Old Venus

by George R. R. Martin

  Jonah and Petri helped each other stand. Together, they turned, still shading their eyes. Sound had transformed, and so had the very texture of the air, now filled with strange aromas.

  There must be a breach!

  With shock, still blinking away glare-wrought tears, Jonah saw the cause. Impact must have knocked loose the dog bolts charged with holding shut the main hatch, amidships on the starboard side—never meant to open anywhere but at the safety of a colonial dock.

  With a shout he hurried over, even knowing it was too late. The poisons of Venus—

  —apparently weren’t here.

  No one keeled over. His body’s sole reaction to the inrushing atmosphere was to sneeze, a report so loud and deep that it rocked him back.

  Jonah reached the hatch and tried pushing it closed, but Bird of Tairee was slightly tilted to port. The heavy door overwhelmed Jonah’s resistance and kept gradually opening, from crack to slit, to gap, to chasm.

  “I’ll help you, Jonah,” came an offer so low, like a rich male baritone, yet recognizably that of his wife. He turned, saw her eyes wide with surprise at her own voice.

  “The air … it contains …” His words emerged now a deep bass. “… different gases than … we got from pinyons.”

  Different … but breathable. Even pleasant. Blinking a couple of times, he managed to shrug off the shock of his new voice and tried once more to close the hatch before giving up for now. With the boat’s slight leftward roll, there was no immediate danger of flooding, as seawater lapped a meter or so below. The opening must be closed soon, of course …

  … but not quite yet. For, as Jonah and Petri stood at the sill, what confronted them was more than vast, rippling-blue ocean and a cloud-dense firmament. Something else lay between those two, just ahead and to starboard, a thick mass of shimmery greens and browns that filled the horizon, receding in mist toward distant, serrated skylines. Though he never dreamed of witnessing such a thing firsthand, they both recognized the sight, from ancient, faded pictures.

  Land. Shore. Everything. And overhead, creatures flapped strange, graceful wings, or drifted like floating jellyfish above leafy spires.

  “It will take some time to figure out what we can eat,” his wife commented, with feminine practicality.

  “Hm,” Jonah replied, too caught up in wonder to say more, a silence that lasted for many poundings of his heart. Until, finally, he managed to add—

  “Someday. We must go back down. And tell.”

  After another long pause, Petri answered.

  “Yes, someday.”

  She held him tight around the chest, a forceful constriction that only filled Jonah with strength. His lungs expanded as he inhaled deeply a sweet smell, and knew that only part of that was her.

  GARTH NIX

  Here’s an ex-soldier who’s dragooned into joining an expedition attempting to penetrate the deepest, most deadly, and most impenetrable part of the Venusian swamps, and who finds that he must “go native” in the most profound and fundamental of ways if he’s to have any chance to survive …

  New York Times bestselling Australian writer Garth Nix worked as a book publicist, editor, marketing consultant, public-relations man, and literary agent before launching the bestselling Old Kingdom series, which consists of Sabriel, Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr, Abhorsen, and The Creature in the Case. His other books include the Seventh Tower series, consisting of The Fall, Castle, Aenir, Above the Veil, Into Battle, and The Violet Keystone, the Keys to the Kingdom series, consisting of Mister Monday, Grim Tuesday, Drowned Wednesday, Sir Thursday, Lady Friday, Superior Saturday, and Lord Sunday, as well as stand-alone novels such as The Ragwitch and Shade’s Children. His short fiction has been collected in Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories. His most recent books are two novels written with Sean Williams, Troubletwisters: The Mystery and Troubletwisters: The Monster, a new stand-alone novel, A Confusion of Princes, and a new collection, Sir Hereward and Master Fitz: Three Adventures. Born in Melbourne, he now lives in Sydney, Australia.

  By Frogsled and Lizardback to Outcast Venusian Lepers

  GARTH NIX

  THE MARTINI GLASS IN ITS SPECIAL BRACKET NEAR KELVIN’S left hand shivered as the shuttle’s wheels touched the plascrete runway. For a moment, it looked like the blood orange, gin, and vermouth mixture would splash over the side before it settled down as the shuttle eased into its long, whining run down Venusport’s shortest, cheapest, and busiest landing strip.

  “Didn’t spill,” said Kelvin. Without taking his eyes off the strip ahead or his right hand from the control yoke, he reached over and picked up the martini to take a delicate sip. “That’s two-fifty you owe me now.”

  “I’ll be checking the black-box vid,” said a disembodied woman’s voice through the cockpit speakers. “Besides, it could still spill when we brake.”

  “Nope,” said Kelvin. A holographic display had popped up in front of him, advising him to apply reverse thrust and wheel brakes, and several other pop-ups were flashing amber alerts about systems not working as expected, but they were the ones he expected, so that was OK. “Drinking it now. First touchdown, that’s always the rule. Everyone OK back there, Suze?”

  “Sure. Only had to stun two so far. Early starters, on some kind of energizer. Got a bit overexcited about the fabled Venusian attractions, wanted to get out early. Like at ten thousand meters.”

  “Miners!” said Kelvin. He put the martini back and worked the controls, briefly applying himself to bringing the shuttle to a complete stop before immediately taxiing off the strip toward the terminal. There was another shuttle a minute and a half behind him, and twelve more in various stages of approach. The six-month shift change from Mercury Incorporated was on, the leave ship—a converted megaliner—was in orbit, and ten thousand miners who couldn’t afford to get all the way back to Earth were raring to come down to sample the delights and diversions of the excessively humid, permanently cloud-shrouded city of Venusport and its surrounds.

  “Venusport, Venusport,” said Kelvin. “Drop Baker Seventeen rolling in to Gate Twenty-Five, looking for a fast turnaround. What’s my slot on the catapult?”

  There was no immediate answer, which was unusual. Shuttle traffic was controlled by an expert system with a voice synthesizer some joker had tweaked to make it sound like an old Venus hand with lung-husk problems. It usually snapped back immediately, wasting no time.

  “Venusport, Venusport, I say again, this is Drop Baker—”

  “Drop Baker Seventeen make gate, Pilot in Charge stand by for further instructions.”

  “Stand by?” asked Kelvin. He recognized the voice of Chief Controller Kandis, who was very rarely to be found in the tower. Venusport Traffic was easygoing, with few rules about anything other than safety, and the expert systems ran that well enough. “You kidding me, Kandis? I got to pay for this crate, you know, I can’t be sitting on the ground when there are miners to move.”

  “Stand by for orders, Kel,” said Kandis wearily. “Terran Navy will meet you at the gate.”

  “What? Navy to meet me? Why?”

  “Don’t ask me. Now leave me alone. I’m busy today.”

  “You done something bad?” asked Suze over the insystem.

  “Nothing that would involve the Terran Navy,” said Kelvin, mystified. Venusport was a treaty city, administered by a complicated tripartite council from the Terran World Government (which wasn’t really the whole world, as it excluded several pariah states), MBU (Mars and Beyond United, not including Ceres), and Mercury Incorporated (corporate dictatorship at its best). In practice, local interests dominated Venusport and everything was pretty freewheeling unless something major came up and one of the interplanetary governments decided to shove their oar in.

  “I think.”

  “Sort it out quick,” said Suze. Kelvin owned 63.7 percent of the shuttle Lightheeled Loafer, but the rest was held by Suze’s family on Venus Above, the orbital station. Suze was aboard to pr
otect their interests as much as manage passengers and cargo, and her many clone brothers and sisters handled all the back-end office and engineering tasks.

  “I will, I will,” vowed Kelvin. He handed over to the robot docker, fingers running through the shutdown sequence even as his mind wandered over years of sometimes shady dealings and borderline illegal activities. He could think of plenty of reasons why the usually somnolent Venusport Customs Service might want to talk to him with the aim of extracting further payola. But he couldn’t think of anything he’d done recently that would get the Terran Navy on his back.

  Despite not being able to come up with anything specific, Kelvin still had a niggling feeling of disquiet. He kept thinking about it as he knocked back his antifungal booster tablets with the last of the martini, unstrapped and got out of his seat, unsealed his helmet and racked it, smeared some antifungal cream on his face and hands, then put on his planetside belt with holstered heat-beam (for Venusian ambulatory fungus and the like), stunner (for ambulatory human lowlifes and the like), and bush knife (for when the options got really limited). He eyed the bar at the back of the cockpit for a moment, considering a second martini, but decided against it. Time enough for that when the Loafer was back in orbit.

  “Cabin secure?” he asked Suze, though as always he also checked the somewhat mildewed viewscreen next to the hatch. Miners were exiting to the gate in an orderly fashion, doubtless encouraged by the sight of Suze, huge in her armored vacuum suit, a stunner held tight in her right gauntlet, her left hand entirely encased in the ball of a field-lightning projector, for those exciting moments when the occupants of the entire front six passenger rows needed to be shocked into better behavior.

  “Yeah, all OK.”

  Kelvin palmed the hatch, then repeated the gesture several times until it opened, letting in a wave of warm, moist air. Like everything else on the shuttle, the sensor was affected by too much moisture and by Venusian molds that had a liking for plastic. Only so much could be done with regular cleaning and decontamination, the life of even “Venerified” tech was always much shorter than the manufacturers claimed.

  “Go and get whatever it is sorted out,” said Suze. “I’ll do the ground admin and clear us to go back up.”

  “Thanks, Suze,” said Kelvin. He smiled, trying not to show his apprehension. He hoped it would be both of them going back up. Suze could fly the shuttle if she had to, though she wasn’t anywhere near as experienced as Kelvin, having learned on the job, whereas he had been through the full orbital-atmosphere school at Fort Atherton, then flown ten years operational with the Pan-Pacific Collective Combined Forces on Earth before somehow living through the Third PPCCF Intervention, flying assault shuttles to and from the beachhead on Deimos to Mars …

  “Oh shit,” he said, as his previous vague apprehension solidified into a more certain dread. His Navy service was twenty years ago, and with a different navy, but he was still getting a derisory pension and there had been some small print attached to that when he demobbed …

  “What?” asked Suze.

  “I just remembered something,” he said grimly, a memory made more concrete by the sight of a thin-faced chief petty officer in a Terran Navy coverall sidling down the side of the gate tube, the miners edging across to give her room when they saw the razorgun on her hip and the lit-up SP brassard on her arm. Venusport Police were inclined to turn a blind eye and could be bribed, but everyone knew that you didn’t want to cross the Terran Navy Shore Patrol, the MBU Law Enforcement Detachment, or the Mercury Inc. Compliance Facilitation Division, the three organizations that took turns in policing the spaceport.

  “Commander Kelvin Kelvin 21, formerly of the PPCCF?” asked the petty officer. She didn’t wait for Kelvin to nod, already holding up a field identification unit, taking a snap of his eyes before proffering its waiting orifice.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” said Kelvin because there was no point trying to pretend he was someone else. He put his hand in the unit and waited for the prick of the tester, which would sample his DNA, specifically looking for the encoded sequences spliced there long ago by the PPCCF to identify him from his clone siblings, and, later still, to note various information and secrecy access levels as he was promoted or when he got assigned to Special Forces.

  The ID unit reported positively to the petty officer, who collapsed it and returned it to a thigh pocket. Then she conjured a blue flimsy from somewhere, possibly inside her sleeve, handed it to Kelvin and saluted him.

  He almost saluted back out of long-lost habit, but the blue flimsy was in his hand, and it was squawking only slightly more slowly than he could read the printed words.

  “Nonsecret. Commander Kelvin Kelvin 21 OFC HPPC Second Class, under the terms of the amalgamation of the PPCCF in Terran World Government Treaty Part Seven Section Three Paragraphs Four through Twenty ‘Absorption of Existing Active and Reserve Military Forces’ your Sufficient Service Exemption from Recall to Active Service Exemption Type 23A is revoked and under the TWG Emergency Requirements Activation Act (New) you are hereby required to report immediately and without delay to Commanding Officer Venusport Treaty Obligation Detachment, TN for service not to exceed three standard Terran years and of this moment your salary, Venusian supplements, Pilot Bonus, and War service gratuity will commence at the rate of Commander Step Three (Special Forces) Terran Navy. Thank you and have a nice day.”

  “Shit,” said Suze. “Three years!”

  “What’s this about, Chief?” asked Kelvin. “Did a war start and no one tell us?”

  “Not so as I’ve heard, sir,” replied the CPO. “If you’d just follow me, sir?”

  Kelvin nodded and turned to Suze.

  “Take the Loafer back up as soon as you can. You and Sal fly together, take turns as pilot in charge, and have Sim and Saul in the cabin—better to double up just in case. I’ll be back as soon as I see what this is about. Uh, tell Susan Senior not to worry.”

  “You just going to go along?” asked Suze.

  Kelvin shrugged. “You heard it. I forgot the PPCCF kept all of us Mars Intervention vets on the reserve list and World Gov just took that over, I guess. Nothing I can do about it. But I can’t see them needing a clapped-out fifty-year-old shuttle pilot for long.”

  “I was told to hurry, sir,” reminded the petty officer. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Lead on,” said Kelvin. “See you, Suze.”

  The terminal was crowded with miners trying to expedite themselves ahead of one another through the rudimentary automatic arrival system, but instead of joining one of the jostling queues, the CPO led Kelvin to a VIP exit, where two Venusian Police agents checked her pass and waved them to a moving walkway that ran through a prep tunnel that misted them with antifungal agents, performed an automated ID check, then extruded them out through some slowly yawning armored doors of great antiquity into the vehicle park, where the full soggy warmth of Venus hit. Kelvin took a handkerchief out of the sleeve pocket of his coveralls, mopped the instant sweat off his forehead, and tied it around his nose and mouth to help keep out the airborne spores. The booster tablets were supposed to take care of anything inhaled or digested, but Kelvin figured that cutting down the ingestion in the first place was always worth a try.

  “So what can you tell me now that there are no civs listening, Chief?”

  “Nothing, sir,” replied the CPO. She held up a hand and a waiting groundcar popped its doors. Two more Shore Patrol types got out of the front, putting paid to any notions that Kelvin might have had to do a runner. Not that he had any. There was nowhere to run to on Venus, not long-term anyway. At least, nowhere he wanted to run to, that was for sure.

  While the spaceport was somewhat ordered, the rest of Venusport was pretty much a shambles. Along a notional grid pattern that had been bent, twisted, and ignored over the last hundred years there rose the massive domes from the First through Fifth Expeditions, each now containing hundreds of homes, businesses, and small industries. Sprinkled betw
een the domes were buildings of every possible style, from single-box prefab plasteel instahuts to six-story mansions of local phlegm-colored brick, abandoned ships repurposed as factories or dwellings, and the ever-popular yurts of local lizard-hide over steel frames that could be quickly moved if circumstances required it.

  As Kelvin expected, the groundcar was not headed for any of these places but drove at the customary top speed of twenty kilometers an hour along Central Avenue toward the imaginatively named stone frigate TNS Aphrodite, trusting that its bright yellow flashers and spark-tipped feather feelers would clear the road of walking miners, prostitutes, panhandlers, prophets, pickpockets, and whoever else was walking, shambling, or staggering around, there being no other vehicular traffic at all.

  But the groundcar didn’t keep going to Aphrodite. Just before they reached the main gate, the car left the road, turned to the right, and followed the rough track that ran around the outside of the ten-meter-high perimeter fence.

  “Oh, don’t tell me,” said Kelvin, craning his neck to look out through a windscreen that was already dappled with splattered orange spore bodies. “Some totally black operation, right?”

  “Nope,” said the CPO. “You got to meet someone who won’t submit to the antifungal cleansing routine of the base. Easier to meet out here.”

  Kelvin thought about that as the groundcar continued around the perimeter. There was a five-hundred-meter exclusion zone around the fence, but it was hardly needed, as most of Venusport sprawled in the opposite direction. There were just a few shanties nearby. Constructed from very mixed materials, they were almost lost in a jungle of three-meter-tall green tops, the fortunately innocuous fungi that grew everywhere it was not slashed, burned, or sprayed back.

  He expected that they were heading now for one of those shanties but was surprised again when the car slanted off and he saw a temporary camp up ahead in the middle of the bare red earth of the exclusion zone: an array of five small domes laid out in approved fashion around a tracked armored command vehicle, with sentries in place some ways out.