Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  Bo, still brimming with proud excitement but now also a healthy dose of confusion to boot, stepped in front of Holly at the lander’s entrance. “But why can’t I just tell her what I found?”

  “Because,” Holly said, typing the lander’s security code over his shoulder. “We found something, too.”

  forty-three

  Yury was sitting in his usual chair in the lander while the recently returned Grav and Rusev talked him through their successful recovery of the components required to fix the radio. All three were utterly unaware that Bo had sneaked away, let alone that he had single-handedly discovered something that changed the whole context of the group’s battle for survival and rescue.

  “Anything exciting?” Yury asked, turning to face Holly as she walked in. “Aside from the lines. Good mapping on that front.”

  Holly answered by placing a sealed sample of Grow-Lo on the table, in a container roughly the size of a standard tin of food.

  “For soil analysis?” he asked.

  Holly opened the container and poured a small amount of the artificial soil onto the table. “Ask her,” she said, glaring at Rusev.

  Curious, Rusev approached the table. She saw what it was, with no need to feel it. “Why did you go back to the Karrier? And why did you bring this?”

  “We weren’t at the Karrier,” Dante said, stepping forward. Both Bo and Viola maintained their silence, as firmly instructed. “We found this in the middle of nowhere, inside a wall, with three different kinds of crops growing in it.”

  While Grav and Yury responded to these words with several natural and automatic questions, like “what kind of crops?” and “what do you mean, a wall?”, Rusev picked up a small amount of the soil and closely examined it.

  “No more lies,” Holly said. “Tell me what the hell is going on here.”

  Rusev’s expression didn’t waver even as everyone’s eyes bore into hers in search of a nervous twitch or similar tell. “Holly… right now, you know more than me. Take me to this wall. I need to see it.”

  “What you need to do is tell us the damn truth,” Dante snapped.

  “Take me there,” Rusev repeated, ignoring Dante in favour of the more controlled Holly.

  “There’s somewhere else we need to take you first,” Holly said. She turned to Bo and signalled for him to take over.

  Holly watched Rusev like a hawk to see how she would react to what Bo was about to say; the woman had already kept an impressively straight face when discussing the presence of her own brand of artificial soil on the planet, but the discovery of a nearby door which could and inevitably would be opened to reveal its secrets… well, that was something else entirely.

  Bo gulped. “Uh, I found a door to a locked bunker.”

  Rusev’s eyes widened reflexively. Holly didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed that she looked genuinely surprised rather than like someone who’d just been caught out or whose grand lie had finally been exposed.

  Yury stood up immediately. “Show me,” he said.

  Rusev nodded. “Let’s go. Everyone… right now. If there’s a door, we can open it.”

  Yury held Holly’s gaze for several seconds as he walked towards the lander’s exit. He didn’t have to say anything; whatever truth might have ended up coming out and whoever might have ended up being implicated, Holly knew in her heart that Yury was as in the dark as she was.

  Holly was last to leave. As she prepared to descend the ladder, Rusev stopped midway and looked up at her.

  “Holly, I won’t hold these suspicions against you, because I can’t explain why you found the Grow-Lo and I can understand why that raises a flag.”

  “Go,” Holly urged impatiently.

  Rusev sighed. “Sooner or later you’re going to realise that I have nothing to do with any of this… and the later that moment comes, the longer it’s going to take us to find out who does.”

  forty-four

  With a makeshift implement thrown together using a circular blade and a lightweight pipe from the lander’s storage area, Grav scythed his way through the patch of small but dangerous plants. He made a broad path to the centre.

  There, precisely as Bo had insisted, Grav found a hidden staircase.

  Bo and Robert had led the group to the patch, with Robert finding time on the way to tell his son that he was “more disappointed than angry” that he had sneaked away, let alone that he’d returned to such a dangerous area.

  No one criticised Robert for catching up on some sleep after the night he’d had, and Holly was too glad that Bo had made his discovery to stay angry at him for taking such a foolish risk.

  The anger rightfully lay with whoever knew what the hell was really going on, she thought, and the answer to that question lay on the other side of a wide metal door.

  Having seen what one of the surrounding plants had done to Bo’s foot the previous evening, Holly urged everyone in the group to take extreme care when following Grav’s laudably well-cleared path to the stairway. Grav remained there, waiting for the others.

  The twelve metallic stairs were steep, with no handrails for support. Holly and Viola assisted Yury on his way down then stood with everyone else in the flat area in front of the door. The flat roof overhead, providing more than sufficient headroom, was the same metallic grey as the stairs and the door. The area where the group of eight now stood accommodated them all with plenty of room to spare.

  The area was lit by a white light above the door. Aside from a small drainage hole in the ground — which raised its own questions — the only other thing anyone could see was the security keypad to the left of the door.

  “Go for it,” Rusev said, talking to Holly and signalling to the keypad. “I know you want to try.”

  Holly hesitated briefly then entered the familiar security code used for both of the landers and the Karrier. Nothing happened. She stepped back towards the rest of the group, feeling awkward but unapologetic.

  “After three?” Grav asked her.

  She nodded and stood next to him, ready to charge into the door with their combined strength.

  “Wait,” Dante said. “Let’s not be rash… we don’t know what could be in there. It could be booby-trapped to do something if anyone breaks in. There could be—”

  “If you’re worried, you can leave,” Holly said, maintaining a neutral tone.

  Dante stepped in front of her. “Holly, listen to me: I know you want to be in charge, but—”

  She cut him off. “I don’t ‘want to be’ anything, Dante. I am in charge.”

  Everyone was quiet.

  Grav then counted to three, at which point he and Holly threw their full force into the door.

  It didn’t budge.

  Neither suggested trying again; there had been zero give, and both knew that a second effort would be no more powerful than the first and could only serve to exacerbate the shoulder pain they were doing their best to hide.

  “May I?” Robert said, surprising everyone. “Take a look at the keypad, I mean.” He chuckled, slightly lifting the mood. “Not try to smash the door down.”

  “Please,” Rusev said.

  Holly and Grav parted to let him past.

  “What are you thinking?” Yury asked.

  “Well… with a mechanical keypad like this you can sometimes see a slight buildup of dust on the side of certain keys, which would tell you that they haven’t been pressed in a long time. But there are no clues like that here. Other than that we can only look for branding.”

  As the others watched on, more in hope than expectation, Robert crouched down and looked up at the underside of the protruding keypad. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket and shone it upwards.

  “M X E dash 4 1 0,” he said. “Model number, I assume? Then to the right of that, just M X E, then a tiny bird. Maybe a logo?”

  Holly, Grav, Yury and Dante were no longer looking at Robert. Now, they were sharing brief and shocked glances.

  “What’s MXE?” V
iola asked.

  “Morrison Electric,” Holly said, almost choking on the taste of the words.

  Viola gasped. “Roger Morrison?”

  Holly nodded, almost in defeat.

  “Wherever or whatever the hell this place is,” Grav said, looking all around and then gazing up the stairway, “we are standing on GU property.”

  forty-five

  “A whole planet,” Grav muttered. “It is not enough for Morrison and his cronies to hoard healthy seeds while their famine starves half of the world? He also has to hide a whole fucking planet while telling everyone the world is too overcrowded?”

  Viola was shaking her head, in tandem with Grav. “If they have the resources to try to settle a whole new world, imagine how easily they could have cleaned up Earth.”

  “Exactly,” Grav said. “People always say there is no such thing as a perfect world but that there is always something better. All of Morrison’s bullshit proves that the opposite is just as true: however bad it gets, there is always someone ready to make it worse.”

  No one else spoke for a few seconds as everyone tried to make sense of what had just been revealed.

  Robert inhaled sharply and gestured with his hand as though he was about to speak, but nothing came out. With a perplexed expression, he tried again. “So, to be clear…” he said, addressing his forthcoming question to no one in particular, “is the implication that Morrison and the GU are actively hiding this planet? Because if they are… A) why are they hiding it? And B) where did it come from?”

  Yury was the first to begin climbing the stairs, unilaterally deciding there was no sense in standing beside the door. The others followed, with Bo making a comment about the possibility of blowing the door open with some kind of IED and Grav telling him it wasn’t such a bad idea.

  Holly wanted to see the other side of the door, whatever it took, but for now she was racking her mind for any logical answers to Robert’s questions. Where had the planet come from, and what the hell did Morrison want with it?

  As Rusev reached ground level, she answered Robert with another question: “Do you know anything about Harriet Brock?”

  “I know of her,” he replied. “I know that Brockian economics focuses on predicting the nature of a post-labour world, and I know she went off the deep-end towards the end with the whole Great Reset thing. But beyond those headlines, I couldn’t tell you much else.”

  Viola stopped abruptly. “Ewww… I know this stuff from school. That exact old book: The Great Reset. We had to read it last year. Brock had this whole thing about people being seeds who have to be responsibly cultivated.” The girl paused and shook her head; it came across as an unusual head-shake, one of uncomfortable realisation as everything fell into place in her mind. “Brock’s big thing was genetic intervention, and the thought experiment she kept using was about what would happen if humanity had to evacuate to a new planet. She said we would have limited capacity on the spaceships and that the human seeds we chose to send wouldn’t be picked at random, so why should we leave the future genetic makeup of Earth’s population to chance when we know its resources are just as finite as whatever new planet we might find. I got my best grade in years for that paper because I actually cared about it… you know, because it was so much bullshit. Our teacher hated it too.”

  Based on her typical indifference to schoolwork, Robert was so surprised by the depth of Viola’s answer that he didn’t even admonish her language.

  “What does Brock have to do with Morrison?” Holly asked, aiming the question at Rusev. “Why did you bring up her name?”

  “Because Morrison has been obsessed with her work since he was a child,” Rusev said. “We had moles in his operation, just like he had moles in ours, and every single one of them mentioned the obsession with Brock. He tested his assistants’ knowledge of her principles and made them read up on it all if they didn’t score well enough. One described his interest in Brock as ‘beyond religious’. His business policies have always gone hand-in-hand with Brock’s economic theories, and with the famine and everything else so clearly pointing to deliberate depopulation…”

  Viola replied: “You actually think he’s going for a Reset?”

  “I don’t like what I think,” Rusev said, looking at the ground as she spoke, “because I think he’s going to bring the chosen few here. I think they’re testing this place. With the crops you saw, with the climate zones that fit in well with the advanced weather manipulation we know he’s been working on for so long, and with everything he’s been doing on Earth, I think an evacuation is imminent. Probably temporary and probably justified by some disaster he cooks up, but I hate to think what’s going to happen to everyone left behind.”

  “Kind of like when your house gets fumigated and you go to live somewhere else for a few days so that the fumes kill the bugs but not you?” Bo asked, cutting through the euphemisms with his inimitable childlike clarity.

  Rusev nodded. “Exactly. And as for here, we know he boasted about a huge breakthrough in gravity shielding but never openly did anything with it. Between that and some of the effectively invisible romotech applications that are already in use on Earth, at least we’re getting an idea of how he kept this place hidden; even if we don’t know what it is, where it came from, and how he found it before anyone else.”

  “That’s it!” Holly exclaimed, turning instinctively to Dante as the realisation hit her. “Morrison didn’t just find this place and he didn’t just hide it. He made it. This isn’t a planet. We’re standing on a man-made satellite.”

  forty-six

  As Holly’s words sank in, Dante’s eyebrows visibly lowered. “Satellite?” he echoed. “But how could he possibly—”

  “Embryonic romotech,” Rusev said, taking the words from Holly’s lips and delivering them in a eureka-like tone. “Expanding outwards from the core with self-replicating romobots feeding off the sun. He’s demo’d the tech in public, with the bots programmed to form complex structures and designs. I suppose it’s just about feasible that he could have started with an embryonic structure small enough to launch without anyone noticing.” She looked pensively to the sky. “Then all it would take is an artificial atmosphere, some terraforming, plenty of data gathering devices to track conditions, and maybe a few boots on the ground to make sure everything is in order. I think Holly might be right: this could be his version of our Venus station.”

  “What if we’re the boots on the ground?” Dante asked, suddenly buying the man-made theory and immediately worrying about it. “If all this stuff is true, maybe they did something to make us crash here. Maybe we’re the guinea pigs. Maybe they’re watching us right now.”

  The group proceeded towards the lander and extension, with all memories of their planned return to the crops now distant. Dante’s words about standing on someone or something’s territory had taken on a new significance now that all signs pointed towards that territory belonging to Roger Morrison and his GU cronies.

  The discovery of the MXE initials and logo on the door’s keypad also destroyed all prior hope that whoever might return to harvest the crops would be peaceful.

  Now, as far as the group’s survival went, it truly was radio or bust.

  “The plan hasn’t changed,” Holly said, meditating on that point and seeking to lift the encircling dread. “We’re still going to fix the radio and we’re still going to walk onto the station; all of us.”

  Bo nodded a few times, showing enough to convince Holly that he had a hint of positivity left in him. Viola, on the other hand, looked as though she had accepted her fate.

  Holly subtly stepped to the side of the group and signalled for Viola to hang back slightly. Trying a different tack, she laid out a promise in simple terms: “You’re not going to die here.”

  Viola tried to force a brave smile.

  Holly then put a hand on the girl’s back and urged her to resume walking. “I’m going to make sure you reach that station,” she said, “if it’s the
last thing I do.”

  forty-seven

  Holly awoke in the middle of the night and stood up to get a drink from the extension’s sparse supplies shelf. In the gentle glow of her shared bedroom’s nightlight, she saw that Viola’s bed was empty.

  Probably in the bathroom, she thought. She looked down at her wristband to be sure, then instantly dashed back towards her own bed to get her shoes.

  Viola was outside, she was moving, and she was getting further away. In another twist that somewhat assured Holly of Viola’s safety but introduced anger in worry’s place, the tracking dot representing the girl’s movement was headed towards another out-of-place dot: Dante’s.

  Holly cursed his name under her breath and quickly threw on some outdoor clothes. With all that had been going on, this was the last thing anyone needed. Holly’s disappointment in Viola didn’t extend to anger — she was young, and Dante certainly had his charms — but the anger she felt at Dante was the kind that threatened to boil over when she found him.

  Outside, the stars shone down in full force, defeating the worst of the darkness if not quite illuminating Holly’s way. She ran with a flashlight in her right hand, pointed downwards, and frequently checked the distance on her left wrist to make sure she was going in the right direction.

  It looked increasingly obvious that Viola was going to meet Dante in the well-lit and private area between the bottom of the stairway and the locked door. Holly proceeded quietly; she had no intention of sneaking up on them doing… whatever they were doing… but she also didn’t want to unnecessarily awaken and worry anyone else by screaming names into the darkness.

  As the distance between Holly’s wristband and Dante’s continued to steadily decrease, she noticed that Viola’s dot stopped moving a very short distance from its expected destination. For the final few minutes of Holly’s approach, this remained the case.

  It didn’t make sense, but she wouldn’t have to wait long for an answer.