Read The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera Online
Authors: David Afsharirad
The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (8 page)
She swung her hammer on the end of its cord and threw. The hammer dragged the wet parachute cord across the few meters and laid it across the top of the grabbing arm.
Electricity cracked across the wet cord. The drone’s last light popped and smoke puffed out.
Whatever static charge the drone had acquired in the two days in the deep had not been the same as the trawler’s. Now it was.
Marie-Claude hauled in the drone and lashed it to the trawler’s shaft.
Thunder rumbled. Deep, bone-touching vibrations quickened primal fears.
Her fingers trembled as she opened the access panels of the drone and peeled away burnt acid barriers. Half-melted wiring lay over fuses charred in their brackets. She yanked the surviving wires free by the handful and began wiring the trawler shaft above her to the drone’s hydrogen cells. Then, she connected the hydrogen cells to the shaft below the drone. Her fingers tingled as a light current passed through the wires.
She had to get out of here. The wind whipped the trawler past wrinkled walls of cloud, faster and faster. Marie-Claude struggled up the cord, on aching muscles, to the stoma.
The clear space opened wider, and the diffuse brightness of the light lent the gloom the tincture of dawn. Venus had spent almost three days testing her. She had survived. Venus respected Marie-Claude now, but had not finished with her. That was Venus’ message in the gesture of opening the clouds. But Marie-Claude would use Venus’ spite against her.
Her fingers scrabbled at the opening of the stoma, prying, pulling, until she could force her arms in and pull herself up. She kicked. Hard. Fast. Not much time.
Marie-Claude slipped into the chamber, but did not reconnect her suit to the electroplaque. She untied the parachute cord from her harness. She didn’t want to be close to any of the trawler’s electrical vascular systems. She huddled against the wall, her knees tucked close to her.
“Renaud?” she asked. “Renaud?”
Static. Then “Marie-Claude! Are you okay?”
“Have you got a fix on me?”
“Yes. It’s really faint.”
“Keep the fix. I might need a pick-up soon.”
“The deep-dive vehicle won’t be here until tomorrow, Marie-Claude,” he said sadly, “and even then, I don’t know if we can get close to the storm.”
“Keep the fix,” she said.
Thunder boomed closer. Lightning lit the walls of the chamber like a flashlight behind a hand, silhouetting reticulated vasculature. She’d never been close to lightning on Earth, but she felt, even without seeing it, that Venusian lightning was larger, angrier. Soon, the lightning would choose to travel through the stalk of the trawler for part of its journey. She didn’t know what would happen to all the things that parasitized the trawler as a platform upon which to live. They might be burnt to a crisp, cleansing the trawler, or perhaps in the way a forest fire opens ground for new growth, new life might be quickened by the lightning, and given space in which to grow. She did not know if she would survive. She was now a seed in a pod, wondering if the casing was strong enough to survive the trial that preceded birth.
Distantly, through a wall of static, Renaud yelled. “You’re descending. Are you in a down-draft? Marie-Claude! You’re at thirty-one kilometers and dropping!”
The world exploded around her. Painful brightness. Bone-shaking noise. Heat. Sizzling shock seizing her muscles. The world became transparent. Fragments of overloaded sensation were simultaneous with a shuddering explosion below. Where the repair drone had been, a bright flash of orange and purple lit the thin floor of the chamber. The trawler shook, as if it were about to come apart.
Then the world dimmed.
Lightning cracked farther away, lighting the walls of her world like new moments of creation.
Her muscles trembled from electrical shock, even though she’d been grounded to the trawler and not in the path of any of the current. She felt heavy. The chamber continued to shake in turbulence. She was heavy. It was not the electrical shock. The chamber shook in the turbulence of its own rapid ascent through the atmosphere. It had worked. Igniting the hydrogen cells on the drone had severed the trawler’s heavy cable.
“Renaud!” she cried.
Her antenna icon was red. Her operating system was rebooting. Renaud couldn’t hear her. She wasn’t transmitting her location. Her emergency battery was failing. And the trawler’s severed shaft could not produce electricity anymore. But the electroplaque might still be charged.
Marie-Claude crawled to the hole she’d dug in the woody flesh of the trawler. Her hands shook, her muscles still spasming from the shock. She clipped her suit to the electroplaque.
Some displays lit, but it became hard to think, to focus on what they were telling her. Her chest felt heavy. Her arms and legs ached. The decompression icon winked bright red in the middle of her faceplate. The yellow nitrogen icon flashed beneath it. Danger of nitrogen narcosis, despite the low nitrogen mix in her air tank. Going from six atmospheres to one was lethal. The trawler shuddered as it continued upward, and blackness invaded the edges of her vision. Like a fickle genie, Venus might have granted her wish but killed her anyway.
Duvieusart Inquiry Transcript, page 782
6:35, RENAUD LANOIX, ENGINEERING SUPERVISOR: We found Mademoiselle Duvieusart in the charred husk of a trawler at forty-nine kilometers. Her suit had rebooted on a failing emergency battery. We had initially thought the trawler had only been mauled in a deep storm but later on, we found explosive damage underneath the buoyancy chambers and in the remains of its cable. The chambers were still sealed at an atmosphere and a half.
6:35, CHLOE RIVERIN, CHAIR: In what condition did you find Mademoiselle Duvieusart?
6:35, RENAUD LANOIX, ENGINEERING SUPERVISOR: The media reports were accurate. Unconscious. Extreme heat exhaustion. Shock. And nitrogen narcosis. The safeties in her suit had tried to adjust the pressure more gradually, but it hadn’t had enough power to do more than a half-job.
6:35, CHLOE RIVERIN, CHAIR: And then what?
6:35, RENAUD LANOIX, ENGINEERING SUPERVISOR: We had no access to a hyperbaric chamber, so the only thing we could do was put her in our own plane and dive as deep as the tolerances would allow. We managed to raise the pressure in the plane to almost two atmospheres for several hours.
Everything ached when she woke. The drone of a plane engine sounded, and she was strapped in, reclining, in one of the back passenger seats. Her suit was off, and bandages covered her arms. Renaud knelt, applying an acid-burn cream to her legs.
“Renaud,” she croaked.
The wind outside the plane sounded wrong, and the pilot ahead of them fought violent turbulence. It was dark outside the cockpit window. The plane shook and bumped again.
“We’re going to be riding some rough weather until we can get you safely to higher pressures. Then we can take you home to the
Laurentide
to a hero’s welcome. You’re big news, even on Earth. The story of your three days in the clouds has had more hits than any other story on Earth, Mars, or the asteroids. Everyone is waiting to hear what you decide.”
“Les séparatistes?”
she asked.
“I sure hope your choice isn’t
nationaliste
.”
“Neither,” she said.
“Everyone has to choose,” he said. “This will go to a vote, and there’s only yes and no.”
She shook her head. It hurt. “Whether we are a territory of Québec or the nation of Venus, we’re still living in floating cans, losing the race. It doesn’t matter who comes first in a losing race. The solutions that work elsewhere won’t work here.”
“What do you want? You’re in no shape to lead anything right now.”
“We have to learn to live off the land. Smaller habitats have to be more independent, riding deeper in the atmosphere, where we can learn from the life that already thrives here. We have to become the new
coureurs des bois
.”
THE END OF THE SILK ROAD
by David D. Levine
And now for a very different take on the second planet from the sun. Venus was once a lush, swampy jungle world, filled with deadly aquatic and amphibious life—at least that’s what a bevy of science fiction writers told us. Then, of course, the probes said different, proving that nothing lurked under that inscrutable Venusian cloud cover but rocks and poisonous gas. Lucky for us, David D. Levine didn’t let reality get in the way of a rousing good story. Here then, a tale of the Venus of old and a private eye on the trail of a conspiracy.
I GOT OFF THE RED CAR
at the Port of Los Angeles stop, knocking some geezer in the knee with my suitcase as I did. “Sorry, Bud,” I reassured his scowl. “Nothing personal, but I’m in a hurry.”
Somehow I managed to cross the street, dodging between delivery vans laden with bananas and speeding Hudsons, without losing my suitcase, my fedora, or the ticket envelope clutched in my hand. The ticket said Pier A, Berth 152—May 24, 1936—3:40 PM.
My watch said 3:05.
Pier A stretched ahead of me, a huge yellow-painted shed looking as long as five football fields.
I jammed the suitcase under my arm, held my hat on with the other hand, put the ticket in my mouth, and ran for it.
The Three Planet Air Lines steward was just closing the gate as I rushed in, wringing with sweat, and presented my soggy, tooth-marked ticket. He gave me the fish-eye at first, but when he saw the words FIRST CLASS at the top his attitude changed completely. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Drayton,” he said, and waved me up the gangplank with a broad smile.
Halfway up, I took a moment to mop my brow and admire the view.
The Port of Los Angeles sprawled out below me, an enormous model railroad set complete with life-sized trucks, trains, and cranes. Off to my left were the sea terminals, where oil tankers went out and banana boats came in. To my right, the interplanetary cargo docks, mostly workaday marswood freighters plus a few of the new cargo airliners, shining silver whales with dozens of propellers on each wing. One of the marswood ships was just taking off as I watched, rising into a clear blue sky under a white cloud of its own: sixty or more Venus-silk balloons full of hot air straining at their tethers. And behind me . . .
The
A. S. Santa Fe
loomed at the top of the gangplank like a streamlined skyscraper with wings, floating low in the water with a full load of fuel and supplies for the two-week flight to Venus. Gleaming with fresh paint in Three Planet Lines yellow, her engines already roaring, she was fast, clean, modern, beautiful—everything Victor Grossman was not. He ought to hate her; she and her speedy sisters were making a hash of his business. Yet that hidebound old silk merchant had sprung for a first-class ticket aboard her . . . for a beat-up old private eye whose guts he’d hated for twenty years.
Why?
It was that mystery, as much as the very substantial retainer accompanying the ticket, that had overcome this little fly’s quite understandable reluctance to accept the spider’s invitation to his silken parlor.
That, and Maria, of course.
The steward at the boarding door was gesturing impatiently. I waved my hat in the air, called out, “So long, L.A.! Be back soon!” and hurried to meet my fate.
The First Class Observation Lounge was pretty swank, with a magnificent bar at one end, enormous curved windows at the other, and a broad expanse of plush sky-blue carpet in between scattered with little tables. I ordered an orange juice and received two surprises: the drink came in a spherical aluminum container, all Deco and streamlined with a little sippy-straw, and it was on the house.
There was a time I would have made the management regret that decision, even for the price of a first-class ticket.
I sipped my orange juice and wandered to the window, where Brooks Brothers suits jostled elbows with each other at the rail, to watch the takeoff. From here we had a great view of the eight enormous propellers on each wing, each bigger than my house, but even as the engines spun up to speed, their no-doubt-deafening roar was reduced by the double glass to a throaty hum like a Rolls Royce.
There was almost no impression of motion as we thrummed forward, leaving a broad V-shaped wake behind us, then lifted from the water as smooth as a swan. The captain banked and turned in a big half-circle as we climbed, giving us a fabulous view of the glittering City of Angels, then rising still higher over the brown hills and the desert beyond. Details fell away as we climbed, California dwindling to a carpet of brown traced with highways upon which Hupmobiles and DeSotos crawled like ants, then even the highways faded to invisibility. Pretty soon we’d gone so high that we could see Baja and the Gulf of California to our right and the Rockies ahead, the horizon visibly curving away in all directions and a few puffy clouds drifting by below us.
A loudspeaker in the ceiling cleared its throat, then politely requested that passengers return to their staterooms for the passage through the turbulent zone. Quite a contrast with my last such passage, I thought, when it had been a Marine sergeant bellowing, “All right, you leathernecks, strap in!”
Back in my stateroom, I found that the steward had unpacked my bag and left a brochure about the passage, titled
Rounding the Horn
, on the bed. After putting my things back in the suitcase—I travel light and I like to know exactly where my gear is—I read about how the Earth’s atmosphere, rotating along with the planet, collided with the interplanetary atmosphere to create a perpetual zone of turbulence which had claimed many a ship in the days of “Marswood Ships and Iron Men.” But aboard the
Santa Fe
I need have no fear; her mighty engines and modern appointments would guarantee a swift and comfortable passage through the zone.
And, indeed, though the leather armchair was fixed to the deck and equipped with a seat belt, I never needed it. Even at the worst, the liner’s gentle jostling did nothing more than rock me to sleep.
After breakfast, a remarkably tasty concoction of bacon and eggs wrapped in something I’d call a tortilla but which the menu described as a crêpe, I drifted back to the observation lounge, where I slipped my feet under the straps by the rail and sipped coffee from one of those spherical Deco things while I contemplated the globe of the Earth, floating like a big glass marble in the endless cloud-flecked blue of the sky.
From here, all mankind’s schemes, ambitions, and fighting had dwindled to nothing. Dust bowls, floods, wars and rumors of wars . . . all were as invisible as the petty thefts, embezzlements, and infidelities that usually bought me my daily bread. I couldn’t even see where one continent left off and another began, never mind countries.
My reverie was interrupted by a splash, a thud, and a petite little shriek as a soft, silk-clad form caromed off my shoulder, leaving a sphere that smelled of gin and vermouth spinning in the air between us.
Slipping my feet out of the straps, I held onto the rail with one hand and reached up with the other, grasping the dame by one slender wrist and pulling her down out of the air to where she could reach the rail.
Nice gams
, I thought as she struggled to compose her dress, her hat, and her purse, all of which were trying to float off in different directions. Most of the other female passengers were wearing trousers; apparently this one hadn’t read the brochure.
Her drink, I noted, was getting away, a spiral of shimmering droplets spilling from the end of the straw as it tumbled. I snagged the sphere out of the air and snapped it to one of the magnets lining the rail for that purpose, next to my coffee. I was just wondering what to do with the spilled martini droplets when an automaton waiter appeared, smoothly sweeping them up in a pristine white napkin. Just as well; it would have been uncouth, as well as stupidly self-destructive, for me to slurp them up out of the air with my tongue.
“First time in free fall?” I asked the dame after the waiter had refreshed our drinks.
“And here I thought I was hiding it so well,” she replied, arching one plucked eyebrow in self-mockery as she daubed at a spot on her Venusian-silk sleeve. She was about my age but still a looker, honey-blonde with some meat on her bones. Just the way I like ‘em. “And you?”
“Not my first spin on this merry-go-round, no.” Droplets of blood wobbling in smoky air and the smell of gunpowder. I took a big swig of coffee to wash the memory out of my mouth.
We chatted for a while, and I couldn’t help but notice that as she sipped her drink she was inspecting me from beneath the questionable cover of her hat’s veil. I’m not sure just what she saw in a craggy forty-seven-year-old P.I. with a broken nose and graying temples, but she made her move after the second martini.
“Is it true what they say,” she said, tilting her head downward and looking at me through her eyelashes, “about what two people can get up to in free fall?”
“I’ve known people who were quite enthusiastic about it,” I replied, not admitting any specifics.
She turned from me and looked out the window, where the Earth was just vanishing behind the wing. “Pity about the view,” she said. “I wonder if we can see it from my stateroom?”
The
Santa Fe
really did have the very latest word in passenger comforts, including some strategically-placed straps and grab bars on the bed frame. After we’d tried them all out, the blonde turned on the lights, lit a cigarette, and just looked at me for a time, the smoke mingling with her drifting hair before it curled away toward the ventilation grille on the wall. I looked at her, too, admiring the way her creamy breasts bobbed gently in the air.
“Who was it?” she asked.
“Who was what?”
“The girl you were thinking of instead of me.” She took another drag on the cigarette. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I had a good time. But I know when a man isn’t paying attention.”
I looked out the window as I considered my reply. We’d left the curtains open; no one but the whole shining Earth was out there to look in on us. “Someone I haven’t seen in over twenty years,” I said.
“Must have been quite a girl, to hold your attention that long.”
The Earth stared back at me. Wars and rumors of wars . . . all invisible at this distance, but still there nonetheless.
“I didn’t deserve her.”
Cooksport had changed a lot in twenty years, and not for the better. The small and shabby passenger dock from which I’d departed had been replaced with a grand palatial terminal, which had itself fallen into disrepair, with chipped terrazzo and falling plaster and only five of the sixty slots on the arrivals board occupied. I was sure the cargo terminals had seen even bigger changes, following the silk industry’s rising and falling fortunes.
Emerging from the terminal, whose ceiling fans were tarnished but still slowly turning, was like stepping into a sauna. “Ah, Venus,” I said, fanning myself with my hat. “How I haven’t missed you.”
Though it was just past noon, the sky above the port was a curdled mess of gray cloud and weak, fitful light, the best old Sol could manage even at a distance much closer than Earth’s. Wormlights, each sucking a sugar-teat at the top of a light pole, illuminated the square fronting the terminal, where a row of cabs awaited the arriving passengers.
“Superior Silk,” I said to the cabbie as I tossed my suitcase into the cab’s howdah, clambering up after it.
“Office or plant?” the cabbie gurgled from the driver’s saddle. He was a froggie—a “Venusian aboriginal,” to be polite—crammed into a human-style cab driver’s outfit, complete with a uniform cap that perched unsteadily behind his bulging eyes. His collar and cuffs were frayed, and damp with the moisture that oozed continually from his pale, greenish skin.
“Office, I guess.”
The cabbie’s throat-sac worked in acknowledgement. He pushed the flag on the meter down with one webbed hand and goaded the cab with his heel-spurs. The cab whuffled and gurgled as it rose unsteadily to its six suckered feet, then took off down the street at a shambling run, leaving me hanging onto the grab bar with one hand and my hat with the other. The suitcase I wedged between my hip and the howdah’s side.
The breeze helped a little, but not much.
