The Clouds of Venus: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q. Morris

  “Shit,” he said. It didn’t quite reach.

  There was a valve in the sole of the AV’s foot for adding or draining the liquid containing the nanofabricators. He wanted to open it and let some of the magic oil drip onto the damaged elbow joint. He looked around. He needed to add its left forearm, too. Finally, he decided to ask Nuria for help.

  “Can you stabilize the AV on the left side, please? I want to take the forearm segment off.”

  Without a word, Nuria walked around the machine to stabilize it. He disconnected the hand and laid it down before dismounting the left forearm and integrating it into his construction. That was enough! The three leg sections, the forearm, and the foot formed a jointed arch, through which he could now drip fabricators on the joint. He opened the valve of the filler hole. The fluid followed gravity and dripped onto the joint.

  Erik waited until all of the damaged spots were coated. Then he closed the valve, making sure it had sealed, and began reassembling the borrowed left-side parts. Next came the reversed right knee, and reattaching the right foot to its ankle. He didn’t need to program the nanofabricators. They recognized that the physical shape of the joint didn’t fit the structural design and replaced what was missing. After 30 minutes, the joint of his AV was like new.

  February 3, 2079, Akademgorodok

  The plane rolled to a stop and the pilot turned off the engines. Peter Kovalev took a deep breath and unbuckled his seatbelt. Now what? There was no flight attendant in the private jet, and no one telling the passengers what to do. The FSB employees in the seats in front of him got up and hurried to the door. Peter nodded to his humanoid robot Katarina, then followed the others.

  The door opened with a hiss, and frigid air quickly made its way in. Peter was glad he was wearing a mask, since minus 20 is quite normal for winter in Siberian. The group began moving. Peter stopped for a moment on the top step. An armored, large-capacity limousine was waiting at the edge of the runway. That must be his date. The doors were still closed, but he couldn’t blame the woman he had been dating for waiting in the warmth of the vehicle until the last second.

  As the small group was almost to the limousine, the passenger door opened. Valentina Shostakovna, the daughter of RB owner Nikolai Shostakovich, got out. Her fur coat was open, and he saw that she was wearing a lightweight dress underneath.

  I hope she doesn’t catch a cold, Peter thought.

  “I’m glad you have arrived safe, Mr. Ivanov!” she said, briefly raising her hand in greeting. “Come on in, Andrej, we have a secure meeting room in the vehicle.” She turned to the FSB agents. “A second vehicle will arrive shortly for you.”

  Peter reacted a second too late to the false name. Had the driver noticed anything? he wondered. I didn’t detect any reaction from him.

  “And who are you, if I may ask?” Valentina asked.

  Peter was confused. Then he realized that she was talking to his robot.

  “I’m Katarina,” she answered before Peter could react. “We’ve talked on the phone.”

  Valentina gave Katarina a head-to-toe once-over. “Get in the car,” she said.

  One of the rear doors opened, and Katherina complied. Valentina got in next and Peter followed. There were four armchairs inside, grouped around a small meeting table. As soon as everyone was sitting down, Valentina pushed a button on her communicator and the car started to move away.

  Peter’s face itched under the mask, which was, in fact, a whole-head protective covering while also serving as a disguise. “May I?” he asked, pointing to his chin.

  “Yes, the driver can’t see or hear anything from back here. He receives his orders only through my communicator.”

  Peter removed the mask with a deep sigh. How sorry he was about this secrecy! He would much rather focus on his research. But after the two attacks, he was glad that his employer, RB, had helped him out.

  “Why do you have a driver, even though it’s an autonomous vehicle?” he asked.

  “He is actually a bodyguard. He can deal with the police if necessary, or anticipate dangers better than the automatic system,” explained Valentina.

  “But,” she said, lowering her voice, “right now, let’s talk about what’s happened. Things that nobody else needs to know.”

  That didn’t sound good. Peter was hoping that this nightmare would come to an end.

  “Anastasia Jurkova escaped. She seriously injured Ivan Lazarev and a Japanese agent during her flight. I’m really sorry about Lazarev. He helped our company more than once, but that doesn’t matter now. It would have been a different outcome if he had been wearing the special helmet. Well...”

  There was silence for a moment. Valentina seemed to be worried about Lazarev. What if there was more behind it? And it made Peter wonder what was going to happen to him.

  “Peter, as far as your future is concerned,” whispered Valentina, as if she was reading his thoughts, “I have some things I want to discuss with you. But we’ll do that at RB, because there’s a second problem we need to resolve.”

  The vehicle brought the passengers directly to Shostakovich’s protective bunker, a flat concrete building with narrow windows that looked more like embrasures. The most modern defensive weapons were probably mounted behind them. Anyone who had power, and Shostakovich had a great deal of it with his RB group, also had powerful enemies.

  But at that moment everything seemed peaceful. They got out. Valentina left her fur coat open again, but she didn’t seem to be feeling chilled.

  No wonder, thought Peter, she was born here.

  As they were walking the ten meters to the entrance, Valentina kept looking around. She was nervous, and this feeling was transferring to him. It only left him when the powerful bolts of the armored door latched into place behind them.

  They walked a few steps along a brightly lit corridor until they reached an alcove. There, Valentina took him aside. “Do you trust your robot?” she asked quietly.

  Peter smiled. Katarina’s senses were so highly developed that she could pick up every word.

  “Yes. Katarina saved my life in Tokyo at least once,” Peter said. “She’s really Dushek’s masterpiece. The AI and the protective function of the android are still world leaders today, even though she is ten years old. I can’t comment on the rest of Dushek’s work.”

  “The rest?”

  “Well, it’s an HDS model, Home Defender Sex. You understand, right?”

  Valentina smiled. “That sounds like Yuri. Our AI guru has always been something... special. And have you never tried this added feature?”

  “Me...? Ummm...”

  Valentina hit him on the upper arm. “That was a joke. You don’t need to answer.”

  Valentina suddenly looked much more relaxed, and they moved on through an inconspicuous door and then down a staircase. There she shoved a cabinet aside and poked a needle-shaped object into a tiny and barely visible hole that seemed part of the patterned wallcovering. Immediately the wall retracted and moved to the side, revealing a vast laboratory with additional doors that led to an extensive residential and work complex. Valentina let him go first.

  Maria Kuznetsova was standing in the middle of the laboratory. The face of the 26-year-old biochemist from his AI research team brightened as Peter entered, and darkened the moment she saw Katarina trailing him.

  “You already know your co-worker,” Valentina said, not bothering with names. “She has gotten herself in trouble by, let’s say, reckless activities. So far, we thought we could just sit it out and put Maria out of contact until the final resolution. Although she isn’t free here, she is better off in this place than in any prison anywhere.”

  Peter swallowed. The repressed anger rose again. How could a researcher with these career prospects have been so stupid as to distill liquor illegally? She had to have known that it would come back to bite her someday! Salaries were still low at Maria’s level, but he was happy to have a stable job with a well-known company, and he thought she should
be, too.

  Valentina pointed to a few chairs in front of a laboratory table. “Sit down!” she said. “What I am going to tell you now is top secret.”

  Of course. Nothing that Peter had experienced, seen, or heard over the last few weeks could ever go public. He almost felt like a spy himself.

  Valentina took a chair so that she could sit between Maria and him. “Unfortunately, the whole thing has become more complicated,” she said.

  Maria bit her lip.

  “Anastasia Jurkova didn’t just rat you out, she reported you to the top guys. I don’t know what allegations she made. In any case, the investigations are being carried out in Moscow, which severely limits our influence on them. That was probably Anastasia’s plan.

  “Now, Ivan Lazarev is in a hospital bed in Japan, seriously injured, and we don’t know if he will come back. Just like that, we lost a strong man, Maria, who always protected you. There is only one way out. You have to get beyond the reach of the investigative authorities and away from Akademgorodok, so that the RB Group doesn’t get any blowback from the investigation. We can’t do anything to change it.”

  Maria swallowed. “But where should I go?” she asked softly.

  “I’ll get to that soon. Now you, Peter. It looks different for you, but not better. Anastasia has disappeared, and we don’t know when or where she will strike again. You could spend the next few years in this cozy bunker, but I have another alternative for you.”

  “Another bunker?” What kind of alternative is that? he wondered. Couldn’t they just kill Anastasia so he could dedicate himself to his research again?

  “What I’d like to offer you is definitely more interesting than a bunker, or even a prison,” Valentina said, “and it’s related to RB’s core business.”

  “Asteroid mining?” Peter asked right away. He didn’t intend to spend years on a boulder that flew across space.

  “Yes and no. It’s not about asteroids, it’s about Venus, and it is definitely not about mining. Not officially, that is.”

  “But isn’t Venus considered a protected area?”

  “Yes, Peter, commercial use is forbidden by the UN space treaty, but scientific research is allowed. The RB Group is researching our neighboring planets, and we are particularly interested in the crust. There are many unanswered questions, like the strong volcanism. And there will be an overburden with the necessary excavations.”

  “And the UN accepts that?”

  “The conditions down there are so extreme that every material we could harvest could be too expensive, and therefore not very interesting commercially. And with the nanofabricators technology, you can now produce almost everything out of almost anything. But, not everything.”

  “Such as?” Peter asked.

  “Diamonds. Nanomachines can easily arrange carbon atoms however they want. But if pressure and temperature aren’t set correctly, a diamond will never be formed. Coincidentally, we found lots of diamonds in the rubble of our research, so RB is pleased to be doing research there. But of course, it’s only worth it as long as nobody on Earth knows about it. Otherwise the diamond market of the Earth would collapse. We will sell the stones at a lower price. Do you understand?”

  Very smart, and typical RB. That trick was old. For a hundred years, Japan had been catching whales for research purposes and then selling them.

  “But what are we supposed to do up there?” Maria asked—a good question, since robots would surely handle the harvesting.

  “We found something last week that we really didn’t expect.” Valentina turned on a hologram projector that created a three-dimensional image above the table. On the display, they saw a section of wall with numerous carved symbols.

  “We believe that cannot be anything other than a structure from an ancient civilization,” Valentina explained. “We can almost certainly exclude artifacts of biological origin under these environmental conditions. We stopped the exploration and gave the robots the task of transforming the storerooms so that people could live in them.”

  Life on Venus? That was one reason to send people. Who could imagine the secrets that an ancient civilization could reveal to them? Peter thought.

  “You two could do the research. An interesting task, and out of the reach of all your current pursuers. Document everything you find. The analysis can be done by RB researchers on Earth.”

  “When should we start?” Maria asked.

  It would be best to go tomorrow morning, Peter thought. He wanted to go on this mission. It was different from anything he had ever done in his life. It was more important, too, breathtaking—and probably dangerous, but he didn’t care.

  “Your ship will be ready in about three months. It’s equipped with brand new and enhanced direct fusion drives. Not only are they stronger than NASA’s older models—which we used as a model for our development—they no longer have these cold-start problems that sometimes interfered with the previous expeditions. As Earth and Venus are getting closer to each other, approaching a minimum distance, we can dispense with the use of the Hohmann maneuver and fly to the planets directly.”

  “And you probably need our answer right away?” Peter asked.

  Valentina smiled. “No, you have three days to make your decisions. Otherwise we will have to look for other scientists.” Then she suddenly stood up. “Now I have to say goodbye. Someone will come in a few minutes to take you to your quarters.”

  She raised her hand again, and the secret door closed behind her.

  “And will you accept her offer?” asked Maria.

  “Yes, absolutely! It doesn’t matter to me where I am locked up. What matters is that I’m safe from Anastasia on board the spaceship. The opportunity to explore an alien civilization is very appealing to me. What do you think about it?”

  “It sounds fascinating, but it is also very dangerous. Me as a cosmonaut? I can’t imagine that yet. Besides, I’d rather continue with my studies on Earth.”

  “Which studies?”

  “My work with human cell repair based on the individual genome. You know that!”

  He remembered. She had been ranked among the top 20 percent at the State University of Novosibirsk. But if Maria refused to go, who would they send with him? The old Tarasov, the planetary scientist? He knew Venus very well, at least theoretically. Then he would have to listen to his lectures for at least six weeks. No, Maria Kuznetsova would be better.

  “I would really appreciate it if you came,” Peter said.

  Maria turned dark red.

  Peter winced mentally. What did I do? I didn’t want to embarrass you!

  “Are you two ready now? I’ll take you to your quarters,” said a young woman in a laboratory coat. They hadn’t heard her come to the table.

  “Thank you.” You are my savior, he thought.

  February 4, 2079, Havre Volcano

  Erik strode up and down, treading excessively noisily. “We have six days left until the exam, and they still won’t let us leave?”

  “You’re behaving like a child whose ice cream was taken away, do you realize that?” Nuria asked.

  “Well, I don’t want to flunk this exam. I hate exams, and so far I’ve had hardly any time to prepare.”

  “And what about the weekend you chose to spend surfing with the first officer of the Ocean Explorer?”

  That had been the highlight of this trip. Erik couldn’t help but smile when he remembered it. He had finally been able to try out all the tricks he loved so much—he had feared that he had completely forgotten them. But his student had also proven to be very quick and eager to learn. “The man asked me if I could teach him some tricks,” he said. “How could I say no?”

  “And now the biologists are asking us for help. You cannot refuse them, since you didn’t refuse him,” retorted Nuria. “The exam is just a formality, you know that yourself. There are two AVs, and two ASCANs who have learned how to use the AVs. They have to let us fly!”

  “We’re lucky those gizmos are
still so expensive.”

  “It depends. After all, our trip is not without its risks.”

  “Please. The AVs perform real work. We only watch from above.”

  “Then you can prove to everyone how easy all of this is, Erik.”

  Erik sighed. “You win, one-zip.” Nuria was such a spoilsport.

  The lights went out, and Erik sensed the slight draft of the air conditioning. He put on the mask, as he called the BCI, the brain-computer interface.

  “Look. The man in the iron mask,” he said aloud.

  “Can’t you think of a new joke?” Nuria asked. She was lying next to him on the couch and had just donned her BCI as well.

  A calibration sequence in which the system adapted to his brainwave patterns was still running. The BCI was already programmed specifically for his brain. Nobody else could use it. But his brain was so malleable that there were small changes overnight. If he learned a new pattern of movement, a re-calibration would be required. After the surfing lessons with the first officer, the BCI had taken almost 45 minutes in which to fully synchronize.

  But he seemed to have learned nothing new since the previous day, because a countdown was already announcing the establishment of a connection to his AV. Erik involuntarily tensed his arm muscles. The transition was always a bit unpleasant, because all sensations changed within milliseconds.

  He was swimming in the ocean. There was darkness around him. Erik opened his mouth to breathe, but no air flowed into his lungs. Panic threatened to overwhelm him. Calm down, he thought. I don’t have to breathe now. I get my energy from a well-charged battery. As soon as I activate the radar and sonar, my surroundings will be illuminated.