Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  “You don’t have to do this,” Chase said. “But I know you’re going to, and that does sound like as good a landing plan as any other. Just don’t engage the boosters any earlier than you have to, okay? That could destabilise the landing. The later the better, so long as it’s not too late.”

  “So all I have to do is time it absolutely perfectly,” she said.

  A wry smile involuntarily crossed Chase’s lips. “Couldn’t be simpler, right?”

  Noticing how quiet Bo was, Chase glanced across and saw his head in his hands; an uncharacteristically physical display of emotion. “It’s okay,” he said. “Bo, we came here to do a job and we did it. We’ll be able to send the data from these samples back to Arkadia from here. You can talk to Viola, Katie, anyone you want. I’m not going to tell you there’s not a good chance we’re going to die here, but we won’t be alone and it won’t be for nothing.”

  “And it won’t be fucking happening,” Rachel chimed in, hurtling towards the asteroid at a frightening pace. “I’m not coming down there to say my goodbyes.”

  Chase watched on, hoping and praying she would hit the boosters in time. The pace of her descent was far greater than he’d anticipated but he knew better than to interrupt with contradictory advice in her moment of focus, and he had to trust that she knew what she was doing.

  Their rover’s sound isolating abilities ensured that neither Bo nor Chase heard the Karrier’s landing directly. What they did hear, however, was the beautiful sound of victory.

  Rachel’s breathy and involuntarily vocalisation of delirious relief was closer to a festive ‘hohoho’ sound than a humorous ‘hahaha’, but it only meant one thing.

  “Easy there, Santa!” Chase laughed, beaming the widest smile of his life as he gazed out at the upright and intact Karrier along with Bo, who shook his head in disbelief that she had actually pulled it off.

  “Just hurry the hell up, cowboy,” Rachel replied, now lucid but still ecstatic. “This sleigh’s leaving in three minutes, so you better climb in…”

  thirty-seven

  In an ironic twist of fate, Holly and Grav’s drama-free landing back on Terradox after their long return journey from the rendezvous point near Arkadia came within an hour of Rachel Berry’s ultra-dramatic landing on asteroid NGB-2.

  The distance between them meant that Holly didn’t see any Karrier-cam footage of Rachel’s touchdown until after the trio had safely departed from the asteroid, such was the nature of the communications delay, but this was of little meaning since she watched it all as-live and lived every second as though she was there.

  The helplessness of not being there, allied with the guilty feelings of having okayed a mission that looked utterly doomed until Rachel pulled a rabbit out of her hat with a selflessly risky and perfectly executed manual landing, had taken a real toll. Even Grav, normally able to maintain an air of quiet detachment, was shaken. Between this and the recent events on Arkadia, he felt as though he had aged twenty years in the past few days.

  The emotional roller coaster had been like nothing else he could remember, with the lowest of lows followed by the most overwhelming sense of relief he had ever felt.

  That both crises had passed without any fatalities was testament to the professionalism and skill of the inner circle Holly had cultivated over the years, all of whom were now running things in her absence.

  Even on Terradox, still under her charge, the fact that Holly’s lengthy absence had caused no problems likewise reflected well on the capacity of her understudies and bode very well for the future. Grav similarly took heart from his security officers’ success in keeping everything in Terradox in check. He had never feared any problems — it wasn’t that kind of place, largely thanks to his vigilant screening of potential colonists — but it was one thing to think they could oversee things without him and something much better to now know that they could.

  “They don’t need us anymore,” Holly mused as she finally felt the surface of Terradox under her feet once more, a fully positive lilt in her voice. “We didn’t do anything to solve either of these problems, and they made it through both. They don’t need us on Arkadia, they didn’t need us on the asteroid, and they didn’t even need us here.”

  “I still need us, Hollywood,” Grav said, no humour or anything else but genuine feeling behind the words.

  Holly looked at him and smiled. “Then it’s a good thing we’re not going anywhere.”

  thirty-eight

  On Arkadia, a lot had happened in the space of four days.

  Since the successful evacuation from the Biomedical Centre, careful study and analysis of the site had enabled botanists on Arkadia and beyond to reach several conclusions. Some were more welcome and reassuring than others, such as the data-backed consensus that there had been no foul play involved. The precise mechanism by which the root system of a genetically engineered plant species led to atmospheric toxicity when it breached the surface of an area where it didn’t belong was still up in the air, but precautions had already been taken to eliminate the chance of anything similar happening again.

  The most welcome news came within The Mound, where the Ospanov family and many others had been quarantined for what felt more like weeks than days. Conditions were physically comfortable but naturally unsettling, right up until Arkadian medical analysts grew confident enough to announce that no one was any longer exhibiting the virus-like symptoms which had marked the toxin’s emergence in the BMC.

  Tests and observations confirmed an earlier suspicion that the supposedly contagious ’virus’ had never been internally carried by people so much as the pseudo-allergenic toxin had been transferred via the skin and clothes of those who’d been directly or indirectly exposed to the initial spore burst in the BMC’s ground zero sector.

  Some of those who had fallen most seriously ill were still being treated and monitored, but this was no longer motivated by a desire to keep them away from the healthy many but rather simply because their symptoms had reached concerning levels of severity before Romesh Kohli and Robert Harrington had managed to weaken the toxin’s effects via timely atmospheric manipulation.

  No one remained in quarantine, and the emptying of The Mound coincided perfectly with the imminent return from asteroid NGB-2 of Chase Jackson, Bo Harrington and Rachel Berry. A welcome party had already been arranged to greet them, and Viola and everyone else previously cooped up in The Mound could not have been happier that they were going to make it. They had all watched with their hearts in their mouths as the as-live video came in from the asteroid a few days earlier and showed how close to death the trio had been, with Rachel’s selfless decision to risk her own life in a last-ditch effort to save the others having gone down particularly well. There was no news regarding analysis of the samples the trio had collected, but in light of the narrowly avoided human disaster this was the furthest thing from most people’s minds.

  As morning turned to afternoon and the hours until the big return ticked by, a stress-busting welcome party presented something worth looking forward to.

  At the same expansive site which had hosted Arkadia’s anchor raising party what felt like a lifetime ago, almost the entire population gathered to welcome home the returning trio of heroes.

  The party began long before the Karrier came into view, but it reached new heights at that point. In the few minutes the entry and landing took, the trio’s immediate friends and family positioned themselves separately from the crowd. Rachel, piloting the Karrier, had been informed of the party ahead of time and was more than happy to land nearby rather than in the usual spot at Arkadia Central Station. Unlike Chase and Bo she had no immediate family on Arkadia, but she had certainly won plenty of friends with her actions on the asteroid.

  Viola, Peter and Katie Ospanov stood with Robert to welcome Bo, while Nisha Kohli was ready to greet Chase. The whole of Arkadia was ready to greet them all, truth be told, but those at the front would be the first faces they saw.

  Chas
e emerged first, at the insistence of his colleagues, and looked very much like he had made an effort to look presentable. The same couldn’t be said for the utterly exhausted-looking Bo, while Rachel fell somewhere in the middle.

  Young Katie broke ranks first, sprinting forward to leap into the arms of her uncle Bo. His exhausted air lifted in an instant. It was difficult for anyone to hear much over the cheers and rapturous applause from the crowd, but those at the front heard Chase tell Nisha he was sorry.

  “You can’t keep doing this to me,” she said more quietly as they hugged as though they’d been apart for a year rather than a week.

  “I’m done dodging bullets,” Chase promised. “From now on, I’m all yours. I mean it.”

  Peter made his way to Chase and took a long look in his eyes. “I’m not going to say I told you it was a bad idea to go,” he said, breaking into a sudden smile and patting his friend on the shoulder. “But I am going to tell you that you were lucky to make it back, cowboy. No more of that, okay? Robert stepped up to the plate to deal with the outbreak and I don’t think we should make a habit of disagreeing with him or each other about the best courses of action. Holly wanted us to rule by consensus as often as possible. Are we on the same page?”

  Chase’s expression appeared uncharacteristically confused. “With the part about Holly, yeah. But Robert? Outbreak?” he asked, his eyes flitting to Nisha and then back to Peter. “I feel like there’s maybe something you haven’t told me yet.”

  “You’ll probably want to sit down for this,” Nisha grinned. “It’s not the shortest story you’ll ever hear…”

  epilogue

  “This place, Hollywood,” Grav sighed, warmth in his tone. “If you can tell me with a straight face that you thought there was any chance you would grow to love Terradox back when we first crash-landed here, you are a better liar than I thought.”

  She laughed, soaring high above the surface in a TE-500, en route to Christian Jackson’s office in the Botanical Gardens where they were all set to toast his son’s safe return to Arkadia. Jillian would be there too, as soon as she was finished up with her work for the day, and a quiet night with their closest friends was just what Holly and Grav needed. “I definitely never thought we’d be able to cover so much ground so quickly,” she replied. “Think of this, compared to those walks on the first few days…”

  “I played a lot of video games as a kid and this was exactly how it always went,” Grav said. “At first, you toil across the land. Then at the end you have new transport or abilities and you can cover the ground in no time. What used to be difficult terrain with a surprise around every corner ends up looking like nothing.”

  Holly got the point, but when she looked down she certainly didn’t see nothing.

  “Do you want a shot?” she suddenly asked, gesturing to the vehicle’s decidedly joystick-like control. “These things do practically fly themselves…”

  “I am a better passenger than pilot, Hollywood. You will just have to trust me on that one!”

  Moments later, passing over the top of the mountain peak where they first reunited after crash-landing in separate landers so long ago brought a whole flood of memories back to Holly. It wouldn’t get cold tonight like it had back then — they had long since tamed Terradox — but the clarity of the memory led Holly to think about everything else that went along with it.

  She thought back to falling into the pool of water in a hidden cave, only for Viola to dive in and save her.

  She thought of the beach, of Netherdox, of David Boyce and Remy Bouchard, and then right back to discovering Bo hiding in the Ospanov’s quarters after Grav had broken rank to help sneak him onto the station-bound Karrier inside of a suitcase, back before she knew Grav had a human heart beating in that bear-like chest of his.

  “Remember back then, when you thought I was the bad guy?” Grav asked, equally nostalgic in the face of everything that had been going on.

  “You turned up alone with a bloodstained shirt in your bag!” she chuckled. “What was I supposed to think? And really, Grav… have you ever looked in a mirror?”

  Christian’s office was just a few more minutes away, and Holly touched down outside it just in time.

  “Have we missed their landing?” she asked, hurrying into the office.

  Jillian answered from inside. “No. They will be there by now, but we haven’t seen it. You know how the delay is. For us, they’re just about to touch down.”

  Holly made herself comfortable and looked happily at an Arkadian video feed on Christian’s viewing wall. There were fireworks and a ferris wheel and countless smiling faces gazing upwards in the hopes they would catch the first sight of the Karrier.

  “They really did make it through two crises without our help,” she said. “Robert really stepped up and so did Rachel. We always knew what we’d get from Viola and Peter, and from Chase and Bo, but double confirmation never hurt anyone.”

  Jillian Jackson, whose emotional state when Chase had been seemingly stranded on the asteroid Holly couldn’t even begin to imagine, wore a look of serenity as the footage showed her son emerging at last from his Karrier and waving to the adoring people of Arkadia.

  Several key figures, Chase included, addressed the crowd during the early stages of an Arkadian blowout that would run way past sunrise. Viola was first, celebrating the fact that the BMC problem had been handled on Arkadia and the landing problem had been handled on NGB-2 without any external input.

  “We owe everything we have to Spaceman, to Holly and Grav, and to the Rusevs,” she said, “but they wouldn’t and don’t want us to be dependent on them. As Arkadians, we stood up and rose to the occasion. We ran into trouble and we thought and fought our way out of it, because that’s who we are and that’s what we do.”

  Chase was next, and he took his opportunity to whip up excitement over the limitless potential of RKS Arkadia and other romokinetic spheres which would soon be fabricated by Rachel’s team in the Shipyard. “I don’t know how much I’m supposed to tell you, but we didn’t just find signs of life on that asteroid,” he said, “we found actual microbial life.”

  The cheers which followed his impromptu announcement of this groundbreaking discovery were music to his ears and justified the whitest of all lies; in truth, he knew he was allowed to reveal the findings of remote data analysis conducted primarily on the Venus station, but presenting it like this made it feel even more special to those in attendance and those watching from each of humanity’s population bases.

  “And let’s remember something here: this asteroid came to us. It happened to be passing fairly close by at an opportune time. Think of everything we’re going to find as we continue venturing out into space and particularly when we have further colonies expanding outwards into space in multiple directions. The new age of exploration is now, and the universe is ours.”

  More applause followed, and back on Terradox Chase’s parents wore smiles of pride eclipsing even Holly’s.

  When Rachel spoke, greeted by a deafening roar of appreciation as she stepped forward, Holly’s own smile grew further still due to the closing line of a rousing and clearly well-rehearsed speech. “Whenever I have to make a tough decision, I always ask myself what Holly would do,” Rachel said, rounding off a quick explanation of why she had risked everything to give Chase and Bo a chance of making it home. “And that makes it easy, because the answer to that question is always the same: whatever it takes.”

  From then, the Arkadian party really kicked off and no further speeches were made.

  “I don’t even know what to think, let alone what to say,” Jillian said, smiling with tears in the corners of her eyes. “It’s not just Chase… it feels like they’ve all just flown the nest and succeeded on their own. But I can hardly think straight, it’s all been so up and down…”

  “As long as it ends on an up, I’m happy,” Christian said, reaching under his desk and producing an unlabelled bottle before proceeding to generously fill f
our glasses with priceless Terradox wine.

  “To them,” Holly toasted. “Without us.”

  “Not quite, Hollywood,” Grav said, raising his glass and successfully inviting the others to do the same. “To them… beyond us.”

  Terradox Zero: Before The Crash

  One

  Holly

  “Ten minutes until arrival on Earth,” an automated voice relayed through the Karrier’s speakers.

  After more return journeys to the Venus station than she cared to count, Holly was far less excited by the prospect of arriving on Earth once again than she was by the prospect of leaving for the last time just an hour later.

  The Karrier would land itself safely, as it always did, so Holly didn’t rush back to the control room upon hearing how imminently its landing procedures would kick in. She would check on things with a few minutes to spare just in case a manual intervention was necessary — a safe touchdown was ultimately her responsibility, after all — but landing at Rusentra’s space port was so much simpler than docking with the Venus station that her presence really wasn’t needed.

  Holly had no urge to look outside as Earth approached, such was her lack of attachment to a planet she was only too glad to be leaving behind. She had no one to miss, and like everyone else fortunate enough to secure a place on the station she certainly wouldn’t miss the Global Union’s despotic rule.

  The only negative feelings Holly felt about leaving Earth came when she thought all of those who would be left behind. These feelings were the primary reason she wouldn’t step out of the Karrier while its final Venus-bound cargo was loaded, for fear of seeing a forlorn child’s face as they watched the launch from the other side of the security barriers.