also seen his zero-staff hotels, with the self-cleaning floors and bedding,” Dimitar continued, unperturbed. “We now know that Morrison had smaller test sites for self-contained romosphere-like ecosystems on Earth, which is something we didn’t know at the time, but we’d already seen his proud demonstrations of the cloaking tech that made Terradox invisible. And like I just said: embryonic romotech isn’t all that new, either, Holly, and more than a few smaller demonstrative applications were safely conducted on Earth long before you thought it was something worth worrying about. I guess what I’m trying to say is that although Terradox was an incredible thing to discover, the most incredible thing was that Morrison managed to build it unnoticed. But us? We don’t have to worry about being noticed, because we have nothing to hide. And in embryonic romotech, we have a technology at our fingertips that changes life as we know it. For all intents and purposes we can create whatever we want, and we can use those creations to protect humanity’s future and extend our reach. I’m not asking for a commitment, Holly; I’m just asking for an open mind.”

  Holly nodded slightly, less in agreement with Dimitar’s request than in recognition of a point reasonably made. “I understand that,” she said. “It’s just… we’ve been so close to disaster — twice. And we’ve had to risk everything — twice — just to protect humanity from what Morrison created. Right now, Terradox is operating within safe bounds, with sensible restrictions on unnecessarily risky romotech-related projects. But if you start carrying out risky work somewhere else — and making a new romosphere is just about as risky as it gets — then that makes all of our precautions meaningless. Do you know what I mean? It’s like telling a little kid not to play with matches in the living room while his brother is playing with dynamite upstairs. I just don’t see how I could ever come round to your way of thinking on this.”

  “Well, I certainly disagree about the level of inherent risk,” Dimitar said, “but I do take your point. These are the kinds of things we’ll be thinking about.”

  “Speaking of which… you still didn’t answer my second question,” Holly replied, reminded of it only now. “Who’s the ‘we’? Who else have you been thinking about this with?”

  “It’s not something that’s been discussed at board level, or with any number of people. It’s something I’m personally interested in, and the other person I alluded to — someone who’s very knowledgeable about this kind of thing — is even more interested than I am. His ideas are grander than mine, and I’ll admit that some of them sound pretty crazy, even to my ears. But my main focus is on the possibility of safely creating a new romosphere, and he sees success on that front as a foregone conclusion.”

  “Who is it?”

  “You said that you thought whoever else was thinking about embryonic romotech must have forgotten about Netherdox, right? But he hasn’t. Holly, he was with us on Netherdox.”

  “Bo?” she asked, her voice suddenly a full octave higher and the answer already clear in her mind. “So that’s what he’s been so busy with outside of his rover work? Did you push him down this road, or did he come to you?”

  Dimitar casually shook his head. “Neither. I was speaking to him one night, just catching up, and he asked what new ideas I’d been thinking about. We always have talks like that, and the communications delay actually facilitates deeper discussion because when an interruption won’t be heard until long after the other person finishes their point, there are no interruptions. And short back-and-forth answers don’t work, either, so we think about what we’re going to say and then we say it. But anyway, on this particular occasion, I said I’d been watching a live feed from inside Little Venus and that it got me thinking about exploration. He was interested as soon as I—”

  “Sorry,” Holly said, acknowledging a sudden and shrill notification sound which emanated from her wristband. “It’s a voice message from Peter. I guess he thought that the comms delay would be too long for a live two-way conversation, like you were just saying, but the fact that he’s sent this at all means it must be something important.

  “By all means,” Dimitar said, holding out a hand to suggest where Holly should move to ensure her privacy.

  “It’s okay,” she replied, tapping a button to play the message and moving closer to Dimitar so he would hear it, too. “No secrets.”

  The message began with Peter’s voice, relatively calm but slightly out of breath, telling someone to be quiet. “Holly…” he went on, his voice growing louder as he held his wristband to his mouth, “you asked me to keep you informed of any security incidents, and unfortunately I—”

  At this point, a second and altogether less welcome voice entered the fray: “And unfortunately he’s locked me in this goddamn prison cell!” it yelled.

  Holly’s head fell into her hands. Monica Pierce.

  “Shut your mouth!” Peter boomed. “Don’t worry, Holly: there is no immediate security threat. But I caught her sneaking around the Jacksons’ house, saying she was looking for Christian, demanding to interview him about some medical breakthrough… so as you can imagine, this is not exactly under wraps. I wouldn’t have gone to these lengths if she hadn’t resisted my initial orders to leave the area, but an audience was building and ultimately I had no other option than to securely detain this uncooperative individual. Fortunately it was late at night, otherwise the crowd would have been much larger… and otherwise Viola would have been awake to see who was intruding in our residential community, in which case this wouldn’t have ended as cleanly as it did. Call me when you’ve spoken to Grav and decided on how I should deal with this, because this news will already be the talk of Terradox and it’s not going to die down until I know how you want this to go.”

  The message ended there, just as Monica launched into another tirade.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Dimitar asked. “The TV executive guy from Earth must have told her what we were talking about in the board meeting. Slick, was it? How else could she know about medical breakthroughs and link them to Christian?”

  Furious, Holly nodded as she rose to her feet. “Come on,” she said. “Grav first, then Rusev, and then Slick.”

  Dimitar’s expression reflected his unease. As tempers went, Grav’s was famously short; bringing him to confront Slick, an apparent mole, was unlikely to end cleanly for anyone.

  “They’ll pay for this,” Holly vowed under her breath as she walked through the bar as calmly as she could, forcing a smile as Rachel and the other patrons waved goodbye. “Both of them.”

  seven

  Having called in on Grav along the way, Holly and Dimitar walked briskly to Rusev’s office on the far side of the station to tell her the news.
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  Grav, no less angered by Monica Pierce’s troublemaking than the others had expected, spent the walk muttering an impressive array of obscenities. On arrival, his scowl prompted Rusev to ask what was wrong before Holly had even closed the door behind them.

  Holly dispassionately explained the situation regarding Peter’s last-resort decision to detain Monica in front of a crowd of onlookers, and more importantly the obvious implication that Slick had shared confidential information with Monica which led her to urgently seek an interview with Christian Jackson on the topic of potentially imminent medical breakthroughs.

  Dimitar chimed in as soon as Holly stopped talking, offering up a devil’s advocate position that Peter may have overreacted.

  Grav shook his head. “Peter knows how it looks to forcibly detain someone in public. He would not do such a thing without a bulletproof reason.”

  “Well,” Rusev said, the tone leaving little doubt she was going to back-up her son’s suggestion. “I know you both dislike Monica, and I know that you’re hardly alone in that. But Viola hates her. They’ve both publicly said some harsh things about each other, and I think it’s worth considering that Peter’s judgement might have been—”

  “Peter is a professional,” Grav scoffed, unceremoniously shutting down Rusev’s train of thought. “I will not stand here quietly while his integrity is called into question — by anyone. Like I said: he would have known the kind of headaches this would cause for all of us. So for him to do this, it has to mean that those headaches are preferable to whatever he thought would have come our way if he had not acted so decisively.”

  “That’s not the main point, anyway,” Holly said, keen to move away from the discussion of Peter and just as sure of his professional detachment as Grav. “The main point is that Slick told Monica what we talked about in a confidential board meeting. Monica has always known that Christian is Chase’s dad — that’s not new information — but she’s never been caught creeping around his home in Sunshine Springs… not until right after Slick found out that Christian is close to a major regenerative breakthrough. You couldn’t have told me that was a coincidence, not even if she hadn’t explicitly mentioned medical breakthroughs like Peter said she did. I have no concerns about the security situation on Terradox while Peter is holding down the fort, and neither does Grav. My concern is that you’re inviting people into the meeting room who can’t be trusted. That’s what’s concerning me.”

  Rusev, unmoved in the slightly reclined chair behind her wide oak desk, held a finger against her wristband’s mini-screen until it extended several inches down her arm. “I’m going to ask Peter to clarify a few things,” she said. “The communications delay would make a conversation difficult, so I’ll send a few questions at once and ask him to reply as soon as he can.”

  The others watched on as Rusev asked her questions, and then added their own when she encouraged them to do so. Rusev’s voice message would reach Peter via the station’s main transmitter and Terradox’s main receiver, and her voice would be in his ears as quickly as the laws of physics would allow. It may have felt to many like a minor breakthrough in the grand scheme of things, but the recent perfection of direct person-to-person contact across the vast distance between Rusentra’s two research outposts was no mean feat in and of itself.

  The air was tense in the moments after Rusev sent her message — it was rare for there to be any kind of disagreement between her and Holly — and Dimitar’s attempts to kill the awkwardness with small talk had no success.

  “If Slick was involved, he has to go,” Holly said, very abruptly piercing the silence. “No excuses, no compromises.”

  “He doesn’t work for us,” Rusev replied.

  Grav snorted in disgust. “That is right. Slick works for the network,” he added, grunting out the word ‘network’ like it was the most offensive one he knew.

  “Semantics,” Holly said. “If we find out for sure that he was involved, he can’t work with us. In fact, while we’re all here and while we’re waiting for Peter to get back to us, there are some questions I wouldn’t mind asking Slick. Why don’t you call him in here without telling him what it’s about?”

  Rusev leaned forward, straightening her chair. “He left an hour ago. He’s on his way back to Earth with the others who came for the meeting. They had no more business here, so they weren’t authorised to stay overnight.”

  “They had no business being here at all!” Holly said. “As soon as we find out that Slick did this, you have to revoke all future authorisations for all of those sharks. We can’t afford to keep discussing important information in front of people who don’t need to hear it, and especially not in front of people who can’t be trusted to keep it to themselves.”

  Rusev nodded somewhat distantly, as though seeing Holly’s point without fully agreeing with it. “What you say isn’t without merit, Holly, but this is the structure we’re operating within.”

  “So change it!” Holly shot back, an unusual sharpness in her voice. “It’s your damn structure!”

  Ekaterina Rusev had never surrounded herself with yes men or sycophantic careerists, but nor had she ever been known to tolerate being addressed in the kind of tone Holly had adopted. Dimitar and Grav shared an uncomfortable glance during the most oppressive silence yet, while Rusev appeared to be waiting for an apology and Holly appeared more likely to spontaneously combust than back down.

  The incoming message tone which suddenly filled Rusev’s office was well-timed and gladly received by everyone, offering as it did an easy way out of the wordless impasse of the last few moments.

  Rusev immediately pressed the button to play Peter’s short message, in which he got straight to the point and quickly ran through his answers to each question.

  “I asked her who told her that Christian was worth interviewing,” Peter said, his deep voice resonating through the impressively powerful speakers built into Rusev’s wristband. “She came back with an answer that was intended as evasive but was actually amateur and illuminating: she said she has to protect the confidentiality of her sources. Of course, this gives away the core point that she has a source.”

  Holly listened carefully, taking no pleasure in being proven right.

  “As soon as I mentioned the name Slick, as you requested, her expression gave it away,” Peter went on. “If Grav was here, or if Holly was here, they would have been just as sure as I am. We were alone when I asked her these things, but I am as sure as sure can be: Slick, whoever the hell ‘Slick’ is, was Monica’s source. She became desperate when she realised that I knew about him, at which point she tried to buy her way out of trouble by offering… well, I am sure you can use your imagination. In any case, as I have already told Holly in my initial report, detaining Monica was my last resort. If there had been another option, I would have taken it.”

  The message ended there.

  “So, talking of choices…” Holly said.

  Rusev encouraged her to continue.

  “If there are any attendees from Earth at the next quarterly board meeting, there are going to be no attendees from Terradox,” Holly went on. “Some of the board members don’t like me and some don’t want me here — fine, I can deal with that. I can deal with that because all of the people who have been here for decades are people who care about the station; they care about Rusentra, and they care about what we’re doing on Terradox. Personalities don’t matter when we’re all on the same side. But people like Slick? Those people don’t care about us. Like you said yourself, they don’t even work for us. These ‘third-party partners’ are only on our side for as long as their interests align with ours. They’re loyal to us for as long as loyalty pays better than their other options.”

  “The security implications are what trouble me,” Grav said, stepping in and assuming Holly’s usual role as the more dispassionate of the two following her firm comments. “I trust the station’s security team — after all, I trained each and every one of them — but t
he only reason I was comfortable taking both myself and Peter to Terradox was that this station’s physical isolation and lack of staff turnover makes it an inherently safer place. But now? Now that I know you are inviting people we cannot trust?” He paused and made a show of shaking his head very slowly. “If meeting these people face-to-face is important enough to justify the long trip, my professional opinion is that you should be sending a delegation to see them on Earth, not inviting them here.”

  Rusev, clearly somewhat shaken by the confirmation of Slick’s untrustworthiness, offered a weary nod in reply. “I’ll take that into consideration.”

  Holly didn’t push for any further commitment; even though Rusev hadn’t been as firm as she would have liked, it sounded very much like she really would consider their points.

  “So I assume the two of you are returning early to deal with this nonsense Monica has caused?” Rusev asked, sighing out the words as a rueful grin formed on her face.

  “As soon as a Karrier and a pilot are ready to take us,” Holly said, moving towards the door without a prolonged goodbye of the kind she and Rusev had long ago agreed to avoid at the end of their regretfully brief quarterly reunions.

  “Okay,” Rusev said, smiling more warmly. “I’ll deal with all of this — firmly — and I’ll see you both again soon.”

  “I hope so,” Holly said, pausing in the doorway to wave to her ageing boss and friend of so many years. “But that depends on how firmly you deal with it.”

  eight

  Viola woke to the usual sound of her alarm clock and the unusual sight of an empty pillow.

  She immediately sat up and navigated through her wristband’s menu screens until a map eased her mind by revealing Peter’s location. It told her that he was fairly close and getting closer, meaning that whatever kind of problem had pulled him out of bed in the middle of the night had been dealt with and that he was now homeward bound in the safety of a transport capsule. He was with a colleague, the map revealed, so Viola didn’t bother him with a call; details of the overnight excitement would come soon enough, when he reached Sunshine Springs in a matter of minutes.