Holly then somewhat reluctantly responded to a time call from Grav and performed a brief final walk around the others, offering heartfelt if less emotional goodbyes before returning again to Viola.
“We really need to go,” she said, struggling to look away once her eyes were back on Viola, who in so many heart-wrenching ways felt like the daughter she’d never had.
Viola was no longer crying and was instead now making a conscious effort to remember every little detail of Holly’s face. This final farewell was difficult, but since it was one she hadn’t expected to have she was taking every second of it as a bonus.
“We’re going to continue what you started,” she said, pleasantly surprising Holly with a strong tone. “I’m going to continue what you started, and I’m not going to stop until I do you proud.”
This was more than a platitude and had in fact been a driving force for Viola for a decade; because before there was Chase Jackson, understandably seen by many as the anointed chosen one, Holly had shown remarkable faith in Viola from an even younger age. And just like the richly deserving and always grateful Chase, Viola would do whatever it took to show Holly she was right to have believed in her.
“You do me proud every single day,” Holly said, for once the more emotional of the two. “Just stay true to yourself and keep trusting your gut, okay? The rest will take care of itself.”
“I love you all,” Grav said loudly, capturing everyone’s attention as he gently pulled Holly away towards the doorway that would soon reseal. The windowed partition closed before the airlock, giving all of the future Arkadians one last view of the two people they would miss more than any others.
“Thanks for everything,” Viola said, greatly over-enunciating the words so that Holly could make them out through the glass.
Holly smiled warmly, not at all forlornly, and gave a slow wink in reply.
Combined with the proud look on her face, it said more than words ever could.
twenty
The Ferrier’s descent towards the Arkadian surface involved no instantaneous passage through an invisibility cloak, as some of its passengers had experienced elsewhere in less positive contexts, but this did nothing to reduce the feelings of awe-struck wonder among all of those who watched their gargantuan new world gain detail and fill more of the Ferrier’s viewing windows with each passing second.
The largely unseen crew of pilots had made several cargo runs in recent months and guided the Ferrier towards its landing spot beside the straightforwardly named Arkadia Central Station with no difficulties.
Their vantage point, like that of their passengers, revealed a distinct but not unexpected lack of fanfare on the ground. Indeed, there was no fanfare at all and literally no one to be seen. Although Rachel Berry and a small number of other Arkadians had arrived early, all of them were there to do a job and clearly none of those jobs involved welcoming and greeting the arriving VIPs.
No one particularly noticed the absence of a welcoming party, however, such was the sheer wonder of the blank canvas before them. Arkadia was the epitome of human ingenuity — a whole world borne of human ingenuity — and all of the adults who took it in understood how privileged they were. The children were quite understandably more expressive in their excitement, bounding around between different windows to take in as many aerial views as they could before the ever-nearing touchdown.
That touchdown, which came with remarkable smoothness, was greeted by cheers and applause all round.
“I’m more than willing to be the last one out,” Chase said as the initial hubbub faded while the others got ready to make their move. “I was lucky enough to be first on my earlier landing.”
“Rub it in, why don’t you,” young Vijay Kohli laughed as he positioned himself near the front of the crowd. He didn’t go all the way to the front, seemingly respecting an unspoken ’youngest first’ setup that saw Katie and Patch eagerly leading the way. No one had told Vijay to do this and Peter knew how keen he was to get onto the surface, so the self-managed patience and kindness spoke well of him.
As the Ferrier’s outer hatch slid open, the overwhelming thought in most minds was that Arkadia looked an awful lot like Terradox. This was no accident, with the landing area having been built with Terradox’s in mind, but Chase knew that the similarities largely ended there. Once the others saw more of their new home they would realise that the craggy terrain of Terradox was utterly absent, with vast plains as flat as any they could imagine ready to greet them in almost every conceivable direction.
With varying degrees of ecstatic impatience, each of the Ferrier’s passengers made their way down the gently sloped exit ramp and touched foot on their new home.
The three children in the party bounded around like gazelles, with Vijay’s unrestrained exuberance making him fit in perfectly with the much younger Katie and Patch. The latter pair had never even set foot on Terradox, while Vijay couldn’t remember ever setting foot anywhere else.
Regardless of where they had come from, everyone on Arkadia was delighted to be there.
As the grown-ups took in their new surroundings somewhat more sedately, Chase’s eyes fell on a parked group of TE-900 multi-terrain vehicles which were modelled on the old Explorers from the days of the ill-fated Terradox Resort.
“Does anyone feel like a quick tour before it gets dark?” he asked loudly, directing his offer squarely to the children.
They reacted with predictable glee, all three quickly turning to their respective parents and letting their expressions do the begging.
Viola and Kayla looked at each other for a few seconds before agreeing that Katie and Patch could go, while Peter and Vic nodded in assent without the need for any such deliberation. The Kohlis authorised Vijay’s participation in the unplanned tour just as quickly, but Romesh added that he was keen to get everything out of the Ferrier and into their new family home before darkness fell. His wife Farrah voiced her agreement with this plan, as did Viola and the Hawthornes.
Nisha, sensing this was a good time for Chase to get to know Katie and Patch and that her closeness to Viola would give her plenty of similar opportunities, chimed in to say that she would stay on the ground to move her and Chase’s things into their new home just as the others were all doing.
It was certainly the case that having the children eagerly occupied by Chase’s aerial tour would make the task of transporting luggage easier than it would otherwise have been, so the spur-of-the-moment idea was keenly received by everyone.
While Viola said something about important supplies and went to grab a few bottles of water from the Ferrier for the kids to take with them, Chase turned to Peter, who was standing right next to him and was the only person yet to state his intention.
“How about you, sheriff?” he asked. “Coming along for the ride?”
“I don’t have the best memories of those things,” Peter said under his breath, his voice solemn.
“Why?” Chase asked, understandably enough.
Peter exhaled deeply, discomfort tinging his typically stoic expression. “Holly and I had to fill one of them with the bodies of the guards that Boyce’s men massacred. They’d been lying in the sun for far too long, piled up like rats.” He shook his head and looked to the ground. “That kind of thing doesn’t leave you.”
As a relative latecomer to Holly’s inner circle and a veteran of only one near-disaster, it was sometimes difficult for Chase to bear in mind just how much the likes of Peter and Viola had gone through before he came to prominence within Little Venus’s Isolation Kompound.
And although people often spoke of him and Peter in similar tones, particularly those who had grown up during Peter’s seven quiet years on Earth, Chase Jackson knew he had a long way to go before he deserved to be considered on anything close to an equal footing. In decision-making terms they were officially equals as per the terms of Arkadia’s founding constitution, which gave each of them and Viola one deciding vote versus Robert’s two in any situat
ion where a consensus couldn’t be reached, but Chase nevertheless looked up to Peter in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“Everything you guys have done over the years is what brought us here,” he said, trying to comfort Peter with the only words he could think of before clapping his hands together and using a far more upbeat tone to encourage the children to follow him to their touring vehicle.
None of the three so much as looked back at their parents before boarding.
“Don’t be too late,” Viola said to Chase as she handed him the water and emergency supplies she’d gathered from the Ferrier. “And Katie, do whatever Chase says. He’s the boss today, okay?”
“So who’s the boss tomorrow?” Chase whispered.
Viola, caught off-guard by this playful reply, used a hand to cover her face during an instant outburst of laughter. Still smiling widely, she drew a triangle in the air between the two of them and Peter. “If we disagree on something, my dad. But you already know that as well as I do.”
“Well I’m gonna use the next few hours to win the youth vote, so my time will come,” he winked. Viola chuckled as she walked away.
As effortlessly as the TE-900 then took to the sky under his capable control, Chase fell into his role as Arkadia’s first ever tour guide. His audience could hardly have been more interested, meaning that he didn’t have to say much.
“Do these fields go on forever?” Patch Hawthorne asked, gazing around in every direction.
“It sure feels like it,” Chase said, thinking that ‘fields’ was a fair enough term for what he thought of as plains, “but there’s a lot more to this place than you can see right now.”
Before too long the TE-900 passed over a relatively small area of water that Chase didn’t recall from his previous flyover a year earlier. He wasn’t following a set route so couldn’t be sure he had crossed this exact piece of land — Arkadia was enormous, as everyone was now seeing with their own eyes — but curiosity got the better of him and led to a change of course directly for the area in question.
This closer vantage point revealed that the water was something akin to a moat, although its size relative to the patch of land in its centre made him think it was more like a pond with an island in the middle. It finally clicked when he noticed the presence of some medium-sized buildings at the shoreline.
“This is where the chimps live,” he said, an authority in his voice belying that fact that he’d only just realised this. “They can’t swim, so an island makes sense. Who wants to go lower for a better view?”
To put it mildly, the children weren’t as enthused at this prospect as he’d expected.
“You know what chimps are, right?” he pushed. “Chimpanzees? The really smart monkeys?”
“Really smart apes,” Katie said, sporting a self-aware grin that said she knew the correction would make her sound like a know-it-all. “But yeah, they have those on Earth, too…”
“Gotcha,” Chase said, momentarily having forgotten that the novelty of Arkadia was the whole reason for their general excitement. “Don’t worry, though, the next big thing we’ll see is something they definitely don’t have on Earth.”
This led to guesses and fidgeting in the passenger seats behind Chase while he took a final look down at Chimp Island. His knowledge of the non-invasive tests and observations that would be carried out on the chimpanzee colony was very limited, but his faith in the project was strong. This was because he knew the chimps would be primarily monitored and cared for by a young primatologist named Yannika, an early arrival from Terradox. Chase had spent some time with Yannika in recent years, initially through his closeness to her fiancé Bradley Reinhart, an already high-ranking communications officer who had made the move at the same time.
Chase was eagerly looking forward to seeing them both again, just as he was looking forward to meeting the many thousands of pioneering Arkadians who would imminently be arriving from Earth.
During the approach to Chase’s next chosen point of interest — Arkadia’s enormous Shipyard — the children continued to gaze out in wide-eyed wonder at the sheer scale of their new home. With their imaginations unbound by convention and their creative visions unbroken by the boring reality of consensus-based planning meetings, some of their ideas for ways to utilise the land under their feet had Chase nodding his head in approval.
Just as Holly and Grav were confident that Arkadia was safe in the hands of Viola, Peter and Chase, Chase himself was now very much getting the sense that the next generation would prove just as capable. And while he had already experienced his own wondrous first flight over Arkadia, the strength and longevity of the children’s excitement was allowing him to relive the feelings all over again.
Rachel, Chase’s companion during his groundbreaking Arkadian voyage, was another individual he was greatly looking forward to seeing. Her work in the Shipyard had been ongoing for months and would soon culminate in the launch of a probe towards the nearby asteroid known as NGB-2. Updates on that mission had been non-existent for a while, but he had no reason to think there had been any complications; and with so many skilled people involved, he couldn’t imagine many scenarios which could have held them back.
“Here it comes,” he said as the Shipyard first appeared on the horizon. The next few minutes revealed that a great deal of development had occurred in the past year. “We’re going to see it in a minute…”
But as the TE-900 arrived and passed over the central section of the Shipyard, Chase’s mood fell slightly — not because of anything he saw, but because of what he didn’t see.
“Sorry guys,” he said, only semi-aware that he was by far the most disappointed person inside the TE-900. “I thought we would see the probe. But this place is still pretty cool, right? Especially the giant inverted launch area. Look at the size of that hole, dug into the ground. That’s where everything launches from. There are underground offices and observation rooms looking into the middle of that pit… maybe one day we’ll all be allowed to check it out on foot. Would you guys like that?”
“Were you talking about the probe they made to check out the asteroid?” Katie asked, interrupting his focus on the hole, having politely waited for him to finish talking. “Because that’s already gone.”
Chase turned to face her, the vehicle under his charge safely cruising in an empty sky. “Gone where?”
Katie looked at him like he was crazy. “Uh, to the asteroid.”
“It’s supposed to be already here, not already gone. I think maybe you misheard something. They might have cloaked it for some reason, or they could be working on it somewhere else.”
“I didn’t hear it wrong,” Katie insisted.
With her tone leaving little room for doubt, even though Katie was as young as she was, Chase started to think she was right. “So who did you hear it from?”
“My mum, right after Holly told her about it. Are you sure she didn’t tell you too, and maybe you just forgot?”
“Probably,” Chase nodded carefully. “There have been a lot of things to think about lately, so it’s pretty easy to forget some of them.”
Even though this particular conversation-ending lie was as innocent as they came, dishonesty didn’t come easily to Chase Jackson. It clearly didn’t come easily to Katie Ospanov, either, given that she had blurted the truth out without hesitation or consideration.
“I didn’t know it was gone…” Vijay chimed in, a hint of concern in his voice. He naturally knew more details about certain projects than the much younger children, particularly given that his parents and sister had all been high-ranking colonists on Terradox. Chase sent him a reassuring wink via the rear-view mirror, telling him they would talk about it and clear it up once they got back to the others.
The rest of the children’s impromptu tour passed with no further surprises, with Chase managing to keep a lid on his somewhat troubled curiosity regarding the expedited probe launch that had been kept from him. It didn’t go unnoticed tha
t Vijay managed to avoid mentioning it, either, and Chase found himself impressed once again. The two naturally saw a lot of each other given Chase’s relationship with Vijay’s sister Nisha, and they got along very well. Certainly better than Chase had been getting along with Romesh Kohli of late, but that was the last thing he wanted to think about right now.
Katie and Patch were both feeling tired by the time Chase landed the TE-900 under the gentle streetlights of Starview Springs, the remarkably expansive residential area they would now call home. Chase had kept in touch with their parents so the landing was expected, with everyone gathered at the landing site and ready to thank him for keeping them occupied and getting them back safely.
They all wore glowing expressions, clearly elated with their new homes. Chase quietly called Nisha to his side while the others gathered around Katie and Patch to ask all about what they’d seen.
“Everything okay?” Nisha asked, seeing something in Chase’s eyes that suggested it wasn’t.
“Did anyone tell you that they’ve already launched the probe?” he asked, straight to the point.
Nisha instinctively turned to look at the others, as if checking whether anyone had overheard. “What are you talking about?” she whispered in reply as soon as she turned back around. “Are you saying the probe is already gone?”
That was enough for Chase. He had never for a second thought Nisha might have been keeping it from him on purpose, but her visible surprise ruled out any possibility that she had merely forgotten. “I couldn’t see it out at the Shipyard and Katie said Holly told Viola a while ago. The next question is why.”
“Viola knows?” Nisha asked, her eyes widening.
Chase nodded.
Nisha then raised her voice more than slightly and beckoned Bo over, catching the other’s attention in the process but not raising any particular interest, much less suspicion. Vijay, desperate to be part of the group, also snuck away from his parents’ side to join what he correctly assumed to be a discussion about the probe.
Terradox Beyond Page 15
