The Venusian Gambit (29 page)

Shaila called up a visual on the first one. She was Asian, probably Korean, somewhere in her 30s, and dressed in an elegant gown that flowed behind her yet was as motionless as her body. She only had one of her stilettos on—the other was probably close by, but too small for sensors to find. The woman’s skin was grey and bruised, the result of blood vessels bursting in the vacuum of space, and her eyes were open and milky. Somehow, Shaila expected her to look stricken or horrified, but the woman merely looked as though she was mildly surprised.

After that, Shaila didn’t look at any more.

As the first two or three showed up on sensors, Diaz seemed to be inclined to stop and pick them up…but then more and more bodies showed up on the screen, and the entire CIC quickly grew quiet. Finally, the general ordered the position and course of each body calculated and transmitted to Houston. Someone, hopefully, would recover the dead. The perpetrators were heading for Venus, and justice would be better served by capturing them instead of cleaning up their mess.

The problem was finding them. Two days later, their sensors had picked up no trace of the pirated ship.

“Stable orbit, 500 kilometers above the surface,” Baines reported from the cockpit. “Sensors running at max.”

Diaz nodded and gave a wave toward the cockpit. “All right. Full sensor sweeps with every orbital pass. I want Venus mapped all over again and I want everything in orbit out to a hundred thousand klicks. If there’s so much as a micrometeor out of place, I want to know about it.”

Shaila nodded and ensured Diaz’ orders were carried out, then turned back to Chrys VanDerKamp, who had been trying for the past twelve hours to uplink with her satellites using a new tack. Long-range hacks hadn’t worked, but the satellites also had short-range comms aboard to coordinate their efforts. The hope was that Chrys, with Coogan’s help if needed, could use those short-range receivers to beam commands into the satellites’ operating system, circumventing the normal I/O interface that had been seemingly given a new operating system. Perhaps by approaching the problem at the hardware level, they could at least cripple the satellites, robbing Greene and Hutchinson of their use.

“I can’t even
find
my sats,” Chrys said as her fingers flickered over the holocontrols. Screens of data and maps flowed across the air before her, and none were able to wipe the frown off her face. “Hard to send a signal if I can’t aim it well enough.”

“Can’t you just broadcast it wide?” Shaila asked.

Chrys turned to her with a look of disdain. “They’re narrow-band laser comms, sat-to-sat only. They’re designed to be secure. Otherwise, anybody with a goddamn ham radio could mess with them.”

“Try harder,” Shaila said icily before leaving the exec to her work. Naturally, Chrys’ conglom opted not to allow JSC full access to the satellite array without a representative aboard—as was their right—but Shaila didn’t have to like it one bit. She tried to have sympathy for the exec, but the fact was that, to Shaila, she was just as small-minded, and as complicit, as Harry Yu.

“Jimmy, why aren’t we finding these sats?” Shaila asked. “We’re going at a pretty good clip. Shouldn’t we have been in range by now?”

Coogan sat at his ops station and manipulated the holoimage of Venus in front of him. “Our last track on the satellites was here,” he said, pointing to several dots in geosynchronous orbit around the planet. “When we entered the atmosphere to brake, we lost them, and we’re still not picking them up.”

“Debris?” Shaila asked.

“None detected. In fact, if it weren’t for several diagnostics on the sensors, I’d question whether they were working properly. I’m not getting anything. I can’t even find the Stanford outpost.”

Now that got Shaila’s attention. Stanford University’s orbital labs held twenty souls aboard, the vast majority of them academic researchers. It was an older facility, but it worked well, and it gave the tourists somewhere to visit when they got tired of looking at clouds all day. “Did Stanford report a burn?”

“No, Commander. We should be well within comm range, and we should’ve gotten a hail by now, but there’s nothing.” Even Coogan looked concerned, which seemed extraordinarily out of place on his usually placid face.

“What about Cherenkov radiation? Maybe there’s been a rift and they got caught in it or something,” Shaila said.

“Nothing there either, ma’am.”

“Keep trying,” she replied, then hit the comm. “Major Parrish, how are we doing on V-SEV readiness?”

A moment later, the marine responded: “All systems ready. We can launch in five if needed.”

“Thanks. Jain out.” Shaila then turned to Diaz. “General, suggest we hail the Stanford facility. If they’re in trouble, we can maybe get a bead on them, even use the V-SEVs to evacuate as needed.”

Diaz was reading her own holodisplays and frowning. “Yeah…something’s just not right. Where the hell is everything? Did the Virgin ship just come in and blow everything up?”

“We’d see something, ma’am,” Shaila replied. “Debris, latent energy readings, something.”

“I know,” Diaz snapped, then calmed visibly. “Sorry. Send a broad comm out for Stanford.”

“Yes, General.” Shaila toggled a few keys, then spoke into a mic on the console. “Stanford University Venus Outpost, this is the Joint Space Command Ship
Hadfield
. Come in, Stanford outpost.”

To Shaila’s surprise, a reply came back within seconds. “
Hadfield
, this is Stanford. Where the heck did you guys come from?”

Diaz and Shaila traded a look. “Stanford, we’ve been coming in hot for a while now, just made orbit. You should’ve picked us up hours ago. Over.”

“We should’ve, yeah. We’re not getting anything right now. All our sensors went down about six hours ago. All our projects on the surface, stuff up here, nothing.”

Shit
. “Do you require assistance, Stanford?” Shaila asked.

“Maybe if you got a tech handy or a spare sensor suite. We were showing an incoming before our sensors went down, but we haven’t made comm or visual on them since. You might want to check on them first.”

“Roger that. We’ll survey what we can and get back to you soon.
Hadfield
out.” Shaila dropped the link and turned to Diaz. “Ma’am, looks like we need to do a search for….”

Oh, shit. Shit shit shit!

Diaz saw the emotions play out on Shaila’s face. “What? What is it?”

Shaila turned to Coogan. “We’re being jammed! The whole goddamn system is being jammed! Countermeasures!”

Coogan’s fingers flew across his controls. “I believe you may be right, Commander. There’s a very low-frequency signal surrounding the system. Trying to place the source now to counter it.”

Diaz caught up fast. “Focus on the last known location of those satellites and extrapolate, Jimmy. Only possible source.”

Chrys rushed over to Coogan’s station, and the two began trading data quickly and furiously. “Confirmed. Low-frequency signals emanating from projected positions of corporate satellites. Hang on. Engaging countermeasures.”

Suddenly, every alarm aboard
Hadfield
went off at once, followed quickly by a half-dozen voices.

“Cherenkov radiation spikes!” Ayim reported. “In orbit and on the surface!”

“Debris, straight ahead, twenty klicks!” Baines reported. “Taking evasive action!”

“Proximity alert! We have another ship within fifty kilometers and closing fast!” Coogan shouted. “They’re heading right for us!”

Diaz rushed forward toward the cockpit. “Baines! Evasive burn! Take us to 350 klicks above the surface and prepare for a slingshot into geosynch. We need to get above this crap!”

“Calculating! It’ll take a few seconds!” the young pilot replied.

The general then turned to Ayim. “Gerry, report! What’s going on with Venus?”

The physicist looked both elated and alarmed. “There is a huge area on the surface, General, covered with vegetation! At least two hundred square kilometers. The area appears to extend upward into orbit, ending at the satellites! I don’t know how… It’s extraordinary!”

“Roger. Record everything. What about that debris?” Diaz called out toward Coogan.

“Scanning now, General. Appears to be…oak wood. Iron. Hemp fibers. Human remains.”

Shaila put it together quickly. “Ship! It’s a goddamn shipwreck!” She met eyes with Diaz. “We’ve just flown into the middle of an overlap!”

Suddenly,
Hadfield
shuddered violently, and more alarms went off. The room’s lighting turned red and the data on every screen was replaced with a single message.

COLLISION.

HULL BREACH.

Coogan’s hands waved wildly in front of him as he flew through the holographic data before him. “Engines hit,” he reported, his usual cool inflected with just a hint of panic. “Offline. Breach in engine room, damage to landing gear, deployment bay and cargo hatch. And…”

His voice trailed off, leaving Shaila and Diaz to look over expectantly at him. “Jimmy?” Diaz asked.

“Life support on critical,” he said simply.

Diaz immediately turned toward the cockpit. “Baines! Get us aimed at Stanford! Use chemical thrusters and give me an ETA stat.” She turned to Shaila. “Get Ayim in gear. We need him and the Emerald Tablet secured in a V-SEV in case things get worse.”

Shaila nodded. A ship like
Hadfield
didn’t have lifeboats. The V-SEVs could serve in a pinch, but they had extremely limited maneuvering ability aside from simply landing on the surface of Venus. None of this would go well. “Come on, Doctor. Move your ass,” she snapped, grabbing the old scientist by the scruff of his jacket and pulling him toward the doorway of the CIC, with zero-g making it quite easy for her to bodily drag him along.

Shaila and Ayim sped toward the lab, where Ayim carefully undocked the Emerald Tablet from its mechanical cradle—a bit too carefully for Shaila’s taste. “Move it, Gerald!” she shouted, but the physicist was intent on making sure the tablet was placed just so, and Shaila floated impatiently for what seemed to be hours, but was only thirty seconds or so.

When they finally opened the door to the lab, Stephane was floating out in the corridor in front of them, a pained and worried look on his face.

It startled the hell out of her.

“Why aren’t you in your quarters?” she demanded.

“The locks stopped working when the alarms went off,” Stephane said. “Something’s happening. I am…
mon dieu
, it’s happening again, isn’t it?”

Shaila nodded. “You still in the driver’s seat?”

Stephane gave her a weak smile. “For now. This is strengthening him. I have this sense that he is happy. Eager? Yes, eager.”

Fuck
. “All right. Get moving, Durand,” she said as Ayim floated up from behind her with the briefcase containing the Tablet. “Deployment bay, now!”

Before they could launch themselves down the corridor, another impact rocked the ship, sending them into the walls and ceiling. More alarms went off, followed by a panicked voice from the CIC which Shaila couldn’t place: “Emergency suits! All personnel into emergency suits now!”

Shaila immediately grabbed a handhold on the side of the corridor and gave it a twist, opening a storage locker. Orange emergency pressure suits began spilling out. “Grab ‘em and put ‘em on!” she shouted.

Stephane immediately took a helmet and put it on, then started shoving his legs into the suit itself. Shaila did likewise—until she saw Ayim just…floating there. Wide-eyed. Panicked beyond all action.

Swearing loudly, Shaila grabbed a third suit and shoved it into Ayim’s chest, sending him floating back into the wall. “Gerald. Put this on. NOW.”

He looked down at his hand, where he carried the case with the Emerald Tablet. “This…” His voice trailed off. “Can you hold this?”

Shaila snatched the case from him. “Put it ON, Gerald.”

The scientist slowly began unfurling the folded up suit. Shaila’s every urge was to help him with it, but her training said otherwise—you can’t help someone else if you’re not secure first. A basic rule since the earliest days of space travel, but it was hard to enforce sometimes. She turned to see Stephane just about sealed up. “Stephane, help him,” she ordered as she wrestled with the seals on her own suit.

Then a massive
whoosh
rang through her ears as the ship shuddered a third time, and she felt herself pulled toward the deployment bay.

The ship was falling apart, and the air was going with it.

She grabbed a handhold and, with the other hand still holding the Tablet, she tried to finish her seals. A scream caught her attention—she saw Ayim hurtling past her down the corridor at high speed, limbs flailing through his half-donned emergency suit. His head caught the ceiling hard and the scream stopped instantly, and she watched in horror as his body was carried downward to the bay below.

Then she felt Stephane’s hands finishing up her suit seal. “There,” he said. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t save him.”

Shaila nodded and gave his helmet a rap. “You tried,” she said, then keyed her comm. “Diaz, this is Jain. We’ve lost Ayim.”

Several long moments passed—in which the two made their way down toward the deployment bay—before Diaz responded. “Roger. Deployment bay is breached into space. Parrish and his team aren’t responding. Jimmy and I are heading down there. Let’s get the V-SEVs fired up.”

A dozen people.
“Understood,” Shaila said as she floated down to the bay below. On entering, she could see a meter wide hole in the side of the ship. There was blood all around the ragged outer edges of it. There were no people. “Go for V-SEV startup sequence. Where’s Baines and the rest of the CIC crew?”

Another long pause, during which Shaila keyed in the command codes for the V-SEVs and watched as they came to life. “Baines sealed himself in the cockpit to try to steer us clear of anything else. The rest…we got VanDerKamp with us. That’s it.”

Shaila turned and guided Stephane toward one of the V-SEVs. “Shit. Roger that. Let’s go one person per V-SEV.” Not the optimal operating crew, of course, but Shaila knew that launching four of them would increase the chances of someone surviving the day. She turned to Stephane. “Did you read the manual I sent you on these?”