Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  When Holly pushed the green button and the Super Ferrier initiated the take-off, the image on the large screen behind Holly switched to a live feed from the launch site. The crowd cheered, understandably, and Holly turned away from them to catch a glimpse.

  The camera capturing this sight had evidently been placed at the cliff-edge from which she and Viola had first discovered their crashed Karrier ten long years earlier. It was incredible to see the scale of the spacecraft that was about to launch from that very spot, let alone to consider what it was hauling, and Holly had to make a conscious effort to restrain her emotions.

  The embryonic romosphere, which most people already thought of as Arkadia, appeared jet black thanks to the opaque cloak which would remain around it until the two-year expansion was complete. Teams on Terradox, Earth and the Venus station would all have access to imagery from cameras on the inside of this cloak, but the first time the general public saw Arkadia’s surface would be in two years’ time when the cloak was lifted. Arkadia’s external gravitational cloak would remain in place for even longer — right up until the enormous sphere reached a sufficient distance from Earth that its presence would have no discernible gravitational effect.

  Cloak or no cloak there would have been nothing to see at the moment, in any case, and the colonists surrounding Holly were all more than satisfied to catch a glimpse of the perfect black sphere.

  Only twenty seconds after she pressed the button to order the launch, Holly felt a lump in her throat as she gazed at the screen and saw the Super Ferrier successfully lift its most precious of all cargo.

  “Woohoo!” dozens of the crowd yelled. “Yeahhhh!”

  Within another minute or so, both the Super Ferrier and black sphere became directly visible at a great height in the sky.

  “Up there,” someone yelled, drawing everyone else’s attention. “That way!”

  Sure enough, there it was.

  “There she goes,” Chase said, beaming the widest smile of his life.

  Holly said nothing, only wiping a stubborn tear from her joyous face.

  Chase briefly glanced beyond her to Grav, whose expression, as ever, gave a lot less away.

  “Go well, little sphere,” Grav said, looking directly at it and speaking his first words since Chase stepped out of the Wasp. “Go well.”

  Two years later

  seven

  “No… Peter, I don’t want to mess up your home!”

  “Pavel, enough,” Peter insisted, guiding his friend and bodyguard out of the taxi and trying to usher him towards the front door of the Ospanovs’ New London home. “No one is in and if there’s any mess, I’ll clean it. I’m not sending you home across the city looking like that — not after all you’ve done for me.”

  Pavel sighed in acceptance. Seconds later, he was following Peter inside… at least until Peter stopped dead on the spot.

  “Daddy!” Katie yelled, excitedly jumping to her feet.

  It was already too late.

  “Daddy?” Viola’s voice parroted, as surprised as Katie. She appeared from the living room seconds later. Upon catching sight of Pavel she gazed intently at Peter. Their eyes silently asked each other why they were home at this hour, with Viola’s unspoken question understandably carrying a significant level of concern along with the healthy measure of surprise.

  She looked beyond Peter at Pavel once more, but before she could ask anything out loud and before Peter encouraged Katie to go upstairs, the child beat them all to it.

  “Is Pavel covered in paint?” she asked, the words full of all the innocence in the world.

  “That’s right, angel,” Peter said, pulling Pavel into full view by his side. “Some bad people tried to throw paint at me and Pavel stepped in the way.”

  Katie looked puzzled. “But you must have had your bubble switched on…” she said, halfway to a question.

  Too smart for her own good, Peter often thought. Viola often told him that some of Katie’s mannerisms and unusual speech patterns reminded her of how her own younger brother Bo had been at six years old, and Robert had said similar things with more conviction. She had “her uncle’s brains and her mum’s looks”, in Robert’s grandfatherly words; “the best of both worlds”, in Peter’s.

  Pavel cleared his throat. “I wasn’t one hundred percent sure that the paint wouldn’t get through,” he said. “I’ve never seen paint hit a cloak before.”

  Peter bit his lip, but he knew this explanation would last a few seconds at best.

  “How could paint get through?” Katie pressed. “I thought nothing gets through?“

  “It doesn’t,” Pavel said, “it was just that in the heat of the moment, things aren’t always clear. My job is to keep your dad safe. I would do it for free, but that’s how I’m earning my families’ tickets to Arkadia. You remember Sophie from your birthday party, right?”

  Smart move, Viola thought.

  “Baby Sophie?” Katie asked, her suspicious inquisitiveness dying in an instant and quickly replaced with a wide-eyed smiled. “Are you and Sophie coming to Patch’s birthday party, too? It’s tomorrow!”

  “Of course they are, honey,” Viola said. “But why don’t you go and make an invitation for them now, just in case Patch forgot to give them one? Daddy will help you with the scissors while I help Pavel clean up all of this silly paint.”

  Katie happily took hold of Peter’s hand and pulled him into the living room, too excited by the thought of seeing little Sophie again to reason that there was no way Patch would have forgotten to invite her.

  Peter glanced at Pavel as he went and held a firm finger to his lips. “Nothing,” he mouthed, as forceful as a silent word could be.

  As soon as Peter pulled the living room door closed, Pavel’s expression changed immediately. “Don’t ask,” he said, incongruously weakly for a man of his size and build. “Please.”

  Viola looked deeply into Pavel’s dark eyes; there were no tears, but they were bleary. “Come to the bathroom and get cleaned up,” she said gently. “I’ll get you some clothes from Peter’s wardrobe.”

  Pavel nodded in thanks and followed her up the stairs. Viola opened the bathroom door and turned on the shower, telling Pavel not to worry about staining any towels while he washed away the worst of the stains. It wasn’t paint, as everyone over the age of six knew only too well, and clean linen was the least of anyone’s concerns.

  Viola wasted no time in fetching a change of clothes from Peter’s wardrobe — Pavel was several inches shorter than Peter but similarly built, so they would do the job until he got home — but she didn’t take them straight through to the bathroom.

  Pavel was in the shower, anyway, so she sat down on the bed and pressed a button on her wristband while holding it towards the viewing wall on the far side of the bedroom.

  A live news feed filled the wall. Its content filled her with fear.

  They were only talking about one thing: an assassination attempt on Peter Ospanov, the second in eleven days. Viola saw the city streets behind the reporter, locked down, and listened carefully to the headline version of the story: “… no casualties other than the two foiled assassins who were deflected by Mr Ospanov’s bodyguard.”

  Viola instinctively looked in the direction of the bathroom, as though two walls weren’t in the way. She thought of Pavel, covered in more blood than she had ever seen in her life, and couldn’t help but think that ‘deflected’ was one hell of a euphemism.

  “I think it's time we start holding to account the politicians who have legitimised the braindead conspiracy theories that lead to this kind of radicalisation,” said a talking head in a news studio as Viola stared blankly towards the bathroom. “We had already seen knives and bombs, and today we’ve seen machetes on the streets of New London. How long until more sophisticated methods rear their heads?”

  Viola tapped her wristband to kill the feed. She sat in silence until she heard the shower turn off, then carried the clothes to the bathroom door and k
nocked.

  Pavel opened it no more than necessary, revealing only his head. His face was clean, but he could clearly see that Viola’s now bore the weight of knowing what had happened.

  “This house is the safest place in the world,” he said, solemnly but firmly.

  Viola handed him the clothes and nodded distantly, hoping he was right.

  eight

  It was difficult for Chase Jackson not to feel slightly embarrassed as he gazed up at a large screen playing a three-minute montage of the significant training progress he had made over the last six years.

  More than anything else, the footage made Chase realise how much he had aged. The fresh-faced 22-year-old who had excitedly stepped into the Isolation Kompound was still the same on the outside, but his hairline had receded young and the skin under his eyes had darkened.

  Holly, standing before him, put this down to the stress of the incredible pressures that had been put on Chase, the face of a generation who had seen unprecedented attention and hope dumped on his shoulders. He had borne this weight selflessly and as well as anyone could have expected, but the last six years had very clearly taken their toll.

  The gathered audience of around a hundred onlookers was far smaller than the crowd that had packed the temporary grandstands at the RPZ when he last stood in this spot as Holly launched Arkadia into orbit. Every one of them knew that he himself was set to blast off from Terradox the very next day and travel to Arkadia, now fully expanded, to conduct a thorough mission involving the delivery of recently developed instrumentation and the gathering of detailed atmospheric data which was only possible with such instrumentation. He would be back before too long and many of them would join him for the final one-way trip in a year’s time, but today they were gathered for a formal graduation ceremony.

  Chase wasn’t the only individual whose progress was being recognised in this ceremony, but his graduation was unquestionably the highest profile. Seven years had passed since Holly handpicked Chase for participation in an isolation test she hoped would prove his viability as a future mission captain, and in those seven years he had done nothing but justify her faith.

  Having already spoken extensively before introducing the montage, Holly needed few words to symbolically pass the torch to Chase. “Arkadia and its citizens will be in safe hands,” she said, placing a cap on Chase’s head to go along with the rest of his formal uniform. “The hands of Commander Chase Jackson.”

  The families and friends in the audience applauded as Chase shook the hands of the three stalwarts at the podium: Holly, Grav, and the rarely present Dimitar Rusev who had insisted upon flying in from the Venus station for this ceremony. Grav’s handshake was the firmest and most prolonged by far, and a slowly spreading grin confirmed that he wasn’t going to let go without a fight.

  “That’s how you want it?” Chase laughed.

  Holly rolled her eyes.

  Grav put his left hand behind his back, challenging Chase to do the same, and the two proceeded to engage in a minute-long squeezing contest — for lack of a more established term — in which each tried to force the other to quit before their own hand gave way.

  Chase gritted his teeth and tried to block out the pain, feeling like his hand was a berry and that Grav was a gorilla trying to crush it.

  “Come on, boy, I am an old man!” Grav said, displaying an unsettling lack of effort.

  Just as it started to look very much like it was only a matter of time until Chase’s hand fell, the tide rapidly turned. Grav let out a grunt as his right arm grew shaky, then waved his left hand in surrender just seconds later.

  Chase looked down at his own bright-red hand, which felt extremely raw, and he was more than a little surprised when Grav used his own reddened right hand to pat him on the back twice.

  “Credit where it is due,” Grav said, loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  Chase stood momentarily conflicted, suddenly sure that Grav had let him win and feeling simultaneously patronised and thankful that Grav — a man’s man if ever there was one — had opted to publicly humble himself for Chase’s benefit.

  As the audience jovially cheered both competitors and Holly introduced the next graduate, Chase lingered momentarily at Grav’s side.

  “You gave me that win,” he said.

  Grav didn’t deny it. “I have only ever lost once,” he whispered in reply.

  “To Peter?” Chase asked, confident in his guess and struggling to think of anyone else whose grip could compete with the force he had just felt.

  Grav gave a barely perceptible half-nod. “To Peter.”

  Chase quietly made his way to his parents and Nisha to watch the rest of the ceremony. His father Christian congratulated him on the win — “I knew you had it in you!” — while his mother Jillian was congratulatory of his well-earned Commander designation rather than his victory in the aftershow.

  Nisha, meanwhile, was more than a little concerned about the deep imprints that Grav’s improbably thick fingers had left on the back of Chase’s hand.

  “Why would you do that when you’re flying to Arkadia tomorrow?” she asked, her tone one of concern rather than nagging. “Look at your hand!”

  “You should see the state of his,” Chase joked, feigning machismo.

  Nisha laughed under her breath.

  Holly, looking up at them, was happy to see Nisha look happy. It hadn’t been plain sailing for her over the last two years, and everyone knew that she and Chase were back together rather than still together.

  For the sake of collective morale their split had initially been kept under wraps, with Nisha having long struggled with Chase’s accidental position as a media figurehead and her own restless discomfort with life on Terradox.

  Nisha had gone through a very tough time for several months, coming very close to asking her family if they would be willing to return with her to Earth rather than stay on track for a move to Arkadia.

  Fortunately, a strong support network had stepped up to the plate. One individual who had since contributed greatly to rebalancing Nisha’s mindset was none other than Chase’s mother, of all people: Jillian Jackson, the colony’s leading psychologist.

  Even when Nisha temporarily moved out of the home she shared with Chase, a move which came out of her general need for space rather than any specific disagreement or argument, Jillian remained a neutral figure, confidante and sounding board. It was Jillian who argued that covering up the split would have been a terrible idea, disagreeing with the ‘experts’ who insisted that it was crucial to protect the good news story of a relationship that had blossomed in the hellish confines of Little Venus’s Isolation Kompound.

  There was no denying that many on Terradox and even more so on Earth were hugely invested in Chase and Nisha — or Chisha, as elements of the media had come to know the pairing — but Jillian was firm in her insistence that the couple’s mental wellbeing was infinitely more important than the vicarious feelings of their distant fanbase.

  When Chase eventually had to publicly comment on the growing rumours, in words that were his own but which had been cleared by PR experts, the tearful reactions of fans on Earth mirrored those which had greeted the news of the break-up of successful boybands and other music acts of the past.

  On Terradox, meanwhile, Chase threw himself further and deeper into his work. Despite this, he still couldn’t help but notice that people were treating him differently, as though someone close to him had died. He didn’t see much of Nisha for several months — their work tasks rarely overlapped — and he never pressed his mother for an insight into what Nisha was telling her during their increasingly frequent sessions.

  Holly and other high-ranking colonists did all they could to help Nisha through her rough patch, primarily because they cared about her in a personal sense but also because they were desperate to ensure she remained on track for Arkadia, where her peerless knowledge of the propulsion system she’d helped to design would be much needed.

 
But one person more than any other was responsible for Nisha’s continued presence, her emotional stability and most recently for her grudgeless and seamless reunion with Chase. That person, not even present on Terradox, had been recommended by Jillian as a useful point of contact. And through long written communications and occasional voice messages, Viola Ospanov had tapped in to the similar feelings that had almost derailed her own life on Terradox six years earlier, ultimately succeeding in keeping Nisha’s head above the water.

  No one else would ever know exactly what Viola said, but Nisha was open in telling her close friends and family that it had been Viola’s words that made the difference.

  Everyone from Dimitar and Holly to Chase and Jillian took turns to thank Viola profusely for her intervention, but she knew that they would have all done the same and more for her.

  That kind of teamwork and mutual assistance was what made Terradox great, and it was why Viola herself couldn’t wait to travel to Arkadia and start building a society around the same principles.

  Next to graduate during the ceremony, which was more symbolic than anything, was none other than Viola’s brother: Bo Harrington.

  As requested, Bo wore a lightweight pressure suit without complaint and didn’t feel at all awkward despite being surrounded by a crowd of smartly dressed onlookers.

  That was Bo to a tee, Holly thought; always willing to do what was asked, and often oblivious to subtle social conventions.

  Bo had completed his basic flight and fitness training almost a year earlier, but he understood why the public recognition had been held off until today. Always a man of few words, Bo collected his cap — a different colour from Chase’s Commander cap — and returned to his spot in the audience with minimal fuss. He stood beside Lisa Croft, his own longterm partner of almost three years, but when Holly looked up at them her thoughts were far less cheery.

  For unlike Nisha and Chase, Bo and Lisa were doomed by circumstance; the Croft parents, both employed in the colony’s medical research vision, had opted to stay on Terradox.