by Devin Hanson
Cynthia’s face was a mask of forced calm. She clasped the hands of each of the girls in turn, and offered a tight, joyless smile, before turning back and marching out of the auditorium again.
“Cynthia has some serious nerve,” Alana said softly as the procession of matriarchs started up again. “I don’t think I could do that if one of my daughters had just failed the Challenge.”
“Will she try again?” Bryson wondered aloud.
“She has the wealth,” Alana shrugged. “Though, it might take a few years for her to regain enough confidence in herself.”
“The storm makes everything worse,” Addison commented from the other side of Alana. “Cynthia is stuck here until the storm blows over, as is her daughter. To run into her in the hallways would be excruciating.”
“For both of them,” Alana sighed. “Young Leila will be kept out of the way, and likely sedated, until she can be brought to one of the megahabs and reintegrated.”
Dennison planted his chin on his hand and brooded down at the procession of matriarchs congratulating the two girls. The wisdom of the Manifesto was cold-blooded but irrefutable. A society of immortals must have iron-clad rules, and those allowed to join the ranks must be worthy. The participants were given one chance to prove their worth.
The only surprising thing, he thought, was the number of matriarchs who had passed the Challenge. Something like eighty percent of everyone who took the test succeeded. Among the matriarchs, there were all types of women. There were loners and socialites, scientists and artists, politicians and farmers, and everything in between. But none of them were cruel, none of them were abusive, and none of them were criminals.
Whatever else the Challenge did, it successfully weeded out those who would have sociopathic tendencies. If it occasionally eliminated those who were only marginally unfit, such was the necessity. It would only take a single matriarch to ruin it for everyone else, and that possibility could not be tolerated.
“You coming?” Bryson jostled Dennison’s elbow and startled him out of his thoughts.
“What? Sorry. Are we leaving?”
“Mother is.”
Dennison saw that the last of the matriarchs were leaving the platform. The mothers of the two girls were there, accompanied by lab-coated technicians. They would be heading to the gene labs next, where the girls would be fitted with a uterine implant that would catch their eggs as they emerged from their fallopian tubes. The implant made it possible to extract the eggs trauma-free for incubation or processing into the Rebuild serum.
“Right with you.” Dennison stood and followed his sibling from the auditorium.
Addison was standing with Alana, his tablet in his hand. “We have a slight change of plans,” Addison announced when Dennison joined them. “Mother’s slot with the gene lab wasn’t until late afternoon, but there’s a vacancy that’s opened up.”
Alana’s nose flared, and then she gave a wry smile. “I’m not happy about it, but there’s no sense in wasting time.”
Of course. The lab would have expected three girls, not two. “Great,” Dennison said. “Anyone tell Garrison yet?”
“He was in the control tower assisting with the dirigible traffic,” Addison answered. “He isn’t answering my calls, though.”
“Probably busy.” Dennison shrugged. “I’ll head up there and let him know the change in plans. I’ll meet you down in the labs once I find him. Send me a message with which lab you’re assigned to.”
Dennison waved over his shoulder and headed for the lift. It was a bit of a hike to the control tower. On Nova Aeria, the tower was a four-story blister that sat at the intersection between the three habitat teardrops. To get there, he would have to take a lift to the top ring of the teardrop he was on, then go around to the intersection where another lift would bring him to the tower.
He reached the top level of the main habitat and paused by one of the large picture windows. The leaded glass offered a visual portal to the chaos of the storm. They were in the thick of it now, though the habitat’s bulk rode out the surging winds without reaction.
The blanket layer of clouds below had been torn into mountains and valleys kilometers high. Lightning flickered, and the white of the sulfuric acid clouds were stained with yellow from the aluminum chloride layers deeper in the atmosphere.
Around Nova Aeria, clouds of sulfuric acid whipped by, lashing the habitat with squalls of precipitation. The props around the rim of the habitat were a blur of speed as they fought to keep on course. Dennison eyed the walls of yellowed cloud worriedly. It wouldn’t be immediately catastrophic for the habitat to run through aluminum chloride, but it would wreak havoc with the enamel protecting the habitat aerogel cores. The habitat would have to be evacuated while the aluminum chloride was neutralized and the cores re-coated.
Dennison turned away from the window and hurried down the corridor toward the central lift. The view outside the habitat spurred him on. Something wasn’t right. There was no reason to risk damage to the habitat.
He passed the arc of windows and slowed down from the jog he had unconsciously fallen into. The lift came into view and he strode toward it.
A woman stepped out from behind a desk and moved to intercept him before he could reach the lift.
“Hello,” she greeted him with a veneer of pleasantness. “You’re lost, I guess. This is the control tower.”
Dennison had to stop or he would bowl her over. “I’m aware of where I’m going,” he snapped.
“Then you’re also aware that it’s a restricted area.” She smiled at him without humor. “It’s not a tourist attraction.” There was an unspoken undercurrent of not-so-polite dismissal in her tone.
Impatiently, Dennison drew out his tablet, found his authorization flashes and spun it around.
The woman’s saccharine smile slipped as she took in the lurid splash of color, and her eyes darted as she took in the list of qualifications and experience. Like everyone who lived on Venus, Dennison had a rank with the central duty board, so that in the case of an emergency the computer could triage people to where they were needed most.
“I have business in the tower,” Dennison said pointedly, jerking his head to the side.
“Ah. My apologies, Ainlif.” The woman ducked her head and hurried back to her desk.
Dennison hurried to the lift and hammered the button. The woman who had stopped him was on her phone, calling his arrival ahead of him. That suited Dennison just fine. The faster he could find who was in charge, the faster he could resolve the situation and the inherent danger it put Alana in.
The trip up into the control tower was quick. Once he let the lift’s scanner read his tablet, it went straight to the floor he requested without stopping. When the doors opened, there was a harried-looking man waiting for him.
“Hello, Commander Romaine. We appreciate your interest in the safety of Nova Aeria, but you have my assurances that everything is under control.”
Dennison stuck his hand out. “And you are?”
“Chief Officer Hadwell.” He shook Dennison’s hand. “Might I ask why you made the trip up here?”
“I’m looking for my brother, Garrison. He was helping guide dirigibles to their docking stations. But now I’m concerned about the condition of the habitat. Why are we still flying so low?”
“Ah, yes. Uh, Garrison was on the third level where traffic control is, I believe. He certainly wouldn’t be on the command deck.”
Dennison stepped past Hadwell, ignoring the CO’s polite attempts to usher him back into the elevator. He took in the readouts on the screens running in a semicircle around a raised central station. A little over two dozen people were hunched over terminals in the semicircle, working furiously.
“Ahoy up there,” Dennison called up to the central station.
The broad-shouldered man leaning against the railing turned, his brow furrowed, and then grinned when he saw Dennison. “Well, if it isn’t my favorite Romaine! What are you doing here?�
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“Just looking for a straight answer, Everard. I didn’t think you’d still be flying this hulk.”
“Well it isn’t Cross Station,” he admitted, “but someone has to do it. Get up here, I could use your eyes.”
The CO fell back at the invitation, chagrin that his protests had been so completely ignored making his face ruddy. Dennison gave the CO a nod and climbed the steps. From the captain’s station, the view of the surrounding terminals was uninterrupted.
“Your CO wasn’t inclined to answer my questions about our current altitude,” Dennison said as he scanned the terminals. His eyes caught on the power intake meters and he grunted. “You’re running on fumes. What’s happening here, Alden?”
“We have two-thirds of the battery banks offline while a work crew finishes the repairs on the solar collectors,” the captain said sourly. “There’s no immediate danger.”
“It’s a gale out there. What’s the reading?”
“Beaufort Eight,” Alden said, reading it off a monitor. “The crews are trained to work in up to twelve. There’s no emergency yet.”
Beaufort Eight was a wind strong enough to knock a grown man off his feet. From personal experience, Dennison knew only the most basic tasks could be achieved in that sort of wind. At twelve Beaufort, a man would need mechanical assistance to move along the safety cables.
“If the wind blows us into an aluminum chloride well, every man you have outside is dead,” Dennison said grimly.
“You don’t need to tell me that. We’re running models of the wind flow and the existing cloud formations.”
Dennison leaned against the rail, his mind racing. Alden Everard was doing the right thing, under the circumstances. Dropping the liquid carbon dioxide ballast would get them above the danger in a hurry, but the extras doing repairs would suffer the brunt of the maneuver. He was about to suggest a gradual ballast release, then saw a monitor showing that Alden was already doing just that.
Nova Aeria was rising as the weight of the ballast was discarded. They had already lifted nearly a kilometer above the normal cruising deck, but the storm had stirred up the clouds even more than Dennison had thought.
The habitat still carried nearly two tons of disposable ballast. Dropping it all at once would rocket the habitat into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, much the same way that an air-filled balloon held under water launches upward. To a man on the outside, the sudden hurricane of wind could be fatal.
Until the extras finished their repairs, they were limited to the gradual release of ballast.
“Hell of a time to do repairs,” Dennison said, mostly to himself. He didn’t mean it as a criticism; the storms on Venus didn’t give much warning and were hard to predict.
“Not that we had much choice about it,” Alden grumbled. If he took offense at Dennison’s comment, he didn’t show it. “An orbital foundry had a mishap, shed a few tons of refuse in an unplanned dispersal. We caught the fringes of it and the debris knocked out a third of our solar panels. We had a repair crew called in from Nueva Angela to provide extra manpower.”
“I heard about that. New Galway caught a piece of the debris as well.”
“And Nueva Angela, and a dozen other habitats. What a mess.”
On the screens front and center, a rendered representation of the clouds surrounding Nova Aeria was displayed, constantly looping through a short animation showing the current state of the clouds and a freeze-frame approach through the next sixty seconds. The prediction model gave Dennison a clearer picture of where the habitat was and how the clouds about them were moving.
Nova Aeria was running down a trench in the clouds, riding the winds. Behind them, the storm was kicking up a boiling swirl of lower-layer clouds, heavy with acids and metal sulfides. The predictive model showed how the clouds behind them were beginning to curl over, not unlike an ocean wave. The habitat was slipping sideways, driven at a frantic pace by her props, running a few kilometers ahead of the collapsing wave.
It reminded Dennison of a video he had seen of a surfer on Earth, riding the curl of a wave until the water arced overhead and began crashing down, with the surfer shooting through a tube of water at a tremendous speed. Such was the fate of Nova Aeria, except if the clouds closed overhead they would be forced to rise up through them. Unlike the surfer on Earth, who eventually outran the curl of the wave, there was no way the habitat props could outrun the storm.
“We’re running out of time,” Dennison said grimly. “What’s the status of your repair crews?”
“It is getting close,” Alden agreed, “but they’re not out of time yet. The last check-in claimed they were nearly complete. I’m giving them all the time I can.”
Dennison’s grip on the railing turned his knuckles white. Mentally, he urged the extras to work faster. He could only imagine the pressure they were under and the difficulty in fighting the gale-force winds. The extras he had known were competent men and women, who earned every credit of their generous bonuses.
It took stones of steel to stand out in the elements and defy a planet that was actively trying to kill you. He had nothing but respect for them, but they knew the risks. If it came down to a choice between risking the habitat and risking the extras, he would not hesitate to save the habitat.
He hoped it wouldn’t come down to that, but there was more on the line than the lives of a few extras. Damage to Nova Aeria would be intolerable. The habitat was one of only three that provided the necessary process to turn a matriarch’s egg into the Rebuild serum. Without Nova Aeria, hundreds, if not thousands, of Ainlif would die an excruciating death.
CHAPTER
NINE
The original explorers to Venus went in search of life. It was hoped that in the middle atmosphere, microbes or other floating or flying life forms could have developed. There were trace compounds in the atmosphere that suggested metabolic byproducts might be existent.
Despite the scientifically sound principles, the earliest explorers did not find anything humanly recognizable as life. Later, as human contamination of the atmosphere became inevitable, the search was largely abandoned. More promising environments, such as the ice-covered seas of Enceladus or Europa, received funding instead of further Venusian exploration.
Earthly bacteria can survive on Venus, though it eventually dies off from lack of nutrient input. It is hypothesized that the bacteria human explorers have brought to Venus will eventually mutate into something that can withstand the acidic environment and receive its energy needs from solar input. Indeed, there are signs such mutations are already beginning. Not that anyone cares anymore. By and large, the human population of Venus has far more pressing matters to concern itself with than whether extremophile bacteria has adapted.
Jackson Harding dragged himself along the safety line one braced step at a time. As the storm had picked up, he was, at first, grateful for the improved design of the exposure suits on Nova Aeria. Then, as the wearying labor of repairing solar panels in gale-force winds dragged on and on, he grew resentful.
The working conditions on the curving roof of the habitat were beyond extreme. Wind howled past him, dragging at his tool pouches and parts satchel. Without the safety cable, he would have long since been blown off into empty space.
If they had been wearing the flimsier suits available on Nueva Angela, they would have been forced to retreat to the safety of the habitat long ago. Reminding himself that he was being well paid for the day’s work, Jackson crept forward until he reached the next panel.
Moving one carabiner at a time, he transferred himself off the safety line and onto the panel’s anchors. In the lee of the panel, the buffeting of the wind was lessened. They were under a time crunch, though, and he had no time to relax.
Jackson drew out his multimeter and checked the solar panel’s wires. The panel was hot. Relieved that he wouldn’t have to perform any repairs to the panel itself, he looked down to the habitat’s enameled surface.
The milky-grey of
the enamel was too opaque for him to see the aerogel beneath, but he could make out the shadowed form of the electrical conduit as it ran from the base of the solar panel to a junction. That junction was reporting a successful connection, so the break in the circuit was somewhere further into the panel cluster.
Wearily, Jackson transferred his carabiners to the next panel in and repeated the task of verifying that the panel was live and connected to the junction. Each cluster of panels was linked in series. Individually, the clusters didn’t produce much voltage, but with all the panels connected in parallel, the amperage would pack a hell of a wallop if he accidentally touched a bare wire.
A few panels later, he heard the popping hiss of a short before he was able to see it. He climbed slowly through the panel braces until he saw the white flashes of electrical discharge.
“I have eyes on the short,” he announced through his mic. “Section five, panel…” he squinted, trying to make out the stenciled lettering through the jumping arcs, “panel eighteen.”
“Good work, Jackson,” Millicent said. Her voice was tight with effort, and he could hear her labored breathing as she hauled herself along the safety line. “Stay clear, I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
“Belay that order,” another voice chimed in. “This is Section Chief Tulsen. We don’t have time for that. Jackson, you’re qualified to repair the short. Get it bridged then head for your nearest airlock. It looks like that’s the last fix we need to get the panel bank online.”
“Ten-four, Section Chief,” Jackson replied. He released the send switch on his radio and cursed to himself.
Working with solar panels was inherently dangerous. There was no way to turn them off; once they were exposed to sunlight they produced electricity whether you wanted them to or not. The cloud cover kicked up by the storm had reduced the throughput of the panels by around fifty percent, but even so, there was enough electricity running through the short to kill him several times over.