Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  “So what’s the plan?” Jessica asked.

  Holly hesitated. The plan, to the extent that there was one, was to find whatever was left of the Karrier and hope there was something to salvage. The need for this could have been neither simpler nor stronger: the lander had sufficient supplies to last four weeks at most, while the Karrier’s radio presented the only potential hope of calling the Venus station for help.

  Although Holly hadn’t lied to the boy when suggesting that the people on the station would already be looking for them, there was a potential complication that she herself couldn’t fully comprehend. Grav’s statement that the planet they’d just landed on had “appeared from nowhere” after something hit the Karrier made as little sense now as it had at the time. Holly worried that the planet might disappear just as quickly, or that something made it visible only from close range.

  None of it made sense, but here she was.

  “We’re going to run some atmospheric tests,” Holly said. “That’s the first stage. The results will determine where we go from there.”

  The girl nodded keenly.

  “Okay, you go to the window over there and look down at the circle on the leg straight below you. And Norman, you stay at that window and do the same. They should both open to let the instrum—”

  “Who’s Norman?” the boy interrupted.

  Everyone looked at him.

  When Norman began to talk, asking the boy why he was being so silly, Holly raised a hand to him without turning around.

  The boy gulped, feeling the weight of everyone’s stares.

  “What’s your name?” Holly asked him, as gently as the circumstances allowed.

  “Bo.”

  “Bo?”

  He nodded.

  “What’s your dad’s name? He is your dad?”

  The boy nodded again.

  “And his name…?”

  The man stepped between them. “That’s enough.”

  Holly stared into the man’s eyes. “I’ll give you one chance,” she said, almost whispering. “And I do mean one chance. If you tell me the truth — all of it — then I’ll forget that you just tried to make a sick child lie to me.”

  “We haven’t done anything wrong,” the man insisted. His English accent now struck Holly as truly refined; the kind she rarely heard anymore. The young boy spoke similarly to his father — clearly coached, if less resonant — which made Holly think that the girl’s incomparably common speech was a deliberate rejection of social expectations. If this had ever bothered her father, which Holly imagined it might have, he had clearly lost the war.

  “Well so far I know that you’re travelling on fake names,” Holly said, focusing on the facts. “And there are more of you than there should be. So that’s two things you’ve done wrong, straight off the bat.”

  The man gulped. “And we’re guilty of nothing beyond that. All this secrecy is nothing personal, but that’s the point: we don’t even know you. Personally, that is. We know who you are, where you’ve been, what you’ve done… we know all of that. But we don’t know you.”

  Holly doubted that the family knew all of where she’d been and what she’d done. She imagined they’d know as much about her life as everyone else did; she imagined they would know the narrative.

  She imagined they would know that she’d been born into a life of relative comfort 39 years earlier; that she was a decorated gymnast in high school and a promising pilot afterwards. She knew for sure that they’d know all about her recruitment from Air Force training into the public space program at the age of just 20, when she was presented as the poster-child of what was supposed to have become a new golden age of exploration.

  Back then, the space program had both wanted and needed mainstream attention to combat a dearth of qualified applicants amid ever-waning investment. When a huge media conglomerate proposed a partnership to document a flagship mission from selection to completion, it made sense for all involved.

  When Holly was selected, every media outlet — without fail — used the same already two-year-old photo of her being crowned prom queen of a tiny school in the middle of nowhere, thus creating and perpetuating the idea that she’d been plucked from a pageant stage and dropped into a spacesuit to smile for the cameras. Inevitably, many resented her selection.

  Holly did well out of the situation financially, but the mission failed to materialise due to chronic funding gaps despite huge viewing figures and public engagement. The ever-decreasing political will to invest in space ultimately led to many of the public program’s most qualified staff leaving for private enterprises.

  This brain drain amounted to death by a thousand cuts for the public program, and in the end Holly had no choice but to leave. She then accepted the wrong offer — Morrison over Rusev — and she would regret that decision until the day she died. Holly was certain that the family in front of her knew nothing of her time with Morrison, let alone what happened. She was glad of that.

  But what mattered most right now was what Holly didn’t know about them. What mattered now was their backstory.

  “I said I would give you one chance,” she said, refocusing intently on the man’s shaky eyes. “And this is it.”

  “Dad,” the girl interjected. “Tell her.”

  He looked to the ground, closed his eyes tightly as if trying to squint away the doubt, then sighed deeply. “My name is Robert Harrington,” he said, slowly meeting Holly’s eyes. “This is my son, Bo, and my daughter, Viola.”

  Holly turned to the girl first, ready to read her expression. “Your name is Viola Harrington?”

  The girl looked to the side and gulped.

  Taking this affirmatively, Holly said and did nothing for several seconds. Robert Harrington’s expression fitted a man who had just had a weight lifted from his shoulders. But that weight — that heavy, heavy weight — had just been dumped squarely on Holly’s.

  “Harrington,” Holly said, breaking the silence with something halfway between a statement and a question. “As in… Olivia Harrington?”

  “They killed her for telling the truth about the famine,” Bo snapped from his father’s side, the childish pitch of his voice providing stark contrast to the gravity of his words. “They said they didn’t, but they did.”

  Holly exhaled slowly, her resoluteness boosted by hearing such horrible words from such an innocent child. “I know,” she said, making sure to look at Viola, too. “But I’m going to get you all to that station, and we’re going to make sure they don’t get away with it. We’re going to make sure she didn’t die for nothing.”

  eight

  After a brief discussion with Robert Harrington, Holly now understood that he had paid for two spaces on the Karrier’s final journey to the Venus station using his late wife’s substantial life insurance payout. Since the death had supposedly been caused by workplace violence on company property, Olivia’s publicity-averse employer sought to bring the matter to a swift conclusion and quickly delivered a considerable payout which happened to be large enough to cover two tickets — but not quite three — and still leave enough for the fake travel cards Robert had used to mask his own identity as well as Viola’s.

  He explained his fear that travelling to Rusev’s launch site without fake papers would have risked their lives and that revealing themselves at the point of boarding might have rendered their tickets invalid by virtue of being booked under fake names.

  Without Holly having to prod, Robert then moved on to how he’d managed to sneak an extra person on board: Bo had literally hidden inside a suitcase.

  This struck Holly as fantastical until Robert added that the Karrier’s security officer, who he knew only as Goran, had noticed movement in the suitcase while he loaded it. It took her half a second to realise that Robert was talking about Grav, who was referred to as Goran about as often as she was referred to as Ivy.

  “I thought about telling him everything,” Robert said, “but in the end I only said that my wife is dea
d, I could only afford two tickets, and that I would be forever in his debt if he pretended not to have seen anything. He lifted Bo out of the suitcase and put him on the bed, then told me to stay in here until we reached the station. He said he didn’t know what would happen when we got there.”

  Holly firmly believed that Robert was leaving out a part about buying Grav’s cooperation with whatever money he’d had left, but there was nothing to gain by pressing the matter. Still, Grav’s request for her and Dante to give the Harringtons some privacy in the wake of their earlier suspicions certainly made more sense now than it had at the time.

  “Did Grav ever come in here to check up on you after the launch?” she asked.

  “Goran?” Robert said. “No. Well, he came in a few hours later with a child-size emergency suit he’d managed to find in amongst the cargo.”

  Holly followed Robert’s hand to the wardrobe-like container which housed the EVA suits. Each lander had an emergency suit for everyone who was supposed to be on board the Karrier — only seven people, in this highly atypical instance — but Grav’s decision to go out of his way to provide one for Bo caused Holly’s mind to wander.

  Did Grav know the boy would need it?, she wondered, half seriously. He was the only one at the control console when the Karrier hit trouble and the emergency landing on this mysterious planet became necessary…

  Another, more useful thought then arose: Holly and Dante had been in the windowless utility room when the planet “appeared from nowhere”, but Robert and the children hadn’t.

  “Which one of you saw this planet first?” she asked, now firmly in the habit of thinking and speaking of it as a planet even though that designation was far from confirmed.

  “Me,” Bo said, smiling with a proud kind of excitement. “I was on the bed looking out. There was nothing there, but then everything shook… and suddenly there was something there. It was like we broke through a forcefield or something.”

  “That’s pretty much what Grav said,” Holly mused. She liked to think that Rusev was too good a judge of character to have employed someone capable of deliberately sabotaging a mission by crashing the Karrier into whatever it had crashed into, but it was reassuring to have Grav’s “it appeared from nowhere” line reaffirmed by someone she knew was telling the truth.

  “We should get on with the atmospheric tests,” Viola suggested. “Do you still want us at the windows?”

  Holly said yes and stepped in front of the lander’s control panel once again. Viola and Robert soon confirmed that the ‘circles’ on the ‘legs’ at their respective sides had opened to expose the lander’s recessed instruments to the external atmosphere.

  From there it was a waiting game for several minutes until the array of digital readings first appeared and then stabilised. Across several rows of readings detailing everything from air composition and gravity to wind speed and radiation, Holly saw nothing but green text and green numbers.

  If the numbers were to be believed, the oxygen level outside was actually better than it was in the lander. Such numbers were good. Almost too good.

  In the face of these universally Earth-like readings, Holly could only think of two realistic possibilities. The first possibility was that something in the system was broken, causing it to display ideal rather than actual data. The second brought Holly’s focus too close to the harrowing memories of what happened during an ill-fated psychological test in which she and several others were expertly tricked into thinking their vessel had crashed in an inhospitable landscape when really they’d been dropped in a controlled environment to be monitored like lab rats by Roger Morrison and his demented cronies.

  “Green means good,” Viola said, looking at the readings over Holly’s shoulder. “Right?”

  Holly measured her words. “If these readings are correct, we won’t even need our suits.”

  “For what?” Robert butted in. “You can’t seriously be suggesting that we leave the lander?”

  “It’s not a suggestion,” Holly replied firmly. “This isn’t a debate.”

  “But Goran will be looking for us. And your other colleague. Dante, was it?”

  Robert’s incidental choice of word — was, rather than is — carried more weight than he realised.

  But Holly, knowing that spreading grief and hopelessness among the Harringtons would make her job of keeping them alive even harder than it already was, stuck with her decision to keep quiet about the red dots on her wristband which told her that the other lander’s four passengers hadn’t made it.

  “We’ll walk in a straight line and mark the ground as we go,” she said. “If they are looking, that increases their chances of finding us. And if we can find the Karrier, there might be supplies we can salvage… maybe even the radio.”

  Robert’s tense expression spoke for him.

  “I’m going outside to do some tests first,” Holly announced. “If my suit’s readings match up with the lander’s, we’ll know they’re right. I expected the temperature and solar radiation levels to be far too high and for the air to be unbreathable, but that’s not what the initial readings suggest. That’s why I’m going to go outsi—”

  “No,” Robert interrupted.

  “What?”

  “No! You can’t leave us in here. What if something happens to you? We’d be left with no chance of surviv—”

  Holly shushed him sharply, annoyed less by his concerns than his decision to voice them so audibly in front of the children.

  Bo in particular looked far more frightened than he had moments earlier.

  “Will you help me get my suit on?” Holly asked him, trying to settle his mind by including him in the process.

  The boy’s expression lifted immediately.

  “Do you need me to do anything?” Viola asked, looking and sounding younger now than ever before. Holly had even more difficulty placing Viola’s age than Bo’s, thanks largely to the huge difference between how she looked today without the makeup and how she’d looked on the few previous occasions when their eyes had fleetingly met. If pushed, she would have guessed 16.

  “Not right now,” Holly said, “but I will.”

  Having explained the procedure for safely exiting and reentering the lander, which required no assistance from anyone else, Holly stood before the Harringtons in an EVA suit and instructed them to stay beside the control panel and the nearby windows.

  She held her hand out for Bo to high-five then walked across the lander towards the inner air lock. She stopped at the threshold and spoke for the first time since putting her helmet on:

  “Can you hear me?”

  Bo and Viola smiled, surprised by the volume and clarity of the words which rang from unseen speakers above them.

  “Good,” Holly said, taking their smiles as a yes. “Wish me luck…”

  nine

  Holly stepped through the door into the lander’s air lock and descended the ladder. The door above then sealed itself shut, cutting her off from Robert and the children.

  She now stood in front of the lander’s outer hatch, beyond which lay the desolate landscape of a planet which quite simply should not have been there.

  As the hatch began to open, Holly braced herself for gusting winds. None came.

  Score one for the readings being accurate, she thought.

  In the silence of her suit, Holly felt her heartbeat quicken and her breathing deepen; but this time, these involuntary responses were borne of excitement rather than fear.

  Whatever this place was, Holly only now realised the magnitude of what was about to happen: in mere seconds, she would become the first person to ever set foot on it.

  A faint but stubborn hope remained that Dante and the others had only appeared as red-for-dead dots on her wristband due to an innocuous system fault, and she would have happily given up the honour of setting foot on the planet first if it meant that one of them already had.

  “I’m about to touch down,” she said, suddenly remembering that the
Harringtons would be anxiously awaiting updates from their safe position inside the lander. “I’ll be in front of the window soon.”

  Stepping forward to the shorter ladder which would take her to the rocky ground below, Holly got her first real view of the surrounding landscape.

  If the scene before her had been a photograph, she would have had no trouble believing that it had been taken somewhere on either Earth or Mars.

  The sky was a blue better described as faint than light, as though its saturation had been dialled down. Though Holly didn’t look directly at it for obvious reasons, the same seemed to be true of the sun.

  There were no clouds.

  No birds.

  No plants.

  On the ground, the rocky terrain continued all the way to the horizon, flat but for a single mound in the distance. The mound’s height and distance from the lander were difficult to judge, but Holly was glad of the potential opportunity it presented to gain a much better vantage point from which she would hopefully spot either the other lander or the fallen Karrier itself.

  Facing inwards, she descended the short ladder and paused on its final rung.

  “One small step for me…”

  Dust scattered under Holly’s feet as she touched down on the virgin planet’s reassuringly firm surface.

  Though her initial steps were laboured, she did not jump to any assumptions that this was due to a discrepancy between the data gathered by the lander’s instruments and the actual environmental gravity; after all, she had grown rather accustomed to the Karrier’s artificial gravity over so many cargo missions within the last six months.

  Readings on the HUD inside her helmet quickly confirmed that the lander had been correct about the air composition, the temperature, and a handful of other important data points, all of which were within hospitable limits. Some veered towards Earthly extremes — primarily the low humidity — but Holly had been in deserts before.

  As had been the case inside the lander, the HUD readings told Holly that the oxygen concentration in the air outside was better than it was inside the carefully controlled environment of her suit.