Lisa couldn’t even consider leaving her young twin brothers behind and her parents wouldn’t consider a change of heart, but she and Bo had decided to make the most of the year they had left rather than cut their relationship short to make his departure easier when the time came.
At no point had Lisa even asked if Bo might change his mind; it had been made up since the moment Dimitar first mentioned the idea of a Kosmosphere, and he had long since come to see Arkadia and the opportunities it presented as the reason he’d been born.
Bo and the rest of the audience stayed for the rest of the relatively short ceremony, applauding at all the right times. The penultimate graduate was Bradley Reinhart, the young communications officer who had made an unplanned spectacular entrance to the launch ceremony at the same site two years earlier.
Holly made reference to that moment, drawing laughter as she reminisced, and Bradley took the playful ribbing in the intended spirit. His training would be put to good use in the coming days when he was set to lead the team communicating with Chase during his flight to Arkadia.
Last up was the only individual who would join Chase on his imminent trip, and one whose future had led to a prolonged and spirited debate: Rachel Berry.
Rachel, a quietly hyper-effective and greatly respected engineer, had begun her Rusentra career working under Robert Harrington way back when he led the Venus station’s Habitat Management division. Robert’s recommendation soon helped to earn her a highly sought-after position in the station’s Craft Management division, and Rachel’s good work led to her promotion to Head of that division within just a few short years.
Shortly after the plans for a Kosmosphere were formally approved, Holly recruited Rachel to lead a new Craft Management division on Terradox. Many individuals on the station hadn’t taken kindly to this, and in more recent times Holly had come to understand just how it felt to have such an excellent worker snatched away. This was because Robert, from his temporary home on Earth, had since talked Rachel into signing up for a one-way trip to Arkadia.
Holly did her best to convince Rachel to stay, and when that course of action failed she shifted her attention to Robert and all but begged him to recruit someone else in Rachel’s place. Having already lost Robert and with Nisha and Bo soon to follow, Holly knew that Terradox would be without many of its keenest minds in just a year’s time. Adding Rachel to that list would leave an even larger hole to fill, she said, but Robert was not for backing down.
Unrelenting, Robert argued that Holly would always have access to billions of potential Rachels on Earth, just a few hundred million miles away from Terradox. Arkadia, on the other hand, would only have whoever made the trip — at least until the next generation was born and raised. Arkadia needed the best of the best, he insisted, and nothing else would do.
Holly bore no grudge towards Robert and certainly no ill feelings for Rachel, who had always been a model professional and remarkably quick to learn and apply whatever was asked of her.
“You earned it,” Holly said, handing Rachel her cap.
Robert and the rest of the future Arkadian population were getting a top-quality recruit in Rachel. But Holly knew that the challenge Robert had experienced in securing her services was absolutely nothing compared to what he was having to deal with on Earth…
nine
At long last, the provisional list was out.
Everyone who had applied for a place on Arkadia now knew their fate, with the vast majority left disappointed but nevertheless pleased for the lucky few of their friends or family members who had been more fortunate.
No precise selection criteria had ever been published; and while this had done nothing to prevent certain accusations being levied at the committee, it at least ruled out any drawn out appeals or complaints for those unsuccessful applicants who saw themselves as more qualified than some who had made the cut. Despite enjoying broad support from governments and public bodies of all kinds due to the overwhelming benefits of applied romotech, the Arkadia project was ultimately a private one and thus Rusentra was under no obligation to justify its selections.
Cynics claimed that the list reveal had been tactically held back until after the latest Day of Gratitude so as to avoid the potential for angry or even violent scenes caused by jilted ‘rejects’, as some unsuccessful applicants had termed themselves. This theory was so obviously true that no real effort was made to deny it, but even this sensible decision to delay the announcement hadn’t been completely successful in preventing protests during Viola’s annual Day of Gratitude address.
The number of protesters was tiny but their voices were loud, and over the last two years such anti-Arkadian sentiment had become background noise that the content and excited majority had learned to tune out and live with.
The Day of Gratitude had passed with no major violence, in New London at least, but the acute tension of the day had led to Katie Ospanov stating out loud for the first time that she wished her birthday was on a different day.
“Me too, sweetheart,” Viola had said, seeing no sense in lying.
Two weeks later, the family were all present at Patch Hawthorne’s sixth birthday party. Both children had grown many inches taller since Arkadia was launched, naturally enough, while Arkadia itself had expanded to many thousands of times the size of the embryonic romosphere that was carried into orbit by a Super Ferrier as all of humanity watched on.
Pavel Mak, a loyal security guard who was by now a friend of the Hawthornes as well as Ospanovs, was present with his baby Sophie, a child who hadn’t been born or even conceived at the time of the launch.
He certainly looked a lot more presentable than he had just a day earlier when he turned up in a bloody mess at the Ospanovs’ front door, mere minutes after dealing with two would-be assassins who failed in an attempt to take out Peter.
The assassination attempt had since been illuminated to the extent that all of the adults in the room, and pretty much everywhere else, had seen clear video footage of the incident. The footage showed Peter and Pavel being jumped by a pair of self-styled radicals who opposed the Arkadia project and had never even applied for places, although public decency laws saw to it that the messiest moments were blurred out.
What remained clear in the video was that Peter vehemently resisted Pavel’s calls to make himself invisible via his protective cloak, and Viola had been furious to see that Peter actually disabled his cloak for a few seconds in order to disarm one of the assailants while Pavel dealt with the other.
In the end, Peter’s cloak was remotely re-enabled and his entire body rendered invisible against his own wishes in a move that infuriated him. He had since made it clear to Rusentra’s on-Earth security supervisors that he would kill anyone who ever again stepped in to stop him assisting Pavel or anyone else in a life-or-death situation, and the fact that he had made this vow in a calm voice many hours after the incident left all of those who heard it in little doubt that he was serious.
Viola meanwhile begged Peter to think of her and Katie if any similar situation ever reared its head, although she did acknowledge that she understood his drive to help Pavel in the heat of the moment.
“People talk about fight or flight,” he told her, “but let’s just say that where I grew up, they didn’t teach us to fly — and neither did Grav.”
“Well let’s just say you’ve got a wife and daughter waiting at home,” Viola snapped back, “and if that doesn’t get through your head, let’s just say that this whole project would fall apart and all of those assholes would win if anything happened to you. Okay?”
Peter fully understood where she was coming from but tried to explain that rationality didn’t come into it in such moments. In his words: “At times like that, it’s not even about survival. It’s about watching your friend taking on two armed men and knowing that if you don’t do something, he’s done. The beast takes over.”
Viola was at least eased slightly by the fact that it had ultimately been the bea
st in Pavel who had brutally slayed the attackers with their own weapons, because it was more comfortable to think that Peter would be capable of such a thing than to have it proven.
A more meaningful positive was that the public at large, as well as the media, had reacted to the assassination attempt with utter and unflinching condemnation. There had always been a handful of people who spoke against Arkadia for various reasons, but of late it seemed very much like the more militant fringe of anti-Arkadians had been legitimised by certain politicians who saw the issue as a vote-winner.
Largely because there was always a lot of political currency in flat-out contrarianism, and with democracy firmly re-established on Earth after the fall of the GU, it made strategic sense for some parties to oppose the project in an effort to make upcoming elections about a single issue on which other more popular parties were atypically united in support.
It wasn’t a complicated plan and didn’t have to pay off massively, only needing to secure the support of the 5% of voters uncertain about Arkadia while more mainstream parties fought over the other 95% of the electorate.
In the midst of the petty political posturing there were also some legitimate concerns which were addressed as fully as possible but couldn’t be easily dismissed. One example regarded the inevitable ‘brain drain’ that would result from many thousands of Earth’s best minds all leaving for pastures new.
Some long-term critics of off-Earth research criticised Arkadia as the new Terradox in this regard, while fringe voices jumped on the bandwagon to claim that the Terradox metaphor didn’t end there. In their eyes, the similarities didn’t begin with the recent colony but rather with Roger Morrison’s initial plan to abandon Earth having developed a new world as a refuge solely for his chosen elite.
In the words of one prominent anti-Arkadian: “Even if they don’t eliminate us, they are deliberately weakening us.”
Unfortunately, further damaging conspiracy theories naturally followed from this line of thinking, and before long some of those in mass circulation became intensely and unsettlingly personal about Viola’s family.
It was at this point that anti-Arkadian concerns went from fairly reasonable to utterly unhinged, and while the most out-there theories were previously easily dismissed as nonsense, the recent attempts on Peter’s life had suddenly made them feel all too serious.
So-called ‘bloodline theories’ were now rife, and evidently didn’t have to make any sense to gain tractions in some fringe circles. Desperate attempts to link well-known families like the Harringtons and Kohlis to powerful families of decades and centuries gone by didn’t have to be successful to make their mark, because speaking the words was enough to sow the seed of distrust.
Had logic been required, the bloodline theories would have died immediately. For one thing, any suggestion that a group of ill-defined elites had long planned Arkadia as the home of an offshoot civilisation, and particularly one which held that the prominent individuals and families associated with Terradox had always been in on it, utterly ignored the point that Dimitar Rusev — Ekaterina’s only direct descendent and thus the end point of the primary bloodline — was staying behind on the Venus station.
Similar was true of Chase Jackson’s parents, Christian and Jillian, who were set to stay on Terradox while their son headed to Arkadia. Undeterred by these facts, the lunatic fringe shifted gears to say that it wasn’t just about who was leaving for Arkadia, it was about who would continue to be absent from Earth, arguing at something of a stretch that Dimitar and the Jacksons’ continued absence from Earth was more telling than their absence from Arkadia.
One conspiracy theory along this theme went further than the rest, and it was the one that drove susceptible anti-Arkadians into manic rages and drove people to do all they could to prevent the project from going ahead. In short, this was the theory that Earth’s remaining population would indeed be decisively eliminated once the chosen few departed.
Because Roger Morrison had actually tried to do something very similar to this with his original plan to hide out with his cohorts on Terradox while Earth was cleansed of the unproductive masses, such theories, as crazy as they sounded, weren’t immediately discounted by everyone who heard them. Viola and the others knew from that experience that dismissing all theories out of hand could be dangerous in itself, but this was different; this wasn’t a case of people finding something, it was a case of people fabricating something.
Needless to say, the evidence put forward by proponents of the bloodline theory was slim and flimsy to say the least. The supporting ‘evidence’ was in fact almost non-existent and rested largely upon the ‘discovery’ that there had been a viscount somewhere on Viola’s mother’s side of the family, several centuries ago.
It didn’t seem to matter that the individual in question had died childless and relatively young, or even that the rank of viscount wasn’t a particularly high one. Illustratively, Viola’s own initial reaction of moderate surprise at the news was quickly followed by a shrug since she knew that Viscount was the second lowest of five peerage ranks — behind Duke, Marquess and Earl — to which most families were bound to have some distant connection if anyone was motivated to look back far enough into the past.
Indeed, less than a day after the article was published containing this supposed scoop, rational observers found closer and more recent links to higher-ranking noblemen in the families of both the article’s author and the publication’s editor.
The supposed ace in the anti-Arkadian pack, however, was a claim that Peter Ospanov was also of noble stock.
The sole data point presented in support of this idea was that Peter, born in Kazakhstan, was a distant but direct descendent of very powerful Russian nobility. This claim, even flimsier than the other, came as more of a surprise to Peter and his surviving family in Astana than it did to anyone else.
Some agitators claimed that Peter and Viola’s marriage had been arranged long in advance, even toying with the necessary side-theory that the entire discovery of Terradox and the fall of Roger Morrison had been mere sideshows in a centuries-long play. This particular strain of madness was too much of a stretch for almost everyone, and even the more radical of the prominent anti-Arkadian politicians distanced themselves from it. In its place, they ’merely’ posited the theory that the Kosmosphere plan had been on the burner for years and was ultimately publicly revealed to coincide with the birth of Peter and Viola’s firstborn, who they hailed as the ordained leader of humanity’s elite offshoot.
Citing the close timing of Katie’s birth and the announcement of the Kosmosphere as anything but coincidence, it took no great leap for some to state that the elites’ Arkadian departure wouldn’t occur should anything happen to Katie in the meantime. And while this was considered a despicable line of thought by an overwhelming majority, it was still given far more airtime than a more responsible media would have provided.
The educated politicians who enabled such poisonous and potentially murderous rhetoric by failing to distance themselves completely from a broader bloodline theory they clearly knew was baseless were the people who disappointed Viola most of all.
Peter, meanwhile, somehow managed to shrug it off in public while absolutely stewing about it in private. He saw claims of noble lineage as something of a slur, erasing the struggles his family had overcome for centuries and indeed erasing the countless deaths his young eyes had witnessed at the hands of Roger Morrison and his GU forces.
Those were and always had been the true elite, who Peter himself had more than once risked his life to take down. In reality, as he and those close to him knew, Peter had grown up with almost nothing in a region torn apart by conflict between Global Union militants and nationalist militias who saw the GU for what it was long before most of the rest of the world cottoned on.
The people talking about his ‘noble blood’ and his family’s part in a centuries-old elite plan apparently didn’t know that Peter had been smuggled out of his hom
eland at the age of 13 towards the safe zone around Rusev’s base. Grav, who had recognised the name of Peter’s brother as that of a high-ranking figure in the regional resistance movement, had taken one look at the boy’s already above-average stature and personally enrolled him in a training program for security personnel. Peter excelled and soon found himself working on the station, and the rest was history.
His parents and older brother, however, were not so lucky, perishing in a series of targeted bombing campaigns just months after his escape from the area. Grav hadn’t wanted to tell him what had happened but Rusev did, and that was that. Peter was remarkably restrained when he found out, distantly saying that he’d known it was coming, and if anything he was glad to hear their deaths came during a bombing campaign — he had heard the stories from Grav about what the GU’s ground forces had done elsewhere.
But despite his ancestors’ struggles being erased by these bloodline theories, Peter was most angry about the conspiracies having brought his daughter Katie into the political arena.
It took all of his restraint to keep this rage to himself, and a private discussion with Pavel and Vic Hawthorne just minutes before young Patch’s party began had at least allowed some of the anger to get out.
“People want to talk about Katie being the end product of some special bloodline,” he spat into the air, fury dripping from the words, “as if she is somehow linked to fucking Morrison? They talk about this backstory, and what do they do… do they close their eyes at the parts of the story when three of that little girl’s grandparents have been murdered in cold blood by GU thugs and when the only surviving one — Robert — willingly put his life on the line to help us take out Boyce? They close their eyes and plug their ears when the story gets to that fucking part?”
There was nothing the other men could say, and neither could even begin to imagine being in Peter’s position. Even prior to the sudden explosion of the ‘bloodline bullshit’, as he succinctly put it, Katie had been the focus of unsettling attention — some intended as positive and some clearly negative — from weirdos on both sides of the Arkadia debate.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 92
