Maelstrom (5 page)

In twenty minutes she would reach her destination, where the billion-year-old beach ended against the cliffs, and the mouth of an ancient canyon debouched upon the vanished sea. Inside the canyon she would learn if the men in Rover One were dead or alive. . . .

Venus is an astonishingly round and rocky planet. A sphere almost the size of Earth, its retrograde rotation is a slow 240 Earth days; it shows no noticeable bulge at its equator. Unlike Earth, with its half-dozen floating continents, its cloud-piercing Andes and Himalayas, its mid-ocean ridges and abyssal trenches, most of Venus is as hard and smooth as a billiard ball–

–with a few prominent exceptions. Ishtar Terra is one. One of the planet’s two “continents,” Ishtar Terra is anchored on its eastern flank by Mount Maxwell, a vast shield volcano higher than Everest. The whole raised mass of land is roughly twice the size of Alaska, and is situated at about the corresponding latitude; its northern and western curves are also belted by mountains, far less spectacular than Maxwell, while most of the continent is taken up by the flat Lakshmi Plateau.

It was toward the steep southern flanks of the Lakshmi Plateau that Sparta now drove her six-legged rover. The farther and faster Sparta moved, the more confident she felt. Her path took her across a series of shallow impact craters, their steep rims long since melted like putty in the heat. The slope continued to rise, punctuated by traces of wave-cut terraces, remnants of the beach that had continually widened as the planet’s shallow ocean had dried under the heat of a runaway atmospheric greenhouse. As Sparta moved up the beach and crawled over the terraces she moved backward in time, to that era when the ocean had been at its greatest extent, covering all of Venus but for the two small continents and a few scattered islands.

A volley of immense explosion rattled the pressure bell, and moments later the ground shook violently, throwing the machine to its knees. Around Sparta the landscape heaved and groaned; rhythmic waves of soil raced past and slowly died away, leaving floating red dust in their wake.

The explosions were thunder arriving swiftly in the highly conductive atmosphere from a corona of lightning bolts that had bloomed about the head of Mount Maxwell, 300 kilometers away and eleven kilometers up in the sky. The simultaneous earthquake came from the bowels of the mountain, continuing the violent eruption which had begun three hours earlier.

“Rover Two, this is Azure Dragon. We show you at the cliffs. The canyon mouth is one-half-kilometer to your right.”

 

A reddish-black volcanic scarp emerged with startling suddenness out of the bright glow at horizon’s edge. Sparta veered right–

 

–and felt the first sign of trouble, a dragging reluctance in the second joint of her right front leg. There was no point in stopping. She could keep going on five legs, if she had to. Or on three.

She favored the troubled limb, holding it off the ground, but by the time she reached the canyon mouth five minutes later she knew it was useless–a seal had failed, and the lubrication in the joint had fried. She jettisoned it, leaving it behind like a cast-off stick. She held her surviving foreleg aloft and scurried into the canyon mouth on the remaining four.

Twisting, turning between narrowing walls of rock patinaed with a dark metallic sheen, once a rushing watercourse . . . milleniums of recurring flash floods had carved cinctures into these desert walls, but that was a billion years ago, and the heated rock had sagged like belly fat, obscuring the thin soft layers of chalk and coal that would have shouted “life” to the cameras of any passing probe.

Evidence of past life had eventually emerged anyway, when remote-controlled prospecting robots grazed over the surface of Venus. In the scattered calcium carbonates and shales and coal beds, a dozen fragments, no more, of macroscopic fossils emerged from the stone–a dozen fragments in twenty years of exploration, but those were more than enough to fuel the human imagination. Those bits of intaglio had been reconstructed a hundred ways by sober experts, a thousand ways by less inhibited dreamers. No one really knew what the organisms had looked like or how they had lived, and the prospect of ever finding out seemed dim.

Then, only months ago, a prospecting robot had broken into a cave in the cliffside of this canyon. . . .

 

Sparta rounded a rocky shoulder and came to a halt, blocked by a fresh fall of boulders from high up the cliff. The pale exposed facets of rock were shockingly bright and crisp against the blackened and corroded cliff.

 

“Azure Dragon, this is Troy.”

 

“Come in, Inspector.” Port Hesperus was closer now; the radio delay was hardly more than a hesitant pause.

“The site’s buried by a landslide. Meter-length radar shows the rover and an HDVM underneath. Weak infrared, low reactor flux, they must be in auto-shutdown. Probably crushed their cooling fins. There’s movement in the bell. I’m going to dig them out.”

“Stand by, Inspector.”

 

With her one good foreleg she began clawing at the rockpile.

 

“Inspector Troy, our instruments show you have lost the use of your right forelimb. LS controller advises against risking the remaining forelimb. Do you read?”

 

Another lightning bolt crackled the aether. Moments later the thunderclap shook the rover.

 

“Rover Two, please acknowledge.”

 

She heard them loud and clear, as well as they heard her effortless breathing and read her steady biostats. “Let’s both save our breath,” she said.

Her remaining foreleg was efficient at yanking the blocks of basalt and solidified tuff from where they had fallen. Her multiple joint-motors whined ceaselessly, loud in the dense atmosphere. Dust rose in that thick air like swirls of mud. She dug into the slide a couple of meters and then had to back out, taking time to rearrange the debris. The deeper into the mound she went the more she risked being buried herself. On Mercury, on Mars, on Earth’s Moon, on any of the asteroids or outer moons, it would have been different, but Venus was Earth’s sister. A block of basalt on Venus weighed nearly what it would have weighed on Earth.

“Troy, this is Azure Dragon. Dragon Base HDVMs are no more than twenty minutes from your position.” Dragon Base was Azure Dragon’s robotic ore-processing complex and shuttle station on the heights of the Lakshmi Plateau. “Back off, will you? Let the robots do the heavy work.”

“Good thought,” she said. “I’ll just keep at it until they get here.” “Inspector Troy . . .” the controller began. He gave up.

Sparta began to sweat. It seemed natural that with all this effort she would work up a sweat. Except that she was only providing the will, she wasn’t doing the work. Why was the air getting hot? Was something wrong with the AR suit’s heat exchangers? She flicked the helmet to internal display . . . no evident problem. Unless there was something wrong with the internal cooling system of the rover itself.

This machine, along with its twin, had been built for the first manned exploration of Venus a quarter of a century ago. Both of the giant steel bugs had landed successfully on the planet in tubby shuttles, and both had been retrieved. But when they were opened the occupants of one of them–this one–had been found baked alive.

That lesson sank in: remote-controlled robots had taken over the exploration and exploitation of Venus. This was the first mission in two decades that had warranted a human presence on the surface. Most of the past three months had been spent overhauling and refurbishing the two rovers and outfitting a shuttle to accommodate humans.

All known problems had been corrected. Which left only Murphy’s Law.

Her titanium arm pulled loose another boulder and on the next stroke hooked into Rover One’s aft port strut. The rock fall had crushed the bug’s hind legs as well as its wings. The men inside were alive by courtesy of a superconducting refrigerating system that kept liquid metal coursing through the white-hot coils belting the pressure sphere.

Cautiously, as quickly as she could, she removed the overlying rubble from the front of the rover, exposing one side of the pressure bell’s shining sphere. The refrigerator coils were still functioning, but the rover’s antennas had been sheered by falling rock. Sparta fixed acoustic couplers to the outside of the bell to establish communication.

The visual scene changed as sharply as a cut in a holo viddie. Rover One’s pressure bell was suddenly sheared open, as if she were peering directly into it from where she sat. There were three men inside the bell: the pilot, hunched forward and completely sheathed in a shiny black AR suit and helmet like her own, and two men in overalls behind him. They were obviously cramped, but they all appeared healthy.

“Ohayo gozaimas
’, Yoshi.
Dewa ojama itashimasu.”

 

The pilot chuckled. “Don’t mention it, Ellen. Drop in any old time.” Because he was wearing the AR helmet he was the only one of the three who could see her, but all of them could hear her through the acoustic links.

“You’re here at last,” said the shorter of the two passengers, peering peevishly in Sparta’s direction. He was a tiny bright-eyed fellow in his mid-fifties, a banty rooster caught in a crowded cage–Professor J. Q. R. Forster. A believer in natural authority, he did not hesitate to speak for the three of them. “It’s vital we communicate our records to Port Hesperus without further delay.”
Sorry I’m late
, Sparta thought, but she said, “Sorry your work was interrupted, Professor.” To the pilot Sparta said, “Your frame is crushed aft of the bell, Yoshi. To get you out of there we’re going to have to drag you back to the shuttle. We’d better sit tight and wait for the HDVMs.”

“I think we have a coolant leak. The temperature in here has gone up a couple of degrees in the last ten minutes.” Only Yoshimitsu’s husky voice indicated his appreciation of their fix.

 

It reminded her of her own discomfort. “give me a moment.” She opened her helmet and sniffed the air inside the pressure bell. Ozone. If she hadn’t been wearing the sealed suit she would have smelled it earlier.

 

“I’m going to reset the couples.” Sparta deliberately disengaged the acoustic couplers, breaking the sound and video links. From her point of view and Yoshimitsu’s, both pressure spheres became opaque again.

Ozone accounted for her extra body heat, but what accounted for the ozone? She peeled the orthotactic glove from her right hand. From beneath her close-trimmed fingernails, chitinous polymerinsert spines emerged. She slid them into the auxiliary I/O port of her rover’s master computer.

PIN spines were not standard among Space Board inspectors. Hers were another of her secrets, like the name she called herself that no one else knew.

Her data search of the rover’s internal sensor net took a fraction of a second, much less than the rover’s own outdated diagnostics. She pulled her spines from the console and retracted them, then replaced her orthotactic glove. With her rover’s good titanium foreleg she refastened the acoustic links: Rover Two’s bell became transparent again.

“I can see you better now,” she said; it was a white lie. “Seems I’ve got a problem too–sparking in a compressor, and for some reason the scrubbers aren’t handling the ozone. At this rate I’m going to poison myself in twenty minutes. I think I’d better pull you out of there and make a run for it.”

“Rover Two, please hear this.” The shuttle controller’s voice sounded urgently in both rovers. Port Hesperus was now directly overhead to the south, passing through the same longitude as the Lakshmi Plateau. “Your vehicle is handicapped. We urge you to leave the scene immediately and get back to the shuttle. HDVMs will arrive in an estimated ten minutes to assist Rover One.”

“Your passengers are dripping sweat,” Sparta said to Yoshimitsu.

 

“Right,” he said. “HDVMs are good for eating rocks, and that’s about all.”

 

“We’d better start now,” she said.

 

“You would make life easier on everybody if you’d play by the rules,” Azure Dragon’s radio voice said petulantly.

 

“Lend me a hand, Yoshi,” Sparta said.

 

“How about a whole arm?”

Rover One’s second passenger, the tall man with the fine blond hair and bushy brows, had listened patiently to the exchange without comment until now. “Perhaps this is not a good time,” he suggested diffidently, “but if someone could kindly–”

“Don’t interfere, Merck,” Forster snapped at him. “They’re replacing her rover’s handicapped limb with one of our own.”

Forster’s guess was accurate. Sparta and Yoshimitsu were inserting the good right foreleg from his crushed Rover into her empty socket. It was a dry socket incorporating only control connections and requiring no lubrication, designed for just such emergency limb transplants as this, in dessicating temperatures and the driest imaginable atmosphere.

The two pilots had an excellent view of each other, as clear as if they had been a couple of surgeons standing across an operating table. But an outside observer would have seen the two rovers squatting head to head like a pair of blind mantises. One glowing bug was half crushed, nervously offering the other a jointed foreleg, perhaps hoping its vital parts would be spared–

“Okay, the leg’s in and Working. Pull your locking pin and I’ll lift you out.”

 

“Pin’s clear.”

 

–but the sacrifice was in vain, for the mantis that now had two good forelegs suddenly reached out and grasped the head of the other bug and tugged upward. The second bug’s round head came entirely away.

 

“I’ve got you,” Sparta said.

When the locking pin in the floor of the bell was pulled, all connections to Rover One’s motive power, external sensors, and long-term life-support systems were severed and sealed. Yoshimitsu was blind now, his AR suit rendered useless. With the aid of recirculating filters the three inhabitants of the bell would normally have six hours to live, maybe a little more.

Sparta backed cautiously out of the trench she had dug in the mound, holding the sphere aloft until they were clear of the landslide. Then, as fast as she could, she turned and scuttled back the way she had come, holding the survivors egglike in front of her.