Ishtar Rising BOOK 2

by Michael A. Martin

  “Aye, sir,” Shabalala said, and set about entering commands into the tactical station with impressive speed.

  Let’s just hope we can hold the shuttle together long enough to finish up whatever Gomez and Soloman have started.

  “Thank you, David,” Saadya said from the viewer, his image rolling and twisting before it broke up entirely. The atmospheric turbulence was obviously growing ever more intense. Not a good sign, Gold ruminated. This plan has got to work.

  He suddenly realized that he had no concrete idea of what success would actually look like. After all, not only had no one ever attempted a project quite like Saadya’s, nobody had ever tried to force such a thing into an abrupt about-face right in the middle of the proceedings. Literally anything could happen now.

  And my crew is still stuck out there, above it and below it.

  The pressure, Soloman thought as he cradled his head between his long-fingered hands. His cranium felt as though it had tripled in size. The figures on his screen no longer held any meaning whatsoever. He was beginning to see double, and had begun to wonder if he was dying.

  Ground Station Vesper shook again. The lights failed, to be replaced moments later by the dim red illumination of the emergency backups. Someone screamed during the momentary darkness. Soloman thought it was one of the Bynars, bereft of even the cold comfort of the computer system. Soloman’s own console appeared to be dead, even though the emergency power was functioning.

  Soloman closed his eyes, desperately wishing for the ordeal to end, one way or another. The calculations were done, transmitted, and received, and there was no way to refine them further. Even if he could, he wasn’t certain how many of the atmospheric probes—the source of the preponderance of the climate and force-field data—were still functioning, given the high-altitude ionization being caused by the volcanic surges. The force-field network would either behave as he had asked it to behave, or else it would wander further into the unpredictable provinces of mathematical chaos.

  And kill everyone on the planet, probably including the shuttle crew as well.

  The pressure. The people up on the shuttle should have all the data they need. It’s up to them now to relieve the pressure.

  Chapter

  6

  No pressure, Soloman, Stevens thought, recalling one of the last intelligible words he’d heard the little Bynar utter before the storm-tossed atmosphere cut off communication between the Kwolek and Ground Station Vesper.

  He hoped he hadn’t misplaced his faith in Soloman’s ability to improvise. Maybe the Bynar’s facility with numbers was only an asset in situations that required one to go by the numbers.

  This certainly wasn’t one of those instances.

  The sound of rending, shearing metal jolted Stevens out of his reverie.

  “I told you this vessel couldn’t stand up to this sort of punishment for long.”

  “Shut up, Tev,” Gomez and Corsi said in a synchronized harmony that would have put a cadre of Borg drones to shame. Pattie’s tinkling laughter was barely audible over the roar of the wind.

  “Excuse me?” the Tellarite said, a now-familiar dudgeon inflecting his voice.

  There was a loud bang, as though something had struck the hull. An alarm Klaxon sounded, and the readouts on Stevens’s console suddenly changed. Numerous amber and orange warning lights suddenly shifted to a far friendlier green hue.

  Stevens watched a grin spread slowly across Corsi’s features like a Venusian sunrise. “The da Vinci has just arrived. And they’re supplying all the power we’ll need to finish this.”

  “How can you tell—” Stevens interrupted himself, watching the rhythmic pulsation of the energy-intake readout that monitored the main power coupling. “Morse code. Our comm system must be down.”

  Stevens turned in his seat, hoping to share a triumphant smile with Gomez. He was surprised to see a dour expression clouding her face.

  “That’s great,” she said. “But we’re still out of contact with Vesper. We can only hope that those last figures Soloman gave us are still precise enough to get the job done safely.”

  “So do we maintain power for the full duration?” Stevens asked as he quickly rechecked the numbers. Soloman’s last batch of figures had required the Kwolek to bolster several key force-field nodes for another eight minutes and twelve seconds.

  Gomez sighed. “We don’t have any other choice. Not if we want to keep the sky from falling.”

  Corsi’s sharp intake of breath caught Stevens’s attention. “What’s wrong, Dommie?”

  For once, the security chief didn’t seem ready to summarily execute him for using her family nickname. A quick glance at his own scanner readout told him why.

  A large portion of the force-field network was suddenly twisting itself into an entirely unexpected shape.

  Stevens felt a sharp pang of regret at having encouraged Soloman to improvise.

  “Captain!” Shabalala shouted from the tactical station.

  Startled, Gold turned his chair around almost quickly enough to cause a whiplash. He saw at once that Shabalala’s dark skin had suddenly gone gray. “What is it?”

  “The force-field network is…changing.”

  Turning back toward the main viewer, Gold said, “Show me a schematic.”

  The static-marbled image of the Kwolek, held fast in the complex web of energy radiating from the da Vinci’s main deflector dish, vanished. It was replaced by a simple orange-and-black wire-frame representation of the planet and the constantly fluctuating force-field lattice that surrounded it. Gold looked to a position on the daylit side, about twenty degrees south of the equator, where concentric rings marked the epicenter of the volcanic activity that had already radiated out across the surface in every direction for several hundred kilometers. Noting that the late Ground Station Aphrodite now lay well within the still-spreading volcanic hell, he mouthed a silent prayer of thanks that his people had reached the Aphrodite team before the lava did.

  Then he saw that several other ground stations still lay in harm’s way, the nearest of them perhaps another hour or two away from immolation.

  Unless his people could find a way to work around the force-field network, all those people—Soloman included—were going to die. They would all expire, one small crew at a time, as each station slowly succumbed to the unleashed furies of the Venusian interior. The same way Galvan VI slowly ate away at my ship, killing people off one by one….

  Gold cut off those thoughts and forced himself to study the lines that represented the field network itself, in response to Shabalala’s report. All across the schematic of the planet, the crisscrossing meshwork of field lines—the energetic meridians and parallels that connected hundreds of force-field generation nodes and covered the entire globe—appeared to have maintained a fairly stable, if lopsided, overall shape. The north-south field lines drew shapes that resembled overlapping slices of a strangely oblate orange, bulging out farthest across the planet’s sunward side, which was the only place from which the atmosphere could be successfully “blown off.”

  But Gold saw a glaring exception to this general pattern: the portion of the force field that lay above the precise center of the volcanic eruption. Here, the lines of force were actively moving, twisting, and taking on a cylindrical shape that slowly rose above the rest of the world-girdling force field. It extended ever upward, like a tenacious plant determined to pierce the clouds and reach the sun.

  “My God,” Shabalala said, his voice pitched scarcely above a whisper. “The network must be malfunctioning.”

  From the forward ops station, Ensign Susan Haznedl said, “I don’t think it is, sir.” A lithe young human with strawberry blond hair, Haznedl had recently taken over as the primary operations officer. Two of the da Vinci’s ops personnel had died at Galvan VI, and the other transferred off, so Haznedl was new to the S.C.E. “The motions of those field lines are too—well, orderly, sir. I’ve never seen a failing deflector shield roll itself up into
a funnel shape like that.”

  Shabalala asked, “You’re saying somebody could be changing the field’s shape deliberately?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  Gold said nothing, focusing instead on the tale unfolding on the main viewer. As he watched, the single elongated tube of force split itself into two, then four, then eight and more progressively narrower tubes. He quickly lost count of the tubes, so quickly were they appearing, bringing to mind a sped-up recording of living cells dividing ad infinitum. He was, however, able to see that the bases of the force-tubules seemed to plunge themselves deeply beneath the planet’s surface—

  —piercing the exact center of seismic and volcanic activity with almost surgical precision.

  Gold smiled. “Haznedl, try to get me a real visual on what’s going on down there.”

  Also smiling, the young woman turned back to her console and said, “Yes, sir.”

  The tactical display vanished, replaced by a hash of static that slowly gave way to a grainy, computer-enhanced image of the Venusian dayside, no doubt relayed down either directly from Ishtar Station or from one of the many automated support satellites that ringed the planet. The resolution was poor, but understandably so given the current local weather.

  Gold quickly found the spot where the force-field network had morphed itself into such peculiar shapes. Although the fields themselves were invisible, the material that was rising with projectile speed along the narrow, rapidly multiplying vertical tubes of force was quite noticeable. The material became white-hot as it shot through the cloudtops and into space, passing at least one hundred kilometers above the highest-altitude layers of the atmospheric “blowoff.”

  The pitiless brightness of the sun made the nature of the ejected material immediately apparent. Recalling what Soloman had said about needing to relieve pressure, Gold looked around the bridge. He spent a moment watching the awestruck faces at each station as everyone present seemed to grasp the enormity of what they were witnessing.

  The main mass of the lava flow was being diverted from the remaining ground stations and flung into a high orbit about Venus. No one seemed able to pry his eyes from the viewer as the molten material continued to be blasted hundreds of kilometers away from the greenhouse-desiccated world below.

  The molten material continued trailing fire across the ochre sky, slowly turning dark as it exited the funnel-shaped, spaceward terminus of the reconfigured force-field network, gradually surrendering its heat to the airless void.

  Haznedl finally broke the silence that had engulfed the bridge. “Somebody,” the ops officer said, “has obviously figured out how to turn the force-field network into a colossal mass driver.”

  “Looks like the pressure may finally be off,” Shabalala said, still looking awed. “The lava’s being funneled off into space.”

  Shaking her head, Haznedl said, “This is truly amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Gold sat back in his chair. “Just another day at the office for the S.C.E., Haznedl.”

  Chapter

  7

  Pascal Saadya stood alone in his darkened office, staring down at the great yellow world through the wide transparent aluminum window. As he looked upon the daylit face of Venus, an old joke sprang to mind: What’s the difference between God and a terraformer?

  He spoke the punch line aloud. “God doesn’t think he’s a terraformer.”

  The bulk of the force-field network—along with more than eighty percent of Venus’s original hothouse atmosphere—had been carefully and safely lowered nearly an hour earlier. The vast majority of the atmospheric probes remained intact and functional. According to a quick report from the ever-busy Adrienne Paulos, all of the Project Ishtar ground crews, as well as the da Vinci personnel who had provided emergency assistance, were finally out of immediate danger. However, all but a handful of the ground staff had been evacuated up to Ishtar Station, where they would remain pending a detailed appraisal of the damage sustained by the surface facilities arrayed across the Venusian surface.

  Saadya was all too keenly aware that he owed an enormous debt to David Gold and his ingenious engineering team. As well as to one extremely insightful and courageous stray Bynar. Without their help, my ambition and haste would have killed dozens of good people. And laid waste to years of meticulous research.

  Saadya watched silently as Soloman’s improvised force-field mass driver continued its work, helping the planet continue to disgorge copious amounts of its fiery insides upward past the limits of the atmosphere and into the infinite gulf of space.

  The “Big One”—the global volcanic conflagration Venus experienced every half-billion years or so—had indeed come, thanks to the internal stresses Project Ishtar had unleashed. But unlike earlier occurrences, the current lava flows would not engulf the entire planet. The damage would remain localized around a Greenland-size area, where a pancake-dome volcano had arisen in response to Soloman’s inspiring job of force-field tailoring.

  The door chime sounded. “Come,” Saadya said.

  He remained facing the planetary fireworks display as the door hissed open, admitting a harsh shaft of artificial light from the outer corridor. From the shape of the trio of shadows that fell across the carpet, he guessed the identities of his visitors at once.

  “Hello, David. Soloman. Adrienne. I’m glad you came. I think that watching the fires of creation all alone isn’t nearly so satisfying as sharing the experience with others.”

  He expected Gold to make a characteristically acerbic remark. But when he turned to face his old friend, he saw only wonder on his face, which—like those of Soloman and Paulos—was turned toward the cosmic drama unfolding far below.

  “It’s incredible, Pas,” Gold said. “And beautiful.”

  Spread into long, thin strands that Saadya estimated each measured no more than a few meters across, the ejected Venusian mantle material was rapidly cooling as it arced over the western horizon toward the night side, encircling the planet in a great ellipse along its equator. Of course, these “strands” were nothing of the sort; they were assemblages of billions of separate congealing objects, many of them no larger than a human hand, some as small as dust grains. But aligned as they were in speed and direction, they presented the long-distance appearance of solidity, as did the various-size particles that composed Saturn’s voluminous system of rings.

  Paulos must have been thinking along exactly the same lines. “It’s a ring system. Forming right before our eyes.”

  Saadya squinted at the purple-and-ochre horizon of the nightward terminator. Was he seeing the telltale signs of uneven clumping of some of the ejected material?

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But it might not remain in annular form for long.”

  “What do you mean?” Gold asked.

  “Just that we may have witnessed Venus in the throes of childbirth. She may have begun to spawn a moon of her own.”

  “If that’s true,” Paulos said, looking thoughtful, “then we have a baby to name.”

  “Eventually,” said Saadya. “It could take centuries for the accretion process to settle down on its own.” Unless we find a way to help it along. He dismissed the thought as soon as it occurred to him. Will I never tire of playing God?

  “It’ll still need a name,” Gold said. “How about Venus Victrix, after the Roman bringer of victory?”

  Shaking his head, Saadya resumed watching the planet. “I think a more appropriate name might be Venus Felix.”

  “Who’s that?” asked Paulos, frowning. “The Roman bringer of housecats?”

  “The bringer of good luck, not cats,” Gold corrected. “Though there are members of my family who might argue that there’s no real distinction between the two.” The captain turned toward Saadya. “There’s more to what you’ve done here than mere mazel, my friend. Getting Project Ishtar to this point wasn’t dependent upon luck. To suggest that isn’t fair to you, Dr. Paulos, or the rest of your team, for that matter.” />
  Saadya smiled grimly, then faced Gold again. “You’re right, David. But I’m being even more unfair to your crew.” His eyes lit on the diminutive Bynar, who so far had yet to utter a word. “Particularly you, Mr. Soloman. You stand astride the worlds of Bynars and humans. And because of that unique outlook, you accomplished what no one else could—you rescued everyone on Venus from my hubris. I thank you.”

  Soloman nodded, though he seemed uncomfortable with the praise. “It would be wrong to completely discount random chance and contingency, Dr. Saadya. The unorthodox data-handling the situation forced upon me involved a good deal of guesswork.”

  “Skillful estimates aren’t the same as lucky guesses,” Saadya said. Soloman looked skeptical, but didn’t seem inclined to argue the point.

  Gold shrugged. “Call it luck, or skill, or even kismet if you have to. You’ve still had several very lucky outcomes here, even without completing the atmospheric ‘blowoff.’ ”

  Saadya was speechless for a moment. “Lucky outcomes? Name one.”

  “For one, no one’s dead, or even badly injured.”

  Saadya drew scant comfort from that fact, then felt a paroxysm of guilt at his own callousness. “Including your shuttle crew?” He realized he’d been so focused on the specifics of Project Ishtar that he’d given little thought to the injuries David’s brave engineering staff might have suffered while flying through the atmosphere’s superrotational layer.

  Gold made a dismissive gesture. “The shuttle took the worst of the beating. Dr. Paulos here has taken the liberty of letting us tow the Kwolek to one of your docking ports so Gomez and Tev can kludge a few quick repairs together before the da Vinci shoves off. Tev says your shuttlebay has a smidge more elbow room than ours.”

  “It seemed like the least we could do, since our own hardware apparently caused at least one of the shuttle’s hull breaches in the first place,” Paulos explained, holding a dark, lumpy, baseball-size metallic object out for inspection. “It seems the Kwolek ran over one of our little reinforced atmospheric probes. Looks like that’s what damaged her comm system when the da Vinci arrived to bolster her power reserves.”