FIFTY-NINE

 

 

MARTHE AND ÉMILE spent the next day picking all the mature crops and sealing the immature ones in composting tanks. The nitrogen and hydrogen were valuable. They stowed and stored everything else on the Causapscal-des-Vents as if the inside of their home was going to fill with sulfuric acid. Packing all their things was a strange job. They didn’t have a lot. They’d recycled almost everything they couldn’t use anymore. Marthe couldn’t find her locket with pictures of maman, no matter where she looked, and she lost long minutes turning things upside down. Acid would eat the silver quickly. But in the end, she gave up. Émile couldn’t find everything he was looking for in his disorganized mess.

The Causapscal-des-Vents had fallen about thirty kilometers behind the main flotilla, fifteen behind the Jonquière, which was also trailing with small repairs. In a pinch, a powerless habitat could mount emergency sails and drift. Secondary flotillas circled the equator at intervals of about seven or eight thousand kilometers. The next one would catch up in about twenty hours. And even lone habitats would be tracked by satellites. But satellites couldn’t see beneath the Causapscal-des-Vents, where she and Émile had stowed the ingredients for their plan.

Fifteen kilometers below, and about fifty kilometers downwind, Pa and Marie-Pier waited with the harnessed trawlers. The difference in wind speeds between sixty-fifth rang and fiftieth rang was about fifty meters per second today, so Marthe and Émile were about fifteen minutes ahead. And they had to count descent time and the speed they would lose as they descended into slower winds.

It was common enough to drop supplies to the lower decks in powered drones, but drones were small and maneuverable, and their carbon nanotube construction was designed to work from sixty-fifth all the way down to fortieth. A habitat was just a big balloon made for cold, low-acid environments. It was going to be a hard descent.

Sixteen kilometers ahead, the Jonquière was just a silvery-green speck, and they needed binoculars to see the rest of the flotilla. They had to avoid the satellites. And their chance was coming up soon.

Most of the atmosphere at sixty-fifth rang was clear down to two or more kilometers, with some haze. But sometimes weird low-pressure eddies formed, and columns of cottony cirrus clouds rose like great fingers, almost high enough to brush the habitats. Visibility in those cloud banks dropped to a few hundred meters. Marthe sat on the bench in the kitchen beside the pressure system controls. She stared out at the cloud columns, rechecked their locations, and drew a deep breath in her suit, briefly fogging her faceplate. This was the line of no return, her Rubicon. From opposition and protest voice to criminal was a bigger step than she’d expected. She squawked her suit radio once and then activated a new buoyancy program.

Her new program was basically the reverse of what every habitat had to do to stay afloat. Pumps sucked the buoyant, breathable air in the habitat into pressurized tanks. The struts in the envelope and the seals in the habitat proper began to creak under the weird pressure. At the same time, carbon dioxide was let in from the thin atmosphere outside and into the habitat.

They slowly began to sink, and their course angled straight for the cloud bank. The atmosphere was so faint at this altitude that even a little bit of carbon dioxide in the envelope made a big difference. After a few minutes, Marthe switched to the long-range antenna comms system.

“Baie-Comeau control, this is the Causapscal-des-Vents. We’re losing altitude. Looks like an envelope leak. Going out to assess. Our patch materials are low and we’ve already requisitioned more. Do you have a crew to run us out some?”

Let the rest of the flotilla hear that.

The radio crackled momentarily.

“Causapscal-des-Vents, we can get a crew there. Give us a leak assessment.”

“I’m topping up and putting on wings right now, control. Émile is going into the envelope. Stand by.”

The cloud bank neared as they sank. The pumps whirred, pumping more and more carbon dioxide into the habitat. Marthe spun the handle on the door, went up the stairs, and cycled through the airlock. Gusts of wind stroked faint fingers along her suit. She put on her wing-pack, clipped herself to a cable, and lowered herself over the side. She belayed in a complete circuit of the envelope, from bow to stern and back along the other side, as if looking for a leak. Later, a crash investigator might examine computer-enhanced satellite footage and see her climbing over the Causapscal-des-Vents, and would hopefully conclude that she’d done everything she could. The habitat’s dip put the cloud column dead ahead.

“Control,” she said into the radio, “it’s a big leak. Looks like a lower starboard strut broke. The snap point tore the skin over sections C and D, and the port support struts are bowing. Émile is going to try to reinforce the port struts and then see if the starboard support can be fixed. We’ll need patch materials, probably struts and temporary clamps. I’m going to check the stern struts and envelope skin. We’re sinking too fast for it to be just the two tears.”

“Câlisse,” control said. “Crew leaving now, Causapscal-des-Vents.”

“Merci, Baie-Comeau. See you when you get here.”

Now the clock was ticking. They drifted into the clouds. In a few seconds, they would be too deep for the satellites to see. Marthe cranked the pumps to full. This was going to wreak havoc on the filters soon. The pumps were fitted with filters covered with different bicarbonates to neutralize the acids, but they had now sunk into a hazy yellow mist of sulfuric acid. The acid would soon fill the filters with salt, and then they’d be useless. Their descent accelerated and the clouds above them blurred the shine of the sun. She switched to the short, private habitat channel as she belayed all the way down the cable.

“Enweille, Émile! Let’s get cracking!”

Her brother unscrewed the emergency hatch under the floor of the kitchen and emerged. It was an airlock of last resort, and he’d stretched three layers of webs of carbon fiber soaked in bicarbonate across the gap. They didn’t need to worry too much about acid getting in from underneath, and the living cabin was now naked to the pressure of Venus. The gondola’s full weight would be pulling it down.

A big bale was strapped beneath the Causapscal-des-Vents, but they couldn’t open it yet. They hadn’t gone through the dangerous part yet. Marthe swung herself under the bale and clung there, slowly strapping herself to it. Émile climbed up the rope she’d just descended. Marthe switched to the long channel.

“Baie-Comeau, this is Causapscal-des-Vents,” she said. “Tell the crews to hurry. I just found the big problem. The bowing of the port struts tore the envelope skin on the starboard side just above the cabin. Atmosphere is pouring in. We’re dropping fast. Émile is disassembling one of the inner envelope walls to patch the outer envelope. I’m deploying emergency balloons.”

She was too Venusian to avoid a twinge of remorse at the lie. Venus was always trying to kill them.

No coloniste ever joked about an emergency. Yet here she was doing just that, initiating a response that would mobilize dozens or hundreds of people. La colonie had lost habitats before, big ones like the Matapédia. People and families had died. La colonie had adjusted, making smaller targets of themselves, just family-sized habitats, but those too sometimes sank when they got too old or too damaged in a storm. It wasn’t just acid that scarred them all. Losses scarred them too.

“The planes and crews are scrambling. What’s your altitude, Causapscal?” Control said. Crackles whispered in the radio.

The Causapscal-des-Vents’s descent slowed. On the top of the envelope, Émile had obviously inflated the emergency oxygen balloons.

“Ostie!” she said. “We just dipped into a cloud. Acid’s gonna get into the inner envelope.”

“Focus on saving yourselves and the habitat first,” Control said. “We’ll fix it later. Pulling you up on satellite.”

“We’re already down to sixty-third!” she said. “Getting a little chop. I’m going into the envelope to help Émile get inner patch material.”

That was another lie. They’d already dropped to sixty-second rang.

“We’ve got nothing on the satellite,” control said. “What’s your location? Where’s your transceiver?”

“I’m not in the cabin! I’m on top of the envelope. If you can’t pick up the Causapscal-des-Vents, use my personal transceiver! How soon are you going to get here?” Marthe said.

“The first crew should be there in nine minutes.”

That was cutting it close. The crews might actually make it in time. They had to add to that time.

“Câlisse!” she swore. “The bowing of the starboard struts is unbalancing the whole thing. The hole on the port side with the missing strut is getting bigger. It might tear the ribs of the entire envelope.”

“Hold it together, Causapscal-des-Vents,” Control said. “It will hold.”

“No, it won’t,” she said. “I can see Les Rapides Plats just beneath us.”

She didn’t need to explain. The rolling convection cells, laid out like a warped washerboard in the sky, were punishing on the best of days. The best way to get through Les Rapides was to be small and heavy, plunging through as quickly as possible. A plane could do it, but it was rough. A person with furled wings could cross it pretty quickly. A big dirigible habitat—buoyant, with lots of surface area—was the worst thing to take into Les Rapides. And if any of what she was saying was true, then the emergency balloons really would be another stress, and would rip even an undamaged habitat.

“I’m cutting the emergency balloons!” Marthe cried into the radio.

It was a sign of whoever was manning Air Traffic Control that they didn’t argue. They knew how habitats worked. Émile was listening in, and abruptly, the Causapscal-des-Vents pitched forward before righting itself. Two emergency balloons floated free, evidence of their emergency. She switched to the private channel.

“Get to shelter, Émile. This is going to be rough.”

The transition layer rose towards them.

“Causapscal-des-Vents! Are you all right?”

“Hang on!” she said on the flotilla channel. “About to hit Les Rapides. Keep a lock on my transceiver.”

Control didn’t bother them on the radio, but there were lots of side orders to the rescue crews, position updates and so on, enough to distract her. The habitat lurched up, and then, with a gorge-raising drop, a downdraft swept them down, like going over a waterfall. The wind howled around them, whistling in the wires and grasping for the edges and corners.

Marthe’s straps jerked her body as the habitat creaked dangerously, metal bending somewhere. They spun, and then all of a sudden, she was flung upward, on top of the upside-down dirigible. Parts of it collapsed, the struts unable to bear the weight up of the gondola. If she’d been there for even a few seconds more, the struts would have all deformed, bursting all the buoyancy chambers. But the habitat spun back to right with a shriek of metal and plastic. Crisse. She’d expected chop, but anxiety rose, like she was a teenager again. All their plans were just plans that Venus would test. And they couldn’t do anything but wait and try to hold down the animal fear.

Turbulence buffeted the Causapscal-des-Vents and snaps sounded above her—big ones, otherwise she wouldn’t have heard them through the fierce, thin wind. She tasted blood in her mouth where the jostling had made her bite her lip. Her head ached. Somewhere in the bumping she’d whacked her head against the bale behind her. Then the Causapscal-des-Vents lay on its side, rattling in place for a fraction of a second, long enough to count as stillness, before plunging a hundred, two hundred meters, maybe more, in one of the big rollers in Les Rapides Plats. The rattling and vibrating in her sideways drop became painful until, like wet soap flying out of a crushing fist, they burst out into thick yellow cloud.

She swung beneath the Causapscal-des-Vents as if under an unwieldly parachute. The habitat shook and creaked and sank. She swallowed blood and the thick saliva that preceded vomit. Two minutes of punishment had passed. She toggled the private channel.

“Émile,” she said unevenly. “Where are you? Émile?”

“Causapscal-des-Vents!” Control was cracking. “Status report.”

“Émile!”

She started unstrapping herself.

“Causapscal-des-Vents!”

“Sapristi...” Émile finally answered.

“Ça va?” she said.

“Good enough,” he said.

“Control, we’re below Les Rapides,” Marthe said, switching to the flotilla channel. “Have you still got a fix on my transceiver?”

“Causapscal-des-Vents, we’ve got a strong signal from your transceiver. Looks like sixtieth. Are you alright?”

“The habitat is in one piece,” she said, as she pulled the knots free of the bales she’d been strapped to. The tarps and ropes came apart and a weird umbrella-shaped parachute hung there. Its surface was silvery. “Checking for additional damage. How soon to the crews?”

“Emergency crews,” control said, “you’re authorized to drop below the transition layer. Do it as quick as possible, before we get too far ahead.”

Good advice. Between sixty-fifth and fifty-ninth, the windspeed would have already dropped by about twenty meters per second. Every minute, the Causapscal-des-Vents dropped behind the flotilla by another kilometer. And as they sank, the differential would build. Air Traffic Control wanted the crew to get down to the same level as soon as they could, so at least they wouldn’t be carried away on winds with the rest of the flotilla. With aching arms, Marthe scaled the ropes up the gondola and envelope.

“Probably ten minutes, Causapscal-des-Vents.”

She reached the roof of the envelope. Émile was strong-arming frayed, ropey nets out from the stairway. She got behind him and they started tying corners of the net to the cleats on the roof. When they’d gotten half of the ends tied down, they stood at bow and stern and started throwing the nets over the edge. The ratty material was made of old fragments of trawler cable and bits of Venusian plants. The uneven shape and hardness would blunt their radar reflection.

The clouds thinned to a fine mist and the view suddenly widened. The kilometer of clear air of Grande Allée stretched for as far as they could see. The bottom of the upper cloud deck loomed above them and the top of the middle cloud deck extended away like a floor. The wide view gave them a visceral sense of the speed of their descent. They were still eight kilometers higher than their rendezvous point with the Profondeurs, and crews of planes were racing their way. If any of the pilots were daring, they might have already ducked straight through the turbulence to get to Grande Allée, where they could fly with more visibility. Marthe and Émile needed to get the hell under Grande Allée before they were seen.

They hooked another section of the improvised radar curtain to the roof and heaved the ends over the edge. While she distracted herself with this, the ceiling of Grande Allée got farther and farther from their heads.

And finally, the mist of the middle deck swallowed them. They pulled out the next curtain. She was getting tired. This was harder lifting than she was used to. Even Émile, outmassing her by thirty kilos, sounded winded. They tied down the third curtain of rope, cabling, trawler and blastula scraps, everything they could afford to lose that would absorb radar.

“Causapscal-des-Vents, can you report?” control asked.

“We’re still sinking. Trying to find something that hasn’t been damaged to tie an emergency balloon to. I don’t think we can use anywhere on the envelope. Émile is in the envelope trying to feed a cable straight through to the gondola so the struts don’t bear most of the weight.”

“Good thinking, Causapscal-des-Vents.”

“Could use some extra hands,” she said. “Crew almost here?”

“It took them time to safely get through the transition layer. They’re listening and are on their way. Maybe eight minutes.”

“You’ve got my transceiver fix?”

“Oui.”

“D’accord.”

“Have you got personal emergency balloons?” control asked.

“We won’t need them.”

Marthe switched to their private channel. A light brightened in her helmet. Radar. “You ready, Émile?” The fine mist was turning into the lightest of rains of sulfuric acid. She wiped her faceplate.

“You?”

“Oui.” She slapped his arm. “Hustle,” she said. “And get back up as soon as you can leave the habitat with Pa.”

“Worry about yourself,” he said.

She grabbed their netting and scampered down the side of the envelope, until she had to swing inward to reach the big silver parachute hanging underneath. She clung to that and climbed down. She found the foot rings at the bottom, just above a hanging tank of pressurized gas. Standing in the ropes, she clipped D-rings to her shoulder harness. Brisk tugging assured her that they would hold.

Then she gave a verbal command on the private channel. The hook under the gondola opened and she fell. The weirdly-shaped parachute expanded, catching her. She turned north. Émile had already started small inner thrusters, which dragged the Causapscal-des-Vents south.

Marthe reached down, hooked a hose from the parachute above her to the tank of pressurized gas below, and then turned the handle. The second layer of the parachute revealed itself as carbon dioxide inflated it into a firm lozenge shape, almost as long as the Causapscal-des-Vents. Below, it was concave, working like a parachute, but from above, its painted surface would be almost as radar-reflective as a habitat. Clumsy as hell to maneuver with, though. Inflated as it was, it caught the wind and handled like a balloon rather than a parachute.

“Control, we’re still descending, but the temperature is within tolerances. In another few minutes, Émile and I are going to try to stop our descent with an emergency balloon attached to the gondola roof. We’re drifting straight north on a cross-current. Can you use my transceiver to follow?”

“Causapscal-des-Vents, we’re following your transceiver. Radar is a mess down there. We have a search plane with radar at sixty-fifth rang. He can make you out. What’s your altitude?”

“It’s looking like fifty-sixth rang,” she said. “Half an atmosphere. Twenty-four degrees.”

“You’re getting low.”

She was. But by turning north-east, she would keep herself farther away from the repair crew coming from the west, and the deeper she sank, the more they’d have to fight a headwind to get to her.

“Tabarnak,” she said. “It’s not working.”

“What?”

“We’ve inflated the emergency balloon and we’re not slowing.”

“Tabarnak,” control agreed. Although her radio would only carry so far in the clouds, no doubt everyone who could hear her transmissions was glued to their radios. La colonie hadn’t lost a habitat to the clouds in a decade. She had to give them a show.

“I’m going to use my personal emergency balloon on the Causapscal-des-Vents.”

“No!” control said. “You have to have one at all times! You can’t put it on anything else!”

“I have a wing-pack. So does Émile.”

“And if they don’t work? If they break? It’s the law. You can’t throw away your safety device.”

“I’m not losing my home, either,” she said.

Lying to the government didn’t bother her so much. But she was lying to her neighbors. Her friends. Her enemies. Up until now, she’d been honest with l’Assemblée. Cunning, yes, but honest. Émile had accused her of trying to take maman’s place in the family, but maman never would have done this. Pa would.

“Marthe, you are not authorized to use your emergency balloon on the Causapscal-des-Vents. It won’t have enough buoyancy to make a difference.”

“Roger, control, but it will as I get deeper.”

“Not authorized. We’re keeping our fix on you. Crews will be there soon.”

She turned the unwieldly wing-chute above her to east-north-east, dropping a few hundred meters into a cloud bank, into gradually slower winds, and then into a wash of pelting acid. The rain would confuse the radar, possibly enough for the rescue team or the radar plane to pick up Émile.

“I’ve entered a small rain cloud, control,” she said. “Can you still see me?”

“Do you have any control over your drift, Causapscal?”

“That isn’t an answer,” she said.

“We can still see you. Radar is circling and sees you. But you’re drifting north-east now, into a storm. Single-cell.”

“What’s the altitude of the storm?”

She’d looked at the met reports every hour for the last day. There wasn’t supposed to be a storm. But weather on Venus was capricious. The atmosphere was just a big engine to redistribute heat. With a baking hot atmosphere seventy kilometers thick, weather conditions turned on Venus’s whim. If the Causapscal-des-Vents hit a storm, it might not survive. And storms weren’t any good for lying father’s daughters, either.

“Looks like fifty-third rang up to fifty-eighth, directly east of you.”

So a tower of a storm, no matter that it was just a single storm cell. She dialed one of the channels on her helmet to the radio frequency that would let her hear the lightning. That band was crackling. A tower, all right. And the more she sank and slowed, the more it would bear down on her.

“Roger, control. My signal’s still clear?” She hoped Émile was making good time, or this would all be for nothing and they’d get arrested.

“We know where you are, Causapscal-des-Vents.”

La colonie only built the things they needed, so the flotillas only had two kinds of radar. One frequency bounced off clouds, which allowed the flotillas to avoid bad weather, or at least get ready for it. The other frequency of radar, mostly used by the coureurs, penetrated the clouds and could find objects suspended in the atmosphere, but its resolution was low. At a distance, it was hard to tell a trawler from a habitat from the inflated wing she was riding into the depths. She hoped.

The wind buffeted her and the pressurized tank. The stitching she and Émile had done with woody trawler fiber wasn’t bad, but she was suddenly questioning how long the inflated wing would last in a storm. The wind stilled and darkened. Tiny pattering droplets of sulfuric acid slowed and quieted before a plunging wall of fat drops roared on the surface above her like drum strikes. As the wing lurched in arguing winds, she swung wildly.

Between fortieth and forty-fifth rangs, from the age of thirteen, she’d only been outside in calm weather. During storms she might be outside, but on the gantry, or flying on short, sturdy wings, away from angry winds. Now she was strapped to a big disguise whose only aerodynamic property was that it caught the wind. The whole wing plummeted on a downdraft, then lurched back, yanking her in the cables, wrenching her shoulders. She nearly blacked out, and the sudden, sucking updraft was a blur.

“Causapscal-des-Vents,” Control said, “we’ve still got your position. What’s your status?”

The wing and cables found an awkward resonance in the tearing winds, shuddering around her.

“We’re holding on,” she said, even her voice vibrating in her chest.

Lightning lit the clouds blinding yellow, before the wind punched the wing sideways and she swung all the way up and slammed into it, bouncing off the inflated surface, right into the empty pressure tank. The crack of impact was so loud that she couldn’t tell if it was in her head or her helmet. She fell back under the wing, but one of the cables circled her arm, slipping closed like a noose. All her weight, and the tank’s, was suspended from the cutting cable, and she cried out.

“Causapscal!” Control called.

A light blinked in her helmet. Émile calling on another channel.

She swung wildly again, pulling at her shoulder. Her arm was getting crushed. Images crashed through her mind. Her sister Chloé, taken with her husband by a storm. No one knew how they’d died. Maybe a blow to the head? Cooking as they fell into the depths? Punctured and bled out? Venus rarely left clues when she struck. Her victims just dissolved, one way or another. However it was that Venus had taken her sister, Chloé had likely had at least a moment of realization, a terrible instant of fear and clarity. Like this. She didn’t want to follow Chloé.

Marthe’s right hand found the hilt and release for a carbon-bladed knife. She reached up, not thinking, vision entirely focused on the cable and the blade. She sawed and sawed, twisting helplessly around the agony in her trapped arm. The blinking light and the sounds of Control yelling to her were static against the pain.

The cable frayed, but wouldn’t cut. Too tough.

The churning lifted her again, flung her upwards, and the cable loosened off her numb arm. The wing came down, about to slam her from above, and she had enough presence of mind to fling the knife away before it got pushed into her suit. Her face slammed into the faceplate, leaving blood, then she was falling again, jerking against the cables.

Dazed, she swung as lightning blasted behind her. Cables whipped against her in the wind, torn loose from the wing. Through the smear of her own blood, she saw the wing losing its shape, bending, getting ready to fold. The cables had yanked out chunks of fabric.

Ostie.

Sulfuric acid poured around her. A torrent of storm-tossed drops. She wiped her faceplate. The rain and clouds darkened the world. Marthe was just a flake of alien life in a sea of acid wind. And she had to get away from this improvised wing before it dragged her into the depths.

Her left arm barely lifted on its own. She had to stand in the foot straps to unclip herself with just her right hand. She’d wanted to step off properly, but a gust flung her away and then she was tumbling in the wind. The wing was there for a moment, and then rain erased it. Marthe spread her legs, dropping head first in the ocher mists. But something ground in the wing-pack machinery, over and over. Her wings wouldn’t unfurl. Tabarnak.

She blew her personal emergency balloon. It took about half the oxygen in her breathing tanks to fill, and the fabric wasn’t made to survive a storm. She’d intended to fly out under her own power.

Her descent slowed and stopped. She dangled in the pouring rain, swaying in the wind. With her good arm she drew the acid-proof sheet out of her survival pouch and pulled it over herself. Her left shoulder and arm hurt badly and her head ached. She smelled chlorine inside her helmet. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

The clouds of Venus had very little chlorine, and what there was of it was bound into the rain as hydrochloric acid. Something was hissing in her helmet. At the edge of her faceplate, hot little bubbles grew and popped inside the seal. Where her face had hit, there was a tiny web of cracks in the glass, bleeding in atmosphere. The wind swept her deeper into the storm.