The Venusian Gambit

by Michael J. Martinez

  Weatherby had already thought of this, and the decision—the right one, he felt, but one that was wholly imperfect and in violation of several sacred vows—had already been made. “The existence of this damnable book remains secret to those in this room,” he said, gathering the attention of the others with the authority in his voice. “We must come to understand how it has affected Finch, whether he is to remain in our trust, and whether it can be used to reverse the evils of Napoleon’s alchemists. And if they are indeed going to Venus, I dare say we must convince the Prince Regent to mount an assault there.

  “And we must not tell him the real reason why,” Weatherby said sadly.

  CHAPTER 12

  January 18, 2135

  Shaila still couldn’t sleep. But at least, she figured, it was good to have different reasons.

  A few days ago, she was angry and frustrated and wanting to do something worthwhile. Now, she was far less angry, though the frustration and the need to be elsewhere was still paramount.

  Being locked in containment will do that to a person.

  Shortly after she left Stephane and huddled with Diaz for her crying jag—a hugely embarrassing crying jag, she felt—Ayim and Julie had come in and gently requested she undergo more testing. Of course she agreed, because she was just as concerned about her blackout, and her vision of Andrew Finch, as they were.

  However, they turned out to be far more concerned. Because they ushered her into a spare containment unit and locked her the hell down while they figured out why touching Stephane had created a massive Cherenkov radiation spike in addition to her rapid unconsciousness.

  On the bright side, the monitors in her unit—on the other side of the clear barrier, granted, but still—were focused on Stephane. And that was a far better view than space.

  So she watched.

  Stephane remained in bed over the past sixteen hours, but he resumed consciousness for at least part of the time. He still looked like he’d been through the wringer, but Shaila knew it was him, and not someone else in that room. Spending two years in a relationship with someone—and a full six months on an interplanetary mission as part of that—was more than enough time to recognize the subtle movements and quirks associated with that person. The way he cocked his head when presented with something different, the way he ran his hand through his hair when thinking…it was all there. The DAEDALUS team had placed some of his personal effects from Armstrong in with him now, conveniently within reach, and he picked them up and turned them over in his hands. He had a few ancient paperback books, at least a century old, mostly French authors like Dumas and Hugo and Le Clezio. They gave him a datapad—almost certainly not networked. And there was a holopic of he and Shaila from when they visited Paris after finally finishing their debriefing after the Daedalus incident on Mars.

  Shaila smiled at that. The trip itself was infuriating. Stephane had insisted on organizing everything, which meant they ended up crashing at a friend’s apartment and sleeping on an inflatable mattress in a closet of a room. They were up until 3 a.m. drinking wine—good wine, it should be said—and laughing at jokes in French that Shaila couldn’t really follow. Stephane had insisted on taking her to the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre, you name it. There was a river cruise on the Seine done on the cheap, which meant an engine malfunction and an extra two hours on a smelly river in the heat of the day.

  If it were anyone else, Shaila would’ve left after the first night. With him, it was somehow the best vacation of her life—though she’d never admit it to him. She got to see him away from work and crisis, and found him to be generous, gregarious and surprisingly soulful—almost the exact opposite of the playboy dilettante she had first pegged him for on Mars.

  She was still afraid to believe he was truly back. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe this was some sort of ruse. The alien intelligence inside him could be playing them, trying to lull them into complacency. Maybe it really was him, but he could be swallowed up by that…thing…at any moment, lost to her forever.

  She tried not to think about it too hard. And besides, she had her own issues—those odd voices in her mind, stretching back more than two and a half years. Stretching back to a cave on Mars and a journal from an impressionable, young Lt. Weatherby, improbably sitting in a pile of rust-red rubble.

  “Jain.”

  Shaila’s reverie was interrupted by Maria Diaz, standing on the other side of the containment barrier. She didn’t even hear the general enter the room, which probably wasn’t good.

  “General,” she replied, rushing to her feet.

  Diaz looked concerned. “Another one?”

  “No, ma’am, just thinking,” Shaila said, nodding toward the holomonitor.

  That won her a small smile from the general. “Figured you’d want to keep an eye on him. He’s doing well, by the way.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. How do you mean ‘well?’”

  Diaz pulled over a chair and took a seat in front of her. “Well, his rad levels are stable, for the most part. There’s some peaks and valleys, and it tends to correspond with his periods of unconsciousness or inactivity. Nothing anywhere near the levels he hit when he was infected…well, hell, he really was possessed, wasn’t he?”

  Shaila shrugged. “Let’s stick with ‘infected,’ ma’am.”

  “So what’s your explanation, Commander?” Diaz’ face took a hard turn at this, leaving Shaila immediately worried.

  “I…don’t understand, ma’am.”

  Diaz frowned. “Here’s my problem, Jain. When you touched Stephane, there was a kind of…reaction. In that moment, there were three huge spikes in Cherenkov radiation in the room. One was from the Tablet, or whatever the fuck that stone is. One was leeching out of Stephane’s neural pathways. And one…was from your brain. Just like his.”

  Shaila nodded. “I assumed as much. I’ve no idea why, though.”

  “Why isn’t something we’re going to really get out of this, Jain. We still don’t know half of what’s going on. Ayim’s got all kinds of theories, most of which make zero sense to me. Some stuff about ‘quantum mind’ and ‘parallelisms’ and God knows what. The plain-English version, though, is that like attracts like. The reaction may have happened because you’ve had your own…interactions, I guess…with the other side.”

  Shaila sat down slowly on her cot, a shiver running up her spine. “You think I’m infected, ma’am?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Not that I’m aware.”

  Diaz smirked. “Good answer. And probably truthful. But not entirely.”

  Now Shaila was thrown for a loop. “Come again?” she asked, the heat starting to rise around her collar.

  “After Ayim talked my ear off for an hour, I had Jimmy run some database searches. He pulled all the sensor data from McAuliffe Base on Mars, including exteriors and pressure suit data, as well as all the data off Armstrong and wherever else we could find you over the past two and a half years. We managed to match up where you were, in physical space, with the sensor data around you. Guess what we found.”

  It wasn’t a tough guess. “Cherenkov radiation.”

  “Bingo. Not a lot—in most cases, it barely registered at all, and never set off any alarms. Just a ping, here and there, weeks or months apart. There were a few on Mars, naturally, and it was tough to work through all the ambient radiation that fuck-all caused. But it was there on Armstrong, and right before the tiger stripes blew on Enceladus. Little hits, here and there. And when we pulled the holovid, we saw you were distracted or spaced for a second or two.” Diaz stood up and walked right up to the clear barrier of the containment unit. “So if you’ve got anything you wanna say, Commander, I suggest it comes out here and now, before I have to make a report on it. Because if I do have to make a report, you’re pretty much gonna be a guinea pig for the rest of your natural life.”

  Shaila nodded slowly. “It was nothing, really. Didn’t seem like it at the time, anyway.”

  “Go on.”

>   “Just little moments, I guess. Visions? I don’t know. Just moments where something just came to me out of the blue. I thought I saw Weatherby’s journal during that first quake on Mars, but it wasn’t there—not until that second time, anyway. I had this…dream, or imagining, or something…about the tiger stripes going before they happened. Lately, it’s been words, like the stuff we saw in Weatherby’s journal, but not his writing. Same wording, that old-time stuff.”

  Diaz nodded slowly. “Times and places, then.”

  “Yeah…and you sound like you knew the answer before you asked.”

  The general stood and walked over to the comm panel. “Gerry, you catch all that?”

  Ayim’s voice came in over the loudspeakers. “I did, General. All readings normal.”

  “Readings?” Shaila asked. She was starting to feel exposed, and a little violated. “Permission to ask what the hell’s going on, General.”

  Diaz ignored her. “How about now, Gerry?”

  “Zero Cherenkov, General. Though she’s starting to get agitated.”

  “Roger that,” Diaz said. She turned and smiled at Shaila. “For once, that fuse of yours is actually helping you.”

  And then Shaila realized what was happening. “You’re worried that if I get pissed off enough…”

  “Yep. And your vitals are already past where Stephane’s were when you goaded him that first time,” Diaz replied. “So I think we’re good.” The general turned back to the comm. “Gerry, why don’t you come in here and tell Jain what we’re thinking.”

  It took several awkward seconds—in which Diaz smiled somewhat apologetically and Shaila simply stood with her arms crossed, feeling irritated—before Ayim entered. “Well done, Commander! I think with our observations of the past day, along with your little test just now and all of the data the general recovered, I do believe—tentatively, mind you—that you are not infected.”

  Shaila stood stock still for a moment until the laughter she was trying to contain burst forth. “Jesus Christ, we really are in the dark here, aren’t we.”

  At this, Ayim looked slightly perturbed. “We are gathering evidence and data and building working theories, Commander. And you were a part of that. I apologize if you feel somehow slighted in all this, but as the general pointed out, you did withhold pertinent information regarding your…condition. Your experiences, if you will.”

  Diaz shot Shaila a told-you-so look which prompted her to stifle her laughs and back down. “All right. Fine. What’s going on, then?”

  Ayim pulled up another chair to the barrier of the containment cell. “Oh, it’s quite interesting, I assure you. You see, in basic quantum physics, a physical system—say, an electron or proton—exists partly in all of its physical states simultaneously. That’s quantum superposition. Only when that physical system is directly observed does it give us a view to only one of its potential states. Are you with me so far?”

  Shaila nodded tentatively. “Mostly.”

  “So let us say, then, that two entire dimensions existed for a finite amount of time in superposition. Now, there is no fundamental way we can reasonably observe the state of every single particle in that crossover, now can we? That would be impossible! Not even the most advanced sensor system, attached to the most powerful computer, could observe every subatomic particle that came into superposition with particles from the other dimension back on Mars—and that was only a limited area! So it was quite possible for the two dimensions to come together. More importantly, it is also quite possible that there could remain a kind of quantum entanglement in those areas of time and space where the crossover occurred.”

  “Which is why we still have particle acceleration experiments going on at McAuliffe,” Diaz added, “and we’re studying what happened in Egypt last year, too.”

  “Right. Time and place,” Shaila said. “And now you think it’s somehow personal to me?”

  Ayim grinned widely. “You are one of only three people living who were present when the first recorded crossover occurred on Mars. And you and Dr. Durand were both present on Titan as well, which was most certainly another interdimensional crossover, if the chamber you discovered there is any indication.

  “Now, given your presence at these various crossover events, it is my theory—and I believe the evidence we’ve gathered is beginning to back this up—that your neural pathways are entangled somehow with the other dimension at the quantum level. And that’s very exciting, isn’t it?”

  Shaila frowned. “You’re lucky there’s a barrier here, Doctor.”

  “Oh, I am sorry! I didn’t mean to imply that this was not a burden on you, Commander. I’m sure it is. But it could very well be extremely beneficial to us as well in figuring out what has happened to the data retrieved from the Enceladus organisms, and who on Earth received them,” Ayim said.

  Shaila looked from Diaz to Ayim and back again. “You think…you’re thinking I can tap into this somehow. That I can see what might go down next?”

  “Either you or Dr. Durand, yes,” Ayim said. “I would suggest Dr. Conti or our Chinese guest, but they remain in comas and completely unresponsive. We have detected no radiation surges from either of them, and I am left to wonder whether the transmission from Tienlong stripped them of their active infection, or somehow the injuries they sustained from our boarding parties did the trick.

  “But anyway, you and Dr. Durand are our best candidates, because you both seem to have a degree of Cherenkov radiation inherent in your condition, which we believe is the calling card for dimensional displacement. Now, the artifact from Titan may be the appropriate conduit, either by focusing on what is occurring in this dimension, or by using it as a kind of comm system to perhaps glean information from the other dimension, to which we are, at this point and for all intents and purposes going forward, entangled on a quantum level.”

  Shaila let this sink in for a moment, then looked to Diaz suspiciously. “You were with us on Mars. You saw Weatherby and Finch and Anne Baker there. Why isn’t this happening to you?”

  Diaz shrugged. “I ran the same location-sensor sweep on myself and Durand, too. You were the only one who had the Cherenkov matches. You had that very first reaction, during the first quake on Mars, so our best guess is that you were basically at ground zero for the entanglement.”

  “Wrong place, wrong time,” Shaila summarized. “Figures. So what’s the deal now? Am I still stuck in solitary here?”

  “There are a few more tests I wish to run,” Ayim said. “We’re going to do a full map of your neural pathways—should take no more than a few hours. And when you are released, I will ask you to wear a very sensitive radiation sensor on the back of your neck. The general and Dr. Durand will be wearing one as well.”

  “And Stephane’s will also have a built-in zapper, in case he…relapses,” Diaz said. “Figure if he gets taken over again, we’ll need to take him down. Gently.”

  Shaila nodded, but inside, she was pretty furious at Diaz for even thinking it. But then…she was probably right. Damn her. “All right. And after that? Do I end up hooked up to the Tablet to try to chat with someone?”

  “All in good time,” Ayim said. “We will need several days, if not weeks, of further study before we are willing to do that.”

  Any further conversation was interrupted by the comm. “Coogan to Diaz. Respond, please.”

  Diaz reached over to the comm panel. “I’m here, Jimmy.”

  “Ma’am. We have a hit on the potential whereabouts of Mr. Yu.”

  Shaila and Diaz traded a wide-eyed look. “I’ll be damned. Where?”

  “Ekaterinburg, Russia,” Coogan replied. “A hospital there accessed his global medical records database seven hours ago.”

  “And why did it take us seven fucking hours to get that info, Jimmy?” Diaz groused.

  “The Russians, ma’am. They do participate in the global medical database network, but they do so on a time delay, probably to frustrate outside intel.”

&n
bsp; “Dammit. He’s probably already gone.”

  “No, ma’am, I suspect he’s still there,” Coogan said, a hint of satisfaction couched in his perfect English accent. “He was brought in 14 hours ago in suspended animation. Gunshot to the chest. The surgical procedure they listed in his file is both risky and time-consuming, and recovery is at least two days.”

  Diaz grinned. “Finally, some luck. Well, for us. Seems like he’s having a really shitty day. Jimmy, have the team prep Hadfield. We’re leaving in 20 minutes. I want Parrish and his team aboard. You’ll stay here and run the show. Diaz out.” She then turned to Jain. “You’re probably going to make my life a fucking misery unless I let you come along.”

  That earned the general a genuine smile. “Absolutely, ma’am.”

  The general looked thoughtful for a moment. “We still need tests. And honestly, I’m still worried about you. I don’t know if you’re a risk. But…if you get fitted for a sensor with a zapper in it, you can come along.”

  Shaila figured this was coming. “Understood. Just don’t get carried away with the trigger, ma’am.”

  Diaz reached over and tapped in the keycode to open the containment barrier. “Gerry, get her sensor fitted. She’s back on duty.”

  January 20, 2135

  Harry Yu’s first conscious thought was surprise at actually having a conscious thought, something akin to: Holy fuck, am I alive?!

  Then the worry set in. He could hear sounds, but they were unfocused, fuzzy. There were some electronic noises, but he couldn’t tell if they came from comms or computers or cars. Finally, he surmised sensors, given that by this point he figured out he was horizontal, likely on a bed.

  Then he remembered what happened to him and his heart began to beat faster. That actually hurt, however; he could feel the muscles around his ribcage were sore, and his heart and lungs felt…messed with. Violated. It was as if someone had reached in and reorganized things. Not entirely surprising, he supposed. He’d been shot, after all.