Terradox Beyond

by Craig A. Falconer

  “It’s okay, he knows,” Chase said to Nisha. “He found out when I did and he played it cool, like I asked him to.”

  Bo and Vijay arrived at the same time; and although Vijay’s face made it clear that he was desperate to ask whether Nisha already knew, he let Chase do the talking.

  “Did you know that the asteroid probe has already been launched?” Chase asked Bo, just as straightforward as he had been with Nisha.

  Far less subtle than Nisha, Bo didn’t even disguise his long stare towards Viola. This, again, was enough to tell Chase that he didn’t know. This time, however, it was also enough to let Viola know what was happening.

  She excused herself from her chat with Peter, Robert and the Hawthornes, which naturally made them all curious as to what was being discussed over in the ever-growing breakaway group.

  “I’m guessing that look is because you’re all talking about the probe?” she asked as soon as she reached them. “Holly didn’t want anyone on Terradox to know; that’s all there is to it. They went ahead with the launch quietly in case anything went wrong, so there wouldn’t have been a huge feeling of failure. You would have found out in the morning if you hadn’t tonight. It wasn’t a big secret, just something she wanted kept quiet until you got here.”

  “So who all knows?” Chase asked, seeming less angry than confused.

  Viola thought for a few seconds. “Everyone who was already here, obviously, and then I think just the board.”

  “And you…”

  “And my dad,” she added, reading little into Chase’s slightly acerbic tone. “And Kayla and Vic. Rachel’s team at the Shipyard cloaked the probe during and after the launch so no one could detect it for themselves, but the good news is that none of that ended up being necessary because it all went smoothly.”

  “Has it arrived?” Bo interjected. “Do we know anything about the surface of the asteroid yet?”

  Viola shook her head. “I think it’s due to touch down in another thirty-six hours or something like that.” She then shrugged, very evidently telling them as much as she knew and understood. “It’s not far, but it’s not fast.”

  “I’ll talk to Holly about it in the morning,” Chase said. There was no anger in his voice; he knew Holly well enough to know the omission of this news, while clearly deliberate, must have been for a sound and innocently motivated reason.

  He fully understood and accepted the general idea of why the launch had been quietly expedited — so that public disappointment could have been managed if anything had gone wrong — and he could similarly understand that worrying about how the launch and the probe would fare could have distracted him from other things during a busy and important time.

  “No hard feelings?” Viola said, quite clearly speaking earnestly.

  “None at all,” Chase replied with a decisive and dismissive shake of his head. “Holly’s word goes.”

  Viola nodded slowly. “Holly’s word goes.”

  That ended the discussion for the night, and within a few more minutes the reunited full group began meandering towards their respective family homes, which conscious community planning had ensured were all next to each other.

  Compared to on Terradox, however, one house that was ‘next to’ another within Starview Springs was still a fair way away.

  “This place really is huge,” Viola said, a minute or so after saying farewell to the Hawthornes at their doorway. She was walking between Chase and Peter, who carried an exhausted Katie on his shoulders.

  “There’s just so much more land to make the most of than there was on Terradox,” Peter said.

  Chase nodded. “But wait until you get up in the air and see the huge areas lying totally empty. This place is so big, I don’t think we’ll ever even come close to really making the most of it.”

  “We’re on a one-way trip to forever, cowboy,” Peter replied with a broad smile. “I’m sure we’ll give it a good try.”

  twenty-one

  When Chase reached out across a chasm of space the following morning to ask Holly about her motivations in keeping the probe’s early launch from him, the potential awkwardness of the situation was greatly lessened by a communications delay which ruled out an as-live conversation. With Holly well on her way back to Terradox, this growing delay both enabled and required them to state their positions clearly and without interruption, making it a lot easier to reach a point of mutual ground than might otherwise have been the case.

  Holly’s position was simple: Chase didn’t have to know about the probe’s launch, so it made little sense for her to trouble his mind with it until confirmation came through that it had landed safely. She followed longer and more sophisticated lines of reasoning, but this was the crux of her point and sufficiently answered his questions.

  The exciting news was that the probe had landed safely overnight, although Holly asked Chase to refrain from making this publicly known until more data was received and analysed.

  His good friends Rachel Berry and Bradley Reinhart — key figures in the Shipyard and Communications divisions respectively — were by his side in the Shipyard’s main office while he communicated with Holly, both having already explained that they were under orders not to tell him anything even if he’d asked. They were as excited as he was about the successful landing, but Rachel confessed that she’d known about this for several hours just as they’d both known about the launch.

  Chase had never felt betrayed over the relatively minor incident, but after hearing from Holly he didn’t harbour an ounce of resentment towards anyone.

  Once the whole episode was cleared up to his satisfaction, which really didn’t take long, attention in the office turned towards the imminent arrival of vast numbers of people from Earth. The incoming masses were sometimes spoken of as settlers, colonists and even pioneers, but in Chases mind they would simply be Arkadians.

  Over the course of two days, tens of thousands of Arkadians arrived in a seemingly endless fleet of several dozen Ferriers. Although this method, rather than using a handful of Ferriers to conduct back-and-forth trips over a longer period, may have appeared inefficient on the face of it, a great number of Ferriers were required for future use — to serve as lifeboats should any emergency situation arise.

  One thing no one on Arkadia felt as groups flooded in was trepidation over their makeup, for the tens of thousands of new arrivals from Earth had all been in full medical and social quarantine for six months, having entered the quarantine program only after highly intensive background vetting and psychological profiling.

  Chase and the rest of the inner circle did feel trepidation over some of the logistical nightmares that were likely to come their way over the next few weeks as countless minor problems no one had ever considered inevitably arose, but in general terms spirits were incredibly high.

  Like his closest friends, Chase’s level of renown required him to maintain a visible presence during the frequent Ferrier landings. The days were tiring and the nights too short, and even as Chase was experiencing the surreal moments of another batch of three thousand new arrivals stepping off their Ferriers wearing some of the widest smiles he’d ever seen, he had a strong feeling that these were days he would ultimately remember as a blur.

  There was so much going on, Chase consistently felt as though all he could do was make it through the next few minutes without doing something wrong. His tasks of welcoming arrivals and assisting with the coordination of their moves to Starview Springs wasn’t difficult in any technical sense, but it was certainly exhausting in a mental one.

  From what he’d gathered from Nisha in the few waking hours he’d spent at home over these few days, Chase knew that the Ospanovs and Hawthornes had settled perfectly into their plush new homes. The home he shared with Nisha was beyond anything that he himself had ever dreamed of, inside and out, but this was just one more thing his busyness and tiredness made it difficult to properly appreciate for the moment.

  When the final landing passed w
ithout a hitch and the time came for an event which should have been among the highlights of Chase’s life so far, his level of exhaustion saw to it that he simply couldn’t wait until this final major public engagement was over so he could go home and sleep for a week. Only Nisha knew how he was feeling, which was testament to his determination to put on a positive face in front of everyone else.

  The event in question was the long-awaited anchor raising ceremony, which would culminate with Chase himself giving the command for Arkadia to breakaway from its orbital position and to truly begin a new era for humanity in space as it set course for the edge of the solar system and beyond.

  The event was a huge party several years in the making, with a colossal area of land devoted to the festivities and countless forms of entertainment laid on for all ages. An intimidatingly large Ferris wheel may have been the eye-catching centrepiece, but the whole site looked like it was ready to host a music festival. Grandstands erected on the site put those Chase had sat in on Terradox to shame, and the scale of the event energised him sufficiently to bring forth a second wind and push the physical and mental exhaustion of recent days to the side.

  He enjoyed milling around and meeting all kinds of people he hoped would soon become friends rather than fans, which was how most introduced themselves. Although this kind of open adoration wasn’t something that made Chase outright uncomfortable, he was hoping it wouldn’t last for too long.

  As the event was about to begin and the crowd were encouraged to take their seats, assigned by name, Chase and Nisha bumped into the Ospanovs and Hawthornes. Although Viola didn’t have a hair out of place and was as immaculately turned-out as ever, Chase could see in her eyes that she was dead on her feet.

  “Tough few days?” he asked.

  “Five more hours and we can sleep,” she chuckled, laughing for the first time in what felt like far too long.

  “You guys definitely got the rough end of the stick being chosen as the welcoming committee,” Peter said. “I mean, we’ve been busy in Security, but not like that. You’ve definitely earned whatever rest you can get.”

  Chase appreciated the sentiment. “I haven’t seen your dad around,” he said to Viola. “I know he’s not scheduled to speak at this ceremony, but is he here?”

  “Apparently he has to take care of some operational thing,” she replied. “If anyone has been busier than us, it’s definitely him… but there’s no way he’s bunking off. Something obviously came up.”

  A loud message then gave everyone a further warning that the ceremony would be starting soon, and at this point young Katie Ospanov went off to sit with the Hawthornes while her parents joined Chase to take their positions for the ceremony.

  Being surrounded by close to forty thousand people felt as surreal as everything else had recently, so Chase took it in his stride. Viola’s rousing introductory speech appeared utterly effortless, thanks in no small part to the years of semi-reluctant practice she’d had on the annual Day of Gratitude.

  Peter spoke next, thanking everyone for having settled into their new homes in such an orderly fashion and reminding them of all the security protocols which were in place. None of his words were designed to frighten anyone, but a firm reminder of the rules and costs of breaking them did no harm whatsoever.

  Although Chase was usually comfortable in front of large crowds, the volume of the roar that greeted his name took him by surprise. Worse than surprise, in fact, it knocked him off focus due to how much louder it had been than the roar for Peter and even Viola. At times like this Chase Jackson felt very much like an actor playing a superhero; someone who was viewed positively by everyone, and children in particular, but who sometimes wished the cape could come off from time to time.

  An aura seemed to exist around Chase, thanks largely to the way he had been portrayed by an unusually united media on Earth for the past seven years. He could neither understand why he was so adored nor how the likes of Peter and Viola could stand next to him without feeling any kind of resentment, and he thought the fact that they always treated him so well said a lot about them.

  He went into auto-pilot during his short speech and did everything correctly in the moments before the anchor raising.

  When that time came, however, he felt suddenly and overpoweringly unworthy. This wasn’t so much an emotion as a realisation; one which very nearly took him completely off-script and which ultimately led to Viola joining him beside the all-important oversized button which would raise Arkadia’s metaphorical anchor.

  I don’t deserve to be the one doing this, he thought. His stomach churned. Not even close.

  “Now that Chase has let the anticipation build…” she said, drawing some well-meaning chuckles from an audience who had been on tenter-hooks while he silently stared at the button, “let’s give him one last countdown. Ten, nine…”

  As the crowd counted, each number louder than the last, Viola saw the reluctance in Chase’s eyes.

  “Don’t think, just press the button at zero,” she said, taking care to cover the microphone on her collar and completely oblivious as to the cause of his hesitation.

  “Viola, it shouldn’t be me,” Chase replied, relieving her by at least mimicking her microphone-blocking hand-on-collar trick.

  “Chase…”

  “You should do it. You’ve done more than—”

  “People died so we could get here,” she whispered. “If you don’t press that button…”

  With the crowd at two, Chase turned around to the giant red button. It was genuinely linked up to the romotech reactor at Arkadia’s core, which would begin the romokinetic sphere’s endless voyage as soon as his hand slammed down, but the size and shape was clearly for show.

  “Zero!” everyone shouted.

  Chase slammed a fist down on the button like he was trying to break it then turned around to the crowd with his arms held aloft. “Bon voyage, people of Arkadia!” he yelled, inviting by far the loudest roars of the day and kicking off a party that would run well into the night.

  Viola applauded and then gave Chase a hug that she skilfully managed to disguise as celebratory.

  But as a veteran of too many Day of Gratitude events, during which she was always presented as some kind of conduit for true giants of recent history like Yury ‘Spaceman’ Gardev and Ekaterina Rusev herself, Viola Ospanov was probably the only person on Arkadia with any knowledge or experience of the kind of inadequacy Chase was feeling. She could only commend how he had managed to muster up enough adrenaline for the unplanned ‘bon voyage’ stunt, but she knew what it was masking.

  “It gets easier,” she whispered in his ear. “Trust me.”

  Chase nodded, trusting that she was right.

  With the open-air party getting into full swing just minutes after the end of the anchor-raising ceremony, and with all manner of activities and refreshments available to keep everyone happily occupied, Chase was surprised to see Viola and Peter heading for a vehicle little over fifteen minutes later.

  “My dad wants to see us about something,” Viola said, honestly answering Chase’s obvious question as to where they were going. “He didn’t say why but he asked me not to bring Katie.”

  “Our stress testing has shown a slight hiccup with the security restrictions around one of the main school buildings,” Peter went on, “so I think it’s going to be about that. I can’t think of anything else that he’d need to talk to the two of us about but not you. You know, Childhood Development and Security wrapped up in one issue… that’s my thinking, at least.”

  Chase nodded in agreement with that logic. “Well, let me know if I can help at all, okay?”

  “Will do, cowboy,” Peter said affectionately.

  Chase then returned to the people he’d been speaking to, an excitable team of young doctors. He found his energy growing as he milled around the crowd, and particularly when he bumped into Nisha doing the same.

  “Nice job, but what was with all that hesitation before you went f
or it?” she playfully chided.

  “I was just… it’s all done now,” he said, thinking better of burdening Nisha with his pointless introspection. “From here on out it all gets easier.”

  And things did get easier for the next hour, with a huge crowd gathering around Chase as he gladly took on all-comers at a series of fairground games. This hadn’t been planned or asked of him, but the joy it was bringing to the young Arkadians all around rubbed off on him, too.

  Shortly after a close hoopla victory over one of Peter’s security team — a full-hearted but well-spirited contest — Chase felt his wristband buzz to alert him of an incoming message.

  A quick glance down revealed the sender to be Viola, and his quick tap to expand the screen revealed a nine-word message which was equal parts intriguing and concerning:

  “Shipyard office asap. Asteroid news — don’t ask. Leave quietly.”

  As Chase tried to think of an excuse to leave without causing a fuss — subtlety in this scenario was a lot easier said than done — he saw Rachel’s eyes uncomfortably darting around in a similar manner to his own. Their gazes met for the few seconds it took for both to realise that the other had received an identical message.

  After whispering to Nisha that everything was okay in an attempt to lessen her inevitable worrying, Chase blew air from his lips and went for the only tactic he could think of: leaving loudly to do what he thought Viola meant by ‘leave quietly’, which was something more along the lines of ‘leave without causing suspicion’.

  “Well, guys,” he boomed, “I could do this all day but right now Rachel and I have to take care of a little something. Keep the fun going and we’ll be back soon, okay? Have a good one!”

  He then beckoned Rachel over with a performative gesture, hamming it up more due to nerves than by design.