“No,” she interrupted. “It’s not your fault, either.”
Robert put his hand around Bo’s shoulder to pry him off Holly. “The important thing is that everyone is alright.”
Viola then emerged from the cave in dry clothes, taken from her suitcase.
“I’ll carry your case,” Holly said. “I’ve got nothing else now, and you earned a rest.”
“It’s okay, I’ve got it.”
Holly walked towards her and forcibly took the suitcase. “I insist.”
“Thanks,” Viola said.
“I reckon we can call it even.”
Viola laughed. “We were already even. You came back for us on the Karrier, I helped you out of the water. Now with you carrying my case, I’m just going to owe you one again!”
“I’m sure I’ll think of something,” Holly said with a smile.
The lander came into sight shortly after the group made it around the mound. It looked closer than it was.
A short way into the return trek, Grav moved side by side with Holly.
“I know it would have been me down there if you had not pulled me back,” he said. Holly turned to face him and saw real guilt in his expression, like nothing she’d seen from him before. “And I know that I probably would not have made it.”
“I’m here thanks to Viola,” Holly said.
“And I am here thanks to you. Seriously, Hollywood: I am sorry for what happened. When you told me to get back, I should have done it straight away.”
“It was an accident,” Holly said, responding in the same good faith she discerned from Grav. His apology had been direct and unqualified, which she knew wasn’t a common occurrence for someone like him. “Just don’t do anything like that again, okay?”
“Spaceman was right about you,” Grav said after a few silent seconds. “You are exactly the kind of asset we need to win this thing.”
Grav stepped away and sparked up a conversation with Robert before Holly could voice the obvious and tantalising question:
Win what thing?
seventeen
The call of the lander, once considered by most as something more akin to a claustrophobic holding cell than a comfortable dwelling, grew ever more appealing as the group drew near.
Sunlight guided the rest of their return trek, though it noticeably faded towards the end.
Grav entered the security code at the lander’s entrance — the same code he’d used to secure the other lander, where he hoped Rusev and Yury had since been rejoined by Dante — and ushered everyone inside.
Aided by a lengthy stretch of unbroken sunlight, all of the lander’s systems were functioning normally. Holly enjoyed a warm shower; after her frightening incident in the cave’s icy pool, the lander’s shower was so refreshing that its greatly restrictive size barely registered.
A greenish bruise had developed on Holly’s left thigh where one of the pool’s jagged rocks pierced her skin, but fortunately the blood loss had been minimal. The swelling around her eye, caused by the face-to-table impact of the Karrier’s as yet unexplained initial collision, had also greatly subsided. Holly had no vision in the affected eye, anyway — indeed, it was no longer truly an eye — so Grav’s earlier comment of “lucky for you it was that eye” certainly rang true.
Holly, who didn’t consider her tolerance to physical pain any higher than the average person’s, put the increased soreness around both injured areas down to the fact that adrenaline was no longer coursing through her veins in the oceanic volumes it had been earlier in the day. With the lander providing overnight sanctuary and Grav’s presence providing relief that the other lander had survived its descent, her two most pressing concerns had been abated.
The lander provided warmth, shelter, and drinking water, as well as the less tangible but still fundamental benefit of making the Harringtons feel as temporarily relaxed as Holly did.
Temporarily, however, was the key word.
As the children worked through the last of Grav’s snacks, Holly asked Robert to pass her the plant from inside his bag. She then placed it safely on the floor and gave it a few drops of water.
“Do you have any more snacks?” Bo asked, his appetite piqued.
Grav shook his head but insisted that he had “plenty more” in his suitcase in the other lander. Holly wouldn’t have cared that his peanuts and chocolate lacked the nutritional punch of Rusev’s broken algae machine had she truly believed Grav’s use of the word plenty, but she felt uncomfortably sure that the group’s survival beyond a few weeks — in the worst-case scenario that neither rescue nor escape came before then — would depend entirely on whether the largely self-sustaining algae machine could be fixed. This in turn depended upon an equally uncertain point: whether the Karrier itself had touched down safely or crash-landed on the planet’s surface following the mysterious initial impact which send it spiralling out of Grav’s control.
Holly kept her concerns to herself. She knew that Grav, at least, must have shared them, but he too saw the merit in allowing the Harringtons to enjoy the evening’s air of faux normality while they could.
When darkness began to fall, speculation turned to the question of how long the night would last. When Viola said that the sun’s movements had been similar to what they were used to on Earth and concluded that the night would probably last around ten hours, Bo pointed out that the day-night cycle Viola was accustomed to was far from universal on Earth and certainly couldn’t be confidently applied to an alien world.
No one argued with Bo’s point, but his use of the term “alien world” led into another inevitable discussion about whether the Karrier’s stranded passengers were truly alone on their desert island of a planet.
Grav firmly and decisively ended this discussion with a viewpoint Holly shared: “If something else was here, we would know by now.”
As everything outside turned black, the readings on the lander’s control panel showed the outdoor temperature plummeting.
But although it became cold enough to ensure that anyone caught outside for a prolonged period would almost certainly die, Holly and Grav were both relieved that the low-point remained well within the lander’s safe operating limits and even above the record lows felt in some populated areas of Earth. Within thirty minutes of pitch darkness, the temperature stabilised at this worse-than-they’d-hoped-for but better-than-they’d-feared level.
The stars in the sky were the brightest Holly had ever seen. The most prominent constellations were familiar to her and also to Bo, who had a far greater pre-existing interest in space than any of the others.
“Do we have anything that can map the stars and use that to tell us exactly where we are?” he asked.
Holly shook her head and looked at Grav, in case he knew about something she didn’t.
“We have scanning drones,” he said. Holly didn’t know about these. “We are using them to map terrain, though; not stars. Spaceman already sent them out. Yury, I mean. You know, Yury Gardev?”
Everyone nodded; even Robert and Viola knew Yury.
“He sent out all eight,” Grav continued. “Each flies in its own line, zig-zagging to capture as much as possible, then turns around and comes back once 45% of its power reserves are exhausted. He will sync the data and every frame will be automatically scanned against the database of images we have from every known planetary body. And if all eight come back, even if there is no match, we will still have a much better understanding of this place than we do now. I think the drones may have sky-facing cameras, too, but I do not know what kind of star map we would get, even if they do.”
Far from being disappointed by the lack of a firm answer to the star-mapping question, Bo was visibly encouraged by the news of the drones. “That means the drones will find the Karrier,” he said. “Right?”
“That is the plan,” Grav confirmed.
“So we’ll be able to retrieve our luggage?” Robert chimed in.
“Again…” Grav said patiently, “that i
s the plan.”
“And we’ll also be able to retrieve the radio?”
Holly met Grav’s eyes and agreed to speak for him. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s the plan.”
It all sounded so easy in theory, she thought.
In theory…
eighteen
Holly tried not to stare as Robert delivered Bo’s painful evening injection. She knew only what Viola had told her about the young boy’s condition: that he suffered from an uncommon but not extraordinarily rare condition which severely hampered childhood growth, and that this condition could lead to life-threatening complications in a few years if not curtailed by effective treatment.
As the boy bravely took the injection above his left hip with tightly closed eyes and a heartbreaking whimper, Holly decided there was no justifiable reason to push for further details at this stage; everyone already had enough on their plates without having to satisfy her prying.
Judging by his silence, Grav seemed to have the same idea.
Bo walked slowly towards one of the lander’s beds and positioned himself in a well-practised manner to make sure he wouldn’t roll onto the still-raw area above his left hip.
“Tell me a story,” he said directly to Holly. “From when you were in the space program.”
Holly thought for several seconds. She had stories, for sure, but none of them were fit for bedtime; rather than soothe anyone to sleep, hers were the kind that were more likely to wake her up in a cold sweat. “It was actually pretty boring,” she said. “Nothing as exciting as this ever happened, I can tell you that!”
Bo smiled weakly then settled his gaze on Grav. “What about you?”
“I have no stories, kiddo,” Grav said, struggling to hold the boy’s eyes.
Holly knew Grav had stories even worse than her own. She’d never heard them from him — he wasn’t much of a talker; to her, at least — but Rusev and particularly Yury had filled her in. Through them, she knew that Grav’s sometimes cynical-looking detachment wasn’t a facade. She knew that he’d been hardened in the worst way, horribly desensitised to things she felt no one should have to see even once.
When Bo faded off to sleep just minutes later, no story required, Robert climbed onto the lander’s other bed and quickly followed suit.
Grav sat alone at the small dining table while Holly and Viola lay on the floor, both exhausted and ready to sleep.
“I want to hear the stories,” Viola said, very suddenly.
“No you do not,” Grav said. “You do not need to know what the enemy is capable of, and trust me when I tell you that you do not want to know. Not if you want to sleep tonight.”
Viola sat up. “I know what they’re capable of. I’m here because my mum’s dead, and my mum’s dead because of them.”
Grav looked into the girl’s eyes. To Holly, he looked not only surprised by the strength of Viola’s words but somewhat impressed. “Okay,” he said. “So you are sure you want to know why I am here? How I got into all of this?”
“Try me.”
He cleared his throat. “I started out working as a bounty hunter in the Horn. How did I get there? A long story; unimportant. Anyway, when the famine reached a certain point, me and a few other guys in Mogadishu were moved to Malta to guard a huge grain storage facility. I do not know precisely who was paying us, but they were paying us well. It was easy money, you know? Easy until the GU forces arrived.”
“And you saw action?” Viola interjected, listening with rapt attention. “You saw stuff that keeps you awake?”
“Only so many things can keep you awake. And I mean that literally: once you have seen enough things, there is no room for any more. There is a fixed limit to how many things can keep you awake. Because after all, awake is awake.”
“I still want to hear it.”
Grav looked at Holly, as if asking permission. He took her shrug as a yes and continued. “A few weeks after we got there, a group of militants arrived to seize the compound. These guys were not GU-sponsored militants or GU-backed militants. They were GU militants. At that time I was doing my job and nothing more; I did not know that they had deliberately engineered the famine, but I knew the grain we were guarding was already being distributed properly and that these men were not here to help. By the time they got me — took me prisoner, that is — I had already seen the bodies on the streets and heard the stories of the torturers sweeping through the city. I am no idiot: it is not like I thought the men on my side were good men, but they were better than these men. Some of the things these men did… I could not even think of those things, let alone do them. We had a mole on the inside, so we knew their men were not doing these things of their own accord; they were doing exactly what they were told, and sometimes reluctantly. We were up against animals; animals with orders to act like beasts.”
“What was the single worst thing they did?” Viola pushed.
Holly remained focused on Grav’s face. His left eye looked almost ready to shed a tear. It didn’t, but she knew that Grav’s almost was the same as anyone else’s breaking down into a crumpled heap.
Grav inhaled deeply. There was no exaggerated clearing of the throat this time. “My third night in the cell, they brought in an innocent local. He was a doctor. They said that if I did not talk — if I did not name our mole — then they would kill him in front of me; right then, right there.”
“What happened?”
After no little hesitation, Grav spat it out: “I did not talk.” His eyes fell to the floor and stayed there.
“I think that’s enough stories for one night,” Holly said.
Viola, apparently with the strongest stomach in the room, wasn’t finished listening. “So what happened next? I mean, you’re here, so you must have gotten out…”
“They told me there would be another innocent death the next night,” Grav said, “and that they would keep going until I talked.”
“Did you talk?”
“Fortunately it did not come to that; I got out that very same night. Only three, maybe four hours too late for the doctor. Our mole blockaded the other guards in a surveillance room and our men stormed the place where they were holding me and a few others. The men who found me knew something had happened; they saw it in my eyes. The original mission plan was to get in and get our men out, and to grab an easy target to capture and interrogate so we could find out exactly who they were working for. But when I told them what had happened, the plan changed. They carried me to the room where the guards were blockaded and asked me who did it.”
“And you told them?”
Grav nodded. “And what my men did to him… well, interrogate is not the word I would use. Believe me: if you think the look in that poor doctor’s eyes would keep you awake at night, you should have heard this asshole scream.”
Almost an hour after Grav finished his story, Holly stood up and spoke the first words since then: “Outside the cave, you said I was the kind of asset we need to win this thing.”
“That is correct.”
“What thing?”
“There is a plan,” Grav said. “Once we reach the station, we are going to expose Morrison’s past actions and attempt to destabilise the GU. Rusev is not abandoning anything; she is retreating to a safe distance from which they cannot reach us but we can still reach them. Because their weapons are weapons, and our weapon is the truth.”
Holly walked over to the table and sat in the chair next to Grav. She looked deeply into his eyes. “Grav, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Some of the things you have been told are not exactly true. I was told the same things originally, but Rusev told me and Dante the truth once we landed. Most of the people we have been ferrying to Venus did not truly pay for their tickets. They were people who know things about the GU; people who know things about Morrison; people who worked on his projects, from the space program to the weather manipulation. We have evidence of everything, it is simply a case of putting it all together and working out
the best way to deliver it.”
Holly was stunned. Deep down she knew that any lies Rusev and particularly Yury had told her must have been for her own good, but that didn’t change the dirty feeling of being kept in the dark.
“It is a lot to take in. Trust me, I should fucking know,” Grav said with a hint of a smile.
Holly couldn’t help but mirror it for a second, until a new thought entered her mind. “So does that mean they knew about Olivia Harrington’s family being on board? Because Robert told me no one knew, not even Rusev.”
“I believe that to be true. Rusev said she was confident that you would be able to look after the other two passengers until we found you. Two. She really did not know about the kid, so she obviously does not know who they are. I did not tell her there were three of them, because I saw no sense in antagonising her when I was not even sure if you were all still alive. That is the whole story… every little bit.”
“But why does Rusev need us?” Holly asked, accepting the story but still struggling with this point. “Why does she need me?”
“Skilled, motivated, respected. That’s the answer Spaceman gave me. And if you think about it, we were the two people they trusted with every single trip the Karrier made. They must see something useful in us; not just for the journey, but for on the station, too.”
“We still need to get there first,” Holly said.
“And we will. Tomorrow we reconnect with Spaceman and Rusev. If you asked me to pick two people to be stuck with on some desert island planet, it would be those two every time. Put them together with our grit — hell, even throw in your boy’s skills with the high-tech shit he is here for — and you can be damn sure of one thing: if there is a way out of here, we are going to find it.”
“There is a way,” Viola insisted, catching both Holly and Grav off-guard given that they’d both been sure she’d fallen asleep long ago.
“Huh?” Holly said.
Viola sat up, abandoning the pretence. “There’s no if. There was a way in to this planet’s atmosphere, so that means there’s a way out.”
Terradox Page 8
