Terradox Read online

  TERRADOX

  CRAIG A. FALCONER

  Contents

  Books by Craig A. Falconer

  Part I

  Day One

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  Day Two

  nineteen

  Part II

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  Day Three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  thirty-four

  Day Four

  thirty-five

  thirty-six

  thirty-seven

  thirty-eight

  thirty-nine

  Day Five

  forty

  forty-one

  forty-two

  forty-three

  forty-four

  forty-five

  forty-six

  forty-seven

  Part III

  forty-eight

  forty-nine

  Day Six

  fifty

  fifty-one

  fifty-two

  fifty-three

  fifty-four

  fifty-five

  fifty-six

  fifty-seven

  fifty-eight

  fifty-nine

  sixty

  sixty-one

  Day Seven

  sixty-two

  sixty-three

  sixty-four

  sixty-five

  sixty-six

  sixty-seven

  Day Eight

  sixty-eight

  sixty-nine

  seventy

  seventy-one

  seventy-two

  seventy-three

  Day Nine

  seventy-four

  seventy-five

  Day Ten

  seventy-six

  seventy-seven

  seventy-eight

  Day Eleven

  seventy-nine

  eighty

  eighty-one

  Day Twelve

  eighty-two

  Day Thirteen

  eighty-three

  eighty-four

  Day Fourteen

  eighty-five

  Author’s Notes

  Terradox

  © 2017 Craig A. Falconer

  This edition published March 2017.

  All rights reserved by the author.

  The characters and events herein are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Reader's note: Terradox was written, edited and produced in Scotland. As such, some spellings will differ from those found in the United States. Examples of British English include using colour rather than color, organise rather than organize, and centre rather than center.

  At the author’s request, this book has been made available free of all DRM.

  Books by Craig A. Falconer

  Now Available

  Funscreen

  Sycamore

  Sycamore 2

  Sycamore X

  Sycamore XL

  Not Alone

  Terradox

  For Mickey.

  Part I

  Day One

  one

  Holly’s wristband buzzed for the second time in quick succession, rousing her from a welcome but all-too-short afternoon rest.

  She rolled over in her bunk and double-tapped her finger on the wall beside her pillow. The image which filled the embedded screen relayed to Holly that her current journey — this final journey — had just entered its final three days.

  Her finger drifted to the lower right corner of the screen and tapped the word Earth. Even after so many trips, it remained impossible for Holly to get used to how insignificant her fragile home planet and its 4.2 billion fragile souls looked from this distance. With every passing day, the dot grew paler and less blue.

  A quick tap on the words Station Interior then brought forth the live feed which always raised Holly’s spirits. The Venus station looked more than welcoming — it looked elegant; it looked chic; it looked precisely how Holly had always thought the future was supposed to look, rather than what it had become.

  Ten seconds of footage from the station was enough to give Holly the energy she needed to play waitress for the next ten minutes. Running these mealtime errands ranked among the most menial elements of the chaperone role she had taken on to earn her place on the station alongside those chosen for their scientific prowess and those whose wealth had been sufficient to purchase a one-way ticket.

  Holly took her chaperone duties seriously but wanted only to get her last batch of distastefully wealthy passengers to the station in one piece; she didn’t want to get to know them, and she certainly didn’t want to be their friend.

  Because this would be the Karrier’s final Venus-bound trip for the foreseeable future — and quite possibly ever — there was a lot more precious cargo on board than ever before. The fact that the vast majority of the Karrier’s living quarters had been stripped and converted to storage bays for this final journey slashed the number of passengers and made Holly’s life far easier; the Karrier wasn’t quite a ghost ship, but it sometimes seemed that way. And although some of the cargo onboard was highly sensitive and some was extremely volatile, the responsibility for its safety lay with one of her colleagues.

  When it came to passenger safety, on the other hand, the buck stopped with Holly.

  She closed her door and came face to face with the digital picture of herself which faced out into the corridor, identifying the room as her quarters.

  As usual, the very old photograph made Holly briefly reflect on the irony of how far she had travelled on this Karrier in the last six months, contrasted against the fact that she had never even left Earth’s orbit during her several years as the poster-child of the long-since defunct public space program.

  And, as usual, Holly quickly shook these thoughts aside. Those days were half a lifetime ago, and the last thing she could afford to do was look back.

  Rusentra’s dining machine may have been a mundane invention compared to the vast orbital research station the corporation had assembled around Venus, or indeed the breakthrough in propulsion which enabled these quick and comfortable cargo missions, but the machine still amazed Holly every time she used it.

  On the outside, it looked like a standard old-fashioned vending machine. But on the inside, this machine processed its sole ingredient into any of 200 distinct “meals” with nothing more than a minuscule amount of the right flavourings and colourings. A perfectly presented and uncannily convincing plateful typically appeared within thirty seconds. For some reason, though, diners tended to prefer their food when they didn’t know what it was made of.

  The Karrier’s longstanding security officer hit the nail on the head with a succinct quip during his first night on board: “Two hundred choices, and they are all algae.”

  Though Holly couldn’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of the machine, she knew that several distinct breakthroughs had been necessary. First came perfecting the algae’s macro-nutritional profile and fortifying it with the myriad micronutrients necessary for human health. Next came the genetic modification which allowed
the algae to not merely survive but to thrive in the absence of a light source, enabling small-scale cultivation within the machines themselves. According to Ekaterina Rusev, Rusentra’s founder and one of Holly’s current passengers, this biochemical progress had been a walk in the park compared to nailing the texture. Eyes and tastebuds proved relatively easy to fool, Rusev said, but even slight errors in texture had elicited physical disgust among test diners.

  Holly pressed a finger against her wristband until its pop-out display extended several inches along her forearm and revealed her passengers’ latest meal orders.

  Yury Gardev, an ageing space pioneer who merited his free place on the station as much as anyone, ordered the same choice for every meal: potatoes, pork, and peas. His cabin-mate Ekaterina Rusev had today opted for the same thing. Holly’s super-rich paying passengers at the other end of the Karrier had chosen an extra large all-day breakfast and a vegetarian lasagne. Given that everything was made of mashed-up algae, the redundancy of the machine’s vegetarian options never failed to make Holly smile.

  Holly selected Rusev’s and Yury’s meals first. She set off towards their cabin little over a minute later, making it almost halfway before one of their forks slipped off the tray and fell to the floor. Holly placed the tray down while she picked up the fork and wiped it on her shirt. After standing silently for a few seconds, she sighed, turned around, and walked back to the utility room for a clean fork. Yury deserved as much, and so did Rusev.

  In 68 well-lived years, Ekaterina Rusev had done as much for humanity as anyone Holly could think of. Though the Bulgarian matriarch of the Rusentra corporation had inherited her controlling interest in the firm several decades earlier, she had since amassed an even greater fortune on the back of her own innovations and Holly didn’t think the issue of the unearned inheritance in any way detracted from Rusev’s long list of positive contributions.

  Top of that list, without question, was the Venus station.

  When Rusentra had first published proposals for its research station almost thirty years earlier, one critic decried the plans as “an example of gross scientific self-indulgence and a wasted opportunity to tackle the looming overpopulation crisis.”

  Now, with the situation on Earth so precarious that the global population had fallen to a level unseen since the mid-twentieth century, Holly didn’t understand how any reasonable person could be anything but grateful that Rusev had diverted so much funding to the station’s creation all those years earlier.

  More than a decade after an unprecedented series of natural disasters and a day-long blitzkrieg of coordinated terror attacks sent the world into a state of chaos which ultimately led to the creation of an all-powerful Global Union of nations, GU policies had done conspicuously little to reverse this population decline.

  Thanks to Rusev’s personal vision, the three largest spacecraft ever constructed now orbited Venus as one gargantuan whole. And although the Venus station was originally intended to become both a self-sustaining research base and a jumping off point for an ill-fated asteroid mining venture, the station had ended up serving as something much more important: a refuge for a lucky few and, in Rusev’s own words, “an off-site backup for humanity itself.”

  This point had been made in the worst way on what had come to be known as Devastation Day, when terrorists destroyed all major Earth-based space research hubs along with innumerable military facilities and critical civilian infrastructure across all major nations. All that survived of Rusentra’s space project was the Venus station and the two Karrier crafts docked to it at the time, one of which Holly was standing in right now.

  The Global Union which rose from the ashes did not look kindly upon any form of investment in space, deeming it wasteful at a time when so many on Earth were struggling to make ends meet. Rusev’s operating research station had been largely ignored until the rapid rise to absolute power of Roger Morrison, a plutocrat turned GU politician with whom she shared a long history of bitter conflict.

  Effective propaganda had since criticised the station as “a bastion of corporate wastefulness.” Despite the GU’s total media control, however, such propaganda fell on deaf ears precisely because Earth’s citizens truly did have far more pressing things to worry about, such as where their next meal would come from and what colour the water would be when they next turned the tap.

  But ever since the propaganda began, both of Rusev’s Karriers had been incessantly ferrying cargo and important individuals to the station; as Rusev explained to Holly personally, she feared that Morrison might soon act to block further launches without notice.

  Holly had a feeling that Morrison and others within the GU’s hierarchy were quietly glad to be rid of Rusev and her allies, thinking that they probably viewed them as something of an unhappy intelligentsia who could do less harm from a distance than up-close.

  Holly often reflected on Rusev’s presence on this final cargo mission. Like any good captain, Ekaterina Rusev had been the last to abandon Earth’s sinking ship and had made sure that all of her associates were on their Venusian lifeboat before she worried about her own escape.

  Thoughts sometimes circled in Holly’s mind about the four billion souls who weren’t fortunate enough to reach the lifeboat, but she ultimately consoled herself that four thousand — the number already safely housed on the station — was a lot better than nothing.

  When Holly arrived with the meals, Rusev asked her usual question: “How are the other passengers?”

  Holly shrugged. “Still pretty quiet.”

  No one spoke for a few seconds. Holly understood the reasoning for Rusev’s decision to sell tickets for the last few Karrier trips — it had been the only way to generate the level of last-minute funding needed to buy crucial supplies on the black market — but that didn’t mean she accepted it.

  Yury, a gentle giant known affectionately as Spaceman by many who knew him and many more who didn’t, removed his scarf from the cabin’s third dining chair and invited Holly to sit down.

  “Thanks,” she said, “but I have to feed the other passengers.”

  Yury patted the chair. “They can survive for a few more minutes while we catch up.”

  Holly sat down.

  In the 74 years since he became the first human to be born in space, Yury Gardev had spent significantly more time off Earth than any other individual.

  There was, however, one record which Yury no longer held, and rarely a day went by without Holly — barely half his age at 39 — playfully reminding him that she and the Karrier’s ever-present security officer now shared the record for the greatest cumulative distance travelled by any human. Holly brought this up once again as soon as she sat down, even earning a chuckle from the typically reserved Rusev.

  Yury took it all in good spirits; having personally trained Holly during her early days in the public space program some nineteen years earlier, he took nothing but pleasure from seeing her belatedly experiencing what she’d worked so hard for… even if the circumstances weren’t exactly those she would have chosen.

  A few short minutes into an easy conversation which Holly would have loved to continue for the rest of the day, her wristband buzzed to remind her that her other passengers were still awaiting their meals.