The Venusian Gambit (3 page)

He turned and gave Anne a soft, sad smile. “I most certainly do.”

“And do you, Anne, take this man, Thomas, to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

Tears flowed gently down her cheeks as Anne squeezed Weatherby’s hand. “I do indeed.”

Suddenly, Finch slammed the door of the church shut and began shoving one of the nearby wooden benches in front of it. “They’re coming!” he shouted.

Weatherby turned back to the ashen-faced bishop. “Now, if you please, my Lord.”

The bishop slammed his book shut. “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.” And with that, the clergyman dashed toward the church’s sacristy.

Weatherby and Anne looked to one another. “We really have horrible timing,” she said. “But we are married.”

“Not yet,” Weatherby said—just before he leaned down and gave her the kiss that was more than two decades late.

Then the doors burst open.

Anne gasped as a squadron of French soldiers marched into the church, bayonets at the ready. The fact that their blue and red uniforms were completely soaked was quite secondary to the fact that the soldiers themselves were…dead.

The soldiers’ skin was stretched thin across their skeletons, so much so that there were tiny tears that exposed white bone to open air. Their lips were peeled back from their teeth, their noses were shrunken, and their eyes were gray and filmy. Under their bicorn hats, the revenants’ hair was limp and stringy. And even from the altar, they could all smell something of the charnel house when the troops entered.

Yet they marched effectively—indeed, almost as if they were connected by invisible clockworks. And their bayonets certainly looked sharp and ready.

“Finch!” Weatherby shouted as he drew his sword. “Are these…?”

“Revenants! Just as we feared!” the alchemist replied as he rushed back to the altar, his blade already drawn. Finch was one of the very few at the Admiralty who thought it possible the French may have gleaned enough alchemical knowledge from Napoleon’s adventures in Egypt five years prior to create mindless but effective soldiers from the corpses of the dead.

The officers who remained engaged the French squadron with zeal, blocking the center aisle of the church in order to allow the admiral and his bride to escape. Anne quickly gathered Philip and Elizabeth to her and made for the back of the church, following in the footsteps of the bishop. Weatherby and Finch followed, swords at the ready, even as the cries and clashes of steel rang through the hallowed building.

And that’s when Weatherby saw his old captain and mentor, Morrow, amongst the blue-coated officers, a blade drawn from the old man’s walking stick.

“James!” Weatherby shouted. “There are too many!”

The old captain turned and favored Weatherby with a sad smile. “When has that stopped us, Tom? Go! I will take command here.” He then turned to the officers, one of whom had already fallen to the French bayonets. “Men of the Navy! Defend your admiral!”

And with that, Morrow dove in to the fray, while the others gave a rallying cry and redoubled their efforts.

“No!” Weatherby cried.

He moved to join his friend and mentor, but Finch grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “Tom, no,” Finch said quietly, but urgently. “We must fly. Allow James his choice.”

Choking back tears, Weatherby watched as Morrow deftly parried the first attacker and stabbed the revenant in the heart. Yet while the revenant staggered, the creature nonetheless took the butt of its rifle and smashed it into the side of Morrow’s head.

The old man fell wordlessly. The other officers continued to fight, but only one managed to fell his opponent, cutting the revenant’s head clean from its shoulders.

Weatherby quickly slammed the door of the sacristy shut, then fled with his wife and family out the back of the church, and into a world he could never have imagined.

CHAPTER 1

December 9, 2134

T
he man behind the antique wooden desk looked exhausted and overwhelmed. His gray hair, normally coiffed to perfection, was slightly shaggy looking now. The bags under his eyes weighed on his usually clear, dark, lean face, and the blood-shot eyes themselves spoke of a lack of sleep and the anticipation of more sleepless nights to come. His shirt was rumpled, his tie hanging loosely. The holomonitor in front of him was strewn with folders and documents, videos and messages. His inbox was full of somber condolences, sober good wishes. He scanned the holograms blankly, eyes darting, not seeming to know which specks of data should come first.

Maj. Gen. Maria Diaz felt bad for him. Historically, there weren’t that many vice presidents called upon to succeed their running mates—certainly none so abruptly as Jackson Weathers. But Diaz figured President Linda Fernandez hadn’t really planned on the cardiac arrest that killed her five hours ago.

And now President Weathers was sitting at the desk in the Oval Office—a desk made from the timbers of the 19
th
century Arctic explorer HMS
Resolute
, and a gift from Queen Victoria some 250 years past. Given what she was about to disclose, she found the desk oddly fitting.

“General…Diaz, isn’t it?” Weathers said, running a hand over his face. “Didn’t expect to see you here. You still with JSC?”

Diaz stood at attention and gave Weathers a salute. “Yes, Mr. President. Executive director of Project DAEDALUS.”

She could see the new president search his memories for a moment while his eyes gave Diaz the once-over. He lingered a bit too long over the curves of her uniform—for a woman pushing sixty, Diaz was still in excellent shape. And Weathers’ reputation for the wandering eye, something of a throwback to late 20
th
century presidents, was apparently well deserved. Diaz smiled slightly. Let him try. Her wife was a sculptural welder and, if anything, was in better shape than the general. President or not, he’d be pummeled to paste.

Weathers finally shrugged. “I don’t remember that project. What is it?”

“You weren’t cleared for it until today, Mr. President. DAEDALUS is the Dimensional And Extraterrestrial Defense, Analysis & Logistical Unified Services,” Diaz said. She started counting the seconds until Weathers’ mind parsed the legalese of the acronym. To his credit, she only got to five.

“Bullshit,” he said, his tone one of both trepidation and resignation. “Can’t be.”

“Sorry, sir. It’s true. I’ve put all the background files, reports and videos on your secure server. We need your approval for something that’s pretty critical right now, so if it’s all right with you, I’m going to give you the five-minute version before we get to the latest,” Diaz said.

Weathers nodded, and off she went, having given the same précis at least two dozen times to other top military and civilian leaders in the U.S. and the European Union, the two governmental partners in JSC’s efforts to explore space. She felt her spiel was good at getting her audiences through anger and denial pretty quickly, though nobody seemed to have a perfect handle on acceptance. Hell, she still needed work on that now and then.

“In 2132, there was an extradimensional incursion on the planet Mars,” Diaz began. “This other dimension, the one that peeked through, is a mirror of our world in the year 1779, with a few key differences. Over there, folks use a process they believe to be ‘alchemy’ to sail between worlds in wooden sailing ships, and to colonize said worlds, which apparently are quite different from those in our own Solar System in terms of survivability. Yes, there are aliens there too—inhabitants of their very different versions of Venus and Saturn. The dimensional overlap was brought about by an alien in that dimension who had been imprisoned for past crimes against the race of aliens living on Saturn. It took the combined efforts of some of their people—the crew of the English frigate HMS
Daedalus
—and my team at McAuliffe Base to seal the dimensional rift, which we did.”

Weathers leaned back in his seat, eyes wide, and didn’t speak for a while as he flipped between reports and images Diaz had sent to his holoprojector. He lingered on the images and vids in particular—a frigate crashed on Mars, a massive alien beast tearing into a bunch of 18
th
century sailors. Finally, he cleared the images and turned back to Diaz with a haunted look on his face. “There’s a lot more to this story, isn’t there, General?”

“Yes, sir. The complete files are on your server, sir.”

“And since you’re just skirting past all that, I assume we have something even
more
pressing?” the President said. “God help me. Skip to that part.”

Diaz nodded. At least he wasn’t staring at her uniform anymore. “Little less than six months ago, as you’ll recall, the JSC ship
Armstrong
reached the Saturn system, the first manned expedition there. You’ll also recall the Chinese got there at the same time.”

“I remember,” Weathers said. “The Chinese played chicken with our ship, then ended up conducting some kind of mining experiment that ended up destroying one of Saturn’s moons, right? What was that moon’s name again?”

“Enceladus,” Diaz said. “And the Chinese didn’t blow it up. One of ours did.”

“And I suppose I wasn’t cleared for
that
tidbit because…aliens?”

“Yes, Mr. President. We have reason to believe that two of the
Armstrong
crew, along with the lone Chinese survivor, were somehow infected by an extradimensional alien intelligence related to the incursion on Mars. We also believe that there were primitive lifeforms in the oceans under Enceladus’ ice which served as the infection vector, and that the moon’s destruction freed those lifeforms. Subsequently, the Chinese ship flew through the moon’s debris field, then turned and headed back for Earth. Our concern is that they picked up several of these alien entities.”

“How primitive are they?” Weathers asked.

“Nothing more complex than viruses, but you know what happens when you catch a virus,” Diaz said. “Sir, we currently theorize that these primitive lifeforms may possess extradimensional properties, allowing them to serve as carriers for cross-dimensional infection and personality displacement—possession, if you will. We think that’s what happened to our people, and we’re obviously concerned that the Chinese ship, the
Tienlong
, is bringing more of those bugs back to Earth.”

“And why not just blow it to hell and back?” Weathers said, sounding a bit irked. “If it’s an alien invasion force, even if it is goddamn microbes, I think we’re justified, don’t you?”

That’s exactly what President Hernandez said four months ago
, Diaz thought. “I appreciate the direct approach, sir, but our people believe that if the lifeforms could survive for thousands of years under the ice on Enceladus, blowing them up could very well just spread them around the rest of the Solar System. The Earth, Moon, even Mars could end up getting showered with them. All it seems to take is one of them to make contact, and we’re concerned they might serve as a vector to bring in others once infection and personality displacement takes effect. The possession of the Chinese, in particular, we believe may have occurred prior to their departure for Saturn via a different source.”

Weathers’ face wrinkled at this. “Another vector?”

“There’s been at least one recorded instance of a cross-dimensional rift being re-opened here on Earth, by a former corporate sponsor of McAuliffe Base on Mars. That rift nearly brought other things, stranger things, into our world. That project used a pre-existing artifact that, we believe, had an extra-dimensional counterpart that allowed for infection of the Chinese officer to take place prior to his departure for Saturn. Long story short, we need to study every aspect of this mess in order to figure out how best to defeat the next incursion.”

Weathers flipped through the reader embedded into the ancient wood of his desk, marveling at the images and details before him. Images of a sailing ship in a canal on Mars. A journal that wrote itself. Carvings found in a cave on Saturn’s moon Titan. The video of Enceladus dissolving into a massive cloud of ice crystals and leaving a small rocky core behind. And schematics of a particle collider buried in the sands of Egypt, which created a second rift between worlds.

“How long until
Tienlong
arrives?” the president asked finally.

“Five weeks. We’re already working on contingency plans. You have write-ups in there already. We’ll need your approval for a few of them in the next few days, sir. The biggest one, though, would be to make an official request to the Chinese government, directly, that we be allowed to board
Tienlong
before she makes Earth orbit. We need to capture that ship.”

Weathers frowned. “Why do you need me to do it? Surely there are processes in place for salvage or something like that.”

“There are, sir, but we would prefer this request be made off the record, and at the highest level, to impress upon the Chinese the need to cooperate,” Diaz said.

“So you need me to be the heavy and strong-arm the premier.”

Diaz smiled. “Exactly, sir.”

“Fine,” Weathers said absently as he moved the folders on his holomonitor to a list labeled TOP PRIORITY. “So what happened to
Armstrong
in all this?”

Diaz sighed quietly. “She’s coming in hot, right behind
Tienlong
. I know her acting skipper. She’s…very motivated to see this through, sir, whatever happens.”

Stars surrounded Shaila Jain, shining upon her from every direction. The Milky Way stretched across the blackness of space, a bold highway of light leading off beyond vision itself. It was gorgeous.

She never felt more alone in her life.

Lt. Cmdr. Shaila Jain, RN, JSC, acting captain of the JSCS
Armstrong
, sat in the cockpit of her state-of-the-art ship, the room around her transformed via virtual-reality glasses into the starscape before her. Occasionally, the view would be interrupted by a graphic or text and accompanied by a subtle chime, alerting her to some routine shift in the ship’s functioning, or to the presence of yet another message from Earth, wondering if and when she would talk to anyone ever again.