Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  “That is the spirit,” Grav said. “And if I know Rusev, she has probably already found it.” The look in Grav’s eyes told Holly he didn’t quite believe this last part, but there was no harm in keeping Viola’s spirits up.

  “Try to get some sleep,” Holly said. “Tomorrow is the biggest day of our lives.”

  Though she knew these words sounded grand, Holly equally knew that they were true. After all, the group would either find the lander, or they wouldn’t.

  They would either have a chance of getting to the station, or…

  Holly cut off her own thought.

  They would find the Karrier. They would have a chance.

  The alternative thought, as invasive as it was, did not bear thinking about.

  Day Two

  nineteen

  The night lasted eleven hours. Bo and Robert slept through almost all of them, Viola more than half, and Holly just over four. Holly didn’t know how well Grav had slept, if at all; all she knew was that he had been awake when she fell asleep and was awake when she woke up.

  “Rise and shine,” Grav announced, waking all three of the sleeping family. He then stirred some high-energy nutrition powder into five separate cups of water. “You are not going to like this, but it tastes a lot better than dying on the way to the lander.”

  He was correct: no one liked it. Holly couldn’t quite understand why or even how a product designed for human consumption could taste so bad.

  Robert and Bo packed as much as they could into the space in Grav’s backpack, while Holly strapped as many water containers as possible to her shoulders and back. In the end she looked like an overloaded mule, as Grav had no qualms about pointing out.

  Viola spent several minutes applying makeup to her eyes. By the time she was finished, they were surrounded with dark shadows. Holly couldn’t help but consider the irony that Robert didn’t have to worry about such things; the dark rings under his eyes had been well earned through the stresses of the last few weeks.

  Holly accepted Viola’s offer of fresh clothes — the baggiest she had — then scanned the lander one last time to make sure she wasn’t leaving behind anything worth taking. Satisfied that everything important was safely packed, including her plant, she led the way outside.

  This trek, though far longer and made with tired legs, passed more easily than the previous day’s journeys to and from the mound. When they passed that landmark — the only one in sight — Grav made a joke about going for a swim to cool off. It fell flat.

  The relative positivity in the air came from the group’s knowledge of where they were going, which was a welcome improvement on the previous day’s “go to the mound and hope we see something” approach.

  Holly’s immediate concern about the other lander was whether Dante had made it back before dark. Grav reaffirmed his confidence that Dante would be safely inside with Rusev and Spaceman, ready and waiting to fall at Holly’s feet all over again.

  Though Holly ignored him and neither Robert nor Bo seemed to hear, Grav’s words caused Viola’s ears to prick up.

  “So…” she said, too quietly for anyone else to hear. “You and this guy Dante, huh?”

  “No,” Holly replied flatly.

  Viola grinned and said nothing, like she knew this was the kind of silence that wouldn’t last long.

  Holly sighed, proving her right. “A long time ago,” she said.

  “How long?”

  “Before he was assigned to my Karrier. We’re colleagues now. Maybe friends, nothing more.”

  “Okay,” Viola said, like she knew that Holly’s silence this time was the kind that would last.

  Slightly ahead of them, Grav turned around and called back: “Just a few more hours from here.”

  As Bo continued searching for pieces of metal despite having found none for almost an hour, Holly and Viola passed the time by playing whatever games they could think of. I Spy was off the table once “R for Rocks” and “N for Nothing” had been exhausted, so they ultimately resorted to 20 Questions and even What Number Am I Thinking Of?.

  Though Holly couldn’t consciously remember the exact moment it happened, she and Viola had overtaken the others and were now slightly ahead and around fifty paces to the side.

  From this position, Viola was the first to spot him.

  “Holly, Holly,” she said, grabbing her arm and pointing in the distance. “Is that Dante?”

  Holly saw a man running towards them and sped up to meet him halfway. She encouraged Viola to keep pace and yelled back to Grav, who had already seen Dante by now and had also quickened his pace accordingly.

  Dante’s eventual embrace, which was fully reciprocated, did little to convince Viola that Holly had told her the full truth about their history.

  “Jessica,” Dante said, panting from his long run. “You made it.”

  Holly smiled, realising how much he had to catch up on. She explained the Harringtons’ true identity while Robert, Grav and Bo caught up. Dante’s reaction of pure shock convinced Holly for good that Yury and Rusev — who had already come clean to Dante and Grav about many of the previous paying passengers really being VIPs recruited to expose Morrison — truly hadn’t known that the family on board for the Karrier’s final journey was Olivia Harrington’s.

  Grav arrived in time to hear the end of Dante’s question as to why Holly had opted to leave her lander in the first place rather than remain safely inside.

  “I thought you were all dead,” she said, revealing this to the Harringtons for the first time. “On my wristband’s last update before your lander went out of range, you all showed up as steady red dots. Red for dead, Dante. Was I supposed to wait there and—”

  “So why were you looking for us if you thought we were dead?” he interrupted.

  “I was looking for supplies. In your lander, in the Karrier, wherever I might have found them. Anyway, why aren’t you wearing your wristband now?”

  “It was chafing in the heat,” Dante said. “Besides, your location wasn’t showing up. But none of that matters anymore. What matters is the Karrier. Have you found it?”

  Holly shook her head. “We found water, though,” she said, remembering it all too vividly. “A deep pool, in a cave. No more plants, no animal life. You?”

  Dante nodded briskly. “Trees. Weirdest looking things, but they had wood-like stuff at the bottom and leaf-like stuff on top. The ground was green, too. I wouldn’t quite call it grass, but it did seem to have stems; definitely more promising than the lichen stuff at the lander. We’ve only searched in two directions and we’ve already found plants and water, so there’s bound to be something edible somewhere.”

  “Did you get any photos of the plants?” Holly asked. “With your wristband?”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “Drones?” Grav interjected. The bluntness of his tone and brevity of his question were typical of the way he interacted with Dante when a situation demanded it; even to the Harringtons, who were properly meeting Dante for the first time, it was clear that his relationship with Grav was limited to work and nothing else.

  “I think some of the drones came back overnight,” Dante said, shrugging to make clear that he knew little else. “Spaceman was asleep at the time and he had just started looking at the data when I left this morning.”

  “So the data will be ready when we get back?”

  “Should be,” Dante confirmed. He then turned away from Grav and formally introduced himself to Robert and Bo. He also promised, just as Holly and Grav had upon finding out the family’s true identity, that Roger Morrison and his cronies would pay for what they’d done.

  “Do you know where we are?” Robert asked him, very matter-of-factly. “Why we can breathe? How this planet exists?”

  “No,” Dante said, being as straightforward as he could. “Right now we all have more questions than answers, but Spaceman is working on them as we speak. Between him and Rusev, I think they’ll have some by the time we reach the
lander.”

  Everyone’s desire for these answers pushed them forward at a brisk pace. As they exited the gradually sloping canyon which had dominated the landscape for so long, the sight of the second lander caused them to speed up even more.

  Holly was disappointed to see that the lichen Grav had mentioned appeared only sporadically on the rocks around the lander. She assumed its presence here but not in the canyon was something to do with the difference in elevation. Less disappointing was the proximity of the lander, which lay very close to the canyon’s edge. Within no more than fifteen minutes, the group stood outside the door.

  Grav entered the security code and ushered everyone inside. The entrance, identical to the other lander’s, was reassuringly and comfortingly familiar.

  Holly climbed the ladder first. Standing at the inner door’s threshold, she saw Ekaterina Rusev.

  “I knew you would make it,” Rusev said, offering a hand to help Holly up the final wrung.

  “Grav told me everything.”

  Rusev’s expression didn’t change. “We told you everything it was safe for you to know,” she said; softly, openly, convincingly.

  Holly already knew as much and accepted Rusev’s invitation for a hug.

  “Why are there three of them?” Rusev suddenly said, looking down the ladder over Holly’s shoulder and seeing Bo beside Grav. Her eyes scanned everyone for an answer. “What’s going on?”

  “He was a stowaway,” Grav called up. “I can explain.”

  “You let a stowaway board the Karrier?”

  “I said I can explain.”

  “Oh, I’m all ears!”

  Holly took it upon herself to cut through the tension that was souring what should have been a happy reunion. “The man is Olivia Harrington’s husband,” she said. “The children are theirs.”

  Rusev’s expression immediately softened, appearing to skip shock and jump straight to gladness. She focused on Robert. “We tried to reach you. We tried extremely hard to reach you. I’m glad you’re here — more than you could ever know — but there was no need for the secrecy.”

  “With respect,” Robert said, “I felt that there was.”

  “Either way, you’re here now. Hurry on up; we have a lot to talk about.”

  Holly walked through the inner door and into the main section of the lander. She saw Yury huddled over a mapping drone, wearing not only his reading glasses but also a pair of headphones. She didn’t quite know why, but it explained why he hadn’t reacted to her arrival.

  She knocked three times on the table in front of him. As soon as he saw her standing there, he removed the headphones and glasses and rubbed his face, covering his eyes with his palms for several seconds. When he moved them away, Holly thought she saw signs of relieved tears that had been stopped in their tracks.

  “Holly,” he said, and it was all he said.

  She sat down next to him. “I know the passengers weren’t all rich people paying their own way.”

  Yury nodded in understanding; he didn’t look like a man who’d been caught out, and he made no effort to defend or explain himself.

  “But there’s something you don’t know about the last batch,” Holly said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Holly tilted her head towards the door, where Robert and Bo had so far emerged from the ladder. “There are three of them, not two, and they’re Olivia Harrington’s family.”

  “Truly?”

  “Truly. And they know things, Yury. The kind of things Morrison doesn’t want people to know.”

  When she finished speaking, Holly heard Rusev talking to Grav. She caught the gist of it: Rusev understood that things had worked out well, but Grav’s double failure of being conned by fake travel cards and allowing a stowaway to board the Karrier was a very serious matter. Like Yury with Holly seconds earlier, Grav made no effort to defend himself.

  Yury tapped Holly’s leg to regain her attention. “I found something,” he said, talking quietly enough to suggest he meant the words only for her but loudly enough to suggest they weren’t a full-blown secret. “Or, to be more accurate, one of my drones found something.”

  “The lander?”

  “No.”

  Holly’s shoulders slumped involuntarily. How was that possible?

  “Nothing so promising, I’m afraid,” Yury went on. “But what the drone found silences a doubt that has been stubbornly testing my mind since we landed and, given your past experiences, one which has probably been testing yours even more. The sky-facing camera on one of the drones picked this up. Why only one, I don’t know. But here we have it.” Yury spoke these words in the authoritative tone Holly remembered from her time spent training under him.

  She followed his finger to a screen on the table.

  “I do not yet know where we are…” Yury said.

  A small dot lay in the centre of the screen, growing larger as Yury spread his fingers on the touchscreen to zoom in. Holly had seen a similar image countless times on the panel next to her bed on the Karrier, and though the dot remained very pale and barely blue, its identity was unmistakable.

  “… But I know for sure where we are not.”

  Part II

  twenty

  The sight of Earth, captured from the group’s current and still unknown location, severed the last faint remnants of doubt in Holly’s mind.

  In one sense, the death of these doubts liberated her mind to focus on executing the plan at hand. In another, it reinforced just how precarious the group’s situation was.

  Lost somewhere between Earth and the Venus station, her inner voice whispered. Stranded on a desert island planet that shouldn’t even exist…

  The plan, such as it was, consisted of three parts. One: survive. Two: find the Karrier. Three: use or fix the radio.

  There was no discussion of a part four should part three become a problem, and certainly no alternative to part two. The group’s full focus was on the Karrier.

  Yury’s sole surviving mapping drone, which failed to record any noteworthy sounds, had at least provided one clue as to the Karrier’s location. Before setting off in its line of travel, the drone had ascended straight upwards to an altitude which proved sufficient to pick up the conspicuous mound Holly had climbed with the Harringtons. Because this bird’s eye view presented no sign of the Karrier, Yury naturally concluded that it had to be further away than the mound.

  This meant that in the best case scenario, it would take at least two hours of fairly brisk walking to reach the Karrier. In more grounded and less optimistic terms, there was no telling how long it might take.

  Much like their mysterious host planet itself, Yury and Holly had a better idea of where the Karrier wasn’t than where it was. They knew for sure that it wasn’t in the direction the surviving drone had flown, and likewise that it wasn’t within an easily reachable distance in the direction of Holly’s lander or the direction of Dante’s initial search.

  After Holly and Yury had finished discussing the lamentable extent of their current understanding of where they were and how they’d ended up there, during which time Rusev had been doing her best to make the Harringtons feel at ease within the busy lander, Rusev herself stepped towards the table and asked for everyone’s full attention.

  “They’re already looking for us,” she announced firmly. “Even if we assume that this… planet… is still unobservable from outside whatever kind of barrier we passed through, and even if we assume that the Karrier itself dropped off the map at that moment, everyone at the station still knows where we were in the instant before it happened. Even if they don’t know where we are, they know where we disappeared.”

  Holly noticed that Rusev focused primarily on the Harringtons as she said this, clearly keen to take the edge off their fears and helplessness.

  Grav cleared his throat in a very deliberate manner. Rusev gave him what he wanted by extending a hand and inviting him to speak. “With respect,” he said, the tone less deferential t
han the words, “if you were on the station and something like this happened, are you really telling me that you would risk the only remaining Karrier to look for the other… which had just disappeared without explanation? Once we call for help, they will come. But before then? Speculatively?”

  The look Rusev shot at Grav mirrored the one he got from Holly; neither could understand why he would voice something like this in front of the children, however much sense it might have made.

  Rusev considered her words and then spoke calmly: “In almost any set of circumstances, no. But if the lost Karrier contained the cargo that ours does, then yes. Regardless of who was on board — even if it wasn’t Holly; even if it wasn’t Yury — and regardless of whether there was the slightest chance that anyone had survived, the recovery of our Karrier would be absolutely essential. Without this cargo, the Venus station can’t survive.”

  “What was on board?” Grav asked. “What exactly was I guarding this time?”

  “Important things,” Rusev said. Her tone made it absolutely clear that she was leaving it there.

  Dante interjected at this point to ask about the group’s resources. Holly was glad he did so; the situation in regards to resources wasn’t as immediately dire as the Harringtons may have thought.

  Answering Dante but really talking to the Harringtons, Rusev explained that both landers remained fully functional in terms of power supply and water reclamation. She didn’t have to tell them why such redundancy was so welcome. She also assured Dante that there were detailed maintenance instructions on the landers’ computer systems and two stocks of replacement components for the core power and water systems, which would make any basic repairs very straightforward.

  Rusev stressed that water would not be a problem. The other lander contained a large reserve of its own, and Holly’s group had of course already discovered a huge pool of harmless and presumably filterable water within the mound’s hidden cave.