The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (7 page)

The walls of the battery bowed like a melting toy. The acid exposed by the hole in the battery bubbled like magma.

“Merde!”

She yanked the wires, but the walls of the battery liquified and its sludge poured onto the floor of the woody chamber.

No more main battery.

Her backup battery was nearly used up. The hot suit against her skin was beginning to sting. She was going to pass out from heat exhaustion soon. Marie-Claude pulled the wires that had connected her suit to the battery, and hesitated over the capacitor and its dirty electricity. Then, she hooked her suit directly to the trawler, downstream of the electroplaque.

The displays in her helmet lit. The electrical icons expanded brightly, showing graphs of incoming voltage and current, their frequent surges. Little alarm symbols in different suit systems flashed yellow and red as fuses clicked, blowing and resetting every few seconds. Her backup battery was recharging. The suit’s heat exchanger whirred, circulating hot fluid through tubes in her suit. She wondered how much it could refrigerate at this depth.

She wilted, but imagined that it was becoming cooler. She felt as frayed as her suit, as melted as the battery. The clock display showed that twenty-six hours had passed since her plane had been attacked. In that time, she’d descended almost thirty kilometers, from the cold, thin photochemical zone past the three cloud decks and into the haze beneath. Venus had not succeeded in killing her yet. Venus was cunning, but Marie-Claude was learning her tricks.

She watched the displays for a long time, making sure that the trawler didn’t blow the suit’s electrical system. And then finally, too tired to manage anymore, Marie-Claude lay as flat as she could and slept.

Venus hated them with blinding sulfuric acid, biting cold, ferocious winds, and if they were foolish, with crushing pressure and melting heat. Venus killed them with the slowness of a lion picking off gazelles, one by one: the slow, the unlucky, those who made small, human errors.

These were bits of heroic news in
La Presse
or
Le Devoir
in Montréal and Québec, testaments to the bravery of Québécois astronauts.
La République
had heroes, until the sinking of
Le Matapédia
.

The upper atmosphere had corroded one of the buoyancy tanks of the floating habitat. As
Le Matapédia
sunk into the killing depths, kilometer by kilometer, many of the inhabitants had been rescued, but the public mood back home changed. The Québécois were proud, and they could stomach the sacrifice of the unlucky and the slow, but Venus had tried to execute a whole herd.

Governments changed, throwing new equipment and fresh colonistes into the clouds. Venus did not care. She could not be outnumbered, and she did not relent.

—From
Commentaries

on the Foundation of the Venusian State

Marie-Claude dreamed of heat and suffocation. A terrible dry thirst and a bath of sweat choked her, and she could neither wipe her face nor drink. Someone called her, incessantly, penetrating the thickness of dream without breaking her free. Against an oppressive exhaustion, she opened her eyes.

“Marie-Claude! Marie-Claude! Can you hear me?”

“Renaud,” she said. She couldn’t place where she was. Static swamped his voice. The lights on her suit were uneven, but, for the most part in the yellows.

“Marie-Claude! You’re alive! Where are you?”

She checked her readings. Two atmospheres. Had the trawler climbed as she slept? She had been at three atmospheres, but the temperature had risen to one hundred and twenty degrees.

“I’m not sure. Have you got a fix on my signal?”

“Faint one. It looks like you’re at thirty-three kilometers.”

She rechecked her barometer and then shone her flashlight on the little pumping sacs on the wall of the chamber. They had dropped the pressure in the chamber, increased its buoyancy, but the trawler still could not hold her up. Thirty-three kilometers. She’d travelled halfway to the surface.

She explained where she was.

“Inside a trawler?” Renaud crackled. “That’s incredibly dangerous!”

Marie-Claude checked the time. She had slept almost twenty-four hours. It had been fifty hours since the sabotage. “How long have I been down here? Four days haven’t passed.”

“No. We got back to the Laurentide and refitted the planes to fly ahead. I’m almost all fuel. There are eight of us up here looking for you. The habitats will be over tomorrow, but I’ll be arriving on your position in about four hours.”

“No plane can reach this depth,” Marie-Claude said.

“A special plane will be dropping a deep probe tomorrow. Can you survive twenty-four hours?”

She looked at the makeshift wiring, the only thing keeping her alive. Her backup battery gave her a reserve of perhaps an hour.

“I don’t know.”

Renaud’s silence dragged so long that she thought maybe they’d lost contact.

“What do you think would happen to a trawler if it goes into a storm?” he finally asked.

“What? Where is there a storm?” Venus had big polar storms, as stable as the ones on Saturn or Uranus, perhaps even as long-lived as the Great Red Spot. But below the super-rotating winds, the equatorial air frequently tore itself into short-lived storms of lightning and ripping winds.

“About an hour from you.”

“How big?”

“It’s a storm.”

She understood. Researchers had dropped probes into the equatorial storms. None had survived the violent shifts of pressure, temperature, and acidity.

“This might be the way out,” he said. “You might catch an updraft.”

“Renaud, I’ve been standing on the edge for two days. I don’t want to talk about luck.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just glad you’re alive. Everyone is going to be happy you’re alive. The habitats are in turmoil. All the talk is about change. The constabulary has made arrests in the attempt on your life. The tracks led back to the office of the
parti nationaliste
. People are calling for a referendum on separation from Québec, but the parties are waiting on your safe recovery.”

“Or death,” she said.

“We’ll get you! You’re the hero of the day. You’ve seen Venus deeper than anyone ever has.”

Thunder, distant and faint, sounded.

“Why are you saying this?” she asked.

“The agents of the
Gouverneur
tried to silence your voice, but they’ve only given you a larger audience.”

“I’m not even
séparatiste
,” she said.

“Everyone will be listening to your voice when you’re rescued. Despite the passions, the referendum is no sure thing. The engineering union will almost certainly tip the balance. And you sway the union. You could give us our own nation.
Un pays pour nous
. We deserve it.”

“Maybe we do deserve Venus,” she said. “Who but idiots would deserve a burning land wrapped in poison?”

“You mastered Venus,” Renaud said. “We will tame Venus.”

“I did not master Venus.”

“You are learning the ways of the land, like the first
coureurs des bois
.”

Coureurs des bois
. She tasted the phrase. It was an old one, from the times of the foundation of Québec by France, a word to speak of boys and men raised among the Algonquin and Montagnais natives to become the bridges between the
colonistes
and the new land. Renaud had used a term laden with history, as politicians and demagogues often do, careless of truth. But his words found a resonance in her heart, unexpected and potent.

A second radio signal chimed in her helmet, devoid of static and interference. Close. She chilled. The drone had heard her radio.

“Merde.”

“What is it?” Renaud demanded, so, so far away, safe in his plane.

“I thought I’d lost it. But it’s homing in on my radio signal.”

“The drone can get to you?”

“It’s probably in worse shape than me, but its tools can break through the walls of the trawler. I’ve got no way to stop it.”

“Shut down your antenna and radio,” Renaud said.

“I’m not shutting down the radio. It will already have colocated my signal with the electrical noise of the trawler, but I’m not going to die by myself.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Venus, the drone, and I are going to have this out.”

“You just said you couldn’t stop the drone.”

“I know.”

“What about the storm?”

“Be quiet,” she said. “I’ve got to think.”

She had little left in her tool kit. She pulled out copper wiring, a small knife, clamps of corroding reinforced plastic, a pockmarked screwdriver, and a small steel hammer. She slitted the wire and stripped away the insulation. The copper wouldn’t last long in the rain, or even in this chamber, but she only needed it to survive until the storm.

For the first time, a rumble, a subsonic vibration, touched her bones. The storm, Venus’ final offer in her negotiations, closed on Marie-Claude.

She wound the copper wire around the hammer, and then tied one of her two parachute cords to it. She swung the makeshift weapon experimentally on its cord. A flimsy thing against a machine.

She tied the end of her second, longer, parachute cord to the screwdriver, and then pounded it deep into woody flesh between the six buoyancy chambers, all the way to the rigid, charged spine of the trawler, and wrapped it tightly around. Static tingled through her gloves. She tied the cord to her harness.

The drone’s signal was very close now.

She unplugged herself from the trawler’s electroplaque, leaving her suit and its heat exchanger to run on the emergency battery. Perhaps an hour.

“You got a fix on me, Renaud?”

His voice crackled. “You’re at thirty-three kilometers and sinking. What’s your plan?”

“Just keep the fix and keep quiet.”

The darkened patch on the top of the buoyancy chamber, the photoreceptor, had a dark filament running away from it, toward the axis of the trawler. She followed this line until the tough vegetable skin obscured it. With her screwdriver and her little hammer, she dug into the flesh, being careful not to dig far enough to break the outer skin of the trawler. She tore, following the filament to where it met five similar filaments and dove with them down the trawler’s spine. She whispered a quick, unaddressed prayer, and severed the trunk of filaments with tip of her screwdriver. No more photoreceptors for her trawler.

She crawled back to the stoma and put her tools back into their little pouches before she took a hot breath. Then, she wriggled her finger into the sealed hole of the stoma. The atmosphere outside hissed in, hot. Her ears and sinuses ached.

Her suit crushed against her, and her tank released more oxygen to compensate, while the heat exchanger whirred to full. Almost seven atmospheres of pressure and one hundred and seventy degrees Celsius. Her suit was rated to five atmospheres, and one hundred and fifty degrees. Engineers understood tolerances; the designers would not wear this suit under these conditions.

But here she was.

She pushed two hands into the opening, pulling the edge wide to stare down into the sub-cloud haze. The trawler’s cable flexed chaotically in surging winds, as crackles of blue-white arced along its length, shedding charge against particulate debris in the air. The trawler was a beautiful machine, a masterpiece of biological engineering, evolved to live and love this terrible world.

Marie-Claude wriggled free of the buoyancy chamber and slipped down her cord. The inconstant wind spun her. Her legs and arms swung and jerked as she tried to straighten. She paid out all her cord, until she hung twenty-five meters down the trawler’s cable. She fluttered in the wind, meters from the trawler’s cable, with nothing beneath her for thirty-three kilometers.

She tried to grab the cable, coming close to its slick, arcing surface. She wished that this was the most dangerous part of her plan, but it was only one part where she might be killed. And the longer she dangled in the wind, the more potential difference she accumulated relative to the cable. Her wet cord, as a conductor, mimicked the trawler’s cable. If she didn’t ground herself on the trawler’s cable again, when she finally reached it, she would shock herself, possibly into unconsciousness.

The storm rumbled again, shaking her bones. She reached for the trawler’s cable, and almost touched, before an arc of electricity leapt between them, shocking her. She snapped her hand back. The drone approached, its lamps lighting the mist from nearby. And the wind still kept her from the cable.

She climbed the cord, getting closer to the trawler’s cable. She steeled herself as she grabbed it and electricity convulsed her. Displays in her helmet winked out momentarily. With spasming muscles, she slid her way down the shaft, wrapping her legs around it.

The repair drone broke through the mist. Two of its three lamps, despite being encased in glass, were dark. Its corroding claw gaped at her.

Marie-Claude reached her arms around the cable to tie the end of her second parachute cord around it, the one with the hammer and copper wire tied to one end. Rain whirled around her in gusts, discoloring the steel hammer and speckling the copper with powdery, blue-edged holes.

And then the rain stopped, the wind stilled, and the air brightened.

She twisted her body to see what was happening. Awe seized her. The haze opened into kilometers and kilometers of clear air. Dark, bruised clouds rimmed the open air, veined with flashes of blue-white lightning. A great vortex, a hundred kilometers across. The center of the storm pierced the bottom of the sub-cloud haze, revealing Venus, unclothed, terrifying and beautiful. A great plane of dark basalt lay beneath the storm, pocked by high, shiny lava domes. And thirty kilometers beneath the center of the storm’s clear air, a flat volcanic mesa shot bright red lava and black sulfuric smoke into the sky.

Naked Venus. Terrifying. Beautiful.

She and the drone were sucked into the quick-moving winds scouring the edges of the clouds. Blue-tinged lightning decorated the walls of the great column with branching forks. The drone neared from the side, avoiding the trawler’s shaft. It could measure electrical charge better than Marie-Claude.