The Fall of Terradox by Craig A. Falconer

Author:Craig A. Falconer [Falconer, Craig A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-12-10T22:00:00+00:00

thirty-eight

“Comm to Karrier,” Holly yelled, in unplanned unison with Grav. “Karrier, come in!”

“It’s still reporting full function,” Bo said, but Holly wouldn’t breathe easily until a voice from inside the Karrier confirmed as much.

When that voice came, it was Dimitar’s. “Holly! What the hell did I just blow up? It was huge!”

Holly bent her knees and crouched to the ground, putting her hands on the top of her helmet in a moment of overwhelming relief.

“What’s going on out there?” Robert Harrington chimed in. “Is everyone okay?”

Holly didn’t know what Robert had already been told so she left the answer to Peter, who had been in this rover all along. Those in the Karrier were able to see everyone else’s location and hence would have known that first Bo and then Sakura had been temporarily immobilised near the first rover, but it now became clear that Peter hadn’t had a spare moment to mention anything to them regarding the autonomous vehicle he had been so quick to warn Holly and Grav about.

“Did you just say robot?” Viola asked, confirming once and for all that all three of the Karrier’s current inhabitants were fine and well. “We’re being attacked by robots?”

“Were,” Grav said.

“Well…” Sakura chimed in. “If you just eliminated a large autonomous vehicle, that means there are at least three smaller pack-defence romodroids out there somewhere. They will briefly return to their alpha — the vehicle you just eliminated — and if you launch a series of strikes as they are about to arrive, you will eliminate them. You didn’t use up everything in that last strike, did you?”

“Nowhere close,” Dimitar said.

In the rover, Bo nodded his head several times at Dimitar’s words. “The Karrier has offensive abilities that make these rovers look like toys,” he added.

“We’ll be back at the Karrier in a matter of minutes,” Holly said. “Dimitar, what’s the communications situation? It looks like the clouds are starting to lift. Have you been able to establish any contact with Terradox or the station? We want to get off this place as soon as we can, but we need absolute confirmation that the romospheric expansion has been reversed.”

That Dimitar’s answer on the communications front was negative came as no real surprise — Holly expected that he would have already informed her and the others of such positive news had there been anything to report — but there was at least some good news when Dimitar confirmed that observations from the Karrier suggested that Netherdox was now in the early stages of embryonic reversion and that the signal-blocking clouds had almost entirely cleared.

Holly sat as helplessly as everyone else in the rover for the rest of the short journey back to the Karrier, with peak helplessness arriving when Dimitar reported that he was about to launch the attack on the three pack-defence romodroids which were approaching their downed alpha.

One slip-up from Dimitar here could have greatly imperilled everyone on Netherdox by derailing the group’s only hope of escape, but in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.