Gravity of a Distant Sun

by R. E. Stearns

  Iridian staggered back into Rio, which was like backing into a mildly feminine steel bulkhead. Tash and Noor were shouting, trying to get the rest of the prisoners involved in the fight. Most people just sat and watched. The ones who’d earned comp gloves raised them, palm out, taking pics or vids.

  “Look, they can’t do anything, can they?” Noor yelled, pointing at the ERT people, who were closing in with batons and fists but no nannite backup. Still, only a few other people got to their feet. Since their behavior on the inside determined how soon they’d get out, they’d need a good reason to jump into somebody else’s fight. Wiley discreetly kept a path to the door clear of onlookers.

  Rio stepped around Iridian, swept all three women with food on their shirts out of her way, and waded into the group who’d stood up to watch. Tash went in too and, through some selection process Iridian couldn’t follow, shoved certain individuals into others in such a way that their impacts seemed at best inconsiderate and at worst intentional. Mayhem erupted in Tash’s wake. It was impressive as hell.

  With the door in view and the guards swinging batons from the periphery, it looked like a good time to make a run for it. Iridian shouldered her way into the hall and ran, finally, actually ran for the first time in weeks, toward where a modern hab’s lift should be. Babe, we’re coming.

  Which was, of course, when somebody tackled her from behind. Tash’s assistant among the guards had made it impossible to activate the nannite culture, but there were other ways to stop people. Iridian turned her head to the side to keep from slamming her face into the floor for the second time today.

  The weight on her back disappeared. Iridian pulled out of a grip on her arm and rolled to her feet to find Rio holding an ERT helmet in one hand and the man’s head in her other. The crack when his head hit the wall made Rio and Iridian wince. Rio dropped the helmet to put her hand over her mouth. “Ooh, might’ve killed that one.” She looked more like she’d just burped than like she’d accidentally ended a life.

  While Rio lowered the guard to the floor, Noor, Tash, and Wiley ran out of the cafeteria. All five of them headed for the lift. “Rio, tell the ZVs we’re coming,” Iridian shouted over her shoulder.

  “With what?” Rio asked.

  Iridian kicked a door that, in an average hab, should lead to the lift. The door didn’t budge, but it was useful that the time she’d spent on her back in virtual prison had given her bad knee time to rest. “Yeah, never mind.” Every other time Iridian had been on an op with separated teams, they’d had an encrypted comm channel to talk over. It was one of the first things Adda had secured when she’d set up ops for Sloane’s crew. “Wiley, does your comp link out to the outside?”

  “Not so much,” Wiley said. “It goes to monitored messaging and sites the ITA thinks is okay.”

  “Then drop it. People can do all kinds of nasty things with a comp.” Instead of following Iridian’s order immediately, Wiley looked to Tash, who nodded, before he took off the comp glove. Iridian would have to figure out another way to tell the ZVs about the new rendezvous location. “Okay. Rio, kick this door in. Please.”

  Rio’s foot was bigger than Iridian’s forearm, and she took down the door even in the soft-soled prison-issue shoes they all wore. Swearing, probably from the pain of kicking it off its track without boots, she led the way into a small room that led to a lift. The doors were shut, but Rio and Wiley forced them open. In a few minutes, all five escapees had climbed through the elevator’s ceiling and into the dark shaft beyond.

  “So,” said Tash as they climbed, “what’s your grand plan now?”

  “Get onto the roof and signal the ZVs from there,” said Iridian. “Then defend ourselves until they pick us up.”

  Noor was already breathing hard. “And hope that happens before somebody drops the station ten kilometers?” That would be deadly for anybody on the outside. Venus’s atmo was hellish.

  “They won’t do that.” Tash was almost as out of breath as Noor. “Too much fuel, too much trouble. They’ll call their ITA friends on the civilian station. It’s on the other side of the ’ject, but it won’t take them long to come fuck up our day. Ah, gods, I can’t keep climbing like this.”

  Rio stopped at the next lift door and pried it open. Iridian followed her out into the station’s upper level. Everything was bland yellow-white and gray, from the walls to the station-style stable-grav desk to the hair of the virtual woman who materialized at it as soon as they stepped into the room. It was a massive relief not to be surrounded by the ITA’s shade of blue. This floor would have facilities for the station’s crew, so regulations required it to have enviro suits and a path to the station exterior. Iridian stepped aside so that Wiley, Tash, and Noor could clamber out of the shaft as well.

  “Where are the enviro suits?” Iridian asked the digital woman at the desk.

  The woman pointed at a shut door across from her console. “Enviro suits are in the airlock cabinet. Shall I activate an enviro emergency alert?”

  “No, we’re good.” Tash leaned over the desk, into what would’ve been personal space if weak AIs had any. “Open it, and then open the airlock or passthrough that’ll get us outside.”

  “And deactivate any comms active on this level,” Iridian added. “Don’t turn on any either.” The staff would have override privileges with this figure, but any delay gave Iridian more time to signal the ZVs. The door to the storage area in front of the airlock slid open. “Hey, what time is it?” Iridian asked.

  “Seven thirteen p.m. Venus Standard.”

  Iridian heaved a sigh of relief, because that was a reasonable match for the time she’d read on the clock in her cell. The simulation’s time had barely been off at all. With no way of knowing how long the ZVs had been waiting for her, or whether they’d waited at all, it felt good to be certain of something.

  “The ITA’s sending reinforcements, yeah?” she asked the AI’s figure. “When?”

  “Ten minutes,” the figure said serenely.

  While the others swore, Iridian headed for the airlock storage area. It was a closet-size space, with the cleaning bot docked across from the suit locker. A side-sliding airlock door took up the entire back wall. There should’ve been a tool kit, but she didn’t see it. Some idiot must’ve wandered off to hang a projector with it or something. If anything in the airlock had broken, people could’ve died for that projector.

  Shaking her head in disgust, Iridian pulled out a suit, double-checked the circle-and-cross symbol that identified it as safe to use in Venus’s atmo, and tapped the tag to adjust it to a size that’d fit her. When she put it on, she ran through an abbreviated systems check. She couldn’t just walk out of the hab with no idea of whether the suit would protect her. The others did the same. Wiley sized Tash’s before handing it to her.

  “Switch to channel six,” Iridian said loudly enough to be heard through her suit’s hood. “Otherwise we won’t be able to talk over the wind. We don’t all have to go out now.” Everybody trained for hab emergencies in vacuum and low grav. It was a hell of a lot scarier to step into an enviro where a leak would let acidic atmo into your suit if your pressure settings were off. Venus’s grav would pull you straight down faster than the average spacefarer expected while suited up too. Its atmo was deadly, but its grav was a nearly perfect one g. “I’m going out to try to get the ZVs’ attention,” Iridian continued. “Block the door to the lift.”

  “On it,” said Wiley.

  “Wait,” said Tash. “This hab is under ITA control. Even if they can’t activate the nannite cultures right now, they might gas us in here. I don’t want to stick around to find out.”

  “Point.” Iridian paused over the airlock controls. “New plan. Everybody out now, and I’ll jam the exterior door open. That’ll stop the airlock from cycling, and they can do whatever they want with the interior atmo.”

  “Better,” said Noor.

  The airlock had been designed for about two people, not four average-size peopl
e and one enormous one. Once the interior door closed, it still found a way to check all their suits. “Somebody’s suit isn’t sealed,” Iridian said, reading the warning to that effect from the control panel.

  “Oh,” said Tash. “Shit.” She took her suit’s hood off and put it on again. After a minute, the cycle finished and the exterior door opened.

  The airlock opened onto a platform caged in on all sides. The heavy gust of wind that blew into the airlock made Iridian appreciate the cage. She’d come too far to be blown into the swirling clouds of golden gases that surrounded them.

  The ITA floated its prison about fifty klicks over Venus’s surface to take advantage of the healthy atmo pressure, but nothing else about this planet resembled Iridian’s few years on Earth. Her suit’s temp system kicked into high gear to account for the heat she’d walked into. Most of the cloudscape churning outside the cage was sulfur. She’d never had any desire to wander around Venus, but now that she was here, it felt primal and alien. Nothing she’d seen before was anything like it.

  The atmo’s high sulfur content would make it smell as deadly as it looked. “Does anybody smell sulfur?” Iridian asked over the local comms. “If you do, you’ve got a suit leak.” Visibility degraded into yellow haze just a few meters beyond the cage walls.

  “No sulfur.” Wiley’s tone was professional, but he was grinning in the suit hood’s depiction of his face.

  “None in mine, either.” Tash was staring out of the cage at the yellow clouds boiling below. “It looks amazing, though.”

  Noor had stayed beside the airlock, staring apprehensively into the clouds. “Somebody want to tell me when we’re actually leaving?”

  Rio had to duck to avoid banging her head on the airlock doorway. “How do we get out from here?” Her question confirmed that the suits were all on the same local channel.

  Iridian stuck her foot into the airlock doorway as the others crowded onto the platform. “Opening’s right there.” She pointed at the hinges above her. “Everybody watch their heads. I want to take that hatch down and jam it in the exterior door here.” It was an inelegant solution, but without the tool kit that should’ve been in the airlock’s storage area, she was stuck with whatever she could do with the flimsy multi-tool in her enviro suit’s sleeve.

  She extracted the multi-tool from her suit, and then, with an incorrect claim of “Aw, this one printed with all the tools stuck to the case,” she took Tash’s and Noor’s, too. They might panic and turn on her when ITA reinforcements arrived. With enough force, a multi-tool’s tiny blade would puncture a suit.

  Using Noor’s multi-tool, she set to work on the square door built into the metal cage surrounding the platform. She’d thought the metal’s coppery color was a reflection of the clouds around them, but a closer look revealed that it was a copper alloy, probably to account for the acidic atmo. More importantly, the damned door was bolted in place.

  “While I’m doing this, Rio, can you see who you can raise on suit comms? Because—” Iridian grunted as the bolt gripper she’d been shoving onto too large a bolt for its size twisted and jammed itself against her glove. Atmo pressure was slightly higher outside the suit than it was on the inside, and she froze, waiting for the stink of sulfur that’d signal a suit breach. It didn’t come. She went back to work on the hatch. “The ZVs sure as hell won’t see us out here.”

  “Are they scanning the infrared spectrum?” Noor asked from where he held the airlock open.

  “Maybe,” said Rio.

  By standing in the doorway, Noor blocked the outside door’s sensors. Standard airlock failsafe design meant that the outside door wouldn’t close on an obstruction and that only one door could open at a time. But if the ZVs didn’t come, it’d take Noor about four seconds to step into the airlock, let the door close, and beg the ITA guards for mercy. Rio shifted to put herself in the doorway too, so she must’ve been thinking along the same lines.

  “Would lighting something on fire help?” Wiley was grinning when Iridian paused to look incredulously at him around her raised arms.

  “It might,” she said. Wiley had mellowed out a little since she’d fought at his side, but he still played with fire more than any self-respecting spacefarer should. “Wait until we’re out of here, yeah? If we stand on this cage, we can climb onto the roof. Then you can light the cage up.” Nothing on the outside of the station looked like it’d catch fire and damage the airlock.

  “What will you burn, though?” Tash asked.

  “O2,” Iridian and Wiley said together, her as a warning and him as a delighted announcement. O2 would light easily and explode. With luck, the bang would look different enough from the rest of this atmo that it’d draw the ZVs down from their maintenance orbit to the roof. The ZVs’ sensors would be trained on the station, and it’d almost have to be a digital catch. Smoke wouldn’t stick around in this wind.

  Also, they’d be down O2 they’d need to breathe for as long as it took the ZVs to arrive. If Iridian had figured out she’d been in a gods-damned sim before she started trouble the first time, she could’ve broken out of the cafeteria during lunch rather than dinner and gotten out of here hours ago. What the hell kind of organization would put a person in a sim without telling them?

  Adda would’ve thought of it. She’d have read about the place somehow, despite the ITA’s system of privileges and restrictions. Iridian figured things out in the end, but Adda made a plan work before it happened. Iridian just wasn’t as good without Adda.

  The bolt she’d been loosening clanked onto the solid platform floor and rolled off the edge. It fell into klick after klick of hot nothing. Golden light flickered through the dense clouds that enveloped it. Lightning, Iridian realized. She’d seen it from below during Earth storms. Atmo should not generate an electrical charge strong enough to kill you.

  Iridian swallowed hard and started on the next bolt. Behind her, Wiley’s O2 tank clanked on the cage floor. He’d disconnected it from his suit, and now he was breathing only what remained in the suit itself while he turned the tank into a small bomb.

  “People, I don’t know what you’re thinking of doing out there, but it’s not safe.” The woman was speaking at a calm and reasonable volume, but her voice over the hab’s external speakers made Iridian jump. The voice belonged to Iridian’s assigned ITA counselor. “This is Shera Marsten. I’m a counselor. Is this something we can talk about indoors?”

  Noor laughed darkly. “What must this look like? Mass suicide?” He was watching the airlock, and he might’ve been able to hear through the airlock’s interior door. All Iridian heard was her breath, the comms, and the wind rushing past her helmet.

  Rio still stood in the exterior doorway, keeping that door open and the interior door shut. Iridian turned back to her part of the job and tuned out Rio’s occasional “Major, this is Rio, come in” on the local channel they were using. The ZV officer she was calling either hadn’t heard or hadn’t gotten close enough to reply. Iridian didn’t hold out much hope for the signal escaping Venus’s atmo intact, but that was about the only chance they had.

  “Are you trying to talk to us, Rio?” Shera asked over the hab’s speakers. “We’re looking for another suit right now, and then we’ll all be on the same channel and we’ll talk.” Iridian wasn’t the only one muttering curses while she worked.

  The last bolt came loose and left Iridian holding the square door that covered the opening in the cage. “Everybody out,” she called to the others. Wiley, carrying his oxygen tank bomb, and Tash climbed out first.

  “Oh, that’s really not safe, you all,” said Shera. “Please come down from there.”

  “Aww, she’s worried about us,” Tash said. “That’s sweet.”

  Rio and Noor made room for Iridian to hold the disconnected hatch upright in the airlock doorway, between the sensors that would’ve told the door a person was standing there. The door shut on the hatch immediately. Somebody in the hab must’ve been slamming the open airlock icon on the
desk console, but now that the exterior door was stuck open, the interior one was stuck shut. The hatch was narrower than the doorway. The wrong gust of wind would blow it loose sooner than Iridian wanted, but it was the best she could do with what she had.

  Iridian and Rio climbed onto the cage roof and pulled Noor up after them, then backed away from the roof’s edge. It was way too far to even think about falling. Wiley stayed near the cage to drop his tank. “How much will you have to breathe without that?” Iridian asked him.

  “Fifteen minutes, maybe?” Wiley shrugged.

  Tash hadn’t offered Wiley any of her O2, which meant that Iridian would be sharing hers with Wiley if they were stuck here long. If the ZVs missed this first attempt, Iridian might have to let Wiley blow up her tank too. “Any luck raising the ZVs on a local channel, Rio?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Blow it, Wiley,” Iridian said. “Let’s see if that gets their attention.”

  “There’s no fuse, so . . .” Wiley crouched, held the destabilized tank over the hatch opening. “Here goes nothing.” He let go of the tank and dove toward the center of the roof.

  The blast shook the domed roof under Iridian’s feet. Pieces of the tank rocketed several meters over their heads. Everyone dodged the falling debris. A lot of it blew past them. The ZVs wouldn’t come to Venus without cams that’d cut through cloud cover. That sure as hell should’ve triggered alerts.

  “What was that?” Shera’s voice called faintly from the speakers by the airlock. “What just happened? Iridian? Are you all okay? We’ll come out to help you just as soon as we can.”

  Everyone watched the clouds, thinner above the station than below it, where golden lightning still flared intermittently. The wind kept the atmo moving past them at a dizzying pace. Nothing that looked like a ship appeared. “How long are we waiting until we try something else?” Tash asked. Wiley’s shoulders slumped, making his discouragement obvious even with the enviro suit. As hard as they’d fought to get up here, they could stay only as long as they had something to breathe.