“Oh my God,” dos Santos said from her helmet. “The look on your face. That’s so cute.”
This was like a warped version of a time-delayed conversation. Two dos Santoses, one a few minutes out of date, one real. Elfrida brought the helmet up to her face so she could talk into the suit-to-suit radio. “You can’t leave,” she said lamely.
“Watch me,” said dos Santos—on the screen, not from the helmet. She was on her feet now, supported by the helper bot. Shakily, she turned to face the screen she was now appearing on. In the vid, it still showed the autofeed of Venus. Supported by the bot, dos Santos’s hand slowly rose and gave Venus the finger.
“That’s why I did it, Goto. And that’s all you really need to know.”
“Why you did what?” Elfrida pleaded, talking to the screen in her confusion.
“Keep watching,” said dos Santos from her helmet. “I’m going to explain.”
On the screen, dos Santos stood in the handler bot’s embrace. The bot resembled a ladder on legs, with spindly arms that supported her under the armpits. Woman and bot looked like two robots frozen in mid-tango.
“Goto, you were on the right track to begin with. Yumiko did have orders that weren’t in her operating guidelines. Those orders came from me. Nothing to do with these clowns on 99984 Ravilious, whoever they are. Basically, she was ordered to talk you out of recommending the purchase of 11073 Galapagos.”
“Why?”
“We’ve been sabotaging the asteroid capture program, oh, from way back. The introduction of the stross-class was supposed to speed things up.”
This was the confession Elfrida had been waiting for. She no longer wanted to hear it.
“A multi-phase, multi-agency project like this? A house of cards. Pull one out and the whole thing comes down.”
Dos Santos on the screen raised her eyebrows comically.
“And now it has come down. Thanks, indirectly, to us. The Venus Project can’t survive the loss of Botticelli Station, and there’s no freaking way this rescue attempt is going to work. A rocket booster that’s actually an antique Longvoyager? Please. Lomax and his buds will be lucky if they don’t kill themselves.”
She paused.
“So, that’s why I feel comfortable revealing this to you now. It doesn’t matter anymore. We succeeded, though not in the way I would have chosen.”
For a moment, dos Santos’s eyes closed.
“I did not want, plan for, or anticipate the deaths of all those people. I want to get this across to you so there’s no doubt. That was not part of our plan. That’s all on these fuckers on 99984 Ravilious, and I hope the ISA takes care of them with extreme prejudice.”
Elfrida shook her head, lips folded tight. She felt sick. A conspiracy to sabotage the Venus Project. How high did it go? Who were dos Santos’s unnamed co-conspirators? Someone, or a bunch of someones, in a position to give UNVRP’s phavatars secret orders …
“What about the rest of us?” she burst out. “If the Project is cancelled, the Space Corps will have to downsize, and the people who were working with UNVRP will be the first to go. And what about all the people on all those other asteroids UNVRP expressed interest in, but didn’t end up purchasing? You know how the recycling companies operate! They evict them, take their recyclables, and dump them on Ceres with the clothes on their backs. Exactly what’s about to happen to the Galapajin.”
On the screen, dos Santos clicked her tongue at her helper bot. “I think that’s all,” she said, glancing up at the camera. “I hope this gives you some closure, Goto. You can squeal to the ISA, or not, as you like. As I said, it doesn’t matter anymore. But this vid will auto-delete when it ends, so there’s that. It’ll be your word against, well, everyone else’s. And you may be famous now, but you’re still just a field agent.”
Assisted by the helper bot, she limped out of the shot.
The screen went black.
Elfrida lifted her helmet to her mouth. “Dos Santos? Dos Santos! Where are you?”
“You don’t want to know,” the real dos Santos said, distantly. She sounded out of breath. “Frag off, Goto. Go watch the show. There should be a nice big explosion in a few minutes.”
Elfrida darted out of the cabin. She did not know which way to go. For lack of any better alternative, she headed back to the elevator. In the vestibule, the autofeed was rolling, a few Galapajin watching. But there was nothing to see on the screen except the smouldering nightside of Venus. Somewhere down in that chthonic atmosphere, the Superlifters were slowly towing the Nagasaki towards Botticelli Station.
“Ma’am! Please! Where are you?”
“What more do you want from me, Goto? An apology?”
The screen switched to the feed from one of the Superlifters. Huge and ugly, the naked torus of Botticelli Station wallowed in the clouds, lit by the Superlifters’ search beams.
“Yes, an apology would be nice,” Elfrida snapped tearfully. She slapped the elevator button.
“Here’s where we are,” said the Superlifter pilot Lomax from the screen’s speakers. “B-Station’s been gradually losing altitude all this time. It’s down in the troposphere now. Just 34 kilometers above the surface. How low is that? If this was Earth, the engineers working on the station would be able to see individual buildings. By the way, I would like everyone to appreciate the heroic work those guys did. It is around 180° C out there. They had to work in heat-resistant suits borrowed from Star Force, which are like freaking exoskeletons. You can’t see what the fuck you’re doing. And under those conditions, they achieved a miracle. Look.”
Through the superheated murk, the Nagasaki rose into view. It had been towed underneath Botticelli Station. In a feat of precision maneuvering, its needle-prow had speared through the torus of the station, like a dolphin catching a ring on its nose. B-Station now perched askew on top of what had been the cathedral’s domed roof.
The watching Galapajin crossed themselves.
“Is anything holding it on?” Elfrida wondered aloud.
“Nuts and bolts,” said dos Santos from the helmet in her hand.
The elevator came. Elfrida jumped in. She searched the Kharbage Can’s public feeds until she found Lomax’s Superlifter, so she could keep watching on her contacts.
“Status update,” Lomax said. “We’ve taken everyone off, except for that bearded madman. We are now running away like little girls.”
“Girls can run faster than that,” shouted someone, perhaps Petruzzelli.
“We’re being careful,” Lomax said.
B-Station and the Nagasaki, conjoined, sank away into the clouds, like sea creatures sinking back into the depths. In reality, Elfrida understood, they were not sinking. The Superlifters were retreating into space as fast as they could trudge.
“No one’s ever fired up a fusion drive in six bars of mostly carbon dioxide before,” Lomax mused. “The whole dang atmosphere might go up. Who knows?”
The elevator reached the transfer point. Elfrida swam down the keel tube, dodging Galapajin, clamping her helmet back on as she went.
She burst out of the airlock just in time to see light bloom in the clouds of the nightside.
It was like watching an asteroid impact in reverse. Instead of vanishing, the flash grew whiter, brighter, bigger.
Shouts erupted all over the public channel. “The whole atmosphere is going up!”
“Told you it wouldn’t work,” dos Santos said in Elfrida’s helmet.
“The oxygen’s burning,” Elfrida groaned in distress. “Six bars of carbon dioxide? Not even half! They forgot to figure in what the Project has already done to the atmosphere! Our green slime produces oxygen, and because oxygen is lighter than CO2, it’s all risen into the troposphere. And now it’s burning. Our oxygen!”
Now easily visible without filters, the spot of fire on the nightside of Venus flickered blue and green around the edges.
“And methane!” Elfrida moaned.
“Yeah,” dos Santos agreed ove
r the radio. “Major facepalm moment.”
Elfrida tethered herself to a stanchion and kicked off into the crowd. There were too many crimson and gold EVA suits to count. She peered at faceplates, saw faces transfixed with horror, greenish in the light of the burning atmosphere. Why did she think dos Santos would be out here with the rest, anyway?
A familiar, long-unheard voice cut across the hullaballoo on the public channel. “Yee-haaaa! We have escape velocity!”
Captain Sikorsky—in the words of Lomax, ‘that bearded madman’—was on the bridge of Botticelli Station, piloting the station on its wild ride towards space. He had lobbied successfully for the job because no one else wanted it.
“Now firing explosive charges,” Sikorsky screamed. “Nagasaki is jettisoned! Do svidaniya!”
Out of the inferno spreading across the nightside, Botticelli Station came flying like a frisbee. It hurtled into orbit and coasted to an altitude appropriate for its momentum.
The Nagasaki followed, flaming like a comet. For a moment it appeared as if the ancient passenger ship, too, would escape Venus’s gravity well. Then it exploded.
With everyone else in the cargo bay, Elfrida instinctively hid her face.
So it was that she, and everyone else, missed the moment when that Steelmule slid out of Cargo Bay No. 1, scant meters above their heads. Unpowered, the Steelmule drifted away from the Kharbage Can. Its trajectory differed slightly from the Can’s, thanks to a push from a certain helper bot. Its shadow flickered across Cargo Bay No. 2, but when Elfrida looked up, it was already out of sight.
“They did it,” she said. Everyone on the public channel was rejoicing, while Sikorsky outshouted them all, singing his own praises in Russian. “They did it! B-Station is safe!”
Blinking back tears, she accidentally blinked Cydney Blaisze’s feed up again.
“We do not yet know the outcome of the attempt,” Blaisze pontificated, far away on Earth. “But we know one thing beyond a doubt: Venus matters so much to these brave men and women that some of them are prepared to die for humanity’s future here. No matter what the fate of Botticelli Station, the United Nations Venus Remediation Project will live on as a testament to their dedication and courage, a symbol of the pioneering human spirit.”
“Oh, damn it,” said dos Santos’s voice, very faint now and staticky.
“Ma’am!” Elfrida wheeled on her tether. “Stay with me! Keep talking!”
She had a nightmarish vision of dos Santos drifting in space, just as Elfrida had drifted on that fragment of 11073 Galapagos. Drifting up to join Jun Yonezawa’s corpse in a graveyard orbit. A different, penitential way of committing suicide.
“Goodbye, Goto,” dos Santos said faintly.
“Where are you? We’ll come and get you!”
“No, you won’t. Everyone’s busy just now, and Steelmules can burn pretty fast.”
Elfrida stared into space. But all she could see was Venus.
“One last thing … ssszzzt … stand by my beliefs one hundred percent. Sssfffppt … speak for the others … best intentions … ssssss …”
Dos Santos’s signal faded into static. Then, for an instant, it came back loud and clear.
“If there’s one thing I learned in the slums of Sao Paulo, it’s don’t squeal.”
With that, dos Santos was gone.
xxxii.
“You helped her to escape, didn’t you?” Elfrida said to Martin Okoli.
The captain smiled. “Don’t say that kind of thing unless you can prove it, Ms. Goto.”
“The Steelmule. You had the Kharbage Dump drop it off. It was for her. She waited until everyone was busy with the rescue attempt, and then she just went for it. But she had help! Literally! That helper bot. That wasn’t hers, it belonged to the Kharbage Can. You let her have it!”
“She took it without permission,” Okoli said. “Same as the Steelmule.” His jaw jutted truculently. “I’m the one that should be PO’d here, Ms. Goto. That truck cost fifty million spiders. Good thing it was insured.”
“Maybe they’ll catch her,” said Petruzzelli, watching them warily.
Elfrida shook her head. “Somehow, I don’t think they will.”
Around the trio, Galapajin families dispersed into a spacious passenger lounge. They were boarding the quad-module barge Kharbage In, Kharbage Out. Two days after the successful rescue of Botticelli Station, the Kharbage In, Kharbage Out had arrived to evacuate the last of the Galapajin, as well as the B-Station survivors.
The ship would first swing out to the Belt to drop the Galapajin off on Ceres. Then it would return to Earth. The whole journey was projected to take about three months, owing to an upcoming conjunction with Mars, which necessitated a wide detour.
And Elfrida was going on the Kharbage In, Kharbage Out, too.
“Be happy, Ms. Goto,” Okoli said. “We saved Botticelli Station. The Venus Project didn’t get cancelled. Money’s pouring in. I can tell you I’m happy. We’re all happy.”
Elfrida nodded. She saw that Okoli was not going to admit a damn thing, and she wished she hadn’t spoiled their goodbyes with her long-stored-up accusation.
“I’m happy,” she said, by way of an apology.
“You don’t look it.”
Elfrida sought another explanation for her melancholy, apart from dos Santos. “It’s just like, it’s all about politics. Remember what that awful talking head, Cydney Blaisze, said about UNVRP? By the way, she asked me for an interview. I might do it, to tell my side of the story. Anyway, she said the Venus Project is a testament of hope and a symbol of the human spirit, blah blah blah. That’s why they’re not closing it down.”
“I could have told you that a long time ago,” Okoli said. “UNVRP’s always been politically motivated. It sure ain’t economically motivated.”
“It’s simple, in my opinion,” Petruzzelli interrupted. “If they shut UNVRP down now, it would look like the PLAN’s winning.” She spread her hands and brought them back together, as if crushing something.
Maybe the PLAN is winning, Elfrida thought, but she did not say it aloud, not wanting to completely kill the mood.
The conflagration in Venus’s troposphere had burned itself out, as the planet’s turbulent Hadley circulation diluted the oxygen with non-flammable CO2. Only about 10% of the oxygen excreted by UNVRP’s green slime had been consumed. That set the biogenic phase of the Project back by several years, but it was hardly a fatal obstacle, in the face of the political determination since exhibited by the General Assembly and the President herself. The successful recovery of Botticelli Station had struck the opening note of a system-wide chorus of self-congratulation. Now politicians and pundits were lining up to pay tribute to the Project.
And to the casualties.
To the roster of B-Station personnel killed in the PLAN attack, was now appended the name of Toshio Hirayanagi. The old priest had died on the Nagasaki. Someone had had to stay on board the ancient ship to throw the switches, and he had volunteered.
“If you’re not happy, Goto,” Okoli said, “you don’t need to stick with the Project. You could get a different assignment.”
“You kind of have to go where you’re sent.”
“Well, then, you could quit the Space Corps altogether. Nothing stopping you.”
“And do what, instead?” Elfrida shook her head. “I guess I’m sticking with the Project. After all these years, it’s like my family.”
Okoli cracked a grin. “Well, if you ever change your mind, you know you’ll always have a home on the Kharbage Can.”
Elfrida stared at him, speechless. She hadn’t sensed that he was leading up to a job offer. Was he for real?
“Yeah, absolutely!” Petruzzelli chimed in. “It would be great to have someone else on board with the same size feet.”
Elfrida chuckled, a lump in her throat. Her decision was already made, but she felt an intense pang of regret. But she could not change her mind now. “I really appreciate it, guys. I mean it.
Anyway, I expect we’ll be working together again. I don’t know if I’ll be posted back to B-Station. They’re saying the repairs might take years. But I’ll probably end up somewhere in the Belt.”
“Then we might see you again,” Okoli agreed. “In a suit, if not in the flesh. Let’s just hope it ain’t another stross-class, huh?”
He was probing for information. Elfrida felt disappointed. That was probably the only reason he’d offered her a job: to get access to what she knew.
Giving nothing away, she said blandly, “The stross-class has been recalled. There were a few problems with its onboard assistant.”
★
As the Kharbage In, Kharbage Out accelerated out of Venus orbit, Elfrida joined her colleagues in the first-class passenger lounge. They congregated with drinks in front of the viewport screen. Venus receded.
Somewhere out there, the bodies of Jun Yonezawa and Father Hirayanagi were dancing around the planet, amid the wreckage of humanity’s latest attempt to conquer it.
“I’ll be back,” Elfrida whispered. “I promise.”
xxxiii.
Six months later, Elfrida and her father strolled around the lake in Kiyosumi Teien. They were actually sitting on separate ergoforms in the Haller-Goto family’s apartment on Piazza Benedetto Cairoli. This was how they related. Elfrida’s mother had shaken her head at them and said, “You two. Do you want me to ping you when supper is ready?”
In Tokyo circa 2015, spring sunlight bathed the exquisite little park which had once been the garden of a timber baron. Sakura bloomed like pink clouds on the shore and on the ornamental island in the lake.
“They had sakura on 11073 Galapagos, too,” Elfrida said.
“Really? That’s amazing.”
“They didn’t look like this. They had that typical low-grav silhouette, all stretched out.”
Tomoki Goto shook his head at this indirect reference to the tragedy she had experienced. His long silver hair tangled in the breeze. “Such a senseless, pointless thing. When we heard about the attack on Botticelli Station, your mother and I didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t sit still, couldn’t eat or sleep. We spent the whole night wandering around here, just walking …”
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy: Books 1-4 of the Space Opera Thriller Series Page 25