Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

When Holly’s flashlight landed upon the edge of the dangerous patch of plants — a genuine barrier, as Bo had insisted all along — her beam of light was intersected by another.

  Holly followed it and saw Viola, standing alone at the top of the stairway. As quietly as she could, and being careful to stick to Grav’s makeshift path to avoid the deadly plants, Holly walked over.

  “Well?” she said. One word was enough.

  “I woke up and saw that Dante was outside,” Viola whispered, talking more quietly than Holly thought necessary. “He was right outside, not moving. And I couldn’t sleep, so I went to see him. But by the time I got my shoes and everything, he was gone when I got outside.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me? I would have looked for him.”

  “I wasn’t going anywhere! It wasn’t until I got outside that I knew he’d left. Then I saw him moving, so I followed, but I couldn’t keep up. He’s fast. But it wasn’t long until he stopped moving, so I kept going to see where he was. I didn’t mean to end up here, I just wanted to know what was going on. I still want to know what’s going on. Do you think this means that Dante—”

  Holly silenced Viola by pushing an urgent finger against her lips in response to the sound of movement at the bottom of the stairs. She then told the girl where to stand — to one side of the stairs, slightly behind them — and made it abundantly clear that she was to keep her mouth firmly shut.

  Viola switched off her flashlight, following another silent order, and stood perfectly still.

  Holly walked to the top of the stairs, her own flashlight still shining brightly, and came face to face with Dante as he took his first step up.

  “Holly!” he yelped. “What are you… uh… I’ve been trying every code I could think of. No luck.”

  “But I just heard you close the door.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Dante,” she snapped. “I literally just heard—”

  “I’ve been banging on it. Trying to get inside! Come on, Holly… I know there’s a lot going on, but you sound crazy right now.”

  “Shut up! Everything you say is a lie.”

  Dante exhaled sharply and dismissively through his nose then gave a defiant shrug; busted, but unwavering. He walked up the stairs. “Not everything, Holly. Remember when I said that I thought someone wanted us to land here?”

  “You? You’re working with Morrison?”

  “And the penny drops!” he said, now smiling broadly and miming sarcastic applause. “What gave it away?”

  Holly took several steps backwards as Dante continued towards her. She rolled her sleeves up and raised her fists.

  “You’re going to fight me?” he chuckled.

  However tough Dante wanted to act and however much smack he wanted to talk, Holly knew he must have known there would only ever be one winner.

  Whatever inherent combat advantages Dante may have had in terms of skeletal structure and bone density were more than cancelled out by Holly’s well-earned advantages in terms of physical training and life-or-death experience. Perhaps most importantly, though Dante wasn’t exactly scrawny, he was soft.

  A lot of words had been thrown at Holly throughout her life; soft was not one of them.

  “Put your hands behind your back,” she ordered.

  “Okay,” he said in sarcastic agreement. “Just because you said.”

  “Dante, I swear to God: if you don’t cooperate right now…”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “This stand-off won’t end well for you,” Holly said.

  “Oh… so you’re going to kill me? Killer Holly’s going to strike again?”

  “You’re a rat,” she spat at him. “You’re a fucking traitor.”

  “So do it!” Dante challenged, making a point of looking down the stairs towards the locked door. “Kill the traitor. Then what?”

  Part III

  forty-eight

  Holly and Dante stood face to face, just a few paces clear of the stairway. Holly had stepped back when Dante climbed up, subconsciously striving to avoid or at least delay the looming confrontation.

  “Why?” she said, asking the only question on her mind. There were countless offshoots — why this and why that — but the most general form rose to the top.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you want us to land here? What the hell is going on?”

  Dante smirked in lieu of an immediate answer. His gloating expression brought a flood of realisations to Holly’s mind as the new context illuminated his previous obstructive behaviour.

  She thought back to his early attempts to make her suspicious of Robert and Viola on the Karrier, followed by his later attempts to make her suspicious of Rusev. She recalled the countless times he had been so reluctant to explore and had tried to stop others from doing so, and the fact that he always insisted on accompanying Holly whenever and wherever she went.

  Holly also saw new relevance in his insistence on choosing his initial search direction when he and Grav split up to look for Holly’s lander on the first day: his search area had encompassed the site of the bunker, at once both ensuring that Grav wouldn’t stumble upon it and ensuring that the area was recorded as barren on Yury’s map.

  She then recalled the group’s first night after reuniting, when she saw Dante outside the lander and he pretended that his motive for removing his wristband was to deliberately trigger her alarm as a way of drawing her outside to talk. It now seemed obvious that he had been planning to sneak away to the bunker and only turned on his usual charm as a diversion tactic. Come to think of it, Holly thought back, he’d even been wearing his heavy walking boots that night. His effortless lies, however obvious they now seemed, had worked.

  Dante had been playing everyone from the start, but no one more so than Holly.

  She wanted to lash out and needed no invitation. On the contrary, it took everything she had to hold back and try to keep the calm head she needed to make sense of what was happening and deal with it responsibly.

  “Tell me why!” she yelled.

  “What’s done is done,” Dante said, still smirking. “And trust me, Holly: this is done.”

  “You’re going to tell me everything.”

  “I’m going to tell you nothing.”

  “Dante, either you’re going to give me that entry code or I’m going to take it.”

  His smirk faded, replaced by a new intensity. “I’ll die before I give it up.”

  “That can be arranged,” Holly shot back.

  “So do it. Do to me what you did to Sarah and Gianfranco.”

  The first thing in Holly’s mind — the only thing — was Gianfranco’s face. His was a name she hadn’t heard in a while, but his was a face forever etched in her memory.

  After several seconds spent trying to blink the memory away, Holly began to wonder how Dante knew these names; she had certainly never shared them with him. This confusion faded as quickly as it had arrived as the rational part of her mind pointed out that Sarah and Gianfranco were the only two people to have died while working within Morrison’s space program, and Holly knew she’d told Dante enough of what happened for him to be able to piece it together.

  “I don’t see any shards lying around,” Dante went on, “so you won’t be able to slit my throat like you did to Sar—”

  “I did not slit her throat,” Holly boomed, cutting him off in a furious tone. Though there may have been more pressing matters at hand, Holly could not allow Dante’s characterisation of the incident as a cold blooded execution rather than an instinctive and reluctant act of self-defence to stand. “I warned her to stay back, she lunged forward, I caught her neck.”

  Dante nodded sarcastically. “If you say so.”

  “Wait… how did you know about the shard at all?” Holly asked. She had definitely not told Dante or even Rusev any of this part, and as far as she knew no one outside of Morrison’s inner circle knew the full details.

  Dante answered flatly: “I’ve seen
the footage. Roger showed it to me.”

  The fact that Dante was apparently on first name terms with Roger Morrison sent a slow shiver down Holly’s spine.

  “That’s right, I’ve seen the whole thing. So with no shard, what’s the plan? Strangle me like you did to Gianfranco… an innocent guy who was standing in your way?”

  “He was trying to kill me! If you’ve seen the tapes, you must have seen that. He was plotting to suffocate me so I didn’t waste his resources. He was the one who told Sarah to hold me down and he was the one who slashed at me first, when I heard what he was planning. He’s the reason I’ve got one eye, Dante! He was the fucking maniac who failed two of his three psych tests and still got chosen for the mission because Morrison liked him.”

  “He was my uncle,” Dante scowled. “That’s what he was. That’s who he was. And he was innocent.”

  Holly didn’t know where this uncle claim fitted in; she didn’t know whether it was part of Dante’s motivation for acting the way he was, nor even whether it was true. The one thing that she knew to be wholly untrue was the claim that Gianfranco had been innocent. It was so baseless that Holly could only conclude that any footage Dante had seen — if there even was any — must have been extensively doctored and misrepresented.

  “Why are we here, Dante?” she asked, now almost pleading for an answer. “I don’t care what happened fifteen years ago. What are we doing here?”

  “If there was a way to do this without landing here, I would have done it,” Dante said. This answer seemed instinctive rather than pre-planned; real, rather than rehearsed. “But this is where he needed someone. Someone he could trust, but someone she trusted, too.”

  “Rusev?”

  He nodded indifferently.

  “So… what… this is all about Morrison and Rusev? Whatever is going on here, I’m collateral? Spaceman is collateral? And the kids? Children, Dante. There were children on board!”

  He didn’t offer the defence she half-expected: that he only knew about Viola, who was pretty much an adult. He didn’t offer any kind of defence at all.

  Holly prodded him in the chest. “You’re a pawn in some game… some vendetta… and no one else even matters?”

  “Just listen to me, Holly, okay? This is how it had to be. It’s too late to undo anything, but it’s not too late for you to make a good decision. You hate me, fine. You hate Morrison, fine. But I know you can detach yourself from all this bullshit and do what it takes to survive. Everyone else is as good as dead. Everyone. If you kill me or lock me up or whatever else you’re thinking of doing, everyone is dead within a week. If you don’t, everyone is still dead. Either way, there’s no undoing what’s been done. But it’s not too late for you. It’s not to late for us.”

  “Us?”

  “Us,” Dante stressed. “They’re all going to die and it’s not going to be clean. But now, while they’re all asleep, we can make it clean. If you care about these people… if you care about the kids… this is the caring thing to do.”

  Holly stayed quiet, in sheer disbelief at how totally Morrison had corrupted Dante’s mind and heart.

  “You don’t even have to do anything,” he said, now nodding gently with warm eyes and placing a light hand on her arm like the conman he was.

  “Okay,” Holly said. “Fine. Just tell me what’s going on and show me what’s inside the bunker.”

  “No offence, Holly, but I can’t show or tell you anything until we see the next stage of the plan through.”

  “Which stage?”

  “Helping the others out. Helping them, you know, pass, without the pain they’ll feel when the time comes if we don’t do it now.”

  Holly said nothing. Even as part of an effort to coax information out of Dante, she didn’t know how to respond to this.

  “I’m not a monster,” he went on, his tone more upbeat than the words deserved. “Why else do you think I got the kid the antidote last night? I don’t want anyone to suffer any more than they have to. What happens to them isn’t my call, but what is my call — and your call — is how it happens. What is our call is whether they’re going to suffer any more than they have to.”

  “So why is what happens to me your call?”

  “The way you feel about Roger,” Dante began, once again disgusting Holly by using his first name, “it’s not mutual. He respects you. He wanted to get rid of you when everything happened with Sarah and Gianfranco, but his inner circle told him there was no way they could cover up your death. Too many people within the program already knew that two people were dead — not that you’d killed them, of course — but you were way too big a name to gloss over. You can cover up the deaths of two no-name astronauts like that…” Dante clicked his fingers… “but you? Back then? Princess Holly? People would have talked. Roger was always worried that you would talk, but the years went by and you never did. He told me how much he paid you to keep your mouth shut about the whole thing, so I know you can make decisions that make sense even if you don’t like them.”

  “I kept quiet because I killed two people, Dante. Whatever his ego wants to believe, he didn’t buy my silence.”

  “But still… you can make decisions you don’t like. And I know you don’t like this, but if you want to survive…”

  Even if Holly hadn’t been repulsed by Dante’s suggestions, the twitching of his right eye — his oldest tell — was so obvious that she would never have fallen for his lies. Not this time.

  Holly was his only obstacle, and she knew that he would strike to eliminate it as soon as she turned her back or otherwise let down her guard.

  She was almost offended by how little he obviously thought of her, and the words “how stupid do you think I am?” strove to escape her mouth. But she kept her cards close to her chest, knowing perfectly well that she couldn’t do anything until his guard was down.

  “I’ll never forgive you for making me do this,” she said, sighing and making sure that the words were filled with believable venom.

  Dante nodded and put on his best understanding face. His lies may have worked on someone else, but no one had more experience of consistently falling for and eventually seeing through them than Holly. “I was always going to give you a chance,” he said.

  “I’ll pretend I can believe that.”

  Dante opened his arms wide to clinch it with a hug. When Holly shook her head, he outstretched his right arm for a handshake.

  After a few convincing seconds of fake inner debate, Holly shook his hand. “I’m not going to die here,” she said.

  “It’s the right choice. The only choice.”

  Holly then squeezed tighter. “And neither are the kids.”

  Before Dante could react, verbally or physically, Holly spun him around and tossed him sideways down the stairs. This was no shove, but more like someone tossing a bag of sand or a doorman throwing a rowdy drunk to the kerb.

  Dante tumbled and groaned then hit the bottom with a thud that would have been sickening had it come from someone Holly still considered worthy of pity. The heavy landing left him crumpled like a sack in the flat area between the stairs and the door.

  Holly didn’t care how badly he might be hurt, but for a moment she prayed that he was still alive. Of all the things he had said in the last few minutes, the one she knew was true was that he would be worthless dead; after all, the bunker’s entry code was in Dante’s head and nowhere else.

  “Are you okay?” a gentle voice asked from the darkness beyond the stairway. Holly shone the flashlight and saw Viola, who had remained so flawlessly silent that Holly had momentarily forgotten about her.

  “Are you?” Holly replied.

  The girl nodded and stepped towards Holly then looked down the stairs. “Is he?”

  In the glow of the doorway’s inlet light, Dante’s stomach rose and fell. “He’s alive,” Holly said, literally sighing with relief. “Okay, right now I need you to go back to the extension and wake Grav. No one else. I’ll restrain Dante whil
e you bring Grav out here, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I can’t stress how important it is that you don’t wake anyone else.”

  “Just Grav,” Viola confirmed. “Got it.”

  “And don’t tell him what happened. Just say that Holly said he has to come with you because there’s an emergency at the bunker that no one else can know about until he’s spoken to me. Don’t mention Dante. Got that? Tell him I made you promise not to tell him what happened, and that I made you promise to bring him but no one else. Okay?”

  “Get Grav and don’t tell him why, just that there’s an emergency at the bunker and you made me promise to bring him out here — just him — without explaining why. That’s everything?”

  “That’s everything. I wish I didn’t have to land this on you.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Viola said.

  Holly nodded and headed down the stairs towards a problem she could never have imagined having to face. She stopped after a few steps. “Viola,” she called.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I have your belt?”

  Viola returned to the stairway and tossed her belt down to Holly.

  “Thanks,” Holly said. “Stay strong.”

  Viola nodded and eyed Dante’s limp body, her eyes making clear that she knew she had the far easier task. “You too.”

  forty-nine

  Holly propped Dante up and bound his hands behind his back with Viola’s belt, looped and tied extremely tightly.

  After that, it was a waiting game.

  There were more than enough thoughts circling in Holly’s mind as she looked back over the previous few days for more clues which she could and should have spotted.

  When Dante groaned and shuffled a few minutes later, his waking up provided something of a respite from the thoughts which were as senseless and self-defeating as they were unavoidable.

  “Bitch,” he muttered.

  Holly didn’t even look at him.

  “You have no idea how big of a mistake you just made. Nothing is as it seems. Rusev is in on this… all of it.”

  “You’re full of shit,” Holly snapped. “You always were.” There was not only venom in these words, but also regret. The anger which tinged them was likewise aimed not only at Dante but also at herself, for falling for his bullshit one more time. Even now, caught red handed, he was still playing with her head.