But Venus was an incredible place to be. Awe inspiring. The city floated in a thin bubble of oxygen resting atop the planet’s true atmosphere. You could look off the edge Zephyr City’s platform and see a sulfurous haze, mass of clouds so thick and impenetrable that it seemed you could almost stand on it.
Fall from Zephyr City's platforms, and you would fall right through the cloud. You wouldn't hit the ground. Within seconds, you would cease to exist. Ultra-acidic rain. Corrosive gases that would melt flesh from bone. Atmospheric pressures strong enough to crush a submarine into a tin can.
Below, Venus was close to the medieval conception of hell. But above, assuming one had air, it was surprisingly habitable.
The boy spent his days here. The brutal temperatures made Venus a place to visit and leave rather than a place to stay, and the few million locals were heavily outnumbered by the vast numbers of tourists coming and going.
Vante had stepped off a shuttle from Terrus by way of Titan, his future the blankest of canvases. Within a few hours of asking around, he'd found a job.
The bubble of oxygen was several dozen cubic kilometers in size. Some entrepreneurally-minded folk had started up Vyre rentals. You'd pay a few hundred ducats, get a pair of biokinetic wings grafted into your spinal column, and enjoy an afternoon riding Venus's atmosphere.
Vante's job was to make sure things went smoothly.
It was easy for “enjoy” to become “experience.” And equally easy for “an afternoon” to become “an eternity.”
He’d train people in how to fly the artificial wings, give them the needed motivation to jump off the edge, and bail them out if they got into trouble. He'd fly after the tourists, keeping close tabs on them, focusing one very beat of their wings. If they started to tire and lose strength, he could radio for a skyhook to reel them back to the platform. If they got lost, he'd be there to direct them back to one of Venus’s few platforms that stood open to the air outside.
His small size and light weight meant that Vyres could carry him for hours and hours without tiring.
As with Victorian-era chimneysweeps, he knew that this job would only last for as long as he stayed small. Once his weight crossed some critical threshold, he'd look for other work.
But as he gazed across at the vast open space before him, the surface of an entire planet curving away, he hoped that the day would not be fast in coming.
Once he had to seek work indoors he would be in contact with more people. Some of which might have memories deeper and wider than those of Krepsen Mas, his perpetually absent boss. People who might have seen things, or knew things.
He had a past.
He was not running from it, he just wanted to be very careful that it would not intrude upon his present or future.
A few weeks after arriving here, Krepsen had taken him aside.
“Joso, I need to ask you some things,” she said, using the fake name he’d given her.
He'd nodded, feeling the same plunging feeling in his stomach that he did every time he swooped off the platform wearing Vyres.
Was he being fired? Worse?
“This does not relate to your job performance, which is exceptional,” she’d said. “All of our customers love you. But there's something that, I confess, troubles me.”
He waited for her to talk. Wished he could hurry her along. Anticipation tortured him like a rack.
“Do you, perchance, know of a man called Emil Gokla?”
He nodded, tried not to let on that he knew too much. “Yes. Scientist, I think? He invented... uhh... molecular engineering?”
He hoped that the mistake would add verisimilude to his ignorance.
“He invented Black Shift. You probably don't have time to keep up with news from abroad, but shortly before the war he was found poisoned in his mansion. At first, it was believed to have been an accident. Now, the people in the know think that he was deliberately poisoned by someone in his mansion. And one of those people was a boy of your age.”
Vante nodded. “I've had people ask me about that before. I've never been been to Titan. I was raised in an orphanage on Terrus. This is the first time I've ever left the homeworld. Run a check on me if you don't believe me.”
He was babbling, and overexplaining.
Using money siphoned from Emil's account, he'd managed to bribe a shockingly lax border guard into forging a set of papers for him, as well as a chain of custody that extended to just a few months in the past. As he'd thought, Emil Gokla's guardianship of him was completely illegal and illegitimate, and the centenarian billionaire had left no paper trial connecting the boy to Black Shift or Titan.
“I believe you,” Krepsen said, in a voice that said so long as it is profitable for me, “but it's just...strange. You arrived within a week or so of Emil's death. And although Emil Gokla never adopted a child, there are many descriptions of a boy around his mansion that fits you exactly.”
“Coincidences, I suppose,” Vante said. He was relaxed now. He knew that he was at no risk from Krepsen, even though there were unofficial warrants for his return all around the solar system. Emil had been part of a doomsday cult called the Sons of the Vanitar, and although they could not formally pursue their leader's killers through the mechanisms of the law, they were certainly aware of him – and perhaps looking for him.
A sympathetic boss would go a long way to helping him evade capture.
“I suppose this is the answer I must accept,” Krepsen said, smiling. “But it must be inconvenient for you to be mistaken for somebody involved in a murder case.”
“It sure is.”
“Well, forget we ever had this talk, Joso.”
And since then, there had been no more trouble. No agents of the Sons of the Vanitar skulking around. No mysterious strangers asking questions. He kept his head low, and did his work.
He heard murmurs of the worlds beyond.
Upheaval.
War.
Peace.
War again.
And one day, he was awoken to the news that the Solar Arm itself was no more.
The Solar Arm had broken their own peace, and been punished harshly for it – their entire fleet wiped out over the course of a single unforgotten and unforgettable day.
In the aftermath of the surprise attack, the Reformation Confederacy had invaded and occupied both Terrus and Selene.
Venus, of course, had capitulated without a struggle. They were never much bothered by who collected taxes from them, just so long as they retained self governance.
Krepsen told him one day that the first Prime Minister of the Solar Arm was Raya Yithdras, the second minister of the missing and presumed deceased Sarkoth Amnon.
Vante nodded. He'd met her before, in the tomb-cold halls of Titan, where all voices were whispers and all cowls were drawn.
She's a large-framed woman. Not warm, but professional and competent. She'll make a fine if uninspiring leader. Also, she used to suck blood from my veins.
Up above he saw the glimmers of lights in space. These were space stations, circling Venus at altitudes of four or five hundred kilometers. The Venus colony boasted a fleet of two thousand Scimitar warships – fast and nimble, and acting almost independently of the Solar Arm's main fleet. This had saved them at the second battle of Terrus, General Sybar Rodensis, Admiral Ypres Covin, and the rest of his command had been taken by surprise and massacred. Only the Scimitars had escaped.
He sat on the edge of the platform, and swung his legs off the edge. It was a slow day for business. Truthfully, there had been a great many slow days since the Reformation Confederacy had conquered the solar system.
Tourism had been devastated by civil war. Peacetime hadn't yet restored it.
You heard stories from the outer worlds that it was becoming more and more difficult to move between the planets. Stricter visas were required. The network of Dravidian shuttles was operating at a fraction of its usual capacity. In the spaceports of Zephyr City, countless ships stood ground
ed, resting on the platform in the one world where it made sense to always be flying.
It was none of his business that a close friend of the man he'd murdered was running the Solar Arm. But he wished she'd do something to give tourism a shot in the arm.
He cast about for things to do. The platform decking had been scrubbed, pointlessly, as there were no visitors to admire it. The Vyres had been meticulously mended and triple-checked for faults – sudden failure of a wing was a serious risk when using one, and one that almost always killed the flyer.
Then, he heard a rasping caw from beneath the platform. It was joined by a chorus of additional caws.
“Oh, great.” He'd forgotten to feed the Quetzals.
He strapped a set of Vyres to his back, feeling them knit themselves to his flesh, interface with the bundles of nerves branching out from his spine. There was the sudden rush of feeling, of having your body receive a sudden set of wings in defiance of nature.
I can fly! His mind cried, a spasm of exultation that came unbidden.
He swan-dived off the edge, feeling the same giddy terror he always felt when he looked beneath the city and saw nothing, just an endless fall into rancorous, corrosive hell. Then his wings spread out, capturing the air, and his fall became a controlled glide.
Venus’s hot wind in his face, he swooped in a wide turn around, and went beneath the platform.
Beneath Zephyr city were hundreds of struts and supports, which fanned out into the gloom, terminating in large, boyant floats that helped kept the city aloft. Weaving through the maze of metal pylons, he followed the sound of the cawing.
Soon, the harsh calls were followed by the sound of beating wings, far larger than his. He turned a corner, and found a series of gigantic perches. On them sat the Quetzals.
They were colossal genehacked freaks, rogue splicings of the Quetzalcoatlus northropi pterosaurs and a blend of Terrestrian avian DNA. The creation of such creatures was only semi-legal, and endemic of a particularly Venusian kind of insanity.
Don't look to the future for wonders. Look to the past.
The reborn dinosaurs were almost unthinkably big. Their necks were as long as those of Terrestrian giraffes. Their wings, neatly tucked on their truck sized body, would unfurl to a wingspan ten meters across. Their beaks were twice the length of Vante's body. They watched him with eyes that swiveled maniacally.
“Hungry, boys?” he panted, flapping closer. They'd been raised from birth to be comfortable in the presence of humans, and were a lucrative extra income stream. Customers of the Vyre shop who paid in at the premium price grade, they would be allowed to gambol in the skies with up to four or five Quetzals.
The giant pseudo-dinosaurs were secured to the platform by a spooled rope that gave them about a hundred meters of flight in any distance.
Cruelly, man had brought the dinosaurs back to life only to imprison them.
The Quetzals look perpetually angry. Probably meaningless. Some eidetic impression imposed upon the human brain by their distinctive plumage and the shape of the wrinkled folds around their eyes.
But it was almost like they knew that they did not belong in this world, and they resented that they’d been born for the amusement of bored and spoiled tourists.
He flapped close to the Quetzals, and landed on the perch of the alpha female. She regarded him with genteel scorn as he hobbled closer to her, checking her for lice and ticks. She could have broken his neck with a single beat of her wings. Cut him into two with a snap of her beak. Crushed him to a pulp with the enormous wart-studded claws. But she did nothing at all as he touched her and parted her feathers.
“Easy, easy,” he muttered as she shuffled in irritation. “You don't want to get sick.”
He repeated the check with the others. When he was satisfied that all was in order, he soared to the underside of the platform, and found a trapdoor.
He unlatched it, and darted back as the steel door swung out with a crash.
Huge carcasses fell through the hole, dangling on hooks. Beyond, on the surface, was a crane. Sheep were strung on the hooks and allowed to rest against the trapdoor.
The sheep, like the Quetzals, were genehacked mutants. They had a tiny vestigial brain, edited to remove anything that could cause suffering or pain. They had no hair, because it was wasteful for a food product to grow such things.
What they did have was massive adipose deposits on haunch and hindquarter. They were sickeningly obese. The combination of hairlessness and size made it difficult to recognise them as sheep. You needed to squint for quite a while before your brain processed them as anything other than wrinkly, disgusting, fleshy balloons.
They were revolting, unlovable, and unloved. Like the Quetzals, the sheep had been bred for a single purpose. Beyond that, their existence was a waste.
Judging from the avid expressions of ravenous hunger in two dozen Quetzal eyes, there were at least some here who didn't think that their existence was a waste.
The Quetzals shuffled along their perches, getting closer and closer to the food. They made way for the alpha female.
He had them well trained. He held up a hand. They watched it, as if they were worshippers at a sacred ritual and his hand was sacrament.
Then he snapped his fingers, and dropped from the perch.
Up above, he felt the shadows on his back and heard a flurry of dinosaur carnage as they lunged at the sheep.
He pulled out of his dive, and landed on one of the now empty perches. He furled his Vyres behind his back. For the moment, they wouldn't be needed.
He rested in the shade of the platform.
It was stunning to see such big things in flight. And now they were doing more than flying, they were fighting.
The comically huge beaks were snapping at each other, crashing together with the percussive force of giant military snares. The hulking monsters swooped and darted, and at the center were the sheep. They were quickly demolished.
Claws tore whole limbs from the animal. Entrails tumbled out of slashed bellies, only to be snatched out of the air by the beaks. Vante saw a sheep's severed head tumble all the way into the acidic clouds below – Quetzal's had no teeth and little ability to chew, so skulls were inedible for them. Birds collided in mid-air, grappling savagely over choice morsels.
He saw a claw strike open an avian breast. Feathers and blood flew.
“Hey! Break it up!” he yelled, suddenly alarmed by the violence of the fighting. The Quetzals were their own worst enemies. Their thick feathers deflected most of the blows, but any seriously injured bird would likely be unable to fly, and would tumble to its death and disintegration in Venus's lower atmosphere.
These things were hideously expensive, and they only had twelve. There were no plans to breed new ones, which made them priceless.
He blew an ultrasonic whistle. He could hear nothing, but the Quetzal's reacted like soldiers at reveille. Hastily gobbling the remaining chunks of genehacked sheep, they separated and started swooping in variegated bolas back towards the perches.
Vante jumped off the perch just in time to avoid collision with a feathery body twenty times his weight. He flew back, waited until the Quetzals had situated themselves, and then started checking them over.
“Damage report, boys,” he muttered, parting layers of feathers.
Only one had been hurt in the flood. Thick dinosoid blood was dribbling from a superficial cut anterior to the left-wing hinge, streaking across the feathers of the breast. He touched it, and his hands came away soaked.
“Woah,” he muttered, shaking his bloody hands. “That wasn't nice.”
The Quetzal didn't seem overly perturbed, or in too much pain. Vante was mostly worried about the internal social dynamics of the flock. Maybe one of the other Quetzals had now developed a taste for blood for this one, and would pursue its bullying on a more ongoing basis. Such a thing usually ended in the death of the dinosaur.
“I just know that if one of you dies, it'll be me to blame
,” he told them, speaking in the relaxing tones that Krepsen had taught him to use. “Don't mess this up for me. We okay, boys and girls”
With the Quetzals settling down and showing signs of sleepiness, he decided his job was done.
If this gig was keeping these oversized parakeets alive, we're doing pretty well, he thought, as he flapped around the edge of the platform, tucking his feet, and landing on the surface. But they're not our customers. Humans are our customers. And humans are in goddamned short supply at the moment.
He looked around the empty platform, and sighed. There would be no customers today. He decided to call it a day, two hours early.
He'd taken his Vyres off and was trudging towards his quarters in Krepsen's apartment when he heard a beeper buzz on his wrist. The sign that a new “up” at purchased a ticket.
Well, damn. We might make some money today after all.
He dashed out the front, and saw a man standing near the deserted gate.
He was very tall, had dark hair, and piercing eyes.
“Hi,” Vante said.
“Hi, yourself.”
“Got a ticket?” Vante asked redundantly.
“Yep. You on duty at the moment? I can come back.”
“No, no,” Vante unlatched the gate. “Come through. We close in two hours, but if you'd like more time I'm sure my boss can comp you for tomorrow.”
“Thanks. I haven't flown a set of Vyres in a long time, and I wanted to see what type of condition I'm in. Two hours will probably be it for me.”
“Smart idea, starting slow,” Vante said. He found a set of Vyres from a bag, and tried to attach a set to the tall stranger's back.
The man waved him away, and attached them himself. “You look like an offworlder. Where are you from?”
“Caitanya-9,” the man said.
“Huh?” Vante was confused. Wasn't that the…?
Foreverlight (The Consilience War Book 4) Page 3