by Ari Bach
They fell silent. Churro looked at Cato, then spoke again, calmly.
“We never bothered to check for her. We don’t go there unless we have to. If a job can be done in five minutes on the Crag or five years in reality, we take the long road. Mishka isn’t going to take down Valhalla. I doubt she wants to. She wants to be left alone. I won’t tell you to leave her alone, but you need to think about your priorities. One is defense. The Black Crag can take down Valhalla. It damn nearly did, and you already seem to have forgotten it. You’re still talking about that damn Crag. Why?”
Vibeke didn’t lose a second. “Mishka’s log from Poshchim Bangla shows—”
“Yes, Mishka is there,” mocked Cato. “You did a great job. You’re doing a great job and chasing a great chase. But it just ended.”
“The hell it did,” Vibs barked.
“The hell?” Claire chimed in. “Let’s say there is a hell. Mishka’s dead, and she’s in hell. Do you follow? Do you drag Valhalla to hell with you?”
Vibs had the good taste not to answer the way she wanted to. Claire went on.
“It’s not your choice if you would. If you set foot there, you put us all in danger. We told you we checked because we need it out of your mind. We still need it out of your mind even if you know for a fact she’s there. We saw Mishka’s missing barriers too. But did you consider what that little bit of clever tracking means? Without contact barriers, anyone there gives up all their security, all their protocol. There’s no such thing as hack armor there, they don’t have to wait for you to touch them to read your mind, they can grab you and kill you or reprogram you without any warning. Valhalla does not go there.”
“We go there every day!” Vibs scowled. “It’s called the real world. You can get shot, and you can get followed and get hacked. And it’s not like we’d go in unarmed, all the shit they can do, we can do better. And we have Aloe to watch out for us.”
“You’re missing the big picture, Vibeke.” Cato kept his voice soft and demeaning. “If you have our computer with you, they can take her over. Sure you know your net combat, and Aloe has the best tricks in the biz up her sleeve, but imagine what would become of Valhalla if she were taken over by a pirate? Or rogue company? There are things in this ravine even you don’t know the danger of.”
Bullshit. Violet knew. They showed her everything. There were no secrets, and she hated Cato enough to speak up. “Like what?”
“Like me,” he replied in all seriousness. Pathetic. He leaned in toward Violet. He nodded severely, tried to be intimidating. Violet hated it when he tried to be intimidating. Violet’s foot hated when he tried to be intimidating. Her foot decided to launch toward his throat. Cato would hardly be a senior team Valkyrie if he couldn’t block a kick. In fact he might be called merciful for not breaking her leg again in the process. He didn’t even flinch. He just blocked, stood, and spoke. “We’re watching you like a Geki. You can’t go, so try elsewhere. Or better yet, lay off the Russian sheila for a while and take a job from the crank file. Maybe nuke Tunisia. Meeting over.”
Chapter II: Nikkei
THE FLIGHT to Venus wasn’t scary. Dr. Mowat had been to Luna, Mars, and Station 9. Space flight was 90 percent dull and 10 percent beautiful. The accommodations on Venus weren’t scary either. She’d have her own room. On Station 9 it was six people to a sleeping pod. Iwo Donatsu was said to have private tents for every individual. The colossal balloon that held the mine afloat was filled with breathable air. Earth air on Venus was like helium on Earth. So she’d be living and working within the balloon, the first time in space she’d have some space. Not the least bit scary.
The scary part was the airlock. It would contain a trace of Venusian weather. It would be purged of air, washed out with a blast of cleaning solution, and it would have a fast cycle of devoted oxygen to lessen the impact of the inevitable. But no matter what they installed, there would be a trace of Venus inside. A drop of rain always stuck to a panel or behind a screw somewhere, and rain on Venus is 700 Kelvin sulfuric acid. They wouldn’t send people through if it still posed any risk. Legally they had to reduce it to a healthy ppm, but those last millionths were said to be damn potent and prohibitively expensive to reduce any further. Orientation said it was like inhaling a bit of Tom Yum soup.
She ran through the airlock and vowed never to try Tom Yum soup as long as she lived. The Iwo Donatsu lock closed and acquainted her with the balloon’s atmosphere. It smelled fresh and alive, and somewhat artificially minty. The walls were all deep blue or green, the light cool and soft. Nothing like Station 9’s nonstop brightness. Once inside, there was nothing to remind her she was on a hot orange planet, nothing to remind her she was in a mining complex. It was more like an undersea hotel, no doubt the merciful architect’s way of letting the workers forget that they were, in fact, on planet hell.
There was one man in the lobby, dressed in shiny black rubber. He carried a microwave rifle on his back. He had no hair and no antenna, nor any discernible emotion. His voice was dead cold too.
“Dr. Mowat, you will follow me to your tent. I will carry your luggage.”
“Whatever you say, boss,” she sighed. He picked up her bags, heavy bags, like they were nothing. The gravity wasn’t that different from Earth. She had just hauled the things in. She noticed the bumps around his sides. Powered armor or powered implants. His rubber garb was covered in too many pockets to tell which. She had to wonder if his extra punch was because he worked in the mine or something else. The man she was working for wasn’t affiliated with the mines. None of his crew were supposed to be either. When she asked what they were doing on Venus if not mining sulfur, they almost terminated her contract on the spot. So she wouldn’t ask here, and she wouldn’t ask the man what his powered arms were for. He led her to a tram, and they sat down. As soon as the tram started, she could see the open balloon.
It looked bigger inside than out. A cavernous, foggy tunnel, half a kilometer high. The tram plodded along the very bottom, a long curved valley from which she could see the atmospheric refineries and storage bays. The refineries weren’t as large as the complex of ducts emerging from them. Every meter of the walls had some sort of duct on it. Even over the hum of the tram, she could hear the throbbing drone of the air systems keeping them afloat and alive. Past the refineries she could see the city. There were tents right off of the track and tents all the way up the walls, accessible by ladder and positioned to offer a flat floor on what lower tents called their sides. There were no people to be seen. Everyone was either at work or asleep. The tram stopped at the far end of the city.
“You will stay in tent 390. You will be the only resident of this tent. Other medical staff live in tents 384–389. The hospital tent is straight ahead.”
A giant tent, but still a tent. Two floors of light green canvas unmoving in the well-controlled air. She walked toward the tent, but the man motioned for her to stick to her own dwelling.
“You will not see the patient until tomorrow. You will be summoned.”
He set her luggage down at her tent door and handed her a key card. Then without another word, sat on the tram and headed back to the lobby. A very cold reception. She found the tent to be as spartan as the rest of space, just a cot and a bathroom. She lay down and immersed herself in a memory partition. The net didn’t reach to Venus, so she blocked out the world and slept in the files for the job to be done.
Dr. Mowat knew nothing about the client. She knew his injuries, his physiological scans, blood typology, immune system, and obviously she had seen images of his face—or at least what his face looked like before. But there was no name, no history beyond medical allergies (Novusazidocillin and Carbamazepine) and the injuries she was there to fix.
The patient was in a miserable state. Mutilated and murdered a year prior and whisked away without treatment. She had seen worse lapses in treatment and time. Many a businessman had been forced to wait in stasis for several years while his company or family saved up to hire
her. Her last client back on Earth had slept for three years, unlinked and unconscious, while his spine was built, then scrapped for nonpayment, then rebuilt, then misplaced, then built again. So one year wasn’t bad. What was bad was that he wasn’t in stasis. He was awake and aware the whole time.
The patient refused to be knocked out. They resurrected him minutes after the murder without fixing a single thing and plugged his wounds for the trip to Venus. But he wouldn’t go back under for anything more than a night’s natural sleep. He had been living for a year with a smashed skeleton, no jaw, no legs, and no link. Dr. Mowat couldn’t think of a worse kind of hell. Or one more easily avoided—if he could afford a flight to Venus he could have stayed on Earth and been fixed in a day. If for some reason he absolutely had to be in a Venusian sulfur mine, he still could have flown in a doctor like her within the month. And with a year to wait, he could have slept. But she was paid not to ask. And not to ask about the new jaw.
The nerve damage was minimal, and scans showed the loss of his jaw was physical trauma, no microwaves or burns or irradiation. He could have had a new normal jaw grown and attached without a problem. Same with his feet. But he had ordered some of the strangest modifications Dr. Mowat had ever seen. Mostly in that they didn’t fit.
The jaw, when implanted, would be about two centimeters larger than his old one. Two centimeters isn’t much in some engineering, but on a face, it’s night and day. And this jaw wouldn’t have skin over it. It was essentially a chain saw made to fit where a mandible used to. The inner teeth and soft tissue would let him eat and talk normally, but the outer teeth, jagged blades on a fast rotary track, were something not even the Cetaceans would ask for. Rumors of modifications for the Unspeakable Darkness contained massive fangs or horns and the like, but she’d never seen someone rich enough to get a jaw like this ever get anything so bizarre. Rotary teeth, structure extendable to half a meter, chrome plating instead of skin.
It was less rare for a man with a crushed skeleton to ask for a larger build and, given the funds, for some new intracranial armor and the latest designer marrow by Ossium. Almost half of her male clients ordered larger genitals. No reason for this one to be different. Link repair was common as cockroaches. A hidden link in the neck was not uncommon either. His hands would be bigger and stronger by far, and his feet—would also be hands. She had done palmed feet with opposable thumbs for Spetsnaz a few years back, the biggest paycheck she’d ever had until the Venusian client. She had no occasion to follow the soldiers’ progress with the feet, all top secret, but she’d get to see it through this time. Two more months on Venus after the surgery. She knew nothing of the man so far but would be getting to know him very well.
She looked forward to it. He must have been a powerful man to afford what he was getting, to afford her and her trip to Venus. To be there at all. And to have earned the injuries she was treating—he was not mugged on the street. Someone had torn his jaw off, crushed him, torn his limbs apart. Someone hated this man. She looked over his external scans from before the incident. His face was not one to be hated easily. He was only just showing signs of his age, more signs of experience than midlife decay. His eyes especially, piercing eyes. There was a strong mind behind them, one strong enough to wake up day after day with an unset skeleton, with no mouth, with only something to do so urgent and so far away….
She had been staring at his insides and outsides all night. She was jarred awake by a page from the cold henchman summoning her to the hospital tent. The Donatsu medical facility was impressive, state of the art from Nippon, so they wouldn’t have to send expensive doctors like her out too often. The programming went quickly. All his scans matched observations of his body. She had to correct for some necrosis that the calculations didn’t expect, but those were calculations by programs made to predict a body’s change over hours, not a year. Some of the skeletal damage was more severe than predicted. The mass of what crushed him must have been tremendous. There was also one more skewed prediction—his body was devoid of painkillers and showed no signs of sustained analgia field exposure. Over the last year his entire skeleton had been growing back wrong, and the tears in his flesh had been cauterized of all things. And he had not been living in an analgia field nor drugging himself into a daze. Who was this man?
Once programmed, the robotic arms took almost an hour to complete their jobs. The longest operation she’d ever designed. She watched the mechanical arms dig in to break all the misfit bones, inject new marrow, repair and plate the tissue in its new position. She saw the hands and handlike feet she’d grown on Earth attached and tested for reflex. And the jaw, that strange apparatus built by Fuji Automatic. They’d consulted with her over the last few months about nerve endings and skull sutures, so she knew what to expect, but to see the thing on his face, held on by bolts instead of muscle, teeth of glistening metal at the angle she devised carefully to not rip off his upper lip. A brutal mechanism. Yet it didn’t ruin his face. He looked strong, unnatural to be sure, but not bad or unattractive. He looked bold.
The robotics and tools receded into their holds. The surplus tissue, 20 percent of his former body, took a last pathological scan and then incinerated, its ashes dumped into the boiling sulfur air, scattered to the terrible winds and burning rock below.
The patient awoke five minutes later. He was eager to stand, as all patients were. But unlike every patient before him, he was able. Dr. Mowat gently helped him up to his alien feet, and he stood on them, flexing his new muscles, popping his new joints. It was a reward in every patient to see the parts she constructed come alive. But never had she seen a man who lived a year waiting for them. It was a look of ecstasy on his face, a smile like no other that formed on his silver lower lip. He spoke, and his voice was deep, tremendously deep and half metallic. His voice from before must have been penetrating. His voice now certainly was.
“Dr. Mowat, thank you! I feel like a new man.”
He put his new hand on her left shoulder. She couldn’t even muster the will to say “You’re welcome.” His presence when awake was intimidating. His pleasure, being free of pain for the first time in so long, standing for the first time in so long, was radiating from him like steam. She stood and smiled, and regretted deeply how obviously she must have blushed.
The rest of that day passed quickly. It was all tests, which he performed perfectly, and scans, which showed a surgery gone well, flawlessly. She didn’t dare to ask any questions. She was scared enough when he laughed or spoke a stray word. Every miniscule fiber of information she could glean from him was a treasure. He had been crushed by an animal. He had been awake because he lost his business empire and busily ordered his men in black to reassemble what they could from his meager Venusian holdings into something worth investing in.
As days went on, she heard more and more snips and bits about his enterprises. She wasn’t a businesswoman by nature or education, but she could grasp his skills. Back on Earth he had a great company, and for every euro of it he kept one cent on Venus. Though he had no interest in sulfur mining, he gradually paid for repair and improvement work on Iwo Donatsu. Over the years he replaced so much of it that he owned it. He never told a single Earthside employee about the venture. He never even made a profit on it. In fact, once he owned the mine, he made certain its output never improved.
So in time he had an off-planet resort, staffed by 200 or so men loyal to him and nobody else. Filled with supplies to start anew should the need arise, not only lawyers on the strangest retainers in history or investment bankers ready to activate other hidden accounts but more. She asked what the “more” was once, and he almost told her before one of the black rubber men interrupted to dissuade him from answering, and raised a stranger question—he called the man “Little Boots.” And the patient did indeed wear shorter boots than usual to fit his Spetsnaz feet. But lacking his real name, the nickname struck her as oddly childish.
As much as she listened to him, he seemed interested in her. What
can a common programming physician say to compare with stories about conquering another planet? Every day she felt more and more inadequate, socially. Like she had nothing to offer. His recovery was so flawless she had no need to be there, so she thought. She was there as company and began to wonder why. She couldn’t be so lucky as to have caught his eye. Not like that. He didn’t give any hint of interest either and finally in passing mentioned that there was someone back on Earth. Though she wasn’t sure it was his wife. She pushed for a little more about her, called the lady back home a lucky woman, but he shook his head.
“No,” he told her, “I wouldn’t say that at all.”
After a month he asked her to take a walk with him to a disused part of the balloon. They passed some things she didn’t expect to see. One was a giant mining drill. But this was a floating mine that collected rare, short-lived sulfur isotopes in the rain. She knew a little about Venus, but she had never heard of any purpose or even capability to mine the surface. Nobody had ever even stepped out onto the surface, she read in school, leading to a broken line of memorable first statements. “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind,” on Luna, “I wish that the peace I see here could bless the Earth again,” from Mars, “This one’s for you, Mark Twain,” on Halley’s Comet. And from the only manned landing on Venus, “Oh my holy fucking shit I think we’re on the fucking ground! Get us up we’re gonna fucking die!”
She was surprised, almost disappointed that he let her in on so much. Even worried that he might not let her leave knowing what she knew. But she wouldn’t tell him to stop. She wanted anything she could get of this man. No matter the cost.
They came to a storage bay set aside from all the others. It was white and subtly decorated. It looked almost like an Elline temple with the pillars. He opened the door and let her inside. The room was flooded with orange light, she realized, because it had a window in the floor. They were looking down onto the clouds and raw orange air. The rain dripping from the bottom of the balloon cast a rippling light on them both. In the room were two crates. Coffins, she realized. He put his hand on one gently.