Old Venus

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 protect 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 between 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.

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.

“Tumblers,” said Vinnie. “Harmless. But if you see something that looks the same, only light purple, that’s not. A fungal mimic. Nasty. Beam it if it’s closing in, let them go if not.”

“OK,” said Mazith. “Uh, I don’t get a lot of practice with small arms usually …”

“You’ll get plenty this trip,” said Vinnie, deliberately misunderstanding her concern. “Don’t worry.”

“So how does this special communication work?” asked Kelvin. “We didn’t have any back in the day. Are you communicating all the time? You know, your sib sees and hears what you see kind of thing?”

“No,” said Mazith. “It’s not that straightforward. We sense each other all the time, but to communicate takes a lot of concentration. If it works, then I can speak through … Lyman’s mouth. And he can speak through mine.”

“So where’s Lyman?” asked Vinnie.

“Uh, he’s on the Rotarua,” replied Mazith. “I … um … drew the short … the straw for the planetside assignment.”

“Rotarua?” asked Kelvin. “That’s a battle cruiser, isn’t it? I thought the treaty limited visiting warships to nothing bigger than a heavy cruiser?”

“Apparently under the treaty terms she is a heavy cruiser,” said Mazith easily. “Besides, we aren’t exactly visiting, just a kind of touch and go. We were on patrol and got called in when the shuttle went down.”

“I see,” said Kelvin. She was lying about something, he thought, but he couldn’t figure out exactly what, or why. The business with the Rotarua was strange. If the battle cruiser had been in anything like a regular approach and orbit, he would have seen it on the traffic scans on the way down that morning, but nothing had shown up apart from the usual picket ships, familiar icons on the screen. A “touch-and-go” approach could mean anything from literally dropping a boat while en route to somewhere else, or a long, irregular orbit that might be designed to keep the ship off the scans of both traffic control and the picket ships, but still put the ship close enough once every Venusian day or so for a brief window to fire ordnance or otherwise conduct military operations.

But why would they want to do that, mused Kelvin …

As predicted, they reached the ranch just as the light faded, the cloud lowering and thickening into a dense fog, as it always did at nightfall. The lizard quickened its pace, keen to get into a warm huddle with its fellows, Vinnie having to hood it to slow it down long enough for the saddle-sore Kelvin and Mazith to dismount and hobble up into the ranch house, a high-stilted building constructed from gorretwood, the valuable fungus-resistant hard timber that only grew on the highest points of the plateau.

Vinnie opened the door with an old-fashioned bronze key in a massive bronze lock that would have suited a Terran house of four hundred years before. There was no one inside, but a note was on the table of the common room.

“Osgood is rounding up some strays,” said Vinnie. “And Jat’s gone on ahead to line up things with the Lepers.”

“How did she know to do that?” asked Kelvin. “I thought the Navy picked you up in town? And besides, since when has Jat done anything anyone asked her to?”

“The Navy did pick me up in town,” said Vinnie. “We’ve got a landline here now, at least for the dry season. I called and told Jat about the mission, and asked her to ask Osgood to go to the Lepers while she stayed back to look after the ranch.”

“Smart,” said Kelvin.

“Nah, she knew what I was doing. It just gave her an excuse to say no to my request, then do what I wanted while pretending not to.”

“You guys have a very complicated relationship.”

“And you don’t?”

“Uh, I don’t suppose there is any chance of a shower, sir?” asked Mazith. Her formerly nicely pressed camo uniform was looking quite bedraggled now, and was splashed with mud and speckled with multicolored spores.

“Through there,” said Vinnie. “It’ll be the last one for a while. Scrub off all your lotion, let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll apply the lichen. It’ll need overnight to get established. Kel, you can use the decon shower. You want to apply your own lichen? There’s a pot there.”

“Yeah, yeah,” grumbled Kelvin. “Can I borrow some clothes?”

“Help yourself,” said Vinnie. “I’ll see if they left us anything ready for dinner.”

They had, and after lizard steaks with breadfungus and several classic martinis, Kelvin felt considerably better than he had, despite the creeping sensation of the lichen spreading along his arms and legs, around his groin and armpits, and across his face. In a fit of whimsy, he’d applied antifungal ointment to constrain the lichen in tiger stripes, with some whiskers out either side of his nose. It was already coming into effect, judging from the sidelong glances from Mazith. Her facial lichen matched Vinnie’s spirals and she had adopted a lizard-skin singlet while retaining her camo trousers, all of it indicating an effort to fit in.

“Time you hit the hay, Lieutenant,” said Vinnie, when the clearing up was done. “We’ll be getting up at first light. Bunkhouse through the red door, take any bunk. See you in the morning.”

As soon as she’d left, Vinnie checked that the door was firmly shut before the clone siblings made each other another drink. Martini for Kelvin, and a local Venusian whisky for Vinnie.

“So what did smooth Captain O’Kazanis not tell us?” asked Kelvin. “And what’s Lieutenant Mazith lying about?”

“It could be just the kids are that important,” replied Vinnie. She paused and added thoughtfully, “If there are any kids …”

“Yeah,” said Kelvin. “A bunch of veep maggots take off by themselves? Sounds pretty thin to me. What happened to their bodyguards, conducting officers, babysitters …”

“I don’t get sending Mazith with us, either,” said Vinnie. “Why do we need instant comms? And how do we even know she is a special communicator?”

“You think she might not be?”

“I dunno. There’s something not right …”

“She’s definitely lying about something to do with the special communication,” said Kelvin.

“Yeah,” mused Vinnie. “Got to wonder why they’re using us, too, our megaskills notwithstanding. Pretty deniable, couple of old-timers from a pre–World Gov Navy.”

“Maybe the Navy wanted that yacht crashed and whatever indication they’ve got that it didn’t crash is bad news,” said Kelvin. “Negative kill. So they have to send an operator to make sure, only its being where it is, they need local help.”

“You got a suspicious mind, brother.”

“Could be, could be something else again,” said Kelvin. He scratched his head, frowned, and carefully inspected his fingernail. Itches on Venus were not to be ignored. “I figure whatever it is, it’ll come clear enough when we get close to the yacht.”

“I’ll have a word with Jat when we catch up with her,” said Vinnie. “Get her to watch over us, hey?”

“Will she do it?” asked Kelvin.

Vinnie gave him the look that had quelled many a junior officer and NCO.

“You ride the rear saddle tomorrow, too. Keep an eye on our young looie.”

It was raining when they set out the next day, warm rain that came down in sudden, smothering deluges that lasted a few minutes before easing off, only to deliver another barrage ten or fifteen minutes later. Within a few hours, they were into the Swamp proper, and finding a way with ground solid enough and water not too deep for the lizard became a full-time task for Vinnie, even with the tall bronze way markers that had been hammered deep into the soft ground to show the path to the Lepers’ territory.

Only a few kilometers into the Swamp, the treelike green caps gave way to a profusion of clusters of smaller fungi, in many different colors, some of them mobile. There were also rabbit-sized lizard-things, and insectoid critters that swam and jumped and chattered, and early on the afternoon of the first day, something shadowy and huge loomed ahead in the fog. Vinnie backed the lizard off and all three of them readied their heat-beams before it continued on its way. There were only two known Venusian life-forms that big. One was a truly monstrous lizard and the other the Devil’s Tower, an ambulatory fungoid terror with fruiting spore-arms six meters long.

Two sweaty, itchy days later—broken by two long, hot nights spent on too-small islands that, while not actually underwater, were astonishingly damp—they came to what Vinnie described as the “Leper Trading Post,” a massive, cube-shaped pink fungus at least fifteen meters a side, that had either naturally solidified into something approaching concrete or been somehow encouraged to, with windows and doors and rooms excavated out of it as if it were a small, rocky hill.

“There’s nearly always a Leper here,” said Vinnie. “There’d better be. I can’t navigate us any farther into the swamp.”

“They live inside that fungus cube?” asked Mazith. She pointed to the top corner, where the fog was swirling and discolored, a strain of grey through its normal bilious green. “And is that smoke?”

“Yeah, they use fires for drying out, cooking, and so on,” said Vinnie. “Some of those dark purple, kind of chicken-shaped fungi burn slow, they’re good fuel. Smoke is good, it means someone’s home. Come on, let’s go say hello. Remember, they can look a bit … confronting. Keep your hand off your heat-beam.”

The Leper who came to the front door was extremely confronting. Kelvin considered Vinnie’s advice to keep his hand off his heat-beam very wise, for if he’d seen the Leper out in the swamp, he would have burned first and investigated afterward.

Still roughly human-shaped, with two arms and two legs, the Leper wore no clothes and was instead clad in outgrowths of different-colored and -textured fungus from its body. It—for it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman—had a hard, bulbous carapace over its chest and back, extending down to its thighs, and rippled, corded growths along its arms and legs. Its feet were now more like flippers, the big toes still visible, the other toes buried beneath layers of a rubbery, bright yellow fungus reminiscent of duck feet.

Its head was almost entirely encased in a fuzzy ball of many thousands of black filaments, which were in constant motion. Only its face was free of this growth, and even then only around the eyes, nostrils and a narrowed mouth, lips replaced by puffy orange growths.

“Howdy,” said the Leper, the depth and timbre of his voice indicating that he was probably male. Or had been male before his fungal transformation, which presumably went well beyond the visible indications. He raised his hand, which had only three fingers and a kind of wound-up sprung tendril in place of the pinkie.

“Afternoon,” said Vinnie. “I’m Vinnie, and this is my brother Kelvin, and an associate, Mazith. Maybe you heard about us coming through from Jat?”

“Oh, yeah, Jat said you’d be by. My name’s Theodore, by the way. You folk want a drink, bite to eat?”

“We’re kind of eager to keep going while there’s light, thank you all the same,” said Vinnie. “We’re going into the Roar to see if anyone’s survived a spaceship crash. Time might be kind of short if someone has.”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” said Theodore. “You need a frogsled, too, and a driver?”

“We do,” said Vinnie. “I was hoping we could work something out with your people, maybe Terran credit, or lizard steaks or hides, whatever.”

“Sure, sure, we’ll take your credit,” said Theodore. “Or the Navy’s, I believe.”

“And I heard tell that you … your people—”

“Call us Lepers, that’s what we call ourselves,” said Theodore, with a laugh that set the filaments on his head all quivering.

“I heard tell that you Lepers can find your way in the Roar,” said Vinnie. She pulled out a paper map—map tablets died faster than treated paper would rot on Venus—unfolded it across her arm, and pointed out the likely position of the yacht. “We got a rough planetfall, probably give a search area of a couple of kilometers, but I sure as shit can’t navigate us there, not in the Roar.”

Theodore leaned close to look at the map and nodded.

“That’s not far off a marked trail, and it’s in the eye,” he said. “Tell you what, I might drive that frogsled for you folks myself. Been a while since I went into the Roar. Might be kind of unsettling going through the storm, but it’s very nice in the eye. Calm, and you get less cloud. I even saw the sky once.”

“Get out of here!” protested Kelvin. In thousands of shuttle flights, he’d never seen the sky. Not as such, not from anywhere even close to ground level. The cloud cover extended from twenty thousand meters to ground level, and never cleared. Not anywhere near Venusport, anyway.

“Just for half a minute or so, the clouds were sucked back by the storm,” said Theodore. “Beautiful! Now, you all lichened up, all parts? Because you don’t want to be on a frogsled with me, nor go into the Roar, unless you are. We don’t do conscription, you know. Got to volunteer to be a Leper. Like an ASAP, huh, Vinnie?”

“I never volunteered for anything,” said Vinnie sternly. “That was propaganda bullshit. We were made to be ASAPs. Variation D12 of only six clone lines, most of us Kelvin Kelvins or Oscar Goodsons.”

“Well, we’re honest about the volunteering,” said Theodore. “Truth is, it don’t work out unless it’s voluntarily. Fungus grows wrong otherwise, don’t know why, but that’s what happens. So if you get to be interested, just let me know.”

“Will do,” mumbled Kelvin, with something like a nod from Mazith. Vinnie didn’t answer.

“When was Jat here, by the way?” asked Vinnie. “Did she say where she was going?”

Theodore laughed.

“She was kind of here, then she wasn’t,” he replied. “Yesterday. Dunno where she went, or even how she was traveling. Didn’t see a lizard.”

“That’s Jat,” said Kelvin. Annoying as hell but often useful. He hoped she was going to be around. The more he saw of Lieutenant Mazith, the more he doubted she was a straightforward special communicator, and if she wasn’t a communicator, then what was she?

“Let’s go get on the sled,” said Theodore. “Got a bunch of frogs raring to go, we should make good time.”

The frogsled was a kind of punt drawn by four of the jumping Venusian batrachian analogues that were similar to Terran frogs, being a nice bright green with big back legs for jumping and smaller ones at the front. They were also the size of small hippos and on closer inspection they turned out to have hard carapaces and an additional set of vestigial legs, so the comparison was not very scientific. When harnessed to a frogsled, they moved the vehicle in a series of jerking, sliding, bucking movements that Kelvin had always found horribly like a spacecraft about to suffer a catastrophic thruster explosion.

The first day’s travel was relatively uneventful, at least by the standards of the Swamp. For a while, Kelvin thought that Theodore was changing direction erratically, just for the fun of alarming his passengers, but after some careful observation he recognized that the Leper was avoiding potential dangers, and not just danger to the humans, but also the other way around, where their passage might disrupt the careful balance of the Swamp’s ecosystem. This included taking a long diversion around a huge mass of early stage breadfungus that would have been torn apart by the frogsled and not come to maturity, depriving many of the higher life-forms of their sustenance.

They had to sleep on the sled that night, no islands being in evidence, with the frogs circled round and two of them on watch at all times. Toward dawn Kelvin woke Theodore to point out something he didn’t recognize, a slow-moving luminous carpet of something that was either a fungus or a gestalt entity of tiny insects that mimicked the look of spores, floating across the water.

Theodore knew it, and swam around cursing while he quickly harnessed the frogs.

“Glowpile,” he explained, as they started out again, the frogs swimming rather than jumping, taking it slow. “Absorbs everything in its path, spits what it doesn’t want out the back. Highly resistant to heat-beams, chemicals, and the defensive spores we use. But at least it’s slow and we can get out of its way.”

When they stopped for breakfast on a welcome islet of rare rock, Mazith suddenly stopped chewing and her eyes went blank for half a minute. Kelvin watched her carefully, presuming that he was witnessing a communication from her telepathic sibling. Which meant a message from the battle cruiser.

When her eyes focused again and she started chewing, Kelvin asked her what that communication had been.

“Just routine,” she said. “Like a radio check. They want to know if we’re getting close.”

“We are,” said Theodore. “Can’t you hear it?”

“Hear what?” asked Mazith.

“The Roar,” answered Theodore, the tendrils on his head making a waving motion, all in the same direction, though the ever-present fog was so thick there was no knowing what he was pointing out that way.

“I’m not … sure,” said Mazith. She tilted her head, listening intently. “There is something.”

They could all hear it, now that they were listening. It was slight, for the moment, like a faint clearing of the throat noise overheard through a closed window, but constant.

“It will get louder,” said Theodore. “Much louder.”

He was right. The noise got much louder and louder still with every kilometer they zigzagged and backtracked and meandered toward the Roar.

With the noise, there later came a breath of wind, welcome at first, simply because it made a change. The fog moved and shifted, and after a few more hours transformed into scudding cloud at surface level, sometimes even breaking up enough so that they could see more than the twenty meters they’d got used to in the other parts of the Swamp.

This too, was welcome at first. But the wind speed continued to increase as they lurched and skipped onward, soon drenching them in muddy spray mixed with spores, with the frogsled making a crabwise course, constantly having to be angled diagonally across the wind, for it was impossible to go against it. The frogs were not jumping now but rather crawling and paddling, their pace slowed to something not much better than a human could wade.

“Worse higher up,” shouted Kelvin to Vinnie, as they lay flat on the frogsled, drenched, mud-spattered, and windblown, gripping on for dear life. “Wind’s about eighty kilometers an hour down here, double that at two thousand meters, double again at ten thousand meters.”

“It’s bad enough here,” yelled Vinnie. The frogsled had almost gone over several times, and would have if Theodore had not already deployed a kind of gripping keel that provided greater stability, again at the cost of slowing their speed even more.

“We are getting close to the eye,” Theodore called back to them. He was strapped in at the front of the sled, the reins in whatever he called his hands. “Would’ve been there hours ago if we could have cut straight across. But we’re getting close.”

How Theodore knew this was impossible to fathom, but an hour later he lifted the keel. The frogs began to jump again, short jumps that made the sled lurch forward with a sucking pop as the surface tension was broken. Kelvin raised himself up slightly, grimacing as the wind cut at the skin on his face that wasn’t protected by mask and goggles. But the wind was definitely weakening. The rushing clouds were slower ahead too, some breaking up and being sucked back behind them, into the eternal circular motion of the storm. He hadn’t noticed before, but it was getting quieter too, the noise of the Roar subsiding as they continued deeper into the eye of the storm.

“The calm center,” said Theodore. He sat up straighter and breathed in deeply, the air no longer quite so full of spray, mud, and particulate fungus. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Kelvin and Vinnie did not remove their masks to take a breath. They looked at each other, then at Mazith. She was lying at right angles to them, behind Theodore, pressed as flat as she could make herself on her stomach, with her head turned toward the clone siblings. Her eyes behind her mud-smeared goggles were shut, her breathing mask tight around her mouth.

Kelvin reached across and tapped her on the shoulder, repeating the movement a second later. Mazith stirred and sat up, grimacing as the wind smacked her wetly in the face. At that same moment, Vinnie snatched Mazith’s heat-beam from her shoulder holster and pointed it at the young officer’s head, finger next to the firing stud.

“We’ve got a few questions, Lieutenant,” said Vinnie.

“Are you really a special communicator?” asked Kelvin.

“Yes,” said Mazith. “Of course I am!”

“Why do we need a special communicator?” asked Vinnie.

“Uh, I guess, Navy HQ thought I could be useful,” replied Mazith. “I mean, there are VIPs who want to know what’s happened to their children, without delay.”

“Maybe true,” said Vinnie harshly. “But I bet there’s more to it. What’s the Rotarua doing?”

“I don’t know,” said Mazith. “Just a patrol. I’m only a lieutenant, I don’t know anything.”

“We know that’s true in general,” said Kelvin kindly. “But we think you might be an exception and actually know something. So why are you really here?”

“To communicate,” said Mazith. “That’s all.”

“How many special communicators has the Terran Navy got?”

“That’s top secret,” said Mazith. “Of course.”

“There are not that many, are there?” asked Kelvin. “Because they can’t be gengineered, right?”

“No,” said Mazith.

“So why send one of these incredibly rare special communicators into the wilds of Venus, into the Swamp, into the Roar?” asked Vinnie. “Please tell us why you’re really here, because otherwise I am—with great regret—going to shoot you, then Kelvin and I will turn around and go back right now and report that the ship was a write-off and you got killed by something along the way.”

“No!” exclaimed Mazith. “We have to keep going!”

“Why?” asked Kelvin.

“Because she … they … there are survivors.”

“Who is she?” asked Vinnie quickly. “And how do you know?”

“I … I can’t tell you,” said Mazith.

“Lieutenant Mazith,” said Vinnie. “You know that Kelvin and I are veterans of the Third Martian Intervention. You know I was an ASAP. I really will kill you if I’m not satisfied with your answers, and we definitely will not bother going any farther.”

“I’m … I’m one of a triplet,” said Mazith. “It’s top secret. Everyone thinks there can only be telepathic pairs, but there are three of us.”

“Let me guess,” said Kelvin. “Your third is on that downed ship.”

“Yes,” sobbed Mazith. “Jezeth’s in one of the survival pods. When they landed, they opened the air lock, and something got in, she said the others were careless, and now they’re … they’re … she doesn’t know what they are, not exactly dead, but not alive, there’s a fungus, she saw a little before she locked herself away … she’s hurt, she can’t send very much …”

“But why put you in a rescue party?” continued Vinnie. “Sure, they lose one communicator but then they’ve still got a pair like everyone else. Why risk that to try and rescue this Jezeth?”

Mazith didn’t answer for a moment.

“Remember what I said about answering my questions,” said Vinnie. Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact.

“Jezeth’s a made communicator,” whispered Mazith. “She’s younger than Lyman and I, eight years younger, gengineered to link up with us, and it worked. Sort of worked … there are … problems. So we have to get her back.”

“Why was she on the ship?” asked Kelvin. He paused, a nasty thought creeping into his brain. “And were there really any VIP kids on board?”

Mazith shook her head.

“All triplets,” she whispered. “Made ones. But they’re kind of … unstable, I guess … they do dumb stuff. Like steal the Jehosophat.”

“They stole the yacht?”

“Yes,” said Mazith. “I don’t know, Jezeth didn’t send to me until they were going down and they realized that they didn’t have a pilot. They had a crazy idea that they could defect to Mercury Inc., their genetic material would get them executive positions—”

“It’d get them vivisected most likely,” interrupted Vinnie. “I’ve seen some stupid young folk in my time, but …”

“Jezeth’s only fifteen,” said Mazith. “The oldest is … was … sixteen.”

“So you think we’ve really been sent here to rescue survivors?” asked Kelvin.

“Of course!” said Mazith. “What else …”

Kelvin and Vinnie looked at each other. They were thinking exactly the same thing, and it wasn’t about World Government trying to rescue a bunch of created telepaths. Far more likely that they’d want to make sure that any genetic information that could enable anyone else to duplicate the feat was destroyed. But to do that, they needed to know exactly where the ship had gone down.

“Tell me,” said Kelvin. “You said that telepathic communicators are always ‘aware’ of each other. Does that mean that you know where the others are? I mean in specific terms, like you could supply coordinates?”

“We always know where our partners are,” said Mazith. “In terms of a direction and distance. But Jezeth is injured or just too scared; I can’t link up with her properly. Otherwise, I could just tell you exactly where to go.”

“It wasn’t Jezeth I was thinking about,” said Kelvin. “Do you know where Lyman is right now, on the Rotarua?”

Mazith shut her eyes and was still for a moment. Then she pointed up at the sky at an acute angle.

“There,” she said. “About 1.2 million kilometers out, coming toward us.”

“So Lyman knows where you are too?” asked Vinnie, catching on.

“Direction and distance,” said Mazith. “But he can extrapolate that on a chart, he can use the … well, there’s a visualization system, to help us plot, that’s one of the experiments with the triplets, because you can triangulate so much better …”

“I reckon they’re on the return path of an elongated planetary orbit perpendicular to the standard plane,” said Kelvin, looking up where Mazith had pointed. “Can you tell if they’re accelerating on that course?”

“I can only sense the direction and velocity,” said Mazith. “Is this important? I could send to Lyman and ask him.”

Kelvin did a mental calculation of attack paths, ordnance speed, and launch windows. It seemed extremely probable to him that the Rotarua was on a sneaky approach pathway to launch something targeted by courtesy of the unaware Lieutenant Mazith, and after doing that, it would then continue on into the obscurity of deep space.

“I think we’ll keep communication silence for a while,” said Kelvin. “Don’t send anything unless I say so, all right?”

“Yes, sir,” said Mazith.

“You say the young triplet, Jezeth, she’s not sending properly,” said Vinnie. “What is she sending?”

“After she locked herself in the lifeboat, it’s just been flashes of emotion. It’s common in the made triplets; if they get unbalanced, they can’t focus properly, and I have to block out most of the terrified stuff that she does send. It’s like someone screaming all the time. Please, Major. I don’t know all the ins and outs of the program or anything, but I do know my little sister is on that ship. I’ll do whatever you say, but can we please go on and help her?”

Vinnie looked at Kelvin.

“How long have we got if they do launch something once they’ve got the target from the lieutenant here?”

“What!” exclaimed Mazith, her back suddenly rigid, her neck tensed.

“At 1.2 million klicks out, they’re probably coming in at two gees, a spread of the latest-generation tactical multis launched half a mill out …” Kelvin figured it out in his head as he talked. “I reckon we might have just short of an hour once they confirm the target.”

“But … but my orders … we’re meant to rescue the survivors and take the yacht back up!” protested Mazith. “Why would they launch missiles?”

“Figure it out,” said Vinnie. “World Gov doesn’t want anyone else to get the technology to make telepaths. They know most of them are dead already because you told them so. Better to waste a couple of communicators and some reactivated old grognards than to risk someone else’s finding the genetic trove.”

“But I wouldn’t give them my location to be a target!”

“They don’t need to ask you,” said Kelvin wearily. “Won’t your mate on the cruiser just point and say ‘There she is’ when the XO looms over him and asks? I bet you’ve been told to report in when you sight the yacht, right?”

“Yes,” said Mazith. She was quiet for about twenty seconds, then she said, “I … I suppose you’re right. What are … what are you going to do? Shoot me and go back?”

“Nope,” said Kelvin. “I think we’re going to do what they don’t expect.”

“Which is what?” asked Vinnie.

“Find that damn yacht and fly it back up,” said Kelvin. “As soon as we clear the Roar, we start squawking to Venusport, Venus Above, and everyone else about how we’ve successfully carried out the rescue. That’ll bring the picket ships over, the Rotarua won’t attack if anyone’s watching. They’ll sheer off—with all the publicity, Terran Navy has to call us heroes, we sign a few secret forms, and go back to normal life.”

“You hope!” said Vinnie, with a snort. “We have to find the ship in the first place and sort out whatever—”

“The ship’s over there,” said Theodore, who made no attempt to hide the fact he had been listening intently the whole time. “Leastways, I reckon it is, judging from the look of things.”

He did something complicated with the reins, tugging on the secondary nerve ganglions that lined the frogs’ ridged backs. They slowed, then stopped, paddling gently in the shallow water. Theodore slipped over the side and immersed his head completely underwater, the fungal filaments on his scalp waving. When he came back up, he nodded.

“There’s something over in that direction,” he affirmed. “A current of destruction flowing … a burn-off where the ship came down, I guess.”

“I don’t know …,” said Vinnie. “You reckon the Rotarua will be in a launch position an hour from when they know we’re at the location, Kelvin?”

“Yeah, give or take five minutes.”

“But I won’t report we’ve found it,” said Mazith urgently. “I promise.”

“What if Lyman checks in with you?” asked Kelvin. “Could you hold it back? You mentioned receiving emotions, images … he could tell probably, right?”

“Yes, he might,” said Mazith. “But I could ask him not to tell—”

“Don’t be stupid, Lieutenant,” said Vinnie. “He’s up there, on the bridge, surrounded by superior officers. He’d tell them. So would you if you were in his position. He won’t know why they want the location fix.”

“So we’ll have say fifty-five minutes to get into orbit and start shouting from when we see the ship and Mazith gets pinged from the Rotarua,” said Kelvin.

“Doable?” asked Vinnie.

“Yes,” said Kelvin. “If she’s not too damaged. If we can deal with whatever fungus offed the rest of the triplets. If we can—”

“Don’t break out into Kipling,” warned Vinnie. “Shakespeare’s bad enough.”

“It would be easier to shoot the lieutenant and just go back,” offered Theodore.

Kelvin and Vinnie looked at the Leper, who shrugged not so much with his shoulders but with a curious undulating movement of his fungal carapace.

“I’m just saying. It’s not a recommendation or anything.”

“You’d better come with us if we try to lift the yacht,” said Kelvin.

“Nope,” said Theodore. “I’m a Venusian now, got no business in space. I figure if there’s an hour going, I’ll hightail it on the sled. You mentioned multis, but I’m presuming low-yield microfusion, maybe a hand of eight. I reckon there’s a reasonable chance I can get clear of that.”

Vinnie gave him the look.

“Commissioned Engineer,” said Theodore. “Syrtis Spaceforce, before the amalgamation, MBF for a while afterward. Long time ago.”

“Hell of a long time!” exclaimed Kelvin. “Syrtis got subsumed, what, back in ’21 or ’22. That’s ninety years!”

“Lepers live longer,” said Theodore. “Didn’t you see the bumper sticker on the back of the sled?”

“What’s a bumper sticker?” asked Mazith, Kelvin, and Vinnie, all at the same time.

“Ancient history,” said Theodore, with a sigh. “So what are we doing?”

“Lay on, McTheodore and damned be him who first cries ‘Hold! enough!’ ” said Kelvin.

“What does that mean?” asked Mazith.

“I know,” growled Theodore, and whipped up the frogs.

They found the Jumping Jehosophat three hours later, in the quiet heart of the eye of the Roar. The ship had landed well considering the circumstances, a better landing than Kelvin expected any autopilot to make. The ship was still in one piece, and was only slanted into the swamp at a gentle angle, the nose buried in mud and water some five meters or so, just past the cockpit escape hatch. Looking at it, Kelvin figured that the ship must have been flung out of the storm into the eye high enough to be able to make a series of corkscrewing turns within the calm center, and had then landed on its VTOL fans, only to discover that the apparently solid island beneath it was really loosely compacted mud.

As they sighted it, Mazith’s eyes glazed over. Vinnie had been watching for this, and immediately pushed the young woman over the side into the water, dragging her back onto the sled a moment later.

“Does he know you’ve found it?” asked Vinnie.

“Maybe,” coughed Mazith. “I … I just haven’t been trained to block, I couldn’t help answering—”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Kelvin. He looked at his watch, a locally made automatic winding timepiece that had no electronics at all. “We have to presume they know we’ve found it, have the position, and will fire on it. Fifty-five minutes to get into the ship and get out of here. Theodore, you’d better leave now.”

“In a few minutes,” said Theodore. “I’m kind of curious as to what’s got inside that ship.”

“Main air-lock outer door is open,” confirmed Vinnie, as they drew closer. She slipped over the side of the sled into the waist-deep water, heat-beam in her hand. Kelvin followed suit, and a moment later, so did Mazith. “Not good.”

“Nope,” agreed Theodore.

He snapped the reins, and the frogs turned quickly, pulling the sled into position for a quick getaway. But he didn’t leave.

Kelvin looked around. Here in the center, the fog settled like it usually did, but it was thin and he could see at least fifty meters. There was no visible threat, nothing was coming out of the air-lock door, nothing moving around the ship.

“Is Jat around?” he whispered to Vinnie. “Because I don’t particularly fancy going in there myself.”

“Wimp,” said Vinnie. “She’s here. Don’t know how close.”

“Maybe I could contact Jezeth,” said Mazith eagerly.

“No!” Kelvin and Vinnie spoke together. “No contact with anyone, OK?”

“So what are you going to do?” asked Theodore with interest, from several meters back.

“We have to go in,” said Kelvin. “Time’s getting away.”

“Someone’s coming out!” exclaimed Mazith, pointing. “It’s one of the other triplets, not dead after all!”

She started to wade forward as a figure appeared in the air-lock door. A teenaged boy in a bright gold-and-black civilian flight suit, without a helmet. He stood in the air lock and waved one arm jerkily.

“Stay back,” ordered Vinnie. “Lieutenant Mazith! Halt!”

Mazith didn’t obey. She thrashed vigorously through the water toward the open air lock, calling out, “Hey!”

Vinnie cursed and dashed after her, reaching out to pull her back by the harness of her Terran Navy webbing belt. But it broke, the fabric having rotted away in just the few days of exposure. Mazith floundered on.

In the air lock, the man waved again but he also rose up, feet dangling, a huge pink spore mass suddenly visible behind him. Fungal creepers ran beneath the man’s feet and splashed out into the water, racing toward Mazith with frightening speed.

Kelvin and Vinnie fired together, heat-beams sizzling over Mazith’s head as they targeted the spore body in the air lock and its human puppet. But unlike most Venusian fungi the thing didn’t burst into flames. The pencil-thin beams just drilled smoking, blackened holes and more and more spore creepers kept spewing from it, the leading ones rushing toward the frantically reversing Mazith.

She only made it a few meters back before they latched on to her, drilling through lizard-skin and artificial fibers and straight through skin, following blood vessels and nerves and muscles, holding her upright as she screamed. Then she stopped screaming, and her arms lifted up and down, as if the fungus was testing its control of its new puppet.

“Back and sweep,” ordered Vinnie tersely, firing in broad arcs across the water only ten meters ahead, trying to stop the creepers. Kelvin followed suit, backing and shooting and swearing, but the creepers were going wide and there were so many of them, dozens and dozens of tendrils that would encircle them both in a matter of seconds, and Theodore and the frogsled too—

Something erupted from the water just behind Kelvin. He began to turn, and it smashed into him and pushed him deep underwater. Panicking, he reached up to claw his way to the surface—and everything above went white, the white of utmost brilliance that marked the detonation of a tactical plasma grenade.

Even facedown under a meter of dirty water and wearing goggles, Kelvin was blinded for a few seconds. He thrashed and fought in dark fear as something dragged him out of the water, till he realized it was a human hand and not fungal tendrils about to bore into his flesh.

“Brace your feet!”

Kelvin dug his feet in and leaned back as water rushed around him. His vision cleared, apart from some dancing spots of darkness. He briefly saw a deep, smoking crater between himself and the Jumping Jehosophat, before it was once again filled as the waters rushed back in. Theodore was whipping his frogs into a frenzy of paddling and jumping to keep the sled from being sucked back, while Vinnie was bulling her way against the current toward him and the woman who was still holding him up.

“A hit, a very palpable hit,” muttered Kelvin, shivering. Not from cold, for it was as warm as ever, the water still steaming and boiling twenty meters away, the final aftereffects of the grenade.

There was nothing left of Lieutenant Mazith and the fungus tendrils. She might never have existed at all.

“Never seen anything like that puppeteer,” said Jat, slotting the snout of the Mark XXII Plasma Grenade projector over her back into its harness, the whine of its protective shield generator slowly fading as the weapon went into standby mode. She was an Oscar Goodson clone, small and wiry, and apart from the grenade-launcher harness and several other weapons, she wore only a kind of lizard-skin swimsuit, and the rest of her body, face and hairless scalp included, was covered in swamp lichen grown in a splinter pattern mimicking ASAP Terran equatorial jungle camouflage. A particularly large frog paddled placidly in a circle behind her, trailing a rig rather like the travois of the Plains Indians of Earth. “You reckon there’s more inside?”

Kelvin spat out some water, rinsed his goggles, and took a look at the air lock. The plasma blast had scoured out the air lock and the fungal mass that he’d seen there, doubtless along with all the electronics and who knew what else. They’d be lucky if they could get it to close manually now. But he wasn’t particularly worried about that. The thought of more puppeteer fungus was of much more immediate concern.

“Probably not,” called out Theodore. “I’ve seen them puppeteers before. Single spore body always, no groups or clusters. They always keep one life-form to use as a decoy and absorb the rest. Interesting fellers.”

“ ‘Probably not’ doesn’t sound all that convincing,” said Kelvin. He looked at his watch. “Forty-eight minutes.”

“Shit,” said Vinnie, raising her heat-beam. Kelvin’s head flashed up. There was another jerking, twisting figure in the air lock, another puppet raised by the bright pink threads of the fungus behind it.

“Turn and brace!” ordered Jat tersely, unlimbering the launcher. Kelvin felt a crawling sensation across his skin as the force shield extended outward. He had already spun about and was hunching down, with his eyes closed, when the second grenade went off.

A minute later he was blinking and hopping backward to avoid a stream of very hot water that had rushed past as the shield came down. The launcher’s power pack could only maintain the shield for two or three seconds, to protect a squad from the initial blast. It wasn’t designed for the aftereffects of detonation close to water.

The yacht’s air lock was now definitely out of operation, the outer door hanging at a slight angle, scorch marks and pockmarks of melted alloy visible on the inside.

“So what are the chances of there being more than two?” asked Jat.

Vinnie shrugged and looked at Kelvin.

“Too risky to go in,” she said. “We’d better hightail it out of here with Theodore.”

“I guess so,” said Kelvin heavily. He looked up at the clouds above, visualizing the sky beyond and the missiles that would be streaking in sometime in the next thirty-eight minutes or thereabouts. “What about if I go in? The ship’s been venerified; they’ll have a deluge system of antifungals operated from the bridge.”

“You’d have to get to the bridge, and you know most of those antifungals aren’t worth shit for the stuff out here,” said Vinnie.

“I’ll go have a look,” said Theodore. He got off his sled and started to wade ahead toward the ship. He didn’t bother drawing his heat-beam.

“Hey!” called out Vinnie. “Wait up!”

“Lot of the local fungi leave me alone,” called out Theodore. “I’ll have a look around. If I’m not back in five minutes, help yourself to the sled.”

He gingerly tested the half-melted lip of the air lock but it had already cooled enough, so he hauled himself aboard, disappearing inside.

“I fucking hate Venus sometimes,” said Kelvin.

“It is what it is,” replied Jat with a shrug. “You got to admit, it’s an improvement on Mars.”

“Anything is an improvement on Mars,” said Kelvin. He looked at his watch again. “Anyone know the exact kill radius of whatever Terran Navy uses for tac nukes these days?”

“Got to be five kays each warhead, and they’ll overlap a bunch,” said Jat. “Also, the Roar will deflect them some, so the spread will be uneven. We could get lucky.”

“I haven’t noticed a lot of luck in the last little while,” said Kelvin.

“So we’re due some,” said Vinnie. “Quit with the whining.”

“I wasn’t whining,” protested Kelvin. “Just pointing out a fact.”

“Movement,” said Jat, raising the grenade launcher. “I only got one shot left with this, by the way.”

“It’s Theodore …” said Kelvin. The Leper appeared in the air lock, but there was something strange … he was holding up a bluish figure that might be another differently colored puppeteer or something equally dangerous …

“Hold your fire till my command,” ordered Vinnie tersely.

“It’s all clear!” called out the Leper. “A few minor things growing here and there, nothing serious.”

He lifted the blue-encrusted shape, which moved of its own accord a little, revealing a head and limbs.

“This is Jezeth! The triplet, Mazith’s ‘little sister,’ ” he called. “She escaped the puppeteer but has what we call the blue blanket. I’ll have to take her with me, she’ll die under any Terran treatment.”

“I thought Lepers had to volunteer!” called out Vinnie.

Theodore gave his strange, rippling shrug.

“You could say she has,” he said. “The blue blanket hasn’t killed her, and she’ll come back to consciousness and a good life in time, I would say.”

Kelvin looked at his watch. Thirty-four minutes.

“We have to take off and get the word out,” he said.

“I don’t think I can just leave that girl with Theodore,” said Vinnie. She looked at Jat, who nodded. “You take the ship up, Kel. We’ll go with Theodore.”

“You sure?” asked Kelvin.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” said Vinnie. “To tell you the truth I was never keen on leaving the planet anyway. I haven’t been off Venus since we were demobbed. I guess the place has grown on me.”

Kelvin didn’t laugh at the old joke.

“Take care, then,” he said, giving her a quick one-armed hug. “I’ll do my best to make sure the Rotarua doesn’t launch anything. I’ll get the rescue story out.”

“Here,” said Jat, handing over a flame pistol, the bigger military version of the heat-beams Kelvin and Vinnie carried. “You never know; Theodore might have missed something.”

Kelvin took the weapon and made as if to hug Jat as well. She ducked under his arm in a lightning move and punched him very lightly on the side of the head, which for Jat was pretty much an extreme show of affection.

Theodore carried the girl out of the air lock, lifting her high as he waded over to the waiting frogsled. Kelvin raised a hand as he passed, but not too close.

“Thanks, Theodore,” he said. “Stay leprous.”

As Kelvin expected, the outer door of the air lock wouldn’t shut under power and he didn’t have time to wrestle with the hydraulic system. The inner door did shut, however, and he closed every hatch behind him as he made his way cautiously to the bridge, flame pistol ready. There were patches of mold all over the place, but nothing that moved, sent out tendrils, blew spores into the air, or otherwise seemed immediately inimical.

The bridge was sealed, which was good and bad. Good because it meant it should be relatively unaffected by anything Venusian and bad because it took Kelvin five minutes of his precious time to circumvent the security lockout using old military override codes that, as he had hoped, were grandfathered into the ship’s operating system.

The bridge was fungus-free. Lights winked here and there, indicating the presence of standby power and dormant systems, another sign that the landing had been much more successful than it deserved to be. Kelvin hurried forward past the rear seats for the nonexistent bridge crew, checked the command pilot’s chair to make sure there wasn’t anything nasty waiting in its highly padded interior, and sat down, his hand sliding easily into the authorization glove. This was the real test.

A holographic screen flickered in the space in front of his eyes.

“Commander Kelvin Kelvin 21, Terran Navy, assuming emergency command in potential disaster situation,” rasped Kelvin. He felt the slight prick of the sampler. The screen flashed amber, then red, then finally the green of acceptance. Other holographic screens blinked into bright existence, the authorization glove slid away and a control stick rose up under his hand.

Kelvin scanned the screens. The layout was familiar enough. There were various small malfunctions, a couple of big ones like the open exterior air lock, but on the whole he thought he could raise ship. The lifting fans in the wings were out of the water, and as the whole craft had been venerified, should work even if they weren’t. The nose was probably dug into the mud a bit, but he could tilt his wings and edge backward and up.

He looked at his watch. Twenty-nine minutes.

Ignoring the holographic interface and its complicated expert system-ruled procedures that would take too long, he twisted open the emergency catches, folding down the direct control panel with its heavy-duty switches and dials. Lights lit up on the panel as he turned the switches. The ship shuddered as the power plant shifted from standby to ready use. The lifting fans began to slowly whir in the wings, telltales indicating that they were a bit bent up but still within the margins of military tolerance. The expert system would have shut them down immediately, of course.

Kelvin flicked an icon on the holograph and it wiped blank, then refreshed to show a panning view of the exterior. There were clouds of vapor coming off the wings, probably just churned up swamp water. He could just make out the frogsled, leaping into the distance, Jat’s big frog its close companion.

Twenty-five minutes.

Kelvin ran over his mental checklist, flicking a few more switches. The lifting fans were slowly gathering speed. He had to push them ahead slowly, carefully watching the telltales, ready to shut down a fan if there was a problem. He could take off on two of the four fans, but not if one of them exploded and destroyed the wing.

What else? He got out of his seat and looked behind it, detaching the case with its emergency vacuum suit. He put it on but didn’t expand the concertina-like soft helmet, setting it on the copilot’s seat. Then he went to look at his watch, realized it was under the suit, and took a valuable thirty seconds to unseal at the wrist and strap the watch on the outside.

Twenty-two minutes.

“Plenty of time,” muttered Kelvin to himself. “I could make a martini. If I had the makings.”

He looked around again, and saw the bright green handle of the antifungal deluge system. Kelvin reached up and turned it to the right, a red-bordered holograph flicking up to offer numerous warnings, the most significant one being that no one could breathe the stuff that would be misted through every possible part of the ship.

Kelvin turned it to the right again and pulled it down. A Klaxon sounded a strident warning, very loud on the bridge. He sat back in his command chair and reached across for the emergency-suit helmet. Pushing it open, he fixed it over his head before connecting the external air supply. Then very deliberately he fastened his harness, double-checking every connection and point of attachment.

A yellow mist fell around him as he called up the weather radar, one small segment of the massive swirling storm of the Roar completely dominating the whole display. He looked at the airspeeds, rotating and moving the model across and up and down, his mind instinctively gauging how he would approach it, use it to lift him up, and when he was high enough, come slingshoting out of it and fire off the booster that would take the ship into orbit.

Eighteen minutes.

Kelvin’s fingers twitched. The lifting fans howled. There was a horrible creaking, sucking sound as the ship lurched backward and upward. The crash screen over the forward viewports slid back as the nose came out of the swamp, but Kelvin hardly bothered to look. He was feeling every motion of the ship, every small vibration, watching the telltales for the power plant, the fans, the control surfaces.

He fed more power to the fans. The ship rose higher. Several audio alerts sounded, squawking about ground proximity and the open air lock and a dozen other things. Kelvin ignored them. One fan was running ragged, drawing too much power and providing little lift. He shut it down and flew on the remaining three, now tilting them forward a little, the ship climbing up in a corkscrew. But he couldn’t keep it up all the way in the eye; there wasn’t enough room, and the fans couldn’t provide vertical lift for more than a thousand meters.

He had to go into the Roar. At exactly the right angle of attack.

The time was forgotten now, the closing cruiser on its attack run, his clone sister and friends trying to escape below. Kelvin’s whole being was with the ship and the great storm, his mind and body remembering lessons learned from the terrible ascents out of the battlefield on Mars, climbing through the raging dust storms that spun as fast as the Roar, with enemy ordnance exploding all around, in ships worse damaged than this one, crowded with the dead and dying, the bridge itself packed so close he could barely move his elbows out and knowing that even if they made it, he’d have to go back down again …

The ship shuddered violently and pitched up, Kelvin correcting, tweaking, using all his skill to ease into the windstream. Clouds whisked past the viewports, so fast they were like flickers of shadow. There were more audible warnings, more amber- and red-bordered holographs glaring near his face.

The control stick shuddered under his hand and the ship rocked violently. The fans were tilted right back now for horizontal flight, but the number three fan wouldn’t stay in that position. Kelvin shut it down, hesitated for a moment, hit two more switches, and pulled the short lever that emerged from the panel. A few seconds later, there was a deafening crack from somewhere aft and the ship jerked sideways. Kelvin’s left hand flew across holographic controls and manual switches, as he flew with his right hand tight on the stick. The ship would not come level, but it still answered, was still climbing with the storm.

A schematic flashed red in Kelvin’s peripheral vision. He glanced at it, seeing a hole where the number three fan used to be. He’d ejected it perhaps a second before it exploded, only just in time to save the wing, while still sustaining some damage.

The Jumping Jehosophat on two of four fans was only marginally controllable in the storm. Sweat poured down Kelvin’s face under his helmet, no matter how high he dialed up the air circulating through the suit. Though he was only handling a tiny control stick, flicking holographs and turning smooth manual switches, his arms felt like he’d been carrying heavy cargo under high gravity for hours.

In a moment, he would have to slingshot out, but if he did it even slightly at the wrong angle or the wrong speed, the ship would be torn apart, the mangled pieces being strewn widely over the Venusian swampscape.

And without him to alert Venus to their presence, the Rotarua would undoubtedly fire on the last known position of their errant telepathic communicators, and that would very likely take out Vinnie, Jat, Theodore, and the poor girl under the blanket of blue mold.

The moment came. Kelvin took it, without any preparatory calculations or consultation of the ship’s systems. He instinctively absorbed all the data on the screens in front of him, he felt the vibration, he sensed the speed, direction, and possibility.

The Jumping Jehosophat came catapulting out of the endlessly circling storm forty thousand meters high, pointing almost straight up. The fans began to lose their purchase in the thin air. For a moment the ship hung suspended, either to fall like a stone or rise to even greater heights.

Kelvin goosed the fans, made the slightest adjustment, and lined the ship up absolutely vertical for a straight ride to the stars. Then he hit the one-shot orbitmaker.

There was a second where he thought that the rocket booster wasn’t going to activate, where he felt his stomach rise up before the fall.

Then there was a roar greater and closer than the storm. Kelvin was savagely thrust back into his chair and he blacked out.

He came to feeling intensely aggrieved. How could he have blacked out? He never blacked out. He’d been designed from birth to be a pilot! But the emotion only lasted the merest instant. Already, he was automatically taking stock of his situation. There was no massive pressure holding him back. The orbitmaker was off and … he wriggled in place … they were in zero G. In some sort of orbit, at least for the time being.

His eyes raced over the displays, his full senses returning. With them came a sudden shock. How long had he been out? Kelvin’s arm jerked but his watch wasn’t there, it had fallen off his suit and was floating somewhere. The ship’s time was meaningless, the display set to Venus Above.

His fingers sped across controls, bringing up comms. Radio, laser-link, maser, every damn thing the ship possessed. At the same time, he activated scans, looking for his own position, the picket ships, Venus Above, and, most important, the Rotarua.

There she was, a massive blip coming around the curve of the planet, heading in fast and almost … almost but not quite … in attack range, either to take out him or launch on the crash site.

Automatic queries were coming in, answering the hails he had set in motion. Venusport Traffic Control, the familiar hoarse lungy voice of the expert system, emotionlessly asking where he had come from, what he was doing, why his transponder was off.

Kelvin used the manual board to flick on the backup emergency transponder and plugged his suit into the comm system, to broadcast by all means across many channels.

“Anyone receiving, anyone receiving, this is Kelvin Kelvin 21, pilot in charge of the salvaged vessel Jumping Jehosophat. We have damage, comms issues, request relay from any receiving party to Venusport Traffic, Venus Above Orbit Control. Please relay position as per data blip, and relay following to Terran Navy NOIC Aphrodite. Vessel located planetside, no survivors. Lieutenant Mazith killed by fungal hostile. Despite damage, ship is maneuverable, I intend docking Venus Above Hazard Area, please be advised need high-level de con.”

As his words went out, Kelvin settled back in his seat. On the scan, he saw the Rotarua change course and slow, as if it were never intending any kind of attack run anyway. A Martian picket ship was coming in over the pole, closely followed by a Mercury Corp patrol vessel and some small civilian craft that might well be a newshound.

Vinnie and the others would be safe, at least from an attack from space, and he figured they were good for anything else.

Beneath him, the clouds of Venus roiled, the Roar like some dark, unwavering eye looking up toward him, as if to get a good look for the next time he came to visit.

“Not a chance,” said Kelvin, waving. “I am never going back to see you, buddy. I’m not stepping one meter outside of Venusport, no matter what!”

At that moment, the audible alerts that had diminished to a whisper grew raucous again, and a flashing holograph bigger and brighter than any before erupted in front of his face.

“Orbital decay! Orbital decay!”

Kelvin sighed, and reached for the controls.