“Is that the shortest route, or should you do some kind of curve?” I asked.
“Leave the flying to me and the computers,” she said as her hands danced over the controls. “Go see if you can help the nurse or something.”
I was about to ask her who put her in charge, but after her reaction to the whole Sarge thing, I just let it go.
The patients didn’t look good. The guy with the broken leg was unconscious. I recognized him as Lasko—didn’t know his first name, but he was some sort of management type. I didn’t know the guy with the bandage on his head, but he had on Venusian fashions—who else would wear a loose-fitting pastel suit? So he must have come in with that banker with the name that sounded like a sneeze and a chortle. And that banker looked bad. He had dried blood on his lips and a pale sweaty face. His body was wrapped in torn drapes.
Nurse Resnick came back with two first aid kits and then knelt by Achuthanandan. “Well, at least they’ve got synopiates,” she said.
I nodded. Snyopiates: All of the painkilling without any of the fun. I helped move her patients to better positions and change some bandages. By the time we were done, she was almost pleasant with me. Then our floor began to shake.
I popped my head back in the tech room.
“Not going so smoothly,” Moor said. “I mean, the systems say it should work, mathematically, but it’s never been tried before. The rigs use thermajets for propulsion, not morphing balloon wings. So I’m working on feedb—ack!”
It felt like we hit a bad pothole. Resnick yelled at us, but from what I could see, we’d turned in the right direction and built up some speed, maybe even close to the hundred klicks an hour we needed for a curving course. The schematic of the morph’s balloon and wing combination looked like a squashed flaccid sausage. Yeah, well, we weren’t looking for points for style.
“How are we doing on velocity and bearing?” I asked.
Moor flicked up another screen. “Not bad. I’ll build it all into a nav view so we can keep track. The wing is morphing ten times a second, so once it builds a good feedback model, the shaking should taper off some. It’s really up to the computers to keep us on course and steady.”
“That’s what they’re for, though, the computers.”
“Yeah, this system is specialized for morphing, life support and kitchen management, but there’s enough in there for controlling the wing.”
Our makeshift sky-ship shook again and the nurse yelled at us. Again.
“Sorry,” Moor said. “It’s going to be a bit bumpy if we want to make any headway.”
“Fine,” Resnick said. “Then, Vic, you need to help me figure out how to strap these people down.”
We found enough raw materials on the observation deck to rig up some better stretchers with restraints. Then Moor shut down all power and light to that big deck to save energy. I was almost sad to lose the panoramic view, but there was a little observation blister now on top of the torn-away platform, that we could use to get visuals. In fact, the camera views Moor was using came from that little hemisphere of glass.
Small talk was awkward, but as we worked on the stretchers, I gave it a try. “So, Ms. Resnick—Kyla, what brings you all the way out here from the lovely terraformed beaches and fields of Venus?”
“I’m Mr. Achuthanandan’s executive assistant. I go where he goes.”
“I thought you said you were a nurse?”
“I am.” She paused, considering, I don’t know what—patient-nurse professional privilege? And then she said, “He’s old. Nearly three hundred years old, and his immune system is sporadic. He gets these terrible migraines and the occasional blood clot—though he has the opposite problem right now—so he needs a medical professional more than he needs an appointments secretary. Space travel is expensive, so I do both. I only wish I’d gotten my kit off the shuttle before all this happened.”
“Ah, just got here, eh? What about that guy?” I asked, jerking my head at the one in the pastel suit.
“Mr. Zhou is the brains. Finance and stuff.” She paused and looked at her two traveling companions and at Lasko, the management drone. He had probably been showing them around when the missiles hit. She asked, “What about you, Vic? Earth is far away, too.”
“Yeah, and much poorer than Venus. Florida’s still sinking into the ocean and there’s not a lot of decent work. My uncle Sal was shop steward here, so he got me a union billet. Takes two years to pay off the transport fees, but after that, it’s better money than I’ll ever see working in some arcology.”
“So your uncle Sal is . . .” She couldn’t finish the question.
I smiled. “Up on Miranda for the mandatory month of leave. I’m sure he’s fine. A lot of other people, though . . .” Now it was my turn to leave it unsaid. I wasn’t even supposed to be out working. It should have been Liam Kelly out there.
She frowned. “Vic, what’s your blood type?”
“What?”
“Blood type. My boss is slowly bleeding out and a transfusion from you could buy him some time.”
“Well, I have no idea. You mean you want to use real blood, not synthetic? That’s disgusting. Is it even legal?”
“Well, you don’t see a big supply of synthetic laying around, do you, Vic?”
Turns out Moor could look up my personnel file from her computer. It was supposed to be confidential, so I don’t know how she did that. Well, turns out I’m O negative, which is something called a “universal donor.” Next thing you know, I’m half a liter short.
The ride got smoother. Moor was right, the more data points the computer got, the better it was at the adjustments. We cut across the wind, heading toward where the Venusian rig ought to be. It was early northern spring on Uranus, so day and night were almost equal in length. As it got to be evening, I found an excuse to get up into the observation blister. Once, that clear hemisphere had looked down on the mining operation, now it looked up, in front of the morphed wing, out into the darkening sky. There was a row of clouds ahead. The distant sun lit the forward formation, but behind, the canyons of cloud faded into gray, blocked from the sun and glowing only by the light of the sky itself. That bank of clouds was probably as big as Texas. I tried to call back to Moor and that’s when I found out my radio was dead. I didn’t have my phone either. It was back in my locker. Blown to bits or crushed down below. Gloomy thought. I went back down to the others.
I don’t understand it,” Kyla Resnick said. “We’re at nearly three hundred atmospheres. That’s the pressure of the deep ocean. How could we possibly be falling if we’re mostly filled with air? We should float.”
We were sitting in the corridor, trying to concentrate on a meal, while the three unconscious men lay nearby, possibly dying, probably needing another half liter from me. Moor looked disgusted by the question and shook her head, so I tried to answer.
“You’re confusing density with pressure,” I said. “The gas rig is—was—held up by these big cans of vacuum—that’s about as least dense as you can get. But pressure comes from how much force the gas is pushing on you, from the weight of all the gas above it. Down here, the pressure on us is three hundred times the pressure on Earth at sea level, but the density of this hydrogen-helium soup, even down here as compressed as it is, it’s just a fraction of the density of water. It’s a lot denser than the air on Earth, but on Earth, water is a thousand times denser than air. Do you see?”
“No, not really.”
I sighed. “Okay, try this. You know what gold leaf is, right? Made of gold, which is one of the densest metals out there. The disgustingly rich can cover themselves in nanometers of gold leaf, but it doesn’t crush them, right? But take that same gold leaf and crush it into a tiny nugget and drop it into a bucket of water, and it’s going to drop right to the bottom. Pressure and density: not the same thing.”
; She nodded. I don’t think she got it, but she wasn’t going to make an issue of it. It was hard to wrap your head around. First time I found out the rigs were held up by vacuum, I thought they were pulling my leg.
Darkness fell and so did our power reserves. We’d moved north up to the same latitude and air current as the Caleus rig, but we were still nearly eight hundred klicks behind it and forty klicks below it. We could close that distance in just eight hours, but Moor figured we now had just over two hours of power left—if we were going to keep the balloon inflated and moving like it’d been. We could go slower with a smaller canopy, or allow ourselves to descend. But either way, we’d reach broiling depth four or five hundred klicks short of our destination. By the time the sun rose in eight more hours, we’d be cooked. But still, there was no point in giving up.
How about we evacuate the air out of the observation lounge?” I asked. “That should lighten the load. We could do it using the air lock I came in through, pumping it out like I said before.”
“About three tons of air. Less than two percent of our mass,” she said. “I’m not sure it’s worth the power drain. But it might help slow the descent.” She did something with her screen and watched graphs of two lines crawl across it. Both were down, but one went a lot less down. “Well, it’s better than flapping the wings. It might get us to morning.”
So after I checked all the seals, we started pumping air out of the back half of our little life raft. The balance of the whole place tilted, but Moor morphed the envelope to compensate a bit. Now we had a slant on our upside-down floor, and we had to move the three casualties again. Mr. Lasko was out on pain meds but he would probably live as long as the rest of us. The two Venusian guys looked pretty bad, like they might not make it to morning. So the second half liter of blood went out of me, and I felt really light-headed.
As Resnick drained me, I asked—mumbled, really, “So Achuth . . . ah, your boss is bleeding out, and Zhou has a hematoma. That’s like blood putting pressure on his brain. Can’t you just drain it out of Zhou’s head and into Ach . . . your boss?”
“Doesn’t work that way. Besides their blood’s not compatible.”
“No, of course not.”
“Hey, take a look out there,” Moor called.
I looked at the tube in my arm, sucking out my life essence. “I can’t come to the screen right now.”
“Well, there’s a light down there.”
“Might be the natives.” Well, it could have been. Uranus has things that live in the deep atmosphere. Next to the sea worms of Europa, the Uranian tube and jelly fliers were probably the most advanced life forms in the Outer System. And every spring they migrated with the light, braving the equatorial regions to reach the pole where the sun would shine for another forty years. And a lot of the Uranians were bioluminescent, at least during the migration. Or so I’d read. Hadn’t seen any yet. It was a rare thing that only happened for one year out of forty.
“No,” Moor said. “There’s only one light. It’s red and it blinks.”
“Rescue!” Resnick gasped.
“No, I doubt it,” Moor said. “It’s below us by ten klicks and not moving relative to the wind.”
I said, “You know, there’s supposed to be old platform hulks from before the Big War still floating around. I heard they found one about ten years back.”
“Yeah, abandoned and looted long ago,” Moor said.
“But if it’s got light, it’s got power,” I said. “We can use it to recharge the batteries, maybe get enough juice to get us back up to a decent altitude.”
“Only if we can latch onto an air lock. Otherwise we’d need to run cables through an open air lock and that’d kill us quick.”
“Yeah, maybe.” I thought about the logistics of it. Air lock interfaces hadn’t changed in four hundred years. Neither had power connectors, so a two-hundred-year old platform back from an age when they built things to last, that should still be able to juice us up. Worst case, we could disconnect our batteries, bring them over to the platform and recharge them from the outside. It would be a slow and heavy job, but it should work.
It was the worst case, of course. After I’d managed to talk Moor into it and after she’d gotten us close enough to inspect the platform, it was pretty obvious we weren’t going to dock at a convenient air lock.
The platform looked like it had been through a war and a dozen bad storms. The deck was riddled with holes. If the vacuum bags hadn’t been distributed around the thing, it would have dropped into the crush long ago. Whole sections ended in sheared wires and sharp ceramic spikes jutted out in all directions. Moor found a clear spot just off-center where she could touch down, but it wasn’t a pretty landing. At least the old platform held. It wasn’t even sinking into the sky, as far as she could tell.
“We could just stay here for a bit,” I suggested.
“We can’t,” Resnick said. “My patients will die. Mr. Zhou doesn’t have more than a few hours, and Mr. Achuthanandan is getting worse.”
“Plus, we’re still over seven hundred klicks away from rescue and nobody’s recovered this platform in the last two hundred years,” Moor said. “Nobody’s likely to find us for years. Let’s go see if we can get some power.”
Easy for her to say. She didn’t have to go outside. The others didn’t even have suits to go if they wanted to, because neither air lock on our chunk of metal had spare suits. And I was still in my suit. Did I mention that the bathrooms were upside down? Well, that was a real bit of a problem for the ladies, but at least I could pee in my suit.
I didn’t really want to go out there. It was dark and hot. At our altitude, it hardly mattered whether it was day or night. It was always dark and hot. The temperature was about five hundred Kelvin and the pressure was pushing four hundred atmospheres. My suit would only protect me for a couple of hours before it needed to cool down.
Did I mention the wind? Well, it wasn’t more than a variable breeze relative to the platform’s float, but at that pressure, it was enough to bend me near sideways and shake me like a rag doll. I crouched low and used my magnetic boots, but I had to plan each step ahead to make sure I stepped on something solid.
Before long, I found an open air lock. Well, burnt out was more like it, and that confirmed the worst. This place was long looted of everything, including most of what had been bolted down. But at least the rig’s emergency power was still working. I did a quick survey for radio equipment, but in those corridors and the few rooms that I could get into with all the damage and caved-in walls, there was nothing that looked like comm equipment. But there were power conduits. And I was right—the power plugs hadn’t changed in centuries. All I had to do was drag our rack-mounted portable batteries to the working outlets in the burnt-out air lock and juice them up.
Yeah, well, portable is a relative term. The batteries massed fifty kilos each, and that’s still more than forty kilos weight on Uranus. So first, we had to unbolt each of them from the rack, and then it took Moor and me both to carry them into our air lock. Then I cycled the lock and had to get them out, over the upside-down air lock’s threshold, then lower and carry them across the ancient deck. On the wreck’s surface, with holes the size of, well, battery packs, dragging was out of the question and carrying the suckers was pretty hard, too. And I couldn’t see my feet when I walked. But at least the extra mass helped steady me against the wind.
Our recharge cables were only two meters long, so I had to get the batteries pretty close to the outlets. And recharging took time. I had four batteries going at once before the first was finished. We had eight total. It took me about four hours and strained every muscle I had. Being a liter down on blood didn’t help.
Halfway through my moving exercise, I was back in our air lock, dragging batteries back into the corridor when Resnick called out to us. “Mr. Zhou is going to die in under an
hour if we don’t get him medical attention.”
I’m not sure why she said that. It’s not like we had any way of calling for a doctor, and it’s not like I was hiding a medical degree or an operating suite in my back pocket. I suppose she had to vent to someone. Having just used power tools to disconnect those batteries, I offered my suggestion. “Well, if it’s pressure inside his skull, can’t you just drill a hole and let it out?”
Long pause, then, “I can’t do that.”
“We have a large assortment of drill bits,” I added, not too helpfully.
Not too tactfully, either. I think I made her cry, but then she said, “I can’t just go drilling into his head. I’m not trained for that, and it will probably just kill him.”
“Isn’t he going to die in the next hour anyway? So it’s your choice: active or passive.” Okay, that was harsh, but I was getting pretty tired dragging the damn batteries back and forth to save us all and wasn’t really interested in her problem.
I got no answer from her, but Moor hissed, “Shut up, genius.”
So I did. Mr. Zhou was dead by the time I finished with the batteries. There was a hole in the back of his head.
When dawn came, we were ready to take off. Moor expanded the envelope, and even though it drained our energy fast, it got us back up in altitude. Just barely above the altitude we had before we descended to the station.
“Hey, at least it bought us six hours,” I said.
“But it didn’t get us any closer toward the last reported location of Caelus IV.”
“So how far out does that put us?”
“We’re still seven-eight hours away by my plot. Late afternoon,” Moor said.
The latest track had us running out of power and reaching broil depth about an hour and a half short of our target. Of course, that was a hundred and fifty klicks away—and a hundred down—so theoretically it was within line of sight of the rig, if the atmosphere was fairly clear. They might see us. If they had any instruments looking down into the gloom for a tiny spot. But that old platform we’d just left was evidence enough that mining rigs didn’t spend a lot of time looking down into the sky.
Writers of the Future Volume 27: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Page 28