The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  “Why me?”

  Marthe finished her mint juice, then played with the condensation it left on the table. “You’re a straight shooter,” she said slowly. “I think you have an incentive to help us. And I think you’re smart enough to contextualize a small theft within the larger scheme of events.”

  “A theft?”

  “A small theft, in the bigger picture.”

  “I trade on the black market, but I’m not interested in being a thief. Or in helping one.”

  Marthe nodded, sliding her glass into the middle of the table. “I understand,” she said. “It probably wasn’t a sound idea. You weren’t the only partner we needed. I can go.”

  “You’re not going to pursue your incalculable wealth?” Marie-Pier asked.

  “You were my Plan A. I’ll have to develop a Plan B.”

  “What was Plan A?”

  Marie-Pier was staring at her. Marie-Pier the bioengineer and Marie-Pier the black marketeer were accustomed to being frank and being treated frankly. That’s why she didn’t like l’Assemblée. Empty words. Posturing.

  “The government wants to take the Causapscal-des-Vents,” Marthe said. “We need enough metal to build something on the surface. If it sank and looked like an accident, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.”

  “Steal a whole habitat?”

  “It wouldn’t be hard to make it look like it really sank,” Marthe said. “No one gets blamed.”

  “Ballsy,” Marie-Pier said. She hadn’t said reprehensible, or underhanded, or cowardly.

  “I’m sure I can come up with something after we lose the Causapscal,” Marthe said.

  Marie-Pier eyed her unfinished juice. “What exactly does very, very valuable look like?” she asked.

  “Unique,” Marthe said, “hard to exploit, hard to hold onto, but I think incalculable is a reasonable valuation.”

  “Mineral?” Marie-Pier asked. “Animal? Vegetable? Technological?”

  “Scientific and technological,” Marthe said after musing on it.

  “And everyone will want it.”

  “Oui,” Marthe said. “But we’re staking our claim.”

  “And the government has a right to it, just like they have a right to the Causapscal-des-Vents?”

  “Just like they have a right to your bioengineered trawlers,” Marthe said.

  “And what kind of cut of ‘incalculable’ had you considered for me?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Marthe said. “Do you want to talk about it with us?”

  “You D’Aquillons are hard to trust.”

  “Have you ever known me or my father to be anything but plain-speakers?”

  “No, and that’s what got you into your trouble.”

  “And you?”

  “Maybe,” Marie-Pier said. “I never built the alliances I should have in l’Assemblée. But I’m not stupid either. I don’t know your father except by deed. He hasn’t got my back. If it’s a choice between me and one of the D’Aquillon children, I have no illusions about the decision he’d make. That’s no way to think about working together.”

  “Visit the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs,” Marthe said. “If you can be discreet, we can talk there.”

  Marie-Pier slid her finger on the table, dragging condensation into thinning roads that she considered intently.

  “No promises, no expectations,” she said finally. “I’m just going for information.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE FLOTILLA OF ninety-two habitats and factory floats around the Baie-Comeau was slowly crossing the terminator into night. The forward-most habitats were already in the somber starscape, like tiny, distant ships sailing on a curving reddened sea.

  The Baie-Comeau had begun dropping in altitude. Although the lower winds were more turbulent, it was slightly warmer; enough that they needed less battery power to keep the greenhouses from freezing. Gaschel liked watching the habitats transition from forty-eight-hour day to forty-eight-hour night. The crops grew under lamps, the industries ran on low power, her people turned to indoor work and family time and enjoyed more sleep in what they called the long night.

  The two men sat with their backs to the window.

  “We did some looking, Madame la Présidente,” Labourière said. “Monsieur Tétreau found some interesting things.”

  Tétreau turned a pad so she could see his display. He cleared his throat.

  “It turns out that only three families regularly submit meteorological reports as deep as forty-fifth rang,” Tétreau said. “The Mignaud family, the Cyr family, and the D’Aquillon family.”

  “Of course it might be Marthe D’Aquillon,” Labourière said in exasperation.

  Tétreau was looking for some sign from Gaschel’s face. She didn’t give one.

  “The Mignauds and D’Aquillons herd and modify their own trawlers,” Tétreau said, “just small stuff, not full bioengineering. They trade oxygen and water with other coureurs and occasionally with upper atmosphere families.”

  “Black market,” Gaschel said.

  “Oui, madame,” Tétreau replied.

  Black markets were a necessary evil. Tétreau knew it. Labourière knew it. She knew it. She still didn’t like it.

  “What about the Cyrs?” she asked.

  “Trawler breeders in the lower cloud decks,” Labourière said. “They spend more time at fiftieth rang, but they also descend and have submitted met reports from lower altitudes.”

  “If we wanted to, how fast could you find them?” she asked.

  “This wouldn’t give us much more to go on,” Tétreau said. “They don’t submit the reports in real time, or from their central trawlers. They’ll transmit upward through a transmitter-repeater setup on the most distant trawlers in their herds.”

  “But you can build up patterns over time,” she said. “Where they’ve been, they’ll go again.”

  “The D’Aquillons and the Mignauds are also volcano chasers,” Tétreau said. “They’ve fitted some of their trawlers to drag nets of rosette fronds through the lower cloud deck, and especially the sub-cloud haze, where volcanic ash may be floating. They can harvest up to a dozen kilograms of metals and minerals in a good month of trawling. But this means that they’ll go wherever they think volcanoes and really low storms have conspired to lift metallic and mineral dust into the sub-cloud haze.”

  Gaschel didn’t look pleased.

  “I pulled in some favors,” Tétreau offered. “I have a cousin married to a coureur at fifty-fifth rang. He looked into acquiring some metals from D’Aquillon. They met up and he traded for some. He sent me up a sample.”

  Gaschel’s eyebrows rose.

  Tétreau produced a small plastic ziplock bag with about thirty grams of black powder.

  “Very mildly radioactive,” he said, “nothing that couldn’t be explained by contamination.”

  She took the bag, squeezed it. The texture was wrong.

  “This isn’t volcanic ash,” she said. “It’s been processed?”

  “I’ve seen processed ash,” he said. “It’s finer than this. This has been roughly ground.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I used labs on the Petit Kamouraska,” he said. “These aren’t the normal elements that come out of volcanic ash. It’s heavily enriched with iridium, tungsten and platinum group metals.”

  “We haven’t looked very hard for platinum metals on the surface,” she said, squeezing the bag again, considering the grains.

  “We don’t think we’ll ever find any,” Labourière said. “Tungsten and platinum group metals bind strongly to iron. During the resurfacing of Venus half a billion years ago, iron sank in the molten crust.”

  “We should never see these metals coming out of volcanoes,” Tétreau added. “We would expect to see them in iron-nickel asteroids. Not only that—there are fragments of clays mixed in this sample. Very few, but they’re there. Venus has no clays because it has no water.”

  Her office had dimmed as they pa
ssed the terminator. Now the lights came on. She placed the bag on her desk between them.

  “And how many ways are there to get asteroidal metal and fragments of clays down to the forty-fifth rang?” she asked.

  Labourière made a doubtful face. “The same two ways Woodward hit you with,” he said, finally. “One of the coureurs is trading with one of the other Banks in secret, or the Bank of Pallas is trading with the coureurs in secret and isn’t telling you.”

  She sat back. The darkness outside had closed in. The approaching cloud tops gave the impression of being poised to swallow the Baie-Comeau.

  “Since the Bank of Pallas brought this to us, we might assume that it isn’t them,” she said, “meaning the coureurs are playing with another Bank, violating our loan contracts with the Bank of Pallas.”

  “Unless the Bank of Pallas itself is setting up a false flag operation to find us in violation in advance of our next debt negotiations,” Labourière said glumly.

  Gaschel ground her teeth. “What made you focus on D’Aquillon?” she asked.

  “George-Étienne D’Aquillon doesn’t have any love for the government,” Tétreau said, “and this happened just after Marthe D’Aquillon started posting her arguments in the flotilla web.”

  “The Mignauds don’t love us either,” she mused, “but George-Étienne’s resentment is old.”

  “My talk with Marthe wasn’t very useful,” Labourière said. “I offered spots on the Forillon, but I don’t think she’ll be easy to buy off.”

  “Everyone has a weakness,” Gaschel said. “Find out what theirs is.”

  “The second son, Émile, isn’t rumored to be much of a friend to his father,” Tétreau said. “Bit of a drunk and drug-head.”

  “Doesn’t sound like getting him on our side would do much,” Gaschel said.

  “I made first contact with him. Now might be the time to try seeing what we can get from him,” Tétreau said, “while Marthe is in the depths consulting with her family.”

  “I want to know where they are. Where they all are,” Gaschel said.

  She gently ground the powder in the plastic bag.

  “If someone is getting radioactives from another Bank, or even from our Bank, we need to know and we need to know fast,” she said. “Put planes and drones into the atmosphere. I want a real search. If we can’t figure out who’s doing it, and it puts the colonie in danger, we may need to arrest all three families and search their habitats.”

  THIRTY

  PASCAL ROSE AND rose with a queasy, excited knotting in his stomach. He was in an emergency safe-bag, basically a hammock-chair inside a narrow plastic umbrella sheet sealed at the bottom. The whole thing hung under a flabby balloon of oxygen carrying him higher and higher.

  Every coureur had enough of these for everyone who lived in their trawlers, for getting to urgent medical attention or to flee a sinking habitat. The balloon would only take him up to about fifty-eighth rang, but la colonie distributed itself so that at any time, some habitat of the flotilla was within a few hours and could provide a pickup. “Be careful,” George-Étienne had said, assembling the safe-bag on the gantry for him.

  “I will, Pa.”

  “Watch the storms,” his father said. “If they get bad, drop and try again later. Or duck and find a coureur habitat.”

  “I’ve been herding with you for years, Pa.”

  “Don’t trust anyone up there,” his father said. “Don’t tell anyone except Phocas that you’re a D’Aquillon.”

  “I won’t, Pa,” Pascal said.

  “That includes your brother,” his father said, dropping the plastic around his survival suit.

  “I know, Pa.”

  Pascal had dutifully lifted one foot, then the other, so that George-Étienne could seal him in. His father fussed with the wires, gave him a hug, and then inflated the balloon. It rose, bumping its way up the undercurve of the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. When he was done, it tugged hard on its peg. His father looked through both their faceplates and the layer of plastic.

  “Come home, Pascal.”

  “I will, Pa.”

  He gave his father the thumbs-up. George-Étienne pulled the slipknot and Pascal swung off the gantry. Before he could swing back, the top of the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs was already five meters beneath him. Two more swings and his home was a darker smear in the hot haze. Then it was gone, and he found himself peering futilely up through the acid-covered sheeting. But there was nothing to see except the balloon carrying him higher and higher. The haze was the same from every direction.

  The altimeter in his helmet showed him rising fast: at forty-six kilometers, the temperature dropped below the boiling point of water. The altitude tickled in his stomach with vertigo. He’d worked with his father outside for three years in the suit and wing-pack Chloé had worn as a teenager, but always within a few kilometers of the habitat. He felt different now. He’d left home. For the first time. He was terrified—of what he would see, of what the world would see in him.

  Was this what Émile had felt like when he’d left home? His stomach lurched, not from the wind. He hadn’t thought about Émile’s leaving for a while. He didn’t like feeling that the family was breaking apart.

  Five years ago, he’d been eleven, feeling odd in his skin, and his family had already been breaking for some time. Maman had been dead for five years, and Marthe had been in the upper atmosphere for a year. Pa and Émile yelling had woken him. The youngest of the children, Pascal had missed the beginning of many arguments, and didn’t speak the shorthand adults used to fight. Jean-Eudes snored restlessly.

  “How is that responsible?” Émile demanded. “No medicine. No rations. Who are you helping? What if Pascal gets sick? Or Alexis?”

  “Or Jean-Eudes, ostie?”

  Both of them had been drinking. Pascal slipped from his hammock.

  “Jean-Eudes doesn’t have medicine,” Émile slurred. “That hasn’t changed. All you’ve done is said that you won’t let anyone in your family get medicine or rations.”

  “That’s for your brother!” Pa yelled. Émile and Pa stood toe to toe. Émile’s head almost brushed the inner wooden ceiling of the habitat, but Pa was bigger. His heart made him bigger. Being their father made him bigger, and there was a hesitation in Émile’s stance in the face of Pa’s heart.

  “Nobody changed their minds!” Émile said. “We’re just down here rotting, making your moral gesture. Tabarnak! We’re not even doing that. We get rations now, thanks to Marthe.”

  “We’re not eating goddamn government rations!” Pa said, stabbing his finger into Émile’s chest. “Marthe grew every damn bean she sends us.”

  “Every habitat does that,” Émile said, waving his hand dismissively. “We went almost twenty years with less food than we needed because you wanted to make your point.”

  “Colon! Jean-Eudes is the point. If you don’t love him, go find some fucking medicine!”

  Émile leaned closer. “I can, any time I want. So can Marthe. Even you can. You know who can’t? Maman, because you brought us down here. You killed her.”

  Pa stood in white-faced shock. Pascal, in the shadows, stood by stupidly. Pascal had never connected Jean-Eudes and living in the depths and maman. Pa swung his fist at Émile. But Émile was fast. He caught Pa’s fist in one hand and held it there, against all of Pa’s force. They stared at each other over the shaking fist. Émile seemed to grow taller as his right arm drew back. Pa looked at Émile in eye-narrowed defiance.

  Pascal ran out. “Non! Arrêtez!”

  Émile’s fist snapped forward, knocking back Pa’s head, throwing him to the floor.

  “Pa!” Pascal screamed.

  He hammered his fists into his brother’s arm and ribs. It didn’t do anything but hurt his hands. Émile put his hand on Pascal’s head, gently, the way Jean-Eudes touched Alexis.

  “You’ll see one day, Pascal,” Émile said slowly. A tear ran down his cheek.

  Pa rolled up, holding his eye
, looking up at Émile.

  “Get out,” he said coldly, quietly. “I wish you’d never been born. You’re not a real man.”

  Émile turned, patting Pascal’s head as he walked to the airlock.

  “Non!” Pascal screamed. “Go where? He can’t go anywhere! It’s too hot to stay out! He has to come back to cool off.”

  Émile was putting on his survival suit. Jean-Eudes was groaning awake. Alexis mewled in his hammock.

  “Émile! Don’t go!” Pascal said. His brother sealed the chest of his suit. Pascal wiped his eyes. “Papa! Papa! Make him stop! Take it back! Émile! Take it back!”

  Pa rose from the floor, still holding his eye. Jean-Eudes was up and didn’t understand. Émile’s back was to them and he fitted on his helmet, snapping the seals.

  “Émile!” Pascal cried, and he ran across the line as Émile stepped to the airlock door.

  “Pascal!” Pa yelled.

  Pascal gripped his brother’s waist and looked down, seeing his bare feet across the line. There was no burning. The acid burned inside him. Émile stroked Pascal’s hair with a gloved hand, then gently picked him up under the arms and set him on the right side of the line.

  “Émile...” Pascal said, but so quiet that Émile couldn’t hear him through the helmet. Émile opened the airlock and stepped in. “Take it back...”

  “Émile is going outside?” Jean-Eudes asked.

  Pa came to Jean-Eudes, planted a kiss on the top of his head and then moved to the kitchen, still holding his eye and swearing.

  Jean-Eudes neared. “You shouldn’t cross the line,” he said to Pascal. “You’re a good boy, but you shouldn’t cross the line.”

  Pascal began sobbing, and hugged Jean-Eudes around the chest. Jean-Eudes hugged him back tightly.

  Émile had never come back.

  His trip to the upper atmosphere was the exact one that Pascal was taking now. Clouds roiled, changing shape tirelessly. Most of the time he was inside them, and it was darker, but bubbles of clear air shot through the clouds, some of them kilometers across. He felt movement; he felt himself rising with a frisson of aimless terror. He would come back. Whatever he found up there, it wouldn’t be home.