The Venus Belt (20 page)

“Slow down, Lucy!” That was Koko. “Whoever’s behind this—they’ve even interfered with Navigation Rock, somehow. I don’t want to be inte
r
fered with the same way—until we find out what’s going on.”

“She’s right, Lucy. Let’s sneak up on them, okay?”

“Yer both right, you two. Must be gettin’ senile ‘r somethin’—mebbe just undernourished. How about a bite t’ eat? We’ll be a coupla hours ge
t
tin’ there.”

I declined in favor of reclining. There wasn’t room enough to stand i
n
side the vehicle, but there was plenty to stretch out in. I guess it amounts to the same thing in freefall. Part of the extra space came from the orient
a
tion—”down” was toward the fusion burners (at one-tenth gee, it didn’t matter very much), the paired seats flanked a ladder lying on the “floor.” A minijohn and microkitchen rested on a supporting shelf behind, and aft of that, a firewall or bulkhead for the engines, generously upholstered for snoozing.

I unbelted my weapons and strapped them down, removing the .25 from the inside of my suit and wedging it into an extra ammunition pouch. Some gun. The hissing of the engines made a lovely, soporific veil of sound. In disconnected snatches, I could hear my friends discussing the solar flare. There were plenty of weather-predicting companies, and no single outfit should be able to fake a storm-warning on a scale like this. They’d be paying restitution well into the next
eon,
at least that’s what Lucy kept insisting. K
o
ko seemed crushed, disappointed in what had seemed the Promised Land to her, and unjustly disappointed with Lucy for being unable to account for the anomaly.

I wondered—and worried—about it myself. This whole situation was getting more complicated by the minute: people disappearing, others tr
y
ing to knock me off, electronic zombies wandering around loose. And above all, Clarissa, always Clarissa. Like that dream where you’re ru
n
ning, trying to reach the one you love, and, in all the confusion, somehow never quite able to.

I slipped from fitful doze into a solid, if occasionally troubled, sleep, vaguely aware at turnaround, then back into the warm, friendly darkness b
e
hind my eyelids.

I almost missed it when we reached the asteroid known as Navigation Rock.

Sunday, March 14, 223 A.L.

Find a little asteroid, drill a little hole,
plant a little bomb
.
Heat the whole mess cherry-red in an induction field generated by orbiting constru
c
tion drones rented for the occasion. When solid rock has acquired the consiste
n
cy of incandescent bubble gum, the explosives puff it up into a larger, ho
l
low shell.

Old stuff, right? Then tunnel in and plant your trees and grass—don’t forget the animals and air and topsoil.

Wrong
.

Instead, try filling half the mile-wide cavity with water. A modest spin will plaster your captive lake around the inner surface, shallow at the poles, deeper at the equator. Top it off with an air system like the aquarium in your living room—an aquarium whose denizens make their mortgage pa
y
ments by furnishing unprecedentedly accurate navigational information to half the civilized Solar System.

If I’d been in a position to appreciate the situation—a longtime inhabi
t
ant of the Belt or seasoned space-traveler—a falsified solar flare report and the subsequent cutoff of Navigation Rock’s transmissions would have been my greatest shock so far. It certainly seemed to be affecting Lucy.

Her final approach was downright paranoid, one “hand” carefully c
a
ressing the controls, the other locked rigidly on the trigger switch, pr
e
pared to unleash the Darling gun on the flivver’s starboard fender. One nervous twitch of her tongue, we’d be minus a windshield, courtesy of her own built-in quick-firer.

At one pole of the asteroid a gigantic bay was brightly lit and open wide: invitation or trap? Lucy chose to hang us out in empty space, politely wa
k
ing me before she depressurized the hull. I’d been sleeping with my hood down, so I appreciated the thought. I sat up groggily, feeling worse after my nightmare-ridden nap than before. We were once again in free fall, hell on equilibrium, but otherwise welcome as I runged my sleep-stiffened way t
o
ward a jumpseat in the nose. Beside me, Koko seemed unusually awed and quiet, but our chauffeur was simply full of cheerful trivia.

“Tried t’raise ‘em on a dozen different bands, Winnie. They’re clammed up real good.” She pointed toward the bloated rock drifting beyond the windshield. “Guess
that’s
why.”

I squinted myself into tears before remembering to adjust my suitsen
s
es. On the cracked and pitted surface below, four broken stubs of well-scorched alloy thrust a feeble foot or so into the flivver’s spotlights. “A
n
tenna mast?”

“Usta be half a mile of it,” Lucy answered, goosing us into an orbit that suited her minutely better. “Somebody done that
deliberate
. Loosen up yer ordnance,
amigos
—time we got t’gettin’” The cabin thrummed; a little ye
l
low light on my forearm warned me it was now completely full of vacuum. She pressed a few more dashboard buttons; a scarlet panel lamp blinked on and off, then died. “A little surprise fer anybody tam-pers with Eddie’s car!”

She opened the door, swung herself outside, and hung there without visible means of support, waiting. Finally I stepped out onto nothingness, clinging with acrophobic trepidation to the door handle as Koko followed and Lucy took us each by the hand. “You two just let
me
do th’ maneuv
e
rin’. Gonna leave ‘er ajar, case we need a fast getaway.” My fingers tingled m
o
mentarily as she left the open frequency and trans-mitted through our suit-skins: “Somethin’ happens t’me, don’t try startin’ th’ engines without you flush th’ toilet an’ turn th’ kitchen water on—cold. Otherwise, it’ll be th’ Second of July, all over again. That’s th’ way I got it rigged,
co
m
prende
?”

“Flush the toilet, water cold. I get it, Lucy.” I was also getting sicker by the second.
Try
not looking down when it’s that way every direction.

“Unh! Er, toilet and water,” Koko acknowledged after a second prod in the ribs. This must have been her idea of heaven, the goddamned fuzzy space cadet. I clutched fearfully at Lucy’s chassis, trying to keep my right hand on the butt of the Webley. She produced a brief, quick-frozen propu
l
sive flurry that nearly jarred me loose, and we began drifting slowly across the hundred-yard void.

At least I tried to
think
of it as “across.”

Navigating by the seat of her impellers, Lucy compensated for Koko’s greater mass by shortening up her left manipulator, while extending her right, the side I was on, as far as it would go. It wasn’t quite enough; toget
h
er, we made a lousy spaceship, but the warm, buttery light of the lock kept getting closer all the same. Finally our pilot pivoted passengers and corpus around her axillae and gave one brief, carefully calculated blast. We slowed and bumped into gentle contact with the sabotage-blackened rock.

I stickied up my shoe soles and Lucy let me go.

“Stand by a moment, kids. Somethin’ I gotta find out.” She grabbed a broken cable sprouting from one fused and buckled tower leg. “Hello, Na
v
igation Rock, any of you mudpuppies still there?”

At this range, even Lucy’s arm made a passable antenna. A blurry, snowfilled image seeped into the bottom corner of my suitscreen, the same Orca, I think, that we’d talked to back on Ceres. “
This is Navigation Rock, who are you
?”

“This here’s Lucy Kropotkin. Any reason we shouldn’t come inside outa th’ cold?”

Koko turned her back to watch the Cord as it hung a hundred yards away, lighted by the open lock beside us.

“
We’re quite secure, Lucy. However, we can’t persuade the outer door to cycle shut See what you can do, I’ll meet you at the inside entrance to render such assistance as I can
.”
As before, some indistinct squirmy horror oozed across the viewfield, and the killer whale rang off.

We picked our careful way to the lock over a highly uneven suface. The ground seemed broken, tortured, cracked, and fractured like the bottom of some drought-sticken river bed. Evidence, I supposed, of the heroic mod
i
fications made to this submoonlet.

Stretchmarks
.

Thanks to the artifically imposed rotation of the asteroid, keeping my feet glued to the ground was a problem. Against a negligible native gra
v
ity was pitted an inexorable outward pull—approximately the same tenth-gee that had held me down on Ceres—threatening to propel me into space. It was a long walk home. I never watched my step so carefully in my life. The lock itself was a smooth-hewn hangar-size rectilinear proposition, filled with friendly yellow light, but not much of anything else. Lucy left us teetering at the edge in double-ended vertigo, and hovered her way over the abyss, somehow maintaining what amounted to a synchronous orbit.

“Win, c’mere an’ take a gander. An’ bring that toad-sticker of yours.”

Not being outfitted with engines, I crawled reluctantly around the well and over the lip like a housefly. Lucy was investigating the edge of an eno
r
mous sliding door. Fragments from the shattered antenna tower had spa
t
tered this end of the lock, one six-foot metallic splinter penetrating the ga
s
ket like a broom straw tornadoed into a phone pole, neatly nailing the door to its frame. She reached across for my Rezin.

“Hey, don’t mess up my knife! Probably won’t cut that supersealant, anyway. Just get Koko over here, and we’ll help you wiggle it out, okay?” Maybe
okay
wasn’t the word; it was beginning to dawn on me that, where any direction can be “up,” the longest, most dizzying direction inevitably seems “down.” I swallowed and tried to think of this wall I clung to so de
s
perately as a
floor
,
while Lucy casually fetched my assistant. The pair drifted easily across the chasm, Koko holding Lucy’s manipulator, and grabbed hold of the six-foot fragment. I shoved, then Koko shoved, with Lucy pul
l
ing “upward” at every stroke. Back and forth we sawed, Koko scarcely breathing hard, while I, with merely human muscles, began to worry about my suit’s capacity to absorb sweat.

Finally the stanchion lurched free, taking the three of us with it. Lucy blasted, snatching us up into the lock as the door began abruptly sliding shut. She stomped a red emergency panel and we hopped out of the way as another set of doors, an inch or so behind the first, closed up as well. Grat
e
ful for the double floor beneath us, we walked over to a handhold in the wall and waited for the air.

Suddenly an elephantine gout of water bashed me on the head, nearly tearing me from the strap. In an instant it was boiling around my hips with a violent swirling motion. A second more and it washed my shoulders, lapped its way past my head and filled the lock completely. A trapdoor in the cei
l
ing far above us slid aside and I looked “up” at a fascina
t
ing scene.

Overhead reached a broad tunnel into the rock. The roiling water made it hard to judge distances visually, but the sonar in my suit said half a mile, brilliantly illuminated every inch along the way. Lucy seemed serenely u
n
perturbed, and Koko continued uncharacteristically silent. I gulped and concentrated on viewing this thing as a horizontal tunnel, but my brain was gibberingly convinced it was the bottom of a well.

Ever
been
at the bottom of a well?

Then Lucy was off again with a churning, whizzing sound, taking both of us in tow at a respectable submarine clip. At the far end of the tunnel, I had another queasy reorientation to perform, mentally tran
s
muting what seemed to be an endless abyssal cliff side into a shallow sea bottom, clothed in weeds of a hundred colors, shoals of shiny rainbow fish dashing in and out among them. The floor was white and sandy, the surface not far ove
r
head, alternately sunny and reflective. There to meet us as the waterlock’s inner doors rumbled shut in a cloud of well-stirred silt were a dozen killer whales, their striking black-and-white markings disguised by partially fa
s
tened smartsuits, as if they hadn’t entirely trusted the damaged lock. Good judgment, in my estimation.