After what seemed like too long, the last of the memorial posters passed into the taxi’s rearview mirror. These posters, intended to further stir emotions of gratitude in an already grateful public, had the effect of turning the final stage of Viola’s journey into something of a sombre procession. She tried to think of Katie waiting at home — probably still chasing the invisible ball around with her best friend Patch — and also to focus on the fact that she would only ever have to deliver two or three more Day of Gratitude speeches. That depended on the exact date of her family’s departure for the Kosmosphere in around three years, and framing things in these terms helped her to keep a level head.
The speech itself was nothing to worry about, given both how thoroughly she had rehearsed it and how comfortable she had become addressing large crowds. This comfort came via the brute force of massive experience, with each major public appearance having become easier and easier after her first few abortive attempts to get through a speech without constantly and nervously reading from her notes.
“Destination reached,” the taxi soothingly announced as it slowed to a halt.
Viola opened the door and instinctively closed it straight away, amazed by the level of noise outside. It was a general cacophony rather than a sudden burst of focused cheering or chanting, because no one knew she was there yet. The incredible level of this general hubbub made her wonder about the size of the waiting crowd, and she couldn’t even imagine what level the noise would reach when she finally stood before them.
A matter of seconds later, before she had finished psyching herself up to step out, a serious-looking man in a long black coat and dark black sunglasses appeared at the side of the car. He removed his sunglasses before opening Viola’s door then smiled relatively warmly as he introduced himself as her bodyguard for the speech. At least a dozen uniformed police officers were watching on, assuring her that the man was who he said he was.
“Thanks,” she said, stepping out, “but if I needed a bodyguard I would have brought Pavel.”
“Well, my name is Lance and I’m going to be taking Pavel’s place. The crowd is considerably larger than expected and the police weren’t able to screen everyone at the checkpoints as thoroughly as they would have liked. All I’m here to do is stand at your side for the duration of your speech and ensure you make it back home safely. Pavel can pick up his duties again as soon as that happens.”
Although Lance spoke in a fairly soft tone, his words were tinged with insistence.
“I’m cloaked,” Viola said. “I really don’t need anyone to stand beside me.”
“Mrs Ospanov, my orders are very—”
“I know you’re doing your job,” she interrupted, “and I’m not trying to give you a hard time here. I know you’re trying to keep me safe, but I am safe. And when I spoke to Holly last night she was very clear about how she wanted this to go down: only me on the podium, and only me in the shot — no one else.”
Lance nodded, unflustered. “I understand your position, but like I was saying: my orders are crystal clear.”
Viola pointed to the police-guarded steps which led to the stage. “Lance, I don’t know what to tell you. One of us is going up there. Either I’m going up there alone to give this speech and send everyone home happy, or you’re going up there alone to tell everyone that the speech isn’t happening.”
“That’s not how this is going to go,” Lance said, standing his ground both literally and figuratively.
“I’ll personally make sure you don’t get in any trouble for this,” Viola reassured him. “Who’s your top-level boss, anyway? Are you with the city or the police?”
“R.E.S.C.” he replied with a brief shake of his head.
Viola’s shoulders loosened. “Rusentra Earth Security Corps?”
“Precisely. So ultimately, I suppose my top-level boss is Dimitar Rusev.”
“One of my best friends,” Viola said with a smile. She patted Lance on the shoulder like he was an old friend himself and walked away. “Don’t worry about anything. You won’t just not get in trouble for letting me go alone, I’ll ask Dimitar to make sure you get a raise.”
“Viola, wait,” Lance called after a few seconds. He walked towards her and she stopped to hear him out. “Instead of more money, do you think you could put in a word with Dimitar to move me up the list for the Kosmosphere? I have a kid… but only one, if that helps.”
Suddenly tremendously uncomfortable, Viola wracked her mind for a response. “I really can’t get involved in the list-making, but I’ll definitely tell him that you helped me out.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” Viola said, turning again to walk up the steps. But only a few paces later, she paused once more and looked back over her shoulder. “It’s not the end of the world if you don’t make it onto the final list, though. Whatever breakthroughs we make on the Kosmosphere, they can and will benefit everyone on Earth — just like the breakthroughs from Terradox.”
Lance didn’t react.
His blank expression prompted Viola to turn around fully in an effort to reassure him. “If you don’t make it, I want you to know that we’re not abandoning Earth,” she went on. “I need you to know that. We’re not leaving you all behind.”
Still, Lance said and did nothing. It looked as though he had a thought in mind but didn’t want to speak it given his present company.
“We’re not abandoning you,” Viola repeated with ninety-five percent conviction in her voice, trying to swallow away all doubt as she turned away from Lance for the final time and climbed the steps.
These words echoed in her mind and overpowered what would otherwise have been a positively deafening roar that greeted her emergence on the main stage. She looked out at a crowd that seemed to go on forever and was certainly well over a million strong.
Inevitably, given the topic of recent conversation, she wondered how many of those everyday people might make the list.
A few hundred at most, she guessed, trying not to let her solemnity show.
The rest will be left behind.
four
Only forty seconds from his destination at full speed, a large arrow appeared before Chase on the ground up ahead, digitally superimposed by the Wasp’s reactive windshield in the same manner as the obstacles he had overcome earlier. He asked the Wasp for a closer look and was immediately shown a close-up from one of the plane’s excellent exterior cameras. On the small inlet screen that appeared on the windshield he then saw a boy running around 300 metres ahead of a grounded and open transport capsule, evidently having had some kind of problem with the capsule and evidently trying to make it to see the launch before there was nothing left to see.
Although the launch site at the RPZ was well under a minute away by Wasp, it would have been a considerable journey on foot.
With Holly’s words echoing in Chase’s mind — “there’s no way we can start without you” — he changed the Wasp’s course and rapidly descended for an impromptu landing.
The boy stopped in his tracks and turned to face the Wasp. When Chase got low enough to make out the boy’s face, he recognised him as a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old trainee communications officer named Bradley Reinhart. The unplanned pickup would doubtless earn Chase a private dressing down from Holly later in the day, but a relatively mild inconvenience for him would make all the difference in the world for young Bradley, who would otherwise have had no chance of reaching the RPZ in time to witness the launch.
Bradley walked towards the Wasp as it touched down, confusion etched on his face. Chase wasted no time getting out and instead beckoned Bradley inside with a hand gesture. The boy was only too glad to oblige. “Uh, shouldn’t you already be at the launch?” he asked as he climbed in the open door.
“Holly said they won’t start without me,” Chase said, assisting Bradley with his safety belts. “What happened to your capsule, anyway? Why did you have to run?”
Bradly held his arms aloft; totally unfam
iliar with the safety belts, all he could do was let Chase take care of it. “I just left it too late,” he said. “I knew the transport system was being disabled for an hour — everyone did — but I was playing chess with my cousin on Earth and I completely lost track of time. My dad called to ask where the hell I was, but it was too late. The capsule cut off maybe three minutes before it would have arrived. On foot, I would have been lucky to be there before everyone else started to leave.”
Chase nodded in understanding after securing Bradley to his seat. It was very rare for the transport system to be disabled but the reasoning for today’s pause made sense: all research and education was suspended for the rest of the day so that everyone could attend the launch, and it was both deemed unnecessary and unfair for those who normally watched over the colony’s extensive network of transport capsules to have missed it themselves. The necessity of their oversight positions had been called into question on multiple occasions with some voices insisting that the system could manage itself and avoid collisions or traffic bottlenecks, but Holly’s entrenched reluctance to depend entirely on automation for such a core function meant that those voices would never have their way so long as she remained as President of the Colony Council.
“It’s Bradley, right?” Chase asked as he began the takeoff procedure. “You’re training to be a communications officer?”
“Wow,” the boy said. “It’s just Brad, but… I mean… yeah, that’s right. But we’ve never properly met, so I really didn’t think you’d know my name. There are thousands and thousands of people here. Do you know every—”
“They’re not all on track to make the cut for the Kosmosphere,” Chase said.
“You pay attention to our work?” Bradley asked, sounding even more surprised.
“Certain disciplines more than others,” Chase explained, lifting off more gently than normal for the benefit of his inexperienced passenger. “Comms knowledge saved all of our asses back when Holly and the other six of the original landing crew managed to contact the station from here. Thinking outside the box to solve communications problems in a tight spot was crucial again when they took down Boyce, and then again when Steve was trying to get out of the Kompound four years ago. We need people who think like that, outside the box. People like you.”
“A lot of us are doing well,” the boy said, humbly if somewhat awkwardly searching for the right words to downplay his position.
“Glad to hear it. After all, we need a lot of good people. And uh, just a heads-up: this thing goes pretty fast.”
The boy nodded, thinking he knew what fast meant. “So who else is on track? How many disciplines do you follow?”
“Pretty much all of them,” Chase said, speaking over the sudden noise that came with his rapid acceleration. He looked at Bradley and saw him leaning back with an expression of borderline horror. Late was late, so he slowed down very slightly to a less unsettling speed.
“Keep talking,” Bradley panted, short of oxygen not directly because of the Wasp’s pace but more so because of how utterly unaccustomed he was to it. “About anything… just keep talking, okay?”
Chase looked at him again and saw that he was smiling very slightly, as though part of his mind was amused at his body’s reaction to the flight. “We’ll be on the ground again in a minute, dude. But if talking makes it easier… what did you ask earlier, something about which disciplines I was paying attention to? Yeah… well, practically all of them, like I said. Everyone cares about the makeup of the Kosmosphere’s population, but I think I probably care even more because I was inside that Isolation Kompound when Steve flipped.”
Bradley nodded again, this time as though he was really focusing on Chase’s words and as though the conversation was succeeding in distracting him from the flight. “That makes sense,” he said, making Chase grin momentarily since this reply came many times louder than it had to be.
The topic at hand saw Chase’s grin fade quickly, though, and he continued his point as the RPZ drew ever nearer. “Right. And the thing is, Steve wasn’t a bad guy; he just wasn’t psychologically fit for the mission. You know the story as well as I do about how the rest of us were trapped inside there with him. But here’s the thing: when Steve lost it, we only had a week left. My goal at that point was to keep Steve stable until the mission ended. But that’s the difference… because on the Kosmosphere, the mission never ends. There’s no time limit. No one gets out. Whoever we take, we’re stuck with them. And when the idiots who used to be in charge of security for the old Terradox Resort somehow let David Boyce come here under an alias, look at how that problem ended up being solved. Holly, Rusev and all of the others were able to come here from the station and deal with it quickly because the station is so close to here. But the Kosmosphere is going to get further and further away from Earth, Terradox and the station every single day. If something goes wrong, there’s no one else to help. So we need to do two things: we need to bring a lot of smart people who can and will help whenever they have to, and we also need to bring zero bad eggs. Because if we take a single bad egg to the Kosmosphere…”
Bradley remained silent as Chase trailed off. His hands were still gripping the edges of his seat, knuckles whitening thanks to the intensity of his grip, but Chase’s words and tone were now breeding an altogether different kind of concern.
As the RPZ came into view, revealing an enormous crowd on the temporary grandstands that had been fabricated for the launch ceremony, Chase began to descend. He glanced at Bradley and noticed that the nature of his expression had changed from fearful to deeply contemplative. “I hope I’m not talking you out of applying,” he chuckled. “Everything is going to work out. The best people are doing everything possible to make sure only good people get in, and we’re going to have Peter Ospanov back in charge of security once we get there. You’ve been here since before Peter and Viola had to leave, right? You know no one is ever going to be stupid enough to mess with Peter, just like no one messes with Grav.”
“I guess so,” Bradley said. He then breathed the deepest sigh of relief of his young life so far as the Wasp touched down just a few hundred metres from the grandstand, but his mind was far from soothed.
His fear of the flight was gone, but a frightening seed had been planted in his mind.
five
Light rain began to drip on the ground around Viola’s feet just as she took to the stage in front of New London’s City Hall, standing alone before an intimidatingly huge crowd who had been waiting for many hours to see her. She was kept dry by the personal romotech cloak which was in place to protect her from potential attackers, but the crowd had no such protection.
She saw a number of the better prepared spectators raising umbrellas, which understandably irked those further back whose views were obstructed. Several of those who raised umbrellas lowered them within seconds after generally polite requests from their fellow spectators, but Viola knew that arguments could break out if the rain got any worse. Keeping the New London crowd peaceful and maintaining a positive tone were absolutely crucial factors in how well her speech would be received elsewhere, so this was a real cause for concern.
“One second,” she said to the crowd, holding up a single finger. “I forgot something.”
Viola ran down the steps and glanced around in search of Lance, the Rusentra security officer she’d spoken to moments earlier. Fortunately she spotted him very quickly and was at his side within a few more seconds.
“How long would it take to put a roof over the crowd?” she asked, urgency in her tone. “Just a basic single-layer cloak with run-offs or guttering or whatever we’d need?”
Lance blew air from his lips. “Once we had authorisation? Seconds. To get the authorisation for any kind of weather manipulation, even as localised as this? Hours.”
“Even if it’s me who asks for it?” Viola asked. She knew how this sounded — dangerously close to ‘do you know who I am?’ — but the fact that she was trying to use her posit
ion for the benefit of others rather than herself made the words less uncomfortable to utter.
“Unfortunately, yes. The time delay is built in and can’t be over-ridden. We’re not on Terradox, Mrs Ospanov; everything has to be cleared by the committee and even then it’s subject to the delay.”
Viola rubbed her chin in frustrated thought. “There’s already a square barrier around the stage, right? A high but roofless four-sided cloak to stop objects from being thrown onto the stage? That’s what they told me would be in place…”
“That’s right,” Lance said. “But that doesn’t really solve the rain prob—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Viola replied as she ran back up the steps, a fresh idea in mind.
The crowd cheered once again as she reappeared.
“It’s literally impossible for us to put a cloak over you guys while I talk,” she said into the microphone, “so we’re just going to have to stick this out.”
The rain was growing stronger, now bouncing around the base of Viola’s cloak rather than dripping. “You can probably see that I’m not dressed for rain,” she said, gesturing to her long black dress and lightweight shoulder-covering cardigan. “But if we’re all going to get wet, we’re all going to get wet.”
She then pressed a few buttons on her wristband to disable her cloak, feeling momentary regret when the cold rain suddenly hit her.
The crowd roared as she cleared her eyelashes with her thumb and adjusted her long blonde hair.
“Do your worst!” she laughed at the sky, drawing further cheers. “You think us New Londoners are scared of a bit of rain?”
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 89
