The Venusian Gambit (24 page)

“Which is why we still have particle acceleration experiments going on at McAuliffe,” Diaz added, “and we’re studying what happened in Egypt last year, too.”

“Right. Time and place,” Shaila said. “And now you think it’s somehow personal to me?”

Ayim grinned widely. “You are one of only three people living who were present when the first recorded crossover occurred on Mars. And you and Dr. Durand were both present on Titan as well, which was most certainly another interdimensional crossover, if the chamber you discovered there is any indication.

“Now, given your presence at these various crossover events, it is my theory—and I believe the evidence we’ve gathered is beginning to back this up—that your neural pathways are entangled somehow with the other dimension at the quantum level. And that’s
very
exciting, isn’t it?”

Shaila frowned. “You’re lucky there’s a barrier here, Doctor.”

“Oh, I am sorry! I didn’t mean to imply that this was not a burden on you, Commander. I’m sure it is. But it could very well be extremely beneficial to us as well in figuring out what has happened to the data retrieved from the Enceladus organisms, and who on Earth received them,” Ayim said.

Shaila looked from Diaz to Ayim and back again. “You think…you’re thinking I can tap into this somehow. That I can see what might go down next?”

“Either you or Dr. Durand, yes,” Ayim said. “I would suggest Dr. Conti or our Chinese guest, but they remain in comas and completely unresponsive. We have detected no radiation surges from either of them, and I am left to wonder whether the transmission from
Tienlong
stripped them of their active infection, or somehow the injuries they sustained from our boarding parties did the trick.

“But anyway, you and Dr. Durand are our best candidates, because you both seem to have a degree of Cherenkov radiation inherent in your condition, which we believe is the calling card for dimensional displacement. Now, the artifact from Titan may be the appropriate conduit, either by focusing on what is occurring in
this
dimension, or by using it as a kind of comm system to perhaps glean information from the
other
dimension, to which we are, at this point and for all intents and purposes going forward, entangled on a quantum level.”

Shaila let this sink in for a moment, then looked to Diaz suspiciously. “You were with us on Mars. You saw Weatherby and Finch and Anne Baker there. Why isn’t this happening to you?”

Diaz shrugged. “I ran the same location-sensor sweep on myself and Durand, too. You were the only one who had the Cherenkov matches. You had that very first reaction, during the first quake on Mars, so our best guess is that you were basically at ground zero for the entanglement.”

“Wrong place, wrong time,” Shaila summarized. “Figures. So what’s the deal now? Am I still stuck in solitary here?”

“There are a few more tests I wish to run,” Ayim said. “We’re going to do a full map of your neural pathways—should take no more than a few hours. And when you are released, I will ask you to wear a very sensitive radiation sensor on the back of your neck. The general and Dr. Durand will be wearing one as well.”

“And Stephane’s will also have a built-in zapper, in case he…relapses,” Diaz said. “Figure if he gets taken over again, we’ll need to take him down. Gently.”

Shaila nodded, but inside, she was pretty furious at Diaz for even thinking it. But then…she was probably right. Damn her. “All right. And after that? Do I end up hooked up to the Tablet to try to chat with someone?”

“All in good time,” Ayim said. “We will need several days, if not weeks, of further study before we are willing to do that.”

Any further conversation was interrupted by the comm. “Coogan to Diaz. Respond, please.”

Diaz reached over to the comm panel. “I’m here, Jimmy.”

“Ma’am. We have a hit on the potential whereabouts of Mr. Yu.”

Shaila and Diaz traded a wide-eyed look. “I’ll be damned. Where?”

“Ekaterinburg, Russia,” Coogan replied. “A hospital there accessed his global medical records database seven hours ago.”

“And why did it take us seven fucking hours to get that info, Jimmy?” Diaz groused.

“The Russians, ma’am. They do participate in the global medical database network, but they do so on a time delay, probably to frustrate outside intel.”

“Dammit. He’s probably already gone.”

“No, ma’am, I suspect he’s still there,” Coogan said, a hint of satisfaction couched in his perfect English accent. “He was brought in 14 hours ago in suspended animation. Gunshot to the chest. The surgical procedure they listed in his file is both risky and time-consuming, and recovery is at least two days.”

Diaz grinned. “Finally, some luck. Well, for us. Seems like he’s having a really shitty day. Jimmy, have the team prep
Hadfield
. We’re leaving in 20 minutes. I want Parrish and his team aboard. You’ll stay here and run the show. Diaz out.” She then turned to Jain. “You’re probably going to make my life a fucking misery unless I let you come along.”

That earned the general a genuine smile. “Absolutely, ma’am.”

The general looked thoughtful for a moment. “We still need tests. And honestly, I’m still worried about you. I don’t know if you’re a risk.
But
…if you get fitted for a sensor with a zapper in it, you can come along.”

Shaila figured this was coming. “Understood. Just don’t get carried away with the trigger, ma’am.”

Diaz reached over and tapped in the keycode to open the containment barrier. “Gerry, get her sensor fitted. She’s back on duty.”

January 20, 2135

Harry Yu’s first conscious thought was surprise at actually having a conscious thought, something akin to:
Holy fuck, am I alive?!

Then the worry set in. He could hear sounds, but they were unfocused, fuzzy. There were some electronic noises, but he couldn’t tell if they came from comms or computers or cars. Finally, he surmised sensors, given that by this point he figured out he was horizontal, likely on a bed.

Then he remembered what happened to him and his heart began to beat faster. That actually hurt, however; he could feel the muscles around his ribcage were sore, and his heart and lungs felt…messed with. Violated. It was as if someone had reached in and reorganized things. Not entirely surprising, he supposed. He’d been shot, after all.

And that started his heart beating hard again, which made him more rueful.
How do you go from senior conglom exec to internationally wanted criminal and gunshot victim in six months, anyway?

Once he calmed himself down—bitching about things in his head wouldn’t do him any good, after all—he decided to figure out where he was. It took what seemed like an age just to find his eyelids, let alone force them open.

White walls, trimmed with beige. Random holopicture of flowers on the wall. Electronic equipment.

Hospital. That made sense.

A voice shook him out of his slow, methodical observations. “Jesus, Harry, you sure know how to pick ‘em.”

With great effort and focus—or what felt like it, at any rate—Harry slowly turned his head in the direction of the voice. There, sitting in a chair next to his bed was Chrys, his backer, with datapad in hand and a look of both consternation and sympathy on her face.

“Yeah,” he croaked quietly. “Nuts.”

Chrys nodded grimly. “You want the download now, or should I wait until you’re up for it?”

It took several seconds for him to register what she said, and several more to interpret it. Given that she was there, in his hospital room, rather than running her ops and making money, chances are something went south on her end as well. “Now,” Harry replied.

Chrys nodded. “Well, first you got shot, of course. Bullet nearly went straight through your heart, and they had to freeze you in place before moving you. You’re lucky I got a building with gunshot detectors all over. Ambulance was there in four minutes. Saved your life.”

Harry managed a small smile. “Owe you one.”

“You owe me a shit-ton more than that,” she grumbled. “Your
team
there, Greene and that other woman, they screwed me over. They fucked with my satellites. I’m out trillions of terras.”

This took even longer to digest, and when Harry finally got there, he felt his heart racing again. “You…went backdoor.”

At this, Chrys gave him a small, lopsided grin. “Yeah, I did. Total end-around on you. I contacted them just about the same time as I contacted you. I knew what you were trying to do for Total-Suez—open the door to whatever place is on the other side, exploit the hell out of it. Your intel from the Mars fiasco made the rounds with a few people. I read about what Venus was supposed to be like, and figured it’d be absolutely perfect. So I had Greene do up some extra hardware for the sats so maybe we could experiment on a larger scale, without the repercussions of opening some kind of fucked-up portal right here on Earth. But as it turns out, Greene rewrote the entire software command structure to lock us out of the project entirely. So now I got a dozen sats heading for Venus with God-knows-what on board, and I have no control over them.”

Harry took all this in, his mind fighting against anesthesia and medication in order to focus. For the first time, he noticed that Chrys looked horrible—dark circles under her eyes, disheveled hair, no makeup, wrinkled suit.
Good
. “You…screwed me. You screwed us both.”

“Hey, if you didn’t have homicidal whack-jobs on your team, this wouldn’t be an issue, Harry,” she replied, only slightly defensively. “Give me straight-up capitalists any day. I pay, they produce. But this, this is some left-field shit. And now I’m on the hook with my conglom because of your people.”

“And I got shot.”

“And you got shot,” she replied with a sigh. “So you don’t have your accelerator project, and I don’t have my sats. We’re both screwed.”

Harry thought about this again, all the while all-too-conscious of his uncomfortable heartbeat inside his ravaged chest. “Anything on our computers?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. They erased everything. We can’t even reconstruct what was there. They were thorough. Only positive I can see here is that Greene needs a big-ass comm dish to get commands over to the sats. He might have control, but he can’t talk to them unless he has a corporate-quality interplanetary comm rig, or he somehow gets a lot closer to them.”

Harry was about to reply when there was a perfunctory knock on the door. By the time he turned his head to reply, it was already opened.

Maria Diaz and Shaila Jain walked in.

“Fuck,” Harry whispered.

To her credit, Diaz looked suitably concerned with his wellbeing. Shaila, as he had come to expect, seemed almost disappointed she couldn’t shoot him again.

“Christ, Harry. You really screwed the pooch this time,” Diaz said by way of greeting. She looked annoyingly maternal about it.

Harry started to laugh, but his chest muscles protested fiercely, leaving him gasping. “Everyone…says that.”

Diaz turned to Chrys. “Miss VanDerKamp, we couldn’t help but overhear your problems.”

Chrys gave Diaz a once-over, stopping at the two general’s stars on her uniform. “Couldn’t help it?”

Shaila held up a datapad with a satisfied smirk. “Fine, we spied. Welcome to Russia.”

Chrys turned to shoot Harry a deadly look before replying. “That won’t hold up in corporate court, you know.”

Diaz nodded. “Good thing this isn’t going to court. We got more important things to do, like fixing the fuck-all you just got us into.” She turned to Harry. “You realize now what’s going on, don’t you?”

Harry managed a nod. “They’re…opening it up…on Venus.”

“And who’s ‘they,’ Harry?” Shaila prodded.

“Greene. Huntington.”

Diaz stared, wide-eyed, and took several seconds to respond. “They’re alive? I thought we lost them in Egypt!”

“Alive, but…they’re…not…” Harry paused. He didn’t have words for it.

To her credit, the general recovered quickly. “Right. They’re not themselves. That actually makes more sense to me than you might think. OK, then. You two are about to spill everything you got. Miss VanDerKamp, you’re going to cooperate, as will your conglom, or I’ll make damn sure the only project you’ll get to manage again is lunch rush at McDonald’s. How many days until those sats reach Venus?”

Chrys stared hard at Diaz, who stared right back. Finally, the exec relented. “Nine.”

“Thank you,” Diaz said. “Means we got nine days to get there and stop all this. Otherwise, it’s going to be Mars all over again…and probably a whole lot worse.”

CHAPTER 13

May 14, 1809

“
L
ord Weatherby, I assure you whilst I feel your information is of the highest validity, I cannot simply allow you to take half my fleet to Venus whilst we prepare to retake England—our very homeland!—and drive the foul French from our shores!”

George, Prince of Wales and Prince Regent-in-Exile on behalf of the captive King George III, paced his council chamber with an energy typically reserved for infantry drills—or, in the prince’s case, a particularly high-stakes game of cards. His agitation was understandable, certainly, for there in the room were his two most trusted military advisers—Lord Admiral Thomas Weatherby and General Sir Arthur Wellesley—advocating two entirely different things, neither of which assured success by any reliable measure.

But the potential to retake England, no matter the cost, was the most deciding factor. And even Weatherby had to admit he would choose similarly if in the prince’s position—though the prince did not, and would not, have all the information available to Weatherby.

“Sire, I wish it were otherwise, but it is my belief that if we can defeat the French upon Venus, our chances of success south of Hadrian’s Wall shall be vastly improved,” Weatherby said. “Without the bulk of their fleet, they cannot be resupplied. Our people continue to resist the occupation, and without supplies, the French are weakened.”

Wellesley cleared his throat. “With utmost respect to Lord Weatherby, sire, the bulk of the French forces require neither food nor water, and even should they run out of munitions, they remain impervious to most types of injury. There will be no greater opportunity to fight them than the summer months, when our troops will require little in the way of additional supply themselves. Plus, the ships of His Majesty’s Navy can provide a great deal of firepower as we land, especially should we take the mouth of the Thames. They may sail as far as Windsor, allowing us a foothold in the south and the liberation of London itself!”