SIXTY-TWO

 

 

TÉTREAU HAD BEEN aboard the Venusian Branch of the Bank of Pallas before, but never past the glass doors into Woodward’s offices. Woodward’s title, Branch Manager, was deceptive. The laws of the Earth didn’t work in the solar system; the distances were too great. A person could be charged with a crime, but if he was on the other side of the solar system from Earth and couldn’t be investigated—much less apprehended—for two or three years, in what sense were laws enforceable?

Banks like the Lunar Bank, the Bank of Ceres, the Bank of Enceladus, and the Bank of Pallas, already major financial and industrial powers, had emerged in that legal vacuum. They’d incorporated in space, under the jurisdiction of no country, creating their own laws even as they financed the growth of nations into space. They engaged in transport and trade, and even made and enforced law, much like the Hudson’s Bay Company founded to service early Canadian coureurs de bois. As Branch Manager, Woodward exercised the Bank’s authority on Venus, backed by the financial, trading, and even police powers of a solar-system-spanning company.

The glass doors slid open. A financial secretary, Amélie d’Argenson, escorted him past Woodward’s office to a room neatly labelled Mapping Survey Office in English. Miss Woodward was already there, with a meteorologist Tétreau recognized as Mark Nasmith, one of the imported Bank staff.

The wall screens projected a dizzying array of data. Several side screens, each a meter square, showed polar maps in false color at exquisite resolution. Mineral maps. The central screens had parallel views of low-wavelength radar images of clouds, along with fuzzy, largely empty images of the cloud columns.

“Good afternoon, Monsieur Tétreau,” Woodward said in English, offering a hand.

He felt a bit baffled by all he saw as he shook her hand. What were they doing with such detailed mineral maps? Most of Venus’s surface was basaltic, old magma, with the metals buried far below. Did the Bank have tech to exploit the surface?

“Do you know a lot about mapping technology, Monsieur Tétreau?”

He shook his head.

Nasmith pointed at the topology of the cloud surface in one image.

“Here we shoot high-frequency radar at the clouds,” he said. “Great for watching cloud formations and trying to figure out how weather works on Venus. Most of your habitats have something like this, but this is a bird’s eye view.”

Tétreau had never seen a bird, and found this English expression odd.

Nasmith’s finger pointed to the surface maps.

“If we go with longer radar waves, we can see through the clouds to map the radar reflectivity and smoothness of the surface, but our resolution goes down,” he said.

Tétreau had never made the intuitive leap that would allow him to interpret radar maps without effort. Smooth flat things reflected radar and so they were bright. Rough things and slopes reflected radar poorly and so were darker. A contour map could be built of radar maps, but not by him; too abstract.

Nasmith was shifting the view, neither fully long-wave nor short-wave. Fuzzy blobs formed in the projection. They looked like out-of-focus cells seen through a microscope. Tétreau squinted.

“Focusing the radar emissions differently, we can resolve things in the clouds,” Nasmith said. “These are probably trawlers. Their surfaces are partly smooth and partly rough depending on how much they’ve been colonized by epiphytes. Here you’ve got some small wildtype ones and some bigger engineered ones, or several in a column, but at different altitudes. But here,” he said, pointing at the bright spot, “is the Causapscal-des-Vents.”

The hard white blob was falling further and further behind the flotilla, and it was already deep, at the edge of a storm.

“The transceiver from the habitat doesn’t look like it’s working, so we’ve confirmed this is the Causapscal-des-Vents with D’Aquillon’s transceiver.”

“Missing parts,” Tétreau said absently. “What are these?” He indicated small bright shapes.

“Your crew planes. The fainter ones are rescue drones,” Woodward said. “They’re following the transceiver signal and using their own cloud-penetrating radar, but the resolution might be lower.”

“We can triangulate with this signal,” Tétreau said.

“Please do,” Woodward said.

Tétreau called Air Traffic Control from the Bank and began reading them coordinates for the Causapscal-des-Vents.

“Thank you for letting us access this,” he said. “We’re very concerned with the safety and property of those living on the Causapscal-des-Vents. Additionally, the habitatwas... is,” Woodward corrected herself, “collateral for a loan. Should it not be rescued, some other material goods will have to become collateral, or the colonie will be in breach of the terms of its debt.”

She said it evenly, neither harshly nor softly, but Tétreau didn’t mistake the intent of her words. Nasmith gave Tétreau comms access at the next work station. He had access to the common band and the encrypted channel the searchers were using for the radiation search. He hadn’t realized that Gaschel had shared that with the Bank.

“Control, Les Plaines is collapsing,” one of the pilots declared on the radio. “We can’t get around the storm, or under it. Do you want us to come back?”

“Negative, rescue team,” control replied amid the static. “Keep going.”

“Roger, control,” came the resigned reply.

“Control, this is one-five-six. I’ve got a signal!” a pilot said in the encrypted channel. “Straight under my position. It’s faint.”

Woodward lifted one questioning eyebrow, observing him.

“Start pinging, one-five-six, and start diving,” control said. “One-hundred-level units, converge on one-five-six and start triangulating. Two-hundred-level units, stay on search and rescue.”

“One-five-six is a good constable,” Tétreau said.

“Câlisse,” one-five-six said. “Okay.”