Terradox Beyond

by Craig A. Falconer

  “Keep an eye on things,” Peter said, directly to Robert. “This is a team effort.”

  Robert shook his hand. “You can do it,” he said.

  “We’re all going to do it,” Peter said, holding Robert’s eyes. “I know this isn’t easy for you. I have Katie in there, but you have Katie in there and Bo somewhere out in space with Chase. You’re handling this better than me or Chase could, and I mean that.”

  Robert nodded. He liked Peter, and almost always had. Their arguments were rare and seldom serious, with only the most recent stress-induced bust-up ever having threatened to boil over. That all seemed beyond trivial now, and had been utterly forgotten.

  As the door swung closed behind the trio of departing rescuers and they walked towards one of the Shipyard’s waiting TE-900’s, Nisha had one final question: “Does Holly know we’re doing this?”

  “No,” Viola said, “but if she was here, she’d be coming with us.”

  thirty-one

  There was more to the rescue plan than simply showing up at the BMC and hoping it all worked out, with some of the final details of the extremely time-sensitive mission clarified only during the trio’s flight.

  Katie and Vijay, confined together, would be in the initial batch of evacuees. They quite simply had to be, and anyone who disagreed was unlikely to make their views known in Peter’s presence. In any case it was almost certain that the youngest members of the Ospanov and Kohli families, respectively, would have been in the first evacuation group even if they weren’t who they were. Confined in the most central sector of the BMC and both exhibiting relatively few signs of symptoms, they were among the lowest-risk and theoretically healthiest individuals awaiting rescue. Due to a short-term lack of certainty about the severity of the toxin once it took hold, it had been decided that the priority would be removing those who were yet to display evident symptoms.

  As Peter stepped into the TE-900, he kept to himself his harrowing memories of filling a similar TE-500 vehicle with the corpses of slain security guards on Terradox during David Boyce’s bloody coup attempt. There would be no repeat of those scenes today — Peter would see to that.

  Nisha followed a direct route to the BMC, flying at sufficient altitude to avoid any microspheric barriers. Robert and Romesh stayed in touch during the relatively short duration of the flight, breaking the slightly unsettling news that a considerable number of individuals within the BMC had seemingly become more symptomatic. No one was dead — at least there was that — and Robert happily reported that the already seriously affected individuals within ground zero had not gotten any worse.

  “I’m going down first in case there’s a problem,” Peter announced as the TE-900 neared its destination. “And V, I’m not suggesting that; I’m telling you that’s how it is.”

  Viola didn’t argue.

  Right on cue, Robert temporarily weakened the upper part of the romotech barrier which surrounded the BMC’s central sector, allowing the TE-900 to effortlessly descend and touch down on the roof.

  Perhaps for the best, the trio had come in too high to see the dead canaries outside the BMC’s main entrance.

  In physical terms, Peter expected his entry to be the most challenging part of the mission. There was no real access point over this particular sector, necessitating a forced entry through a skylight. His landing wouldn’t be comfortable but Peter didn’t expect it to be truly difficult, and if this proved to be the hardest thing he had to deal with over the next few hours he would be a happy man indeed.

  “Remember to bend your knees,” Viola said, her final words as Peter gazed out of the stationary vehicle’s window towards the skylight.

  “Remember to wait until I raise a ladder and come down on that instead of jumping down after me,” he replied with a chuckle. “But don’t worry about me, I know how to land.”

  With the area directly below the skylight cleared by Robert’s careful intra-sector zoning, Peter took it upon himself to smash his way in. This part wasn’t difficult — the skylight hadn’t had to be reinforced for any security or insulation-related purposes — and the excited cheers that followed the sound of smashing glass filled his heart.

  He was almost there.

  It looked like more of a drop than he’d expected, a good fifteen feet, but there was no going back now. And Peter hadn’t been lying when he said he knew how to land, so he thought little of the drop until he felt his left ankle buckle on impact.

  “Fuck!” he yelled. “Oh, shit!”

  No one was disturbed by the language, but the fall hadn’t been pretty. Peter grimaced and pushed himself to his feet, scanning the room until he saw her. At that point, the pain receded for a beautiful moment as Katie came into his view.

  “The barrier surrounding Sector 1 Group 1 has been lifted,” Romesh Kohli’s voice relayed through the speakers.

  “Daddy!” Katie squealed with excitement, unaware that his ankle was badly sprained given that his expression appeared so suddenly serene. She ran towards him, his smile growing with each of her giddy steps.

  But then, a new pain hit Peter. It wasn’t physical — it was worse.

  This was the pain of helplessness… of sudden and total helplessness.

  For as his daughter reached a distance of barely ten feet from him, she collapsed backwards; crying loud and hard having collided with an invisible barrier.

  Patch Hawthorne and Vijay Kohli, as well as everyone else from Group 1, continued well beyond the point where Katie had stopped. She rose to her feet, holding her sore nose and still crying, but couldn’t get past the barrier. The adults from her group surrounded her, quickly marking the extent of the small chamber-like barrier.

  “Romesh, talk to me!” Peter yelled, knowing everyone in the Shipyard’s communications office would hear him.

  “It’s an automatic barrier,” Romesh said, slowly forcing out the words. “Peter… it’s the symptoms. She just turned red.”

  thirty-two

  “Override it!” Peter yelled. “Robert, Romesh… override it!”

  Before a reply came, he heard Viola’s voice: “Someone get me the ladder!”

  Kayla Hawthorne, who had taken Katie to the BMC along with her own son Patch, hurried to the extendable ladder and passed it up so Viola could lean it against the side of the broken sidelight. With others supporting it from below, Viola rushed down the ladder and towards her now truly trapped daughter.

  “Everyone get back,” she said. “Peter, especially you — you need to help everyone else.”

  Peter knew Viola well enough to know she was sure about whatever she was thinking, and he moved away as quickly as the others.

  “Dad,” Viola went on, “add a manual barrier around me and Katie, and then manually override the automatic one around Katie. Don’t waste a single second saying no, because I’m not leaving her.”

  Five seconds later, the forcefield-like romotech barrier between them — which both were leaning against — disappeared. “I’m here now,” Viola said, holding Katie tighter than she’d ever held anyone or anything. “We’re going to be okay, darling, and we’re going to be together.”

  Peter could only watch on, the initial relief of their daughter no longer being alone quickly replaced by the painful realisation that he was now separated from not only her but also from Viola.

  “You need to do what we came here to do,” Viola told him, speaking over Katie’s shoulder. “You need to get as many people out of here as you can.”

  Pavel Mak, a longtime Ospanov family friend and ever-reliable security officer, walked to Peter’s side and assured him that he could take over from here and assist others into the rescue vehicle parked overhead.

  “What’s the story?” Peter shouted, clearly talking to Robert and Romesh. “Talk to me!”

  His wristband buzzed almost instantly, and he held it to his ear to hear a reply that Robert didn’t want to announce publicly: “A lot of people are getting worse, Peter, but no one is getting gravely worse.
We’ve stabilised the toxicity level of ground zero so we’re confident nowhere is going to get worse than it was at the peak. We’re not out of the woods, but the woods don’t look as dark as they did. The Mound is ready to take people into different areas depending on their condition, and we can’t change the plan. Green people first, at least until we have multiple vehicles in the air at once. A team from the Shipyard have delivered four more TE-900’s to just outside the extent of the BMC exclusion zone, and there are people in there who can fly. This way we can evacuate a lot more people at once. Ask for pilots and make sure they’re in the first evacuation, then they can come back for more people. Are you able to move okay on that ankle?”

  “We’ll worry about that later,” Peter said, loudly answering a question no one else had heard. “But if all the groups are isolated and I’m exposed anyway, am I right in thinking I can move between sectors now? Because no one else in this room can fly.”

  “For now, you can move into the rooms immediately connected to the one you’re in,” Robert replied. “We’re still working to further stabilise the sectors closer to ground zero. The need for pilots is so great that we’ll manually release any who are showing as yellow, but we can’t stretch to orange.”

  Peter nodded. “You’ll all be coming soon,” he announced to the whole room, “but right now I need some pilots. Kids and parents only… start going with Pavel. I’ll be back with however many pilots I can find and then we’ll fill however many more seats we have. But listen to me: everyone will be out of here soon.”

  “Daddy…” Katie called just before Peter set off to the first connected room.

  “Yeah, sweetheart?”

  “You can do it.”

  thirty-three

  The physical pain in Peter Ospanov’s ankle was like nothing he had ever felt, and the doctors present in the three rooms currently accessible to him regretfully relayed that no usefully powerful painkillers were stored in any of those rooms. He had no option but to suck it up, and no desire other than to do just that.

  Peter came across only two individuals capable of piloting a TE-900, but this immediately tripled the number of rescue journeys which could be carried out simultaneously once the first evacuees reached the other vehicles at the edge of the exclusion zone.

  “I’ll be back soon,” Peter promised Katie and Viola as he painfully ascended the ladder to escort the first batch of evacuees from the BMC. Viola insisted that she felt perfectly fine and encouraged Peter to make his way to The Mound and rest his foot, insisting that they would be okay.

  Pavel tried to make a similar point, but Peter was having none of it. He left Nisha’s TE-900 when she landed expertly at the other vehicles, at which point he entered one of those with its pilot to make his way back to the BMC in order to continue the mass evacuation while Nisha took the first batch to The Mound.

  Vijay thanked Peter for saving everyone, to which Peter replied that his role was smaller than both Nisha’s and Romesh’s, and that Vijay should look closer to home if he was looking for a hero this time out. The boy didn’t respond, apparently thinking quite deeply, but Nisha gave Peter an appreciative wink via her rearview mirror.

  Emergency staff were already on hand at The Mound to assist with the arrival of Nisha’s first evacuees, and she knew which area to bring them to in accordance with its internal divisions.

  When Peter reached the BMC again and came face to face with Viola and Katie once more, a new announcement from Robert filled the air to announce that two further rooms would be opened. One selfless pilot, who himself had been represented as a yellow dot prior to leaving, had since turned green but remained willing to carry ‘higher-risk’ evacuees than the green-dot individuals who filled the other two TE-900’s. This left the initial five central rooms all but empty, with only a few other red dots besides Katie still waiting to be evacuated.

  Viola informed Peter that she still felt fine but that Robert had told her she was now yellow and getting more symptomatic. Peter had faith in Robert and Romesh, as well as the unseen botanists and analysts working tirelessly behind the scenes to come up with rapid solutions, and fell back upon the single-minded focus of saving those he could save as quickly as possible.

  His mind returned to his family as soon as his next batch of evacuees were in the air, however, and he was utterly ecstatic to hear from Robert that Katie’s measurable physical symptoms were in decline. His flight to The Mound was not short but passed more comfortably than it would have without this news. With more people awaiting rescue, however, he couldn’t yet step inside the enormous complex which would be used to quarantine the survivors for an indeterminate time. What mattered now was making sure that everyone inside the BMC would be among those survivors.

  Each TE-900 had so far been overloaded beyond its officially permitted capacity, and only one more three-vehicle evacuation would be necessary. One of those vehicles would contain only the individuals who had been represented by red dots at some stage of the day, and the fact that some of them had since seen their colour ‘soften’ to orange was a further sign that the atmospheric amendments made by Robert and Romesh from a virtual screen in the Shipyard really had come up trumps. The final passengerless flight back to the BMC gave Peter time to think about just how incredible it was that technology had come so far in so short a time. More specifically, he thought, it was the huge leap in their grasp of romotechnology that was making all of the difference.

  Inquiries into what had gone wrong in the BMC would raise uncomfortable questions for everyone — Peter knew that, and he supported it — but the positive potential of romotech had scarcely been more apparent than it was right now, albeit only in dealing with a problem caused by a lack of care in other areas.

  Peter’s wristband buzzed as he neared the BMC for the last time, announcing a call from Robert. During it, Robert informed him that all remaining barriers were going to be removed at once. Toxicity in all sectors including ground zero was now within broadly acceptable bounds, Robert said, and this would be the quickest and best way to get everyone out of there and into their isolated sector of The Mound.

  “This has been one hell of a stress-test,” Peter said, raising a laugh from the normally reserved and currently preoccupied Robert.

  “Well, Peter… at least we passed.”

  Now it was Peter’s turn to laugh. “It’s almost like we work better as a team than when we’re at each other’s throats,” he said more soberly. “And that goes for you too, Romesh!”

  “I knew all that practice I had messing with Nancy would come in handy,” Romesh replied with a self-deprecating chuckle. “But you’re right, this was a team effort. Holly would be proud.”

  We’ve not done it yet, Peter thought as his TE-900 landed on the BMC’s roof one final time. He descended via the superior ladder which had been brought in from another room and which required no human support, unlike the first. As soon as he touched the ground, his ankle painfully protesting each step, he walked back towards Katie and Viola.

  “On three, I’m going to lift the remaining barriers,” Romesh announced over the PA system. “To everyone in the outer sector in particular, but to all of you who knew your movements were being restricted to aid us in our efforts to make this work, we can’t thank you enough for your patience and your trust that we would get you out of here. Without your compliance this wouldn’t have been possible. Now, on three.”

  By one, Katie was beaming.

  By two, she was ready to move.

  On three, she was landing in Peter’s arms and knocking him to the ground with the strength of her pounce.

  “Be careful!” Viola cautioned, wary of his injured foot.

  But lying on the ground with Katie in his arms, the last thing on Peter’s mind was the ankle which he would soon learn to be suffering from a moderate fracture rather than a mere sprain. All he could feel were her arms tight around his neck and her heartbeat fast against his own. He looked up and saw Viola being warmly embraced by
the other survivors who were flooding the central sector, all delighted to be freed and eternally grateful that she had come to save them in the first place.

  “I knew you’d come back,” Katie said, crying gently out of sheer relief.

  “I always will, sweetheart,” Peter replied, catching Viola’s joyous eyes as she pointed the others towards the ladder. “I always will.”

  thirty-four

  Chase Jackson, a great distance from Arkadia and with no idea of the drama that had unfolded there in recent days, had never felt a level of anticipation anything like the rush he felt right now.

  Asteroid NGB-2 was now before his very eyes, with the most daring landing in the history of manned spaceflight barely a minute away from its commencement. His only passenger, Bo Harrington, was equally unaware that hundreds of people were currently quarantined in Arkadia’s Mound development, much less that his sister and niece were among them. Both young men were thus utterly focused on the task at hand: recovering a dead probe and collecting samples which could forever change humanity’s understanding of its own place in the universe.