No one remained in quarantine, and the emptying of The Mound coincided perfectly with the imminent return from asteroid NGB-2 of Chase Jackson, Bo Harrington and Rachel Berry. A welcome party had already been arranged to greet them, and Viola and everyone else previously cooped up in The Mound could not have been happier that they were going to make it. They had all watched with their hearts in their mouths as the as-live video came in from the asteroid a few days earlier and showed how close to death the trio had been, with Rachel’s selfless decision to risk her own life in a last-ditch effort to save the others having gone down particularly well. There was no news regarding analysis of the samples the trio had collected, but in light of the narrowly avoided human disaster this was the furthest thing from most people’s minds.
As morning turned to afternoon and the hours until the big return ticked by, a stress-busting welcome party presented something worth looking forward to.
At the same expansive site which had hosted Arkadia’s anchor raising party what felt like a lifetime ago, almost the entire population gathered to welcome home the returning trio of heroes.
The party began long before the Karrier came into view, but it reached new heights at that point. In the few minutes the entry and landing took, the trio’s immediate friends and family positioned themselves separately from the crowd. Rachel, piloting the Karrier, had been informed of the party ahead of time and was more than happy to land nearby rather than in the usual spot at Arkadia Central Station. Unlike Chase and Bo she had no immediate family on Arkadia, but she had certainly won plenty of friends with her actions on the asteroid.
Viola, Peter and Katie Ospanov stood with Robert to welcome Bo, while Nisha Kohli was ready to greet Chase. The whole of Arkadia was ready to greet them all, truth be told, but those at the front would be the first faces they saw.
Chase emerged first, at the insistence of his colleagues, and looked very much like he had made an effort to look presentable. The same couldn’t be said for the utterly exhausted-looking Bo, while Rachel fell somewhere in the middle.
Young Katie broke ranks first, sprinting forward to leap into the arms of her uncle Bo. His exhausted air lifted in an instant. It was difficult for anyone to hear much over the cheers and rapturous applause from the crowd, but those at the front heard Chase tell Nisha he was sorry.
“You can’t keep doing this to me,” she said more quietly as they hugged as though they’d been apart for a year rather than a week.
“I’m done dodging bullets,” Chase promised. “From now on, I’m all yours. I mean it.”
Peter made his way to Chase and took a long look in his eyes. “I’m not going to say I told you it was a bad idea to go,” he said, breaking into a sudden smile and patting his friend on the shoulder. “But I am going to tell you that you were lucky to make it back, cowboy. No more of that, okay? Robert stepped up to the plate to deal with the outbreak and I don’t think we should make a habit of disagreeing with him or each other about the best courses of action. Holly wanted us to rule by consensus as often as possible. Are we on the same page?”
Chase’s expression appeared uncharacteristically confused. “With the part about Holly, yeah. But Robert? Outbreak?” he asked, his eyes flitting to Nisha and then back to Peter. “I feel like there’s maybe something you haven’t told me yet.”
“You’ll probably want to sit down for this,” Nisha grinned. “It’s not the shortest story you’ll ever hear…”
epilogue
“This place, Hollywood,” Grav sighed, warmth in his tone. “If you can tell me with a straight face that you thought there was any chance you’d grow to love Terradox back when we first crash-landed here, you are a better liar than I thought.”
She laughed, soaring high above the surface in a TE-500, en route to Christian Jackson’s office in the Botanical Gardens where they were all set to toast his son’s safe return to Arkadia. Jillian would be there too, as soon as she was finished up with her work for the day, and a quiet night with their closest friends was just what Holly and Grav needed. “I definitely never thought we’d be able to cover so much ground so quickly,” she replied. “Think of this, compared to those walks on the first few days…”
“I played a lot of video games as a kid and this was exactly how it always went,” Grav said. “At first, you toil across the land. Then at the end you have new transport or abilities and you can cover the ground in no time. What used to be difficult terrain with a surprise around every corner ends up looking like nothing.”
Holly got the point, but when she looked down she certainly didn’t see nothing.
“Do you want a shot?” she suddenly asked, gesturing to the vehicle’s decidedly joystick-like control. “These things do practically fly themselves…”
“I am a better passenger than pilot, Hollywood. You will just have to trust me on that one!”
Moments later, passing over the top of the mountain peak where they first reunited after crash-landing in separate landers so long ago brought a whole flood of memories back to Holly. It wouldn’t get cold tonight like it had back then — they had long since tamed Terradox — but the clarity of the memory led Holly to think about everything else that went along with it.
She thought back to falling into the pool of water in a hidden cave, only for Viola to dive in and save her.
She thought of the beach, of Netherdox, of David Boyce and Remy Bouchard, and then right back to discovering Bo hiding in the Ospanov’s quarters after Grav had broken rank to help sneak him onto the station-bound Karrier inside of a suitcase, back before she knew Grav had a human heart beating in that bear-like chest of his.
“Remember back then, when you thought I was the bad guy?” Grav asked, equally nostalgic in the face of everything that had been going on.
“You turned up alone with a bloodstained shirt in your bag!” she chuckled. “What was I supposed to think? And really, Grav… have you ever looked in a mirror?”
Christian’s office was just a few more minutes away, and Holly touched down outside it just in time.
“Have we missed their landing?” she asked, hurrying into the office.
Jillian answered from inside. “No. They will be there by now, but we haven’t seen it. You know how the delay is. For us, they’re just about to touch down.”
Holly made herself comfortable and looked happily at an Arkadian video feed on Christian’s viewing wall. There were fireworks and a ferris wheel and countless smiling faces gazing upwards in the hopes they would catch the first sight of the Karrier.
“They really did make it through two crises without our help,” she said. “Robert really stepped up and so did Rachel. We always knew what we’d get from Viola and Peter, and from Chase and Bo, but double confirmation never hurt anyone.”
Jillian Jackson, whose emotional state when Chase had been seemingly stranded on the asteroid Holly couldn’t even begin to imagine, wore a look of serenity as the footage showed her son emerging at last from his Karrier and waving to the adoring people of Arkadia.
Several key figures, Chase included, addressed the crowd during the early stages of an Arkadian blowout that would run way past sunrise. Viola was first, celebrating the fact that the BMC problem had been handled on Arkadia and the landing problem had been handled on NGB-2 without any external input.
“We owe everything we have to Spaceman, to Holly and Grav, and to the Rusevs,” she said, “but they wouldn’t and don’t want us to be dependent on them. As Arkadians, we stood up and rose to the occasion. We ran into trouble and we thought and fought our way out of it, because that’s who we are and that’s what we do.”
Chase was next, and he took his opportunity to whip up excitement over the limitless potential of RKS Arkadia and other romokinetic spheres which would soon be fabricated by Rachel’s team in the Shipyard. “I don’t know how much I’m supposed to tell you, but we didn’t just find signs of life on that asteroid,” he said, “we found actual microbial life.”
&nb
sp; The cheers which followed his impromptu announcement of this groundbreaking discovery were music to his ears and justified the whitest of all lies; in truth, he knew he was allowed to reveal the findings of remote data analysis conducted primarily on the Venus station, but presenting it like this made it feel even more special to those in attendance and those watching from each of humanity’s population bases.
“And let’s remember something here: this asteroid came to us. It happened to be passing fairly close by at an opportune time. Think of everything we’re going to find as we continue venturing out into space and particularly when we have further colonies expanding outwards into space in multiple directions. The new age of exploration is now, and the universe is ours.”
More applause followed, and back on Terradox Chase’s parents wore smiles of pride eclipsing even Holly’s.
When Rachel spoke, greeted by a deafening roar of appreciation as she stepped forward, Holly’s own smile grew further still due to the closing line of a rousing and clearly well-rehearsed speech. “Whenever I have to make a tough decision, I always ask myself what Holly would do,” Rachel said, rounding off a quick explanation of why she had risked everything to give Chase and Bo a chance of making it home. “And that makes it easy, because the answer to that question is always the same: whatever it takes.”
From then, the Arkadian party really kicked off and no further speeches were made.
“I don’t even know what to think, let alone what to say,” Jillian said, smiling with tears in the corners of her eyes. “It’s not just Chase… it feels like they’ve all just flown the nest and succeeded on their own. But I can hardly think straight, it’s all been so up and down…”
“As long as it ends on an up, I’m happy,” Christian said, reaching under his desk and producing an unlabelled bottle before proceeding to generously fill four glasses with priceless Terradox wine.
“To them,” Holly toasted. “Without us.”
“Not quite, Hollywood,” Grav said, raising his glass and successfully inviting the others to do the same. “To them… beyond us.”
Author’s Notes
Thanks for reading Terradox Beyond.
If you enjoyed the book and could spare a few moments to leave a review on Amazon, that would be very helpful. Reviews are a great way for readers to find books that might interest them and every kind word really does help. Thanks!
I’ve had a lot of fun exploring the possibilities of romotechnology and writing about Holly and the gang, but at this natural end point it seems very likely that this fourth book in the Terradox series will be the last, at least for now. Of course, never say never. I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride!
Not Alone: The Final Call, my next novel, will be released on May 14th, 2019. For the latest news and updates on these and other future books, you can sign up to my author newsletter.
www.craigafalconer.com
Terradox Beyond Page 24
