The Venusian Gambit

by Michael J. Martinez

  “Aye, my Lord Admiral,” Searle said, then turned to his first lieutenant. “Beat to quarters! Run out the guns!”

  Shaila felt the deck below her vibrate as Victory’s crew opened a hundred gunports, and ran out a hundred cannon. All were loaded and ready to fire. It was funny to think that she could unleash nearly as much raw firepower from a 22nd century fighter/bomber with the flick of a switch, but she was nonetheless impressed at the efficiency of eight hundred men, acting in concert.

  “Let us try to make keel-fall in front of that brig,” Weatherby said, pointing to the ship furthest out. “We can contain her or destroy her as needed and bottle up the rest of the bay.”

  “Anything you want us to do, Admiral Weatherby?” Diaz asked, handing off her delicate teacup to Gar’uk.

  Weatherby and Searle traded looks. “Can your vehicles be dropped upon land?”

  Diaz waved Shaila over to join the conversation. “How high up can we survive a drop?” she asked.

  Shaila took out her datapad and linked it to the operating systems of the four V-SEVs. “We have enough thrusters to go from 100 meters, ma’am. Any more we’d have to deploy the airbags.”

  Searle bent over the map table on the quarterdeck and quickly penciled out some equations; Shaila noticed he was faster than she would’ve been. “They’ll make the beach, but barely.”

  Diaz nodded. “Good enough. Jain, get everyone suited up. We’ll secure the beach. All right with you, Admiral?”

  “It is indeed, General Diaz,” Weatherby said. “Godspeed to you.”

  Shaila and Stephane followed Diaz to the maindeck, where Chrys and Coogan were already working on their V-SEV. Everyone clambered aboard their mechs, which had been brought onto the deck and laid out horizontally during the descent to better distribute the weight. It made for awkward going, and added a new wrinkle to their plans—especially as they continued to barrel forward toward the bay.

  “Um…Shay, how do I get this thing standing up?” Stephane asked over the comm.

  Shaila thought about it for a moment as she powered her systems up. “Just wait there. I’ll give you a hand. Once you’re up, get right up close to the side and get ready to hit thrusters. We gotta roll in….90 seconds.”

  There was silence after that as the group from Hadfield prepared their V-SEVs. All systems were functioning normally, and Shaila was sure to seal herself in as if she were going onto the surface of her Venus. If they missed the beach and landed in the bay, she was sure the seawater would play havoc with the mech’s systems if it got in. She then panicked a moment about the mechs being waterproof, but quickly dismissed it out of hand, remembering that they were designed to be completely airtight and to resist atmospheric pressures comparable to the lowest depths of Earth’s oceans.

  Shaila tucked her mech’s legs under it, then used its arms to push it into a kind of squatting position. She felt the machinery tremble a bit as she got it into a standing position—it wasn’t used to being deployed in such a way. Once upright, she turned to Stephane’s mech and reached for its outstretched claw, pulling it up far more easily. To her left, she saw Coogan giving Diaz a similar helping hand. A moment later, all four mechs were at Victory’s maindeck railings, two to a side.

  “Coming up on target. Ready to jump off on my mark, then hit your thrusters to get clear of the ship,” Shaila said. “Three, two, one….MARK.”

  A second later, she was falling straight down, and numerous alarms and warning messages popped up on the heads-up display before her. “Yes, I know this is sub-optimal deployment,” she groused quietly as she got her mech upright and fired thrusters.

  A burst of noise from the comms startled her. “I have negative thrusters! Repeat, negative thrusters!” Coogan shouted.

  “Deploy airbags!” Diaz ordered.

  From her hatch window, Shaila could see Coogan’s mech tumbling toward Venus out of control—and much further out than the rest of them.

  “Unresponsive! We hit the side of—”

  Shaila saw a splash about 50 meters out to sea, and a moment later, HMS Victory splashed down further out, creating a massive spray and wake that obscured everything else. Then her HUD interrupted her view with the tracking information she needed to touch down safely. Shaking her head, she quickly reversed her thrusters in order to make a safe landing on the sandy Venusian beach.

  “Jain to Coogan. Come in, Coogan,” she said.

  There was no response.

  “Scanning now,” Stephane said; Shaila could see on her display that both he and Diaz landed safely, about 10 meters from one another on the beach. “The V-SEV is about twenty meters under the water. No movement, no life signs.”

  “Can the sensors penetrate inside the V-SEVs, Jain?” Diaz asked.

  “No idea, ma’am. I—wait. We have three bogeys on the beach, running toward the tree line to the south.” Shaila turned and zoomed in on them. “Blue uniforms, officer with a red collar. Presumed French.”

  “Get after them, Jain,” Diaz ordered. “I’ll go after Coogan and VanDerKamp. Stephane, guard this goddamn beach.”

  Shaila grasped the controls inside her cockpit and urged the V-SEV forward, its broad metal feet gaining surprisingly good traction in the sand as it headed down the beach toward the trees. In fact, the vehicle was handling better than Shaila remembered from her simulator training. The damn thing weighed tons; it should not feel spring-loaded.

  Then she remembered: She wasn’t on her Venus. The simulator had simulated the dense atmospheric pressure of the Venus she knew, which had made her feel like she was piloting through gravy. Yet on this Venus, there was a mere fraction of the pressure.

  And it made piloting the V-SEV seem like driving a performance sports car. Within moments, she managed to get the mech up to a decent jog, crashing through the verdant undergrowth near the treeline with abandon.

  Thankfully, a jogging V-SEV with a 2.5-meter gait matched up well against running humans. She started wondering how to subdue the French without much injury, given that they had abandoned Hadfield without taking any nonlethal microwave weapons with them. And the V-SEVs weren’t subtle, no matter the atmospheric pressure.

  Then one of the dots on her tracking grid vanished. And others appeared, with the word UNKNOWN FAUNA next to them.

  She looked up to see one of the Frenchmen on the ground about ten meters in front of her with a spear sticking out of his chest. His hands clutched the shaft, even as Shaila watched his vitals slow, then cease.

  The dots representing her other two targets winked out a few moments later, while the UNKNOWN FAUNA bogeys faded out of sensor range just as quickly as they entered it.

  Having met Gar’uk a few hours ago, Shaila had a pretty good idea of what just happened.

  “Jain to Diaz. French targets neutralized by third party. Over.”

  There was a fairly long lag before Diaz responded. “Roger that. Come on back. You see ‘em?”

  “Negative, ma’am,” Shaila said as she piloted her V-SEV around and headed back to the beach. “I can report that one target was eliminated with a primitive spear.”

  “Understood,” Diaz said. “You think they’re on our side?”

  “Doubt it, ma’am. We have no comms with them. The French may have simply entered a well-defensed territory,” Shaila said. “How are Coogan and VanDerKamp?”

  “Alive. Get back here.”

  Shaila put her V-SEV back into a jog, and arrived at the beach to find the British RAF officer and the corporate exec on the beach, unconscious and soaked. Diaz was just opening her hatch and scrambling out, while Stephane still remained aboard his mech, his window aimed at the forest.

  “General?” Shaila asked as she opened her hatch.

  “Their mech shorted out,” Diaz said. “I think they hit a few cannon on their way off Victory, sprung a leak somewhere. They were filling up with water when I got there. Had to rip open the hatch, grab them fast and hit thrusters to get them up and out.”

  Sha
ila hurried over, her V-SEV’s first aid kit in hand. “Electrical too?”

  “Yeah, they got zapped and drowned,” Diaz muttered, grabbing the kit to supplement her own. “Alive, but barely. I’m hoping our resident alchemists can whip up a magic potion or something. Help me get them stabilized and chilled.”

  The two officers worked fast to put their colleagues in a short-term stasis. They injected them with medications designed to slow bodily functions considerably, and then began wrapping them in a thin, chemical-laced foil. Once completely wrapped—except for a small breathing tube—a small electric charge would interact with the chemicals in the foil, cooling them down to just a few degrees above zero and stemming the worst of whatever injuries they had.

  As they worked, the booms of the battle in the bay echoed across the beach. Shaila could see that one of the brigs nearest Victory already flew a white flag, while the second was in flames. Another English ship—she thought it might be HMS Thunderer—was engaged with the French 74 and seemed to have an edge, aided by Surprise and another English ship.

  By the time Shaila and Diaz had the two fully stabilized, the battle at sea was over. A brig and the 74 had struck their colors; the rest of the French ships were ablaze. There were also flames aboard two of Weatherby’s ships, and even Victory was looking a little worse for wear. Meanwhile, a few hardy survivors started coming ashore, drenched and exhausted, and Diaz directed them to different parts of the beach—French toward the center, farthest away from the tree line, and English survivors to a point a good 50 meters away.

  “Durand, get down here and speak French to these guys,” Diaz ordered. “Shaila, saddle up and use the sensors to keep watch.”

  Shaila and Stephane passed each other on the beach, and she noted he looked drawn again. “You all right?”

  He shrugged. “I get the sense that Rathemas is…happy? Somehow…yes, he’s happy. He’s fighting me less and he’s happy to be here. That seems bad to me.”

  Shaila put a hand on his shoulder. “Me too. We need to tell Weatherby and the alchemists when they get here. Meantime, go help Diaz translate.”

  Stephane nodded and, a few seconds later, was yelling orders at the French survivors, who looked more and more confused. Shaila couldn’t blame them, of course—two women ordering them around on a beach, backed up by metal giants, then some guy gets out and barks at you in your own language. All that after you had your ship shot up from under you? Even in this dimension, that was a weird day.

  Shaila climbed up into her V-SEV and brought it online again. She felt very discomfited by Stephane’s revelation, much more so than she let on. The whole situation seemed a bit too pat, that they would come together, each bringing with them one of the two sacred alchemical objects needed to do…well, whatever they’d do. Probably not great. She wondered if Greene and Huntington would be in contact with the French—Cagliostro again, or this Berthollet guy—and whether the French were once again in contact with Althotas. She wondered what the data was that Greene and Huntington brought with them, and just what they planned to do with it. After all, they were already in overlapping dimensions. What more could they…?

  A beep from Shaila’s sensor grabbed her attention, and she called up the terrain grid on her display. One of the UNKNOWN FAUNA contacts was back, at the very edge of her sensor range, deep within the jungle.

  “Jain to Diaz, I have sensor contact with an unknown bogey, possibly one of the Venusians. Over.”

  “How far out?” Diaz asked.

  “About two klicks and closing. Sensors aren’t picking them up further out. Wonder why.”

  Stephane chimed in. “If they are Venus people, they would be cold-blooded, yes? Lizards. They would mix well with the background. And they are small.”

  “Good thinking. Roger that,” Shaila said. “At least we have…crap. We have a half-dozen now. Coming at us in a couple groups, to the north and south.”

  “Keep me posted. Do not engage unless you see them on the beach,” Diaz ordered.

  The number of contacts grew regularly and substantially in the time it took for HMS Victory to launch a number of boats toward the crescent-shaped beach. In the meantime, there were about fifty exhausted Frenchmen on the beach now, along with twenty English survivors, many of whom Diaz pressed into service as guards, even though they weren’t in any better shape than the French.

  “I think the Admiral and his family are in the landing party,” Stephane said. “I can tell Finch is with them as well. We should’ve given them a comm.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ve never been on Venus before,” Shaila groused. She had powered up the V-SEV’s laser drill which, while a huge drain on the vehicle’s power reserves, would probably cut through dozens of hostiles at a time. Hopefully, they wouldn’t be hostile.

  “Stephane, grab any spare headsets from our V-SEVs,” Diaz ordered. “Let’s not make the same mistake twice.”

  “We may not get a chance,” Shaila replied. “I now count three hundred bogeys, about five meters from the tree line.

  “We’re surrounded.”

  CHAPTER 20

  January 29, 2135

  May 28, 1809

  Weatherby had come ashore quite willing and ready to vent his fury upon his guests from the future, for it was that one of their metal vehicles—metal ogres, more in fact—had upon exiting off the sides of the ship severely damaged eight gun placements upon Victory’s larboard side and, more importantly, injured some thirty-two men, two of whom were upon death’s door.

  Then he saw two of General Diaz’ people, mummified in queer metal wraps, and came to quickly understand that the targets of his wrath were themselves among the most unfortunate.

  And there were, perhaps, more misfortunes.

  “We are surrounded, you say?” Weatherby asked Diaz. “Could you not have signaled before….ah. Of course. You’ve not any flags.”

  Diaz handed over one of the strange headpieces Weatherby had worn those many years ago on Mars. “Sorry. No flags. And we didn’t think to give you one of these before we jumped ship. I have two others. Who gets them?”

  Weatherby looked over his landing party, which consisted of Anne and their two children, along with Finch, Gar’uk and several Royal Marines. Philip might have been a better option, but he was quite busy treating Diaz’ fallen comrades and the English injured on the beach. “Sadly, I fear we must give one to our Dr. Finch, simply based on prior experience. And given that we are likely well outnumbered by Venusians….”

  Elizabeth stepped forward to interrupt her father. “I will take the other device,” she said. “It is for communication, is it not?”

  Weatherby turned toward her with a smile but also exasperation. “My dear girl, it is not as though you may use these to communicate with the Venusians.” He then paused and turned toward Diaz. “That is correct, yes?”

  “Right, but if your girl here is the expert she says she is, having her keyed in to Shaila on the sensors might not be a bad idea,” Diaz said, handing the headset to Elizabeth. “We’ll be able to tell you what we’re seeing and whether what we do from here on out has any impact, one way or the other.”

  Weatherby looked over to Anne, who nodded with a small smile, while Elizabeth simply took the headset and placed it upon her head, doing her best to emulate her father’s actions in doing so. “So now what do I do?” she asked.

  “I hear you, Elizabeth,” Shaila said. “I’m in one of our vehicles, the one facing the jungle. Our sensors are showing at least 300 creatures out there right now—mostly small, but a few really big ones as well.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “Yes, those would be the sek’hatk mounts. Large saurians used as steeds by some of the Venusian chieftains. How many ‘big ones’ do you see?”

  “Screening now…we have six large targets.”

  Elizabeth relayed this information to her parents. “My guess is that we have representatives from at least three different social groupings, possibly as many as six, perhaps even more, dep
ending on whether the French have left them alone or actively mistreated them,” she said. “Even the honored Va’hak’ri are reported to have but three sek’hatk among their warriors.”

  Anne nodded. “In our years here on Venus, we never saw more than two of these in one place. They are only for the greatest of the tribes. And given that these Venusians before us are working in concert, and not at each other’s throats…”

  Weatherby finished her thought. “Yes, they likely have had a run-in with the French already, for that would certainly unite them. And they would wish to determine whether we represent another threat. Do they recognize the differences in uniforms by now, do you think?”

  “If the Va’hak’ri are among them, then yes, they will have a lore-master who would likely have enough experience to tell English from French,” Elizabeth replied. “It’s been reported that the red coats of His Majesty’s soldiers are known to a number of tribes, so we may wish to bring more Marines ashore at our earliest opportunity.”

  “It seems we were right to bring you along,” Weatherby said to his daughter. “Might you suggest a course of action, Miss Weatherby?”

  At this Elizabeth smiled, then traded whispers with her stepmother for several moments. Weatherby knew Anne had lived on Venus for a number of years, and interacted with the Venusians—yet her focus, and that of her first husband, was on alchemy, not the culture of the lizard-creatures. Still, Anne was the most knowledgeable alchemist among them, save for Finch, and had Elizabeth’s trust besides.

  “I think we have a plan,” Elizabeth said finally. “There is an introductory ritual that, while somewhat difficult, is one of utmost respect and friendship. It is called the dul’kat, and…”

  Gar’uk suddenly let out a shrill bark unlike anything Weatherby had ever heard. “You cannot do dul’kat!” he said. “You will be hurt!”

  Weatherby turned quickly back to his daughter. “I will not allow you to be harmed by them, Elizabeth.”