The Fall of Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  With her knees clenched and one hand gripping the base of the main console, Holly then took the deepest breath of her life and pressed the button.

  twenty-two

  Like Terradox and the other observed romospheres that Grav had recently told Holly about, gravity within Netherdox’s artificial atmosphere was Earth-like to within fractions of a percentage point.

  In theory, travelling across the romosphere’s surface inside a rover would feel just like travelling in the same rover on Earth.

  But as the Karrier began its rapid descent through the storm clouds, that surface felt a long way away. For the first few seconds, Holly’s stomach felt like it was being tossed up and down in the carriage of a high-speed roller-coaster.

  The observed wind speed, as reported on the control console, increased as the Karrier rapidly shot downwards towards the unseen surface below the clouds. Despite this increase in wind speed, the rapid and constant descent soon ensured that the buffeting became less apparent to Holly than it had been when the winds were somewhat less extreme.

  Holly consciously decided not to fight the wind and rather to focus on getting to the surface without any concern over which area of it the Karrier was being blown toward. The lack of visibility made it impossible to aim for the control bunker, so this was perhaps less of an active decision than a necessary concession.

  After a short but frightening period of ever-increasing wind speed, Holly suddenly noticed that the wind speed reading on the control console had peaked and was now beginning to slowly decrease. She immediately gazed at the screens displaying the Karrier’s external visual feeds, with the sky-facing camera’s feed on the left and the ground-facing camera’s on the right. The visible reddish clouds in the ground-facing image, illuminated only by the Karrier’s powerful lights, appeared visibly thinner than the clouds above. This supported her welcome conclusion that the Karrier was now past the centre of the thick cloud coverage — past the worst of it.

  As the seconds passed and the decreasing wind speed became ever more decisively apparent, Holly began to gradually reduce the Karrier’s speed of descent. This was a welcome development, infinitely preferable to the kind of abrupt and uncomfortable deceleration which would have been necessary if the wind had remained ferocious until the clouds faded.

  Shortly before the Karrier was fully out of the clouds, a message flashed on the console’s main screen to alert Holly that a safe landing spot had now been identified. She hesitated to accept the offer to revert to automatic controls, worrying that there might not be time to revert to manual again should any further problem rear its head.

  Holly’s heart felt fit to pump through her chest as she weighed up a huge decision, and she ultimately opted to switch to hybrid controls. This middle ground meant that the Karrier would head for its target landing site but it also allowed for real-time path modification should Holly feel the need for a last-gasp manual override.

  With the Karrier now in charge of its own descent, the pace slowed further and would have felt very much like a run-of-the-mill descent were it not for the fading but still violent winds. The numbers in the field beside the word ALTITUDE, a field which was no longer empty as it had been in the middle of the clouds, dropped safely and steadily.

  When the Karrier finally broke through the clouds, it wasn’t the visual difference which first made the breakthrough clear. Instead, what made it clear that the group had successfully escaped what Holly was already thinking of as Netherdox’s upper atmosphere was the sudden and obvious absence of wind. Absence, rather than reduction, was very clearly the right word; the wind wasn’t almost gone, it was gone.

  With a wind speed reading of zero, the Karrier’s path was now untroubled and vertical.

  The visual feeds from the Karrier’s exterior cameras now relayed a world so dark that Holly deemed it necessary to tackle the oppressive darkness immediately by sending a small squad of light-bearing mapping drones towards the surface, ahead of the Karrier. She hoped these drones would quickly send back useful images of the ground which would enable her to make an informed decision of where to land while there was still time for a change of course.

  Holly again slightly slowed the Karrier’s descent, this time in order to give the drones time to approach the surface and do their thing. She knew that the others on board would wonder what was going on, but she didn’t have time to worry about telling them.

  Upon firing the drones and watching as the specks of light faded into a sea of black, she expected that at least some of the others, having seen the drones, would now understand what she was doing.

  The Karrier continued to descend at a rate which it reported as leaving just over two minutes until touchdown.

  Much like a human eye, the Karrier’s state-of-the-art mapping and reconnaissance drones were programmed to seek both patterns and novelty. When the first image data was sent back to Holly’s control console, her initial feeling was tangible relief that she could see anything at all. It didn’t particularly matter what she could see, as the relief stemmed purely from the non-total nature of the oppressive darkness.

  That Netherdox’s darkness was simply the result of an absence of light may have sounded tautological, but it was in fact a significant relief; for had the darkness been the result of the surface being composed of a material with exceptional light-absorption properties, any kind of visual analysis or exploration may well have proven utterly hopeless.

  The first image flagged as novel by one of the drones showed an unmistakably sheer cliff-edge. This was not sheer in the colloquial sense, like the passably natural-looking cliff above the valley which now housed Terradox Central Station. This, Holly could clearly see, was literally sheer.

  Perpendicular, she thought. That’s the word.

  Seconds later, footage from another drone showed a similar image from a different area an appreciable distance from the first. What was most significantly different about the second image was that it came from the bottom of a perpendicular cliff-edge. This image was annotated, telling Holly that the drone’s error-proof scaling feature had measured the height of the cliff at a hair under 400 metres.

  Holly returned her focus to the first drone and remotely instructed it to fly down to the bottom of its cliff so it could track its height. As soon as she finished doing this, the second drone alerted her to further novelty in its own field of view.

  At first Holly saw no difference between the new image on the screen and the one she had seen a few moments earlier. On closer inspection, however, she noticed that the height of the towering cliff-edge was now reported as slightly higher than before. She couldn’t remember the exact previous reading, but she knew with one hundred percent certainty that it hadn’t ended in something point 66.

  Thinking this had to be a mistake, Holly then remotely captured a series of still images of the cliff. With several images to compare, she noted with more than a little unease that the height of the cliff was rising steadily in each progressive image.

  Holly momentarily wondered what the hell was going on until it hit her like a stone-filled snowball, blindingly obvious as soon as she realised it. The details of precisely what was happening, and how, would have to wait.

  For now, Holly knew the important part: she was watching Netherdox’s erratic and menacing expansion, live in real time.

  twenty-three

  Within minutes of realising the necessity of manually landing the Karrier, Holly was poring over a new and unsettling composite image which had been automatically generated using data from seven mapping drones.

  The image revealed that the surface featured a series of tiered stages.

  Like stairs, she thought, or perhaps more like an inversion of the classically built pyramids; moving towards the centre, each “tier” was lower and smaller than the last.

  Holly didn’t know if tier was anything close to the right word, but it would do for now. And what she realised in the nick of time was that the all-important control bunke
r, which was included in the planning drawing and had thus presumably been present on Netherdox’s surface prior to the recent beginning of the dangerous expansion, quite simply had to be on the highest tier.

  She assumed full control of the Karrier and steered it firmly away from the previously identified landing point. Very helpful data on the screen displayed the Karrier’s current distance from each drone and Holly made sure that she took the Karrier further and further from the drone which now rested in the lowest observed tier.

  Why Netherdox was expanding in this manner, with tier-like segments in the distance towering above a central canyon like something out of a surrealist painting, was just one more source of uncertainty. Holly had fully expected a spherical expansion, something more like a balloon or a ball being inflated, but right now there were more important things to worry about than why the expansion was occurring like this; chief among them, how to react.

  Given a lack of clarity over what would be identified as ground level, Holly could no longer trust the Karrier’s altitude reading. What mattered now was touching down on the highest tier she could see, and for the final 90 seconds of the descent that was exactly what she focused on.

  Just seconds before the Karrier touched down on what Holly hoped and prayed was the highest tier, a previously unresponsive drone delivered its first novel image: a top-down view of a discernible rectangular outline, right next to what convincingly resembled a small stairway. The stairway to the bunker?, Holly dared to hope.

  The data that accompanied this image almost felt too good to be true: the bunker, assuming that really was what the drone had identified, was less than 3,000 metres away.

  While Holly’s hopes began to run wild, the Karrier’s landing gear made contact with the surface of Netherdox.

  The immense relief of touching down gently on the unknown and largely unseen surface with no damage or difficulty was almost immediately overtaken by the joyous optimism provided by the next drone-gathered data.

  Keen to be sure that the distance data wasn’t incorrect, Holly assumed control of the stationary drone and turned it around to face the Karrier. Through one of the Karrier’s external cameras, she saw the drone’s light, faint but real.

  “Holy shit!” she said out loud to herself, fully appreciating the unlikeliness of landing in such proximity to the target. It felt like finding a needle in a haystack on the first try, while wearing a blindfold and mittens.

  Holly tried to contain her excitement, knowing that the level of deflation she would feel if the structure turned out to be anything other than the all-important bunker would be a direct inversion of the excitement she allowed herself to feel right now.

  On the theme of wariness over early celebration, Holly then took a brief moment to check that her broader assumptions of a safe landing weren’t equally premature.

  The briefest of glances at the atmospheric readings showed that the external conditions would pose great challenges for the sub-group tasked with entering the bunker, but a full status report showed no physical problems with the Karrier itself. The landing gear was in perfect order and a full-body check likewise revealed no damage from the unbelievable winds.

  Holly pressed her finger against the console’s comms button and spoke to the rest of her team:

  “We’ve landed safely,” she said. “All systems report full functionality, and I believe the bunker is within eyesight of our landing site.”

  Holly looked more thoroughly at the atmospheric readings. The further down the long list she looked, the more her positivity was tempered. At some point, even if everything else went perfectly, Grav and likely at least one other person would have to leave the transport rover and walk into the control bunker. Certain readings in particular made her extremely uneasy about their safety.

  “We’re here!” Viola’s voice rang out through the control room’s speakers, alerting Holly that her finger was still on the comms button.

  “Oh, we’re here alright,” Holly replied as positively as she could.

  She then released the comms button and muttered a decidedly less positive addendum:

  “Welcome to Hell.”

  twenty-four

  Upon announcing the Karrier’s safe landing, Holly was quickly mobbed by her grateful and relieved passengers.

  Robert Harrington, more upbeat than Holly had seen him in a long time, likened the “I’m still alive” euphoria to his experience of bungee jumping in England as a carefree teenager.

  Even the ordinarily sober Peter Ospanov permitted himself a broad smile.

  Though the general mood was congratulatory rather than celebratory, there was more than enough positivity going around for some of it to brush off onto Holly. She knew there was a very long way to go before their mission could be considered a success, but the mood in the Karrier reflected the size of the obstacle that had just been overcome.

  Unsurprisingly, Grav was the least expressive among the group. He retained a laser-like focus, standing over the main console and scanning the countless data points displayed on its screens and dials.

  Holly briefly watched as Grav took in the data. When his eyes widened, she correctly assumed that they did so in reaction to the temperature data.

  While low temperatures had been expected, the group found themselves surrounded by temperatures far colder than anyone had predicted. The reported external temperature, assuming it was correct, nevertheless remained within the operational limits of the Karrier as well as its two exploration rovers.

  More in line with the group’s pre-arrival expectations, other readings confirmed that the air outside was not even close to breathable.

  “At least the air does not seem too… alien,” Grav said, turning away from the console to address Holly. “Not corrosive or flesh-eating or ridiculously flammable or anything like that. A terrible mix for life, no doubt, but that is why we have the suits.”

  “Are the suits definitely okay in these temperatures?” Holly asked, voicing her chief concern.

  “Definitely,” he replied with no hint of hesitation. “Anyway, how did the Karrier feel on the way down? Those winds… were they in control, or were you?”

  “In the end, I didn’t even try to fight those gusts. Is it going to be the same going up or are you hoping that the bunker’s systems will let us clear the upper atmosphere?”

  “The second one,” Grav said. He then leaned in closer and lowered his voice. “But if I cannot do so… could you still get us out of here? With full juice, would we make it through?”

  Holly nodded, surprising herself with her own confidence. “Put it this way: it wouldn’t be fun, but I think we could do it.”

  “Good. For now, do we have any better-lit images of the structure we believe to be the bunker?”

  “Not yet; only one drone has been there, and there’s an obvious trade-off between flying low enough to fully illuminate a small area of the surface and flying high enough for the light to spread across a larger area with less focus. I’ve just ordered the rest of the drones to gather data for a broad high-altitude composite, but after that we’ll send them all towards the bunker.”

  Grav gave a relaxed nod then turned to the rest of the group to relay the essence of Holly’s rundown. “And once we know for sure whether or not the structure up ahead is indeed the bunker,” he told them, “the primary grouping will prepare to depart in the rover.”

  Viola was first to ask the obvious question, the answer to which Grav had repeatedly deferred until now: “So who exactly is in the primary group? Who’s going in the rover?”

  “That depends on what the drones tell us,” he replied.

  “Why?” Viola pushed.

  “Because if that is not the bunker then the first expedition will be purely exploratory and will be undertaken by the minimal necessary crew: Bo and myself. If that is the bunker, we will add a third member to assist with my activities in the bunker while Bo remains in the rover.”

  “The composite images are in,�
� Holly announced, having paid enough attention to Grav’s words to know that he had finished talking but not quite enough to wonder who the third crew member would be should the imminent close-up images confirm the Karrier’s proximity to Netherdox’s all-important control bunker.

  Everyone crowded around Holly for a glimpse of the images, by far the clearest representations of the Netherdox surface ever seen.

  “Are those cliffs?” Sakura asked, shoulder-to-shoulder with an equally intrigued Dimitar Rusev.

  “Whatever they are, they’re getting taller,” Holly said. “We have images taken at short intervals which show the changes. I’m sure we could calculate the romosphere’s current rate of expansion if we took the time.”

  “Can I squeeze in a little closer to see that?” Robert asked, making his way to the front of the group.

  Holly instructed the drones to generate close-up images of the suspected bunker area and within seconds they set off. She then tapped a few options to enlarge the recently generated composite image of the broader area around the Karrier. “Bo, you should come in closer with your dad and Sakura. Take a look at this.”

  Dimitar also stepped forward to join this suggested trio, who, it went without saying, Holly recognised as the most ‘book smart’ members of the team. The more ‘street smart’ trio of Grav, Viola and Peter stood slightly further back as the others pointed things out and shared thoughts about what it all meant.

  “The cliffs, if that’s what we’re calling them, are getting further apart as well as taller,” Dimitar said, turning away from the screen to keep the others in the loop.

  “Right,” Sakura added. “I know this is a terrible analogy but the only easy way I can think of to describe it right now is to say that it’s something kind of like two tectonic plates shifting apart and another one rising to fill the gap between them.” Hand gestures accompanied Sakura’s analogy, doing a better job of getting her point across than the words did.