Authors: Christian Cantrell
Arik had built a lot of things in his life, but nothing that made him grin precisely like this.
He laid the plug gun across the back of the rover, checked the time, then pressed both gloved palms against the surface of the door. He hadn't calibrated his watch perfectly with the beginning of the timer, but within a few seconds of his expectation, he felt the vibration of the massive steel bars as they withdrew into the wall. Arik stepped back, and used the tip of his glove to gently press a button on his watch and start the two hour countdown. He would have liked to have waited a few minutes to see if anything happened now that the door was unlocked (had he tripped an alarm? would the door automatically lock again? would someone or something open it from the other side?), but he was already beginning to feel the pressure of the countdown. He stepped to the side and began applying his weight to the massive metal wheel. With every half turn, he could see the giant slab of steel pivot.
When the door was open about half a meter, it occurred to Arik that he should probably have some sense of what was on the other side before opening it the rest of the way. He left the wheel and peered through the gap. As far as he could tell, the other side of the wall was indistinguishable from the side he was on. There was nothing to see but a few meters of rocky ground gradually swallowed up by the thick mustard yellow atmosphere. If there was anything out there, it wasn't coming forward to meet him, but waiting for Arik to come to it.
He went back to work on the wheel. The gears weren't difficult to turn, though when the door was open wide enough that he judged he could get the rover through the gap, he found he was slightly winded and already damp with perspiration. He wondered if he should change his plan and leave the door open since closing it behind him would not only consume additional energy and air, but it would also require him to reserve enough strength to open and close it again on his way back. But he knew he wouldn't have much walking to do since he had the rover, and even if he injected all 100 solutions into the ground, the plug gun was an efficient enough tool that it required very little effort to use. It was better to stick to the plan.
Arik maneuvered the rover carefully through the gap, and as he expected, there was another wheel protruding from the wall directly opposite the one on the inside. For some reason, closing the door was easier than opening it had been, though with every half turn and every few centimeters that the gap narrowed, he found himself increasingly reluctant to cut himself off entirely from V1. He checked behind him several times to look for some hint of what the wall was intended to defend against, but all he could see was the thick yellow haze. Leaving the door open, even slightly, would have made him feel better, but he was committed to following his EVA's program as closely as possible. He had planned it logically and objectively precisely to avoid making spontaneous and emotional decisions which he knew could later reveal themselves to be tragically erroneous.
Before getting back in the rover, Arik removed a small steel canister from an outside pocket in his bag. He unscrewed the top, depressed the nozzle, and applied the supercooled isotopic iodine inside to the surface of the door from as high up as he could reach all the way down to the ground. The liquid would evaporate rapidly in the Venusian heat, but not without leaving behind enough residue to emit a clear radioactive beacon while it decayed over its half-life of eight days. Arik had initially planned to use a simple radio transmitter to help him find his way back, but even the smallest one he could find or build in a reasonable amount of time would have been noticeable to anyone or anything that might happen by the door. The isotopic iodine, on the other hand, was completely invisible without the right equipment, and couldn't be removed or deactivated.
Arik calculated that he would need between 40 and 60 minutes to get all 100 solutions injected into the ground which gave him about 30 minutes to locate an ideal spot. He really didn't know what constituted "ideal" except that it should receive all the remaining sunlight of the Venusian day, and should be inconspicuous but still easy enough for him to locate again sometime in the future. He knew he would probably end up using a piece of ground a few meters down from the door just outside the shadow of the wall, but locating a suitable plot of land was only part the objective of this portion of the EVA. The secondary objective was exploration.
Although his instincts were telling him to lay down his experiments and get back inside as quickly as possible, another part of him was compelled to continue driving slowly away from the wall. Arik was used to being outside by now, but this was something else entirely. He had left V1 in every relevant sense. There were no strobes around him to help him maintain his bearings, and no one standing by in the airlock in the event of an emergency. He was on the other side of a massive wall which neither he nor Cam could even begin to explain, and with every meter he traveled, he burned another second off the timer that could cut him off from everyone and everything he had ever known. Receding behind him was the safety and familiarity of V1, and in front of him, concealed in the thick yellow smog, was both the fear and exhilaration of the unknown.
The rover's suspension and tire pressure had stopped adjusting itself, and Arik suddenly realized that he was driving on a road. He stopped and raised the trajectory of the radar mapping device. On the screen between the hand controls, he could see the well-packed terrain stretch out before him with the rocky Venusian desert on either side. He raised the radar further, ignoring the warning from the navigation system that the trajectory was now out of range, and watched in astonishment as the small screen rendered something he could not understand: massive round structures concealed in the haze ahead, each one several times taller than the tallest section of V1. There were plenty of hills and mountains on Ishtar Terra, but what Arik was seeing was far too perfectly formed to have occurred naturally. He advanced slowly, his eyes flicking back and forth between the rover's screen and the thick yellow atmosphere in front of him until he was close enough that one of the enormous structures began to emerge. At first he thought it was a perfect cylinder, but as it revealed more of itself, it took on the unmistakable hyperbolic shape of a nuclear reactor cooling tower.
As the rover continued forward, additional towers emerged beside flat rectangular structures which Arik assumed housed the nuclear reactors themselves. He knew that none of this could be related to V1's power grid; their entire fusion generator was no bigger than Arik's bedroom, and certainly had no use for a cooling tower. This was clearly a remnant of more primitive nuclear technology when fission reactors generated indirect energy by creating steam which drove turbines, and required massive cooling towers to transfer heat waste to the atmosphere. Arik recalled Cam's story about the original Founders, about an initial colony of unsuccessful settlers. It obviously wasn't a perfect fit, but even the most farfetched folklore sometimes had long tenuous roots that tapped into a distant reality. It was obvious that V1 was not the first settlement on Venus; at least one entire human civilization had come before them, and apparently gone.
Arik continued forward past various dilapidated structures. The last cooling tower he saw was partially destroyed, it's black carbon scoring telling of a quick but violent explosion. In some ways, the settlement had actually been more successful than V1 — at least temporarily. Expansion had clearly been a priority, though they seemed to have struggled to meet their own energy demands. Arik wondered how they supplied themselves with oxygen and food. Most likely, they had been entirely dependent on Earth — so much so that even the smallest disruption in communication or launch delay could have been catastrophic. To these people, the GSA would have been God.
Or maybe this settlement even predated the GSA. If Arik rummaged through the debris, perhaps he'd find the the insignia of the European Space Agency, or even logos from long-defunct NASA. Considering the age of nuclear fission technology, this could very well have been built before the last worldwide economic and environmental cataclysm. Arik tried to imagine what living here would have been like. There was no way they could have had the technology to get home if the settlement had proven unsustainable. While the people on Earth were witnessing economic collapse, global power shortages, and one environmental catastrophe after another, to the Venusian colonists, the entire process would have manifested itself as nothing more than a perfectly good radio signal from Earth one day, and inexplicable dead air the next.
Arik was about to turn the rover around when he noticed the road surface changing and his visibility dramatically improving. He lowered the radar again to safeguard the rover's axles, then checked his watch. If he still wanted to set up his experiments, he would need to get back very soon, however his original EVA objectives now seemed distant and misplaced. Arik had inadvertently discovered an entirely new world — the only world he had ever witnessed outside of V1 — and its secrets and stories were mesmerizing. With the atmosphere clearing, he was starting to be able to see further than he thought possible on Venus, and he wanted to see more.
The rover's tires began slipping, and Arik could see that the terrain had become much finer, almost gritty. He had no idea how the rover's navigation and traction systems would adapt, so he parked and decided to continue a few more meters on foot. He could see as much as a hundred meters ahead of him now so there was no chance of getting lost, and the dark terrain was almost perfectly flat with only occasional gentle outcroppings. The soil was different here, and Arik pulled the plug gun from the back to help him get a better look at what was below the surface.
The ground became increasingly soft as he walked, and his boots began to sink with every step. He approached one of the outcroppings around him — about a six meter long cone-shaped mound which he assumed was basalt or some other type of volcanic rock — but before he reached it, he stopped. He watched the black ground around him carefully and was almost positive that he detected movement. He used the end of the plug gun to prod the surface in front of him to make sure it was secure, and just beside the mound, the muzzle sank below the surface. When he withdrew it, a thick tar-like substance clung to the tube in long viscous threads like black mucous. Arik assumed he was on the edge of an impact crater where the surface was still partially molten, but when he squatted down and inspected the mound next to him, he realized he could not be next to a lava pool.
What he had thought was some sort of a rock was in fact a tremendous skull several times larger than the length of his entire body.
A
rik knew that he was experiencing some form of shock. He was perfectly aware that he should be monitoring his suit, checking his watch, getting the rover turned around and pointed in the direction of the radiation beacon, but none of those things seemed important anymore. He was fixated on the colossal skull in front of him, and his mind reeled from trying to comprehend its implications.
No evidence of life had ever been discovered on Venus — even simple microbial life. There was no way something of this magnitude could have evolved and gone unnoticed for this long. A creature with a skull that size would have to be between 30 and 40 meters long, weigh hundreds of metric tons, and would have to be the largest terrestrial or aquatic animal in the history of life on Earth.
He experienced short moments of clarity — even moments when everything made perfect sense — but he found that they were impossible to retain. While the brain was perfectly capable of adapting to the gradual changes that invariably accompany the passage of time, it was perfectly incapable of accepting an entirely new reality all at once. Arik logically understood what he had just discovered, but he was unable to accept it.
The same world that fascinated him only moments ago now sickened him, and Arik began to worry about vomiting in his helmet. The nausea and disorientation convinced him that he needed to get back to the rover, but just as he started to turn, he found himself careening forward from a massive blow to the back of his helmet. His legs were unprepared for the sudden forward momentum, and after a few feeble steps, they fell behind and he went down into the sand and sludge in front of him. He scrambled backwards and turned himself over, instinctively raising the plug gun to defend himself, and the moment he felt pressure on the muzzle, he jerked the action bar back. His visor was almost entirely coated with a combination of grit and the thick black mire he had fallen into, but he could see far enough in front of him to witness the pneumatic chamber turn crimson, then yellowish as his attacker's intestines filled it and pressed against the plastic tubing. The shrill scream from above penetrated his helmet and pierced his eardrums. He reversed the action of the plug gun and the weight that was on top of him was gone.
Whatever knocked him down had not been wearing an environment suit.
He was trying wildly to get to his feet when he had his legs jerked violently out from under him, then felt himself being dragged by his boots away from where he had fallen. Just as he regained the presence of mind to try to kick and fight, he felt himself pinned to the ground at the arms and legs. A tremendous weight was applied to his chest, and a moment later, a green spark appeared through the grime on his helmet and gradually grew into a long blurry emerald flame. A heavy fleshy appendage landed on his visor and slowly and deliberately wiped aside enough of the film that he could see what was on top of him.
It was a human form, though grotesquely disfigured. It was completely exposed except for a primitive plastic respirator through which Arik could see a nose of only a few protruding shards of cartilage, and exposed gums and jaws in which were set short metallic teeth filed into points. It was bald, and its head and face were covered in wide black lesions. It's eyes were hard and dry and misaligned, and they looked at Arik more with curiosity than savagery. In its webbed stump-of-a-hand, it grasped a green laser cutter which it lowered slowly toward Arik's visor.