The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  “This is crazy, Pascal!” Gabriel-Antoine called. “Even if you’re close, you’ll collide!”

  She ignored him.

  “Pa!” she said. “Fly straight at me, full thrust. We have to stall right at the same time, right in front of each other!”

  She didn’t know what Pa was thinking. Whether it was right or wrong. But he trusted her. Or he was just as crazy. Or maybe he needed this. Maybe the Axis Mundi to the stars would give some meaning to all he’d lost. Venus owed him. He just needed to collect.

  The shriek of her engine felt like it was burning behind her. The Causapscal-des-Vents was nearly level with the floating frame. Pa was coming at her just as hard, dragging his heavy cable. Twenty meters. Ten. Five.

  They both pulled up at the same time, but they were so heavy, they stalled early, and they were falling, together. Pascale dipped forward, revving to recover from the stall. She grabbed Pa’s hook and yanked it closer to hers.

  Falling as he was, Pa nonetheless also got a grip on both and pulled them closer. Almost there. Muscles strained as the pull of each cable became irresistible.

  The tip of one hook was against the concave top of the other. And they still fell, engines screaming, bodies straining.

  Then suddenly, the hooks found each other, just as Pa snapped his fingers out of the way. The immediate tension on the cable whipped it out of their hands, flinging them spinning into the air. Cables and metal and carbon struts creaked warningly, an alien sound in the clouds.

  She spread her legs, head down, pointing her hands to get control again. With unnatural speed for its size, the Causapscal-des-Vents swung beneath her, right into her dive path. If she hadn’t been so terrified, the image of Gabriel-Antoine bracing himself on the envelope, looking up at her in astonishment, would have been comical.

  Pascale’s engine bit at the clouds. She pulled up and swooped out of the way. Pa flew counter-clockwise as well, rising on the winds, on the opposite side of the float frame.

  No. He wasn’t rising. The float frame was sinking.

  Marie-Pier was scrambling across the shaking frame, quickly turning valves to pump oxygen out of the woody bulbs of the trawlers. They were filled with oxygen, which gave them enough buoyancy, but in extremis in the depths, they could lower the pressure inside their buoyancy chambers, giving them additional lift. Marie-Pier sped the process along with mechanical pumps.

  The Causapscal-des-Vents swung pendulum-like, dragging the float frame down into a bank of clouds which rained on them and cut their visibility. They were at forty-ninth now, almost home for Pascale and Pa.

  “Gabriel-Antoine, check all the cleats and the structural stability on the envelope,” she said. “And get ready to get out of there in a hurry if something goes wrong. Pa, check on the cable mounting on the frame. I’m going to check along the cable.”

  She swept upward, around the sinking frame. She couldn’t get too close because the four bobs from the four trawlers hung there. A collision would smash her helmet and cook her instantly. She banked tightly, circling the cable over and over, shining her light down its length, looking for fraying. She turned more tightly where the two hooks held tight to one another. They looked ok.

  She followed the cable down and landed on the roof of the habitat. The Causapscal-des-Vents creaked ominously. It didn’t like this depth. Too hot for it. Too crushing. She checked all the cleats that Gabriel-Antoine had already checked. He was below decks, just coming up the envelope stairway.

  “It’s holding,” he said.

  He was sweating in his helmet. So was she. He came close and pressed his faceplate against hers.

  “I can’t believe what you did!” he yelled, not transmitting by radio. His voice was both distant, muffled by two helmets, and amplified by the high temperature down here. It existed in multiple places, like her emotions. His face was admiring and stormy with anger. “You were so brave! But you could have been killed!”

  Pascale didn’t know if she was blushing. Her suit’s cooling system was working on a deficit. Sulfuric acid rained on them, like a spring shower. She wiped his faceplate clear with her glove. It seemed a very intimate gesture, like preening, and he did the same to hers.

  “If we weren’t trapped in these things, I would kiss you!” he yelled.

  “I would let you,” she laughed.

  “You’re not like anybody I’ve ever met.”

  She felt like crumpling at the heart-squeezing happiness and the heart-stabbing irony.

  The Causapscal-des-Vents sank more slowly now, the cable groaning with geriatric protest. Hot clouds rose magically around them.

  “This cable will only hold so long,” Pascale said, looking up.

  The frame they’d built to harness the four trawlers was holding. The habitat hung from the x-shaped cross-struts a hundred and fifty meters above. The weighted ends of the trawler plumb lines swung pendulously in the wind. They weren’t in resonance, which they’d worried might be dangerous enough to rip the frame apart.

  “We’re going to need a lot more cable to bridge this,” Gabriel-Antoine said, “or we’re going to have to winch the Causapscal-des-Vents higher.”

  “I’ll get the winch ready with Pa and bring down a second cable. You get the balloons deflated before stray radar recognizes us!” she said.

  She leapt from the roof of the habitat, flying up, her wing-pack engine whirring. Gabriel-Antoine followed. The plumb lines under the trawlers were acting funny. They bowed gently outward, all of them. There was no resonance with the wind to do that. She circled, climbing. Her suit had a crude voltmeter that normally showed electrical fields when they flew around trawler plumb lines. The cables bridged slightly different levels of the clouds, turning static into current, but they were variably conductive. If not, a lightning strike would blow out the biological capacitors in the trawlers. And Marie-Pier had already turned the conductance of these cables off.

  “I think the plumb lines are live!” Pascale said. If they were conducting, that was trouble.

  Everyone was on a different trawler head, checking the ties on different equipment. Marie-Pier pulled out a better voltmeter and began checking as Pascale flew close over the frame.

  Above the x-cross where the habitat was attached, a bright blue arc of electricity leapt four meters to shock her. Pascale’s body seized, and she dipped and glided down between the struts before the arc let her go. Black crawled inwards from edges of her vision and her muscles continued to tremble, but she managed to pull up and crash on top of the nearest trawler head, where Marie-Pier kept her from falling over the edge. Then dizzy black loomed over her vision like a storm cloud.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  GEORGE-ÉTIENNE LANDED BESIDE Pascale just as Gabriel-Antoine did. A stripe of black lined the front of Pascale’s suit from shoulder to knee. Pascale was moving sluggishly as George-Étienne prodded at the burn mark.

  “What are you doing?” Gabriel-Antoine demanded stridently beside him.

  “Quiet!” George-Étienne said. He continued probing with his fingers, feeling for crackling, listening for crunching over the patter of raining sulfuric acid.

  “We need to get him inside somewhere,” Gabriel-Antoine said.

  “Make a shelter here,” George-Étienne said. Without stopping his probing of the suit, he opened a pocket of Pascale’s suit and pulled out a silvery acid-proof sheet.

  “We have to take him somewhere!”

  “Non,” George-Étienne said. “We have to finish checking to see if his suit is breached. If it is, at this depth, acid and heat will get in and cook him.”

  Gabriel-Antoine looked stupid for a moment, processing everything. He was pretty dumb for a smart guy. Marie-Pier took the sheet out of Gabriel-Antoine’s hands and laid it over Pascal’s legs where George-Étienne had already checked.

  “To be sure, apply some base,” George-Étienne said.

  This time, Gabriel-Antoine reacted with more self-possession. He pulled out his own neutralizing paste and
dabbed it along the burn mark on the suit. George-Étienne got to Pascal’s shoulder.

  “Pas mal, mon p’tit gars,” he said. “You were lucky.”

  Pascale weakly held up a thumb.

  “Reste içi,” George-Étienne said.

  He stood. He and Marie-Pier looked down on the Causapscal-des-Vents, swaying gently in the breeze at the bottom of the cable. The plumb lines from the four trawlers holding it up bowed outward noticeably.

  “What’s going wrong?” he said.

  “The plumb lines are conducting,” Marie-Pier said. “They shouldn’t be. They should be in their non-conductive state right now. They’re not; they’re conducting enough to make magnetic fields to repel each other.”

  The inside of her helmet was so bright with heads-up displays that her frown was apparent.

  “My diagnostics say the plumb lines should be off,” she said. “I don’t know what’s causing this.”

  Gabriel-Antoine was behind them.

  “It’s the middle cable, the one holding up the Causapscal-des-Vents,” he said. “It’s longer than we intended, so it’s connecting clouds across a greater distance. It’s conducting, either inside, or along the rain on the outside, and it’s probably inducing a current along the plumb lines.”

  George-Étienne nearly whistled appreciatively. “Is that right?”

  “Ciboire,” Marie-Pier said. “Maybe.”

  They’d done it. Against all odds, they’d sunk it and caught it in mid-fall. But if the cable holding up the Causapscal-des-Vents had started building a charge, they were in a lot of danger unless they could put that charge somewhere. Healthy trawlers stored excess charge in electroplaques, and then shut off their conductance. Now, they could build up enough charge to induce lightning from the clouds. Or burn themselves out.

  SIXTY-SIX

  ÉMILE WINGED NORTHEAST at full throttle. He was probably still twelve kilometers from Marthe, and even once he got close, he’d still need to find her in the air column. He didn’t hear anything from Pascal behind him. The radio crackled ominously ahead, synchronized with brilliant flashes smothered behind layers of ocher cloud.

  He was already at forty-sixth rang, but picked up airspeed by angling into a long descent. Gravity sped him, moving him to a slower layer of winds. Fat drops pelted him, knocking loudly on the crown of his helmet and shrinking visibility to a few hundred meters. Chaotic gusts became violent and a crack of lightning lit the world bright yellow. Deep, bone-vibrating sound reached him nearly at the same time as the blinding light. He was wrenched a hundred meters higher and then plunged down two hundred meters, as if the storm wanted to shake him to death. His upper-deck wings would have snapped long ago. Even the stubby coureur wings strained. The coureurs avoided storms.

  Smart coureurs, anyway. No one had ever called him smart.

  “Marthe!” he called. “Marthe!”

  The static in his helmet was dialed painfully loud, but he didn’t hear an answer.

  An updraft hit him like a fist, stalling his lift, flipping him onto his back and into a tumble. He fell half a kilometer before he could level out in the punishing turbulence. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a storm like this. He was a bit scared. This really might be it.

  Something clenched his heart too. Not his own end. He was thinking about Chloé. She and Mathurin had vanished in a storm. He’d loved his little sister. She’d been romantic, dreamy, a good mother, a forgiving sister, and too young to die. And she’d only died because Venus had been in a mood that day. Venus didn’t care who her victims were. She couldn’t care who they were.

  Les colonistes made of Venus a hungry and capricious goddess, because their minds were wired to find intent in the world. They looked for meaning because they had none. Thérèse dug for meaning with all her heart. And what did he do? Did he really sacrifice at Venus’s altar? He hadn’t sacrificed anything that was his own. He’d lost his sister, his mother and in some ways his girlfriend, but those weren’t his sacrifices. He’d helped drop the Causapscal-des-Vents into the clouds, but he’d not yet given anything that was his.

  An updraft grabbed him, throwing him upward so fast that breath left him, and the vibration of his wings straining in their mountings went straight into his bones. Venus threw him high, so high that he met another wind going in another direction that plowed him downward. He climbed into a slower-moving pocket of air and turned east again. After the pounding, the moderate rain gentled. This might be it. Really it. He might go not as a willing sacrifice to Venus, but as just another of her murder victims.

  “Marthe! Marthe!” he called.

  In the distance of static, he heard a voice talking. Baie-Comeau control on the common channel, so swamped that he couldn’t make out the words.

  “Marthe!” he called.

  His battery level was starting to worry him, but he kept climbing. He was getting close to her last coordinates. From here, the storm could have thrown her in any direction at any speed, with her emergency balloon and cracked helmet.

  Every suit had an emergency beacon, and a weaker one on the balloon, but he couldn’t hear hers. If her balloon had endured so far, she’d be somewhere between fifty-third and fifty-eighth rangs. Big range. And if her balloon had burst, or even just been leaking, she’d be below fiftieth rang. Ambient pressure told him he was at forty-eighth rang, but GPS put him at fifty-second.

  Up or down?

  “Marthe!”

  A very faint ping sounded in the static. His suit had heard it, at the edge of detection. Down.

  Émile jack-knifed and dove. The wind rushed past, the rain flying upwards, receding above him, nature running in reverse, time flowing backwards. He was descending into Venus, becoming more primitive. In his heart, he offered himself for Marthe. All of them—Pascal, Jean-Eudes, Alexis and Pa—needed her. He did too. And he was willing to bargain with a goddess for Marthe, no different from any hunter burning animal remains to the gods fifty thousand years ago.

  The ping became louder, enough that his helmet began to resolve its location. Forty-seventh rang, about five kilometers east. Below the storm, and twenty kilometers below safety. She’d somehow dropped so low that she’d gone beneath him. She was at the limit of the zone where her emergency balloon could function. And to have gotten there at all, the storm must not have treated her well.

  Droplets of hot sulfuric acid spattered the glass of his faceplate, beading off in the wind. The heat sweltered, pressing his suit hard against his skin, not burning yet, but uncomfortable. He hadn’t been this deep in a long time. Then he broke into clearer clouds of smoky brown. There was no more rain, but the light was reddened and scattered, shadowless and coming from all directions. The occasional crash of lightning far above painted lumpy textured shadows onto the clouds.

  He passed forty-eighth rang before pulling up, circling to home in on her signal.

  “Marthe!”

  Her signal was stronger. East four hundred meters. Down eight hundred. The clouds finally broke into the trackless uniformity of the sub-cloud haze. This virga zone was the world without definition, the chaos that existed before clouds, before ground, before stars or even storms.

  A shape came into blurry view in the distance. A silver-white balloon, half-inflated. Beneath it, on a short cable, hung a body. The nature of the attachment point of the balloon to the wing-pack made it look like someone had been hanged. The silvery sheet hanging over didn’t help.

  “Marthe!”

  He circled, bleeding off airspeed before climbing into a stall with almost no forward speed, right beside her. He grabbed the balloon string with both hands and wrapped his legs around her body. His weight caused them to plunge. But she didn’t move.

  He furled his wings and activated his emergency balloon. It inflated off the top of his wing-pack, jerking sullenly at him until they stopped descending. Then they hung together in the featureless haze at forty-sixth rang.

  He pulled another emergency balloon and hooked
it onto Marthe’s wing-pack. He twisted in the end of a hose, and attached the other end to his oxygen tank, and then blew it. After moments, they began rising, slowly and calmly. He opened a strap on his suit and attached himself to Marthe’s wing-pack so they couldn’t be separated. Then, hanging there from his own balloon, he pulled up the protective tarp that had been hiding his sister.

  Her sweaty forehead was pressed against a bloody spot on the inside of her cracked helmet. Shallow breaths fogged a tiny patch of the glass and her cheeks were pink. He tried patching into her suit to read some of her vitals, but her processor was offline. The radiator on her wing-pack was blistering hot.

  If he thought she could go deeper and that they were close enough, he would have brought her to the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs, but he didn’t trust her suit.

  “Baie-Comeau, can you read me?” he said.

  No response.

  Ostie.

  With two and a half emergency balloons, they would rise, slowly, over four or five hours. He didn’t trust either of their suits for that, nor their oxygen supply. They’d gone too deep to depend too much on balloons. They were below the storm, and it might be moving past them if it was contained enough. Towering storms could be quick hits. Or they could become monsters.

  He unfolded his wings and checked the engine readings. He had a third of a charge left on his battery and his coolant system was still okay. And what he was about to do went against every piece of advice any smart person would ever give.

  He clung tightly to Marthe and looped the cable he was dangling from round a tie-loop on her wing-pack. Then he carefully popped the attachment on his own wing-pack and brought the end to her pack and tied it firmly. His emergency balloon was now her third balloon. He had no more safety margin. If for any reason his wing-pack failed, he was going to meet Venus up close.

  Then he let go and throttled up his engine. Without his weight, Marthe rose fast. He circled her, following her up. Every so often, he flew beneath her, grabbing a trailing cable, yanking her eastward. He needed to get them east of the storm, and higher.