The Fall of Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  The remainder of the journey to the Karrier passed quickly and uneventfully. By the time the rover reached the ground under the cargo hatch and ascended with the aid of the magnetic claw, Holly was positively itching to get out of her EVA suit.

  thirty-nine

  Viola and Robert Harrington stood at the Karrier’s inner air seal, waiting to greet the returning group once they had removed their suits and gone through the brief but thorough decontamination procedures which were necessary before re-entering the main body of the Karrier.

  Both greeted Holly warmly but naturally focused their affection on Bo. Viola embraced Peter when he entered along with Grav, who was still fighting to hide the pain that came with every step.

  As everyone made their way to the control room to see Dimitar and catch up with the latest developments, which they all hoped would include contact with Rusev and the TMC, Viola hung back and began to walk alongside Sakura.

  “So let me get this straight,” she said, making no effort to sound anything but accusative. “Your dad invented romotech, which let Morrison rise to the top of the GU and cause a lot of death and misery along the way, not to mention almost cause a lot more — which would have actually happened if it wasn’t for what the rest of us did on Terradox. With me so far?”

  Sakura looked dumbstruck, caught completely off guard.

  Viola continued. “And then you were on the team that invented this group dynamics romodroid social hierarchy thing that Dimitar just told me about, right? The thing that’s now being used in robot killing squads? But you want me to believe that neither you or your dad had any idea what your work was being used for… that you were both totally innocent and didn’t just jump off Morrison’s ship like rats when you knew he was going down?”

  “Listen, sweetheart,” Sakura said, exasperated rather than condescending, “I don’t really give a shit what you think of me. I worked at one of Morrison’s firms just like Holly did and just like your mother did. And as for the here and now, just ask Bo or Peter if they’re glad I’m here, okay?”

  “Don’t you ever talk about my mum again,” Viola said.

  Sakura shrugged slightly. “I wasn’t trying to upset you,” she said, halfway to an apology. “But you did mention my dad.”

  “He invented romotech! My mum died trying to expose Morrison’s lies. Your dad lived his whole life covering them up!”

  Sakura stopped walking and gently held Viola’s arm to stop her, too. “You’re right to be suspicious,” she said. “I’m the only person here who you didn’t already know, and I know all about what happened with Dante Parker on Terradox. But if you’re looking for another traitor, you’re looking in the wrong place. And I really would appreciate it if you could stop implying that my dad knew something he didn’t.”

  Just as Holly was set to intervene to make sure that Viola dropped the point, Peter interjected with the same intention. He tilted his head slightly in a friendly manner to encourage Sakura to walk away. “She risked her life to help Bo,” he said to Viola. “She ran outside into a dangerous situation just to stand with him until Holly and Grav could get there. She almost died, Viola. If you don’t trust her, please trust me when I tell you that you should. She is okay. She is with us.”

  Viola looked down the corridor towards Sakura, a hint of regret tinging her expression. Holly decided that now was the time to get involved; she had wanted to let Viola express her natural doubts and to allow Sakura to defend herself as she was not just perfectly capable of but also very used to doing, but it was now time to ensure that Viola didn’t feel too much guilt over what were very reasonable suspicions.

  After considering for a few seconds which tack she should take, Holly opted for an element of truthful humour. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I remember how much of a brat you were to me when we first met, even though all I was doing was risking my life to save yours. And we ended up okay, didn’t we?”

  “Shut up,” Viola replied, trying not to laugh. “That was only because you rugby-tackled me.”

  “If by rugby-tackled you mean saved your life…”

  “Ladies, ladies, ladies,” Peter groaned in mock irritation. “How many times must I hear the same story?”

  With the tension broken, Sakura and Viola were soon exchanging half-nods of peace across the control room as Dimitar Rusev began his rundown of the group’s current situation now that everyone was once again gathered in one place.

  Disappointingly, there had still been no contact with either Terradox or the Venus station. Dimitar insisted that the clouds were still clearing and estimated that it would be a further ten minutes before they were fully dispersed and contact could be established.

  “Secondly,” Dimitar said, “our latest high-altitude mapping has detected four small rectangular structures which appear consistent with something mentioned in the binder found inside the bunker. Holly, did you miss the section on Charging? It mentions the romodroids as well as these structures.”

  “I didn’t read the whole thing,” Holly said. “We did have quite a lot going on out there, you know.”

  Dimitar chuckled, slightly uneasily given Holly’s unamused tone. “A fair point. But one of the headings is Charging, and that section of the binder details the location of four romodroid charging points. From what I can gather, direct solar charging isn’t possible on Netherdox but the external cloak gathers solar energy and transmits it to the ground at a handful of points. The romodroids, as well as the autonomous vehicles, connect to charging ports at these points. Fortunately, although the map covers the entirety of Netherdox — pre-expansion — it appears that all of the charging points are sufficiently close to the bunker to be on the same ‘tier’. This makes sense if we assume that the core function of these autonomous guards is to protect the bunker. And given their relative proximity to our current location as well as to one another, I believe it is worth attempting to destroy these charging ports.”

  “Why?” Grav asked. Judging by the expressions around the room, the question could have come from anyone. “The robots aren’t going to go into the bunker and undo my changes. Be real, Dimitar.”

  “With respect, Goran, I’d appreciate it if you would mind your tone.”

  “Tell me how to fucking speak, will you?”

  Holly put a hand on Grav’s back to remind him that she was there, astounded by how automatically he could flip when he felt even slightly belittled or slighted. His posture relaxed at the touch of her hand.

  “All I was saying…” Dimitar went on, composing himself, “is that it’s not beyond possibility that one of these autonomous vehicles or romodroids might damage the bunker, perhaps halting the embryonic reversion. Alternatively, they might try to attack our Karrier when we launch. It seems reasonable to me that any other hostile machines on this romosphere could be inside their large box-like charging ports. If we decisively attack them, they can’t attack us.”

  “Get them where they sleep,” Grav nodded, seemingly over the perceived slight of a few moments earlier. “I like it. Now, is this the part when you tell me that the ports are outside of the Karrier’s range? The part where you ask me to drive out there in the rover and take care of it?”

  “I would never ask that of anyone,” Dimitar said, “but I do think it’s the best course of action. However, I am volunteering for the task.”

  Grav shook his head. “This is my mission. I will do it.”

  Though Dimitar’s initial offer to volunteer had struck Holly as perfectly sincere, his lack of arguing with Grav’s counter-offer gave her second thoughts.

  No one tried to talk Grav out of it, partly because they knew he wouldn’t listen and partly because they knew that clearing the surface of hostile forces before launching the Karrier was an absolute necessity.

  The voice which broke the silence belonged to Bo Harrington. “I’ll drive while you fire,” he suggested. “That’s the safest way.”

  “Not this time, junior,” Grav said, his manner leaving n
o doubt that the decision was final and saving Viola and Robert the trouble of telling Bo there was no way he was going back out. “Thank you — I mean that: thank you — but I cannot put you in that kind of danger again. All I am going to do is drive in a straight line and fire from a distance, so this is something I can do myself. The rover’s most basic functions are not too difficult.”

  Bo accepted the answer, but Holly had zero doubt that his offer of assistance had been an earnest one.

  Grav continued: “While I am gone, Holly is in charge. If anyone does not like that, feel free to wait outside. She has the wheel and she has final say — on everything. Oh, and Dimitar, if I do not come back…”

  “You will,” Dimitar said.

  “But if I do not… I want you to know that it is my express desire for Peter to become the new head of station security. Everyone else just heard me say that, too, in case you misremember. Now, Peter, I want you to take scans of the binder’s pages while I get back into my suit, because I am taking it with me in case I need the information and there is any kind of communications problem.”

  Everyone crowded around Peter and the binder while Grav quickly got ready for another excursion. Holly was the only one looking at the control room’s door when he came back in, fully suited and booted in a fresh EVA suit. They shared a knowing ‘what can you say?’ kind of glance.

  Holly walked over to him. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Kill or be killed, Hollywood,” he said, maintaining frame as always. “Kill or be killed.”

  “Kill and come back,” she replied. “Okay?”

  Grav winked and patted Holly’s shoulder on his way past to talk to the others. “Peter, the binder,” he said.

  Everyone turned in response to Grav’s voice and said their farewell-for-nows, one at a time.

  Peter, having finally scanned the last few pages of the binder, was last to rise to his feet. When he did, he gave the binder to Grav then extended a hand. “It has been a great honour, sir.”

  Grav swatted it away. “Put your hand in your pocket, boy. I am not dead yet.”

  forty

  Everyone in the Karrier eagerly crowded around the screens in the control room to watch the live images from the drone which was following Grav’s rover as he attempted to decisively ensure that Netherdox was cleared of all hostile vehicles and romodroids ahead of the group’s imminent departure.

  Even with the rover travelling at full speed, it took a frustrating number of minutes for Grav to draw close enough to the first of the four identified charging ports to launch a strike. Working on the assumption that two teams of romodroids wouldn’t need four isolated charging points, Dimitar told Grav to expect that at least two of the ports would each contain at least three romodroids and one alpha, as both Sakura and the binder had termed the far larger autonomous vehicles.

  After successfully blitzing the first enclosed charging port, which was larger than expected and easily the size of a typical family home, Grav waited a few minutes to ensure that nothing crawled out of the wreckage. Satisfied, he set off to the next port.

  “It is going well so far,” he said, stating the obvious in an unusually upbeat tone. “One down, three to go.”

  Shortly after “one down, three to go” became “two down, two to go”, Dimitar excitedly reported that a green LED on the radio console suggested that contact with the station had been established and that a message would likely come through inside the next minute or so, depending on the precise delay caused by the distance. A connection with Terradox, which was much closer than the station, had not yet been established. Dimitar assured the others that this was nothing to worry about and was perhaps down to the signal-blocking clouds in one direction not being quite so fully dispersed as those in the other.

  Dimitar decided to deliver a message to the station before receiving one. “We believe that our mission has been a success,” he announced. “Grav and Holly entered the bunker and accessed the systems without injury, and our data so far suggests that the Netherdox romosphere has begun its reversion to an embryonic state. We seek confirmation of these findings.”

  While Dimitar’s message was on the way to the station, a full two-way video connection was established and Ekaterina Rusev’s face appeared on the chat screen.

  “From here it looks as though you have succeeded,” Rusev said. “The difference is slight, but we believe that the expansion of Netherdox has halted and begun to reverse. We also see that you are all alive and well, according to the latest wristband data synced with the Karrier.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Viola said.

  Had the content of Rusev’s message come in text form, this statement would have seemed unfounded. But with the benefit of full video and audio, everyone knew that Viola was right. In stronger terms, Holly had a feeling that something big was very seriously wrong.

  “However,” Rusev continued, knowing full well that the communications delay would make a back-and-forth exchange impractical and hence that delivering her news in one message was the best course of action, “within the last hour there has been an extremely negative development on Terradox. I don’t know who is in the control room right now, but I don’t want the children to see the images I’m about to send.”

  Though Bo and Viola were now 16 and 22, Rusev still routinely thought of and referred to them as “the children”. And although both had heard what she said and knew that she was obviously talking about them, neither budged or looked away.

  “Robert, Sakura,” Rusev continued, “you don’t have to see this, either. No one should have to see this, but my words alone could not describe the extent of what has happened… I can’t express it like the images can.”

  The forthcoming images were now so built up that Holly was sure they couldn’t really be as bad as Rusev was setting them up to be.

  How could they be?, she wondered. A fatal crash involving one or more touring vehicles was her first thought, and no better guess came in the seconds before the two images arrived on the screen, side by side.

  Harrowing was a word Holly had seen and heard applied to many things, but none merited it more than what she was now looking at. In the simplest terms, it was infinitely worse than she’d imagined.

  Peter protectively shielded Viola’s eyes from the screen as he looked away himself, disgusted and defeated by what he saw. Viola, having already caught a glimpse of the sickening sight, didn’t try to look again.

  Despite what Holly was looking at, and despite what she knew it meant, she didn’t feel anger. She couldn’t feel anger. Right now, grief and sorrow left no room for anger or anything else. Holly had experienced a lot in her time — countless gruesome up-close-and-personal sights, the smell of death, the feel of warm blood — but none of it compared to this.

  None of it came close.

  The still image on the left side of the screen showed a large group of petrified tourists and still-uniformed Terradox Resort staff members, all forcibly huddled together inside New Eden’s cavernous museum like frightened sheep. Front and centre, as though placed there on purpose for Holly’s viewing displeasure, she saw the little twins, CeCe and DeeDee Bouchard, grasping their mother Cherise with fearful and tearful expressions. Their father, Remy, sat at the back of the circle along with every other working-age male tourist and staff member, segregated for a reason which wasn’t yet clear to Holly but which she knew couldn’t be good.

  Holly then noticed that the women and children beside the Bouchards were from the other three lottery-winning families, two of which hailed from China and the other from Brazil. This gave her some justified hope that the Bouchards hadn’t been singled out for a front-row seat for any deeper reason than the colour of their status-signifying tourist lanyards, but at this stage nothing could be taken for granted.

  The large group of tourists and workers — the large group of hostages, as was by now painfully apparent — sat in a circle marked by tape on the floor. No captors were pictured, but the sc
ared eyes of countless tourists near the edges made it clear that those responsible for this horror were standing on the other side of the camera.

  Almost unbelievably, the image on the right was even worse.

  It contained another circle of people. This circle, on the ground directly in front of the entrance to the Yury Gardev Memorial Garden and within shouting distance of Terradox’s control bunker, was far less precise.

  The people in this stomach-churning circle wore no fearful expressions, for this circle contained what could only be described as a bundle of dead guards piled haphazardly in the afternoon sun.

  The size of the pile was bad enough, consisting of at least forty innocent young guards and their supervisors, but Holly immediately recognised two of the more visible faces: one belonged to the guard from her touring vehicle, the other to the helpful and friendly curly-haired guard who had been stationed at the top of the bunker’s stairway.

  The guards in the pile had been innocent young men and women, many of whom had taken their inherently dangerous jobs on an artificial planet nearer to Venus than Earth solely so they could send a portion of each large pay-cheque to their struggling families back home. And now they were dead.

  Dead and discarded like diseased cattle.

  Piled like rats in an alleyway.

  Even as Holly’s horror and disgust grew, anger at last found a foothold and began to boil over.

  “I am sure you can tell by now what you’re looking at,” Rusev said, her own voice breaking in the stress of the moment.

  Robert Harrington, already facing away from the screen, walked out of the room with his head in his hands and tears welling in the corners of his eyes.

  Rusev, still trying to get everything across in one single message, continued to the final line.

  “It is my unhappy duty to confirm and report that the TMC’s security forces have been infiltrated and eliminated,” she said, forcing out the terrible words. “Terradox has fallen.”