“Not quite,” she said, reining in his excitement. “What we have for sure is firm evidence that life has been there in the past. That could mean more than one thing, and they’re not all as Earth-shattering as the ideas you’re probably thinking of.”
“But still…” Grav said, lowering his hand and looking excitedly into Holly’s eyes. “Even if this is not something crawling around on the asteroid… it is more exciting than any discovery or breakthrough I have heard of! Okay, we saw Nancy, but whatever is on that asteroid is there independent of human influence.”
“Is or was,” Holly said, still playing it down. “We don’t know which.”
“And finding out will tell us more than a million Nancys ever could!” Grav replied. “Especially when Chase is offering to go alone, this is on the right side of the risk-reward calculation in my book. Sure, in terms of morale he is the one person we would least want Arkadia to lose, or at most he would be second to Viola, but one person is less of a risk than a whole crew.”
Holly sat thoughtfully. “He couldn’t possibly go alone. We’ve already seen the surface from the first images that came in, and only the new rovers could handle that. Bo couldn’t pilot it remotely from Arkadia in real-time — not at that kind of distance — and Chase couldn’t learn everything about the controls in time. The window is so short… if there was any chance this was going to happen, Bo would have to be there to drive the rover.”
Grav couldn’t quite read between Holly’s lines, trying to figure out her qualifications and changing tenses. “Do you mean if it does happen, you would want Bo to go? Because I can tell you now, Hollywood, he is not going to say no to something like this.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” she said. “There would need to be a second Karrier, too, in case something went wrong with their landing or escape. Rachel could shadow the asteroid while they’re down there.”
A broad smile filled Grav’s face; he liked the sudden change in Holly’s direction of thought.
“They’re asking for a deciding vote,” Holly said. “Time is almost too tight for this to work even if everything goes well, so we would need teams on it right away — there and here, to formulate a plan and double-check every aspect.”
“You know what you want to say, Hollywood,” Grav said, still surprising her with his level of excitement. “Do not doubt your gut, we all know how well it has served us over the years.”
Without any further hesitation, Holly tapped her wristband’s screen three times, once for each letter:
Y, E, and S.
twenty-five
Robert Harrington’s eyes fell to the floor when Holly’s decision arrived, but he was both powerless and unwilling to do anything to block her wishes from being carried out.
Viola had been correct to point out that the extraordinary potential discovery of life on asteroid NGB-2 was of the kind that transcended the remit of Arkadia’s Executive Council, and the fact that she was instantly able to recall the relevant constitutional clause in detail hadn’t gone unnoticed by the impressed others.
What Viola hadn’t expected was for the answer she’d sought from Holly to come alongside a suggestion that her own brother should be part of Chase’s landing team. Regret filled her heart as she took it upon herself to read the entirety of Holly’s message to an elated Chase, a hopeful Rachel, and a shell-shocked Peter.
Like Robert, Peter said nothing against Holly’s decision; but just like Robert, he quite clearly disagreed with it.
There was little for any of them to say and the timescale demanded by the incredible revelation meant that everyone whose input was required had to be looped in as quickly as possible. One of the few points which was discussed immediately in the tense communications office regarded the group’s options for telling — or not telling — the Arkadian population at large about the all-or-nothing mission Chase was set to undertake.
It was quickly agreed that they couldn’t hide Chase’s absence for more than a few days without anyone noticing and wondering where he was, so a public announcement of the probe’s apparent discovery and the recovery plan would be made in due course.
Due course could amount to no more than forty-eight hours, Chase reaffirmed, given the asteroid’s relative position to Arkadia and its speed and path of travel. The speed at which the group’s path of conversational travel had moved in the past hour was disorienting for everyone present, including Chase. Their surprise, however, was nothing compared to what greeted them when they broke the news to their nearest and dearest.
In a whirlwind few hours, Viola broke the news to Bo and Chase broke it to Nisha. Needless to say, Viola had the easier task of the two. Although she still regretted broaching a subject which was about to land her highly willing brother on an unprecedented and inherently risky mission, the strength of his excited and positive reaction did go some small way towards abating her sorrow.
Sensing Viola’s concerns, Bo made similar points to those Grav had made to Holly in defence of the mission, albeit in clearer and more strongly worded terms. He told Viola that the possibility of finding proof of life on an asteroid could lead to the greatest discovery in human history. When he giddily told Viola “this could be it!”, she held her tongue.
‘If anything goes wrong, this could be it for you and Chase!’ was the reply rattling around in her mind, but sharing it when Bo’s mind was irreversibly made up would have helped no one.
Chase tried to frame things in the most palatable terms he could when it came to telling Nisha, but she didn’t hear anything after the initial revelation of the almost unbelievable risk he had volunteered to take. The risk was only almost unbelievable because she knew Chase so well; but even for him, this took the biscuit.
She didn’t mince her words in telling him that his plan was insane and that Bo, Rachel and Holly were just as insane for going along with it. She also didn’t avoid issuing the ultimatum Chase had feared: “It’s me or the mission.”
Chase didn’t say anything, and his silence was the only answer Nisha needed.
“I didn’t come here to sit around and watch opportunities fly by,” he called as she stormed out.
Nisha paused in the doorway, looking back only for as long as it took her to reply: “And I didn’t come here to watch you leave.”
Chase spent much of the rest of the day with Bo and Rachel, his fellow prospective crew members for a mission none could have possibly seen coming even just a few hours earlier.
The three sat together once again in the otherwise empty communications office and engaged in a long discussion with Holly and Grav, battling through the ever-growing delay. Talking like this enabled them to get a better feeling of Holly’s emotions than they could via mere text.
Although Chase and Bo had never expected anything else, Rachel was pleasantly surprised to hear positive approval rather than regretful assent in Holly’s voice. Grav’s excitement over the progress was a surprise — to all three — but he stayed fairly quiet when it came to discussing technical details and plans.
While Rachel’s Craft Management team on Arkadia had been preparing at very short-notice for a launch whose importance they didn’t yet fully understand, high-ranking experts on Terradox had been briefing Holly with their concerns and suggestions. The number of people involved in such discussions was low given that the launch was not yet public knowledge, but the consensus so far was that the mission, while beyond reckless in the eyes of some, shouldn’t prove all that difficult in an operational sense.
Holly enthusiastically shared one plan which had been mooted, insisting that she firmly believed it was the sensible way to proceed. This plan involved Rachel departing Arkadia before the others in a Karrier of her own, towards where the fast-moving asteroid would be when they were scheduled to depart after recovering the probe. Holly sold this as a safeguard, just as it had been sold to her, and explained that Rachel would then be able to drop an emergency lander should anything go wrong with Chase’s initial landing that could othe
rwise leave he and Bo with no way off the asteroid. The new landers functioned as escape pods, but it was reasonably assumed that any landing impactful enough to ground a Karrier would also ground its landers.
The speed of the asteroid’s movement meant that taking one Karrier and having Rachel drop the others in a lander would be too risky, since her Karrier couldn’t keep up with the asteroid for any real period of time and thus attempting a hopefully unnecessary recovery would have been impossible from an ever-increasing distance.
This plan took a while to settle in their minds since they had all expected to be landing as a trio in a Karrier and taking off again mere hours later, but the safety-first logic was there. Chase asked Rachel both if she didn’t mind not landing on the asteroid and if she would be okay piloting a Karrier on her own over a significant distance. She chuckled at the first and insisted she was sure to get over the disappointment at some stage — reckless adventure didn’t drive her in quite the same way it drove Chase — and she calmly insisted that she would have no problem being out there by herself.
“So all going well, we land in the Karrier and take off again once we have the probe,” Bo said to Rachel. “And all going well, once you leave we won’t see you again until we all get back here.”
“Bingo,” Rachel said. “All going well.”
“And if we run into any problems, you’ll drop a lander and we’ll use it to escape,” Bo added. “Re-docking should be easy enough, assuming the lander makes it in one piece.”
Rachel nodded then glanced at Chase as though to indicate she would rather not discuss this worst-case scenario.
He shrugged. “One way or another, we’re getting in and we’re getting out.”
Despite his pensive words, Bo had full faith in the landers, which were after all upgraded iterations of the kind which had given he and his family a cushioned landing on Terradox after their Karrier’s unexpected collision with its then-impenetrable cloak so many years ago.
Chase spoke briefly about the landers, for his own peace of mind as well as anyone else’s, insisting that technology had come on leaps and bounds in recent years thanks to the work carried out by the Terradox colony’s research staff.
It was at this point that Rachel jumped back in to unnecessarily remind him with a smile that she had been in charge of the colony’s Craft Management division and knew all about what its staff had achieved.
“As long as we all know this is going to be a cakewalk,” Chase said, smiling back but evidently speaking out of deeply held confidence rather than bravado. “Between the crafts you guys have developed and the new rover Bo’s been telling us about, we have the very best people and the very best tech. Agencies with way fewer resources at their disposal were landing stuff on asteroids decades and decades ago, probably even a century, and probes have been recovered before. The only difference this time is that we’re actually going.”
“Just that one tiny little difference,” Rachel said.
“But we also all need to know that the priority is finding what we’re looking for,” Bo said, his tone suddenly stronger than before. “Chase, especially you. If it comes down to running out of time for an escape window that would let us dock, and choosing between that and either recovering the probe or looking further into what it found… our priority is properly documenting this discovery. It has to be.”
“Your priority is staying alive,” Rachel interjected.
Bo focused on Chase, waiting for a response.
As if knowing what Rachel was thinking and preferring to address his answer to an approving listener, Chase looked only at Bo when he spoke: “If our priority was staying alive, we’d be staying here.”
The firm nod of agreement from Bo’s side of the table contrasted greatly with the uneasy expression on Rachel’s, and for the first time she felt deeply glad that she wouldn’t be in the landing party.
Elsewhere on Arkadia at the moment, Nisha Kohli was also in deep discussions with other physicists who had already been looped in on the plan. Kayla Hawthorne was privy to the news and both she and Nisha had been tasked with triple- and quadruple-checking the trajectories and timings that could prove the difference between the success and failure of a mission whose stakes could not have been any higher.
Chase had no idea Nisha was playing any such part in the planning, and her refusal to take any of his calls or reply to any of his messages ensured that he spent the evening at home alone. Her ability to separate the personal from the professional — angry at Chase for taking the mission but willing to focus on the work that had to be done — was just one part of a well-rounded skill-set that had seen Nisha rise so quickly through the ranks in her younger years and stay there ever since.
Initially after storming out of the home she shared with Chase, Nisha had visited her parents to vent about the news. She arrived to find Robert Harrington and Peter Ospanov already there, filling Romesh and Farrah in on the news. With Nisha’s sadness and worry now understandably leaving little room for anger, the others did what they could to console her.
Most of the others, in any case.
Robert, still furious with Chase for suggesting the crazy mission, didn’t mince his words: “This is what you get with someone like him: reckless abandon.”
Peter shot Robert, his father-in-law, a look of anger tinged with disappointment. If there was a time to bad mouth Chase, this certain wasn’t it.
Romesh, effectively Chase’s father-in-law in all but name, hadn’t always seen eye to eye with him of late — particularly following the Nancy episode during their last days on Terradox. And although he could see Chase’s strength as a leader as clearly as anyone else, there had been many occasions when Romesh had quietly wished his daughter had chosen a simpler and more stable life for herself with almost anyone else.
Now, however, he took it upon himself to not criticise Chase but defend him.
“Robert,” he began, “if you could tell me one time when Chase seriously attempted something and failed, I’d be more inclined to share your perspective. But if the story you tell is the way it really went down and Chase offered to recover the probe on his own, I have a hard time understanding where you’re getting ‘reckless abandon’ from. To me, that sounds more like courageous leadership.”
Peter nodded, approvingly rather than performatively. He had his own reservations over Chase’s plan and could certainly see the reckless side, but Romesh’s point was equally valid. More importantly, though, it was well-timed and delivered free of ego. Nisha had likely expected her father to be the last person to deliver a defence of Chase, and the words did seem to have softened her sadness already.
When it came time to leave a few minutes later, Peter shook Romesh’s hand with more warmth than normal and winked slowly in appreciation. When he entered a waiting transport capsule with Robert, Peter wasted no time in asking what the hell he’d been thinking of when he decided to criticise Chase like he had.
“My son is going to a damn asteroid because of his idiotic plan,” Robert scorned under his breath. “Don’t think I’m only angry at him, by the way, but without him Holly wouldn’t have had a decision to make!“
“Viola’s brother is going on this mission, too, in case that went over your head,” Peter said. “But do you see her going around acting like an asshole? And Nisha is upset, but do you see her shit-talking Chase to anyone else?”
“Peter…” Robert scolded in a somewhat condescending tone.
“Don’t fucking ‘Peter’ me,” Peter shot back. “If you want to be in charge around here, step up!” He turned towards Robert, seated next to him, and pushed a firm finger into his chest while inching forward, nose to nose. “Because if you won’t…”
Robert stopped the transport capsule. “Get out,” he ordered.
“I’ll pretend you didn’t say that,” Peter said, settling back in his seat. “Come on, take us back to the Shipyard.”
“Get out of the fucking capsule!” Robert boomed.
&nbs
p; Peter looked at him, dumbstruck.
“Still pretending?”
This time, Peter emotionlessly unclipped his seatbelt and opened his door. “Big mistake,” was all he said, stepping outside and tapping his wristband to call for another capsule while Robert sped away without so much as a backwards glance.
Peter kept his bust-up with Robert to himself for as long as he could, but when night fell and he found himself alone in his lounge while Viola and Katie slept upstairs, the urge to talk got the better of him.
He hadn’t mentioned it to Viola for obvious reasons — the last thing he wanted to do was dump her in the middle of a row between himself and Robert — and bringing it to Holly would inevitably come across as petty. It was Robert’s words to Nisha rather than his actions in the transport capsule that troubled Peter most, though, and with that in mind he tapped his wristband to call the only person he could think of: Chase.
Chase took the call while carefully reading through detailed mission plans drawn up by a team on Terradox, which shared a great deal with the plans drawn up entirely independently by the equivalent team on Arkadia.
“Robert’s a liability on this,” Peter lamented. “He’s angry the mission is going ahead and he’s letting that get in the way.”
Chase listened carefully to the full story, which was shorter and somewhat less explosive than he’d expected.
“And you’re telling me Romesh said that?” he asked at the end, stuck on the part where Nisha’s father had unexpectedly defended him to the extent that Robert’s preceding criticism didn’t seem to have registered at all.
“Yeah, I thought that was pretty big of him. But that’s the kind of thing Robert should have been saying. In his position, you can’t talk like he was talking. Could you see Holly doing that? Could you see one of us or Viola doing that?”
Over the next few minutes, Chase promised to talk to Robert about this before he left for the recovery mission. He also stated that while he understood Peter’s desire to keep Viola out of it, any problem between two members of the Executive Council was a matter for the whole Council.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 103
