The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (6 page)

—From
Persephone’s Descent: The Biography of Marie-Claude Duvieusart

Marie-Claude sailed her rosette with the wind, slowly sinking. The atmosphere thickened, but the rosette was still not able to support her weight. After several hours, the Stygian clouds broke again, into the kilometer of clear air beneath the middle cloud deck.

This great cavern in the clouds was somber. Other rosettes floated in the distance, like dark specks, failing to give perspective to the vastness and too far away to help her with buoyancy or oxygen.

She must be only fifty kilometers above the surface now, almost twenty kilometers below the
Laurentide
and the other habitats. No one would be able to come this far down to rescue her.

Marie-Claude sank through the hot air and into the lower clouds of Venus, a thick yellow haze of sulfuric acid, veined with lines of brown and green mineral dust and chlorine. Few photosynthesizers would survive at these depths, leaving the clouds open to webs of chemotrophs, living off what volcanoes and storms churned upward.

A rain of hot acid fell, until, through the cloud, she spotted a cluster of blastulae beneath her, directly in her downward path. But her two-edged luck persisted; the blastulae were full of oxygen, but they were gummed to the side of a trawler.

Trawlers were shaped like rosettes, darker in color, radially symmetric, with six buoyancy chambers, but were much larger, serving as the platform for many kinds of life. Blastulae sometimes stuck parasitically to the great trawlers, absorbing nutrients from the rain they were not large enough to collect on their own.

Trawlers were not photosynthesizers. They occupied a more dramatic ecological niche. A conducting carbon filament hundreds of meters long hung beneath the trawler, ending in a bob. As the trawler drifted with the wind, the conductor joined clouds of different static charges and altitudes, drawing an electrical current along its length. More dangerously, trawlers were lightning rods in the storms of the middle and lower cloud decks. It was not healthy to be near a trawler.

But she needed the oxygen. The trawler and its crown of blastulae floated half a kilometer beneath her.

Marie-Claude’s battery display suddenly flashed, edging from yellow to orange. The suit’s heat exchanger shifted to a power-saver setting, and the suit’s radio antenna turned off.

Merde.

She slipped her battery out of its pack behind her. The hand light trembled.

Merde, merde, merde.

Grainy acid leaked out of the fiber-reinforced plastic on one side of the battery. Its lifetime was measured in minutes, hours if she was lucky.

This shouldn’t have happened. These plastics were hardened to survive in the Venusian atmosphere. Not exactly true. The fiber-reinforced plastics were resistant to the low concentrations of sulfuric acid at the cooler temperatures sixty and seventy kilometers above the surface. They reacted very differently to higher concentrations of sulfuric acid.

Over the beating rain, a regular machine sound thrummed. With the increasing pressure, sound warbled and direction deceived. She spun. The drone closed from only a few hundred meters away, scarred by patches of acid corrosion. Marie-Claude had nothing with which to damage it. And now she would cook far sooner than the drone would dissolve.

It neared.

She was trapped.

She couldn’t see more than a few hundred meters through the rain. No sign of a storm. No thunder.

The drone was fifty meters away now.

She slipped the battery back into its pocket, switched her helmet light to its brightest, and shone it on the rosette, along with both hand lamps. The rosette opened all six of its stomata, flooding its buoyancy chambers with heavy carbon dioxide.

Marie-Claude’s footing shuddered as the rosette tipped and sank. She held the frond tightly as the sludge on the rosette poured into clouds. Marie-Claude’s feet slipped off and then there was nothing beneath them. One of her flashlights spun into the gloom below. She and the rosette fell sideways toward the trawler.

When the top of the trawler was fifteen meters below her, the rosette began drifting with the wind. She was going to miss her landing. And after the trawler, nothing separated her from the surface of Venus except forty-eight kilometers of crushing, hyper-acidic, broiling atmosphere.

She let go of the frond.

She spread her arms and legs. She hit the top of the trawler hard, the blow accompanied by a powerful static shock. She splashed in the pooled acid and organics, and bounced, nearly to the edge. Venusian epiphytes had colonized the trawler thickly, clutching with stringy roots or sticky mucus. They slowed her slide. She let her flashlight and parachute go and pulled free a pair of screwdrivers. She scraped the points along the top of the trawler until she stopped.

Slowly, she pulled herself away from the edge.

She ached all over.

The rosette she had ridden all the way down to the lower clouds ascended lazily past the circling drone. The gloom pressed in. Even though it had only been a further half kilometer down, she could have sworn that the temperature had risen, and that the atmosphere pressed tighter against her suit.

The trawler was not evolved to carry an extra ninety kilos of rider and survival gear. It began sinking, but more slowly than the rosette had. The lower cloud deck thinned around her, and she descended into a dark, yellow haze. The temperature outside her suit had risen almost to the boiling point of water. She was now beneath the upper, middle and lower cloud decks. The browned, cooked bellies of the lowest clouds on Venus lay above her head. This sub-cloud haze was a zone of thermal dissociation.

She took the blastulae stuck to the trawler, one by one, and pumped the oxygen into her tank until it was fully in the green. Her battery icon still blinked orange-red.

Something stung her leg, like a wasp sting. She jerked and patted at her leg. The sulfuric acid, at this heat and pressure, had bored a hole through the fiber-reinforced plastic of her suit.

The spite of Venus.

She huddled under the remains of her parachute and pulled the suit repair kit out of a pocket. She neutralized the acid, cleaned the hole, applied the adhesive and slapped the patch on. It was a drilled movement, automatic, thoughtless. It was now natural. What had her stupid plan been? Would she have one day taught children how to thwart the lashing of a chemically predatory planet? That was no birthright. The
séparatistes
and the
nationalistes
could have the whole damned place.

The last part of the drill was to get to shelter to replace the suit. Leaks bloomed in clusters, just like blastulae. She inspected the parts of her suit she could see. Patches of discoloration showed that her suit would not last even one day more in the hot rain. The acid delighted in dissolving all the cleverness of people. It might not matter. The heat would kill her soon if she didn’t fix her battery.

The Hadean rain poured again as she sank. It jumped and spattered the surface of the pool in the depression in center of the trawler’s platform, and overflowed the depression, running over the edge and out of sight, to fall until it evaporated, long before it ever came close to the surface of Venus.

She ran a finger through the slime on the surface of the trawler. Murky organic strands shot through its translucence. It repelled water, and probably contained bases to neutralize any acids that penetrated it. That was how an engineer would have designed a plant on Venus.

Marie-Claude scooped a handful of the slime and rubbed it on her suit and the parachute. If she guessed wrong and it was just a viscous acid, it would be a terrible way to die. It didn’t seem to be hurting her suit, so she applied more, and soon, she looked like she’d been dipped in egg white. But the rain no longer touched her suit.

The battery reading flashed red. She needed to run the heat exchanger on full refrigeration. She had to do something.

She pulled a pair of needle-nosed pliers from her tool pouch and cut her parachute cables, tying them together to make a cable about forty meters long. With nothing to act as a piton, she rammed the pliers into the woody shell of the trawler and hammered them deep into the thick wood near the trawler’s axis with her boot. She tied the cable around it, tested her weight, and then slipped over the edge.

The surface of Venus baked forty-three kilometers below her boots. But it would never get a chance to kill her. Too much of the rest of the planet wanted to try first. As did the repair drone. A light shone into the rain high above, and the sounds of a propeller working carried. The drone relentlessly descended, as if it were necessary for it to finish the job.

The long cable grown of carbon and wood and slime hung below the bulk of the trawler like a plumb line. Thick as her whole body, it flexed, resonating with the constant wind to form standing waves that hummed in her bones. Other winds would find different resonances, and many others would find only discordance. She imagined ageless flocks of trawlers moving through the lower cloud deck, playing eerie, subsonic hymns to Venus as she bathed them in poison.

She lowered herself and swung, trying to reach the lower side of one of the buoyancy chambers. She didn’t know how long her pliers would survive as a makeshift piton. She found one of the trawler’s six stomata on the lower curve of the buoyancy chamber. It was larger than the stomata on the rosette. She shone her helmet light on full. Its faltering light ought to have opened the stoma, but the vegetable lip remained shut. On the rosette, her helmet lamp had been enough to open a single stoma, but the trawler was bigger and far more complex. It probably opened all its stomata in unison, triggered by photoreceptors. She couldn’t trigger them all from here.

Acid rained over her as she dangled. The stalk of the cable was still wide at this level, and slippery, but on the end of a swing, she wrapped her legs around it.

She produced a screwdriver from its pocket sheath and pushed it into the stoma. The stoma opened slightly, and inflowing gas hissed. She wiggled the screwdriver back and forth, loudening the hiss. She had a small pry, useful for corroded access hatches on the habitats. One end was flat, the other tapered to a blunt point. She jammed the blunt end into the stoma, beside the screwdriver. Air wooshed in, until the pressure inside equilibrated. She strained the lip wider. The first inch resisted, but then she must have reached some point that triggered the rest of the opening cycle. The stoma dilated to about fifty centimeters.

Marie-Claude tossed her tools in and wedged her elbows and head through. She got a better grip and pulled herself awkwardly in. The stoma slowly contracted behind her.

She collapsed against the curving walls. The chamber was round and nearly tall enough to stand in. She struggled to catch her breath in the heat, when her parachute cord suddenly slacked and then tugged lightly at her waist. She reeled it in. Only a corroded fragment of the pliers still dangled from the end. If she’d been a few seconds later, she would be plummeting through the brown haze right now.

The stoma shut completely and the drumming rain sounded hollow on the top of the trawler. Her faltering head lamp showed small sacs in the sides of the chamber beginning to inflate and deflate. She crawled closer. They were fleshy, transparently thin, their muscular flexing slowly pumping air out of the chamber. Regaining buoyancy.

Remarkable.

She shut off her helmet lamp to save the last of her power for her suit’s cooling system and switched on her last flashlight, a small one for looking at the guts of machinery. A woody frame webbed the chamber, covered with a tough skin. Her light fell on dark patches above her that contracted in apparent response, simultaneous with a slight irising of the stomata, letting in more of the Venusian atmosphere, reducing the chamber’s buoyancy further. She turned her light away from the patch.

Unlike the rosette, the trawler had ribs and webs of vasculature. Marie-Claude followed them. Most cells in a rosette were photosynthetic and each made their own food, like a cooperative. That was not true in a trawler, so it needed a complex vasculature to separate its functions. The cable moving through the atmosphere generated electricity, and something must carry either chemical or electrical energy to the rest of the body. Her flashlight showed dark lines within the skin of the chamber, all leading down the axis of the trawler to the cable. Other thick lines led from the axis to long cylindrical nodules beneath the floor of the chambers.

That was what she was looking for.

There must be times when the trawler had no chance to collect electricity. The trawler must store food somewhere for those times. Those nodules might be it.

Her red battery display flashed faster.

She slipped her leaking battery from its pocket.

She sawed through the tough vegetable flesh of the buoyancy chamber with the flattened end of the pry. She peeled back rubbery flaps, exposing a red, woody cylinder, like a stack of disks. The living carbon wiring of the trawler led into and out of the cylinder. She pulled a small voltmeter from a sealed pocket and pressed the needles against one of the wires leading into the cylinder. The voltmeter shot up and wobbled. She checked other wires. They were all live, with large variations in potential. The cylindrical stack showed a large, steady potential across its ends, like a capacitor, or the electroplaque of an eel. Something for times of famine.

She hesitated. The electricity was dirty, changing potential rapidly, even past the capacitor. But the alternative to recharging her battery was seeing how she liked one hundred and ten degrees at three atmospheres of pressure. She had continued dropping and might be as low as thirty-nine or thirty-eight kilometers above the surface.

She looked for the best place to attach alligator clip wires to the capacitor and finally chose a spot. The battery display in the visor of her helmet did not change. It blinked red as if mocking her. If this were a world that did not want to kill her, she would have lightly touched the battery to see how much the charging had heated it. Or to swat the
bebbits
. But the deep dark of hell had her. Her voltmeter showed a variable current for long, changeless minutes. Still no new charge. She examined the battery more closely with the flashlight.