FORTY-NINE

 

 

NOËLLE CIRCLED THE Causapscal-des-Vents, bleeding off speed,cutting back the thrust. From the outside, the habitat looked abandoned. A third of the hydroponics bays were white behind opaque windows, growing nothing because of pressure leaks or missing piping. In other habitats, bright green leaves would show in the other outer cells, but here algae filmed the inner surfaces, obscuring whatever was growing there, giving the old habitat a sickly, blinded look.

Nervousness tickled at her stomach as she flared and landed. She was self-consciously quiet about her steps and she looked around the sky to check if anyone had seen. No one was flying nearby, and the odds of someone watching her with a telescope were a bit silly to consider. Habitats tried not to approach each other closer than six or eight hundred meters, so only a handful were in naked eyeball range. She unstrapped her wing-pack quickly and went to the airlock.

It was locked. She entered the code Marthe had shared with her once, when she’d been flying here in secret instead of visiting her mother like she’d told Délia. The same excitement and fear hit her now. The panel greened and she turned the airlock wheel. Cycling through, she crept down the stairs and through the lower airlock. She cracked the seal on her helmet.

“Marthe?” she said softly. “Marthe?” She peeked around the airlock door. Sun shone through the blinds, warming the galley, but only the soft creaks of the gondola hanging under the envelope sounded, punctuated by different machines in the floor turning pumps and fans on and off. Dishes were everywhere. Old clothes. The remains of joints and cigarette paper.

“Émile?” she said, stepping out of the airlock. “Marthe?” she said louder.

Still nothing. The two rack rooms were quiet and unlit. She peeked into each one. No one was here. She went to the communication set and called up the call logs in the tiny display. She tried downloading the log, but it didn’t look like the comm set’s Wi-Fi still worked. She tsked in frustration.

She took a picture of the display, then toggled through the whole log, taking a picture of each call, the direction of the antenna, the strength of the signal. She didn’t know if this would be useful, but she hoped it was.

She snapped a few more general pictures of the galley, then moved to the rack rooms. She knew Marthe’s big hammock, the neatly netted clothes and bagged or boxed tools. She’d had more than a few pleasant trysts in here, with the excitement of the forbidden, and the rough, rugged beauty of Marthe, so different from Délia.

Noëlle took pictures and opened small drawers. She found a few knick-knacks. Cheap nail polish. Some old datapads that wouldn’t power on. A stash of weed. Then, she pulled out a locket that might be silver. She’d never seen Marthe wear it. It was pretty.

A tiny LCD inside the locket displayed different pictures every time it was opened: babies, old people, young adults, even pictures of people on Earth. She’d never seen real silver. The links of the chain were blackening. Maybe it wasn’t silver. It sparkled against the sunlight slipping past the gaps in the blinds.

She unzipped her collar and slipped the necklace into an inner pocket of her suit.

She took a picture and closed the drawers. She noticed the floor plates and lifted those up, exposing the drive shafts of the main propellers. Oily. Dirty. Nothing hidden there. She took pictures anyway, feeling a growing sense of urgency. Either of them could be back anytime. She looked under more floor plates. Just spare parts and tools.

She took pictures before moving to Émile’s room. Piles of old clothes, a datapad and even some paper were everywhere, under old carbon-fiber jars that stank with the sour scent of dried bagosse. The paper wasn’t real paper. Nobody was rich enough on Venus for real paper. The colonistes made something filmy out of rosette envelopes and some people wrote on that with pencils made of fused atmospheric carbon or artisanal inks, but it was an affectation more than anything else. Everyone used datapads. Except Émile.

The faux paper scraps were endless, with scribbled lines, crossed out, substituted, erased and rewritten pieces. She tried to read some, but it wasn’t complete sentences, just random thoughts. She hoped he didn’t show this to anyone. That would have been pathetic. She took a few pics anyway. The datapad worked and was filled with poems from Earth and Mars. A directory held a bunch of files that looked like poems written by Émile. They were cleaner than the handwritten things, but clumsy to her eye. Émile was at best a deckhand, when he even showed up for work. He was grasping, trying to be something he wasn’t.

Then her eyes widened when she found pictures of gorgeous, naked Earth women. She wasn’t an innocent. She’d seen racy things, Venus-produced sex videos, amateur films and stills under gloomy lighting, or worse, blinding white light. Depressing more than anything, especially when she saw someone she knew. The women in these pictures from Earth were beautiful, well-fed, shapely, with flawless skin that had never felt the least touch of acid. They were photographed under soft lights or even daylight. Her mouth went dry looking at them.

The pad was old, not Wi-Fi enabled, so she slipped it into her suit. She could download the pictures on her own habitat and then toss the pad into the clouds later. Her search of the galley was desultory. There was nothing here but old dishes. The floor plates in the galley didn’t show anything interesting.

She took her helmet off the table and snapped it back into place. Being a spy was far less interesting than she’d thought.