The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  The boiling barrel looked like it was made of carbon weave. The same materials might have made a lot of small parts, but he couldn’t fault them the still. Beneath it was a solar stove where the window could provide hard sunlight to focus. Part of the wall had been stripped of insulation so the vapor could run against the cold outer skin of the gondola. Rows of collecting sacks bulged full. Down in the depths, the coureurs ran stills the other way: they boiled by putting pots and boil sacks outside, and cooled by running their tubes into the living areas of the trawlers.

  “Is this any good?” the cop said, taking one of the sacks. “Or is this methanol?” He opened it and took a sip, swishing it between his cheeks. He made a face. “Oof. That’s strong!”

  Émile and Tétreau tried it. It wasn’t bad. Wasn’t good either.

  “Evidence!” Tétreau warned, and the cop hung up the sack.

  The business of charging the people with hoarding and resisting arrest got boring fast. Floaters were on their way to the Batiscanie to cart away the metals for redistribution. A foster sitter was also flying over to take care of the toddler and the habitat while these three were transported to detention on the Baie-Comeau. And there was the matter of what to do with the other inhabitants of the Batiscanie, who were on shift right now. Émile could see why some of the guys didn’t want to be sergeants. It was dull. He would have let these people off on some of the charges—it was too much trouble. Eventually Tétreau walked Émile up to the roof again. As they sealed their helmets, Tétreau handed Émile one of the heavy sacks.

  “Here. Thanks,” Tétreau said.

  Émile hefted the bag. “Evidence?”

  “We got enough with one sack and all the metals and the hoarded scraps that ought to have gone to the bioreactor,” Tétreau said. “And although being in the Sûreté is fun, it doesn’t pay much, and some of it is dangerous. This is the least la colonie can do to thank you and the other guys. Besides, we can’t do anything else with it.”

  Émile emerged onto the roof and strapped the sack to his chest after putting on his wing-pack.

  “I’ll call you for the next one,” Tétreau said.

  Émile nodded slowly in his helmet. “Yeah.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  THE STARS, WRAPPED in vertiginous spaces, glared down hard and cold and endless. Marthe had come up to the roof in her suit to take one last look. The Causapscal-des-Vents was ending, no matter what happened next. If they were fast enough, her home would be chopped up for parts by her little brother... sister. If they weren’t, la colonie would get its chance to scrap it.

  The truth hadn’t penetrated all the way to her heart. It was like rain on a suit, looking for cracks to creep in. Did she know how to say goodbye to a home? At the top of Venus, on her floating island, alone with this beauty, she didn’t know how to put any of it into words. She wanted something concrete to make this experience hers and enduring, in the way the habitat had been hers.

  Could Pascale and Pa, with their strange, impossible Axis Mundi, possibly replace this? Ten to twenty kilometers of attenuated atmosphere rose above her, making the stars wink unpredictably. What would naked stars look like in a real vacuum? She was a little terrified and a little excited by the thought. She turned in a slow circle, regarding the whole horizon, her feelings still unnamable. But all this she promised to one day give to her family, including Marie-Pier’s children, and Paul-Égide and Louise.

  She went back inside. Past the airlock, a small light was on in the kitchen. Émile sat sideways at the table, legs out straight. He had some bandages under his pants, but hadn’t said anything. He held a datapad in one hand and a smoldering cigarette in another. Two lumpy shot cups sat on the table beside a black jar. She cracked the seal on her helmet.

  “Inviting me to my own bagosse?” she asked.

  “Scored my own stash,” he said.

  She sat and zipped down her suit. She sniffed at the cup nearest her. It wasn’t subtle. The transparent liquid was still near the lip of his cup. “That’s your second?”

  He sucked on his cigarette. Handed it to her. She took a drag.

  “Waiting for my little sister,” he said. She couldn’t tell if he was being ironic.

  She blew smoke and lifted the little cup in two fingers for a toast. He raised his and they drank. It tasted the way band-aid glue smelled. “Ouach!” She shuddered, sucked another drag on his cigarette to drown some of the taste in the tobacco sulfur. “What is this?”

  He shrugged and downed his.

  “What’s the occasion?”

  He shrugged again.

  “Are you writing?” she asked. His eyes assumed something of the startled animal. She averted her eyes, sniffed distastefully at the jar and poured them each another shot. “Pascale says you’re good.”

  Émile snorted. “He’s just a kid.”

  “I’d like to read your poems sometime.”

  He reached across the table, took his cigarette out of her mouth and lifted the next shot. They toasted and drank. Both shuddered.

  “I’m in,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He made a face. “What do you care?” He looked at the remains of the shot, but didn’t drink and avoided her eyes. He shrugged. “Family is family, isn’t it? In the end?”

  She nodded. “All the way?”

  He nodded, flicked the burning ash off their cigarette with big, acid-melted fingertips. He rolled the butt in his fingers to drop the remaining tobacco back into the box.

  “‘All the way’ means I need some help making peace between you and Pa,” she said.

  “Did you ask him for the same?”

  “Yeah.”

  He reached for the jar, but then screwed the lid on instead of pouring more. He rose.

  “I’m going to finish cleaning out the greenhouses,” he said. “No matter what happens, we aren’t going to grow much more in them.” He spun the airlock and carried his helmet into the envelope.

  The Causapscal-des-Vents bucked in an updraft, but settled before too many chirping alarms went off. Down in forty-fifth rang, that would have been just a love tap. She sat for a bit, feeling the buzz. When she was younger, she’d been better with her liquor. She’d gone a bit soft. Had she stopped being a coureur? Was there such a thing as a coureur in the heights? If there was, she was it. She silently toasted her father and Jean-Eudes and emptied the cup.

  She went into her room. Beneath the decking was a door into the small but powerful electric engines. Two propellers ran more often than not, keeping the habitat properly oriented in the wind. In a pinch, they could run for days to try to avoid a storm. She shut them off and opened a panel. Inside, the propeller shaft touched the drive train with a gear plate full of worn gears. She’d been asking for gear plates for over a year and had made do. She’d even traded away part of a door frame to get a third-hand gear plate for one of the shafts. And that was still better than the worn-out one it had replaced.

  She pulled out that old gear plate and began wearing down the teeth even more with a brush and a small bit of acid. There wasn’t much to do before it would be unsafe and ineffective. Then she unsecured the shaft, lifted it, and switched out the gear plates, storing the third-hand one under her bed, and installing the ineffective gear plate where it wouldn’t do any good in the assembly. She closed the casing, put away the tools, closed the door and wiped her hands. In the kitchen, she switched on the radio.

  “Causapscal-des-Vents to Baie-Comeau control,” she said.

  “Vas-y, Causapscal-des-Vents.”

  “Control, our port gear plate, part 2288C, has given out,” she said. “I’ve shut off the port prop. We can probably do a few kph on the starboard prop and full rudder, but we’ll need a new position in the flotilla.”

  “Roger, Causapscal-des-Vents. Permission to drop downstream. Do you need immediate assistance?”

  “No. I need a 2288C. I’ve had it on order for eighteen months with no response from Baie-Comeau Resources.”

 
; “Talk to Resources. Permission to drop downstream granted.”

  “Roger, control. Causapscal-des-Vents out.”

  That was the first step. The wind carried the flotilla, so it would take a day or two for the Causapscal-des-Vents to fall to the back, and then another day or two for it to fall out of sight of the flotilla. Control would probably assign a few habitats to slow down to keep pace with it.

  That morning, she’d written a similar message to control from the Marais-des-Nuages. Normal maintenance would take the engines offline and the Phocas habitat would also drift back. Either she or Émile would do the maintenance and follow the navigational instructions. In a few days, the Marais-des-Nuages would also be near the back of the flotilla.

  And radio was open chatter every habitat had to listen to. Everyone would have heard, again, that the Causapscal-des-Vents was having problems because Resources wasn’t giving them parts. Whether Resources had parts to give wasn’t the point. What mattered was how many people on how many habitats now looked nervously at their own unfulfilled parts requests.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  MARIE-PIER’S HABITAT, THE Coureur des Tourbillons, down at fifty-first rang, was just coming into range. A little electronic chirp let Marthe know that they’d established a maser line: cloud-penetrating and very difficult to intercept. After a few moments, Pa’s voice crackled in Marthe’s earpiece.

  “Ma chère?”

  “I’m here, Pa,” she said quietly.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “Oui. You?”

  “C’est beau.”

  “I’ve been thinking through things a bit more, Pa. I can fly fine, but I don’t want to leave the Causapscal-des-Vents alone too long. I’m going to get Émile to mind it.”

  “I’ll send up Pascal,” Pa said. “Or come up myself.”

  “You have too much work down there, Pa,” Marthe said reasonably. Nothing would be served by letting her temper into this conversation. “This is what were were talking about, Pa. Émile is good. He can do this.”

  A long period of white noise crackle sounded in her earpiece, the popping echoes of lightning halfway around the planet.

  “Crisse,” he finally said. “I should have put you in charge of the House of Styx.”

  “You’re the head of the family, Pa.”

  “And you’re going to be la présidente of Venus someday.”

  “I swear too much for the old ladies,” she said.

  “Tabarnak! They won’t care when we free Venus from the Bank.”

  His voice sounded like there was a smile in it. There was a dream in it.

  “See you soon, Pa.”

  FIFTY-NINE

  MARTHE AND ÉMILE spent the next day picking all the mature crops and sealing the immature ones in composting tanks. The nitrogen and hydrogen were valuable. They stowed and stored everything else on the Causapscal-des-Vents as if the inside of their home was going to fill with sulfuric acid. Packing all their things was a strange job. They didn’t have a lot. They’d recycled almost everything they couldn’t use anymore. Marthe couldn’t find her locket with pictures of maman, no matter where she looked, and she lost long minutes turning things upside down. Acid would eat the silver quickly. But in the end, she gave up. Émile couldn’t find everything he was looking for in his disorganized mess.

  The Causapscal-des-Vents had fallen about thirty kilometers behind the main flotilla, fifteen behind the Jonquière, which was also trailing with small repairs. In a pinch, a powerless habitat could mount emergency sails and drift. Secondary flotillas circled the equator at intervals of about seven or eight thousand kilometers. The next one would catch up in about twenty hours. And even lone habitats would be tracked by satellites. But satellites couldn’t see beneath the Causapscal-des-Vents, where she and Émile had stowed the ingredients for their plan.

  Fifteen kilometers below, and about fifty kilometers downwind, Pa and Marie-Pier waited with the harnessed trawlers. The difference in wind speeds between sixty-fifth rang and fiftieth rang was about fifty meters per second today, so Marthe and Émile were about fifteen minutes ahead. And they had to count descent time and the speed they would lose as they descended into slower winds.

  It was common enough to drop supplies to the lower decks in powered drones, but drones were small and maneuverable, and their carbon nanotube construction was designed to work from sixty-fifth all the way down to fortieth. A habitat was just a big balloon made for cold, low-acid environments. It was going to be a hard descent.

  Sixteen kilometers ahead, the Jonquière was just a silvery-green speck, and they needed binoculars to see the rest of the flotilla. They had to avoid the satellites. And their chance was coming up soon.

  Most of the atmosphere at sixty-fifth rang was clear down to two or more kilometers, with some haze. But sometimes weird low-pressure eddies formed, and columns of cottony cirrus clouds rose like great fingers, almost high enough to brush the habitats. Visibility in those cloud banks dropped to a few hundred meters. Marthe sat on the bench in the kitchen beside the pressure system controls. She stared out at the cloud columns, rechecked their locations, and drew a deep breath in her suit, briefly fogging her faceplate. This was the line of no return, her Rubicon. From opposition and protest voice to criminal was a bigger step than she’d expected. She squawked her suit radio once and then activated a new buoyancy program.

  Her new program was basically the reverse of what every habitat had to do to stay afloat. Pumps sucked the buoyant, breathable air in the habitat into pressurized tanks. The struts in the envelope and the seals in the habitat proper began to creak under the weird pressure. At the same time, carbon dioxide was let in from the thin atmosphere outside and into the habitat.

  They slowly began to sink, and their course angled straight for the cloud bank. The atmosphere was so faint at this altitude that even a little bit of carbon dioxide in the envelope made a big difference. After a few minutes, Marthe switched to the long-range antenna comms system.

  “Baie-Comeau control, this is the Causapscal-des-Vents. We’re losing altitude. Looks like an envelope leak. Going out to assess. Our patch materials are low and we’ve already requisitioned more. Do you have a crew to run us out some?”

  Let the rest of the flotilla hear that.

  The radio crackled momentarily.

  “Causapscal-des-Vents, we can get a crew there. Give us a leak assessment.”

  “I’m topping up and putting on wings right now, control. Émile is going into the envelope. Stand by.”

  The cloud bank neared as they sank. The pumps whirred, pumping more and more carbon dioxide into the habitat. Marthe spun the handle on the door, went up the stairs, and cycled through the airlock. Gusts of wind stroked faint fingers along her suit. She put on her wing-pack, clipped herself to a cable, and lowered herself over the side. She belayed in a complete circuit of the envelope, from bow to stern and back along the other side, as if looking for a leak. Later, a crash investigator might examine computer-enhanced satellite footage and see her climbing over the Causapscal-des-Vents, and would hopefully conclude that she’d done everything she could. The habitat’s dip put the cloud column dead ahead.

  “Control,” she said into the radio, “it’s a big leak. Looks like a lower starboard strut broke. The snap point tore the skin over sections C and D, and the port support struts are bowing. Émile is going to try to reinforce the port struts and then see if the starboard support can be fixed. We’ll need patch materials, probably struts and temporary clamps. I’m going to check the stern struts and envelope skin. We’re sinking too fast for it to be just the two tears.”

  “Câlisse,” control said. “Crew leaving now, Causapscal-des-Vents.”

  “Merci, Baie-Comeau. See you when you get here.”

  Now the clock was ticking. They drifted into the clouds. In a few seconds, they would be too deep for the satellites to see. Marthe cranked the pumps to full. This was going to wreak havoc on the filters soon. The pumps were fitted
with filters covered with different bicarbonates to neutralize the acids, but they had now sunk into a hazy yellow mist of sulfuric acid. The acid would soon fill the filters with salt, and then they’d be useless. Their descent accelerated and the clouds above them blurred the shine of the sun. She switched to the short, private habitat channel as she belayed all the way down the cable.

  “Enweille, Émile! Let’s get cracking!”

  Her brother unscrewed the emergency hatch under the floor of the kitchen and emerged. It was an airlock of last resort, and he’d stretched three layers of webs of carbon fiber soaked in bicarbonate across the gap. They didn’t need to worry too much about acid getting in from underneath, and the living cabin was now naked to the pressure of Venus. The gondola’s full weight would be pulling it down.

  A big bale was strapped beneath the Causapscal-des-Vents, but they couldn’t open it yet. They hadn’t gone through the dangerous part yet. Marthe swung herself under the bale and clung there, slowly strapping herself to it. Émile climbed up the rope she’d just descended. Marthe switched to the long channel.

  “Baie-Comeau, this is Causapscal-des-Vents,” she said. “Tell the crews to hurry. I just found the big problem. The bowing of the port struts tore the envelope skin on the starboard side just above the cabin. Atmosphere is pouring in. We’re dropping fast. Émile is disassembling one of the inner envelope walls to patch the outer envelope. I’m deploying emergency balloons.”

  She was too Venusian to avoid a twinge of remorse at the lie. Venus was always trying to kill them.

  No coloniste ever joked about an emergency. Yet here she was doing just that, initiating a response that would mobilize dozens or hundreds of people. La colonie had lost habitats before, big ones like the Matapédia. People and families had died. La colonie had adjusted, making smaller targets of themselves, just family-sized habitats, but those too sometimes sank when they got too old or too damaged in a storm. It wasn’t just acid that scarred them all. Losses scarred them too.