Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  Khalid smiled, and his liquid brown eyes closed in recollection of better times. “I trust your word.” He glanced up through the window at an impatient ground crewman who was beckoning from beside the spaceplane’s open lock. “Your hosts are eager to leave for Labyrinth City. Perhaps you should not give them an excuse to leave you behind.”

  Blake squeezed Khalid’s hand for the last time and turned away. He sealed up his pressure suit as he stepped into the lock; in less than a minute he was striding across the blowing sand toward the waiting spaceplane.

  The crewman gave him a boost into the lock and followed him inside, helping him into his seat in the plane’s small cabin. Blake glanced forward to the flight deck, but its door was closed. The ground crewman saw to it that Blake was strapped securely into his acceleration couch and then quickly retreated, snugging the double hatches of the airlock behind him.

  The pilot did not bother to use the comm system; the only launch announcement came from the computer’s synthesized voice: “Prepare for launch. The time is T minus thirty seconds.”

  Half a minute later the booster rockets exploded and the spaceplane tore down the runway and lifted off abruptly.

  The plane angled steeply back. Blake found himself peering straight up—the angle of attack was too steep, and the acceleration was crushing. Then, just as abruptly, the engines’ thunder ceased. The plane leaped as the boosters fell away. A huge weight lifted from Blake’s chest—

  No longer crushed, he now felt disoriented by weightlessness. This was no low-level trajectory to Labyrinth City … Blake woke to the first hint that something was wrong.

  Before he could free himself from his acceleration harness the door of the flight deck opened. Blake peered straight at the pilot he had not met before, and the first thing he noticed was the barrel of the .38 caliber Colt Aetherweight semiautomatic pistol that was aimed at his nose.

  What he noticed next was the smiling face of the man holding it, a small fellow with curly orange hair who was wearing a roomy flying jacket that appeared to be tailored from camel’s hair—worth more than a grade six plumber made in a year.

  “Don’t bother to get up, Mr. Redfield,” said the orange man. “There’s really no place for you to go.” The dapper little fellow allowed himself a broader grin. “Not just yet, anyway.”

  Blake almost lost his temper then, something that happened when he felt like an idiot. “In here you wouldn’t dare pull the…”

  “Forgive me for disillusioning you,” said the orange man, “but there is no danger to the hull of this fragile craft. I assure you that if I am forced to shoot you, the bullet will stop in your heart.”

  For a full minute Sparta lay facedown, eyeing the blinking readouts clustered beneath the chin of her helmet. Her suit was intact; she had suffered no damage in the explosion.

  She fell into a split-second trance. Her soul’s eye ran the partial differential equations she needed to estimate the arrival of Doradus in the near vicinity of Phobos: thirteen minutes.

  She pushed up lightly and lifted herself out of the coal-black dust of Stickney. She peered over the crater’s rim. Nothing moved on the black plain.

  The suitcomm of her emergency spacesuit, though short ranged, was sensitive to an unusually wide band of the radio spectrum—but she could hear only one thing of interest on it—what sounded like the ghost of the Mars Cricket, still aloft and drifting slowly away from Phobos, its transponder signaling normally.

  So Doradus had sent a decoy to take the shuttle’s place. Even that signal faded rapidly. Her radio’s range was indeed severely limited.

  She would have given much for the microwave sensitivity that had been ripped from her when the pulse bomb exploded in Khalid’s marsplane; she might then have been able to pick up a hint of the position of the Doradus, and had she chosen to beam signals of her own, she might have tried playing a few games with its electronic systems. She might even, with her own internal structures, have been able to detect the coded short-range transmission from the buried penetrator.

  Those chances were history now. Isolated inside her suit from every other sensory medium, she was dependent upon her eyes. But they were very good eyes.

  She had thirteen minutes in which to locate the penetrator and the plaque it contained before she had to cope with Doradus at close range.

  While flying the Mars Cricket into orbit she had mentally run estimates of the penetrator’s likely flight path. The thrust of the little solid-fuel rocket was more than sufficient for it to achieve the 2.1 kilometers per second orbital velocity of Phobos. The robber would have wanted to get the plaque off Mars as quickly as possible; that meant a high-energy parabolic orbit. Fired from somewhere near Labyrinth City as Phobos was high in the sky, the rocket’s flight would have appeared almost vertical. The impact presumably would have been somewhere on the eastern half of the overtaking moon, its leading half.

  Sparta was just inside the western rim of Stickney. A few long cautious bounds took her down into the crater’s eight-kilometer-wide bowl and, some minutes later, up its far side. As she flew she moved toward the sub-Mars point of Phobos, the place on the tidally locked moon that always faced the planet. It marked the little moon’s prime meridian; somewhere within the more than 500 hundred square kilometers of misshapen hemispheroid beyond it, the penetrator was surely buried.

  Sparta paused beside the long-abandoned radio tower on Stickney’s rim, a gleaming relic of the first human exploration of Mars. The little hut at its base had a bronze plaque beside the hatch: “Here men and women first erected a permanent structure on a body beyond the orbit of Earth.” It was a qualified distinction—that bit about “beyond the orbit of Earth” was meant to exclude the moon—but a worthy distinction nevertheless.

  As Sparta gazed upon the pocked and grooved landscape commanded by the tower, she sensed something besides fear for her safety or anger at her attackers. She sensed exhilaration. When Doradus had failed in its sneak attack, the initiative had passed to her.

  Already Mars was waning visibly as Phobos swept toward the night side of the planet. She could make out the lights of an isolated settlement far over her head, gleaming faintly in the twilight of the Martian outback. All else was stars and silence and a lumpy horizon, so near it seemed she could almost touch it.

  Mars, overhead, was a very useful clock. When it was half full the sun would rise, and quite probably, if it had not risen already, the Doradus would rise with it. The ship already knew or would soon learn the location of the buried penetrator and would put down a party to retrieve it.

  She tugged the net bag of tools behind her as she entered the danger zone. The landing of a search party would not be a problem; it would be an opportunity.

  From his command couch the commander of the Doradus could see over the heads of the pilot and engineer to an unobstructed view of the high-resolution flatscreen that stretched across the width of the bridge, displaying a telescopic view of approaching Phobos. A slowly widening cloud of sparkling dust was suspended above the moon’s limb—the remains of the Mars Cricket.

  “Have we acquired a signal from the objective?”

  “Not yet, sir. We are still overtaking. The objective is not yet within line of sight.”

  The commander thrust his chin into his hand, brooding.

  Somewhere down there—most likely in the eastern hemisphere—was a half-buried set of tiny rocket fins supporting a wire-thin radio aerial. Doradus had to stimulate the target to reveal itself by sending a coded transmission; they had to pinpoint its location optically; they had to land people to dig it up and get it back to the ship before Mars Station traffic control began questioning what was going on out here.

  One more thing they had to do before they left—they had to find Troy and make sure she would not give away any secrets.

  The surface area of Phobos was over a thousand square kilometers. If Troy had survived, she was somewhere down there waiting. It seemed prudent to assume she was armed. />
  Considering the weapons the Doradus carried, this last consideration might seem beside the point to some of his colleagues. The commander hoped he never had to explain to them why it was very far from being so. In the ordinary course of business, sidearms and other portable weapons are as much use in a space combat as cutlasses and crossbows, perhaps even less so. A handgun is a dangerous thing aboard a spaceship or a space station—or an airplane, for that matter—for it is quite capable of punching a hole through the metal skin that keeps in pressurized air. For that reason, working handguns were universally barred in space.

  As it happened, the commander of the Doradus—quite by chance and strictly against regulations—had a Luger pistol and a hundred rounds of ammunition stored in his cabin; the gun was an heirloom, inherited from an ancestor who had served under Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. As for the ammunition that went with it—well, guns and ammunition were a sort of hobby of the commander’s. And in any event the finger of a spacesuit glove doesn’t fit into the trigger guard of a Luger.

  How would Troy be armed? Except on Earth, Board of Space Control personnel resorted to only three kinds of weapons, and then only in pressing need. In artificially pressurized environments, they used guns that fired rubber bullets; their punch was enough to knock people down but leave vital structures undamaged. But if sidearms were needed in vacuum—a rare occasion—laser rifles might be called into play; they were recoilless and if held on target long enough could cut a hole through sheet aluminum or even the layered fabric and metal of a spacesuit. But lasers exhausted their charges in seconds; they were also awkward and massive, and therefore generally useless.

  For the worst work the Space Board issued shotguns. Shotguns had the distinct disadvantage of propelling the user backward when fired, but they could rip open a spacesuit, and at close range aim wasn’t much of a problem.

  The Doradus carried three shotguns modified for use in space.

  “What is the status of the landing party?”

  The voice came back from the crew deck. “Suited up and standing by, sir, at the main airlock.” There were two men and two women in the party, old space hands and dedicated members of the Free Spirit.

  “Break out the shotguns,” the commander ordered. “The party is to go down armed.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Sir,” said the pilot, “we have acquired the objective’s signal.”

  A squeak and chatter of telemetry issued from the speakers, earlier than expected.

  “On the western hemisphere?”

  “The near southwest quadrant, sir. Apparently the penetrator rocket somewhat overshot its target.”

  The terminator of Mars was now a perfectly straight line overhead, and at almost the same moment the sun came up—not so much like thunder as like a salvo of atomic bombs. The sun seemed smaller here than from Earth or Port Hesperus, but unfiltered by atmosphere it was blindingly bright.

  The filter of Sparta’s helmet visor had instantly adjusted to the glare. No sign of Doradus on the too-bright horizon… Sparta sought the shadow of a nearby crevice, one of the peculiar linear grooves that streak Phobos like furrows in a ploughed field.

  Whatever had hit Phobos hard enough to make Stickney’s big crater had almost squashed the moon, like hitting a watermelon with a mallet. The dust-filled grooves that radiated from Stickney, some of them up to a couple of hundred meters wide, were the scars of the encounter—splits in the moon’s rind.

  Up to her knees in the soft powder that filled the shallow trench, Sparta peered over the edge and scanned the horizon all around her. Her gaze lifted to sweep across the sky overhead. She was reluctant to move into full sunlight, for Doradus was no doubt equipped with powerful optics. With her own right eye Sparta could match them, if she knew where to look. But just now she could see nothing but stars.

  She turned up her suitcomm to maximum volume but got nothing but static on the standard channels. She tuned it down again. Unless they were keeping radio silence, the landing party would have to communicate over standard suitcomm channels. To locate them she had to keep her suitcomm open and get within range.

  Doradus must have rendezvoused with Phobos by now. The big ship was not afraid of her—she was hiding from it, it wasn’t hiding from her, and its one overriding task was to recover the penetrator. If she could not see it from her present position, it was more likely behind her than in front of her.

  She could sit here, exposed in sunlight, or she could retreat with the terminator line that marked the creeping edge of dawn. On a planetoid where flying was easy, it was equally easy to keep up with the sun. Cautiously launching herself along an almost horizontal trajectory, she began to circumnavigate her world.

  She skirted Stickney to the north this time. The narrowing crescent of Mars rose and, as she kept moving, began to sink again, until only one vast horn reared itself enigmatically against the stars. It irked her that she could see no sign of Doradus. The ship was painted the standard white, and anywhere above the horizon it would be a bright beacon.

  She paused, instinctively sinking into the blacker shadow of a nearby hummock. Doubt assailed the dictates of logic: what if she’d moved in the wrong direction? What if Doradus was stalking her, circling the moon behind her?

  Just then she glanced up, and her heart skipped a beat. Something quite large was eclipsing the stars almost vertically over her head, moving swiftly across them. How could she have blundered right under the belly of the monster?

  In a fraction of a second she realized the black shadow slipping across the sky was not Doradus at all, but something almost as deadly—something far smaller and far closer than that first startled glance had suggested. If she had correctly identified its silhouette, the thing floating above her was a search-and-destroy missile.

  Sparta froze in place. With the suit’s chin switch she instantly shut off all her life-support systems. The suitcomm shut down with them. If she did not move, if the SAD got past her before she was forced to gulp air, the infrared radiation from her spacesuit’s life-support systems might escape its notice.

  She was good at holding still and holding her breath.

  If Doradus was using the kind of SADs used by the Board of Space Control—supposedly highly classified arms, unavailable for purchase on the open market—they had certain limitations. Unlike torpedoes, SADs did not home on a specific target. They were designed to move slowly, to lie in wait, to detect programmed activities: the firing of a steering motor, the swivel of an antenna, the escape of organic vapor—the signs of life in space. Their primary sensory organ was a video eye. Only when that eye could plainly identify a preprogrammed target, or detect movement, or deduce an anomalous contrast ratio within the field of view, would it focus its other sensors. SADs were not at their best when searching for a woman hiding in a dark jungle of rocks—a woman who could see them first.

  With a brief glow of its steering jets, the SAD moved on. Sparta switched on her suit pumps and allowed herself to breathe again.

  The incident confirmed her suspicion that the Doradus was interested in more than simply recovering the plaque; it also needed to eliminate her as a witness. There are more men on the chessboard now, Sparta thought, and the game is a little deadlier. But the initiative is still mine.

  The SAD kept going until its silhouette vanished in the night sky to the southeast; since the missile was traveling an almost straight course in the low gravitational field, it would soon be leaving Phobos behind, unless… Sparta waited for what she knew would happen next. In a few moments she saw it, the brief stab of steering jets: the projectile was swinging slowly back on its course.

  At almost the same moment she saw another faint flare far away in the southwest corner of the sky. She wondered just how many of the infernal machines were in action.

  She considered what she knew of Doradus—there were not so many freighters in space that an officer in her job could not remember the basic facts about them all, even without an enhanced
memory. Doradus had been built ten years ago at the New Clyde Shipyards, one of the oldest and most respected of the private shipyards orbiting Earth. It was an average-sized vessel for a freighter, unusual at the time only in that it had a somewhat higher ratio of fuel-to-payload mass than was customary. The crew complement was ten, also unusually large—the minimum and customary crew being three—but because Doradus was intended specifically to serve the burgeoning settlements of the Mainbelt, it was not illogical that it should sacrifice a bit of carrying capacity for speed, or that it should have a crew large enough to be self-sufficient where docking and cargo-handling facilities were primitive.

  The ship’s history since then had been uneventful, although Sparta recalled that its maiden voyage had kept it away from Earth for three full years. Sparta wondered just where it had gone during that cruise and how it had spent its time. She had no doubt that some considerable period had been spent secretly converting Doradus into a pirate ship.

  Even with an extra-large crew it seemed unlikely that Doradus had more than one fire-control officer, whose computer would have difficulty simultaneously keeping track of more than half a dozen SADs in a small area—for the greatest challenge of working with SADs was to prevent them from blowing one another up.

  Sparta herself could keep track of that many SADs if she could find them. With a bit of luck, that would be no problem—and at the same time, she would find Doradus. Somewhere not far away the Doradus was pumping out radio power, at frequencies from a kilohertz on up. She switched on her suit’s broadband comm unit again and began cautiously to explore the spectrum.

  She quickly found what she was looking for—the raucous whine of a pulse transmitter not far away. She was picking up a subharmonic, but that was good enough: the Doradus had betrayed itself. As long as the ship kept a data channel open to its missiles, Sparta would know exactly where it was.

  She moved cautiously toward the south, listening to the transmitter whine with superhuman sensitivity, analyzing what she heard at lightning speed. With an oscillation imperceptible to ordinary ears the signal alternately faded and increased sharply; the pulsed signal was interfering with itself as Sparta moved with respect to the ship, and the width of the diffraction zones gave her the relative velocity. From the increasing signal strength she knew she was getting closer to Doradus. She should see it—