Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  Chase was eagerly looking forward to seeing them both again, just as he was looking forward to meeting the many thousands of pioneering Arkadians who would imminently be arriving from Earth.

  During the approach to Chase’s next chosen point of interest — Arkadia’s enormous Shipyard — the children continued to gaze out in wide-eyed wonder at the sheer scale of their new home. With their imaginations unbound by convention and their creative visions unbroken by the boring reality of consensus-based planning meetings, some of their ideas for ways to utilise the land under their feet had Chase nodding his head in approval.

  Just as Holly and Grav were confident that Arkadia was safe in the hands of Viola, Peter and Chase, Chase himself was now very much getting the sense that the next generation would prove just as capable. And while he had already experienced his own wondrous first flight over Arkadia, the strength and longevity of the children’s excitement was allowing him to relive the feelings all over again.

  Rachel, Chase’s companion during his groundbreaking Arkadian voyage, was another individual he was greatly looking forward to seeing. Her work in the Shipyard had been ongoing for months and would soon culminate in the launch of a probe towards the nearby asteroid known as NGB-2. Updates on that mission had been non-existent for a while, but he had no reason to think there had been any complications; and with so many skilled people involved, he couldn’t imagine many scenarios which could have held them back.

  “Here it comes,” he said as the Shipyard first appeared on the horizon. The next few minutes revealed that a great deal of development had occurred in the past year. “We’re going to see it in a minute…”

  But as the TE-900 arrived and passed over the central section of the Shipyard, Chase’s mood fell slightly — not because of anything he saw, but because of what he didn’t see.

  “Sorry guys,” he said, only semi-aware that he was by far the most disappointed person inside the TE-900. “I thought we would see the probe. But this place is still pretty cool, right? Especially the giant inverted launch area. Look at the size of that hole, dug into the ground. That’s where everything launches from. There are underground offices and observation rooms looking into the middle of that pit… maybe one day we’ll all be allowed to check it out on foot. Would you guys like that?”

  “Were you talking about the probe they made to check out the asteroid?” Katie asked, interrupting his focus on the hole, having politely waited for him to finish talking. “Because that’s already gone.”

  Chase turned to face her, the vehicle under his charge safely cruising in an empty sky. “Gone where?”

  Katie looked at him like he was crazy. “Uh, to the asteroid.”

  “It’s supposed to be already here, not already gone. I think maybe you misheard something. They might have cloaked it for some reason, or they could be working on it somewhere else.”

  “I didn’t hear it wrong,” Katie insisted.

  With her tone leaving little room for doubt, even though Katie was as young as she was, Chase started to think she was right. “So who did you hear it from?”

  “My mum, right after Holly told her about it. Are you sure she didn’t tell you too, and maybe you just forgot?”

  “Probably,” Chase nodded carefully. “There have been a lot of things to think about lately, so it’s pretty easy to forget some of them.”

  Even though this particular conversation-ending lie was as innocent as they came, dishonesty didn’t come easily to Chase Jackson. It clearly didn’t come easily to Katie Ospanov, either, given that she had blurted the truth out without hesitation or consideration.

  “I didn’t know it was gone…” Vijay chimed in, a hint of concern in his voice. He naturally knew more details about certain projects than the much younger children, particularly given that his parents and sister had all been high-ranking colonists on Terradox. Chase sent him a reassuring wink via the rear-view mirror, telling him they would talk about it and clear it up once they got back to the others.

  The rest of the children’s impromptu tour passed with no further surprises, with Chase managing to keep a lid on his somewhat troubled curiosity regarding the expedited probe launch that had been kept from him. It didn’t go unnoticed that Vijay managed to avoid mentioning it, either, and Chase found himself impressed once again. The two naturally saw a lot of each other given Chase’s relationship with Vijay’s sister Nisha, and they got along very well. Certainly better than Chase had been getting along with Romesh Kohli of late, but that was the last thing he wanted to think about right now.

  Katie and Patch were both feeling tired by the time Chase landed the TE-900 under the gentle streetlights of Starview Springs, the remarkably expansive residential area they would now call home. Chase had kept in touch with their parents so the landing was expected, with everyone gathered at the landing site and ready to thank him for keeping them occupied and getting them back safely.

  They all wore glowing expressions, clearly elated with their new homes. Chase quietly called Nisha to his side while the others gathered around Katie and Patch to ask all about what they’d seen.

  “Everything okay?” Nisha asked, seeing something in Chase’s eyes that suggested it wasn’t.

  “Did anyone tell you that they’ve already launched the probe?” he asked, straight to the point.

  Nisha instinctively turned to look at the others, as if checking whether anyone had overheard. “What are you talking about?” she whispered in reply as soon as she turned back around. “Are you saying the probe is already gone?”

  That was enough for Chase. He had never for a second thought Nisha might have been keeping it from him on purpose, but her visible surprise ruled out any possibility that she had merely forgotten. “I couldn’t see it out at the Shipyard and Katie said Holly told Viola a while ago. The next question is why.”

  “Viola knows?” Nisha asked, her eyes widening.

  Chase nodded.

  Nisha then raised her voice more than slightly and beckoned Bo over, catching the other’s attention in the process but not raising any particular interest, much less suspicion. Vijay, desperate to be part of the group, also snuck away from his parents’ side to join what he correctly assumed to be a discussion about the probe.

  “It’s okay, he knows,” Chase said to Nisha. “He found out when I did and he played it cool, like I asked him to.”

  Bo and Vijay arrived at the same time; and although Vijay’s face made it clear that he was desperate to ask whether Nisha already knew, he let Chase do the talking.

  “Did you know that the asteroid probe has already been launched?” Chase asked Bo, just as straightforward as he had been with Nisha.

  Far less subtle than Nisha, Bo didn’t even disguise his long stare towards Viola. This, again, was enough to tell Chase that he didn’t know. This time, however, it was also enough to let Viola know what was happening.

  She excused herself from her chat with Peter, Robert and the Hawthornes, which naturally made them all curious as to what was being discussed over in the ever-growing breakaway group.

  “I’m guessing that look is because you’re all talking about the probe?” she asked as soon as she reached them. “Holly didn’t want anyone on Terradox to know; that’s all there is to it. They went ahead with the launch quietly in case anything went wrong, so there wouldn’t have been a huge feeling of failure. You would have found out in the morning if you hadn’t tonight. It wasn’t a big secret, just something she wanted kept quiet until you got here.”

  “So who all knows?” Chase asked, seeming less angry than confused.

  Viola thought for a few seconds. “Everyone who was already here, obviously, and then I think just the board.”

  “And you…”

  “And my dad,” she added, reading little into Chase’s slightly acerbic tone. “And Kayla and Vic. Rachel’s team at the Shipyard cloaked the probe during and after the launch so no one could detect it for themselves, but the good news is that none of th
at ended up being necessary because it all went smoothly.”

  “Has it arrived?” Bo interjected. “Do we know anything about the surface of the asteroid yet?”

  Viola shook her head. “I think it’s due to touch down in another thirty-six hours or something like that.” She then shrugged, very evidently telling them as much as she knew and understood. “It’s not far, but it’s not fast.”

  “I’ll talk to Holly about it in the morning,” Chase said. There was no anger in his voice; he knew Holly well enough to know the omission of this news, while clearly deliberate, must have been for a sound and innocently motivated reason.

  He fully understood and accepted the general idea of why the launch had been quietly expedited — so that public disappointment could have been managed if anything had gone wrong — and he could similarly understand that worrying about how the launch and the probe would fare could have distracted him from other things during a busy and important time.

  “No hard feelings?” Viola said, quite clearly speaking earnestly.

  “None at all,” Chase replied with a decisive and dismissive shake of his head. “Holly’s word goes.”

  Viola nodded slowly. “Holly’s word goes.”

  That ended the discussion for the night, and within a few more minutes the reunited full group began meandering towards their respective family homes, which conscious community planning had ensured were all next to each other.

  Compared to on Terradox, however, one house that was ‘next to’ another within Starview Springs was still a fair way away.

  “This place really is huge,” Viola said, a minute or so after saying farewell to the Hawthornes at their doorway. She was walking between Chase and Peter, who carried an exhausted Katie on his shoulders.

  “There’s just so much more land to make the most of than there was on Terradox,” Peter said.

  Chase nodded. “But wait until you get up in the air and see the huge areas lying totally empty. This place is so big, I don’t think we’ll ever even come close to really making the most of it.”

  “We’re on a one-way trip to forever, cowboy,” Peter replied with a broad smile. “I’m sure we’ll give it a good try.”

  twenty-one

  When Chase reached out across a chasm of space the following morning to ask Holly about her motivations in keeping the probe’s early launch from him, the potential awkwardness of the situation was greatly lessened by a communications delay which ruled out an as-live conversation. With Holly well on her way back to Terradox, this growing delay both enabled and required them to state their positions clearly and without interruption, making it a lot easier to reach a point of mutual ground than might otherwise have been the case.

  Holly’s position was simple: Chase didn’t have to know about the probe’s launch, so it made little sense for her to trouble his mind with it until confirmation came through that it had landed safely. She followed longer and more sophisticated lines of reasoning, but this was the crux of her point and sufficiently answered his questions.

  The exciting news was that the probe had landed safely overnight, although Holly asked Chase to refrain from making this publicly known until more data was received and analysed.

  His good friends Rachel Berry and Bradley Reinhart — key figures in the Shipyard and Communications divisions respectively — were by his side in the Shipyard’s main office while he communicated with Holly, both having already explained that they were under orders not to tell him anything even if he’d asked. They were as excited as he was about the successful landing, but Rachel confessed that she’d known about this for several hours just as they’d both known about the launch.

  Chase had never felt betrayed over the relatively minor incident, but after hearing from Holly he didn’t harbour an ounce of resentment towards anyone.

  Once the whole episode was cleared up to his satisfaction, which really didn’t take long, attention in the office turned towards the imminent arrival of vast numbers of people from Earth. The incoming masses were sometimes spoken of as settlers, colonists and even pioneers, but in Chase’s mind they would simply be Arkadians.

  Over the course of two days, tens of thousands of Arkadians arrived in a seemingly endless fleet of several dozen Ferriers. Although this method, rather than using a handful of Ferriers to conduct back-and-forth trips over a longer period, may have appeared inefficient on the face of it, a great number of Ferriers were required for future use — to serve as lifeboats should any emergency situation arise.

  One thing no one on Arkadia felt as groups flooded in was trepidation over their makeup, for the tens of thousands of new arrivals from Earth had all been in full medical and social quarantine for six months, having entered the quarantine program only after highly intensive background vetting and psychological profiling.

  Chase and the rest of the inner circle did feel trepidation over some of the logistical nightmares that were likely to come their way over the next few weeks as countless minor problems no one had ever considered inevitably arose, but in general terms spirits were incredibly high.

  Like his closest friends, Chase’s level of renown required him to maintain a visible presence during the frequent Ferrier landings. The days were tiring and the nights too short, and even as Chase was experiencing the surreal moments of another batch of three thousand new arrivals stepping off their Ferriers wearing some of the widest smiles he’d ever seen, he had a strong feeling that these were days he would ultimately remember as a blur.

  There was so much going on, Chase consistently felt as though all he could do was make it through the next few minutes without doing something wrong. His tasks of welcoming arrivals and assisting with the coordination of their moves to Starview Springs wasn’t difficult in any technical sense, but it was certainly exhausting in a mental one.

  From what he’d gathered from Nisha in the few waking hours he’d spent at home over these few days, Chase knew that the Ospanovs and Hawthornes had settled perfectly into their plush new homes. The home he shared with Nisha was beyond anything that he himself had ever dreamed of, inside and out, but this was just one more thing his busyness and tiredness made it difficult to properly appreciate for the moment.

  When the final landing passed without a hitch and the time came for an event which should have been among the highlights of Chase’s life so far, his level of exhaustion saw to it that he simply couldn’t wait until this final major public engagement was over so he could go home and sleep for a week. Only Nisha knew how he was feeling, which was testament to his determination to put on a positive face in front of everyone else.

  The event in question was the long-awaited anchor raising ceremony, which would culminate with Chase himself giving the command for Arkadia to breakaway from its orbital position and to truly begin a new era for humanity in space as it set course for the edge of the solar system and beyond.

  The event was a huge party several years in the making, with a colossal area of land devoted to the festivities and countless forms of entertainment laid on for all ages. An intimidatingly large Ferris wheel may have been the eye-catching centrepiece, but the whole site looked like it was ready to host a music festival. Grandstands erected on the site put those Chase had sat in on Terradox to shame, and the scale of the event energised him sufficiently to bring forth a second wind and push the physical and mental exhaustion of recent days to the side.

  He enjoyed milling around and meeting all kinds of people he hoped would soon become friends rather than fans, which was how most introduced themselves. Although this kind of open adoration wasn’t something that made Chase outright uncomfortable, he was hoping it wouldn’t last for too long.

  As the event was about to begin and the crowd were encouraged to take their seats, assigned by name, Chase and Nisha bumped into the Ospanovs and Hawthornes. Although Viola didn’t have a hair out of place and was as immaculately turned-out as ever, Chase could see in her eyes that she was dead on her feet.

  “Tou
gh few days?” he asked.

  “Five more hours and we can sleep,” she chuckled, laughing for the first time in what felt like far too long.

  “You guys definitely got the rough end of the stick being chosen as the welcoming committee,” Peter said. “I mean, we’ve been busy in Security, but not like that. You’ve definitely earned whatever rest you can get.”

  Chase appreciated the sentiment. “I haven’t seen your dad around,” he said to Viola. “I know he’s not scheduled to speak at this ceremony, but is he here?”

  “Apparently he has to take care of some operational thing,” she replied. “If anyone has been busier than us, it’s definitely him… but there’s no way he’s bunking off. Something obviously came up.”

  A loud message then gave everyone a further warning that the ceremony would be starting soon, and at this point young Katie Ospanov went off to sit with the Hawthornes while her parents joined Chase to take their positions for the ceremony.

  Being surrounded by close to forty thousand people felt as surreal as everything else had recently, so Chase took it in his stride. Viola’s rousing introductory speech appeared utterly effortless, thanks in no small part to the years of semi-reluctant practice she’d had on the annual Day of Gratitude.

  Peter spoke next, thanking everyone for having settled into their new homes in such an orderly fashion and reminding them of all the security protocols which were in place. None of his words were designed to frighten anyone, but a firm reminder of the rules and costs of breaking them did no harm whatsoever.

  Although Chase was usually comfortable in front of large crowds, the volume of the roar that greeted his name took him by surprise. Worse than surprise, in fact, it knocked him off focus due to how much louder it had been than the roar for Peter and even Viola. At times like this Chase Jackson felt very much like an actor playing a superhero; someone who was viewed positively by everyone, and children in particular, but who sometimes wished the cape could come off from time to time.