TWENTY-ONE

 

 

GASCHEL’S SUITES IN the Baie-Comeau were less expansive than Woodward’s, although her view was higher. Her office looked down on the yellowed clouds and the white hazes as if from the tower of a great ship. Blobs and specks of green far ahead and to the side marked the positions of other habitats. La colonie’s main flotilla was spread across a circle thirty kilometers off the Baie-Comeau. Smaller flocks of a few dozen habitats lay thousands of kilometers away, following the west-to-east winds over the top of Venus’s clouds, so that every seven to eight thousand kilometers was a human flotilla.

Most of her closest aides lived on the Baie-Comeau or in attendant habitats. They met today in her office. Claude Babin, the colonie’s treasurer, was standing. His news hadn’t been good. They already had a trade deficit with the asteroidal corporations, as well as a sizeable debt, and they’d just gone through the list of what the colonie would and wouldn’t import this quarter.

They’d again put off buying updated vaccines, as well as some cancer therapies, so that they could get some basic metals that had no substitutes. They’d also added a shipment of water and ammonia, because their closed habitat systems kept leaking away hydrogen and nitrogen, which were difficult to replace on Venus. And, with too much hesitation, she’d decided to acquire a set of higher-grade solar cells that would increase the colonie’s industrial production of carbon nanofibers, which were durable enough to substitute for metals and cladding in some places. But they’d be paying for it for a while.

“Merci, Claude,” she said, dismissing him. “I need the rest of you for a moment.”

She was left with a small group of people. François-Xavier Labourière was the chief of her political and administrative staff. He’d been with Gaschel since the beginning of her political career. Thomas Bacquet was the fidgety, efficient Deputy Chief-of-Staff. Cécile Dauzat managed la colonie’s industrial works, and Laurent Tétreau was a politically-minded Junior Engineer in industrial works who’d been doing more and more political work for Labourière. She sat. They did too.

“I need the locations of the coureurs des vents,” she said.

Labourière looked to Dauzat.

“All of them?” Dauzat asked warily.

“There aren’t that many,” Gaschel said.

The manager of industrial works wriggled in her seat. “It’s almost a hundred families, maybe more, madame, floating at many changing altitudes, across dozens of latitudes.”

“Forty-five kilometers is the altitude,” Gaschel said. “The latitude is the Atla Regio region. The time is four days ago.”

“We don’t track the coureurs, madame. They don’t even track themselves,” Dauzat said.

“You can narrow it down with this information,” Gaschel insisted.

“Maybe,” Dauzat said. “Historically, maybe. The coureurs do share meteorological reporting. We might be able to build up profiles based on where they tend to report from.”

“What kind of a problem are we dealing with, Madame la Présidente?” Labourière asked.

Gaschel looked at each one.

“Just this room?” she asked.

They nodded.

“Someone down there is floating around with some hot radioisotopes,” she said.

“One of the mom-and-pop operations found some on the surface and brought it up?” Dauzat asked.

“The signal was too hot for raw ore. And no one on Venus has the capacity to refine it,” Gaschel said. Some of the faces, especially Tétreau’s and Labourière’s, started to show dawning realization. “The Bank of Pallas thinks that someone down there is cutting a deal with another Bank.”

She let that sink in.

“Is this Marthe D’Aquillon? Or her father?” Labourière asked.

“Narrow it down,” she said, with a finality that caused the four of them to stand, pay their respects and get moving.