The Matriarch Manifesto

by Devin Hanson

  Jesus Christ. He had just killed someone! Nausea roiled in his stomach and only the fear of making noise and drawing attention to himself kept him from throwing up. He tried to remember what had happened when he had fired his shotgun at the doorway, but it was all fragments. Maybe they would live? He remembered the raw, murderous rage on the man’s face just before he had pulled the trigger and found himself hoping that they had died.

  A foot came down on the inside of the pile of bodies, blocking Jackson’s view of Marcell’s face. Jackson levered himself up off the floor and peered out between the shelves. Two men were advancing into the room, shotguns held at the ready. They stepped quietly, checking every row of shelves as they went past.

  Jackson twisted his head around, searching the shelving units for the matriarch. Where had Cynthia gone? There wasn’t an exit, was there? Any moment now, the men would reach the aisle where he was hiding, and then it would be all over.

  There was a shift in the shadows and Jackson looked up toward the top of the shelves just as Cynthia swung down and kicked both feet into the chest of the leading extra. He stumbled backward and tangled with the second man. Cynthia landed next to them, off balance. Before she could follow up, the first man lunged at her, his mouth open in a wordless shout.

  Cynthia turned aside the first wild punch and ducked the second, but the man wasn’t squaring up to box, he was charging in madly. She caught one of his swings high on the cheek and it knocked her backward into a shelf. Sensing his imminent victory, the man roared and sprang at her.

  Jackson missed what happened next. One moment Cynthia was sprawled against the shelf all but unconscious, the next moment she was twisting aside, her hands tangled up in the man’s clothing. The extra slammed headlong into the shelving upright with a dull crack and toppled to the floor, his limbs flopping loosely.

  “Freeze, you god damn bitch!”

  Through the shelf he was hiding behind, Jackson saw the second extra had found his feet and had the shotgun leveled at Cynthia. He was breathing hard and seemed to be bleeding from a shoulder wound, but the shotgun was steady, and his finger was on the trigger.

  Cynthia straightened slowly and spread her arms. “Okay,” she said, her teeth gritted. “You got me.” Blood trickled down her face from her split cheek and dripped from the point of her chin. She looked battered and exhausted, but she looked at the extra levelly, and without fear.

  “God damn right, I do!” the man shouted. “Turn around! Slowly! Give me a reason to blow you in half!”

  She lifted her chin slightly. “If you kill me, everyone you know and love will pay the price. Nobody on this entire habitat will survive the purge. Is that what you want?”

  “Just do it!” he shrieked. The gun was trembling in his hands, but there was no way he could miss from that distance.

  Cynthia complied, moving slowly, and the extra advanced toward her. He walked right past where Jackson was crouching, his eyes locked on the matriarch in front of him.

  Jackson lifted his shotgun from the ground, forcing himself to move at a snail’s pace lest it scrape the floor and draw attention to him. For the moment, it seemed like the extra had forgotten about him, or maybe he thought it was Cynthia that had shot them in the doorway. He didn’t have an angle, though. He could shoot the man in the back, but Cynthia was in the line of fire.

  “Get on your knees,” the man growled and kicked Cynthia in the back of one knee. She dropped to the floor with a muffled cry. “That’s better,” he snarled. “Hands behind your head.”

  “You don’t need to do this,” Cynthia said, her voice hoarse.

  The man stepped back half a pace and leveled the shotgun at her head. “You and your filth have brought the people of Venus to their knees,” he shouted. “Why shouldn’t I just shoot you?”

  “You’re wrong about that,” Cynthia pleaded. “We’ve only worked to protect the people on our planet. Every day we work to make your lives better, safer, more rewarding.”

  “Lies. Propaganda! Put your hands behind your head, Matriarch! One more word out of your mouth and I splatter your brains all over the wall.”

  Slowly, Jackson raised his shotgun, praying that the motion wouldn’t register in the man’s peripheral vision. With Cynthia on her knees, he had a clear shot, but he had to aim high. If he missed, then both of them would be dead.

  “Hey, asshole,” Jackson called.

  The extra jerked his head around and Jackson pulled the trigger. He was prepared for the vicious kick of the shotgun this time, but not for the way the man’s head disappeared from the shoulders up. Blood sprayed his face and got in his eyes, and the shelves and walls of the storage room were painted in sudden, glistening red.

  Jackson threw up. He scrubbed at his eyes between spasms, but his hands were slick with gore and every slippery touch against his face made the nausea cramp in his guts all over again.

  A gentle hand caught his wrist and a cloth was pressed into his hand. A wave of gratitude mixed with embarrassment rolled over him and he scrubbed the blood from his face and wiped down his hands as best he could. Jackson’s nausea eased and he took a deep, sobbing breath.

  Cynthia stood next to him, a shotgun of her own in her hands. She was watching the doorway alertly, but there was no fear on her face. “How you doing, Jackson?”

  “Better. Thanks for… this.”

  She made a noncommittal sound in her throat. “I should be thanking you. That’s the second time you’ve saved my life.”

  Involuntarily, Jackson looked over at the man he had just killed, then jerked his head away before he stomach could attempt to empty itself again. He swallowed convulsively.

  “Never killed a man before?” Cynthia asked.

  “I… no! Why would… no!”

  She grinned. “Just teasing. You did good, Jackson.”

  Something about the way the matriarch shot a glance sideways at him made Jackson think of Leila, and he couldn’t help but return the smile. The unexpected levity went a long way toward settling his nerves. “We need to get out of here. When these men don’t check in, Wharton will send more.”

  Cynthia nodded. “You’re right, I—”

  The floor bucked beneath Jackson’s feet and a roaring hammer of sound crashed over him. For a moment, Jackson expected the floor to drop out from under him. He expected the harsh atmosphere of Venus to sweep in and steal his breath away, for the walls to crush in around him and snuff him out. He was already on his knees, and the jolt had knocked him flat. He felt the tremors run through the floor and fear swooped through his stomach.

  Cynthia was shouting something at him, but he couldn’t hear the words through the hollow ringing in his ears. Dust had leapt from every surface and filled the air, tickling at his sinuses and scratching at his throat.

  “Up!” Cynthia shouted again, and Jackson finally heard her. “You need to get up!”

  Jackson forced himself to his feet, spurred not by Cynthia’s words but by the layer of clear air he could see sweeping toward him. The atmosphere of Venus, almost pure carbon dioxide, was significantly denser than the mix of nitrogen and oxygen inside the habitats. It was outside atmosphere he was seeing roll toward him now.

  “Hull breach,” Cynthia shouted.

  “We need to get masks!” Jackson cried. The layout of the restaurant jumped to the forefront of his thoughts. That hour spent helping Tabitha piece together the floorplan of the Basement told him exactly where the emergency locker was. “There’s a locker outside, down the hallway around the corner.”

  The layer of clear atmosphere was eddying around his ankles now. There wasn’t anything inherently dangerous with the atmosphere unless he breathed it, but it made his skin crawl as he walked toward the door.

  He remembered the rescue efforts on Nova Aeria. So long as doors were shut, the seep of carbon dioxide into the rooms beyond was slow. In a room behind a closed door, the air should remain breathable for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Their room wasn’t sealed, though,
and without knowing the size of the breach, it was impossible to guess how long their air would remain safe. They needed masks immediately.

  Once out in the hallway, the oscillating shrieking of the breach alarms made it past the ringing in his ears. Jackson led the way toward the hallway juncture, forcing himself to move at a walking pace. The more turbulence he introduced, the faster the atmosphere would mix with the air.

  There! The locker was right where he remembered. The same sensors that had triggered the sirens had unlocked the locker and he hauled the door open. A score of masks sat in neat rows, the bottles of oxygen hung with labels indicating their last inspection date. He handed Cynthia a mask and pulled one on himself, then busied himself with strapped the belt on and hooking in a bottle.

  “Take an extra bottle,” Cynthia suggested.

  Reluctantly, Jackson complied. There were twenty masks and twenty bottles. Every extra bottle he took was one less usable mask. But then again, everyone in the Basement was trying to kill them. Maybe he shouldn’t worry so much about the survival of other people.

  A heavy, thumping chatter sounded somewhere beyond, outside in the open space of the club. Jackson looked at Cynthia and she bared her teeth at him in a feral smile.

  “That’s machinegun fire. The Horizon marines are here.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The marine task force on Horizon was established as soon as the growing colony had the resources to put toward essentially nonproductive members of its society. The first iterations of the newly established military body were little more than armed militia. It took nearly a hundred and fifty years before the colony inaugurated the first wholly professional battalion.

  The purpose of the marines was two-fold. First, to guard the matriarchs and their newly developed society. Preserving the welfare of the population as a whole came as a distant second. Their authority superseded all local habitat law and command structure. The marines were the blunt fist of the matriarchs; they had no concern for anything beyond carrying out their mission.

  In all the years since their creation, the marines had been deployed only twice. Once in tracking down a murderer who had made an attempt on a matriarch’s life, and once to intercept a crew of mercenaries from Mars who had come hunting the bounty to be found in a matriarch’s womb. The live broadcast of the fifteen mercenaries being literally walked off a plank into the bottomless clouds of Venus was streamed to every major concentration of humans in the solar system. Nobody has tried to attack Venus or its residents since.

  Leila saw the light of an overhead vent and felt a rush of relief. Her back ached from being forced to walk hunched over. The caked oil residue had been largely left behind, but the inside of the duct was still slippery to the touch.

  It made her wonder just how long it had been since the ducts had been cleaned. The central computer should have tasked someone to clean them years ago. It was, she thought, an oversight caused by the computer simply not being aware of the ducts’ existence. Whoever had retrofitted the Basement hadn’t gotten around to registering the ductwork with the central computer, and the buildup of oil from cooking had had decades to accumulate.

  Her goal in entering the ducts had been to escape the trigger-happy ainlif come looking for their missing matriarchs. It hadn’t occurred to her until she had been slogging through the muck in the ducts for fifteen minutes that her brothers were probably out there.

  The thought brought with it a confusion of emotions. Hope, that they would recognize her and protect her, fear that they wouldn’t acknowledge their shared ancestry and gun her down anyway, shame that they would see her as a failed matriarch, homesickness sharp enough to sting tears from her eyes, and a clutter of other, lesser feelings, all swirled together.

  In the end, she had continued on. The continued gunfire told her the ainlif were hard-pressed and unlikely to welcome her presence. Besides, there was no guarantee the ainlif would survive. There must be hundreds of extras in the Basement, and far too many of them had guns.

  She was better off on her own.

  Leila reached the vent and paused underneath it, taking a moment to breathe in the clean air coming through. She thought the lingering scent of stale smoke would stay with her forever.

  She had only the vaguest of ideas where she was now. The duct had gone up a level twice, with ladder rungs bolted to the sheet metal offering a means of ascension. Her best guess put her somewhere in the upper levels of the Basement’s restaurant. She tried to remember the turns the duct had taken, but her sense of direction was completely shot.

  At least it didn’t sound like there were people outside the duct. She listened for a minute, but all she heard were distant shouts and muffled gunfire. Cautiously, Leila popped the latches holding the vent closed and pushed it open. Nobody shouted, no guns stabbed into the duct at her.

  Leila straightened and raised her head out of the vent. She groaned involuntarily as her abused back muscles protested, then breathed a sigh of relief. She was safe. The duct had taken her to the narrow gap between the ceiling of the restaurant’s upper level and the floor of the level above.

  She climbed out of the vent and made her way to the edge of the roof. Below, she saw the bowl of the club floor, buzzing with activity. Sparks of arc welders sprayed from the elaborate fortifications built around the lift lobbies, one cluster on each side of the club.

  Idiots. Leila rolled her eyes. There was no way the marines or the ainlif would use the lifts. The fact that the ainlif had already infiltrated the Basement was proof of that, but they were a relatively small force. When the marines came, they would come in strength. The lifts would simply be too inefficient. She didn’t know how the marines would attack, but it certainly wouldn’t be through the most obvious bottleneck.

  She wondered where Jackson was. He had gotten her into this mess. As much as she wanted to hate him, he was still the only person who had been kind to her. And it wasn’t like it had been Jackson’s choice. The extras had forced him to come.

  A thump on a wall below her interrupted her thoughts. She leaned out, trying to make sense of what wall had been hit. Strange. The wall was the curving outer shell of the habitat. Nothing should be hitting it from the other side.

  Realization came a second too late. She was still leaning out over the edge when a deafening blast tore a great, gaping hole through the side of the habitat. Debris crashed down among the club floor and the air was filled with billowing clouds of dust.

  Leila was knocked over by a hammer of air and she sprawled out on the roof, half over the edge. She hauled herself back to safety, her heart hammering and her ears ringing. Vertigo swooped through her guts as she stared down at the clouds kilometers below.

  Almost half of the sweeping outer wall of the habitat was gone leaving a gaping hole twenty meters across. Chunks and slabs of expanded resin were still crumbling away, making the hole even wider. Leila’s shock faded and fear took its place.

  She could see the air flooding out of the hole, dusty ripples billowing out and rising away, and the clear, poisonous atmosphere rushing in. On the club floor, dozens of people were staggering about, bleeding and bludgeoned by the debris from the hull. The deadly carbon dioxide flooding into the Basement pooled in the club and Leila could see people collapsing.

  The hissing whap of rotor blades became audible and the first of the marine skimmers swept in through the gaping hole. Landing grapples on the skimmer reached and clawed for purchase along the rim of the club, then the overhead prop blades disconnected, sending the six-meter blades spinning wildly out onto the crowded club floor.

  Doors on the skimmer blew open and half a dozen armored marines in full atmosphere helmets jumped out, machine guns raised. The rattle of automatic gunfire crackled through the air, controlled bursts that caught the nearest extras and flung them to the ground amid sprays of blood.

  It was chaos in the Basement. The extras were just coming to grips with the carbon dioxide flooding the Basem
ent, and now the sudden arrival of the marines in their midst scrambled any sort of organized response to the hull breach.

  Any other gathering of civilians would have succumbed immediately, but these were extras. They made their living working outside the safety of the habitat, and while they were taken by surprise, a hull breach was a contingency they had prepared for.

  Masks started appearing on figures scrambling through the rubble and the boom of shotguns being fired sounded in harsh counterpoint to the rattle of automatic fire. One of the marines went down with an exploded faceplate.

  The extras were rallying! Leila gripped the edge of the roof, squinting against the billowing dust. She couldn’t help but feel the vicarious excitement of the extras as they ran forward between their tumbled barricades trying to get close enough for their homemade shotguns to have an effect against the armor of the marines.

  Then another skimmer slid through the breach and a mounted cannon on the door opened up with a howl. Tracer rounds ripped glowing streaks through the air in an almost solid beam of light. The gathering resistance among the extras crumbled. Men they could face; even out-gunned, they had sufficient advantage in numbers to overwhelm the marines.

  It has long been a maxim in warfare that an overwhelming display of force has the power to win battles through sheer intimidation. It worked at the end of the second World War, when the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. It worked in Desert Storm and countless other engagements throughout human history.

  The cannon was no different. The will to fight among the extras shattered. Those that had located masks ran for cover while those that were not so fortunate choked on the atmosphere and died.

  For a moment, it looked like the fight was over. As suddenly as it had begun, the last stand of the extras had fallen apart. Then the stream of tracers twitched abruptly toward Leila, sweeping up from harassing the retreating extras and chewing a splintered path up the side of the restaurant. There was a coughing boom below Leila, and something darted toward the skimmer, trailing a line of smoke.