Rachel Berry, the mission’s only other participant, was currently out of their sight in a Karrier of her own, positioned further along the asteroid’s path as per the cautionary plan.
“This is what it’s all about,” Chase said, gazing out at the asteroid — far larger than he imagined — and preparing to trust a lot to the Karrier he was piloting. “You ready?”
Bo turned to him, a smile crossing his lips. “I mean, we’ve come all this way. I suppose we might as well see what’s down there…”
With no further ado, Chase initiated the Karrier’s automated final approach and landing. Human crews had landed on asteroids in the past, but they had always been far more slow-moving than NGB-2.
“Karriers don’t make mistakes,” he said as they hurtled directly towards their target. “It’s not going to miss.”
Moments later, he might just wish it had.
thirty-five
“Chase!? Bo!? Can you hear me?” Rachel Berry’s shaky voice blurted out. Having watched their Karrier crash impactfully into the asteroid, she feared that she already knew the answer. The myriad red lights on her own Karrier’s communications dashboard suggested that her colleagues had graver problems than being able to hear her, but that thought only made her heart race even faster.
“We’re okay,” Bo’s voice replied, firm but distant due to the damage his Karrier had sustained.
“Okay?” Chase echoed. “We’re fucked! The Karrier completely lost control of itself! Rachel, there’s no way this thing is taking off. We’re going to be lucky if the structure is still intact. Both of the landers are offline — they can’t sustain the same level of impact as the main body — so we’re not going anywhere unless you can somehow get a lander down a lot more gently than this Karrier was able to get itself down.”
“We’re okay,” Bo repeated, more insistently. “Neither of us are hurt.”
Thank the Lord for small mercies, Rachel thought as she immediately redirected her Karrier to intercept the comet’s path.
“Rachel, we’re going to need you to drop one of your emergency landers,” Chase said, back in control of himself. “If it reaches us in one piece, we can leave in that. The rover should be okay, so we’re still going to venture out for the probe… no matter what. Even if we can’t leave, we can still find what we came for.”
“I’m on it,” Rachel promised. They were too far from Earth, Arkadia, Terradox and the Venus station to seek advice or approval from anyone else, such was the time sensitivity of their current predicament, but for the purposes of this mission she and Chase were in charge of their own actions and decisions, in any case.
“I’m going to get the rover ready to take us outside,” Bo announced, leaving Chase’s side as he spoke. “Rachel, once you’re close, you’re not going to be able to keep within range of this asteroid for long. We need to be ready to launch in the lander you send down as soon as you send it, because a lot more can go wrong if we end up relying on re-docking with the Karrier at speed rather than as we’re taking off. Everyone agreed?”
Chase nodded. “Get on it. We’re just going out there to recover the probe and grab some samples from the area where it collected them. The analysis will come when we’re back on the Karrier, on the way back to Arkadia. Rachel, what’s your ETA?”
“Even if I fly out along its path to maximise the time until it catches up and gets as close to me as it will, we’re only looking at forty minutes,” she said. “Then another few minutes for the lander to reach you. Is that long enough for you to do what you need to do out there?”
Chase looked out of his window at the alien surface of the asteroid, whose darkness positively swallowed the Karrier’s bright outward-pointing lights. “Well… I guess it’s going to have to be.”
thirty-six
“I can’t believe we’re driving on an asteroid,” Chase mused, fully suited up and sitting in the rover’s passenger seat while Bo drove with the most focused expression of his life.
“This is a simulator,” Bo said, almost robotically and without so much as diverting his gaze. “I’ve done this a million times before.”
Chase didn’t say anything else, correctly recognising that Bo was in the zone during a testing drive across very difficult conditions. The rover’s suspension and ability to excel in low gravity were tested to the limit, but Chase had confidence in the vehicle for the simple reason that it had been designed and tested by Bo, the single greatest mind Chase had come across during a decade surrounded by brilliant researchers and scientists.
The accuracy of the Karrier’s botched landing — essentially, it crashed in the right place — made the drive mercifully short. Indeed, the rover reached the dead probe a full ten minutes before Rachel was due to come into reach with the emergency landers which presented their last hope of escape and survival.
At the press of a few buttons, Bo sent some drones outwards to illuminate the area around the dead probe. It showed clear signs of landing damage, so much so that both men were surprised and impressed that it had managed to send any data back to Arkadia before packing in. The jagged terrain of the asteroid alone shouldn’t have posed too many problems, and Chase could only assume that its speed was what had led to the difficulties faced by not only the probe but by the much larger and more robust Karrier.
But right now, what mattered was collecting the probe and a sample of its surroundings. The reason for Chase’s presence on the hellish rock was the incredible discovery suggested by the probe’s own analysis of its surroundings, and his goal was turning that suggestion into a decisive confirmation.
“Are you okay with me doing this?” Bo asked, hovering his hand over the controls which would produce and manoeuvre the rover’s huge claw-like arms to take hold of the probe. After that, it would be time for the drilling and sample-taking. Bo knew that this was Chase’s raison d'être — turning over rocks to see what was there — but they only had one shot, and an experienced hand was needed.
“Do your thing,” Chase said, breaking into a brief grin. “I got us here… more or less in one piece… so at least I’ve done something.”
Chase’s self-deprecation was honest rather than conceited, but Bo had stopped listening as soon as he heard ‘do your thing’. Without another wasted moment, the rover’s enormous retrieving arms gathered the probe and elevated it to a safe height. This rover had been chosen specifically for the task at hand from an extensive roster of options, and Chase could easily understand why.
Bo then released a second batch of drones, this time specialised excavating drones rather than their illuminating counterparts, which would collect small samples from nearby sites and promptly return them to the rover. Next it came time to engage the rover’s primary sample collecting tools; and after the initial non-invasive collections were complete, he finished by powering up both the rover’s jackhammer like excavator and its more conventional borer. Within a few more minutes, he had as many samples as he could have hoped. All that was left to hope for now was that he had what he needed.
“Rachel, ETA?” Chase asked, knowing she was on the same open communications channel and would hear every word he uttered.
“You should see me soon,” she said. “It’ll reach me in two minutes. Head back to your Karrier and I’ll try to put a lander down somewhere else — that area didn’t seem too accommodating.”
“Send them both down at once,” Chase said. “We don’t have time to try one and then the other. If they both fail, they both fail. But waiting to see how the first gets on might leave too little time for the second to be viable. Remember, you can’t keep up with this thing for long and we don’t want to have to meet up with you and dock out in space! The landers aren’t made for that.”
Neither Rachel nor Bo argued with Chase’s logic. Her Karrier became visible before the rover returned to their own doomed Karrier, and now all they could do was watch and hope.
“You’ve got this,” Chase said. “Send the landers down.”
> Twenty seconds passed.
“In your own time there, Rachel,” he added, a nervous chuckle in his voice. “It’s not like our lives are depending on you doing this quickly enough…”
“It’s not working,” she blurted out, reluctantly admitting this out loud having tried to work past the automated landing system’s objections. “Chase, it can’t secure a spot. With my altitude, the lack of gravity and the speed of this damn asteroid, it won’t isolate any landing spots.”
Chase and Bo turned to face each other, more than forlorn.
“Go manual,” Chase said, an intensity returning to his tone. “Rachel, fuck it. This is a free shot, no pressure. Seriously — we’d be dead if you weren’t here, so just do what you can. I believe in you. Robert believed in you, Holly believed in you, and that’s why you’re here. This is an almost impossible task but if there’s anyone who can give it a real shot, that anyone is you.”
Rachel exhaled audibly. “Here they come,” she announced, releasing the landers more in hope than expectation. “I’ll control them as best as I can, but they’re so much smaller than your Karrier, and that didn’t even make it.”
“That was automated,” Chase said. “The Karriers are supposed to land themselves, but they weren’t built with somewhere like this in mind. Focus on one of the landers… let the other one fall where it falls, but get one down as gently as you can, okay?”
“That was my plan,” she said. Indeed, even as she spoke one was already veering well off course; and once it was gone, it was gone. Try as she might, Rachel couldn’t swing it back towards where it had to be, and its window was gone. “And now I guess the alternative is off the table.”
The second lander, fully in her control, descended more slowly. Chase could feel his heart rate quicken, but this time in anticipation rather than fear.
Bo, for his part, couldn’t help but think back to the stomach churning moments when Holly had been forced to manually land a Karrier on Netherdox, fighting through the impossibly fierce storm clouds that guarded its surface like a ring of fire.
“I’m losing it!” Rachel yelled. “Chase, there’s no… no grip. No pull. It’s going to slip!”
Rachel’s words were imprecise, reflecting the novelty of the situation. ‘Slip’ was as close a term as anything else to reflect the lander’s unplanned movement as it passed laterally beyond its target touchdown site — far beyond — and ultimately missed the elusive asteroid altogether. “I’m sorry,” she gulped. “It was just like it hit a certain point then—”
“You tried,” Chase said. “Rachel… we’re going to analyse what we have in the rover’s on-board lab and we’re going to send the data to you. You’re going to take it back to Arkadia, and none of this will have been for nothing. Tell Nisha I love—”
“No,” Rachel interrupted. “And don’t even try to tell me you wouldn’t do this… either of you.”
Neither of them said anything; they knew what she meant. Even before they saw Rachel’s Karrier begin to descend in a last-ditch effort to bring them home, they knew what she meant.
And the truth was, she was right. Chase wouldn’t and couldn’t have ever left someone behind, and nor could Bo. They would have understood perfectly well if Rachel had done just that, and indeed a large part of each of them wanted her to save herself with certainty rather than risk everything for a far-out chance of saving them all.
“I’m coming down fast, so I can avoid as much of that unexpected lateral movement as I can. I’ll try to use the launch boosters at the last second to avoid a vertical crash, but I’m hoping the Karrier will be okay with a bit of a bump so long as it’s straight when it happens.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Chase said. “But I know you’re going to, and that does sound like as good a landing plan as any other. Just don’t engage the boosters any earlier than you have to, okay? That could destabilise the landing. The later the better, so long as it’s not too late.”
“So all I have to do is time it absolutely perfectly,” she said.
A wry smile involuntarily crossed Chase’s lips. “Couldn’t be simpler, right?”
Noticing how quiet Bo was, Chase glanced across and saw his head in his hands; an uncharacteristically physical display of emotion. “It’s okay,” he said. “Bo, we came here to do a job and we did it. We’ll be able to send the data from these samples back to Arkadia from here. You can talk to Viola, Katie, anyone you want. I’m not going to tell you there’s not a good chance we’re going to die here, but we won’t be alone and it won’t be for nothing.”
“And it won’t be fucking happening,” Rachel chimed in, hurtling towards the asteroid at a frightening pace. “I’m not coming down there to say my goodbyes.”
Chase watched on, hoping and praying she would hit the boosters in time. The pace of her descent was far greater than he’d anticipated but he knew better than to interrupt with contradictory advice in her moment of focus, and he had to trust that she knew what she was doing.
Their rover’s sound isolating abilities ensured that neither Bo nor Chase heard the Karrier’s landing directly. What they did hear, however, was the beautiful sound of victory.
Rachel’s breathy and involuntarily vocalisation of delirious relief was closer to a festive ‘hohoho’ sound than a humorous ‘hahaha’, but it only meant one thing.
“Easy there, Santa!” Chase laughed, beaming the widest smile of his life as he gazed out at the upright and intact Karrier along with Bo, who shook his head in disbelief that she had actually pulled it off.
“Just hurry the hell up, cowboy,” Rachel replied, now lucid but still ecstatic. “This sleigh’s leaving in three minutes, so you better climb in…”
thirty-seven
In an ironic twist of fate, Holly and Grav’s drama-free landing back on Terradox after their long return journey from the rendezvous point near Arkadia came within an hour of Rachel Berry’s ultra-dramatic landing on asteroid NGB-2.
The distance between them meant that Holly didn’t see any Karrier-cam footage of Rachel’s touchdown until after the trio had safely departed from the asteroid, such was the nature of the communications delay, but this was of little meaning since she watched it all as-live and lived every second as though she was there.
The helplessness of not being there, allied with the guilty feelings of having okayed a mission that looked utterly doomed until Rachel pulled a rabbit out of her hat with a selflessly risky and perfectly executed manual landing, had taken a real toll. Even Grav, normally able to maintain an air of quiet detachment, was shaken. Between this and the recent events on Arkadia, he felt as though he had aged twenty years in the past few days.
The emotional roller coaster had been like nothing else he could remember, with the lowest of lows followed by the most overwhelming sense of relief he had ever felt.
That both crises had passed without any fatalities was testament to the professionalism and skill of the inner circle Holly had cultivated over the years, all of whom were now running things in her absence.
Even on Terradox, still under her charge, the fact that Holly’s lengthy absence had caused no problems likewise reflected well on the capacity of her understudies and bode very well for the future. Grav similarly took heart from his security officers’ success in keeping everything in Terradox in check. He had never feared any problems — it wasn’t that kind of place, largely thanks to his vigilant screening of potential colonists — but it was one thing to think they could oversee things without him and something much better to now know that they could.
“They don’t need us anymore,” Holly mused as she finally felt the surface of Terradox under her feet once more, a fully positive lilt in her voice. “We didn’t do anything to solve either of these problems, and they made it through both. They don’t need us on Arkadia, they didn’t need us on the asteroid, and they didn’t even need us here.”
“I still need us, Hollywood,” Grav said, no humour or anything else but genuine fee
ling behind the words.
Holly looked at him and smiled. “Then it’s a good thing we’re not going anywhere.”
thirty-eight
On Arkadia, a lot had happened in the space of four days.
Since the successful evacuation from the Biomedical Centre, careful study and analysis of the site had enabled botanists on Arkadia and beyond to reach several conclusions. Some were more welcome and reassuring than others, such as the data-backed consensus that there had been no foul play involved. The precise mechanism by which the root system of a genetically engineered plant species led to atmospheric toxicity when it breached the surface of an area where it didn’t belong was still up in the air, but precautions had already been taken to eliminate the chance of anything similar happening again.
The most welcome news came within The Mound, where the Ospanov family and many others had been quarantined for what felt more like weeks than days. Conditions were physically comfortable but naturally unsettling, right up until Arkadian medical analysts grew confident enough to announce that no one was any longer exhibiting the virus-like symptoms which had marked the toxin’s emergence in the BMC.
Tests and observations confirmed an earlier suspicion that the supposedly contagious ’virus’ had never been internally carried by people so much as the pseudo-allergenic toxin had been transferred via the skin and clothes of those who’d been directly or indirectly exposed to the initial spore burst in the BMC’s ground zero sector.
Some of those who had fallen most seriously ill were still being treated and monitored, but this was no longer motivated by a desire to keep them away from the healthy many but rather simply because their symptoms had reached concerning levels of severity before Romesh Kohli and Robert Harrington had managed to weaken the toxin’s effects via timely atmospheric manipulation.
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