The Sky People

by S. M. Stirling

  "Power's flowing," she said.

  A moment later the pump began to hum and chug again. Cynthia added, "Captain Tyler repeats that none of us is to get out of sight of the others."

  "Weh," Marc replied. "That's reasonable."

  "And he won't let me work on the computers alone," she said unhappily.

  He spread his hands, and she nodded. Then he looked around. The camp was set up, complete with tents; they weren't going to sleep in the aircraft until they got under way again, either. He suspected that Tyler had had to bend Clarke's ear a good deal to get permission to keep going, but he wasn't taking any unnecessary chances. The process of filling the ballast and reserve-hydrogen tanks was pretty well automatic; he picked up his rifle and fishing rod and headed over for the lake.

  "The fish here aren't much," Cynthia said casually, strolling along with him.

  "Weh," Marc said again. "Mashwarohn."

  "Is that Kartahownian?"

  "Grand Isle. But even as catfish, they aren't much."

  They weren't; the commonest species seemed to be the equivalent of a mud puppy, with coarse, bland flesh. On the other hand…

  "But Big Hungry Dog here doesn't mind," he went on.

  Tahyo followed him, then went running off after something with glittery wings six inches across, leaping into the air and tripping as he came down. A few seconds later the greatwolf's head came up again, looking sheepish.

  She hesitated, then went on: "Do you think whoever's responsible is… one of us?"

  Marc sat down on a convenient rock, put a worm on his hook, and braced the rifle close to hand.

  "Yup," he said. "I can think of two or three ways to make that jiggery with the computer fatal instead of just dangerous; can't you?"

  "A dozen," she said, then winced.

  Marc laughed. "Hey, podna, that proves you're either innocent or a real good actress. But if you're the Evil One, you'd have to be, no?"

  She laughed unwillingly. "Unless you're the good actor, bayou boy."

  He nodded, and then jerked the line sharply as the float bobbed. The reel hissed sharply for a moment, but the fight didn't last long. A fat, chublike fish was on the end when he used the net on its last pole, gasping and twitching the barbell-like tendrils under its jaw.

  "Another mud puppy," he called, extracting the hook and tossing the flopping length into the air. "Tahyo! Come and get it!"

  The big, lanky animal galloped over, stopped, judged distances, and opened his mouth. The fish disappeared in a snapping bite, except for its head; Tahyo cocked an eye at the ground and snapped it up, crunching it and licking his chops with a hopeful look.

  "God, does that damn beast never stop eating?"

  "Mais, he sleeps, too, yes," Marc said, and cast another worm on the waters.

  Cynthia dropped her voice: "Do you think it might be…"

  Her eyes flicked to Jadviga, who was methodically straightening out small rucks and creases in the solar collectors. She had a methodical neatness that Marc found a little surprising, given the number of disasters her side's space effort had endured. But then, she wasn't exactly a Russian, and he supposed the EastBloc selection process was nearly as rigorous as the one the Americans and their allies followed.

  "Well, it's her husband we're trying to rescue," Marc said quietly.

  You had to be careful; sound carried better on Venus.

  "If she's really Jadviga Binkis," Cynthia said. "Or if anything they've told us is true."

  "There is that," Marc said. "Their shuttle went down, but beyond that it's all their word. Mais, hey, no information is no information." Cynthia made a frustrated sound, then looked a little doubtful when he added, "What does Blair think?"

  "Well… Chris says that it's either someone back at Jamestown, or Jadviga. The slow leak was actually a good idea, he thinks. It would probably have killed us, or at least wrecked the Vepaja, but might have been classed as something natural even if we survived—we'd have had to get out too fast to investigate."

  "Hmmm. Possibility," Marc said.

  He didn't add: Or your boyfriend might be the one. But who'd benefit? Maybe the EastBloc… but they've got Jadviga here anyway, and they'd only benefit if they've been selling us a line of goods about their crash. And why would Blair work for them, anyway? Money? That's ridiculous… isn't it? And it could be Cynthia, I suppose… but that leaves us with motivation again.

  "I can see we're all going to have a fascinating hobby to while away the hours," he said. "Unless we're all killed the next time."

  Cynthia snorted and threw a tuft of grass at him. Just then the floater bobbed again. Tahyo wulfed, eyes fixed on the thrashing that broke the blue surface of the lake, making little abortive lunges as he waited for Marc to land the fish.

  "Well, there it is," Captain Tyler said. "It blew up fast, but that's Venus for you."

  They all looked over his shoulder at the main screen at the captain's position. The airship had VPS—Venus Positioning System—and satellite weather coverage direct from orbit. That gave them their own position, about three-quarters of their way towards the crash site. It also gave them an excellent real-time view of the huge, bruiselike, circular storm that was heading their way out of the north-polar ocean. On Earth they might have called it a typhoon or a hurricane, but the similarity was only a general one. Weather was a solar-driven heat engine. Venus got more solar insolation than Earth, and stored it in a thicker atmosphere; winds blew harder, and seas ran higher. Marc was profoundly grateful he wasn't out on the northern ocean in a single-sail Kartahownian boat under that.

  Outside the control cabin, the sky was still clear except for the usual high haze, but the afternoon sunlight had an odd sulfurous light, almost like the old gold of sunset but with a sickly cast that set his teeth on edge. Occasional gusts of wind pushed at the fabric-covered hull, making the geodesic shamboo framing creak and moan softly, louder than the quiet humming of the engines.

  "I used to think we got what we deserved," Marc said.

  "Used to, Lieutenant?" Tyler said dryly.

  "Yessir. But bad as we are, we aren't that bad."

  "What's your explanation, then?"

  ''Mais, sir, I'm coming round to the view that God hates us."

  Everyone chuckled, even the normally stone-faced Jadviga. "That would be funny, if only it were funny," Cynthia said, holding up her hands.

  There were salve and bandages on the palms, fruit of an emergency tear-down-and-repair of Engine #4, when a casing cracked and it shorted out in the middle of a rainstorm. Every other system in the airship had hit collywobbles as well, despite the exhaustive rebuild before they set out.

  Maybe it's just bad luck. We haven't found anything else that has to be sabotage. On the other hand, we haven't been able to find out how our computers were fucked over, either. And first time accident, second time coincidence, third time enemy action.

  Tyler smiled and nodded back to the screen: "Emily there is moving at about our top speed, and we're only in slightly more danger if we go on than if we go back. The real question is, do we try to stake down, or do we ride it out in the air?"

  "Stake down?" Blair said. "Not in the open, Captain."

  "Christ, no, Wing Commander!" Tyler said impatiently. "But if we could find something on the order of a canyon, I'd chance it. I want you and Lieutenant Vitrac to go over the maps, such as they are—"

  Both men nodded. Back home these days you could pretty well read a car's license plates from space, but the thick, turbulent atmosphere and the sparse network of satellites made observation from orbit a lot less efficient here.

  "Ms. Whitlock, Ms. Binkis, you'll join me in visual observation, looking for a likely place. Gentlemen, ladies, let's get to work!"

  The three of them sat at their workstations, each taking one of the hull-mounted cameras and scanning ahead and to either side of the airship. The fabric of the Vepaja creaked and groaned as Tyler pushed the engines to maximum, and from behind and below them there wa
s an almost inaudible thrip sound as the pumps began to force hydrogen into the intakes of the fuel cells.

  "I'm taking her up another three thousand feet and turning south to follow the coast," Tyler added. "We'll get a little more power from the collectors that way, and make better speed. If we can ride the southern fringe, it'll push us the way we want to go."

  Unspoken in all their minds were the mountains even farther to the south. Chains lined most of the northern part of Gagarin, sometimes right to the edge, sometimes hundreds of miles inland. In places they were broken by sinks and depressions that gave access to the uplands in the interior, or even to the great coastal plains to the south; the big 'saur migrations followed those. Hereabouts, the mountains were a good two hundred miles south. Unfortunately, they were also an unbroken wall higher than the Himalayas; the highest peaks were nearly thirty thousand feet, high enough for eternal snows and even glaciers. Even the lower ones were well over the Vepaja's operational ceiling of twelve thousand or so.

  "Captain, perhaps I'd better make some just-in-case precautions ready… just in case," Marc said.

  Tyler considered that for a moment, then nodded. "There's no point in pretending a crash isn't a possibility," he said calmly. "Storms like this are the biggest reason we haven't done really long exploratory flights before."

  Marc didn't think anyone was too happy to have the possibility mentioned, but it needed to be done.

  Correction, he thought. Blair looks fairly happy. Which is odd.

  The man had been tense and nervous the last week, but he was calm now, flicking through screen after screen of stored satellite imagery with methodical speed, making a note now and then. He raised an ironic brow as he felt Marc's gaze.

  "Do remember to pack some tea, old bean," he said, and went back to his work.

  Marc licked a finger and made a one for your column check mark in the air; then he walked back through the corridor and down the stairs into the cargo compartment. Tahyo came over, whining; he could sense that something was wrong, and probably feel the way the barometer was dropping. The man took a moment to reassure him. It was easy enough; Marc felt a little guilty at the way the young greatwolf simply accepted that he could make things better.

  They all had small survival packs ready; that was SOP. The problem was that in an airship wreck, if you threw things out the door, the ship or the remnant thereof tended to jump skyward, stranding the laggards to drift additional miles unless you were bailing out from high up.

  No more food, he decided. A couple of packages of the freeze-dried stuff will do.

  The closest thing to crashing on Venus was going down in Alaska or Greenland or Antarctica back in the 1920s. The biggest difference was that neither starvation nor attacks by crazed flesh-ripping penguins were much of a menace back there. Eating usually wasn't a problem in the Venusian wilds; the problem was avoiding being eaten by something; here a polar bear would be small game. Or avoiding being eaten by somebody, if rumors about quasi-human tribes were true—and the initial probes had certainly given that theory a lot of backup.

  "Ammunition," he muttered to himself. "Weapons, tools. Fire-starter kit. Clothes, no; you can do without in a pinch. And some extra medical supplies. VPS units so you don't get lost. Copies of the Shipwreck Handbook. I hope to the good God we don't turn out to be the first people who really need it."

  The handbook was a thick hardcover with plenty of illustrations; it was intended for someone unfortunate enough to be stranded a long way from Jamestown with no quick way back. Marc had had a role in the latest edition, which contained notes on everything from archery to how to break a churr to the saddle or perform an emergency appendectomy.

  The cargo bay contained a number of large crates, woven shamboo strips on a framework of larger stems. He emptied four and began methodically packing. The extra two rifles and shotguns; the spare pistols; every last round of 10-mm pistol and 9-mm express Magnum. A couple of bows and quivers of arrows, which were reusable. Knives, machetes, hatchets…

  "Aha!" Marc said.

  A few ringing blows detached the heads of axes from their helves. In a pinch you could improvise a workable handle out of a branch in an hour. Out in the wilderness, the only way to get the head of an axe was to chip it out of flint. Beads and mirrors, the classic trade goods: They'd yet to find a hunting tribe here who weren't gaga over them. They had axes, knives, and spearheads of their own that worked, sort of, but they didn't have anything like plastic beads or anything that would give an accurate reflection.

  Rope, binoculars… And why not? He added the Vepaja's complete carpentry kit and all their nails.

  "Now the brilliant bayou boy will show everyone how to get all this stuff out once buoyancy control has been lost," he said, bowing to the empty hold as if to an audience.

  Not altogether empty. Tahyo found the whole process fascinating and thumped his tail on the deck in applause.

  The airship came with plenty of rope, braided 'saur-hide cables and others down to heavy-twine diameter made from the scutched fibers of the immature shamboo plant. With hand and boot he wrapped each of the crates tightly in multiple layers, then joined each by a stout twenty-foot link.

  "And now for the resistance piece, as my European ancestors would be horrified to hear me say," he said.

  Tahyo seemed to agree that was funny; at least, he grinned and thumped his tail again.

  "Ah, but you're not a tough audience, you."

  The spare just-in-case anchor had been made out of sections of a cargo pod hull—the alloy was tough and flexible, though extremely hard to shape. The four spade-shaped blades were spring-loaded, too, ready to snap out and dig in. Marc secured the cable to the loop at the end of the anchor's short, thick shank, and then lashed it with a quick-release knot to eyebolts near the emergency keel hatch.

  "There," he said, as Tahyo investigated with a quivering nose. "Kick the anchor out, and everything else follows."

  It would be a stone bitch to get everything back in its proper place when the storm blew over, but not nearly as much as trying to get everything together at the last minute.

  When he'd finished, Marc looked up, startled. Didn't notice that, he thought. The airship was pitching now, a slow nose-to-tail motion as if it were a land vehicle going up hills and over and down, again and again. Marc had compensated automatically while he worked, but now he lurched and grabbed for a stanchion.

  There was a new noise under the ever-louder creaking of the ship's frame as well. Something like the wind crackling the edge of a sail.

  Uh-oh.

  That was the fabric panels starting to vibrate on the outer skin. They wouldn't rip easily, but the seams where they were sewn together and fixed to the hull frames were weaker. He muscled the greatwolf into a shoulder-and-chest harness and clipped it to a rope, then made sure he had a full water-dish available and the big crate full of dirt. The animal flattened again and looked at him imploringly.

  "You're not going on the bridge in this weather, cher," he said sternly, ignoring the pleading whimper. "And I'm not leaving you loose to get tossed around."

  He climbed quickly back up the short ladder-staircase, this time keeping a careful grip on the rails. The Vepaja added a corkscrew lateral motion to the pitch, and the creaking and groaning added an ominous squeal. Occasionally one of the engines would surge, the usually near-inaudible humming rising in pitch as an air pocket left the propeller racing.

  As he came back into the control cabin, Marc looked out through the slanting windows to his right and winced slightly. The whole horizon northward was livid black now. As he watched, lightning crawled across the surface of the clouds, horizontal and branching like the forks of a river delta. The flash threw the darkened control cabin into stark blue-white relief for an instant; the rumble of thunder that followed thudded into his chest and made the increasing howl of the wind seem almost quiet.

  "So good of you to rejoin us," Blair said; he had to shout a little.

  "Can
that," Tyler snapped. "Get strapped in, Lieutenant."

  Marc did, then pulled his earphones on—as much to drown out the rising whistle all around him as to hear the others, though that was a bonus. The air had a prickling smell that tingled in the nose, a hint of ozone and danger. The satellite feed of the storm was breaking up in the electrical discharges, though for now the VPS was still tracking them on the computer's map. He called up a schematic of the Vepaja and then the deformation gauges—lasers and mirrors on the structural members within the hull.

  "Mr. Storm, he en fache" he murmured to himself. A metal frame would have started to twist apart already, but the laminated shamboo bent like a bow. "Very angry indeed."

  Tyler spoke in their ears. "I think we can abandon the search for a place to tie down," he said dryly.

  The ground below was still visible through wisps of hard-driven cloud. It was tall forest, almost jungle, covering a maze of steep-sided hills. Some of the sheltered parts might have been possible… if the ground speed of the wind hadn't already been faster than the maximum the Vepaja's engines could command. Trying to drop anchor would just tear the cable mountings out of the frames. Marc called up the feed from one of the cameras mounted in a blister on the keel, dialing the magnification, and blinked as a tree lashing on a hilltop below suddenly shattered, the massive crown flying along like a tumbleweed rolling through the air, shedding bits of itself as it went.

  They'd had storms like this in Jamestown. They were alarming enough with a good, stout three-foot-thick wall between you and the outside. Suddenly the airship stopped feeling like a flying house; the shuddering, toning sensation that welled up through the chair and straps made it seem more like a chip in a spring flood. His hand moved on the trackball, and the camera scanned; just northward was the coast, and waves like flowing walls were crashing on… over… granite cliffs, breaking in vast torrents of white water and withdrawing seaward, carrying boulders and hundred-foot tree trunks with them like beach-wrack.

  He glanced around the cabin. Tyler was totally focused on the controls. Jadviga was watching her screen intently, or appeared to. Cynthia lay back in her crash chair, arms behind her head; when he caught her eye she shrugged and smiled, as if to say, Whatever. Blair was occupied with some task involving multiple screens, until he gave a grunt of satisfaction: