Old Venus

Frogheads

ALLEN M. STEELE

THE SHUTTLE FELL THROUGH THE CLOUDS—CLOUDS AS DENSE as grey wool, separating purple sky and sun above from perpetual rain below—for what seemed like a very long time until the windows finally cleared and Venus’s global ocean lay revealed: dark blue, storm-lashed, endless.

Engines along the spacecraft’s boatlike underbelly fired, forming a concentric circle of white-peaked wavelets that spread outward upon the ocean surface. Gradually the shuttle made its final descent until its hull settled upon the water. As careful as the pilots were, though, the splashdown was rough. A swift, violent jolt passed through the passenger compartment, shaking everyone in their seats, causing an overhead storage compartment to snap open and spill a couple of carry-on bags into the center aisle. Through the compartment, people cursed—mainly in Russian although a few American obscenities were heard as well—and someone in the back noisily threw up, an involuntary act that was greeted by more foul language.

Ronson wasn’t happy about the landing either. This wasn’t the first time he’d traveled off-world, but landing on Mars was mild compared to this. He couldn’t blame the guy a few rows back for getting sick. Although the shuttle was no longer airborne, it still remained in motion, slowly bobbing up and down as it was rocked by the ocean. He’d been warned to take Dramamine before boarding, and he was glad he’d heeded the advice.

Clutching the armrests, Ronson gazed through the oval porthole beside his seat. Rain spattered the outer pane, but he could still see where he was. Not that there was much to look at: ocean for as far as the eye could see—the Venusian horizon was about three miles away, nearly the same as Earth’s at sea level—beneath a slate-colored sky bloated by clouds that had never parted and never would. The shuttle was supposed to make planetfall at Veneragrad, but the floating colony must be on the other side of the spacecraft. Unless, of course, the pilots had miscalculated the colony’s current position and had come down—landed wasn’t the proper word, was it?—in the wrong place.

That was a possibility. Ronson had spent the last four months in hibernation, but his waking hours aboard the Tsiolkovsky had shown him that Cosmoflot’s reputation for ineptitude was well deserved. He’d just begun to consider the possibility that the shuttle was lost at sea when a tugboat came into view. Smoke belching from its funnel, the rust-flecked craft circled the shuttle until it passed out of sight once again. Several minutes went by, then there was a thump as its crew attached a towline to the shuttle’s prow. The shuttle began to move forward again, the tug hauling it toward its final destination.

Everyone on his side of the passenger compartment peered through the windows as the shuttle pulled into Veneragrad, including the middle-aged Russian in the aisle seat who unapologetically leaned over Ronson as he craned his head for a look at the man-made island. Veneragrad was as utilitarian as only a Soviet-era artifact could be: a tiered hemisphere a kilometer in diameter, a shade darker than the ocean it floated upon, the long, wooden piers jutting out from its sides giving it the appearance of an enormous, bloated water spider. Rickety-looking platforms, also constructed of native timber, rose as irregularly spaced towers from the outside balconies; they supported the open-top steel tanks that caught the rain and distilled it as the colony’s drinking water. Radio masts and dish antennae jutted out at odd angles from near the top of the dome; a helicopter lifted off from a landing pad on its roof. An ugly, unwelcoming place.

“Looks bad, yes?” The man seated beside him stared past him. “Better than nothing … it’s dry.”

Ronson had already learned that his traveling companion spoke English, albeit not very well. His breath reeked of the vodka he swilled from a bag-wrapped bottle on the way down from orbit; he’d opened it as soon as the shuttle entered the atmosphere. “Is this where you live?” he asked, if only for the sake of being polite. “Is this your home, I mean?”

The other man barked sullen laughter. “This hellhole? No! My home, St. Petersburg. Come here to make money. Sell … um … ah”—he searched for the right word—“computers, yes? Computers for office.”

Ronson nodded. He wasn’t much interested in making friends with the businessman, but it appeared that conversation was unavoidable. “Whole colony, built in space above Earth, sent here by rockets,” the businessman continued, telling Ronson something he already knew. “Dropped from orbit by para … para …”

“Parachutes.”

“Parachutes, yes. Come down”—he lifted his hands—“sploosh! in water.” He waved the bag toward the window. “People then build onto it. Wood from floating … um, forests, yes? Floating forests on moss islands.”

“Yes, I see.” Again, the businessman wasn’t telling him anything new.

“Yes, you see.” The Russian took another swig from his bottle, then offered it to Ronson. “So why you come here?”

Ronson shook his head at the bottle. There were several ways he could get out of this unwanted conversation. He opted for the easiest approach. “I’m a detective,” he said, and when the businessman gave an uncomprehending look, he rephrased his answer in simpler, if inaccurate, terms. “A cop.”

“A cop. Yes.” The businessman gave him the distrustful look Ronson anticipated, then withdrew the bottle and settled back into his seat.

Ronson didn’t hear from him again for the rest of the way into port. Which suited him well. He didn’t want to talk about why he’d come to Venus.

—–—

The heat hit him as soon as he stepped through the hatch. It was like walking into a sauna; the air was hot and thick, hard to breathe, humid beyond belief. The sun was larger and warmer here than on Earth, yet little more than a bright smear in the sky that heated up the atmosphere. Ronson began to sweat even before he reached the end of the wooden gangway that led from the hatch to the pier where the shuttle had been berthed. A fine, almost misty rain was falling, and it too was warm; he didn’t know whether to take off the denim jacket he’d worn on the way down or keep it on. The dockworkers didn’t seem to mind. Most of them wore only shorts, sneakers, and sometimes a rain hat, with the women wearing bikini tops or sports bras. They unloaded the bags from the cargo bay, and Ronson took a few moments to find his suitcase before walking the rest of the way down the pier to the spaceport entrance.

There were only a couple of customs officers on duty, bored-looking Russians in short-sleeve uniform shirts who regarded the line of passengers with bureaucratic disdain. The officer Ronson approached silently examined his passport and declaration form, gave his face a quick glance, then put his stamp on everything and shrugged him toward an adjacent arch. No one had asked him to open his bag, but he knew what was about to happen. Sure enough, bells rang from the arch as soon as he walked through it. Its weapons detector had found the gun he was carrying.

Just as well. It only meant that he’d meet the police sooner than he had planned.

An hour of sitting alone in a detention area, another half hour of angry interrogation by a port-authority officer whose English wasn’t much better than the businessman’s, then Ronson was loaded onto an electric cart and spirited to police headquarters. Along the way, he got what amounted to a nickel tour of Veneragrad. The colony seemed to consist mainly of narrow corridors with low ceilings and low-wattage light fixtures, their grey steel walls decorated with grime, handprints, and stenciled Cyrillic signs, then the cart passed through a broad doorway and Ronson suddenly found himself in the city center: a vast atrium, its skylight ceiling a couple of hundred meters above the floor, with interior balconies overlooking a central plaza. As the cart cut across the plaza, Ronson caught glimpses of Veneragrad’s daily life. Residents in shorts, vests, and T-shirts resting on park benches, hanging laundry on balcony clotheslines, standing in line in front of fast-food kiosks. A group of schoolchildren sitting cross-legged near a fountain, listening as their young teacher delivered a lesson. Two men in a heated argument; another couple of men watching with amusement.

A statue of V. I. Lenin stood in the center of the plaza. Incongruously dressed in a frock coat and high-collar shirt no Venusian colonist would be caught dead wearing—even inside the city, the air was tropically warm—he pointed toward some proud socialist future just ahead. But the statue was old and stained, and a broken string that might have once been a yo-yo dangled from the tip of his finger. The Communist Party was just as dead on Venus as it was on Earth; it was just taking the locals a little longer to get rid of its relics.

The cart entered another dismal corridor, then came to a halt in front of a pair of battered doors painted with a faded red star. The port-authority officer who’d questioned Ronson ushered him through the crowded police station to a private office, and it was here that he met Arkandy Bulgakov.

Veneragrad’s police chief was about Ronson’s own age, short and broad-chested, with the short-banged Caesar haircut that never seems to go out of style with European men. Seated at a desk piled with paperwork, he listened patiently while the officer delivered a stiff-toned report of the visitor’s offense, punctuated by placing Ronson’s Glock on the desk along with its extra clips, then Bulgakov murmured something and waved the officer out of the room. He waited until the door was shut, then he sighed and shook his head.

“You’re the same guy who e-mailed me a while ago about the missing kid?” His English was Russian-accented but otherwise perfect.

“That’s me.” Ronson motioned to an empty chair in front of the desk; Bulgakov nodded, and he sat down. “Sorry about the gun. I was going to tell you about it when I reported in, but …”

“We don’t allow private ownership of firearms. Didn’t you know that?”

“I figured that my license might exempt me.”

“No exemptions here. Only police are allowed to carry lethal weapons.” Bulgakov’s chair squeaked as he leaned forward to pick up the Glock; he briefly weighed it in his hand before opening a drawer and dropping it in. “I won’t fine you, but you may not carry this. I’ll give you a receipt. You may reclaim it when you leave.”

“All right, but what am I supposed to use until then? I might need a sidearm, you know.”

“To find a missing person? I doubt it.” Catching Ronson’s look, the chief shrugged. “You can buy a Taser if it makes you feel better, but only if you’re going outside the city. And if that’s the case, then your chances of finding this fellow …”

“David Henry.”

“… David Henry alive are practically zero. At any rate, he’s not in Veneragrad, I can tell you that right now.”

“That’s what you told me five months ago,” Ronson said, “and that’s what I told my client, too. But the old man isn’t satisfied. His kid was last seen here nearly a year ago, when he came to Venus on a trip his dad bought him as a college-graduation gift.”

Bulgakov raised a querulous eyebrow. “His father must be rich.”

“The family has a few bucks, yeah, and the kid likes to travel. He’s already been to the Moon and Mars, so I guess Venus was next on his list. Personally, if he was my boy, I would’ve given him a watch, but …”

“We don’t have many tourists, but we do get some. His kind is not unfamiliar. Privileged children coming to see the wonders of Venus”—a brief smirk—“such as they are. They go out to the vine islands, take pictures, collect a few souvenirs. Now and then they get in trouble … a bar fight, dope, soliciting a prostitute … and they wind up here. But they eventually go home and that’s the end of their adventure.”

“That’s not how it ended for him. He didn’t come home.”

“So it appears.” Bulgakov turned to the antique computer on one side of his desk. He typed something on the keyboard, then swiveled the breadbox-size CRT around so that Ronson could see the screen. “This is him, yes?”

Displayed on the screen was a passport photo of a young man in his early twenties: moonfaced, arrogant blue eyes, sandy hair cut close on the sides and mousse-spiked on top. Good-looking but spoiled. The same boy in the picture his father had given Ronson when he’d visited the family home in Colorado Springs. “That’s him.”

Bulgakov turned the screen back around, typed in something else, paused to read the information that appeared. “He was registered at the Gastinitsa Venera,” he said after a few seconds, “but failed to check out. When my detectives went there to investigate, they were told that his luggage was found in his room, which apparently he hadn’t visited for several days before his scheduled departure aboard the Gagarin. My men visited all the restaurants, shops, and bars, and although he’d been noticed in some of them, no one who worked in those places had seen him recently. And, of course, he failed to appear at the Cosmoflot departure gate to make his shuttle flight.”

“You told me this already, remember? In your e-mail.” This was a waste of time. Which was what he’d expected; local police were seldom much help in missing-person cases. Still, he always made a point of checking in with the cops. Professional courtesy, mainly, but there was always the chance that he might learn something he could use.

“So I did, and I imagine that you shared the information with gospodin Henry. And when he contacted the Russian consulate in Washington … he did this, yes?… he told them this as well.” Bulgakov leaned back in his chair. “Very well, let me tell you what I didn’t say in my e-mail, because the government back home doesn’t like to admit certain things and would be upset with me if I stated them in an official letter. On occasion … not often, but every once in a while … a young man like David Henry disappears while visiting Venus. Sometimes he wanders down the docks after he has been drinking all night, falls off a pier, and drowns, and his body is devoured by scavenger eels. That has happened. Sometimes he goes out on a boat tour with an unlicensed operator who’s actually a criminal, who robs him, murders him, and leaves his body to rot on an island. That’s happened, too. And sometimes … well, worse things happen.”

“Such as?”

Bulgakov hesitated. “You’ve heard of vityazka, haven’t you?”

“Yaz? Who hasn’t?”

“That’s the street name back home. Vityazka iz kornia is what it’s called here.” Bulgakov warmed to the subject. “It’s derived from the same slickbark trees that grow on some of the vine islands and from which the pharmaceutical industry has bioharvested korenmedicant, a clinical analgesic used in hospitals. But while koren comes from tree bark, vityazka comes from the roots. A narcotic as addictive as heroin …”

“And tastes just as bad when you smoke it,” Ronson finished. “Know all about yaz. It’s all over America and Europe.”

Bulgakov scowled. He clearly didn’t like being interrupted. “What you probably aren’t aware of is exactly how the smugglers are getting it. Their growers … yaz croppers, we call them … go out to islands where slickbark trees are found. On the islands the drug companies have already harvested, they recover the tree roots left behind and process them for yaz. But everything that goes into this … cutting, boiling, curing … is hard work, not something anyone willingly wants to do. So sometimes they’ll abduct some poor tourist who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and force him into hard labor.”

“And you think that’s what happened to David Henry? He was shanghaied?”

“I’d say that’s a strong possibility.”

Ronson slowly let out his breath. His job had just become much more difficult. “If you’re right, then how do I find him? I understand those islands can drift quite a long distance …”

“There are thousands of them being carried by the ocean currents, and the croppers do a good job staying hidden. My people have always had trouble tracking them down. Locating the boy on one particular island will be difficult.” Bulgakov paused. “However, there may be a way. As you Americans say, it’s a long shot, but …”

“As we Americans say, I’m all ears.”

“Talk to a froghead.”

“A what?”

“Frogheads. The native aborigines. No one calls them Venusians … sounds like a bad movie. Anyway, they’re intelligent”—another smirk—“although I wouldn’t call them good company. And they see a lot of what goes on here.”

“I can’t even speak Russian. How am I supposed to talk to …?”

“I know someone who does. Mad Mikhail. You can find him down on the docks. Bring lots of rubles.” Bulgakov smiled. “And chocolate, too.”

“Chocolate?”

“You’ll see.”

Mad Mikhail hung out on the waterfront. Everyone who worked there knew who he was; all Ronson had to do was follow their pointing fingers to a small shack set up on the dock where the tour boats were moored.

Mad Mikhail made sushi from whatever he’d been brought by local fishermen, which he then sold to tourists. When Ronson found him, he was sitting on a stool inside his open-sided shack, cutting up something that looked like a cross between a squid and a lionfish and wrapping the filets around wads of sticky rice. He was a squat old man with a potbelly and fleshy arms and legs, his dense white beard nearly reaching his collarbone. His skin was wrinkled and rain-bleached, and he wore nothing but a frayed straw hat and baggy shorts; when he looked up at Ronson, it was with eyes both sharp and vaguely mystical.

“Sushi?” he asked, his rasping voice thickened by a Ukrainian accent. “Fresh today. Very good. Try some.”

Bulgakov had warned Ronson not to eat anything Mad Mikhail offered him; whatever he failed to sell today, he’d simply keep until tomorrow even if it had been spoiled by the heat and humidity. At least he spoke English. “No thanks. I’ve been told you can help me. I want to talk to a froghead.”

Mikhail’s eyes narrowed. “They are not frogheads. They are the Water Folk, the Masters of the World Ocean. You do not respect them, you do not talk to them.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know they …”

Mikhail slammed the long knife he’d been using down on the counter before him. “No one knows this! They call them frogheads, make jokes about them. Only I”—he jabbed a scarred thumb against his bare chest—“make friends with them when I came here over thirty years ago! Only Mikhail Kronow …!”

“You’ve been on Venus thirty years?” Ronson seized the chance to change the subject. “That means you would have belonged to one of the first expeditions.”

“Da.” He nodded vigorously, not smiling but at least no longer shouting. “Second expedition, 1978. Chief petty officer, Soviet Space Force.” A smile appeared within the white nest of whiskers. “The others went home, but I stayed. No one in Veneragrad been here longer …!”

“Then, Chief Petty Officer Kronow, you’re the person I need to see.” The best way to handle Mad Mikhail would be to appeal to his vanity. “I’d like to speak with the Water Folk … or rather, have you speak with them on my behalf since you know them so well.”

Mikhail’s gaze became suspicious. “About what? If it’s only a picture you want … pfft! Fifteen hundred rubles, they come up, you stand next to them, I take your picture. Take it home, put it on the wall. ‘See, there’s me with the frogheads.’ ” Disgusted, he spat over the side of the dock.

“I’m not a tourist, and I don’t want a picture.” Ronson reached into the pocket of his trousers—he’d have to buy shorts soon; his Earth clothes were beginning to stick to him—and produced the snapshot of David Henry his father had given him. Holding it beneath the shack’s awning so that the rain wouldn’t get it wet, he showed it to Mikhail. “I’m looking for this person. He came here almost a year ago, then disappeared. His family sent me here to find him.”

Mad Mikhail took the photo, closely inspected it. “I do not know this boy,” he said at last, “but the Water Folk would. If he went out to sea, they would have seen him. They see everyone who goes out into the World Ocean. You have chocolate?”

Ronson had purchased a handful of Cadbury bars at the hotel shop. He pulled them out and showed them to Mikhail. The old man said nothing but simply gave him a questioning look. Ronson found his money clip, peeled off several high-denomination notes, held them up. Mikhail thought it over for a moment. “Very well,” he said at last, easing himself down from his stool. “Come with me.”

He emerged from the shack wielding a cricket bat, the sort an Englishman would carry to a sports field. Taking the money and the chocolate bars from Ronson, he led the detective down the dock, passing the boats tied up alongside. Captains and crew members lounging on their decks watched him with amusement; someone called to him in Russian and the others laughed, but Mad Mikhail only scowled and ignored them.

He and Ronson reached the end of the dock. A wooden light post rose above the water slurping against the dock’s edge. The former cosmonaut raised the cricket bat and, with both hands, slammed it against the post: two times, pause, then two more times, another pause, then two more times after that. Mikhail stopped, peered out over the water, and waited a minute. Then he hit the post six more times, two beats apiece.

“This is how you summon fro … the Water Folk?” Ronson wondered if he was wasting his time.

“Yes.” Mikhail turned his head back and forth, searching. “They hear vibrations, come to see why I call them. They do this for no one but me.”

He’d barely completed his third repetition when, one at a time, three dark blue mounds breached from the rain-spattered surface just a couple of meters from the dock. With a chill, Ronson found himself being studied by three pairs of slitted eyes the color of tarnished pewter. Those eyes were all he could see for a few moments, then Mikhail held up the chocolate bars and the creatures swam closer.

“Move back and give them room,” Mikhail said quietly. “Do not speak to them. They will not understand you.”

One by one, the Venusian natives emerged from the water, climbing up onto the dock until they stood before Ronson and Mikhail. Each stood about a meter and a half in height, the size of a boy, and were bipedal, but their resemblance to humans ended there. They looked like a weird hybrid of a frog, a salamander, and a dolphin: sloping, neckless heads, broad-mouthed and lipless, with protruding eyes; sleek hairless bodies, streamlined and mammalian, their slender arms and legs ending in webbed, four-fingered hands and broad, paddlelike feet; short dorsal fins running down their backs, away from blowholes that vibrated slightly with each breath and tapered off as reptilian tails that barely touched the wet planks of the dock.

Ronson couldn’t see any anatomical differences between males and females even though he knew that the natives had two genders. Each were naked, their light blue underbellies revealing no obvious genitalia; only subtle splotches and stripes upon their wine-colored skin distinguished one individual from another.

And they smelled. As they came out of the water, his nose picked up a fetid, organic odor that reminded him of an algae bloom in summer. The stench was offensive enough to make him step back, and not just because Mad Mikhail had asked him to do so. If they came any closer, he was afraid he’d lose his lunch.

Ronson had recently read a magazine article about how an Egyptian-American scientist, who’d perished during a dust storm on Mars, had discovered just before his death certain genetic evidence linking Homo sapiens to the native aborigines of the Red Planet. He wondered if much the same link might exist between the people of Earth and the Water Folk of Venus, and was both intrigued and disgusted by the thought he might be related, in some distant way, to these … frogheads.

Mikhail unwrapped the chocolate bars and offered them to the natives. As he did so, he addressed them in a low, warbling croak: “Wor-worg wokka kroh woka.” It sounded like nonsense to Ronson, but the Water Folk apparently understood him. The ones on the left and right bobbed their heads up and down and responded in kind—“Worgga kroh wohg”—and moved toward him in a waddling, forward-hunched gait that might have been clumsy if it hadn’t been so fast.

Only the native in the center remained where it was. It watched its companions with what seemed to be disdain as they each took a chocolate bar from Mikhail. When they opened their mouths, Ronson was startled to see that they contained rows of short, sharp teeth, with slightly longer incisors at the corners of the upper set. He was even more startled by the way they gobbled down the chocolate bars. Repulsively long tongues snatched the candy from their webbed hands; chocolate bars that even a hungry child might have taken a couple of minutes to eat were devoured in seconds. And yet the third froghead—Ronson couldn’t help but to think of it that way—refused the bar that Mikhail held out to it.

“Why doesn’t it take it?” Ronson whispered.

“I do not know,” Mikhail murmured; he was a bit surprised himself. “They have never done that before.” He raised his voice again. “Wagga kroh?”

“Kroh wogko!” The third froghead’s tail swung back and forth in what seemed to be an angry gesture, its dull silver eyes narrowing menacingly. “Kroh wogko wakkawog!”

“What did it say?”

Mikhail didn’t respond at once. He held out the bar for another moment or two, then slipped it in his pocket. The other two Water Folk made hissing noises that sounded like protests, but the third one stopped thrashing its tail and appeared to calm down a little. “The one in the middle is the leader,” Mikhail said softly. “She …”

“You can tell it’s a she?”

“Their leaders are always females. She refused the chocolate because … I think … she said it’s poisonous.” He shrugged. “I am not sure. I speak their language, yes, but some words of theirs I do not know well.”

“But this is the first time you’ve seen any of them refuse chocolate?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve been giving it to them for many years. They love kroh. Nothing else like it on Venus. This is how I have made friends with them, learned how to talk to them.” A thoughtful pause. “I do not know why one of them would refuse to take it. Very strange.”

“Well, that’s interesting, but I’ve got a job to do.” Ronson pulled out David Henry’s photo again. “Show this to them,” he said as he handed it to Mikhail, “and ask if they’ve seen him.”

The reaction was immediate. The moment Mikhail held up the photo, all three frogheads became agitated. Their tails swished back and forth, sometimes slapping the dock boards, as their heads bobbed up and down. They hissed, the leathery tips of their tongues slipping in and out of their mouths, and air whistled from their blowholes. Then the clan leader pointed to the photo and spoke in a rapid stream of angry-sounding croaks.

“Oh, yes … they recognize him, all right.” Mikhail was just as surprised as Ronson. “And I do not think they like him very much.”

“I kinda figured that. Ask if they know where he is.”

Mikhail addressed the frogheads again, and once more they responded with head bobs and tail slaps. Then the leader bent almost double, shifted slightly to the left, and raised her tail to point to the left. Mikhail listened as she spoke to him at length, then he turned to Ronson.

“She knows where he is … on a moss island that’s now some distance from here. She said she will lead us to him, but only if we will take him away.”

“That’s exactly what I want.” Then he darted a look at Mikhail. “You said ‘we’?”

Mad Mikhail smiled at him. “Unless you think you can speak to them, I will have to go with you, yes? And I will have to hire a boat, yes?”

Ronson knew without asking that the fee was going to be considerable. But he’d brought plenty of rubles with him, and he could always recoup his expenses from his client. “All right. Tell them that we …”

Mikhail didn’t have a chance to translate. With no more conversation, the three frogheads suddenly turned and dove off the dock. Their bodies barely made a splash as they disappeared into the dark water. In an instant, they were gone.

“That was fast,” Ronson muttered.

“We have an understanding. They will come back tomorrow morning.” Mikhail turned away from the dock’s edge, started walking back toward his shack. “Be here then. I will hire a boat and pilot to take us where they lead us. Dasvidan’ye.”

“See you later.” At least he’d have time to buy new clothes and the equipment he’d need—namely a Taser, seeing that was the only kind of weapon he was permitted to carry. Yet he couldn’t help but notice the guarded expression on Mad Mikhail’s face and wonder if there was something the old man wasn’t telling him.

The Aphrodite was a beat-up fishing boat with rain-warped deck planks and a wooden hull that appeared to have been patched many times. To Ronson’s surprise, its captain was an American: Bart Angelo, middle-aged and a bit warped himself, smelling of fish and with ivory hair thinning at the top of his head. Forty thousand rubles was a lot to pay for the charter of a weathered old tub, but Ronson had little choice in the matter. He talked Angelo down to thirty-five thousand, and was grateful that he wouldn’t have to also pay for a crew that the captain had decided to leave behind.

The frogheads returned, just as Mikhail said they would. Ronson assumed they were the same three he’d met yesterday, but he couldn’t tell for sure. They didn’t climb on the dock again, though, but instead lingered in the water beside the Aphrodite, half-submerged eyes steadily watching the men as they prepared to leave. Ronson wondered how they’d known which boat they’d use; Mikhail told him that they’d simply waited until they spotted him and Ronson again, then followed them to the Aphrodite.

“They are not animals,” Mikhail added, giving him a stern look. “The Water Folk are intelligent … never forget that.”

Hearing this, Angelo laughed out loud. “If they’re so damn smart, then how come they keep getting tangled in my nets?”

“And what happens when they do?” Mikhail asked.

“They chew their way out.” The captain finished counting the wad of money Ronson had just handed him and shoved it in his shorts pocket. “Goddamn critters cost me a repair bill whenever they do that.”

Mikhail smiled knowingly. He didn’t reply, though, but instead went aft to loosen the stern line. Ronson heard him murmur something in Russian; he had no idea what he’d said, but it sounded rather amused.

The frogheads joined the Aphrodite as it chugged out of Veneragrad’s harbor. They swam alongside until the boat passed the outer buoys, then moved out front and surfed its bow wake as the boat picked up speed, occasionally breaching the surface just as if they were dolphins. Ronson was concerned at first that the captain would run them down, but once Angelo throttled up the diesel engines to twenty knots, the Water Folk returned to their previous positions. They had no difficulty keeping up with the boat; never once did Ronson or Mikhail completely lose sight of them.

Veneragrad gradually disappeared behind them, becoming smaller and smaller until it faded into the misty, perpetual rain. Long before it vanished over the horizon, though, they saw other signs of the human presence on Venus. They passed fishing schooners and tour boats heading out for the day, and at one point crossed the wake of one of the massive sea-dragon trawlers that prowled the global ocean for weeks on end. In the distance, they made out a tall structure erected on stilts: an oil derrick, probably owned by a Russian-Arab consortium, positioned just above a sea mount. Small, single-mast sailboats took advantage of the mild weather and fair winds, but only a couple; Venus was not a planet for pleasure boating, and amateur sailors were the kind who often vanished and were never seen again.

By early afternoon, though, all other vessels had disappeared, and Aphrodite was the only boat on the ocean as far as the eye could see. Yet it wasn’t alone. The first of the vine islands had come into view, and the Water Folk were leading the boat straight to them.

Ronson had never been a good student—he’d dropped out of college to join the NYPD, which in turn eventually led him to become a PI—but he remembered enough from his high-school science classes to recall the planet’s natural history. Billions of years ago, Venus had been Earth’s twin sister, and even similar enough to Mars to make the panspermia hypothesis a possible explanation for a shared genetic heritage among humans, the Martian shatan, and frogheads. At some point in the planet’s early eras, though, the Sun had raised the average global temperatures enough to cause a catastrophic greenhouse effect, which melted the polar ice caps and formed the permanent cloud layer with its incessant rain. Eventually the entire planet was flooded, its landmasses inundated before tectonic shifts could keep them above the rising waters.

All that remained was a global ocean, yet beneath the watery surface were the old continents with their canyons and mountain ranges, like some vast Atlantis that would never again see the light of day. In some places, the ocean bottom lay only a dozen or so fathoms down, and it was here that underwater vegetation grew in abundance. One of the most common forms of marine plant life was a thick, ropy kind of seaweed that, once it grew large enough to become buoyant, tended to break free and float to the surface. Ocean currents gradually caused these weeds to clump together and form floating islands, some kilometers in length.

Over countless millennia, life evolved on these drifting isles. The frogheads were one kind; the slickbark trees that were a harvestable source of everything from timber to pharmaceutical drugs to yaz were another. And once humans learned how to travel between planets, the people of Earth discovered that Venus was a world rich with resources just waiting to be exploited.

Not everyone was happy about this.

“We are raping this planet.” Mad Mikhail leaned against the starboard rail, watching the frogheads as they swam toward a vine island not much larger than a house. One of them had approached the boat and told Mikhail, in its croaking native tongue, that they needed a rest, so Angelo had grudgingly complied and dropped sea anchor near the next island they came upon. Now the Russian was in a reflective mood, breaking the pensive silence he’d maintained since leaving Veneragrad.

“Rape?” Angelo sat beneath the tarp strung as a canopy across the aft deck, eating a sandwich he’d made in the galley. “Don’t talk about your sister that way … it’s not nice.”

Mikhail ignored him, as did Ronson. The captain had an ugly sense of humor; Ronson had discovered this when he’d joined him for a while in the wheelhouse, only to have Angelo start telling him jokes that grew progressively more disgusting until he found an excuse to leave. “Why do you say that?” he asked, turning his back to the captain.

“We come here,” Mikhail said, “and we take and we take and we take, but we give nothing back.” He nodded toward the frogheads; they lay prone upon the island’s matted weeds, vines, and moss, dozing in the midday heat. “They suffer the most. We steal their forests, pollute their water with oil, ruin their islands …”

“And then they hang around Veneragrad so they can mooch candy bars from you.” Angelo shrugged. “Sounds like a fair trade to me.”

“No. Not fair.” Mikhail cast a cold glare at him. “Chocolate for a world … not a fair trade at all.”

“Yeah, well … look who got ’em hooked on it in the first place.” Noticing Ronson’s quizzical look, Angelo sneered. “You mean you don’t know? Chocolate is addictive to frogheads. Like cocaine, maybe even worse. Once they’ve had a taste, they gotta get more. And guess who got ’em started on it?”

“You lie!” Mikhail’s face was red. “I was not the first to do this! One of my shipmates …”

“O, sure. Maybe it wasn’t you, but you’re their number one pusher.” Angelo tossed the remnant of his sandwich overboard, wiped his hands against his shorts. “And if you’re not, then why don’t you toss over those candy bars you brung?”

Mikhail looked away, avoiding the accusation Angelo had made. Ronson wondered if it was true. “One day, we will pay for what we have done here,” he said quietly.

“Yeah, well … you’re paying me for this trip and the day ain’t getting any shorter.” Angelo stood up from the barrel, headed for the wheelhouse. “Tell the froggies to rise and shine. I want to find this place and go home.”

The captain didn’t get his wish. At the end of the day, the frogheads still hadn’t reached their destination, forcing Aphrodite to seek another island where it could anchor for the night. Again, the frogheads found a place to rest on its mossy, vine-covered banks.

As darkness fell on the ocean, Angelo opened a locker on the aft deck and pulled out a large net. Ronson thought at first that he intended to go trawling, but instead Angelo told him and Mikhail to rig the net above the boat, from the wheelhouse roof to poles erected at the stern, until the deck was completely covered. Angelo then switched off the deck lamps, and once the three of them went below he closed the curtains in the cabin portholes.

They’d barely finished dinner when Ronson discovered the reason why the captain had taken such precautions. From somewhere outside came the sound of wings flapping, punctuated by high-pitched shrieks. Mikhail explained that they belonged to one of Venus’s few avian species: night shrikes, nocturnal raptors not much larger than the pelicans they vaguely resembled but dangerous nonetheless. The shrikes hunted in flocks, seeking prey near the islands where they nested; they had little fear of humans, and had been known to gang up on unwary sailors who ventured out on deck after dark. The nets would keep them away, and if that didn’t work, a Taser shot was sufficient to drive them off. Still, the best defense was to remain inside until daybreak.

Through the night, long after the three of them had crawled into their bunks, Ronson heard the shrikes prowling around the boat. Distant thunder and lightning flashes glimpsed around the edges of the porthole curtains told of an approaching storm. It came in around midnight, and although it only rocked the boat a bit and threw rain against the portholes, it kept Ronson awake for a while. He lay in his bunk, Taser beneath his pillow, listening to the shrikes and the storm.

Venus was a dangerous world.

Yet the morning was calm. The rain had slackened to a mild drizzle, the sun a hot splotch half-seen through the clouds. The frogheads were croaking impatiently beside the boat when Ronson and the others emerged from the cabin. Mikhail gave chocolate bars to two of the aborigines—as before, their leader refused to accept any—while Angelo and Ronson took down the net and hoisted the anchor. Then the captain started the engine and Aphrodite set out again, the frogheads once more taking the lead.

The floating isles had become bigger and less far apart by then, and for the first time, Ronson saw forests on the larger ones. Slickbark trees looked like palmettos but grew in dense jungle clusters, their broad trunks strangled by vines, their broad, serrated leaves casting shadows across the surrounding water.

Around midmorning, Aphrodite came within sight of a larger vessel going the other way: a lumber ship the size of a small freighter, its deck loaded with cut and trimmed tree trunks. The lumber ship blew its horn as it went by, but Angelo didn’t respond to the hail.

“A yaz runner wouldn’t do that,” the captain explained.

“Yaz runner?” Ronson asked. “You mean, like someone who’s …”

“Out to purchase yaz, uh-huh.” Angelo gave him a sidelong look. “That’s what we’re going to pretend to be once we get to this place … because, believe me, there ain’t no way they’re gonna let us live if they don’t think we’re here to buy dope.”

Ronson was still coming to grips with this when the frogheads suddenly turned to the right and started heading for a large island only a kilometer away. As Aphrodite approached the island, the three men spotted thin lines of smoke rising from its forest. Angelo handed a pair of binoculars to Ronson, and through them he saw a couple of boats about Aphrodite’s size tied up at a floating dock.

“It’s a yaz camp, all right,” Angelo said, then he looked off to the side. “Hey! What the hell are they doing?”

Ronson followed his gaze. The three frogheads had suddenly turned and were swimming back toward the boat. “I think they want to talk,” Mikhail said.

Angelo throttled down the engines. “So talk to ’em,” he muttered with an annoyed shrug.

As the boat came to idle, the Russian walked back to the stern. By then, the frogheads were dog-paddling along the starboard side, their faces visible above the water. The leader warbled something to Mikhail; he listened for a few moments, then turned to Ronson.

“She says this is the place where we will find the man we are looking for,” Mikhail said, “but they refuse to go any farther. They will remain here until they see us leave, then they will follow us.”

Ronson was puzzled as to why the Water Folk wouldn’t escort them the rest of the way to the island, but he wasn’t about to argue. As the boat began moving again, he went below, where he found the Taser he’d left beneath his bunk pillow. He had just slid its holster on his belt, though, when Mikhail followed him into the cabin.

“Leave that behind,” the Russian said. “If the yaz croppers see you wearing it, they’ll think we mean trouble.”

Ronson stared at him. “Then how the hell am I supposed to rescue the kid?”

Mad Mikhail hesitated. “We will think of something,” he said at last. “Let me do the talking, yes?”

Again, Ronson didn’t have a choice. As the boat came closer to the island, though, he came out on deck with the Taser beneath the nylon rain jacket he’d put on. When no one was looking, he carefully hid the weapon behind the net locker where it couldn’t be seen yet could be easily reached.

Men on the island had seen Aphrodite coming. Two yaz croppers were waiting on the dock as the boat glided up beside it. They grabbed the lines Mikhail and Ronson tossed to them and pulled the fishing boat alongside their own craft, then a thickset man with grey, brush-cut hair rested a foot on Aphrodite’s gunnel, arms folded across his bare chest.

“Priv’et,” he said, gruff yet not entirely hostile. “Kak vas tibut?”

“Mikhail Kronow,” Mad Mikhail replied. “Vy gavarti pa angliski?”

The other Russian looked over at his companion, a younger man with a shaved head and a goatee beard. “I do, mate,” he replied, an Australian accent to his voice. “So who the hell are you, eh?”

“He is gospodin Ronson, an American friend.” Mikhail barely glanced at Ronson. “Thank you for speaking English … his Russian is very bad.” The Aussie laughed but the Russian remained silent, apparently not understanding a word they were saying. “We are here to do some business, yes?”

“What sort of business?”

“I think you know what kind.” A smile and sly wink. “May we speak to your leader? Someone we can … um, how do you say … negotiate, yes?”

“Vityazka iz kornia,” Ronson said. Mikhail gave him a sharp look, but he saw no need to dance around the subject. There was only one reason why a boat would be all the way out here. “I’m looking to buy yaz.”

The Aussie looked at the older man and spoke to him in his own language. The Russian cropper studied Ronson and Mikhail for a few moments, dark eyes sizing them up. Then he slowly nodded, and the Aussie turned to the visitors. “Sure, c’mon … this way.”

Ronson glanced back at the wheelhouse. Angelo was standing at the door. He shook his head, silently telling Ronson that he was going to stay behind. Ronson nodded, then followed Mikhail off the boat. With the two croppers leading the way, they walked onto the island.

The ground was soft and spongy. Until he reached the crude walkway of wooden boards laid down by the croppers, Ronson’s shoes sank a bit with each step he took, making squishy sounds. The forest closed in around them as he and Mikhail were led away from the dock until they couldn’t see Aphrodite anymore, and he fought an impulse to hold his breath against a pungent reek that permeated the humid, chlorophyll-laden air. It got stronger the farther they walked, and at first he thought it came from the jungle around them, but then they reached the middle of the island and he saw what was causing it.

A clearing had been hacked out amid the trees and tangled underbrush, and it was here that the croppers had set up camp. Wooden shacks and canvas tents surrounded an open area. Nets were suspended from tall poles erected around the periphery, doubtless to ward off night shrikes but probably also to provide camouflage from any aircraft that might pass overhead. The camp had the basic amenities—a cook tent, a cluster of satellite dishes, outhouses—and might just as well have belonged to a wilderness expedition were it not for what was in its center.

Vats made from discarded fuel drums had been set up above iron braziers. Brackish water slowly boiled over wood coals, emitting stinking fumes that made his eyes weep. The men and women stirring the vats wore bandanas around the lower parts of their faces, and Ronson wished he’d known enough to take the same precautions. Lumpy brown scum floated on top of the bubbling water; as he watched, one of the croppers dipped a large, long-handled spoon into a vat, carefully scooped out a dripping mass, and placed it on a tray, which was then carried to a wooden platform set up beneath a tarp and laid out to dry.

“Yaz,” Mikhail murmured, nodding toward the platform.

“Yeah, here’s where we make it.” The Aussie—his name was Graham, Ronson had learned during the trek through the forest—proudly pointed to the vats. The Russian, whose name was Boris, had left them as soon as they entered the camp. “We drop the roots in there, boil off the resin, scoop it out, cure it … that’s how we get the good stuff.” His finger moved to an open-sided shed, where a couple of women were using a grocery scale to weigh bundles of vityazka iz kornia before wrapping them in paper and twine. “Each of those is half a kilo,” Graham went on, indicating a nearby shack where a large stack of bricks could be seen through the door. “From this island alone, we’ll probably get … oh, I’d say, five hundred kilos at least.”

“And then you move on,” Ronson said.

“Uh-huh … another island, another crop, another big pile of rubles.” Graham laughed, clapped him on the back. “Your pot farmers back in the States got nothing on us. They’re stuck in one place, but we’re a mobile operation.”

Ronson only half listened to Graham as he searched the faces of the men and women around them, trying to spot David Henry. No one here looked like him, though, even allowing for the bandanas covering the faces of the men stirring the vats. Indeed, no one in the camp looked like they were being forced to do anything. Some smiled and joked as they worked, and there were no armed guards keeping them in line. If anyone here had been shanghaied, they didn’t seem to be upset about it.

Bulgakov might have been wrong, and the frogheads … Ronson felt annoyance growing in him. How could he have been so stupid as to trust those things? Masters of the World Ocean, his soaked ass. Animals, really, despite what Mikhail claimed. No wonder he was called Mad Mikhail … Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Ronson looked around, saw that Boris had returned. And standing beside him, wearing a jungle hat and a sweat-stained Coldplay T-shirt, was David Henry.

“Hello,” David said, offering a handshake. “I hear you’d like to buy some yaz.”

It was only his brief experience working undercover for the NYPD vice squad that kept Ronson from showing the surprise he felt. In an instant, he realized why David Henry had disappeared without a trace. Perhaps he hadn’t come to Venus intending to become a drug lord. Perhaps the opportunity presented itself only after he’d been here awhile. Yet he wasn’t a captive of these yaz croppers; he was their boss.

“That’s what I’m looking to do.” Ronson shook his hand. “Nice little operation you’ve got here. Never knew how this stuff was made.”

David grinned, shrugged nonchalantly. “Not many people do until they see it themselves. No harder than weed … or even crack, for that matter. And out here, it’s a little easier to get away with.” He motioned to the nets strung above them. “That’s really just to keep out the birds. The law’s just about given up trying to find us. I don’t think they even give a shit anymore.”

Ronson silently agreed. Bulgakov had just about told him as such. “Must be a hassle getting the roots, though,” he said, trying to find something to talk about while he gave himself a chance to figure out how to play this. He looked around the camp. “I mean, it doesn’t look like you’re cutting down any trees.”

“Well, I’ve got my own …” David’s voice trailed off. His gaze had fallen on Mikhail, who stood quietly nearby. “Hey, I know you!” he exclaimed. “You’re”—he snapped his fingers a couple of times, trying to summon a memory—“that guy! The one who hangs out on the docks in Veneragrad and gets the froggies to pose for pictures!”

“Mikhail Kronow.” Mikhail’s eyes shifted nervously back and forth.

“Yeah! Mad Mikhail!” David was both surprised and happy to see him. “I guess you don’t remember me. We never talked or anything, but … man, do I remember you! I owe you a lot, dude!”

Mikhail stared at him. “You do?”

“Uh-huh.” David looked at Ronson again. “You got him as your translator, right? I mean, he couldn’t have known how to find us, so I guess the dude who’s driving your boat must have done that.”

“That’s pretty much it, yeah.” Ronson let David make his own assumptions. “Mikhail hooked us up when I told him what I was looking for, so …”

“Cool.” David returned his attention to Mikhail. “Like I was saying, that trick you have? Getting the froggies to come running for chocolate?” He waved an expansive hand around the camp. “That’s made all this possible. C’mon, lemme show you …”

Another boardwalk led away from the camp. It ended at a smaller clearing not far away, where two croppers stood around a hole. It appeared to have been cut straight down through the vines and moss that made up the floating island, forming a deep well. A wheelbarrow stood nearby; the two men watched the hole, as if waiting for something to emerge.

“When I first came here,” David explained, as they approached the hole, “croppers were using roots of slickbark trees cut down by the lumber operators. Which is okay, except that by the time our people got to them, the roots were all dried out, and that meant the yaz they got from them had lost much of its potency. Everyone knew that fresh roots make better yaz, but since slickbark roots grow underwater, you’d have to use scuba gear and trained divers to swim beneath the islands to get to them. And that’s dangerous as hell … something might eat you while you’re down there. Then I had an idea …”

“Coming up,” said one of the men watching the well.

The water bubbled for a moment, then a froghead came to the surface. Its silver eyes regarded the men standing around the well for a couple of seconds; they stepped back from the hole to give it room, and the aborigine came the rest of the way up. A nylon bag was harnessed to its chest; once the froghead was standing on dry ground, one of the men unfastened the harness, carried the bag over to the wheelbarrow, and upended it. A couple of wet, fibrous objects that looked like large knots fell into the wheelbarrow: slickbark roots.

The man who’d collected the bag from the froghead picked up a root, inspected it, then held it out for his boss to see. He said something in Russian; David frowned a little but nodded anyway. The other cropper reached into his pocket, pulled out a Hershey bar, and held it out to the froghead.

Surprisingly, the aborigine didn’t immediately take it. “Wurgo wogka kroh,” it croaked, looking down at the hole from which it had just emerged. “Krokka kow wok-wokka.”

Mikhail hissed, an angry sound that only Ronson heard. He didn’t say anything, but from the corner of his eye, he could see that Mikhail’s mouth was drawn into a tight line. “Oh, c’mon,” the man with the candy bar said; he was an American, a Southerner judging by his accent. “Take it and git back down there.” When the froghead didn’t accept the chocolate, he yanked a cattle prod from his belt. “This or this,” he said, holding up both the prod and the Hershey bar. “Your choice.”

The froghead flinched at the sight of the cattle prod. Ronson realized then that this creature was different from the three Water Folk who’d escorted Aphrodite from Veneragrad. Thinner, its head slumped forward and its eyes dulled, there were dark, bruiselike marks on its flanks that could have only been caused by electrical burns. He was looking at a slave.

“Kroh,” it said softly, then it reached for the Hershey bar.

“Yeah, kroh this, you ugly mother.” The cropper broke the bar in half and tossed the froghead the smaller part. “Now git back down there … and next time, make ’em bigger!”

The froghead put the chocolate in its mouth, swallowed it slowly. Then, as if resigned to its fate, it turned and jumped feetfirst down the hole.

“Pretty slick,” Ronson said softly. Mikhail remained quiet.

“I kinda think so.” David grinned, proud of himself. “I mean, it’s just regular, ordinary chocolate, but they’re totally addicted to it. So all we have to do is find a few froggies, give them a couple of bars, then don’t give ’em anymore until they learn to chew off slickbark roots and bring ’em to us.”

“Hell, I don’t think they want anything else now but chocolate.” The man with the cattle prod started to take a bite from the other half of the bar, then stopped himself. “Running low, boss,” he added, his voice becoming worried. “I don’t think we’ve got but a few bars left.”

“Really?” David frowned. “Well, we’re going to have to do something about that. Next time we send someone to Veneragrad for supplies …”

“We got some on the boat,” Ronson said.

“Oh, yeah?” David looked at him again, his face brightening again. “How much?”

“Whole bag full. Couple of dozen bars at least.” Ronson was exaggerating—he knew that Mikhail had brought only a few—but an idea had occurred to him. “C’mon back to the boat, and I’ll give ’em to you. We can work out a deal on the way … I’ve got the cash there, too.”

A smile stretched across David Henry’s face. “Sounds like a plan.” He turned to walk back toward the camp. “I like a man who comes prepared. Let’s go.”

Ronson followed him, consciously avoiding Mikhail’s angry glare.

______

Capturing David Henry was almost ridiculously easy. The kid was so confident that the Russian authorities would never catch him, he’d become trustful of anyone who offered to buy yaz from him. He didn’t even take any of his crew with him when he followed Ronson and Mikhail back to the dock.

Ronson kept up the pretense on the way to the Aphrodite. He had to guess how much a runner might offer for a hundred kilos of yaz, but it appeared that he was close to the mark when he bid 500,000 rubles. David tried to talk him up to 600, and by the time they reached the boat, they’d settled on 550. Plus the bag of chocolate bars, which David laughingly called “a sweetener.”

He was still chuckling at his own joke when they stepped onto the boat. Ronson was smiling, too, as he casually bent down beside the net locker and found the Taser he’d hidden there. He straightened up, turned around, and fired it at David before he knew what was happening. The charged prongs hit him in the chest; the kid collapsed with little more than a grunt, and he was still twitching on the aft deck when Ronson and Mikhail hastily cast off the lines and Angelo started up the engine.

By the time David regained his senses, his wrists and ankles were bound, and he’d been deprived of the jackknife Ronson found in his pocket. He rolled over on the deck and glared at the detective. “What the fuck are you …?”

“Your father hired me to come find you.” Ronson was sitting beneath the tarp, watching the island as it receded behind them. “If you’re lucky, I’ll be taking you home to him. But I know a certain cop who might have a say in that, so …” He shrugged.

“Dude, you’re so screwed. When my guys figure out what you’ve done …”

“They’ll come after you?” Ronson shook his head. “Don’t count on it. No one’s following us. I imagine that, even if they put two and two together, they’re not going to risk everything trying to rescue you. My guess is that they’ll pack up and move out as fast as they can, and someone will take over as the new boss.” He glanced at David, gave him a knowing smile. “Hate to break it to you, kid, but with guys like that, you’re expendable. And easily replaced.”

David Henry glowered, but didn’t reply. He must have realized the truth of what Ronson was saying. Ronson cracked open a beer he’d found in the galley. “So how did you fall into all this, anyway? Did you come here looking to get into the yaz business, or was it just something you stumbled into and …?”

“Slow down!” Mikhail was standing at the bow, searching the waters ahead. “Stop! The Water Folk are just ahead!”

“Oh, for God’s sake …” Angelo was reluctant to stop for the frogheads who’d led them to the island, but he throttled down the engines and the boat coasted to a halt. “Make it quick, okay? I want to put distance between us and the croppers.”

The three aborigines floated just beneath the surface, their protuberant eyes the only things visible. As the boat idled, its engine still throbbing, Mikhail leaned over the rail and called to them. He spoke for nearly a minute, but the frogheads didn’t respond. When he was done, they silently submerged, vanishing as if they’d never been there. Angelo waited a few seconds to make sure he wouldn’t run over them, then started up the boat again.

“What did you say to them?” Ronson asked once Mikhail came back to the aft deck.

Mikhail didn’t reply at once. He stood over David Henry, hands clenched at his sides, regarding the kid with cold and murderous eyes. David tried to return his gaze but quickly looked away. “I told them we found the man we were looking for,” Mikhail said at last, his voice low, “and thanked them for their help.”

“That’s all?” Ronson didn’t believe him. Mikhail had spoken a long time for something as simple as that.

Mikhail nodded, then went below, closing the cabin door behind him.

Aphrodite continued westward, chasing the shrouded sun as it gradually dipped toward the horizon. It was beginning to slide into the ocean when Angelo called a stop for the night. There were no islands around, so he simply stopped the engines, allowing the boat to drift. With no nearby islands, there was little chance they’d attract the shrikes who haunted them. The captain left the nets in the locker, and since it was a mild evening, Mikhail suggested that they have dinner on the aft deck beneath the tarp.

Time to relax a bit. All the same, Ronson took the precaution of scanning the ocean with the binoculars. Aside from a distant logging ship, they’d seen no other boats since escaping the yaz camp. As he’d predicted, the croppers had apparently decided that pursuing the people who’d abducted their chief—their former chief—was more trouble than it was worth. And although he’d occasionally glimpsed Water Folk breaching the surface, they’d kept away from the boat. He couldn’t tell whether they were the same ones they’d met before, but he doubted it. Their task was done; no reason for them to have anything further to do with the humans.

He was wrong.

Darkness had fallen when a froghead rose to surface just behind Aphrodite’s stern. By then, the four men were seated in folding deck chairs beneath the awning. Ronson had removed the ropes around David’s ankles but left his wrists tied; he was eating canned stew from the paper plate Angelo had placed in his lap when Ronson happened to glance behind the boat and spotted a pair of eyes that reflected the light of the deck lamps like silver coins.

“Company,” he said.

Angelo turned around in his chair, followed his gaze. “Oh, hell,” he muttered, annoyed by the distraction. “What does it want?” He looked at Mikhail. “Give it a candy bar and tell it to go away. It’s putting me off my food.”

Mikhail had been quiet all afternoon, saying little to anyone. Now he put down his plate, pushed back his chair, and stood up. Instead of turning to the froghead—no, Ronson realized, there wasn’t just one pair of eyes, but two … and now three—he looked at David.

“You remember when we were at your camp and you were showing us how you got the Water Folk to bring you tree roots?” he asked. “You remember that one of them said something to you and your people?” David said nothing and Mikhail went on. “I know you did not understand what it was saying, but I did. It said that it did not want any more chocolate, and then it begged you to let it go.”

“Yeah, well …” The kid was watching the frogheads. They were coming closer to the boat. Ronson counted six pairs of eyes, and it seemed like more were coming. “That’s really tough, but I don’t think … I don’t think …”

“No. You don’t think, do you?” Mikhail stepped away from the circle of chairs, out from under the tarp. “And now you pay the price.”

A thump against the stern, then a froghead reached over the side. With surprising speed and agility, it pulled itself aboard. Its feet had barely touched the deck when another one followed it. And then a third.

“Hey, what’re you …?” Angelo was out of his chair, staring at the creatures. “Tell these goddamn things to get off my boat!”

“They will be gone soon.” Mikhail was calm, hands at his sides. “They will leave as soon as they have taken what they want from us.” A faint smile. “And no, it isn’t chocolate.”

“Mikhail, this has gone far enough.” Ronson stood up, felt for the Taser he’d clipped to his belt. His hand fell upon an empty holster. Sometime in the last half hour or so, it had disappeared. He remembered Mikhail’s bumping against him just before they sat down for dinner, and immediately knew what he’d done. “Mikhail …!”

Frogheads were climbing over the starboard and port gunnels. Ronson could hear more coming over the bow. Eight, ten, twelve? He had no idea how many. Now it wasn’t just their eyes that were reflecting the light, but also the teeth within their open mouths. Wet, sharp teeth …

“Get ’em away from me!” The plate fell from David Henry’s lap as he leaped to his feet. His eyes, when they swung toward Ronson, were wide and utterly terrified. “Get a gun or something and get ’em the fuck away from me!”

Ronson looked at Mikhail. Frogheads were standing on either side of the Russian now, advancing toward the other three men beneath the tarp. “Don’t do this. Mikhail, don’t let them do this …”

“Go below,” Mikhail replied. “You too, Captain. If you do not interfere, they will not …”

All at once, the Water Folk attacked.

Ronson saw little of what happened next. It was swift, it was violent, and by the time he and Angelo reached the cabin and threw themselves inside, it was over. Almost. The screams were still coming as the captain slammed the door shut and they put their weight against it.

The frogheads hadn’t come for them, though. They’d come for David Henry.

And for Mikhail, too.

Both men put up a fight, but it didn’t last but a few seconds. The boat rocked back and forth, and there were the sounds of a struggle from the other side of the door. A series of loud splashes. And then the night was quiet again.

Ronson waited a minute or so. Not just to make sure that the frogheads had left, but also to give his heart a chance to stop hammering against his chest. Then, with Angelo fearfully peering over his shoulder, he inched the door open and peered out.

Overturned chairs. A ripped tarp. Blood on the deck, already mixing with puddles of seawater. No bodies.

The two men stood on the aft deck, feeling the warm rain against their faces. In the far distance, lightning flashes briefly delineated the horizon, painting the clouds with shades of purple and silver, silver the color of the Water Folk’s eyes. A soft rumble of thunder. A storm was approaching.

“I really hate this fucking planet,” Angelo whispered.

“Yeah,” Ronson said. “Me too.”