The Fall of Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  “Already on it,” Bo said.

  Grav groaned very audibly. “A zonal line,” he said, more statement than question.

  Holly disagreed. “The lines on Terradox weren’t visible like this. The effects of the lines were sometimes visible, like if the conditions on one side led to better plant growth, but the lines themselves weren’t anything like this. They were wafer thin and they were invisible.”

  Three nearby drones arrived in no time and fully illuminated the area below the rover’s camera. The wide reflective strip of ground was now even more apparent.

  “Yeah, I think this looks more like a river than a line,” Bo said. He then assumed manual control of one of the drones and flew it along the path of this ‘river’ at a very low height. The drone quickly completed a full circle and returned to its starting point. “And now we know it’s round. So not a river… more like a moat.”

  “But the surface is flush,” Holly said. “And that shiny stuff doesn’t look like liquid. It just seems like that strip of ground — the strip we’re stuck on — is made of different stuff. Something adhesive, obviously, like a resin or—”

  “Glue?” Grav interjected. “Whatever the specifics, I did not come all this way and make it within spitting distance of the bunker only to get stuck in a moat made of glue. Bo… this rover has its own small ramp for launching the spider, correct? And you can control the direction in which the ramp is lowered?”

  “Yyyy-yes,” Bo said, greatly elongating the word as he uncomfortably realised what Grav was getting at. “But we both know it’s not designed for a person to walk down.”

  “Could it hold our weight? One at a time?”

  Visibly concerned, Bo’s legs were rhythmically shaking and his right eye was twitching. “It’s not the weight, Grav, it’s the width. The ramp is designed for a remote spider the size of your hand! This thing is more like a balance beam in a gymnasium than a plank on a pirate ship.”

  Grav turned to Holly. “You heard him: the weight is not a problem. Are you in? Just the two of us; Bo stays here until we return, and the other rover comes to collect us from here.”

  Holly looked down from her window. The door and retractable ladder on one side of the rover were directly above the moat and those on the other led down to safe ground on the wrong side of it, with very little room for misplaced feet. Since the moat was too wide to clear for even an elite long-jumper, using a ramp to reach the bunker’s side seemed like the only option. Holly figured that she could jump down from the ramp fairly easily if she lost her balance, and she had faith in the impact-cushioning properties of her suit should the landing prove less than graceful.

  “I’m in,” she said.

  Bo leaned back in his chair and looked up at the rover’s domed ceiling. He shook his head, sighed, and turned to Holly. “At least let me send the spider out first to make sure there are no more stupid traps like this, okay?”

  “Go for it,” she said.

  Grav quickly informed the others in the Karrier of the new plan, predictably inviting a barrage of comments about the riskiness of trying to cover so much more distance than planned on foot; particularly given that the rover, a powerful vehicle, currently found itself defeated by a sudden variation in surface conditions. But, like Holly had when internally debating the issue a moment earlier, Grav responded with the crucial point: yes, it was a risk, but it was the furthest thing from a needless risk. This risk was as necessary as they came, he reasoned, and that was the end of it.

  Grav then asked Peter and Sakura to prepare to be ready to leave the Karrier in the other rover as soon as Bo reported to them that Holly and Grav were safely inside the bunker. He asked Bo to carefully monitor the other rover’s journey and to light its path using the drones, to minimise its risk of running into any other areas of sticky ground which the first rover may have been fortunate enough to miss. Bo had shown Peter the basic controls during their journey from the station, and he would be able to assist with any further specific questions that might arise.

  “The other rover should stop at least 100 metres behind this one,” Grav insisted, “to be absolutely sure that it will not become similarly stuck.”

  “It’s really not that far for us to walk,” Holly then said, trying to convince Bo, who was by far the least sure that this was a good idea. “And as inhospitable as the conditions out there might be, we know they’re not dangerous to the suits.”

  Bo raised his eyebrows and almost smiled. “I hope not. Because when we open the door, I’m going to be exposed to the air, too.”

  Grav turned rapidly towards Bo upon hearing this. “That will not be a problem, will it? Opening the rover? I know there are enormous safeguards to protect against contamination and exposure to dangerous external conditions. But I assume you can override them all and open the door without a long safety delay, even though the rover knows how hostile it is out there?”

  “I can override everything,” Bo replied very matter-of-factly. “I don’t want to, but I can and I will. Spider first, though.”

  “Of course,” Grav nodded. “Thank you, junior.”

  This was the first time Holly had heard Grav addressing Bo as “junior”, and she couldn’t help but wonder at what point in the last four years it had taken the place of “kiddo”.

  Holly then watched as the spider’s ramp emerged from her side of the Karrier at Bo’s request. Once the ramp was in place, its vertical legs descended from several points for added stability. It didn’t look as narrow as Bo had implied — certainly no trouble for a once decorated teenage gymnast like Holly, at least in ordinary conditions — but it didn’t look like fun. Fortunately, the length of the fully extended ramp ensured that the angle wasn’t overly steep. There were uncertainties, such as how the grip of her suit’s boots would hold up in the alien conditions, but Holly didn’t see a great deal of danger in the challenge which lay immediately ahead.

  Bo’s “spider” was a remote-controlled device used to test external conditions and access hard to reach places. It reached the surface of Netherdox with no difficulties thanks to Bo’s skilful control and reached the top of the bunker’s stairway very quickly. Bo then drove it back towards the rover in a more meandering line, checking for any further sticky spots. The many drones shining down on the area revealed none, as did the spider.

  Within a few minutes, Holly and Grav were ready to go. On Grav’s back was what he called his “entry bag”, containing several devices which could be used to open the bunker’s door should it prove more difficult than he hoped. Some were significantly more destructive than others, to the extent that he saw no possibility of failing to get in. Of all the things that could go wrong, he had already told Holly, failing to get through the door wouldn’t be one of them.

  Grav looked down the ramp. “You go first, Hollywood. You were first to walk on Terradox and we survived that shit-hole…”

  “I never saw you as the superstitious type,” she replied.

  Grav forced a grin. “At this point, I will take any help we can get.”

  twenty-eight

  Outside, there was no noticeable wind. The romosphere’s artificial gravity felt in line with the rover’s readings; perfectly manageable, but perhaps slightly less perfect than they were used to.

  The ramp, so crucial to the plan’s success, proved both wide enough and sturdy enough for Holly to walk the whole way down.

  Grav jumped to the surface after six tentative steps, concerned that he was losing balance. He landed on his feet, grimaced only slightly, and quickly stood up.

  “Well,” Holly said, taking a deep and relieved breath, “I can move. You?”

  Grav stepped forward with a theatrical leap, as though expecting a lot more resistance than he encountered.

  “Smooth as ever,” Holly laughed. Now that they were alone together on the outside of the rover, they would only automatically hear each other’s words; direct communication with Bo would require a keyword, like direct communication to th
e Karrier.

  Bo’s gangly-looking spider strode ahead of them, triple-checking that their path was safe. Holly didn’t know why the odd-looking micro vehicle was designed the way it was, but she imagined there had to be some good reason.

  Within a few steps, the walk felt to Holly like the easiest thing in the world. The bunker was growing closer with each effortless step, and it wouldn’t take too many more of them before she arrived.

  A small but persistent fear in her mind reminded her that death would be instant if her suit failed in any way, but she knew that this was always the case. She thought back to the advice her training group had received from Yury ‘Spaceman’ Gardev more than half a lifetime ago when someone had expressed a similar concern: “The thing to remember about your EVA suits is that they were built to work,” Yury had said, “and that’s what they do.”

  Since then, Holly had been involved in countless training missions. She had also endured a horrific episode during her ill-fated time at MXA when Roger Morrison had convincingly tricked her and the rest of her group into believing that they had left Earth and crash-landed in a hostile environment, all in the name of observational psychology. In that instance, Holly had fully believed that she was in an environment where exposure to the air outside would have meant death. The big difference this time was that the danger outside was genuine; but since Holly had experienced the MXA fiasco as if that danger had also been real, there was little mental difference. She had a lot more experience of depending on EVA suits than anyone else currently on Netherdox, and she used that experience to soothe her stubborn and largely baseless concerns.

  “Well, that was easy,” Grav said as he gazed down the stairway to the bunker’s door. “And a keypad, too! You think it will be the same code?”

  “Dante’s code?” Holly said.

  “Do not give that piece of shit the honour of a name-check, Hollywood. But yes. His code.”

  Holly descended the stairs ahead of Grav. Everything was now so familiar as to be positively unnerving. The flat area at the bottom of the stairs, the stairs themselves, the doorway, the keypad… it all looked identical to the equivalent area on Terradox.

  All that was missing was the light above the door and the drainage hole in the ground. Aside from that, Holly could have been standing outside the control bunker next to the Yury Gardev Memorial Garden — the very bunker in which she had been standing when Grav first called to alert her of the problem they were about to deal with inside this one.

  Grav entered the code: 2 8 2 8 0 2.

  The door clicked open.

  “Just like that?” Holly said. “There’s easy, and there’s too easy.”

  This didn’t wipe the smile from Grav’s face. “Like I said all along, Hollywood: the hard part was getting here.”

  Holly pushed the door open.

  “Comm to rover one,” Grav said, opening the channel for direct communication. “Bo… call for Peter and Sakura to bring the other rover. The code worked.”

  “It really worked?” Bo asked in reply. “You didn’t even have to blow the door off?”

  Grav took a bold step across the threshold and into the waiting bunker. “That’s right, junior,” he said. “We’re in.”

  twenty-nine

  An overhead light flickered to life as Grav entered the bunker with Holly close behind. This development, as welcome as it was unexpected, brought to light the eerie familiarity of the bunker’s interior.

  The bunker’s physical dimensions were either identical or extremely similar to those of its counterpart on Terradox, and the similarities didn’t end there. While there were no signs that anyone had ever previously set foot inside this bunker — it didn’t have the “ghost ship” feel of an abandoned room, but rather the unsettlingly vacant feel of one never yet occupied — two chairs sat invitingly next to a long control console.

  If Viola had been there to see it, Holly had no doubt she would have mentioned that parts of the console looked very much like an old submarine’s, just as had been the case on Terradox.

  The rover-housing section of the Terradox bunker which had been hidden from view was not closed off in this Netherdox equivalent, but nor did it contain rovers or indeed anything else.

  Empty space was a common theme as Holly looked around. There was no helpful map on the wall, for one thing.

  Holly did see a storage unit featuring the same kind of locked compartments as those on Terradox, but the absence of any and all signs of previous habitation or even visitation left her with little hope that those compartments would contain anything of note or indeed anything at all.

  In the seconds Holly spent looking around the bunker and drawing early conclusions, Grav promptly took a seat in front of the control console and got to work. As he had explained to Holly earlier, he had been extensively briefed by senior TMC and RMC advisors during the journey from the station on how to reverse the romosphere’s expansion.

  A series of instructions for initiating the reversion procedure had been saved to Grav’s wristband, from which they could be projected to the HUD of his suit’s helmet to enable him to perform the necessary actions. This had the obvious benefit of removing his dependence on fallible human memory during a situation in which both the stress level and the stakes would be as high as they came.

  Holly knew that Grav’s ability to access the crucial parts of the system and make the necessary changes would depend on the accuracy of a few more security codes, each of which was much longer than the door entry code and each of which he had been given by TMC officials. Since the expected combination had indeed worked on the bunker’s entry keypad, neither Holly nor Grav saw any reason to expect that these further codes would pose any problems; experience had proven that a code used for a particular function on one romosphere would routinely be used for the same function on another.

  When Grav brought the system to life at the flick of a switch hidden in precisely the expected place, his confidence rose further.

  “It should be fine from here,” he said, openly sharing this confidence with Holly. “They told me exactly what they would have done if this had been possible as a remote fix. The only problem was a lack of access to the system controls — i.e. a lack of remote communication — but now that we have physical access, we have transcended that problem. I have a series of around thirty simple actions, from button presses to code entries, and from there we are good, Hollywood. We are good.”

  “I’m going to check inside the storage compartments,” Holly said. “You’re following instructions to the letter, right? I might as well do something else while you do that.” She then crouched down under the main console’s desk-like surface and felt around for a dial which she hoped would open the magnetic locks on the storage unit’s individual compartments. It was right there, just like on Terradox, and the compartments unlocked without delay.

  “Okay,” Grav said. “Over here, everything so far is going as expected.”

  Holly approached the storage unit and began looking inside each compartment.

  Like on Terradox, most were empty. But, like on Terradox, some weren’t. The first thing Holly found was a familiar looking first-aid kit. She lowered it to the ground and kept looking.

  “No way,” she said excitedly a few moments later, grabbing the contents of the second occupied compartment and holding the front of the newly discovered object outwards for Grav to see.

  Grav momentarily turned away from his console and smiled as he read the words on Holly’s binder: “Emergency Survival Guide — for use in case of catastrophic power failure.”

  Holly couldn’t help but think back to the moment when the corresponding binder had been discovered on Terradox; most of what the group learned was negative, but learning it had greatly assisted in their successful escape and particularly in Yury Gardev’s courageous uncloaking of the Terradox romosphere itself.

  A brief glance at this new binder’s table of contents revealed identical headings to those found in the T
erradox version of the manual, including the likes of “Troubleshooting”, “Zonal Blending”, and “Gravity Control”. The information within these sections would no longer be a surprise and would not contribute to the current task at hand, so Holly closed the binder for now to focus on the remaining compartments.

  “The system control passcode worked,” Grav said, maintaining a calm demeanour even as this obstacle — perhaps the largest left — fell at his feet.

  Holly walked towards him and looked at the console’s screen. After Grav navigated a few more menus, following his step-by-step instructions all the way, a series of complex and busily annotated diagrams appeared.

  “Bingo,” Grav said. This single word reassured Holly that the indecipherable-to-her data was what he had expected and wanted to see. “There is the problem,” he added, directing her attention to an exclamation mark next to an arrow pointing outwards from what looked like a spherical representation of Netherdox. He then moved his finger to a series of steadily rising numbers in the corner of the large display.

  “So the system knows that the romosphere is expanding too quickly?” Holly surmised from the images and data before her.

  “Exactly. And that is a very good thing, Hollywood. This saves us a few steps and means that we are perhaps only one minute from victory.”

  Holly watched in rapt attention as Grav made his way through a few final menu screens. New warning messages appeared in progressively larger text and progressively stronger terms with each press of a button.

  Grav then had to enter a long passcode one final time before being granted access to the option they’d come for: INITIATE EMBRYONIC REVERSION.

  “You can press it if you like, Hollywood,” Grav said, turning to face her. “God knows I would not be sitting in this chair if it was not for you.”