by Nick Webb
Dorian reached out to touch one, a robust, quarter-meter thick green trunk with tiny bristles all around it, and then sniffed his fingertips. “It’s tomato all right.” He gazed up at the leafy tomato branch canopy overhead, and the tens of thousands of tiny yellow flowers. “Have they set fruit yet?”
Schroeder shook his head. “Not yet. The CO2 level may be too high. Honestly, there is so much research to be done. That is why I’ve brought you here. To secure your support.” He turned to Mora. She faced him down. She’d been dreaming about this moment for weeks.
Ever since Vesta.
Ever since her David had died.
Firebrand. That was the old Julianne Mora. This new version seethed on the inside. Seethed and raged. It took an iron will to modulate her voice, smile coldly, and hope to God her anger was checked enough to sound coherent.
“I can’t imagine my support will make much of a difference to the principle funders. Worthlin certainly doesn’t care for me, the bastard. And the pope? Forget about it. They don’t care what this old woman thinks.”
Schroeder shook his head insistently. Good. He was buying her act. “No, you’re mistaken. Well, not entirely mistaken. It’s not that they care about what you specifically think, but they take the members of the funder’s circle very seriously, as a whole. If you lend me your support, along with another dozen or so members, I think we can accomplish something great. Historical, even.”
She was getting impatient. David had already been dead for two weeks, and Hannah….
Longer. Ever since Io.
Both her children. Her only daughter. Her only son. Both destroyed in Laura Walker’s senseless war. Walker, aided and abetted by Nhean.
And by this garbage of a human being standing in front of her, boasting about his precious plants while her children’s ashes were floating in the void of space.
“And why the hell should we give you our support … for this?” She waved to the giant tomato trees. “We can’t save human civilization with … tomatoes.”
Schroeder smiled. “No. Not with tomatoes. Come.” He guided them to the perimeter of the garden, near the edge, where the guard railing rimmed the short wall, preventing people from stumbling. Falling fifty kilometers would lead to certain death. Several transparent environmental boxes were there, angled to get as much sun exposure as possible in this extreme northern latitude. A green haze floated in a thin band about halfway between the floor and the ceilings in the tanks. “This. This will be the solution to war. To the death and destruction that plagues us. To the Telestine occupation.”
“This?” said Dorian. “You can kill Telestines with this?”
“Kill? Of course not. Swords into plowshares, my friends. War doesn’t solve anything.”
Mora smiled grimly. “We’ll see about that. So what does it do, then?”
Schroeder bent down to the computer terminal next to one of the tanks and entered his authorization code.
Finally.
“It’s called cyanobacteria. But not just any cyanobacteria. It’s a special airborne strain I’ve instructed my science team to develop.”
“Bacteria?” said Dorian. “So you are trying to kill them? A bioweapon?”
“No, no, no. Nothing of the sort. Cyanobacteria is notable in that it is a prodigious producer of oxygen. It thrived in Earth’s early biosphere, billions of years ago. It’s what turned our own carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into the pleasant oxygen-nitrogen mix that … the Telestines enjoy today.”
Mora nodded. “So you’re going to terraform Venus. Ambitious. But how do you plan on developing a strain that can survive four hundred and fifty degrees celsius and fifty atmospheres of pressure?”
“No plans for that at all,” replied Schroeder, bringing up a schematic on the computer. She eyed Dorian, who was watching everything Schroeder did with intense interest. She trusted he was taking notes on the filing system. “I’ve instead developed an airborne version, like I said. Further, it’s … highly prolific, within a certain pressure and temperature range. Just set this loose in the Venetian atmosphere, and it will settle at an appropriate altitude conducive to its growth, as if it was floating in water. And there, it will multiply incredibly fast. Explosively fast. Within months, there will be a kilometer-thick cloud of cyanobacteria enveloping the whole of Venus, munching its way through the atmosphere’s vast stores of carbon dioxide within just a few years. And with the carbon gone, the runaway greenhouse effect will cease, and the heat stored on the surface will finally be able to radiate out into space over the next few years.”
She bent down to stare at the thin cloud of green in the tank. A glove built into the tank’s wall hung limp nearby, and she inserted her hand inside and waved it through the haze, which billowed and swirled around her hand. “Fascinating. And what happens when the CO2 supply dwindles? What happens when they run out of food?”
“The cyanobacteria will die, and precipitate out of the clouds like a green rain, I suppose. For awhile, there will be massive oceans of dead cyanobacteria. The atmospheric pressure will drop quite precipitously, as the carbon is extracted from the atmosphere and converted to biomass, and we will need to figure out how to cap it, and essentially store it. On Earth, all that biomass was stored as coal and oil, deep beneath the surface. We’ll need a similar process.”
“And the cities?” She glanced up at him. “The floating cities?”
“They … will drift down to a lower altitude.”
“Drift?”
“Well,” Schroeder demurred, “I imagine if Venus’s atmospheric pressure gets down to Earth-like levels, the cities will no longer be able to float. But I regard that as a feature, not a bug, since then the surface of Venus will finally be habitable. Many variables to still solve, but my hope is that, eventually, we’ll have a new world. A new Earth. Green, verdant, capable of supporting life. Conflict with the Telestines can cease, and we can focus on rebuilding here. No more living in asteroids, wasting our lives away mining rocks or hauling junk halfway across the solar system—” he seemed to realize he’d made a mistake. “Sorry, I misspoke. Not junk. Valuable cargo. The Funders Circle values the Cargo Guild more than you could ever know.”
Enough. She didn’t care about a new Earth. Or an old Earth. Or any Earth. She had nothing left. Anything she had was now floating in the rubble of Io, of Vesta. Not just David, not just Hannah.
But their children.
Her precious grandchildren. Millie, opinionated but sweet, was six. Dearest Aaron, four. And darling Ellie had been just a newborn. Taking her tiny first breath just a week before Vesta’s explosion caused her last.
Gone.
A haze of vaporized blood-red goo. Floating like clouds in the abyss, just like the green haze now swirling around the glove on her hand. She waved it back and forth one more time, ghoulishly thinking the green haze to be the atomized remains of her enemies. Walker. Nhean Tang. Schroeder. Telestines. Fuck them all.
“Mr. Dorian? What the hell are you waiting for?” she asked, absentmindedly, still swishing the cyanobacteria haze through the fingers of the glove.
Schroeder looked up from the computer in surprise. “Excuse me? Hey!”
Dorian had already grabbed Schroeder by the arm, and was hauling him closer to the edge.
“Hey! What are you doing? No! Stop!”
Dorian was strong, she’d give the young man that. With one fluid motion, using one of the cyanobacteria tanks for leverage, he swung Schroeder completely off his feet and sent him plunging off the edge. A terrified shriek pierced the calm Venetian wind, and died away.
“What do you think will kill him first? The heat? The pressure? Or the impact?” she mused, still waving through the haze.
Dorian considered, looking down off the edge at the abyss of yellow clouds below. “Certainly not the impact. His skin will melt in just a few minutes. Then his head will implode from the pressure. He’ll be vapor by the time he reaches the surface.”
“Good.” She pull
ed her hand out of the glove and bent down to consider the open computer terminal. “Now get to work. Computer’s still open. We need … what did Nhean call it? The Seed? He told me that Schroeder developed it for him. Like a glorified computer virus. And if he was able to take control of a Telestine fleet with it, just imagine what we can do.”
CHAPTER THREE
Ganymede, High Orbit
EFS Santa Maria
“So.” Pike threaded his way through the corridors of the Santa Maria, ducking awkwardly under lintels, nearly hitting his head on one.
Half of humanity was as tall as he was, now, living in low gravity, and everyone still made doorways at the same height. It was like no one ever learned. He banged his head coming up too quickly and shot a glare at the doorway.
Walker didn’t answer immediately, at least not the question he was really asking. “So you’ve been helping with repairs?”
He shrugged awkwardly. “Looked like you guys needed a hand. And I know my way around a ship.”
He didn’t say that patching bullet holes and fixing busted machinery seemed a much more manageable way to help than trying to tackle whatever the hell was going on. People were scared. A quiet word and a hand offered to help fix something went a long way to make them feel better.
It even seemed to make her feel better. Her face softened as she looked over at him. “Well, thank you. I mean it. We’re short-staffed. On everything.”
She didn’t say anything more until they were a few corridors away, and demonstrably alone. She sighed.
“So, for some reason, someone organized a mutiny on most of the ships in the fleet and the ones that mutinied successfully are now hightailing it to Neptune.” She did not look up at him. Her nose was flared and she was clearly trying to keep her cool.
He followed her up a staircase, noting the smooth feel of the metal railing under his palm—Nhean’s ships were, in every way, nicer than any other ships he’d been on—and hurried to keep up with Walker as she headed for her quarters.
She walked fast.
She looked over at him once. “Nothing to say to that?”
“No,” he admitted. “Or … too many things?”
She shot him a curious glance.
“I….” Where to start? What was safe to say? “Even with the Old Man, General Essa, it never came to this.”
She nodded tightly. “I know. And I never thought he would do something like this. He was impetuous and bullheaded, but he wasn’t stupid.”
“He had the UN behind him,” Pike pointed out. “And he knew you weren’t going to run roughshod over everything. He was controlling you with that.”
“Not Essa,” she said impatiently. “God rest his cantankerous little soul. No, it’s Nhean.”
“Wait, what?”
“Who else do you think could have done this?” She swung to face him, eyebrows raised. “It has to be him, doesn’t it?”
“No!” The word tumbled out before he could stop himself.
“No?” She looked at him curiously.
Pike had to catch himself. She couldn’t know that he was, in fact, in communication with the elusive data-broker. “I mean … why would he do this?”
Of course, as soon as he said the words, he remembered exactly why Nhean would do something like this: to take the fleet away from a woman who secretly wanted to bomb Earth into eternal oblivion. It still made him sick to know she’d destroy it, just to keep their enemies from holding onto it. Just out of spite.
Pike swallowed. Despite the fact that he could seem to think of nothing else these days, the idea that Walker truly wanted to destroy Earth still seemed unbelievable to him. She couldn’t really want to, could she?
But she did. Pike had heard her say as much to Nhean. Nhean, who must have suspected that he could not trust her when he built in a discreet computer code to monitor the Venus fleet. She had overridden that, of course. She had purged that program from the ships and Nhean could no longer access them.
He’d trusted her with his new fleet, and she’d pulled the rug out from him.
The memory reminded him why he was here—and that he must not ever let Walker suspect his true allegiance.
“He’s gone,” Walker told him flatly. “He left at Vesta, he hasn’t been heard from since, and he has openly doubted my ability to lead the fleet. He’s one of the only ones that has the … nerve. And the capability to act on it.”
“That’s true.” There was not much else to say. Few other people had the resources to match Nhean. It was almost worth wondering if Nhean had done this, in fact, but that wasn’t important right now. All that mattered was turning this event into something that could chip away at her confidence in her plan.
“Why would you defend him?” she asked quietly. Her gaze was worried.
Pike considered. “It doesn’t seem like … his style. But you’re right, who else could it be?” He had a burst of inspiration. “I don’t want to think the worst of him—not while she’s there with him. That means I have to question her loyalty, too.” He gave a bitter laugh. “And that’s a dark road to go down.”
In truth, it was killing him that the girl was back with Nhean. The girl, who could speak now, however haltingly, who could have answered so many questions he had. The girl who was the closest thing to a daughter he was ever likely to get.
The girl Nhean had almost killed once already.
“Pike.” Her gaze was worried. “I can’t make assurances about what she’s doing, but you know she would never willingly betray humanity. And you know she’s smart enough to keep herself safe. If she can escape from the fleet without us ever figuring out how, she can escape from Nhean if she needs to.” She lifted a shoulder. “Hell, maybe she’s spying on him for us.”
He wasn’t keen to have her go too far down that track. “Whatever she’s doing, I’d feel better if I knew she was safe.” He shook his head and gestured for her to keep walking, falling in again at her side. “And have you considered—” He looked around himself. The ambient noise had been growing louder as they approached the engines, but he still wasn’t sure if it was safe to talk about this.
“We’re alone,” she said confidently. “Have I considered what?”
“The bombs.” He looked down. “The iridium isotope bombs. There were more. They weren’t all on Vesta, I don’t think. And there was only one on Mars. So where are the rest? Didn’t your science guy say there were as many as fourteen left before he … before Vesta exploded?”
“Trust me, we’re looking. I haven’t stopped thinking about that.” She shook her head and pushed open the door to the engine room. “But if there’s a way to find them, no one’s found it yet.”
“You should send a detachment to the inner solar system. Inside Mercury’s orbit,” Pike called over the roar of the machinery. He winced at the sound.
“Why?” She frowned up at him.
Because it was the one thing Nhean told me I had to make sure you did. But he really should have come up with a fake reason before he started talking. He scrambled to come up with something.
“Planetary alignment. Jupiter and Neptune are all over here, and for the next few months Earth and Mars are on the other side, along with Saturn. We should cover our bases.” He gestured to show his meaning, in case she missed the words, and then stooped closer to yell in her ear as they walked. “If the Telestines want to hit Mars, then back to Jupiter, they have to go past the sun. We’re having a hard enough time keeping up with Tel’rabim and there’s no knowing where we’ll get pulled. And we should have ships all over in case Ka’sagra makes a move with her iridium bombs.” Yeah. That seemed to hang together.
“Interesting.” He saw her lips move. “I’ll consider it.”
Apparently, he hadn’t reached the point of being able to convince her of tactical moves yet. Maybe he should have gone through one of her captains … but Delaney was likely to be just as suspicious as Walker, and Larsen clearly hated Pike with a passion.
“
So why are we here?”
“FTL.”
He stopped in his tracks. “Say again?”
She pulled his hands away from his ears. “It would be easier to hear me if you weren’t doing that.”
“It’s loud.”
She gave him a wry look. “I know. And I said ‘FTL.’ F … T … L.” She made her way to one of the abandoned desks and rifled through the paperwork there, picking up a few pieces and staring that them. She shook her head and pointed back to the corridor.
Pike gave a groan of relief when they emerged back into the hallway. His ears were ringing.
“So, ah….” He dug at one ear with his pinky. “Wait, you have FTL? That means what I think it means, right?”
“If you think it means faster-than-light travel, then yes. And no, I do not have it.” She shook her head. “But the Telestines did. Once. It’s how they got here from their solar system. And we’re … close. How close, I don’t know. Apparently, the math almost works. The engineering? Well … the Telestines had it once, so it’s possible—we know that much.” She forced herself to take a deep breath. “Beyond that, I have no idea. But we need it, and soon.”
“Why?” Pike frowned. “Wouldn’t that be really difficult to learn how to control? We’re so close to matching the Telestine ships for speed.”
Her lips pursed slightly. She had wanted to tell him, he knew, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t risk it.
Deep down, he could tell she knew what he would think of it.
“It’s—it’s not important right now.”
He faked a cough for a chance to turn away. He couldn’t look at her, not when she lied to his face. He knew she wanted FTL so they could leave Earth behind—and search for a new home that might not even exist. Search the stars for another Earth. Hundreds of Earths. Be free of Earth. But she didn’t know he knew that about her.
She laid a hand on his arm. “You should rest. You’ve been working over at the Anchor all morning. You can use my quarters, and I’ll be back as soon as we have the final preparations done.”
