There was also a riding lizard tied up outside one of the domes, its head hooded, its blue midsection wrapped with a rather incongruous tartan-colored heater blanket that was hooked up to a big Navy power unit that had been wheeled up next to it.
Kelvin twitched when he saw the lizard, not because of some racial fear of dinosaurs, though it did strongly resemble an allosaurus, but because of what its presence meant.
Venusport was built on the Huevan Plateau, a good five thousand meters up from what was usually called the Deep Swamp, a swamp that stretched for thousands of kilometers in every direction, getting hotter and weirder as it headed toward the distant equator. The lizards inhabited the closer parts of the Swamp and never came up to the relatively cooler plateau unless under human direction, and the humans who farmed the lizards—and other things—only came to Venusport when they needed to trade for something. There was a whole human society out in the Swamp that had at least partially detached itself from modern civilization, trying to fit in with Venus rather than trying to force Venus to become Earth-like. Beyond those settlers, there were humans who had gone even further in their attempts, adapting to Venus in ways that made Kelvin extremely uneasy.
The groundcar stopped, the doors popped, and the CPO pointed to the dome with the lizard tied up outside it.
“Just go in there, Commander. All will be explained.”
“Just like that, huh?” asked Kelvin. “All will be explained.”
“All you need to know, sir,” said the CPO with a wink. “However much that is.”
“Yeah,” said Kelvin sourly. “Thanks, Chief.”
He climbed down, noting that apart from the sentries there was no one moving outside the domes. But there was no real attempt at secrecy, the whole camp was visible from the fringe of Venusport, any passerby outside the secure zone could see it, and more important, could see Kelvin arrive. So it wasn’t likely he was going to disappear into the maw of some black operation that would later be claimed as never having existed in the first place. That was highly encouraging, as was the fact no one had bothered to take his heat-beam or stunner.
The dome was new, sprung straight out of the container, and surprisingly, both its air-lock doors were open, allowing the Venusian humidity, airborne spores, and general discomfort free access, which was odd, considering that the whole point of the domes was to provide a lovely scrubbed and air-conditioned environment.
Kelvin went in, and immediately understood why the doors were open. There were three women gathered around a map-display table. Two were Terran Navy officers: a captain in Terran Navy planetside blues, probably the commanding officer of Aphrodite; and a lieutenant in Venus outdoor camo, sporting a heat-beam in a shoulder holster and a belt festooned with pouches, no doubt containing the latest useless Venusian survival gear developed on Earth.
The third person was the reason the doors were open. She wore a singlet, shorts, and boots of tanned lizard-skin; a broad hat of woven shongar reeds hung on her back from a cord of lizard gut around her neck, keeping company with a breathing mask made of cross-layered sponge-bracken. A pair of goggles fashioned from whisky-bottle glass and a kind of fungal rubber equivalent were pushed back on her shaved head; and she had a heat-beam on one hip and an old-fashioned explosive-projectile pistol on the other, next to a long bush knife.
There were broad blue patches of what the locals called swamp lichen growing on her forearms and up her thighs. More grew on her face, here carefully guided by the sparing use of antifungal agents to grow in concentric circles on her cheeks, across her forehead, and around her neck.
Her face was instantly recognizable to Kelvin. He knew it as well as his own, swamp lichen notwithstanding, because it was his own face. Even though the woman was half a head taller and much broader in the shoulders, she was a variant of the same clone line, and, like all the Kelvin Kelvins, was a veteran of the PPCCF, though in her case, her service had been with the elite commando drop troopers colloquially known as ASAP, which legend had it stood for Air-Space-Any-Fucking-Place. The “F” was silent in the acronym, and so were they, at least until they wanted to be noticed.
“Kel,” said the woman, inclining her head. “How are you?”
“Vinnie,” answered Kelvin. “I’m OK, apart from being drafted again, or whatever’s just happened. And kind of puzzled …”
“You’re wondering why on Earth … or Venus … we need both you and your clone sister here,” said the captain. She came around the table and saluted. This time, Kelvin responded, though not with what could be called parade-ground exactitude. The captain was half a meter taller than he was, and he almost jinked his neck looking up at her. “I’m Captain O’Kazanis, this is my communications officer, Lieutenant Mazith. I’m sorry about the draft business, that came from HQ. I said we could just hire you, but it was felt that it would be better to put this on … ah … more official grounds.”
“Hire me to do what, sir?”
“Go on a damn-fool mission into the Deep Swamp to rescue a bunch of inbred morons who shouldn’t be there,” said Vinnie.
“That does just about sum it up,” admitted O’Kazanis. “But perhaps we might go into the details … Mazith.”
“Yes, sir,” said Mazith. Unlike O’Kazanis, whose height and Greek-Irish name almost certainly indicated an origin in one of the former Pan-European L5 colonies, Mazith had the made-up name and blended appearance of a World Government gengineered new person, of no particular ethnic, racial, or geographic origin. She was probably a clone, too.
“Approximately sixty-three hours ago,” she began, “a private yacht named Jumping Jehosophat, on charter to a fraternity/sorority house of the University of Luna, made an emergency planetfall 312 kilometers southeast of Venusport—”
“Right in the middle of the Roar,” interrupted Vinnie. “Like I said, morons.”
The Roar was a particularly disturbed part of Venus, an almost permanent, swirling cyclone several hundred kilometers in diameter that not only interdicted any atmospheric traffic but also messed up radio transmissions and generally was not somewhere anyone sensible ever wanted to go to voluntarily.
“Actually, we don’t think anyone was in charge, not even a moron. Available data points to the yacht landing on automatic, using some kind of least-fuel algorithm that meant that it went for closest landfall regardless of atmospheric factors,” said Mazith. “Certainly neither of the two hired pilots were on board and though we have only limited intel on the passengers, none appears to have had any pilot training.”
“So what actually happened?” asked Kelvin.
“The yacht was on a celebratory graduation tour from Luna. It was docked at Venus Above and the crew and passengers debarked for a visit, with a flight plan filed for the yacht to land here at Venusport when a slot became available—”
“What kind of yacht?” asked Kelvin.
“A civilian variation of what you would know as a Brindi Patrol Corvette,” said Mazith. “Winged, VTOL, with a one-shot orbitmaker so she doesn’t need a catapult. As far as we can figure out from the surveillance at Venus Above, the passengers went back on the ship for some reason and somehow activated an emergency protocol that blew the ship from dock and sent it down.”
“I’m surprised no one took it out,” remarked Kelvin. “You guys, or the Martians, or even MercInc. What are those picket ships up there for anyway?”
“We asked them not to,” said Captain O’Kazanis. “It was clear within the first few minutes the ship was not on a trajectory that would offer either a launch solution at Venusport or a suicide ramming attack.”
“And …” suggested Kelvin. “There’s got to be a better reason than a momentary act of kindness and beatitude. The passengers, I’m guessing?”
Captain O’Kazanis nodded.
“Twenty-four students from U-Luna, including the son of a Mercury Corp board member, twin daughters from two World Government Senators, and the younger clone brother of a Martian Perpetual Chairperson.”
“But they’re dead now,” said Kelvin. “Right?”
“We think they’re alive,” said O’Kazanis. She looked at Mazith, who nodded.
“The ship was tracked most of the way down and we have reason to believe that a successful landfall was made. That being so, and considering who is on board, a rescue mission is indicated. Which is where you and your clone sister come in.”
“They’re dead,” said Kelvin. “An autopilot drop into the heart of the Roar? No chance. It’d be incredibly risky even with a gun pilot. Besides, it was probably some kind of assassination deal, someone lures them back on to the yacht, fiddles the emergency protocols, dumps them in the shit. So I bet there was a bomb or something as well just to make sure. End of story, sorry Senators, sorry Board member, Sorry Perpetual Chairperson. ‘Even golden lads and lasses must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust.’ ”
“Shakespeare,” said Vinnie to the puzzled naval officers. “He only quotes the Bard when he’s stressed. Kel, they want us to go and have a look, and if the ship is there and spaceworthy, they want you to take it up again. Easiest way to get anyone who is still alive back to safety.”
“Go into the Roar?” asked Kelvin. “No one goes into the Roar—”
“Well, that’s not quite true,” said Vinnie.
“Don’t tell them that!” exclaimed Kelvin.
“There are people who go in,” continued his clone sib. “It’s kind of a religious thing, for the Lepers, they go into the eye of the storm—”
“Excuse me?” asked O’Kazanis. “We don’t have anything on … did you say Lepers?”
“Not actual lepers, as in Hansen’s disease lepers,” said Kelvin sourly. “Just people who’ve gone loopy for Venus, let all sorts of shit grow on themselves, they reckon they’re adapting or transmogrifying or something. I didn’t know you hung out with the Lepers, Vinnie. Or that they went into the Roar.”
“The Lepers go for a far more extreme version of what we local settlers do with the lichen,” said Vinnie, sending a quelling glance at Kelvin. “Which, it has to be recognized, is extremely effective. The lichen keeps the malignant spores off far better than any manufactured antifungal agent.”
“Yeah, and then the lichen takes six months to remove,” said Kelvin. “Like after the last time I was dumb enough to get talked into a walk in the Swamp.”
“You offered to help,” said Vinnie. “I didn’t make you come along.”
“Well … Loafer was in dock for repairs anyway,” said Kel. “I didn’t have anything better to do. But this is miner season, I’m flat-out busy. I haven’t got time to go and rescue a bunch of plutocratic larvae who are probably already dead anyway. Not to mention trying to launch a damaged Brindi into orbit through a fucking cyclone, I mean I’d have to wind it up with the storm to forty thousand meters, zip out into the eye for the vertical ascent, light up the orbitmaker, and keep her true without getting sucked back into the cyclical system …”
“I told you he’d know how to do it,” said Vinnie to O’Kazanis.
“You’ve got a dozen pilots who could do it!” said Kelvin.
“In theory, perhaps. Not one that’s done anything like it before,” said O’Kazanis. “You have, though, and survived the Swamp as well. So you’re overqualified.”
“Seriously, there’s no point,” said Kelvin. “They’re dead.”
“We think even a slim chance is worth pursuing,” said O’Kazanis, with another sideways glance at Mazith. “Major Kelvin Kelvin 8 has been briefed more comprehensively on the predicted landing point. She will be in charge until or if you lift off in the Jumping Jehosophat, when you will assume command. Lieutenant Mazith will go with you to provide communications—”
“Radio doesn’t work in the Roar,” interrupted Kelvin. “Lasers, masers, no good. Perpetual cloud, rain, high winds, magnetic rocks, you name it, it’s got it.”
“Mazith is a special communicator,” said O’Kazanis.
“OK, all right then,” said Kelvin, raising an eyebrow. Special communicators were paired clone telepaths, capable of instantaneous communication over interplanetary distances, and were very rare. Mazith was quite possibly the only one the Terran Navy had on Venus, which indicated that this mission was being taken very seriously indeed. More seriously than seemed warranted to Kelvin, no matter how important the lost passengers.
“You leave immediately,” continued O’Kazanis. “Understood?”
“I understand I just got shafted and my big sister dumped me in it,” said Kelvin. “With all due respect.”
“Personnel spat us both out,” said Vinnie. “I didn’t volunteer; you know I would never volunteer. I was just coming into town to pick up some stuff. Wrong place, wrong time … I don’t know why our clone line has all the good luck. Let me know when you’re ready to quit whining and go ride a lizard.”
“And I have to ride a lizard,” complained Kelvin. “We picking up equipment at your place, Vinnie?”
“Yep.”
“What about extra help? Osgood and Jat?”
Osgood and Jat were both former ASAP commandos turned lizard ranchers like Vinnie. Or more accurately, Osgood had turned rancher. Jat had earned her peculiar name not by being an omnicompetent jack-of-all-trades, though she actually was one, but by being teed off with anything involving work. She could do nearly anything practical if she put her mind to it, but that hardly ever happened. However, she was absolutely deadly with all, any, or no weapons and was also Vinnie’s life partner, so Kelvin, like everyone else, cut her a lot of slack.
“Nope, too busy,” said Vinnie. “Ranch has got to be run. Besides, we don’t need them.”
“Jat’s too busy?”
“Says she is,” said Vinnie, with a quelling look. “As for the lizard ride, enjoy it while you can, ’cos when we get toward the Roar we’re going to have to ask the Lepers for a frogsled.”
Kelvin shuddered.
“I hate frogsleds even more than the lizards!”
“What’s a frogsled?” asked Mazith.
“You’ll find out, Ms. Mazith,” said Kelvin. “You ever ridden a lizard?”
“No, sir,” said the lieutenant. A slight tremor in her voice gave away the fact that special communicators didn’t expect to be sent on potentially deadly planetside missions on lizardback, accompanied by what could only be described as extremely irregular forces.
“Just think of it like a paid holiday to the parts of Venus the tourists never see,” said Vinnie.
“There’s a good reason for that,” muttered Kelvin.
“Oh, stop with the whining, Kel. Anyone would think you were six again.”
“Yes, considerably older sister,” said Kelvin.
“Carry on,” said O’Kazanis, poker-faced. “I’ll see you in Venus Above, with the rescued students.”
“I hope,” she added, under her breath, as Mazith saluted and followed the bickering clone siblings out of the dome.
Outside, Vinnie dialed up the power pack to give the lizard an extra burst of warmth before its blanket came off, then quickly rigged an extra saddle between its third and fourth bony plate, a somewhat smaller space than between the first and second, where she would ride double with Kelvin.
“Hop up there,” she said to Mazith. “Put your feet through the stirrups, there are a couple of handholds welded onto the plate, there. You all lotioned up?”
“The latest all-defense formula, sir,” confirmed Mazith. She grabbed hold as the lizard shifted, feeling her weight.
“That’ll work for now,” said Vinnie. “But we’ll have to do you and my idiot brother over with the lichen when we get to the ranch, get you proper masks, and so forth. Nothing Terran-made will work in the Roar, and I’m guessing you don’t want to turn into a giant mess of mushroom flesh?”
“No, sir!” said Mazith. She hesitated, then added, “But does it really take six months to get the lichen off again?”
“Nah,” said Kelvin. He vaulted easily up into the forward
saddle, and eased back to make room for Vinnie, who gathered the reins and mounted up before using the quick-release pull to unhood the mount, who reflexively snapped at the air in front of it. Even though its teeth had been filed down, it would have delivered a nasty bite. “I was exaggerating. It only took four months.”
Mazith was silent as they rode out of Venusport and began the slow descent down the quaintly titled Road to Hell, the clouds thickening with every kilometer and the temperature ratcheting up several degrees. Kelvin unsealed everything he could unseal on his flight suit and was still too hot. He and Vinnie exchanged a few words, mostly just catching up on various family news, his complicated relationship with Susan Susan 5 on Venus Above and so forth, before relapsing into the comfortable silence of close relatives who also happen to be good friends.
It was only when they started splashing through the first pools of steaming water and the green tops began to overhang the track that Mazith asked how far it was to the ranch, and then how long it would take to reach the crash—or hopefully landing—site beyond.
“Ranch by nightfall, or just before,” said Vinnie. “We’ll head out again at first light. Lizardback for three days, I guess, to get to Leper territory. Then we have to find some Lepers, borrow a frogsled, I guess another day after that. Five days there say, five days back.”
“But we’ll fly back, won’t we?” asked Mazith. “In the yacht?”
Vinnie glanced back over her shoulder, sharing a look with Kelvin.
“It really is unlikely the ship is intact enough to take off again,” said Kelvin. “And even more unlikely anyone survived. Apart from the crash and the high probability of sabotage, a bomb or something, there’s just … Venus. The farther you get into the Swamp, the more weird shit there is, of all kinds. We’ll probably end up taking a look to confirm the situation, then have to just slog back again.”
“I … we’re fairly certain there are survivors,” said Mazith, followed by a sudden exclamation as a small herd of tumblers rolled out of the green-cap jungle around them and across the track, the lizard straining at the reins to go after them, the small rolling reptiles being one of its main sources of food in the wild.
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