Viola Ospanov thought she would spend the next two days doing nothing but worrying about their safety.
And within a matter of hours, she would dearly wish she’d been right.
twenty-seven
During what felt very much like the middle of the night but was in fact early afternoon, Viola was rudely awakened by a siren-like notification sound emanating from her wristband. It was set to do not disturb which meant that only calls or messages marked as urgent and sent by individuals she had identified as VIPs would make it through.
The caller on this occasion was her father Robert, and even noticing the strong sunlight creeping past the edge of her bedroom curtains wasn’t enough to rouse her from a half-awake stupor.
“What?” she asked, physically and mentally shattered rather than grouchy.
The past week had been trying for everyone but no one more so than Viola, who had endured an exhausting initiation period alongside Chase as one of the primary members of the Arkadian welcoming party. Only Chase had survived on as little sleep as she had since arriving on Arkadia, and ever since he announced his plan to depart for asteroid NGB-2 she had been running around like a woman possessed making sure everything went smoothly for both Chase and Bo.
Kayla Hawthorne had stepped up in the hours after the previous night’s launch by offering to take Katie to her appointment at the BMC, allowing Viola the opportunity to catch up on some desperately needed sleep and insisting that it was no problem since Patch’s appointment was in the same time-block, anyway. Viola knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth and the children had been as delighted as ever by the prospect of spending some more time together, so everyone was a winner.
Until now, at least, when Robert was interrupting the rest that motivated the whole thing.
“Something has happened,” he said.
“Can you be a bit more vague?” Viola groaned. But she then sat bolt upright as her mind woke up and reality came back to her. “Bo?” she gasped, sudden and intense concern in her tone. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s not them, it’s something at the medical centre. Viola, there’s been an outbreak.”
She rolled her eyes. “Dad, seriously, I’m tired. I know the census is a stress test, okay? I’ll come out later if you need me to make an appearance, but I’m not running over to play some—”
“Listen to me!” Robert snapped, uncharacteristically short. “Viola, this is real. There’s an outbreak inside the BMC and we think it has something to do with spores coming through the soil outside. Pathogens in the plants. I’m not fully up on the terminology, but Christian Jackson thinks it could have been triggered by the number of people in the area and the minor changes in air composition that come with that. Some people in there are seriously ill and getting worse, and we don’t know how to get them out.”
Viola was lost for words. “What… what do you mean spores in the soil? Spores? Soil? And why can’t you get them out? It’s not like the doors can be locked from the inside!”
“We’ve had to cordon off the surrounding area inside an impenetrable microsphere,” Robert explained. “I’ve been talking to Christian and he thinks that if the spores are airborne, they could infect the whole of Arkadia if we don’t keep the affected area locked down. Viola, no one can get in or out until we figure something out… and no one has presented a single way forward so far. This is all just happening now — I’m calling you as soon as I can because—”
“Katie!” Viola yelled, glancing at the time and seeing her worst fears confirmed. “Dad, when did you put up this microsphere? Please tell me it was more than forty-five minutes ago when her appointment started…”
“We had to do it as soon as the threat became clear. The barrier has—”
“Tell me where my daughter is!” Viola interjected.
With his head in his hands, Robert Harrington sighed out the horrible answer: “On the wrong side.”
Part III
twenty-eight
“I’ve sealed off the BMC’s perimeter and I’ve sealed off the internal rooms from each other,” Robert went on, futility in his words and tone as he tried to calm Viola’s understandable panic. “We’re going to get Katie out of there, but I need you here so we can figure out what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it.”
Viola remained silent. It couldn’t be true; her daughter couldn’t really be trapped on the wrong side of an impenetrable romotech barrier with some kind of pathogen that was already making people violently ill. “I’m going to get her,” she eventually said, unshakeably insistent.
“Viola, you won’t get near her. The situation isn’t that straightforward, she’s right in the middle of the BMC and the worst affected area is the outer ring. For now she’s in the eye of the storm but we can’t count on that staying true, so we can’t afford to waste a single minute on ideas that won’t go anywhere. Please, come out here to the Shipyard. We can manipulate the BMC’s conditions from here, but we need a coherent plan. I’ve already called Peter and Romesh and I’m in touch with Christian.”
“Okay,” she sighed, no verve in her voice. “But at least remove the comms block. I’m trying to add her to this call but my wristband says she’s in a restricted area.”
“Unfortunately that’s a necessary step. You can address Katie via the PA when you talk to everyone, but as hard as this is you have to try to understand that there are a lot of other parents trapped inside the BMC with their children, too. And if they sense that Katie is getting special treatment because she—”
“You better believe I’ll give her special treatment,” Viola snapped, “and so should you!”
“She’s my only grandchild and I’m going to get her out,” Robert replied stoically, “but I need you with me on this, Viola. I need you, I need Peter, and I need Romesh.”
“And Nisha.”
“Right. Get in a transport capsule and you can call Nisha on your way here. It’s probably better for her to hear it from you.”
While Viola grabbed only the most necessary items and ordered a transport capsule to her door, she couldn’t help think that — Katie aside — the timing of an outbreak at the BMC couldn’t possibly have been worse. The stress-test which was underway to test Arkadia’s infrastructure in a faux emergency had ironically increased the severity of this real emergency, by clustering so many people in the affected area. The specific time of day was even worse, coming just when a large number of children were undergoing their medical check-ups.
Christian spoke under these rueful thoughts in sharing some of his own, explaining that an over-reliance on microspheres as atmospheric boundaries may have unwittingly opened the door for this kind of issue. The major divisions on Arkadia, as well as being fewer in number than on Terradox, were not strict zonal divisions which ran to the romosphere’s core, but were rather, in effect, surface-level bubbles. This enabled significantly greater adaptability than the zonal system irreversibly built into Terradox by Roger Morrison, its maniacal creator, but it did so at a cost that had only now become clear.
The lack of impenetrable subterranean boundaries, while having no effect on separating surface conditions which varied far less extremely between adjacent areas than was the case on Terradox, offered no protection against a previously unacknowledged possibility: that of root systems spreading beneath the surface, enabling genetically engineered, mutation-prone and potentially dangerous plant species to reach areas they weren’t meant for.
Robert insisted that Christian Jackson, Terradox’s Head of Botany, didn’t believe sabotage was a serious possibility; for although engineering plants which could eventually poison Arkadia’s air like ticking botanical time-bombs may have sounded like a subtle way to destroy the project and everyone involved, Christian saw a simpler explanation as by far the most likely.
With so much of Arkadia being unnatural, he said, unpredictability was part and parcel of the project. He believed that plants may have mutated in ways that he and others
didn’t expect due to a reaction to soil conditions they weren’t made for. “These aren’t natural plants and this isn’t natural soil,” Christian said. “Your whole environment is unnatural, just like here, so we can’t take anything we think we know for granted.”
Unfortunately Christian could be of no more immediate help given that he hadn’t been involved in any of the design or stock-building processes for the Arkadian Botanical Gardens or any other site.
Robert’s natural desire to know everything led him to delegate his own assistants to talk to various people at once, as soon as possible, and to brief him on the double. Those assistants were currently gathering as much information as they could from Christian’s counterparts in Arkadia’s Botany division.
Within a few minutes, Viola was not only en route to the Shipyard but also found herself in the upside-down position of offering moral support to Nisha while she herself was in no real state to do so. Nisha was hysterical, however, having been obliviously unaware at work until this most unwelcome of all calls came through.
“I wish I had taken Vijay, then he wouldn’t be in there alone,” Nisha sobbed, weakened by the thought of her brother having no one at his side in the BMC. “But he wanted to go by himself… he didn’t want any of us to take him! He wants to be grown up so bad.”
“I didn’t go with Katie, either,” Viola said, sharing the same painful regret, “but they’re not alone. They have each other, Kayla is in there with Patch, and some of Peter’s top security staff are in there, too. Nisha, they might not have us right now, but they are not alone.”
“It’s just… first Chase, and now this…” Nisha went on, still crying.
“Bo is on the same Karrier as Chase and Katie is in the same room as Vijay,” Viola replied, not impatiently but certainly insistently. “We’re in this thing together, Nisha. My dad has already called your dad to the Shipyard, and no one knows more than him about manipulating atmospheric conditions. And no one knows more about Habitat Management and taking care of the practicalities of the barriers than my dad, so we’re all going to get through this… together.”
In an odd way, comforting Nisha forced Viola to be strong and talking through the situation allowed her to move beyond her own feelings of helplessness and towards a more practical mindset.
Her arrival at the Shipyard came just a few moments before her husband Peter’s, allowing them to enter and unite with Robert together; though not before an emotional but pragmatically brief embrace.
As soon as the door swung open, the tone changed.
“How could you do something like this without Executive Council approval?” Peter barked at Robert as soon as he saw him. Further into the room, young communications officer Bradley Reinhart sat awkwardly, coordinating various communications channels but unable to ignore the tension around him.
“It was urgent,” Robert replied in kind. “I have two votes and I’m not dropping this on Chase. So even if you had both voted against isolating the BMC, and even if protocol had been for Holly to split the decision again — which it isn’t for an Arkadian matter like this — there was no time to ask her. With the comms delay each way, that’s time I didn’t have!”
“My daughter is in there!” Peter growled.
“And my granddaughter,” Robert more calmly stated. “There are other just-as-innocent people in there, too, Peter, and we’re going to get them out. What we need is calm heads.”
Peter shook his head and looked away. “You’re only even on the Council because of how old you are and whose dad you are. You bring nothing to this table, and you’re only sitting in that chair at the end of it because Viola didn’t want it and Holly and Grav didn’t want to make a public choice between me and Chase. Don’t think everyone out there doesn’t know that!”
“You want to do this now?” Robert asked.
When Peter opened his mouth to reply, Viola cut him off before any sound could escape. “Both of you just back off!” she yelled. “Bo is hurtling towards an asteroid and Katie is trapped inside a live biohazard zone, and we’re arguing with each other?”
Neither man said anything; both knew she was right.
“You said Romesh was coming,” Viola said to Robert, impatience and urgency tinging the words.
“He’s on the way.”
Peter nodded firmly; this was some good news at last, given that Romesh’s experiences in Terradox’s Primosphere were the closest anyone could call upon in the current situation.
“Who do we have on the inside of the barrier?” Viola asked. “Because with the best will in the world, Kayla probably isn’t going to excel in this kind of situation. Is Vic there with them, too?”
“Vic is in the BMC, but not with Patch and Katie,” Peter said. “He was on duty nearer the entrance so I think he’s locked away from them in another sector.”
Robert nodded glumly in confirmation.
“So who is in there with Katie?” Viola pushed.
“Pavel,” her father replied. “Little Sophie is at home, at least, but Pavel is in there.”
Peter and Viola both breathed visible sighs of relief at both points. The presence of their old friend and loyal home security guard wouldn’t solve any problems, but Katie knew Pavel well and would feel more at ease with him than she would have without him.
The door swung open again, heralding Romesh’s arrival.
“And Vijay is there,” Robert added, suddenly reminded of that point. “Quite seriously, he’ll be more helpful than most of the adults who might have been in his place.”
“No one will be in there for long,” Romesh announced with a confidence alien to the others. He got straight to business without so much as looking directly at anyone else, setting up a large screen on the communication office’s empty wall.
“This was caused by an adverse biological reaction to variable conditions,” he spoke as he worked, “and we can manipulate those conditions to reverse the reaction.”
He placed the huge virtual touchscreen on the wall by tapping his wristband against the points of his four desired corners and saying the words “adaptive analytics” out loud. He then turned to Robert. “You need to grant full permissions for me to be able to use this to modify anything.”
With full trust and no hesitation, Robert spoke clearly into Romesh’s wristband: “Harrington one, RXDBA 22812, granting full read-write permissions.”
The others didn’t quite follow, but if Romesh’s confidence wasn’t quite contagious it did at least work to lift the overbearing feeling of dread.
“If Nancy and the other work we carried out in the Primosphere taught me anything,” Romesh went on, “it’s that seemingly minuscule changes in atmospheric conditions — above ground or below — can cause rapid mutations. This is particularly true in non-naturally occurring organisms like Nancy or most of the research plants on Arkadia. By applying what we know, we can fix this within the hour. All I need to wait for is the Analytics team to put together some metrics to go along with the physical mapping, so we can address this on a person-by-person basis and an aggregate basis at the same time. The trends and patterns we see will inform how we deal with the rescue.”
Viola still didn’t know exactly what Romesh was talking about when he mentioned the Analytics team, but the way the word ‘rescue’ effortlessly rolled off his tongue was music to her ears.
A certain glimmer in Romesh’s eye quietly suggested that he may have been viewing this as more than a problem to be solved, and perhaps as a road to the redemption he sought following recent regrettable events. Having lost standing and respect in the eyes of many for acting selfishly by dangerously expediting the Nancy project without permission during his final months on Terradox, Romesh Kohli most definitely had some redeeming to do. His own reputation had suffered far more damage than his family’s as a whole, largely since his daughter Nisha and wife Farrah were admired for what they brought to the table in their own right, but his son Vijay hadn’t looked at him the same way since the Na
ncy project came to an unceremonious end.
This had been far harder for Romesh to take than the similar looks he’d been getting from others, but without question his driving motivation was liberating his son from the confines of the BMC and seeing him again in person — whatever the look on his face.
“Mr Harrington, Mr Kohli,” Bradley Reinhart announced from his work console at the back of the communications office. “The toxic compound has been identified and we can now track its spread to pinpoint the areas with the highest concentration of the pathogen. The Analytics team have pushed some data to our maps already.”
No one knew if pathogen was really the right word, but they understood the intended meaning and it seemed as good a descriptor as any other.
Bradley pulled up the data, presented as a top-down visual layout of the BMC. Carefully designed, the development was divisible into sectors by a series of concentric circles. The outermost circle, encompassing an outdoor area as well as a number of rooms, was marked GZ. “This is ground zero,” he explained. “This is where a small patch of soil was breached and the pathogen entered the BMC’s controlled atmosphere. The consensus is that Christian is broadly right in what he said. We can talk details later but it seems as though the lack of zonal divisions deep underground allowed roots to spread, and the wrong kind of soil combined with the wrong kind of air has led to an unexpected mutation. These aren’t natural plants and this isn’t natural soil, as you’ve been saying. All open soil across Arkadia has been automatically and temporarily sealed off from the atmosphere at large by basic romotech cloaking, so this shouldn’t happen anywhere else.”
“I don’t know what those readings mean,” Viola readily admitted as she gazed at unintelligible numerical data and Latin-looking words full of X’s and Y’s and L’s.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 105
