The Venus Belt

by L. Neil Smith

  The orang consulted his dials and knobs. “LOS, 4137, not even a carrier. That’s unusual, they have at least a dozen relays. I’ll try another channel. Hello, Navigation Rock, Port Piazzi calling. Do you read me, Navigation Rock?”

  Nothing.

  “Just a minute, 4137.” There was a long pause while he conferred with an associate, another, even longer pause. Then, “I’m sorry, 4137, we’d send somebody up to look, but there’s the solar storm. We don’t seem to be able to raise any of their competition, either. Anything I can do for you while we check into it?”

  “Sure, gimme their coordinates.”

  ”But, 4137, uh, Mrs. Kropotkin, it’s dangerous out there.”

  “It’s gonna be a lot more dangerous down here without you give me those coordinates, pronto. Whaddya think I pay m’landing fees fer?”

  “Very well, it’s a Free System.” He reeled off a list of numbers while Lucy programmed the Cord’s computers and cleared for takeoff. The flivver began to vibrate subtly.

  “Hold onta yer helmets, kiddies!” She stabbed a button and the crater floor fell out from underneath us. Suddenly we were bathed in bright sunlight. I cringed, thinking of the radiation sleeting through our bodies.

  “Lucy, I thought you’d ordered extra shielding for this thing!”

  “Wasn’t time, Winnie, but don’t you fret—lookit this gauge.” She pointed to the image of a dial on the screen. Whatever it was measuring, it wasn’t measuring much of it. “See there, hardly a worm-wiggle. We been hoaxed, right ‘nough, there ain’t no solar storm. Wait’ll Port Piazzi hears about this!” She started re-establishing contact.

  “Slow down, Lucy!” That was Koko. “Whoever’s behind this—they’ve even interfered with Navigation Rock, somehow. I don’t want to be interfered with the same way—until we find out what’s going on.”

  “She’s right, Lucy. Let’s sneak up on them, okay?”

  “Yer both right, you two. Must be gettin’ senile ‘r somethin’—mebbe just undernourished. How about a bite t’ eat? We’ll be a coupla hours gettin’ there.”

  I declined in favor of reclining. There wasn’t room enough to stand inside the vehicle, but there was plenty to stretch out in. I guess it amounts to the same thing in freefall. Part of the extra space came from the orientation—”down” was toward the fusion burners (at one-tenth gee, it didn’t matter very much), the paired seats flanked a ladder lying on the “floor.” A minijohn and microkitchen rested on a supporting shelf behind, and aft of that, a firewall or bulkhead for the engines, generously upholstered for snoozing.

  I unbelted my weapons and strapped them down, removing the .25 from the inside of my suit and wedging it into an extra ammunition pouch. Some gun. The hissing of the engines made a lovely, soporific veil of sound. In disconnected snatches, I could hear my friends discussing the solar flare. There were plenty of weather-predicting companies, and no single outfit should be able to fake a storm-warning on a scale like this. They’d be paying restitution well into the next eon, at least that’s what Lucy kept insisting. Koko seemed crushed, disappointed in what had seemed the Promised Land to her, and unjustly disappointed with Lucy for being unable to account for the anomaly.

  I wondered—and worried—about it myself. This whole situation was getting more complicated by the minute: people disappearing, others trying to knock me off, electronic zombies wandering around loose. And above all, Clarissa, always Clarissa. Like that dream where you’re running, trying to reach the one you love, and, in all the confusion, somehow never quite able to.

  I slipped from fitful doze into a solid, if occasionally troubled, sleep, vaguely aware at turnaround, then back into the warm, friendly darkness behind my eyelids.

  I almost missed it when we reached the asteroid known as Navigation Rock.

  10: Swim the Friendly Skies

  Sunday, March 14, 223 A.L.

  Find a little asteroid, drill a little hole, plant a little bomb. Heat the whole mess cherry-red in an induction field generated by orbiting construction drones rented for the occasion. When solid rock has acquired the consistency of incandescent bubble gum, the explosives puff it up into a larger, hollow shell.

  Old stuff, right? Then tunnel in and plant your trees and grass—don’t forget the animals and air and topsoil.

  Wrong.

  Instead, try filling half the mile-wide cavity with water. A modest spin will plaster your captive lake around the inner surface, shallow at the poles, deeper at the equator. Top it off with an air system like the aquarium in your living room—an aquarium whose denizens make their mortgage payments by furnishing unprecedentedly accurate navigational information to half the civilized Solar System.

  If I’d been in a position to appreciate the situation—a longtime inhabitant of the Belt or seasoned space-traveler—a falsified solar flare report and the subsequent cutoff of Navigation Rock’s transmissions would have been my greatest shock so far. It certainly seemed to be affecting Lucy.

  Her final approach was downright paranoid, one “hand” carefully caressing the controls, the other locked rigidly on the trigger switch, prepared to unleash the Darling gun on the flivver’s starboard fender. One nervous twitch of her tongue, we’d be minus a windshield, courtesy of her own built-in quick-firer.

  At one pole of the asteroid a gigantic bay was brightly lit and open wide: invitation or trap? Lucy chose to hang us out in empty space, politely waking me before she depressurized the hull. I’d been sleeping with my hood down, so I appreciated the thought. I sat up groggily, feeling worse after my nightmare-ridden nap than before. We were once again in free fall, hell on equilibrium, but otherwise welcome as I runged my sleep-stiffened way toward a jumpseat in the nose. Beside me, Koko seemed unusually awed and quiet, but our chauffeur was simply full of cheerful trivia.

  “Tried t’raise ‘em on a dozen different bands, Winnie. They’re clammed up real good.” She pointed toward the bloated rock drifting beyond the windshield. “Guess that’s why.”

  I squinted myself into tears before remembering to adjust my suitsenses. On the cracked and pitted surface below, four broken stubs of well-scorched alloy thrust a feeble foot or so into the flivver’s spotlights. “Antenna mast?”

  “Usta be half a mile of it,” Lucy answered, goosing us into an orbit that suited her minutely better. “Somebody done that deliberate. Loosen up yer ordnance, amigos—time we got t’gettin’” The cabin thrummed; a little yellow light on my forearm warned me it was now completely full of vacuum. She pressed a few more dashboard buttons; a scarlet panel lamp blinked on and off, then died. “A little surprise fer anybody tam-pers with Eddie’s car!”

  She opened the door, swung herself outside, and hung there without visible means of support, waiting. Finally I stepped out onto nothingness, clinging with acrophobic trepidation to the door handle as Koko followed and Lucy took us each by the hand. “You two just let me do th’ maneuverin’. Gonna leave ‘er ajar, case we need a fast getaway.” My fingers tingled momentarily as she left the open frequency and trans-mitted through our suit-skins: “Somethin’ happens t’me, don’t try startin’ th’ engines without you flush th’ toilet an’ turn th’ kitchen water on—cold. Otherwise, it’ll be th’ Second of July, all over again. That’s th’ way I got it rigged, comprende?”

  “Flush the toilet, water cold. I get it, Lucy.” I was also getting sicker by the second. Try not looking down when it’s that way every direction.

  “Unh! Er, toilet and water,” Koko acknowledged after a second prod in the ribs. This must have been her idea of heaven, the goddamned fuzzy space cadet. I clutched fearfully at Lucy’s chassis, trying to keep my right hand on the butt of the Webley. She produced a brief, quick-frozen propulsive flurry that nearly jarred me loose, and we began drifting slowly across the hundred-yard void.

  At least I tried to think of it as “across.”

  Navigating by the seat of her impellers, Lucy compensated for Koko’s greater mass by shortening up her left mani
pulator, while extending her right, the side I was on, as far as it would go. It wasn’t quite enough; together, we made a lousy spaceship, but the warm, buttery light of the lock kept getting closer all the same. Finally our pilot pivoted passengers and corpus around her axillae and gave one brief, carefully calculated blast. We slowed and bumped into gentle contact with the sabotage-blackened rock.

  I stickied up my shoe soles and Lucy let me go.

  “Stand by a moment, kids. Somethin’ I gotta find out.” She grabbed a broken cable sprouting from one fused and buckled tower leg. “Hello, Navigation Rock, any of you mudpuppies still there?”

  At this range, even Lucy’s arm made a passable antenna. A blurry, snowfilled image seeped into the bottom corner of my suitscreen, the same Orca, I think, that we’d talked to back on Ceres. “This is Navigation Rock, who are you?”

  “This here’s Lucy Kropotkin. Any reason we shouldn’t come inside outa th’ cold?”

  Koko turned her back to watch the Cord as it hung a hundred yards away, lighted by the open lock beside us.

  “We’re quite secure, Lucy. However, we can’t persuade the outer door to cycle shut See what you can do, I’ll meet you at the inside entrance to render such assistance as I can.” As before, some indistinct squirmy horror oozed across the viewfield, and the killer whale rang off.

  We picked our careful way to the lock over a highly uneven suface. The ground seemed broken, tortured, cracked, and fractured like the bottom of some drought-sticken river bed. Evidence, I supposed, of the heroic modifications made to this submoonlet.

  Stretchmarks.

  Thanks to the artifically imposed rotation of the asteroid, keeping my feet glued to the ground was a problem. Against a negligible native gravity was pitted an inexorable outward pull—approximately the same tenth-gee that had held me down on Ceres—threatening to propel me into space. It was a long walk home. I never watched my step so carefully in my life. The lock itself was a smooth-hewn hangar-size rectilinear proposition, filled with friendly yellow light, but not much of anything else. Lucy left us teetering at the edge in double-ended vertigo, and hovered her way over the abyss, somehow maintaining what amounted to a synchronous orbit.

  “Win, c’mere an’ take a gander. An’ bring that toad-sticker of yours.”

  Not being outfitted with engines, I crawled reluctantly around the well and over the lip like a housefly. Lucy was investigating the edge of an enormous sliding door. Fragments from the shattered antenna tower had spattered this end of the lock, one six-foot metallic splinter penetrating the gasket like a broom straw tornadoed into a phone pole, neatly nailing the door to its frame. She reached across for my Rezin.

  “Hey, don’t mess up my knife! Probably won’t cut that supersealant, anyway. Just get Koko over here, and we’ll help you wiggle it out, okay?” Maybe okay wasn’t the word; it was beginning to dawn on me that, where any direction can be “up,” the longest, most dizzying direction inevitably seems “down.” I swallowed and tried to think of this wall I clung to so desperately as a floor, while Lucy casually fetched my assistant. The pair drifted easily across the chasm, Koko holding Lucy’s manipulator, and grabbed hold of the six-foot fragment. I shoved, then Koko shoved, with Lucy pulling “upward” at every stroke. Back and forth we sawed, Koko scarcely breathing hard, while I, with merely human muscles, began to worry about my suit’s capacity to absorb sweat.

  Finally the stanchion lurched free, taking the three of us with it. Lucy blasted, snatching us up into the lock as the door began abruptly sliding shut. She stomped a red emergency panel and we hopped out of the way as another set of doors, an inch or so behind the first, closed up as well. Grateful for the double floor beneath us, we walked over to a handhold in the wall and waited for the air.

  Suddenly an elephantine gout of water bashed me on the head, nearly tearing me from the strap. In an instant it was boiling around my hips with a violent swirling motion. A second more and it washed my shoulders, lapped its way past my head and filled the lock completely. A trapdoor in the ceiling far above us slid aside and I looked “up” at a fascinating scene.

  Overhead reached a broad tunnel into the rock. The roiling water made it hard to judge distances visually, but the sonar in my suit said half a mile, brilliantly illuminated every inch along the way. Lucy seemed serenely unperturbed, and Koko continued uncharacteristically silent. I gulped and concentrated on viewing this thing as a horizontal tunnel, but my brain was gibberingly convinced it was the bottom of a well.

  Ever been at the bottom of a well?

  Then Lucy was off again with a churning, whizzing sound, taking both of us in tow at a respectable submarine clip. At the far end of the tunnel, I had another queasy reorientation to perform, mentally transmuting what seemed to be an endless abyssal cliff side into a shallow sea bottom, clothed in weeds of a hundred colors, shoals of shiny rainbow fish dashing in and out among them. The floor was white and sandy, the surface not far overhead, alternately sunny and reflective. There to meet us as the waterlock’s inner doors rumbled shut in a cloud of well-stirred silt were a dozen killer whales, their striking black-and-white markings disguised by partially fastened smartsuits, as if they hadn’t entirely trusted the damaged lock. Good judgment, in my estimation.

  “Howdy,” Lucy opened. “Got a place a body can set a spell?”

  The largest of the creatures swam toward me, its suit a delicate complex of geometric patterns. “Greetings, Lucy Kropotkin. It is I, Reeouhoo, come to welcome you to Navigation Rock.” Apparently Lucy had neglected to switch over to acoustic communications. I got her off the radio and we straightened identities around. Reeouhoo, an old acquaintance of Lucy’s (and who wasn’t, from the asteroids to Burbank?), was dismayed to learn about her injuries. Koko was duly introduced, and so was I—learning in the process that there had been a perfectly good airlock for land-dwellers down at the asteroid’s south pole.

  “Well, no harm done,” chattered Lucy. “An’ anyway, we got the waterlock workin’ again. Saw yer broadcastin’ tower, too—what’s left of it.” She’d settled to the bottom where a miniature submarine sand dune began collecting on her lee side. Koko was paddling around like a giant frog, while I, never the most enthusiastic of swimmers, peered up at the surface, a broken, fluttering mirror only a few yards above our heads. This would be one of the shallow ends of the pool—Lucy had mentioned depths as great as a thousand feet at the equator. “Gonna tell us how it happened?”

  The giant porpoise hesitated. “We have yet to sound it out, my friend, and it is a murky situation indeed. I believe it would be best if you accompanied us to a place of rest for land-dwellers. There we can relate to you as much as we know.”

  Suddenly he whirled and burst into a welter of eardrum-splitting clicks and screeches. Dimly in the distance, an alien swarm appeared, unporpoiselike, and coming toward us fast.

  Some inner reflex made me backwater in mounting horror as the nightmare shadows overtook us. They swirled around us in a rapidly narrowing circle and closed in. Dozens of glistening hungry tentacles enveloped Lucy first, then Koko. I whirled in shock to discover a pair of the squishy, horrifying things behind me, fended off a sucker-studded arm, and fumbled desperately for my knife.

  11: A Friend in Need

  Tuesday, March 16, 223 A.L.

  Koko flapped her wings and giggled.

  Thirty feet below her, stretched half-asleep on the sun-baked roof of the Oahu Wahoo, I ducked, too late to avoid the slithery missile she’d released from her toes. The sunfish hit me with a slimy smack! and lay there across my stomach making stupid mouthings. I shuddered and tossed it over the side, planning revenge.

  The furry bombardier above me gained altitude, banked on a plastic wing, sculled fiercely for balance, then swooped to a hasty, amateurish landing on the houseboat. As she stumbled past, I contributed a strategic foot to her confusion. She followed the sunfish over the rail with a dismayed shriek and an enormous slow-motion splash. In Navigation Rock’s minimal
pseudogravity, there were still droplets in the air when she regained the surface, airfoils drooped in a disheveled tent around her.

  “There is,” I informed her placidly, “justice in the universe after all.”

  Koko spat out a salty mouthful and raised her wrist talker above the waves. “You got my pretty new wings all wet! Wait’ll I tell Lucy!”

  Said personage rose with a blast from the lower deck and settled beside me. “Tell me what? Say, muchacha, yer supposed t’be flyin’ with them things, not swimmin’!”

  The moment somehow shrank a little then, as it occurred to me how much Clarissa would have enjoyed it. I reached into my sporran on the deck, extracting a cigar: the killer whales, always looking to make an extra tenth-piece, had gene-spliced up a nicotine-producing strain of kelp. Being a generous sort, I was helping them test it. “Our aqueous aeronaut needs to practice touch-and-goes—though I suppose carrier-landings have their own peculiarities. What have you and your fishy friends been up to all morning, Lucy?”

  It was going on three days since our arrival. The welcome we’d received had been expansive—if a little startling—beginning with a hair-raising jet-assist to landling territory from a squadron of Reeouhoo’s pet Loligo paelii-plus. Maybe “pet” isn’t the best word—try “artifacts,” or “tools”—most sea-folk I knew well were chess pros, theoretical physicists, even opera singers, content with purely abstract strivings, and mildly derisive of the materialistic culture their fellow sapients have erected on the land. This delphinoid gang was different, following a pronounced mechanical bent that made them oddballs among Cetacea.

  Reeouhoo’s people were determinedly making up for the dirty evolutionary trick that had equipped them with a weighty and complex brain while depriving them of any manipulatory faculty by which they might accomplish something tangible. Thus they’d made peculiar and brilliant use of giant squid—and of that same brain-bore technology I’d classified as irredeemably disgusting only days ago.