Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  “From what I’m hearing, these are toxins,” Bradley said, “and the readings are alarming.”

  “That one right there is the culprit,” Robert said, scanning the whole screen and then pointing to a barely pronounceable word next to the number 3.203. “A reading of one would mean the concentration was at the absolute limit of acceptable exposure. A reading of two would mean the concentration was double the absolute limit of acceptable exposure.”

  “For how long?” Peter asked, speaking for all of the others.

  “A minute.”

  “But that’s just health and safety stuff,” Romesh said, trying to diminish Robert’s concern. “It’s like the recommended dose for vitamins or medicine. You can have a lot more than it says… the thresholds are conservatively low. My map on the wall is going to let us track each individual’s condition and enact an individualised plan of ac—”

  “The current air toxicity at ground zero is three times the limit and still growing, Romesh,” Robert interrupted. “That isn’t something we can dismiss out of hand! If we don’t do anything to deal with this on a broad and non-individual scale, the people in that sector will definitely be dead within the hour — and that’s not speculation.”

  These words were very alarming in themselves, but the urgency was underlined by the fact that the figure, previously 3.203, was already 3.211 by the time Romesh finished his explanation.

  After a few seconds of pensive silence, Viola shared a thought: “We know that some people are seriously ill, but so far they’re all inside the ground zero sector… correct?”

  Bradley nodded.

  “But we don’t know if whatever they’re suffering from can be transmitted human-to-human, or if the toxin could eventually make its way through the romotech barriers we’ve put up to keep it in place?”

  “There are a lot of things we don’t know,” Robert answered on Bradley’s behalf.

  Viola turned to Romesh. “If this had happened within a microsphere in the Primosphere — if a plant had mutated in a way you didn’t expect and suddenly released toxins into the air — you could have dealt with it, right? You could have majorly and instantaneously modified conditions to eliminate what essentially would have been a biological and, well, killable problem?”

  “Easily,” Romesh said. “I can see why you ask, because eliminating the problem at ground zero really should eliminate it altogether before there is any prospect of further mutation or pathogenic spread. I could do the same thing here if there weren’t any people in that sector. But, naturally, whatever kills the problem also kills the people.”

  “Further mutation could endanger everyone on Arkadia,” Viola said, “not just everyone deeper inside the BMC. Bradley… exactly how many people are inside that sector? How many people are at ground zero?”

  “Fourteen,” he said.

  An oppressive silence circled the room.

  “How many children?” she pressed.

  Bradley gulped. “None.”

  Viola’s face whitened as she turned to gauge the reactions of her husband and her father. The two were looking at each other. “Sometimes there’s no good option,” she said, drawing their attention. “Sometimes you have to do a really bad thing…”

  twenty-nine

  For a few tense moments, no one shot down Viola’s idea of sacrificing the few for the benefit of the many.

  “I watched Holly shoot Remy Bouchard when he was standing in the way of saving Boyce’s hostages,” she said, trying to justify her difficult suggestion against the oppressive glances of her friends and family. “Sometimes it has to be done!”

  “We have the option of a full evacuation,” Robert said, still stopping short of dismissing the alternative out of hand. “All non-essential personnel currently on the safe side of the line can be loaded into—”

  Romesh sighed out a loud interruption. “Robert, until I have full data from the Analytics team we won’t know if some people who are on the safe side of the line now might be carrying something they picked up earlier — when they ventured into the BMC for their own appointments earlier today. The incubation period, if this is even a virus, would only have to be a few hours for that to be a major problem. We would have to quarantine before we think—”

  “Under no circumstances is Arkadia being evacuated today,” Viola interjected. “For one thing, we’re not giving up. For two, like Romesh just said, people have already been exposed to whatever is causing this. We’re not bringing sickness to Earth or Terradox. But right now I’m concerned with making sure that sickness doesn’t reach Katie. You can talk about cloaks blocking anything else coming up from the soil, you can talk about sectors and barriers stopping pathogens from reaching other parts of the BMC, but we didn’t see this problem coming before it hit us.”

  “Instead of evacuating, we could put everyone in The Mound,” Romesh suggested.

  “We do need to lock everything down,” Peter chimed in. Ideas were now flying from all angles and often competing with each other, but he was apparently in agreement with Romesh, at least.

  Viola shook her head. “I want that space for these people — everyone we get out of the BMC. Everyone else will be comfortable enough either where they are or at home, if we want to go into full lockdown, but it’s a lot easier and more sensible to move hundreds of people who might be infected than tens of thousands of people who almost definitely aren’t.” She turned to Bradley. “Can you make sure the people in charge of The Mound are ready for an influx once we deal with this? And Dad, we’ll need a clear pathway blocked off between the BMC and The Mound so we can move people without exposing them to the wider atmosphere… and maybe more importantly without exposing the external atmosphere to whatever they might be carrying. We can quarantine them there until we know for sure that they’re okay.”

  This idea of Viola’s was better received, given its inherent logic and lack of moral dubiousness. No one had to ask why she chose The Mound as a suggested site for quarantining survivors from the BMC; it was self-enclosed, it was enormous, and it was already fully stocked with emergency provisions and beds for far more people than they’d be sending there.

  Robert nodded in assent to agree that The Mound, constructed as an emergency refuge against atmospheric problems, could indeed be used to house those exposed to the mysterious pathogen. Somewhat ironically, any such quarantining would in effect be protecting the external environment from anything the exposed individuals may have been carrying, rather than the other way around, but no one was in much mood for irony.

  “But first we need to get them out,” Peter said. “Because V, as much as I can understand your first idea, we can’t even think about doing that. We need to get everyone out alive, and one thing Grav always talked about in any kind of hostage situation or other rescue scenario was mitigation before liberation. Romesh, you said the Analytics team are working on adding a whole lot of detail to the map you just put up. And Robert, surely you must be working on isolating individuals if they show any symptoms… in fact, is it feasible to give everyone in the BMC a security bubble like we had on Earth?”

  “Yes and no,” Robert said. “Well, just yes… but with no benefit. Those ‘bubbles’, the solo-spheres, can’t be counted on. They’re designed to protect the wearer from attacks, not toxins. What you definitely can’t count on is running inside the BMC without risking bringing the toxin back out with us. The logistics of this mean that it’s one case when you two can’t suit up and rush in, risking your lives but saving the day. Not this time.”

  Robert didn’t mean this in any pejorative sense, respecting the risks Peter and Viola had taken in the past. In their multiple misadventures of years gone by, this had tended to be the way things played out, but both could understand his explanation of the difference this time. They didn’t fully agree, but they saw where he was coming from.

  Young Bradley Reinhart, still huddled over his work console, raised a hand to beckon Romesh again while the others continued to talk.


  Peter was mulling something over and shared it before the thought had finished processing. “Once we have a secure pathway to The Mound, I’ll be willing to go in. I’ll go to quarantine with the others if that’s what it takes. If passing through ground zero isn’t going to work, what about going in from altitude and dropping through the BMC’s ceiling?”

  Robert appeared pensive for a few seconds until his attention was caught by Romesh’s suddenly animated expression at the other side of the room.

  “If someone can get me in the air and on the roof, I’ll gladly go down to lift people out from the inner sectors,” Peter continued.

  “We’ll go down to get people out,” Viola said.

  Peter narrowed his eyes. “You could barely lift Katie…”

  “I said get them out, not lift them out,” she replied. “There’s a lot more to this than physically removing people. Emotions will be running higher than you can imagine in there. Everyone will want to be taken out first, or to have their child taken out first. Even if everything else goes well and we’re able to go in, it’s not going to be eas—”

  “Guys,” Romesh called, encouraging the others towards Bradley’s work console. “This is the breakthrough. Peter, with this, we can mitigate.” Romesh immediately hurried towards the virtual screen he had earlier placed on the room’s largest wall and tapped a few options on his wristband to fill it with the all-important incoming data.

  Robert turned towards Romesh’s information-packed screen and nodded with determination. “Bradley, put a call out for someone who’s qualified enough and selfless enough to fly at altitude and hover over the BMC in the knowledge they’ll be quarantined afterwards for who-knows-how-long.” He turned to Viola, then Peter. “Because as soon as Romesh is finished mitigating, it’s time to start liberating.”

  thirty

  The wall-sized map Romesh Kohli stood before now displayed several new pieces of priceless information on each mapped individual, including an aggregate ’symptomatic’ score which estimated how affected each was by the toxins at the edge of the BMC. It was too early to discern exactly why certain people appeared more symptomatic than those alongside them in the same room, but Romesh and Robert both acted with enough confidence in the data that the others followed suit in taking it at face value.

  If there had been time to explain, Bradley would have relayed the information he’d been given by the Arkadia’s Analytics team, which explained that each individual’s wristband collected sufficient data to make such estimates. The aggregate score wasn’t calculated in isolation, of course, but rather by taking a reading of the individual’s current heart rate and temperature — as well as several other basic metrics — and comparing the recent changes in their data to the general average of everyone within the BMC. It was hoped that this comparative approach would account for stress-related changes, particularly when cross-referenced with each individual’s baseline readings and historic responses to stress. It was at times like this that the wristbands’ data monitoring came into their own, and the fact that all Arkadians who had been quarantined on Earth for six months prior to their arrival had worn their wristbands during that entire period meant there was plenty of data to be drawn upon.

  Visually, the pattern was obvious: individuals closest to the outer edges of the BMC were by and large the most symptomatic. The dots representing those within the ground zero sector were all blood red, while most of those representing people within Katie’s inner sector were emerald green.

  “This is what we thought,” Peter said, taking in the vast map and correctly assuming what it all meant. “But why are there a few people in the inner sectors with yellow and orange dots? Are they just more susceptible? Were they in ground zero when something happened?”

  Responding to this question with an action rather than offering a direct response, Romesh returned to Bradley Reinhart’s work console and commandeered it to make a request for the Analytics team to trace the generalised movement patterns of everyone trapped in the BMC to look for commonalities between those worst affected. In his mind, it made sense to think that those marked by yellow or orange dots had perhaps been in or near ground zero when the toxins initially emerged from the soil, and that they had made it deeper inside the BMC before any romotech barriers were put in place.

  One major positive for the group of observers was that toxicity levels did not appear to be rising noticeably within the BMC’s inner sectors, including the most central of all where Katie Ospanov and dozens of others were currently trapped. The same certainly couldn’t be said for ground zero, where things were looking graver and graver by the minute.

  “This last piece of data will be with us in a minute or two,” Romesh said, attempting to calm the impatience he expected to see when he turned back to the others. “And it’s going to help us majorly. But in the meantime… Bradley, have any pilots volunteered yet for the rescue mission?”

  Bradley shook his head. “It’s only been a minute, though.”

  “We don’t have a lot of minutes,” Romesh sighed, fiddling with his own wristband. “So, short of any other options…”

  “He’s going to ask Nisha,” Peter whispered to Viola.

  The only reason Romesh didn’t confirm that Peter was correct was that he didn’t hear his guess, and seconds later he was indeed speaking to his daughter and asking if she felt mentally up to a task she was highly trained to undertake and highly capable of successfully completing. “Peter and Viola will be right there with you, and this is the best chance we have of getting Vijay, Katie and everyone else out of there. The downside is that you’ll have to be quarantined with them in The Mound for an undetermined length of t—”

  “I’m in,” Nisha’s voice decisively boomed through her father’s wristband.

  Peter Ospanov pumped his fist and looked to the sky in thanks as though the mission was already complete. Accessing the inner sectors of the BMC from above would be possible for the same reason there was any problem in the first place; namely because the microspheres which divided Arkadia into confined atmospheric zones did not extend from the romosphere’s core to its outer cloak, as was the case with Terradox’s fixed zonal divisions. Though no one mentioned it, there was more than a hint of irony in that fact that the cause of their problem could also enable the solution.

  “Nisha, get here now,” Romesh spoke into his wristband. “We need you.”

  Nisha replied with haste: “I’m on my way, and I’m not far.”

  For a few moments, silence circled. At last, it felt like progress was being made.

  “Romesh,” Robert began, “this map is live and fully reactive, correct? I can place a barrier exactly as I could from my own office?”

  “Absolutely. In fact, since you granted full permissions, I could do the same. Why, what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that I don’t want to enact a full-scale lockdown across the whole of Arkadia,” Robert said, “but I’m also thinking that it’s too early to rule out the possibility of the toxin bleeding out. I want to place further ringed barriers around the whole BMC, and also to prepare the pathway for the rescue vehicle to carry survivors to The Mound. And again, I want that to be a thick barrier with multiple layers. Do you want to take care of that, or shall I?”

  “Go ahead,” Romesh said.

  And so Robert did, effortlessly placing romotech barriers with the mere drag of a finger. The others watched in amazement, all of them but Bradley having been around the inner circle for long enough to remember how much more difficult an undertaking the creation of such microspheric barriers had been during the dramatic incident in Terradox’s Little Venus zone which almost claimed Chase Jackson’s life among many others. It was Bo, currently hurtling towards an asteroid at Chase’s side, whose tireless work had enabled the first microspheres so many years ago, and his efforts were paying off even in his physical absence.

  “Shit,” Bradley cursed, recapturing everyone’s attention. “Uh, guys… the
very worst hit people were all in ground zero at the same time, which is when the toxins breached the soil… if that’s even the right way to say it. Some of them are now further inside, as we can see. But the bad news is that there are people with yellow and orange dots who were nowhere near ground zero at the wrong time, but who have been in extended proximity to the red people who were.”

  “You’re not telling us it’s fucking contagious?” Peter grunted.

  “We still don’t really know what ‘it’ is,” Robert answered on Bradley’s behalf. “If it was a virus, this could be a sign that it was contagious. But it could be physical spores or… I don’t know… ‘residue’ on the skin or clothes of the carriers. It doesn’t mean that one person is passing an ‘infection’ that’s in them to someone else; it could just be that the cause of the infection is on them, if you follow my thought. Ultimately it doesn’t matter, because—”

  “No, it doesn’t matter,” Romesh interrupted. “With respect, Robert, right now it really doesn’t. What matters now, with this in mind, is decisively isolating the symptomatic from the healthy. I think we should communicate with them via the BMC’s PA system and try to herd people into groups based on their current readings, then place barriers between those groups. Is everyone in agreement? We’ll essentially be creating sectors within sectors, based on the currently available data.”

  Robert nodded, grateful rather than offended that Romesh had interrupted him. He announced more details of the plan as they came to him, beginning with the crucial point of sugarcoating reality to avoid carnage. If people knew why some of them were being grouped together, they wouldn’t cooperate, he reasoned. No one disagreed with his logic, or with the mild deception of the white lies that would be necessary for the greater good.

  Wasting no more time, he told Viola that she should be the one to make the initial public announcement. Everyone agreed with this — her voice would be the one most gladly received. He then told her exactly what to say, going so far as to digitally write it on one of the room’s empty walls so she wouldn’t forget the agreed-upon wording.