The Fall of Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  “It’s your mission,” she said with a smile and a tip of her head towards the button. “I’m just the getaway driver.”

  Grav laughed then rolled his shoulders a few times before hovering his finger over the button. “Okay, driver,” he said, exhaling deeply. “Start the engine…”

  thirty

  EXPANSION HALTED. REVERSION INITIATED.

  Neither Holly nor Grav spoke or moved for several seconds, both too busy staring at the positive message and wondering if it really could be this easy.

  “Can we talk to the station yet?” Holly asked, eventually breaking the silence. “They’ll be able to observe the reversion and that way we’d know for sure.”

  “The clouds should be dispersing as we speak,” Grav said. “Or fading, or parting… I do not know precisely what the process is called. But I began that process before this one, so it is underway. We will be able to communicate with Rusev and the others on the station very soon and, as you suggest, they should be able to tell us immediately whether this romosphere really is shrinking. It will be slow, but it will be discernible. We will have our own data very soon from the drones, and hopefully that will show a gradual reduction in the height of the cliffs and in the distance between them. Bo will direct the drones to check that out just as soon as Peter and Sakura arrive safely with the other rover to bring us back to the Karrier.”

  “Comm to rover one,” Holly said, deciding that now was as good a time as any to check up on Bo and how everything else was going. “Bo, is the other rover there yet?”

  “Almost,” he said. “Are you done? I can spare the light from at least one drone if you want me to check one of the cliffs?”

  “Go for it,” Holly said.

  “I’m on it,” Bo replied. “See you both soon.”

  Noticing that Grav was still following instructions and pressing buttons, Holly moved closer and looked over his shoulder at the screen. “What are we doing now?” she asked.

  “Just one more thing before we leave.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Changing the access and control codes,” Grav said, as though he would rather not have been pushed on it.

  “Why? And don’t give me another short answer so I have to ask another question; just tell me the whole thing.”

  “Okay, Hollywood. There is no further reason for alarm, which is why I saw no reason to mention this, but I am taking some precautionary measures. I am changing the codes to make sure that no one can undo our good work, because I do not buy the idea that this problem occurred by accident.”

  Holly considered Grav’s words — more expansive than his previous answers, but still not exhaustive — then replied with the only thought in her mind: “So if you think someone did it… who? Right now I don’t even care about the how. Tell me who.”

  Grav shrugged his shoulders. “Someone loyal to Morrison, I imagine. Someone outside of the TMC, for sure. If someone did this, I think they did it from Earth. The clouds began to thicken right before we noticed the pace of expansion picking up, so it looks to me like someone remotely accessed this system and did two things at once: they both quickened the expansion and created an effective communications barrier which meant that no one else could stop it.”

  It was a lot for Holly to take in. “Loyal to Morrison? Who the hell is loyal to Morrison?”

  “There are some groups,” Grav said, as though discussing something far more mundane. “They are monitored by security services on Earth. But I am sure you know my feelings on the difference in competence between Earth-based security services and those on Terradox and especially the station. For the record, there has been no discovery or surveillance of any Morrison loyalists who have given cause for concern, only a few small groups of former middle-management types who see a GU reformation as something worth striving for. They have some fringe political parties but these do not seem like the kind of people to do something like this. I believe there may be others, completely undetected, who do not just believe in the GU but will take any action necessary to once again destabilise the world sufficiently to create the kind of power vacuum that Morrison exploited in the first place. And somewhere in Australia there is another bunker: the one Morrison used to communicate with Dante when we were on Terradox. It has still never been found, so the possibility of remote control from Earth still exists; in theory, at least. That is why I am changing the codes.”

  “Do what you have to do,” Holly said.

  As Holly spoke, a notification appeared in her helmet’s HUD. She looked at the notification — a message stating that Bo was seeking to communicate directly with her and presumably Grav — for the requisite full second until Bo’s voice came through.

  “It worked!” Bo said, making no effort to temper his enthusiasm. “The cliffs are slowly shrinking. The expansion has stopped and the romosphere is reverting!”

  This confirmation of success sent a flood of relief coursing through Holly’s veins as it dawned on her that whatever happened next, Netherdox no longer posed a threat to anyone on the Venus station or Terradox. Ekaterina Rusev and her several thousand staff were safe. Little CeCe and DeeDee Bouchard, as well as their parents and every other tourist currently enjoying the Terradox Resort, were safe. Thanks to Grav’s plan and the entire group’s brave execution of it, everyone was safe.

  “What about the clouds?” Grav asked, as focused as ever. “Fading yet?”

  This time, Bo hesitated. “Maybe. I can’t tell yet. Sakura and Peter are here now so I’ll keep some drones trained on the clouds. Why are you guys still in there?”

  Grav theatrically pressed one final button then rose to his feet. “Finishing touches,” he said, turning to Holly and raising a thumb. “See you soon, junior.”

  Holly quickly returned to the storage unit on the far side of the bunker to check the remaining few compartments. Quickly disappointed by their emptiness, she looked inside the first-aid kit she had discovered before the binder. Tucked in amongst a large number of more standard remedies, an unusual orange bottle immediately caught her eye.

  When she lifted the large bottle and turned it around, she saw two words on its front label: INSTANT DEBONDER.

  “Do you think this is for the moat?” she asked, holding it towards Grav. “You know, like the bunker on Terradox had an antidote for those poisonous plants which were growing all around it?”

  “Maybe. Put it inside your bag with the binder; we can test it out on the rover.”

  As Holly unclipped and unrolled the emergency backpack from her shoulders, Grav spoke again in a confused tone. “Uh, Hollywood, why did you close the door?”

  She looked across the bunker. “I didn’t. It was wide open, right against the wall. Are you sure you didn’t close it? There was definitely no breeze or anything.”

  Grav said nothing; there was indeed zero wind at ground level, as they both knew. He walked over to the door and pulled the handle. It didn’t open. “Oh, shit.”

  “It can’t be locked…” Holly said.

  Grav held out his hand, inviting her to see for herself. She believed him.

  Immediately, Holly knew they had only two options: call for help, or blow their way out.

  “We have to blow our way out,” she decided. “Just like we would have blown our way in if the code didn’t work. It doesn’t make sense to have Sakura or Peter take the risk of crossing the moat when they don’t have to.”

  “Agreed,” Grav said. “The weakest charge should be enough. If not, we will progressively work our way through the rest. But I have to say something: I am less concerned about being able to blow our way out of here than I am about why we have to do so. Neither of us closed that door and there is no wind to speak of.”

  “Maybe it’s automatic? Timed to close after being open for a certain length of time?”

  “Hollywood!” Grav suddenly yelled, backing away from her towards the locked door. “Behind you!”

  Holly’s neck turned like a dog’s to a whist
le, alarmed by the sudden urgency in Grav’s voice. With one look, she could understand it.

  From invisible pores in the wall beside the storage unit, she saw a slightly yellow gas flowing into the enclosed bunker.

  “We walked into a fucking trap,” Grav said, sounding scared rather than angry for the first time Holly could remember.

  A low but unmissable alarm began to fill Holly’s ears, piped directly through her helmet as her EVA suit detected a sudden and worrying deterioration in the atmosphere around it.

  A critical deterioration in air quality, Holly noted with great anxiety; a deterioration from merely unbreathable to positively corrosive.

  “Are you seeing this, Hollywood?” Grav yelled. “Are you seeing this warning? We are being poisoned!”

  thirty-one

  “Yeah, I see the warning!” Holly confirmed, frantically running towards Grav and helping him rifle through the bag which contained their explosive charges.

  “Stand as far back as you can,” was all he said. “We are going big.”

  Holly ignored Grav’s suggestion to stand back and instead assisted him in attaching several charges to the door; despite the previous plan, they had no time to start small and work their way up. And likewise, despite the inherent risk of utilising explosive charges when surrounded by increasing concentrations of an unknown gas, the corrosive nature of that gas left them with no option but to take this highly unpalatable risk.

  As the air in the bunker became further contaminated by the incoming toxic gas with each passing second and the warnings in their HUDs now suggested that its corrosiveness would soon overwhelm their suits, for Holly and Grav it was now or never — all or nothing.

  With the charges in place, they both sprinted to the bunker’s back wall as quickly as they could and crouched for cover before Grav pressed the button to execute the charges.

  They didn’t hear the booming sound as deafeningly as they would have without their helmets’ smart sound filters, but both Holly and Grav felt the full power of the combined blast despite its hushed volume. Fortunately, the carefully placed charges worked as intended and blew the door outwards off its hinges; very little debris landed inside the bunker and none reached as far as the rear wall they were huddling against.

  “Go go go!” Grav said, though Holly was already ahead of him.

  On her way up the stairway, Holly heard another bang. While again somewhat muted by her helmet, the fact that this bang was almost as loud as the combined explosion of several powerful charges was great reason for alarm. Even greater reason for alarm was the unanswered question of what had caused this bang.

  At the top of the stairway, Holly looked back in the direction it sounded like the bang had come from. She was at least relieved that it seemed to have come from the opposite direction to the rovers and the more distant Karrier, but she didn’t like the fact that she couldn’t see any potential source of the explosion.

  And then she realised the real problem: she couldn’t see anything.

  An illuminating drone had been positioned above the bunker, yet the entire area was now pitch dark other than the light from Holly and Grav’s helmets and a faint glow from the nearest rover.

  “Jesus, Hollywood,” Grav said. “Look: the drone! It fell from the sky.”

  Holly followed the beam of Grav’s headlamp and, sure enough, she saw one of the mapping drones lying in pieces.

  “Comm to rover one,” Grav barked. “Bo, we need a status report on the drone which was hovering above the bunker. It has failed, possibly in reaction to the blast we generated to escape the bunker. Was there a material change in the air immediately surrounding it?”

  “Not that the drone reported,” Bo replied. “I can’t explain why it failed but I’ll send another one your way so you can see where you’re going. Why did you need to escape, anyway? What happened in there?

  “The door became locked,” Grav said, being vague not deliberately but rather because he lacked a more decisive way to put it.

  “Oh. Well, anyway, hurry up and get here. I’ve just sent another drone.”

  As Bo promised, another mapping drone approached to light Holly and Grav’s way as they began the short trip back to the moat-stricken rover.

  “It may have been caused by a change in air composition following the release of whatever gas was flooding into the bunker,” Grav said. “The failure of the drone, that is. I am not convinced, but right now I cannot think of a better explan—”

  Another bang, as loud as the last, cut Grav off mid-sentence.

  “So what about that one?” Holly said, frightened by the sight of another drone falling to the ground around 100 metres ahead of her.

  A notification then appeared in her HUD, alerting her again of an incoming message from Bo. She looked at it for a second as she ran.

  “Get the hell out of there right now!” Bo yelled. “Run faster! Get to the rover!”

  “Junior, what the hell is going on?” Grav asked, bursting into an uncomfortable sprint.

  “The drones aren’t failing because of the atmosphere,” Bo said breathlessly, full-blown panic in his voice. “Something is shooting them down!”

  thirty-two

  “Repeat that,” Grav barked, sure he must have misheard.

  “Something is shooting down the drones,” Bo insisted. “I just saw it! The one that just went down was hit from below. I don’t know what by, but it was something. And whatever it is, it’s a lot closer to you than it is to me, so you need to run faster!”

  Holly didn’t know what to make of this; her primary and unvoiced feeling was uncertainty as to how Bo could be so sure it was something as opposed to someone.

  But with Bo so confident that whatever — or whoever — was responsible for the shooting remained situated on the far side of the bunker, Grav had an idea.

  “Run to the other rover, junior,” he ordered, speaking between pained breaths as his body, not built for running, carried him towards relative safety as quickly as it could. “Every second counts, but be careful stepping down. And add yourself to our comms link before you step outside. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  “Comm to rover two,” Grav then said, establishing a direct connection to Peter and Sakura in the second rover, which was waiting a short but safe distance behind the first. “Stay where you are and be ready to leave as soon as Bo reaches you,” he went on. “If it looks necessary, leave without us.”

  “Comm to rover two, do not even think about leaving without Bo,” Holly added. “We’ll be there as soon as we can. Like Grav said: if you think it’s too dangerous to wait for us, don’t. But you do not leave without Bo.”

  “I would never,” Peter Ospanov’s deep voice assured her.

  As Holly and Grav continued to run away from the bunker and towards the waiting rover, she suddenly noticed how far he had fallen behind.

  “Go,” he yelled, gesturing forward with his hand as she turned to see him. “I will get there when I get there.”

  Holly now noticed Grav’s severe limp, greatly favouring the leg whose calf muscle had been sliced apart like kebab meat by ruthless GU militants many years earlier in an unsuccessful attempt to extract information. More than anyone Holly had ever known, Grav liked to keep all pain and discomfort to himself. She couldn’t imagine the pain he must have been feeling right now, which made his success in hiding it as well as he had all the more remarkable.

  She jogged back towards him and offered to proceed with an arm around his neck; this would slow her own progress considerably, of course, but given that she had no plans of leaving without Grav it would speed up their ultimate arrival at the rover. Carrying him this kind of distance would have been out of the question even if they hadn’t been wearing EVA suits, so this was the best she could do.

  Not unexpectedly, Grav rejected the offer by stubbornly pushing Holly away and continuing to grimace with every difficult step.

  “I’m going to wait for you, anyway,” Ho
lly said, more than a little irritated by his proud refusal to be sensible. “You can slow me down a lot by being a stubborn asshole or you can slow me down a little by letting me help you. Because I’m not going on without you, just like you wouldn’t go on without me.”

  Grav sighed, knowing he had no suitable retort. “Engage your C-Suit,” he said. “If you are going to be slowed down, you should have full protection. The minor loss of mobility will not slow you down any further, so it makes sense to at least have the added physical protection.”

  Holly engaged her C-Suit in the manner Grav had earlier demonstrated to the whole group. Immediately she felt the increase in rigidity and the accompanying minor reduction in joint flexibility. The full-suit modification would make it more difficult to run but would protect her against any non-explosive conventional fire; in this sense, it offered the same general pros and cons as a suit of armour.

  Holly was surprised by the level of the modification; despite no visible changes, it really did feel like she was wearing something else.

  “What about your C-Suit?” she asked.

  Grav tapped his bad leg. “No way, Hollywood. If you think I am slow now…”

  “What about Bo? Should we tell him to engage his?”

  “No again. All he needs is speed; he is already much closer to the rover and much further from the source of fire than we are. The fire probably came from an automatic anti-aircraft system built into the roof of the bunker, anyway, which would mean that we have nothing to worry about on the ground.”

  With Bo’s rover looming larger with each step and the drone above it still intact and operational, a notification in Holly’s HUD confirmed that the boy had added himself to their automatic comms link. A second or two later, he told her that he was about to step out of the rover and descend the ladder on its far side.

  “Did you make it?” she asked him, no longer needing the ‘Comm to rover one’ keyphrase.