Terradox Read online

  “I’m sure our friends on the other side of the Karrier are accustomed to a certain level of service,” Yury said, partly jesting but partly betraying his heartfelt resentment that so many qualified and deserving people had been left on Earth while wealthy nobodies had been able to buy their own safe passage to the station. “Better not keep them waiting too long on my behalf.”

  Holly sighed, rising to her feet.

  “At least there are only three more days until you never have to serve another rich man’s dinner,” Yury added in an effort to lift the mood.

  Rusev nodded and offered Holly a slight but warm smile. “Three days,” she echoed softly. “Three days.”

  Holly stepped out into the corridor and closed the door behind her. As soon as she did so, she felt a cold hand on her arm. Instinctively, she spun around and pressed its owner against the wall in a single defensive motion.

  “It’s just me,” the man said, wide-eyed and whispering.

  “Jesus, Dante! What the hell are you doing sneaking up on—”

  A firm index finger pressed against Holly’s lips to cut her off mid-sentence. Dante, who had quickly become Rusev’s favourite technician and was doubling up as a secondary chaperone for this final one-way trip, scanned the corridor with urgent eyes. He slowly removed his finger from Holly’s lips and brought it towards his own.

  “What’s going on?” Holly mouthed silently.

  In lieu of an answer, Dante took hold of Holly’s arm again and led her down the corridor. When they arrived at the utility room, where Holly had been going anyway, he double-checked in both directions that no one was watching.

  Holly couldn’t miss the heavy expression on Dante’s normally boyish face. Just as she was about to repeat her question about what was going on in more forceful and less patient terms, he opened the door and ushered her inside.

  “There’s something you need to see,” he said, no longer whispering and now looking positively grave. “Right now.”

  two

  “This happened an hour ago,” Dante said, tapping the wall next to the algae machine to activate a touchscreen panel. He wore his standard-issue yellow Rusentra polo shirt, as always, but the expression on his face told Holly that this situation was anything but standard. “Pay attention.”

  Holly did as he said. Footage then filled the screen, showing the corridor outside her rich passengers’ cabin. The female passenger emerged from the door with a large towel folded over her arm and a toiletries bag and hairbrush in her hands.

  “They’re allowed to use the real showers,” Holly said. “The one in their cabin is hardly big enough to stand in.”

  Dante shushed her. “Listen.”

  As the woman disappeared from view of the camera feed Dante had chosen, her much older male companion came into view at their cabin’s door. “Viola!” he snapped, clearly furious but trying to keep his volume down. “Get back in here… now!”

  When she ignored this order, the man returned to the cabin and slammed the door behind him.

  “So the rich guy is a controlling asshole,” Holly concluded. “And that’s your big secret?”

  Dante’s face reflected his confusion. “Were you even listening? He called her Viola.”

  “And?”

  “And that means they’re travelling with fake names! Look at the names on their door: Norman and Jessica Tanner. If her name is Jessica, why the hell is he calling her Viola?”

  Holly blew air from her lips in impatience and slight disappointment that this was what Dante had been so worked up about. “My door says Ivy Wood,” she sighed. “But when did you last hear anyone call me Ivy?”

  “Yeah, but that’s you. It’s hardly the same.”

  “What do you mean? We don’t know anything about these people.”

  “Exactly!” Dante stressed. “We don’t know anything about these people. And it’s not like this is the first thing that’s made me wonder. Forget Jessica — AKA Viola — for a minute. What about the guy? Think about how much he must have paid for this journey. How could there be someone that rich who none of us have heard of?”

  “His money’s probably dirty,” Holly said with a dismissive half-shrug. “People smuggling, fake vaccines, fuel shipments…”

  Dante, still standing beside the screen, was shaking his head vigorously. “You’ve seen what his wife looks like, right? How much younger she is? Money can bridge those gaps up to a point, but there are a lot of rich guys out there. For someone like him to end up with someone like her, it takes more than money. It takes power.”

  “You’re jumping to so many conclusions here, Dante… I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve never wondered about this guy,” Dante challenged. “Tell me he doesn’t look like a guy with something big on his mind. Tell me he doesn’t look like a guy who’s hiding something.”

  Holly hadn’t noticed any particular concern on Norman Tanner’s face on any of the countless occasions she’d handed him his meal order at the cabin door — certainly no more than she’d seen on the face of her previous passengers — but she couldn’t pretend that the discrepancy between Norman and his wife hadn’t played on her mind.

  It was a discrepancy of effort as much as anything else: Norman either had multiple grey shirts with identical stains or always wore the same one; his rough beard grew by the day; and his fingernails were bitten ragged. Holly would have considered Norman noticeably scruffy even without the stark contrast presented by his perfectly manicured wife, with the hair so straight it looked sharp and the perpetually photoshoot-ready makeup.

  “Grav can see what they’re doing all the time,” Dante blurted out, interrupting Holly’s thoughts. “The screen in his security room shows feeds from every other room, not just the corridors. If we could get in there somehow…”

  “Sneak into Grav’s room? Are you trying to get killed?”

  Dante thought for a few seconds. “Fine. But we could at least ask to see some footage.”

  “How about this,” Holly began, reluctant to trouble Grav over what was probably nothing and keen to put Dante’s suspicions to bed. “We both go to their door to say there’s been a problem with their order and that they need to order again. That way we’ll be at the door for more than a few seconds and Norman will have to do more than just nod his head like he normally does. If I think anything seems off — anything — we’ll tell Grav and ask to see some footage. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Dante agreed without hesitation. Immediately, he set off.

  The Tanners’ cabin lay at the opposite end of the Karrier from Rusev’s and Yury’s, with the utility room right in the middle. Both passenger cabins were in fact refitted emergency landers, a modification which had been necessary to maximise the small Karrier’s cargo capacity by stripping the original and much larger sleeping quarters and using them for storage. Chronic material shortages on Earth meant that neither Rusev nor anyone else had been able to construct any space-worthy vessels since the terrorist blitzkrieg of Devastation Day, leaving Rusev’s two surviving Karriers as her sole means of ferrying people and resources to the Venus station.

  Around ten metres from the cabin, Dante suddenly held an arm in front of Holly to halt her progress. “The door’s opening,” he said, spotting the jiggling handle with eagle-eyed focus.

  Holly stopped dead on the spot.

  Immediately upon opening the door, Norman Tanner — stained shirt and all — caught sight of Holly and Dante. He stood rooted in the doorway like a deer in headlights.

  Just as Holly opened her mouth to speak, Norman slinked back inside and quickly but quietly closed the door.

  “Suspicious enough?” Dante said.

  Holly nodded reluctantly. “Let’s go.”

  three

  Back in the privacy of the utility room with Holly, Dante pressed a button on his wristband and raised it towards his mouth. “Grav, it’s Dante. Do you read?”

  “What do you need?”
a gruff and heavily accented voice rang through the wristband’s small but punchy speakers. “I am dealing with something here, so try to keep it short.”

  Though functionally perfect, Grav’s English lacked the polish of the group’s two other non-native speakers in Rusev and Yury. His speech often struck first time listeners as incongruently formal thanks to his avoidance of all contractions, while a strong accent betrayed his Serbian origins. There was a slight irony in the fact that the name by which he was universally known was in itself a contraction of his real name — Goran Vuletic — but Holly had never thought of him as a man with much time for humour or irony.

  Grav’s voice was as deep and his temper as short as they came. But beyond these few isolated points and the handful of stories Yury had told her, Holly knew very little about him.

  Dante briefly considered the best way to breach the delicate subject with Grav, who he knew to be tremendously impatient at the best of times. He soon opted for a straightforward statement of his position: “I don’t know exactly what the problem is, but I need to see the Tanners’ travel cards.”

  “Why?”

  “Norman is acting suspiciously and I think ‘Jessica’ is travelling on a fake name.”

  “I do not have time for your shit right now, Dante,” Grav snapped in his usual staccato way. “Get back to cleaning the floor or whatever the hell it is you are supposed to be doing.”

  Dante held his wristband in front of Holly’s face, clearly urging her to speak up. “I’m here, too,” she eventually said, “and I’m with Dante on this. It would be a real help if we could take a look at those travel cards.”

  “Okay, okay, their cards are on the system,” Grav said. His tone was less sharp than when speaking to Dante, but he now seemed even more preoccupied with whatever he was dealing with. “The passcode is 44-22-35. I will be there as soon as these readings stabilise, okay? Give them some privacy until then. Tanner is a good man.”

  Dante’s wristband beeped to signal the end of the call before Holly had time to reply.

  “So how do we get into the system to see the travel cards?” Dante asked.

  Holly responded by expanding her own wristband’s touchscreen and navigating to a menu that Dante wasn’t familiar with. Unable to see much with Holly’s hand in the way, he stepped back and waited for her to relay her findings. It didn’t take long.

  “Shit…” Holly said, eyes glued to the screen.

  “What?”

  She raised her gaze to meet Dante’s. “Her name is Jessica, but she’s his daughter.”

  “No way.”

  Holly nodded absently as her focus returned to the Tanners’ travel cards.

  The photographs, both taken within the last year, showed two almost unrecognisable people. Norman was clean-shaven and well presented while Jessica’s hair was its apparently natural brown. Both looked fresh-faced, but Jessica’s heartbreakingly innocent smile made Holly wonder how she would fare on the isolated Venus station with almost no one else her own age.

  Holly regretted her previous judgements about both of them and now understood why Norman seemed so tense; with a child in his care in an environment like this, she thought, who wouldn’t be?

  Dante now stood at Holly’s shoulder, peering down at the photograph of Jessica. “Woah. Does it say how old she is?” he asked.

  Holly looked at him in silence.

  “I was just ask—”

  “Listen to me,” she interrupted. “And listen well, because I’m only going to say this once: if you even think about it…”

  There was no need to finish the sentence.

  “Do something useful,” Holly added. “I’m going to bring them their food. They’ve been waiting long enough.”

  “Why don’t we both go?”

  “You heard what Grav said about giving them privacy until he comes to talk to us.”

  “What Grav said?” Dante parroted with unconcealed contempt. “Since when does he give the orders?”

  Holly ignored Dante’s pettiness; she knew that he and Grav had never seen eye to eye, and she had no desire to play peacemaker. Grav valued respect and saw Dante as “an obnoxious punk” who didn’t know the meaning of the word, a feeling he’d developed primarily during a minor argument which ended with Dante urging Grav to “quit it with the hardboiled hard-man act.”

  Though Grav had turned the other cheek, and though Holly was hardly close to him despite the hundreds of millions of miles they’d travelled together, she had heard enough stories from Yury to know that Grav’s stoic detachment was anything but an act.

  The most hard-hitting Grav stories came from the time period when his previous security work put him in direct confrontation with GU forces. Few who experienced such confrontation lived to tell the tale, but Grav had the scars to prove it; inside and out.

  Standing in front of the algae machine waiting for Norman Tanner’s extra large all-day breakfast, Holly’s mind drifted to the similarly costly conflict between Rusev and GU bureaucrats over the algae itself.

  When the distribution of Rusentra brand algae was first banned on Earth — with spurious health concerns cited as the reason — Rusev put it down to spite from her long-time rival Roger Morrison, a man who had enjoyed strong influence within the GU long before his formal rise to power. But when the famine struck and restrictions were tightened despite Rusev’s no-strings offer to produce mass quantities of the incredibly inexpensive algae and to make it available at cost, she began to question whether something more sinister was going on behind the curtain.

  There were certainly no legitimate grounds for health concerns; Rusev had eaten nothing else for almost twenty years, while Holly had also been on an algae-only diet for several months and felt better than ever, her skin looking as youthful as it had when she was Jessica Tanner’s age and her muscle mass holding up well despite the Karrier’s limited exercise facilities.

  A major and unsettling double-development on Earth just five weeks before the Karrier’s final departure strengthened Rusev’s suspicions. The first half of this development came in the form of a peer-reviewed research publication which claimed that multiple blight-stricken crops across several continents contained the same biochemical markers of what the paper’s lead author called “apparent genetic sabotage”. The second half came in the form of a bullet through that lead author’s forehead.

  The suspicious death of Olivia Harrington, who worked within a pharmaceutical firm once controlled by Roger Morrison and still bearing his name, captured public attention so fully that an all-out media blitz was urgently concocted to reshape the narrative. Rusev told Holly she was certain that Morrison and his GU associates had directed their hydra-like propaganda machine to ensure that the public swallowed two convenient stories: that the famine-causing agricultural sabotage was the work of the terrorists who had been wiped out since bringing the world to its knees on Devastation Day, and that Harrington — the “heroic citizen” who brought the truth of the human-engineered famine to light — had been murdered in cold blood by an obsessed male colleague jealous of the recognition her work was receiving.

  Desperate for any shred of evidence which could convincingly link the GU hierarchy to the engineered famine, Rusev had tirelessly tried to locate any of Harrington’s colleagues who might have known something. But if anyone did, they apparently knew better than to share it.

  As Rusev expected, Holly had been quick to believe that Morrison and his GU cronies were capable of something so heinous.

  Holly’s visceral hatred of Roger Morrison originated not from confrontation with either GU forces or GU policy, but rather during the regrettable two-year period she spent working for MXA, the space exploration arm of Morrison’s corporate empire.

  After what Morrison had personally and purposefully put Holly through, she ached to see him fall.

  Jessica Tanner’s meal appeared in the machine’s tray after slightly more than thirty seconds, a delay Holly could forgive given the intricacy of t
he grains of rice which lay in a neat pile next to the girl’s redundantly vegetarian lasagne.

  “Do you want me to open the door?” Dante offered from his seat at the room’s small table.

  “I’ll manage,” Holly said. “Thanks.”

  From nowhere, an unexpected jolt then almost knocked Holly to the ground. She caught herself on the machine, spilling some of Jessica’s rice.

  “What the hell was that?” Dante yelled.

  “It’ll just be whatever Grav was fixing,” Holly tried to reassure him. “He maybe had to restart someth—”

  A second impact, much harsher than the first, shook the entire room and sent Holly face-first into the table.

  Disoriented and blurry-eyed, she saw various components of an all-day breakfast and a thousand perfect grains of rice scattered on the floor in front of her throbbing face.

  A decisive third impact quickly followed, immeasurably more powerful than either of the others. Holly avoided the brunt of it courtesy of already being on the floor and well-braced against the table’s legs, but her good eye saw Dante being thrown into the wall on one side of the room while the impossibly heavy algae machine was ripped from the other.

  The next sight she consciously registered was the countless perfect grains of rice being washed towards the door by a horrible flow of dark green algae water.

  As the utility room’s light flashed amber, an ear-piercing alarm began to sound.

  four

  Holly lay under the table, curled in a ball in anticipation of a fourth impact which never came.

  “Get up!” Dante yelled over the shrill alarm. Holly looked across the room and saw him crawling towards her, holding his ribs and wincing as he went. He shook her by the shoulder when he reached her. “Seriously, Holly, we have to get out of here!”

  As Holly was about to reply — “and go where?” — her wristband’s blue notification light began to flash. If it beeped, she couldn’t hear it for the alarm. Holly pressed a button to answer the call and held the wristband against her ear.