SIXTY-EIGHT KILOMETERS above the surface, in the thin yellowed haze of the photochemical zone of Venus’ atmosphere, Marie-Claude emerged onto the roof of the floating factory. Yellow-brown cloud curved away below her in all directions, while the stars poked through a sky whitened by a big sun, inviting an artistic soul to make something of it. A dumb maintenance drone, one of many on the factory, floated by, wiping the glass of the roof.
Her suit battery status blinked from green to yellow. She jiggled the pack. Yellow to green again. An environment laced with acid bred all sorts of shorts and power leaks. The colonistes called all these irritating maintenance problems bebbits, after the little biting flies of Québec’s wilderness.
She leaned on the wing of her plane, just for a quick break from the life of cramped factory to cramped habitat. The fast, empty wind caressing her suit was a doubtful thing, an experience at a remove, a ghostly touch that froze the bones. The colonistes did not touch Venus. They experienced the idea of her through their suits. Venus wrapped herself in clouds deeper and heavier than an ocean. Marie-Claude could only stand on the shores they’d built and watch Venus, as she might watch a movie, something to be left behind when she returned to the floating habitats. Venus isolated them from everything except the violence with which she touched them, bathing them in hotly cancerous solar radiation, suffocating them with thin, anoxic air, reaching up for them with tongues of sulfuric acid, delighting in marking them with acid scars where she gnawed through environmental suits and protective films.
Her battery toggled from green to yellow again. She whacked the bebbit. Back to green. She opened her plane and climbed in.
“Renaud,” she radioed her supervisor, “Marie-Claude here. I’m taking off from plant six.”
Take-off from a factory was a bit like the short and long seconds at the peak of a roller coaster. A ramp simply led off a lip and into the yawning atmosphere. She started her engine, taxied to the top of the ramp and rolled down, faster and faster.
At the edge, a loud snap shook the plane, and a shrieking hole opened in the side. The plane spun. A glimpse of the factory spun by, showing, at the edge of the ramp, a cleaning drone, with a part of Marie-Claude’s wing in its grabbing claw.
It shouldn’t have been there. It shouldn’t have grabbed at her plane.
She spun away. Dashboard darkened. She plunged toward the yellowed cloud deck. Marie-Claude’s heart thumped too loudly. Thoughts loud, useless. Pilot training dragged her fingers to scrabble under her seat for the ejection switch, but the cockpit floor had bent, jamming itself against her seat. She couldn’t reach it.
“Merde, merde, merde,” she whispered.
“Marie-Claude! What’s going on?” Renaud’s voice crackled in her helmet. “You’re losing altitude!”
No ejection seat. Busted plane. Flat spin. Sulfuric acid clouds. “Câlisse!” she swore.
“Marie-Claude! Do you read me?”
Terror froze her lungs with cold fingers. Jerk harness free. Plane shuddering. Move to gaping hole in the cockpit. Too loud. Fingers gripping seat. Jump. Thin air whipped. Clouds below, racing up. Scream. Tumble away. Small parachute yanked lightly at her. Voice in her ears. Hands searching for parachute cords. Parachute above her. Parachute above her. Breathe. Breathe. Answer.
“Plane blown. I’m on my secondary chute.” The small parachute barely slowed her. Only a fraction of an atmosphere resisted her descent. The air would not thicken to a full atmosphere for about ten kilometers. By then, it might be too late for rescue.
“I’m coming your way,” Renaud said.
He radioed orders to the rest of the team, to the habitat platform five kilometers higher.
Marie-Claude tasted black on her tongue. She gritted her teeth, willing herself not to puke in her helmet. Shock. Probably shock. Her stomach churned harder. Do something.
She patted her suit. Adrenaline might mask leaks or injuries. Seals and fabric and coatings okay. Heater and heat exchanger running. Oxygen pressure a bit low, but green. Main battery still green. Sealed pockets on the arms and legs of her suit contained bits of her tool kit. Breathe. Renaud was on his way. Be calm.
The plane dragged a trail of smoke through the haze. About five kilometers below, the smoke column bent sharply. In that moment, in the vast clouds, relative movement was born. She and the habitats and factories lived in the super-rotating layer of the upper atmosphere, in winds that circled Venus every four days. Her plane had dropped into the slower-moving cloud deck beneath and was slowly falling behind her.
“Merde! Renaud, the transition layer is higher today! I’m going to fall out of the super-rotating winds.” She did not add, and out of your reach until you’ve circled the planet.
“How soon?”
“A few minutes.”
Where the bottom of the super-rotating winds touched the top of the lower clouds, the smoke column had been torn into a string of eddies, dark berries on the stretched lines of yellow clouds beneath. She rode nothing more than a bit of resined fabric on thin carbon cables. “The turbulence will shred my chute.”
“I’m on full throttle, Marie-Claude. We’ll get there.”
She looked up into the yellow-white sky. She couldn’t see any planes. Sixty-one kilometers separated her from the surface of Venus. She had a few minutes before it would become very dangerous for Renaud or any of the other crews to rescue her.
The factory shrank to a toy-like gray stub far above her, but another shape was growing, resolving into a repair drone, descending on two propellers whirring behind it. Coming toward her. It wasn’t programmed to do that. It was not programmed to do anything but clean and fix simple leaks, unless engineers gave it more specific repair tasks.
“Renaud! Did you program one of the repair drones to come get me?”
The radio crackled, echoing lightning from the deep deck of the lower clouds. “No. I didn’t think we’d have enough time to do that. I’ll see if I can have someone on it.”
“That’s not why I’m asking. On take-off, I collided with a repair drone. It shouldn’t have been anywhere near the launch ramp. I think it grabbed part of my wing.”
“Are you sure?”
She hesitated to tell him over the radio. Drones wouldn’t grab her plane unless they were programmed to. Sabotage. Whoever had done this would be as likely to hear. “I think someone tried to kill me, Renaud. I think they reprogrammed the drone. Plant six was added to the inspection route late and my name was put on it. And now this drone is following me down.”
“What? Hang on. I’ll access it from here.”
Marie-Claude waited, time ticking below her as the smog thickened and the drone approached.
“I can’t get in. Its antenna is offline.”
“I can’t get away,” Marie-Claude said.
“I’m almost there.”
The drone neared, only three hundred meters from her. Its grasping claws were open, capable of tearing her parachute. Only a half kilometer below her, the smoke of her plane was a thinning gray streak. She took a deep breath.
“It’s not going to happen, Renaud. The suit can keep me alive in the upper cloud deck, but without a chute, I’m just going to drop until I cook. I’ve got to save the chute.”
“Marie-Claude! What are you doing?”
Instead of pulling on the brake loops of her parachute, she pulled all the suspension wires on one side until the canopy spilled. She fell. Her stomach leapt. Arm over arm, she pulled her parachute close until she hugged it, and only its edges slapped frantically at her arms in the wind. She tucked her legs and tumbled.
Thinly glowing clouds above. Darkness below. Spinning. Two sides.
“Marie-Claude!” Renaud yelled.
Turbulence hit like a fist. She was spinning dust. If she blacked out she was dead. Yelling in her radio. Droplets of sulfuric acid rain streaked the glass of her helmet. The world darkened. The buffeting and spinning wanted to tear her apart, but finally the bumping stopped and she fell again.
She let her chute go. The canopy flapped and bloomed and yanked her upright.
A voice spoke in her radio, nearly overwhelmed by static.
“I’m through the transition,” she said. “My parachute is okay. The pressure is a tenth of an atmosphere. Temperature is about minus twenty Celsius. I’m not dead.”
Yet.
The planes now had a relative wind speed difference to her of about one hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. And the planes were only rated for up to two atmospheres of pressure and about eighty degrees. After that, the sulfuric acid chemistry became too hostile. The Laurentide, the main habitat, had a few probes to study the deep atmosphere and its life forms, but none of them would be nearby. They could probably refit something with which to rescue her in a day or two, but by the time the Laurentide was back overhead, she would have descended well past finding.
Duvieusart Inquiry Transcript, page 772
3:30 P.M., CHLOÉ RIVERIN, CHAIR: We now have Monsieur Renaud Lanoix, who leads the Nouvelle Voie party, but who was also the engineering foreman on April sixth. Could you describe for the Inquiry your view of the events of April sixth?
3:30, RENAUD LANOIX, ENGINEERING SUPERVISOR: Thank you, Madame Chairman. At approximately 2 P.M., Mademoiselle Duvieusart radioed, as per procedure, that she had arrived at Plant Six and started her normal inspections and work planning for later technical crews.
3:30, SANDRINE GROGUHÉ, INQUIRY MEMBER: A question, Madame Chair?
3:30, CHLOE RIVERIN, CHAIR: Go ahead.
3:30, SANDRINE GROGUHÉ, INQUIRY MEMBER: Monsieur Lanoix, in a number of reports, the press contends that Mademoiselle Duvieusart was not even supposed to be at Plant Six that day, and that the shifts were changed to draw her there.
3:35, RENAUD LANOIX, ENGINEERING SUPERVISOR: The schedule had been changed a few days earlier. Mademoiselle Duvieusart was put on Plant Six for April sixth.
3:35, SANDRINE GROGUHÉ, INQUIRY MEMBER: Who had access to the schedule—to change it, that is?
3:35, RENAUD LANOIX, ENGINEERING SUPERVISOR: A number of people have access to the schedule. Changing it is a normal part of any week’s work, Madame Groguhé. I have access, as do most of the engineers, including Mademoiselle Duvieusart.
3:35, SANDRINE GROGUHÉ, INQUIRY MEMBER: You don’t have . . .
3:35, FRANÇOIS BEAULIEU, INQUIRY MEMBER: Madame Chair, Monsieur Lanoix is not able to tell his story.
3:35, SANDRINE GROGUHÉ, INQUIRY MEMBER: Monsieur Lanoix has neglected to bring up important details.
3:35, CHLOE RIVERIN, CHAIR: Go ahead, Madame Groguhé, but please be brief.
3:35, SANDRINE GROGUHÉ, INQUIRY MEMBER: Monsieur Lanoix, fine, many people have access to the schedules, but through accounts that identify those making the changes. Who made the changes to the schedule to set up Mademoiselle Duvieusart for the sabotage of her plane?
3:35, RENAUD LANOIX, ENGINEERING SUPERVISOR: We know who accessed the schedule, Madame Groguhé. My lawyers have suggested that I should not reveal what I know here, so as not to interfere with criminal investigations.
3:40, CHLOE RIVERIN, CHAIR: This Inquiry has the authority to compel witnesses, Monsieur, and our legal counsel suggest that the danger to criminal proceedings is minimal as the cat is already out of the bag, and on the top of blog feeds over most of the Solar System.
(REPORTER’S NOTE: In camera consultation between Inquiry counsel and witness counsel.)
3:45, RENAUD LANOIX, ENGINEERING SUPERVISOR: The schedule was changed by an override code from the Bureau du Gouverneur, masked behind a dummy admin account.
3:45, CHLOE RIVERIN, CHAIR: The press, especially the nationaliste press, has made much of this being a séparatiste plot to frame the nationaliste cause. What are your thoughts on that?
3:45, RENAUD LANOIX, ENGINEERING SUPERVISOR: I don’t think that theory holds water. The sabotage was amateurish, that is certain, but Mademoiselle Duvieusart was not supposed to have survived those first few instants to tell us that the repair drone was acting strangely, which allowed us to pull the curtain back on the plot.
Marie-Claude wiped the drizzle of acid from her faceplate. Her oxygen display had yellowed. Only a few hours of oxygen left. And she continued descending. She hung in a rain of sulfuric acid, fifty-eight kilometers above the surface of Venus. Nowhere to refuel or recharge or repair or even stop.
In the distance below, a flock of spherical, gas-filled photo-synthesizers blew with the wind like pollen. Blastulae. Sometimes storms brought them as high as the photochemical zone, where they quickly died from the changes in pressure. They were small and neutrally buoyant at this altitude. They were not buoyant enough to stop her descent. Maybe if she could put enough of them together?
Perhaps a kilometer below, in the brown-yellow gloom, a cluster of dark spots moved, backward relative to the wind that carried her. They were much bigger than the blastulae. She tugged at her control lines, turning to get a better view, and hard enough to spill some of the air from her parachute. Her horizontal speed picked up, and she dropped faster. And only because she had turned did she see that the repair drone had followed her.
Repair drones had not been designed specifically to survive in the cloud deck, but they were hardy. In the photochemical zone, it might have run forever on solar power, but it also cracked sulfuric acid into hydrogen and solid sulfur, which could be recombined later to work in shadow. It could follow her a long time if it could take on enough ballast to sink as fast as she, and if it could survive the heat and acid.
Marie-Claude gritted her teeth and spilled her parachute. She plummeted. Two hundred meters. Four hundred. Six hundred. She finally let the wires go, and the parachute unfurled. The murk of the burnt yellow clouds hid her from the repair drone.
And two hundred meters below floated a pod of thirty rosettes, large Venusian plants. Their bulbous ochre heads were composed of six radially symmetric gas-filled chambers, each one a meter across. Sulfuric acid and organic materials collected in the cup formed by the tops of the six chambers. From the center of this cup grew a large triangular frond, a fine black net with which to filter the photosynthesizing microbes from the atmosphere. Beneath the six chambers hung short, heavy trunks which stored nutrients and provided ballast. They hung like weird, rootless trees, orphaned in the vastness of an ocean of cloud.
Carefully, Marie-Claude matched her horizontal speed and descended, until with uncertain hands and unsteady feet, she landed on one of the rosettes, scrambling to grab its frond before she slipped. The round, woody platform was slimy with decomposing microbes slowly being absorbed by the skin of the rosette.
The rosette began to sink under her weight, although slower than she’d been descending in her parachute. But, as the pressure increased, so would the buoyancy of the rosette, until she finally stopped descending. And in the meantime, she could hide here from the repair drone. She shook acid rain from her parachute and laid it over herself like a tarp against the drizzling acid.
She sank into the somber clouds for a long time, as the rain stopped. In the enforced quiet, her arms tingled, as if she wanted to hit something, for a long time. She was going to die. She was sinking into the toxic atmosphere of Venus because someone had decided to kill her. Nervous, angry, baffled tears tickled hot lines onto her cheeks. She cursed the acid. She cursed the world and politics. And she cursed herself for coming to Venus.
The Americans, Australians, and British still raced against the Chinese for the industrial and economic dominance of Mars. Egypt and Saudi Arabia had taken Vesta and Ceres, and had staked claims on dozens of other asteroids with robotic prospectors. The Russians, perhaps for having lost the Moon to the Americans a century earlier, took it for their inheritance. The first wave of Solar System colonization was complete by the time Québec separated from Canada.
L’Assemblée nationale decided to make their mark as an advanced nation by colonizing Venus. There was no money to be made on Venus, no resource it could provide to Earth or the rest of the Sol
ar System that could not be gotten for cheaper from the Egyptians or the Saudis, but her clouds were of scientific value. Strange microbial extremophiles had been found, feeding a deep, inaccessible ecology. Basic scientific research would not finance the effort and colonization was not cheap, but the president had wanted un grand geste, a starward look for her new nation.
And it was a grand geste, approached with an earnest, prideful, counterproductive fervor. Little matter that the new republic had to launch Anglo hardware on Egyptian rockets, and that it trained its engineers in Houston. La République du Québec was colonizing Venus.
They ought to have started with robotic stations in the atmosphere, to prepare the way for astronauts, but la République had the romantic eagerness of a teenager, throwing waves of engineers, chemists, meteorologists, and doctors into space with cramped habitats, optimistic assumptions, and fickle support. They were part of la grande histoire, and dreams thrive in fields of willful blindness.
—From Commentaries
on the Foundation of the Venusian State
The clouds thinned and broke beneath her, and a frisson of awe was born in Marie-Claude. She rode the rosette near the top of a kilometer of clear air between the yellow-brown upper cloud deck and the angry dark clouds of the middle deck. The cavernous space was empty, carved into all the stored acid and spite in the Solar System. She was tiny, a mite riding a bit of dander in a stadium. The vertigo that had trailed her all this time suddenly pounced, and she snaked her arms around the frond, as if she stood on a cliff. The rosette sank through the great cave in the clouds, and the puffy floor of the middle deck approached with the gentleness of a summer balloon ride. She was going to die. Venus would kill her, but had given her one last vision of wonder.
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