The Venus Assault

by Felix R. Savage

  “OK, that explains it.”

  “But I thought she would just lose her job. I mean, that’s bad enough. I didn’t know she was going to be arrested!”

  “Hey,” Petruzzelli said. “I might be misinterpreting it. Maybe she isn’t under arrest. Maybe she’s just feeling antisocial.”

  Leaning forward, Petruzzelli powered the monowheel out across the plain. Snow sprayed up like the wake of a boat. Elfrida wrapped an arm around the plasma-cannon mount so she didn’t slide off. She thought about the data she and Captain Nikolopoulos had recovered from Yumiko Shimada’s head. A mystery inside a PR disaster that had been narrowly headed off. And at the heart of it all, a terrible crime. But whose?

  “They must think I’m so dumb,” she said angrily. “They think I’m just going to let it all go.”

  “They don’t necessarily think you’re dumb. That’s why the ambiguity.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you’re going to be doing a lot of media, you’re going to be telling the Space Corps side of the story. So they want you scared and grateful. So they threaten to fire you, and they actually do fire your boss, and maybe they press charges against her, but we don’t know that, it’s all cloaked in ambiguity … and here you are, scared and grateful.”

  Elfrida smarted at the implication that she was easily manipulated. “It’s just so unfair,” she said. “We saved those people.”

  “Don’t talk to me about unfairness. I piloted that ship. I shot down three PLAN fighters! And that cretin Kim is getting all the credit, and I’m not even allowed to tell my mother. Talk about threats, you don’t want to know what they threatened me with.”

  “What?”

  Petruzzelli made a zipping-my-lips gesture. “Elfrida, it’s the UN.”

  “And I work for them,” Elfrida mumbled.

  “Are you going to stay working for them?”

  “Huh?”

  “They graciously said you could keep your job. That doesn’t mean you have to.”

  Elfrida gazed at the snowfield. Birds swooped around an elephant-moss formation, searching for the rodent-analogues that bred in the crannies of the alien vegetation. “I don’t know. I have to talk to dos Santos.”

  Suddenly, violet lightning lit up the orange sky. Elfrida seemed to feel herself flying sideways. Then everything went black.

  She wrenched her headset off. She was sitting on the floor of Petruzzelli’s cabin, where she had been all along, of course. Her limbs tingled as if she’d had an electric shock.

  Lying on her bunk, Petruzzelli said, “Hnnnnfff.” She sat up, wires trailing out of her hair. “Well, now we know. The dang shield didn’t work.”

  “We’re dead?”

  “We’re dead,” Petruzzelli confirmed. “Years of hard work, all gone in a microsecond, bang!” She removed her headset. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “I guess I was ready to quit, after all.”

  Elfrida wondered if she was, too.

  “Y’know, I could do with some minestrone,” Petruzzelli said, getting up and sticking her feet into her Elephunts. “Coming?”

  “I guess …” Elfrida noticed an alarm flashing in the HUD area of her vision. “Oh God, no, I can’t. I’m late!”

  xxix.

  Elfrida’s chat with dos Santos would have to wait. Anyway, if Petruzzelli was right, dos Santos wasn’t going anywhere.

  She sprinted for the elevator and hurried to the auxiliary bay, where a Superlifter was preparing to take off. She’d made it just in time. The sturdy little craft arced through space to the Nagasaki, which was wallowing behind the Kharbage Can in geostationary orbit.

  From the outside, the great passenger ship no longer looked like a cathedral. Splart-scabbed hull bare to the vacuum, it resembled a spherical habitat abandoned in space. Most of its radiator fins had broken off when they unfolded during launch—which was why the drive had overheated. It definitely wasn’t going anywhere under its own power anytime soon.

  The Superlifter docked with the Nagasaki’s main airlock, formerly the cathedral’s front door. Elfrida transshipped. Inside the Nagasaki, inflatable bivouacs drifted around the support pillars like silver balloons, stamped with PROPERTY OF THE UN. Children darted in and out of the shadows. There was a smell of toilets.

  It felt crowded to Elfrida, but this was only a fraction of the twenty-nine thousand colonists who had been rescued from 11073 Galapagos. Whilst Elfrida was floating in space, there’d been a debate about whether to tow the old ship away with everyone inside it, but concerns about the Nagasaki’s structural integrity had ultimately excluded that option. Meanwhile, the strain on local resources had approached crisis point. Help had arrived in the form of another Kharbage, LLC ship, the quad-module barge Kharbage Dump. The Dump had been dispatched to evacuate the refugees from Botticelli Station. Instead, it had ended up taking the Galapajin on the first stage of the long journey to Ceres.

  Elfrida had been upset when she found out about that.

  “Ceres! After everything you’ve endured!” she had said to Father Hirayanagi. “The least they could do would be to resettle you on Earth.”

  The old priest had stayed behind with the remnant awaiting the next ship.

  “Oh, they offered, to resettle us on Earth,” he had told her. “Reconstructive surgery included. I shudder to think how much it would have cost. But not a single Galapajin took up the offer, I am happy to say.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, that surgery is terribly dangerous. They reinforce your bones with nano-something-or-other, and then for the rest of your life you must take drugs to strengthen your muscles, and many people have heart attacks, anyway,” Father Hirayanagi blithely recited a litany of rumors off the internet. “You can never get over a childhood spent in space. Physically, or psychologically.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “Anyway, events have made God’s will clear. It seems we are meant to go to Ceres. As believers, we’re charged with spreading the gospel to all nations, and Ceres is ripe for evangelization, a gold mine of souls to be saved! Praise Christ, He has spared us for this task.”

  “Gotcha,” Elfrida had said, doubtfully.

  But today, Father Hirayanagi’s reality-defying optimism was not apparent in the Nagasaki. Stifled sobs fractured the hush. In the center of the ship, glowsticks burned on either side of the high altar, substituting for candles. A makeshift choir chanted a Kyrie so beautiful and unearthly it gave Elfrida chills.

  Trying not to make a sound, she joined the people gathered in front of the altar for Jun Yonezawa’s funeral.

  11073 Galapagos is gone. This ceremony underlined it with a terrible finality. And with the destruction of 11073 Galapagos, the last remnant of Japan had vanished from the universe.

  But—no! she thought. Japan isn’t gone. It lived in the memories of these survivors, as it lived in the data. In the painstaking recreation of family and community her father had built for her. Japan had shaped her at a tender age. It had given her what it took to swing that asteroid-forged katana and cut off Yumiko Shimada’s head.

  “Our brother sacrificed himself to save us,” Father Hirayanagi orated, celebrating the funeral Mass. “None of us ever doubted his courage. Now, no one should doubt his faith. He was called to serve God, and now God has called him home.”

  Elfrida’s eyes prickled. But she wasn’t moved by the sad solemnity of the occasion. She was consumed by anger and guilt.

  Unable to keep it all inside, she hung around after the ceremony to talk to Father Hirayanagi. “I don’t know how you can say he sacrificed himself to save everyone,” she blurted. “If it wasn’t for me, he would have stayed in the cathedral and survived. It was my fault.”

  The old priest removed the chasuble he had draped over his EVA suit. They had buried Yonezawa in space, pushing his coffin out of the airlock. The coffin had been closed throughout the ceremony. Only Elfrida knew why the corpse had not been presentable.

  “He may not have known he was going to die
,” Father Hirayanagi said. “But he embraced his martyrdom.”

  “Martyrdom!”

  “He died with Christ’s Holy Name on his lips, fighting the minion of Satan that destroyed 11073 Galapagos.” Father Hirayanagi floated ahead of her into the Superlifter’s concertina docking gate. He was going back up to the Can with them to talk to Captain Okoli.

  Elfrida kicked off and followed him. Minion of Satan! If only he knew the truth. She couldn’t tell him anything she knew, because she didn’t officially know any of it. But she knew where the blame really lay, and she had to make it up to him. To Yonezawa’s family. Somehow.

  They strapped into harnesses in the cabin of the Superlifter. More people crowded in after them, and more. It looked like everyone left on the Nagasaki was going up to the Kharbage Can. Elfrida guessed the ancient ship’s recycling systems must have started to break down. It would be crowded in the Can’s passenger module, but better uncomfortable than dead.

  The Superlifter powered away from the Nagasaki, causing people to fall on top of each other.

  “It’s a shame Jun’s brother couldn’t come to the funeral,” Father Hirayanagi remarked.

  “His brother?” Elfrida said dully.

  “Oh, yes. Jun had three brothers, as well as two sisters. The taller of the altar boys who assisted me at Mass was one of them—a good boy, strong in his faith … But I’m talking about the eldest brother. Kirin. He said he’d try to get here for the funeral … I suppose he couldn’t make it.”

  “Kirin? Doesn’t that mean giraffe?”

  “It does!” Father Hirayanagi congratulated her excessively for knowing that bit of Japanese. To him, and the other Galapajin, she was not Japanese at all, but just another deracinated mutt. “We’ve called him Kirin since he was a boy—it’s not his real name—because he looks like one. Very tall, you know. His mother took some sort of supplement while she was pregnant … it worked rather too well.”

  Elfrida turned to look at the old priest. “Are you saying there are some Galapajin who aren’t here? I mean, who weren’t on the asteroid?”

  “Only Kirin, I’m afraid.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Heaven knows. He didn’t say. Always rather cagey, Kirin. The only one he really talked to was Jun.” Father Hirayanagi sighed. He reached between the people floating in front of them and tapped the viewpoint screen on the bulkhead. “Does this work?”

  “Yes. You just have to turn it on.” Elfrida turned it on for him. She was confused by this new information. No one had ever hinted that there might be Galapajin elsewhere in the system.

  Ships, she realized. Of course they had ships, plural. She remembered those glimpsed gardens tucked away in the thickness of the asteroid’s skin—evidence of undisclosed wealth. The Nagasaki wasn’t their only ship. They had at least one more, and it’s still out there.

  She said in a low voice, “I think you’d better not mention this Kirin guy to anyone. If he didn’t come to his brother’s funeral, it’s probably because he had a good reason for staying out of sight.”

  “Of course,” Father Hirayanagi said. “They told us to pick new names, to hide our heritage, and we all know why. Kirin is no fool. He’ll take precautions.”

  That wasn’t what Elfrida had been thinking about. Of course, the Galapajin would always be prime targets for the PLAN, if they ever strayed from Star Force protection. But maybe Kirin Yonezawa had a different reason for hiding … from Star Force itself. Her speculations wouldn’t come together, however, so she said no more.

  “Kirin has another meaning, too,” Father Hirayanagi mused. “In old Japan, it was a mythical creature, similar to a unicorn.” The screen was displaying the usual autofeed of Venus. Abruptly, Father Hirayanagi pointed at the screen. “There!”

  “What?”

  “A flash. That must have been him!”

  If there had been a flash, it had been so tiny Elfrida hadn’t noticed it. Father Hirayanagi stared at the screen as if he might be able to see Jun Yonezawa’s coffin falling deeper into the Cytherean atmosphere. But Elfrida knew he couldn’t really have seen the coffin. More likely, it had been an asteroid. The impacts were still coming. The asteroid capture pipeline was years long, and couldn’t be stopped. In fact, a near-collision with Botticelli Station was the reason the mass driver scheme had failed first time around.

  “Requiescat in pace,” Father Hirayanagi murmured.

  “That wasn’t him,” Elfrida said. “We sent the coffin the other way, remember? Unscheduled impacts aren’t authorized, even for something that small. So he’ll probably never fall into the atmosphere, but just keep spinning around up here forever. That’s why they call it a graveyard orbit.”

  She had tears in her eyes. She leaned back in her harness, trying to will them back into her tear ducts.

  “What’s wrong, my daughter?” Father Hirayanagi said.

  “I ate him!” she whispered fiercely. “My suit told me how to harvest his proteins and water. And I wanted to stay alive, so I did what it said. Dog, those Star Force suits are smart. It probably could have given me highlights and a blow-dry if I wanted. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  She sneaked a glance at Father Hirayanagi, hoping for forgiveness.

  Her hopes were dashed. His face had turned to stone. “That is a grave sin.”

  “I didn’t want to do it!” That was the understatement of the year. “I literally threw up. I had puke stuck to the inside of my helmet until I was rescued. But I had to get over that. I had to survive. I had no choice.”

  “Repent.”

  Elfrida clenched her fists. How dare he tell her she had done wrong? Her own conscience was telling her the same thing. But she turned her face to the screen, trying to block it out with the sight of Venus.

  “We are commanded to bury the dead. Not to eat them. Human dignity matters more than survival. Please reflect: it's not only Jun’s dignity you’ve injured, it is your own.”

  “So I’m a terrible person.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said you must repent. You’ve already confessed. Now repent, and your sins will be forgiven.”

  Elfrida shook her head. She could not bring herself to submit to his judgment. Everyone else had praised her for doing what it took to survive, and they couldn’t all be wrong. Could they?

  She spent the rest of their trip back up to the Can fighting tears.

  And when she got there, she took her anger and grief and went to have that chat with dos Santos.

  xxx.

  “Sir, please let me see her.”

  Elfrida had encountered an obstacle in the form of Captain Okoli.

  “What for, Goto? She’s in a lot of pain. She needs to rest.”

  “But I haven’t seen her since I got back. It’s been days. I just need to talk to her.”

  Captain Okoli was busy. The screens at his workstation coruscated with vector and thrust simulations. On the far side of the bridge, the Kharbage Can’s Superlifter pilots waited impatiently for him. Elfrida had interrupted them in the middle of something. Captain Okoli eyed her with irritation, which abruptly softened into a grin.

  “Oh, those eyes, Goto. All right. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments … not even legal ones.”

  “So it’s true, sir? She’s under arrest?”

  Captain Okoli wiggled a hand, just as Petruzzelli had done on the plains of Kepler-186f. “Go on. I’ll even disable the cameras in Windsor’s cabin while you’re in there.”

  Elfrida managed a smile. Captain Okoli had misinterpreted her anxiety. But he was welcome to think she was pining for dos Santos, if it got her into that cabin.

  “He was just messing with you,” dos Santos said. “There aren’t any cameras in here. Windsor’s descended from royalty; at least, he thinks he is. He has his pride.”

  Dos Santos glanced disdainfully around the cabin, which was a bijou hideaway, at odds with Richard Windsor’s slobby personal appearance. A tiny chandelier hung from the ceiling.
Fake hunting trophies ornamented the walls.

  Dos Santos’s gaze settled at last on the bag in Elfrida’s hand. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Elfrida nodded. She took out Yumiko’s head. She felt silly carrying it around, but it was a kind of security blanket. It reminded her she had won. Survival was winning. Whatever dos Santos might do or say to her, it couldn’t compare to what she’d already been through.

  “How did you stay alive out there, Goto? I never got a chance to ask.”

  Elfrida nodded. Of course they had to start here, where it had ended. “I used locally available resources. I dismantled the phavatar and utilized its onboard mobility functionality to retard and redirect the trajectory of the fragment I was stuck on. I knew if I drifted too far from the location where the incident occurred, any rescuers wouldn’t be able to find me. So I returned to the coordinates of the former asteroid 11073 Galapagos, which took approximately two sols. Then I … waited.”

  She had lapsed into the formal language of the debrief, which concealed more than it revealed. She looked down at Yumiko’s head, remembering how she’d oscillated between hope and despair, how intensely alone she had felt.

  “When I ran out of water and edibles, I relied on my suit’s recycling functionality. There was a corpse on the same fragment where I was stranded, and I harvested water and proteins from that.”

  Dos Santos’s eyes widened. “That’s hardcore, Goto.”

  Elfrida shrugged.

  “Well done.”

  Elfrida swallowed bile. She looked down again at Yumiko’s head, which sat beside her on a tapestry-upholstered corner sofa. Dos Santos was reclining stiffly in her cast on Windsor’s double-wide bunk.

  “Eventually Captain Nikolopoulos came and found me. He said that he deployed about a zillion sprites throughout the volume, programmed to ping everything remotely warm.”