Vijay thanked Peter for saving everyone, to which Peter replied that his role was smaller than both Nisha’s and Romesh’s, and that Vijay should look closer to home if he was looking for a hero this time out. The boy didn’t respond, apparently thinking quite deeply, but Nisha gave Peter an appreciative wink via her rearview mirror.
Emergency staff were already on hand at The Mound to assist with the arrival of Nisha’s first evacuees, and she knew which area to bring them to in accordance with its internal divisions.
When Peter reached the BMC again and came face to face with Viola and Katie once more, a new announcement from Robert filled the air to announce that two further rooms would be opened. One selfless pilot, who himself had been represented as a yellow dot prior to leaving, had since turned green but remained willing to carry ‘higher-risk’ evacuees than the green-dot individuals who filled the other two TE-900’s. This left the initial five central rooms all but empty, with only a few other red dots besides Katie still waiting to be evacuated.
Viola informed Peter that she still felt fine but that Robert had told her she was now yellow and getting more symptomatic. Peter had faith in Robert and Romesh, as well as the unseen botanists and analysts working tirelessly behind the scenes to come up with rapid solutions, and fell back upon the single-minded focus of saving those he could save as quickly as possible.
His mind returned to his family as soon as his next batch of evacuees were in the air, however, and he was utterly ecstatic to hear from Robert that Katie’s measurable physical symptoms were in decline. His flight to The Mound was not short but passed more comfortably than it would have without this news. With more people awaiting rescue, however, he couldn’t yet step inside the enormous complex which would be used to quarantine the survivors for an indeterminate time. What mattered now was making sure that everyone inside the BMC would be among those survivors.
Each TE-900 had so far been overloaded beyond its officially permitted capacity, and only one more three-vehicle evacuation would be necessary. One of those vehicles would contain only the individuals who had been represented by red dots at some stage of the day, and the fact that some of them had since seen their colour ‘soften’ to orange was a further sign that the atmospheric amendments made by Robert and Romesh from a virtual screen in the Shipyard really had come up trumps. The final passengerless flight back to the BMC gave Peter time to think about just how incredible it was that technology had come so far in so short a time. More specifically, he thought, it was the huge leap in their grasp of romotechnology that was making all of the difference.
Inquiries into what had gone wrong in the BMC would raise uncomfortable questions for everyone — Peter knew that, and he supported it — but the positive potential of romotech had scarcely been more apparent than it was right now, albeit only in dealing with a problem caused by a lack of care in other areas.
Peter’s wristband buzzed as he neared the BMC for the last time, announcing a call from Robert. During it, Robert informed him that all remaining barriers were going to be removed at once. Toxicity in all sectors including ground zero was now within broadly acceptable bounds, Robert said, and this would be the quickest and best way to get everyone out of there and into their isolated sector of The Mound.
“This has been one hell of a stress-test,” Peter said, raising a laugh from the normally reserved and currently preoccupied Robert.
“Well, Peter… at least we passed.”
Now it was Peter’s turn to laugh. “It’s almost like we work better as a team than when we’re at each other’s throats,” he said more soberly. “And that goes for you too, Romesh!”
“I knew all that practice I had messing with Nancy would come in handy,” Romesh replied with a self-deprecating chuckle. “But you’re right, this was a team effort. Holly would be proud.”
We’ve not done it yet, Peter thought as his TE-900 landed on the BMC’s roof one final time. He descended via the superior ladder which had been brought in from another room and which required no human support, unlike the first. As soon as he touched the ground, his ankle painfully protesting each step, he walked back towards Katie and Viola.
“On three, I’m going to lift the remaining barriers,” Romesh announced over the PA system. “To everyone in the outer sector in particular, but to all of you who knew your movements were being restricted to aid us in our efforts to make this work, we can’t thank you enough for your patience and your trust that we would get you out of here. Without your compliance this wouldn’t have been possible. Now, on three.”
By one, Katie was beaming.
By two, she was ready to move.
On three, she was landing in Peter’s arms and knocking him to the ground with the strength of her pounce.
“Be careful!” Viola cautioned, wary of his injured foot.
But lying on the ground with Katie in his arms, the last thing on Peter’s mind was the ankle which he would soon learn to be suffering from a moderate fracture rather than a mere sprain. All he could feel were her arms tight around his neck and her heartbeat fast against his own. He looked up and saw Viola being warmly embraced by the other survivors who were flooding the central sector, all delighted to be freed and eternally grateful that she had come to save them in the first place.
“I knew you’d come back,” Katie said, crying gently out of sheer relief.
“I always will, sweetheart,” Peter replied, catching Viola’s joyous eyes as she pointed the others towards the ladder. “I always will.”
thirty-four
Chase Jackson, a great distance from Arkadia and with no idea of the drama that had unfolded there in recent days, had never felt a level of anticipation anything like the rush he felt right now.
Asteroid NGB-2 was now before his very eyes, with the most daring landing in the history of manned spaceflight barely a minute away from its commencement. His only passenger, Bo Harrington, was equally unaware that hundreds of people were currently quarantined in Arkadia’s Mound development, much less that his sister and niece were among them. Both young men were thus utterly focused on the task at hand: recovering a dead probe and collecting samples which could forever change humanity’s understanding of its own place in the universe.
Rachel Berry, the mission’s only other participant, was currently out of their sight in a Karrier of her own, positioned further along the asteroid’s path as per the cautionary plan.
“This is what it’s all about,” Chase said, gazing out at the asteroid — far larger than he imagined — and preparing to trust a lot to the Karrier he was piloting. “You ready?”
Bo turned to him, a smile crossing his lips. “I mean, we’ve come all this way. I suppose we might as well see what’s down there…”
With no further ado, Chase initiated the Karrier’s automated final approach and landing. Human crews had landed on asteroids in the past, but they had always been far more slow-moving than NGB-2.
“Karriers don’t make mistakes,” he said as they hurtled directly towards their target. “It’s not going to miss.”
Moments later, he might just wish it had.
thirty-five
“Chase!? Bo!? Can you hear me?” Rachel Berry’s shaky voice blurted out. Having watched their Karrier crash impactfully into the asteroid, she feared that she already knew the answer. The myriad red lights on her own Karrier’s communications dashboard suggested that her colleagues had graver problems than being able to hear her, but that thought only made her heart race even faster.
“We’re okay,” Bo’s voice replied, firm but distant due to the damage his Karrier had sustained.
“Okay?” Chase echoed. “We’re fucked! The Karrier completely lost control of itself! Rachel, there’s no way this thing is taking off. We’re going to be lucky if the structure is still intact. Both of the landers are offline — they can’t sustain the same level of impact as the main body — so we’re not going anywhere unless you can somehow get a lander down a lot more gently than
this Karrier was able to get itself down.”
“We’re okay,” Bo repeated, more insistently. “Neither of us are hurt.”
Thank the Lord for small mercies, Rachel thought as she immediately redirected her Karrier to intercept the comet’s path.
“Rachel, we’re going to need you to drop one of your emergency landers,” Chase said, back in control of himself. “If it reaches us in one piece, we can leave in that. The rover should be okay, so we’re still going to venture out for the probe… no matter what. Even if we can’t leave, we can still find what we came for.”
“I’m on it,” Rachel promised. They were too far from Earth, Arkadia, Terradox and the Venus station to seek advice or approval from anyone else, such was the time sensitivity of their current predicament, but for the purposes of this mission she and Chase were in charge of their own actions and decisions, in any case.
“I’m going to get the rover ready to take us outside,” Bo announced, leaving Chase’s side as he spoke. “Rachel, once you’re close, you’re not going to be able to keep within range of this asteroid for long. We need to be ready to launch in the lander you send down as soon as you send it, because a lot more can go wrong if we end up relying on re-docking with the Karrier at speed rather than as we’re taking off. Everyone agreed?”
Chase nodded. “Get on it. We’re just going out there to recover the probe and grab some samples from the area where it collected them. The analysis will come when we’re back on the Karrier, on the way back to Arkadia. Rachel, what’s your ETA?”
“Even if I fly out along its path to maximise the time until it catches up and gets as close to me as it will, we’re only looking at forty minutes,” she said. “Then another few minutes for the lander to reach you. Is that long enough for you to do what you need to do out there?”
Chase looked out of his window at the alien surface of the asteroid, whose darkness positively swallowed the Karrier’s bright outward-pointing lights. “Well… I guess it’s going to have to be.”
thirty-six
“I can’t believe we’re driving on an asteroid,” Chase mused, fully suited up and sitting in the rover’s passenger seat while Bo drove with the most focused expression of his life.
“This is a simulator,” Bo said, almost robotically and without so much as diverting his gaze. “I’ve done this a million times before.”
Chase didn’t say anything else, correctly recognising that Bo was in the zone during a testing drive across very difficult conditions. The rover’s suspension and ability to excel in low gravity were tested to the limit, but Chase had confidence in the vehicle for the simple reason that it had been designed and tested by Bo, the single greatest mind Chase had come across during a decade surrounded by brilliant researchers and scientists.
The accuracy of the Karrier’s botched landing — essentially, it crashed in the right place — made the drive mercifully short. Indeed, the rover reached the dead probe a full ten minutes before Rachel was due to come into reach with the emergency landers which presented their last hope of escape and survival.
At the press of a few buttons, Bo sent some drones outwards to illuminate the area around the dead probe. It showed clear signs of landing damage, so much so that both men were surprised and impressed that it had managed to send any data back to Arkadia before packing in. The jagged terrain of the asteroid alone shouldn’t have posed too many problems, and Chase could only assume that its speed was what had led to the difficulties faced by not only the probe but by the much larger and more robust Karrier.
But right now, what mattered was collecting the probe and a sample of its surroundings. The reason for Chase’s presence on the hellish rock was the incredible discovery suggested by the probe’s own analysis of its surroundings, and his goal was turning that suggestion into a decisive confirmation.
“Are you okay with me doing this?” Bo asked, hovering his hand over the controls which would produce and manoeuvre the rover’s huge claw-like arms to take hold of the probe. After that, it would be time for the drilling and sample-taking. Bo knew that this was Chase’s raison d'être — turning over rocks to see what was there — but they only had one shot, and an experienced hand was needed.
“Do your thing,” Chase said, breaking into a brief grin. “I got us here… more or less in one piece… so at least I’ve done something.”
Chase’s self-deprecation was honest rather than conceited, but Bo had stopped listening as soon as he heard ‘do your thing’. Without another wasted moment, the rover’s enormous retrieving arms gathered the probe and elevated it to a safe height. This rover had been chosen specifically for the task at hand from an extensive roster of options, and Chase could easily understand why.
Bo then released a second batch of drones, this time specialised excavating drones rather than their illuminating counterparts, which would collect small samples from nearby sites and promptly return them to the rover. Next it came time to engage the rover’s primary sample collecting tools; and after the initial non-invasive collections were complete, he finished by powering up both the rover’s jackhammer like excavator and its more conventional borer. Within a few more minutes, he had as many samples as he could have hoped. All that was left to hope for now was that he had what he needed.
“Rachel, ETA?” Chase asked, knowing she was on the same open communications channel and would hear every word he uttered.
“You should see me soon,” she said. “It’ll reach me in two minutes. Head back to your Karrier and I’ll try to put a lander down somewhere else — that area didn’t seem too accommodating.”
“Send them both down at once,” Chase said. “We don’t have time to try one and then the other. If they both fail, they both fail. But waiting to see how the first gets on might leave too little time for the second to be viable. Remember, you can’t keep up with this thing for long and we don’t want to have to meet up with you and dock out in space! The landers aren’t made for that.”
Neither Rachel nor Bo argued with Chase’s logic. Her Karrier became visible before the rover returned to their own doomed Karrier, and now all they could do was watch and hope.
“You’ve got this,” Chase said. “Send the landers down.”
Twenty seconds passed.
“In your own time there, Rachel,” he added, a nervous chuckle in his voice. “It’s not like our lives are depending on you doing this quickly enough…”
“It’s not working,” she blurted out, reluctantly admitting this out loud having tried to work past the automated landing system’s objections. “Chase, it can’t secure a spot. With my altitude, the lack of gravity and the speed of this damn asteroid, it won’t isolate any landing spots.”
Chase and Bo turned to face each other, more than forlorn.
“Go manual,” Chase said, an intensity returning to his tone. “Rachel, fuck it. This is a free shot, no pressure. Seriously — we’d be dead if you weren’t here, so just do what you can. I believe in you. Robert believed in you, Holly believed in you, and that’s why you’re here. This is an almost impossible task but if there’s anyone who can give it a real shot, that anyone is you.”
Rachel exhaled audibly. “Here they come,” she announced, releasing the landers more in hope than expectation. “I’ll control them as best as I can, but they’re so much smaller than your Karrier, and that didn’t even make it.”
“That was automated,” Chase said. “The Karriers are supposed to land themselves, but they weren’t built with somewhere like this in mind. Focus on one of the landers… let the other one fall where it falls, but get one down as gently as you can, okay?”
“That was my plan,” she said. Indeed, even as she spoke one was already veering well off course; and once it was gone, it was gone. Try as she might, Rachel couldn’t swing it back towards where it had to be, and its window was gone. “And now I guess the alternative is off the table.”
The second lander, fully in her control, descended more slowly. Chase cou
ld feel his heart rate quicken, but this time in anticipation rather than fear.
Bo, for his part, couldn’t help but think back to the stomach churning moments when Holly had been forced to manually land a Karrier on Netherdox, fighting through the impossibly fierce storm clouds that guarded its surface like a ring of fire.
“I’m losing it!” Rachel yelled. “Chase, there’s no… no grip. No pull. It’s going to slip!”
Rachel’s words were imprecise, reflecting the novelty of the situation. ‘Slip’ was as close a term as anything else to reflect the lander’s unplanned movement as it passed laterally beyond its target touchdown site — far beyond — and ultimately missed the elusive asteroid altogether. “I’m sorry,” she gulped. “It was just like it hit a certain point then—”
“You tried,” Chase said. “Rachel… we’re going to analyse what we have in the rover’s on-board lab and we’re going to send the data to you. You’re going to take it back to Arkadia, and none of this will have been for nothing. Tell Nisha I love—”
“No,” Rachel interrupted. “And don’t even try to tell me you wouldn’t do this… either of you.”
Neither of them said anything; they knew what she meant. Even before they saw Rachel’s Karrier begin to descend in a last-ditch effort to bring them home, they knew what she meant.
And the truth was, she was right. Chase wouldn’t and couldn’t have ever left someone behind, and nor could Bo. They would have understood perfectly well if Rachel had done just that, and indeed a large part of each of them wanted her to save herself with certainty rather than risk everything for a far-out chance of saving them all.
“I’m coming down fast, so I can avoid as much of that unexpected lateral movement as I can. I’ll try to use the launch boosters at the last second to avoid a vertical crash, but I’m hoping the Karrier will be okay with a bit of a bump so long as it’s straight when it happens.”
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 108
