Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  “Holly?” Grav’s voice spoke. “Is Dante still with you?”

  “Yeah. What the hell is going on?”

  A different alarm was sounding in Grav’s security room. “We hit something big,” he said, raising his voice to be heard. “Or something big hit us. Listen to me: both of you have to get inside one of the landers right now. We are going down!”

  Dante, with his ear pressed against Holly’s to listen in as best he could, replied with the same questions that filled Holly’s mind: “What do you mean we’re going down? Are the life support systems failing? Is there structural dam—”

  “I mean we are going down. Look outside!”

  “We’re in the utility room,” Holly said, cursing its lack of windows. “Tell us what you’re looking at.”

  “I am looking at the giant fucking rock that is pulling us towards it,” Grav snapped. “One minute there was nothing there, then right after the impact there was. It just… appeared. Out of nowhere! Whatever we just hit, there is no way the Karrier can land after that impact, so you have to get both of your asses in one of the landers. I am about to run to Rusev’s and I swear to God: I will initiate separation the second I get inside, so do not say I did not warn you.”

  Holly and Dante scrambled to their feet. Both had a thousand questions about the giant rock Grav had just mentioned, but each knew that the other had no answers.

  “We have to get to Rusev’s lander within ten seconds of Grav,” Dante said. “That’s how long the countdown will last once he initiates separation.”

  Holly stood silently by the door. The pain around her swollen eye socket was drowning in an ocean of adrenaline, but her thoughts remained clear. “What about the Tanners?”

  “What about Rusev and Yury?” Dante replied, positioning his body to sprint off in the direction of their lander. “And what about your face? Something could be broken.”

  “I’m fine, and Yury and Rusev already have Grav! The Tanners will die if we abandon them.”

  Dante rubbed his hands against his cheeks and shook his head frantically. “Holly… we have to stay together.”

  “If we both go with the Tanners, we will be together,” Holly said. Deep inside, she knew that even a 100% guarantee of reaching the Venus station alive without the Tanners wouldn’t have been acceptable; the safety and near luxury of the station would be meaningless if she got there by abandoning her duty. She could never relax, never look at herself in the mirror, never sleep at night knowing that the people she’d been tasked with protecting were dead because she abandoned them. And then came the crux: “Dante, she’s just a kid.”

  Dante’s reaction was not the one Holly hoped for. He took two quick steps towards her, held her face, and kissed her forehead. “Stay alive and stay in the damn lander,” he said, more firmly than he meant. “If anything can survive down there, wherever the hell ‘down there’ is, I will find you.”

  With no time for a drawn-out farewell, Dante set off towards Rusev’s lander as quickly as he could.

  Holly dashed back inside the utility room to save the only reachable possession she cared about: the small potted plant she had kept alive throughout her six months on the Karrier. Mercifully, she spotted it right away. Less mercifully, the pot’s fall from the shelf next to the dining machine had led to most of its life-giving Grow-Lo brand artificial soil spilling all over the floor.

  “Shit,” she cursed under her breath.

  After a few urgent seconds spent frantically gathering as much of the scattered soil as she dared, Holly’s spine stiffened at the sound of the robotic voice which abruptly replaced the alarm:

  “Warning. Warning. Lander separation will commence in T minus ten.”

  Holly reached across the floor for an empty backpack.

  The speaker system relayed three deafening beeps.

  She hurriedly placed her plant inside and zipped it up.

  “Nine.”

  Three more beeps.

  Before the count of eight, Holly tossed the bag over one shoulder and started running.

  five

  Holly sprinted towards the Tanners’ lander, imagining all the way just what they must have been thinking and feeling as a voice told them that their cabin-cum-lander was about to separate from the rest of the Karrier with no one inside to help them.

  The distance was never going to be a problem, even through the dull all-over pain Holly felt as she ran.

  At the count of six, Holly saw the door. At the count of five, it opened.

  “Get back inside!” she screamed.

  Jessica Tanner, fully clothed but with a huge white towel covering her long blonde hair, stepped out before closing the door and waving her arms as if trying to warn Holly off. “Wait, we need—”

  “This is not a drill,” Holly yelled forcefully from an ever-decreasing distance, as though the frantic expression on the girl’s face didn’t make clear that she already knew as much.

  Solely focused on getting her safely inside the lander, Holly didn’t hear a word of the girl’s desperate reply.

  The door at Jessica Tanner’s back, though firm, did not function as an external barrier, but rather served only to divide the cabin from the Karrier’s corridor and to give privacy to those inside. The end of the countdown — now at three — would not see this door lock. What the end of the countdown would herald was the descent of the lander’s impenetrable air-seal, in precisely the spot where Jessica was standing.

  There would be no slow action-movie descent, allowing Holly to slide under the closing seal at the last millisecond. Instead, the seal would snap down in an instant. She would either make it or she wouldn’t.

  None of this would have been a problem for Holly, now just a few paces away, had Jessica not taken a sideways step away from the door.

  “Get back!” Holly begged.

  “I need to get more syringes,” the girl replied, her English accent easily discernible now that her words were more audible at close range. “For his medicine!”

  With no time for any distractions, Holly lunged at Jessica, grabbed hold of her practically weightless frame, pivoted towards the door and narrowly managed to direct their combined weight into it firmly enough to ensure that they broke through and fell inside the lander.

  Made it.

  After three more shrill beeps and the final second of the countdown, the thick metallic air-seal snapped into place.

  Holly immediately jumped to her feet and looked out of the nearest window.

  And there it was: impossibly close, from what seemed more like altitude than distance, she saw the rocky reddish-brown terrain of what the scale suggested could only be a planet.

  Her mind battled her good eye, trying to make sense of the impossibility of what it was seeing. Holly knew roughly where the Karrier was relative to Earth and Venus, and everyone knew that there was nothing like this in between.

  Dry land covered the surface for as far as her eye could see, but the limited visible curvature suggested that this area was only a small section of whatever celestial body she was looking down upon. The ubiquitous dry land at least made almost certain that the resilient lander would touch down without any catastrophic difficulties, meaning that Holly and the Tanners should theoretically survive until their resources were depleted.

  Holly suddenly had the thought to use her wristband to check Dante’s position and make sure he had made it to Rusev’s lander. Though there would have been nothing she could have done otherwise — or perhaps because of that — Holly breathed a sigh of immense relief when four dots appeared on the rudimentary map, all safely inside the other lander and all flashing green to show that their wearers’ vital signs were good.

  As Holly’s still-racing heartbeat settled to a level where she could no longer feel it in her eardrums, she became aware again of Jessica and Norman Tanner. Norman stood quietly by another window, a hand covering his mouth in anxious bewilderment, but Jessica was gesticulating wildly at Holly.

  “Pleas
e unlock it,” the girl pleaded.

  “There’s nothing on the other side,” Holly said, not knowing how else to explain it. “It’s an air-seal.”

  “But his extra syringes are in the hold. We only had enough in here for the rest of the journey and he’s not suppos—”

  “Can’t he re-use them?” Holly interrupted, talking to Jessica but turning again towards Norman, who was still tuned out of the conversation as he glanced down at the impossible world below.

  “He’s not supposed to keep using the same ones!”

  “Hello?” Holly called, trying to snap the man out of his trance. Given how far away his focus seemed to be, she doubted he had ordered Jessica to attempt to gather extra syringes and hoped that the girl’s impression of their necessity was overblown. “Hello?! I’m talking to you. What kind of medicine do you take?”

  The man’s head slowly turned towards Holly. He stared dumbly at her for several seconds, briefly opened his mouth like a fish trying to breathe air, then looked back outside.

  “Not him,” Jessica said.

  Holly’s gaze then followed Jessica’s to the far corner of the lander. When it stopped, her heartbeat intensified to all-new levels and her stomach knotted. Though there was no physical jolt to knock her off her feet, Holly felt this impact in her gut far more strongly than any of the previous three.

  Because right there in the corner of the lander, peeking timidly over the top of a tightly-held white blanket, she saw the frightened eyes of a tiny child.

  six

  “There’s only supposed to be two of you,” Holly said, eventually managing to tear her gaze from the terrified boy in the corner and look back at his teenage sister, who seemed to be the only Tanner currently capable of speaking.

  The girl lost her cool. “Why the hell would you do that? Do you even know what you’ve done?”

  “Saved your life,” Holly replied. “We made it inside by one second! If I’d stopped to ask what you needed or to help you get it, neither of us would be standing here.”

  “Did I ask you to save me?”

  Holly sighed. She could have used some help from Norman as she tried to rationalise with his daughter, but he still stood impotently by the window. Clearly not built for crisis, Holly thought. What she wouldn’t have given to have Dante by her side…

  “Stop it,” a weak voice called from the corner of the lander. “Stop arguing.”

  The boy lowered his blanket, revealing a series of almost cartoonishly soft features. His skin was pale, particularly around his eyes. Holly, who admittedly didn’t have much experience with children, wouldn’t have put him a day over eight years old.

  Holly took a few seconds to take in the lander’s layout. The exit to the secure air lock and beyond lay at the opposite side from the fast-closing seal which Holly and the girl had so narrowly avoided.

  The space between these points contained two beds, as expected. The open bag of beauty products placed on a makeshift third, which the boy was currently sitting on, suggested that Jessica had been sleeping on the floor. The impact of the Karrier’s collision didn’t seem to have had quite so devastating an effect here as it had in the utility room.

  Next to the bed Holly assumed to be the boy’s, several physically printed photographs were stuck to the wall. Most featured the Venus station; the only one that didn’t was a very old image of Ekaterina Rusev.

  Holly knelt down and looked at the boy. “You know Rusev?”

  He nodded carefully.

  “So you know that she owns the station and that her son is in charge until she gets there?”

  “Dimitar,” the boy said.

  Holly’s eyebrows rose in surprise that the boy knew Dimitar’s name, but she tried not to let it show too much. “Exactly,” she said with a deliberate smile. “And you can bet he’s already looking for her.”

  “They’ll be looking for you, too,” he said, sitting up a little straighter as he grew into the conversation. “I know who you are.”

  This came as less of a surprise; the extent of Holly’s fame had been so great at its peak that her name and face were still strewn across all manner of media, even after a decade of living as quietly and as far from the public eye as possible.

  She grinned. “Good. So that means you know I know how to land this thing, right?”

  The boy smiled slightly for the first time and nodded.

  Holly rose to her feet and pressed her fingertip against an outlined panel on the thick air-seal to identify herself. The exterior of the panel slid to the left, revealing a busy control interface.

  The Karrier’s landers were extremely sophisticated and could effectively land themselves in most circumstances. Holly’s early Air Force training, undertaken before her high-profile move to the public space program, had involved more complex operations than those she would face here even if moderate complications arose.

  With all systems working well and the lander’s descent feeling as controlled as anyone could have hoped for, Holly caught sight of Jessica, who looked strikingly young without the makeup, grimacing and holding her collarbone.

  “Are you okay?” Holly asked.

  “I’ll be fine,” the girl said, lowering her hand in what Holly took as reluctance to show weakness. But where Jessica’s hand had been, Holly now saw a nasty-looking bruise.

  “Are you sure?” Holly asked. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just had to make sure—”

  “I said I’ll be fine.”

  Holly dropped the point. Jessica clearly had something of an attitude, and though this kind of hardened stubbornness would likely prove no bad thing when it came to surviving the trying days which lay ahead, antagonism was the last thing anyone needed right now.

  Back at the control panel, Holly was pleased to see that the lander had chosen a patch of the solid ground below and that the atmospheric readings were conducive to a relatively straightforward touchdown. She stood beside the control panel for the rest of the descent, only looking away from the readouts to warn the Harringtons when the thrust was about to kick in. A small live feed of the lander’s downward-facing camera gave her a perfect view of the ever-approaching terrain below.

  The ease of the landing brought to Holly’s mind a joke her neurosurgeon father used to tell: “Anyone can cut someone’s head open; it’s keeping them alive that’s the hard part. What you do after the incision… that’s what separates the surgeons from the serial killers.”

  “We made it!” the young boy yelled. He threw his blanket aside and walked across the now stable floor to join his father at the window. Wearing neither shoes nor socks, he was even shorter than Holly expected.

  The man put an arm around his son’s shoulder and finally turned to address Holly. She anticipated the question before it came: “Where are we?”

  Even these three small words — two more than he’d ever previously spoken to Holly in any single interaction — were enough to reveal an accent far more formal and refined than Jessica’s. The man’s voice was utterly incongruent with his unkempt appearance, but Holly knew from the photo on his travel card that he didn’t normally look like this. Now more than ever, he struck her as someone important.

  Holly considered her response. The obvious one kept trying to escape her lips but in the presence of two children she knew that “I don’t know” — however true — was the worst thing she could say.

  After a few seconds, she settled on a response and delivered it as positively as she could: “Solid ground.”

  Holly then preempted Norman’s request for something more specific than that by explaining that she was about to analyse some data to build up a clearer picture. She didn’t say exactly what data she meant, in case the picture it painted was not one she wanted to share with them at this delicate stage.

  What Holly already knew was that Dante and Grav had been safely inside the other lander with Rusev and Yury when the landers separated from the Karrier. What she needed to know now was where that lander was. The wri
stbands they all wore had impressive range, but the altitude of the separation left Holly looking at her own wristband for updated proximity data more in hope than expectation that the other lander had touched down somewhere reachable.

  SIGNAL LOST [RANGE EXCEEDED].

  Even through low expectations, this pop-up message hit Holly hard.

  She navigated to the log to see how long ago the signal had been lost, hoping this would give some kind of clue as to the other lander’s course.

  The previous update displayed a time just forty seconds ago. Finally some good news, Holly thought. This wasn’t as good as knowing where they were, of course, but it at least meant that they had only veered too far from her wristband to maintain a signal towards the end of their descent.

  “Do we know where the others are?” Norman asked, responding to the slight warming of Holly’s expression.

  “Roughly,” she said, navigating to see the details of the last successful update. But when the data filled the screen, an unmaskable look of horror crossed her face.

  As Jessica hurried towards Holly to see what was on the wristband, Holly covered it with her other hand.

  “What does it say?” the girl demanded.

  Holly searched her mind for a euphemism. “Uh, they’re not as close as I thought.”

  “How far away are they?” Norman chimed in.

  Even as Holly met his understandably concerned gaze, the image from the wristband remained etched in her mind: the four dots representing Rusev, Yury, Grav, and Dante, all of which had previously flashed green, were now an ominous steady red.

  Worse than anything she had imagined, this told Holly that their vital signs had flatlined before the signal was lost.

  “How far?” the man repeated, quickly losing patience.

  Holly pressed the button to retract her wristband’s screen then met his eyes again. “Too far.”

  seven

  We’re all alone, Holly thought to herself, trying to maintain something of a brave face for the children’s sake. Dante and Grav aren’t coming.