CHAPTER FOUR
“This is your idea of a secure location?” I asked Sabbath while he waited for someone to answer the door.
“You’re the one who picked the random number, don’t blame me. Anyhow it hardly seems like the sort of place Ishtar Security would bother to watch.”
The door slid open to reveal a tall spacer-human hermaphrodite dressed in a replica Seventh Millennium neo-barbarian feather cape and alligator-skin leggings. “Be welcome!” they said with a big smile. “Dost thou crave a chamber for a night, a fortnight, or a season?”
“I’m not entirely sure. Let’s start with the fortnight.”
“As thou desire. Come and sign the register, noble guest!”
They led Sabbath to a printed wood desk where a bound paper book lay open, and handed him a pen. Sabbath good-naturedly wrote “Ikatan Set” in neat Woshing characters. I did a quick check, and, yes, his comm implant was showing that name.
“Thou canst choose thy room—there be six available. Sumerian, Han, Resettlement, Glorious, Barbarian, and Second Global. All feature period-authentic furnishings, food printer menus, and decor. If thou desire, thou mayest print historic clothing at no extra charge!” They spun about as they said that last, showing off the feather cape and the optical fibers braided into their hair.
In a surprising move, Sabbath picked the cheapest option, the Resettlement Era room. Evidently he really was trying not to be found.
“I be thine host, Templo Monteta. Mine own chamber be the Barbarian Suite, but if thou needest anything, I ask that thou speak to the Assistant Manager. Alexey!”
A skinny young male human emerged from the office behind the registration desk. “Sorry, I was just—”
“Never mind your excuses. We have a guest! Please give Mr. Set the key to the Resettlement Studio and show him to his chamber.”
The skinny kid led us back outside and along the gallery to one of the neighboring apartment doors. Apparently Templo Monteta’s hotel was just a collection of subdivided flats in a residential block.
The key they gave Sabbath was an actual piece of shaped inert metal, so I was considerably relieved to see that it was just a prop and the door had a normal lock using face and comm tag recognition.
“This is the Resettlement room,” said the kid, opening the door and standing back to let us pass. “The bed’s aerogel, and all the room systems are on voice control. There’s a bathroom in there, with modern sanitary and washing. Food printer’s in that cabinet. It’ll show you Resettlement period dishes first but you can access any of the other menus if you want. Any questions?”
“Your name’s Alexey?” asked Sabbath. I noticed his speech had shifted from a generic middle-middle class Main Swarm accent to a decent approximation of Ishtar upper working class.
“Yes. Alexey Kulik.”
“Know this neighborhood well? Grow up here?”
“No—I’m from Zoloty Kupol arcology. Templo lets me stay in whatever room’s empty for free.”
“Nice. Listen, if you notice anybody hanging around, watching this place, asking questions, I want to hear. Bios, bots, anybody. Worth gigs to me. Clear?”
The kid’s reaction was instant. Dilated pupils, elevated pulse and breathing. You’d think he had just fallen in love or something. “Clear!”
“Good, good. Here’s something for my friend Alexey.” Sabbath did a credit transfer and the kid’s eyes widened when he got the message.
“Thank you, Mr. Set!”
“Oh, and don’t spread my name around, either. Privacy’s important.”
“You can depend on me, sir.” He hesitated, as if unsure of what to do next, then gave an awkward sort of half-bow and backed out of the room.
“Seems like you’re just as likely to attract attention as avoid it,” I said when the door shut behind the kid.
“He’s pretty easy to read. If he talks to anyone I’ll know, and I do want an extra pair of eyes on lookout. And now I think I’m going to spend a couple of hours getting my hand fixed.”
His suit immobilized the entire arm and tranquilized Sabbath while its medical smartmatter peeled back the skin from his hand and got to work gluing bones and tendons back together, removing bone and cartilage fragments, patching up broken blood vessels, and generally getting everything back in working order. The whole arm and hand of the suit below the elbow ballooned up to let the medical systems work, so it made sense for Sabbath to sit quietly during the procedure.
Needless to say, I was not invited to participate, and the suit insisted on tracking me with a weapon pod while Sabbath was semi-conscious, which made me feel distinctly unwelcome.
So I spent a few seconds inspecting the suite. The theme was “Resettlement Era,” which in practice meant a random assortment of leftovers from all the other eras—including a few anachronisms from more recent periods.
The room did lack most of the features I remembered from Earth’s actual Resettlement Era—no feral subterranean lurkers, no arrogant Communitat officers getting ready to start the Glorious Unique State, no random failures of the biosphere restoration efforts turning regions into deserts, no looters from the Old Belt dropping out of the sky, no anti-tech zealots smashing anything more complicated than a windmill, and a glaring lack of ruins and bleached bones. If you want to relive the past, why leave out the best parts?
After less than a minute I had exhausted the room’s possibilities, so I slipped out and left the suit to treat Sabbath’s injury without my help. Serve him right if it screwed up and put the wrong bones together.
Outside I spotted the “Assistant Manager” sitting on the gallery floor in front of an open door, and I could see a girl about the same age sitting just inside the door, propping it open with her back. From the carpets on the floor and the tile patterns on the wall I deduced it was the Islamic Suite.
I made my shell match the color of the outside wall and crept toward them, just below the ceiling of the gallery. I admit it: I was snooping. I make no apologies for it—gathering information is always useful.
“I wish we could go down to the plaza,” said Alexey.
“You know I can’t.”
“It’s a public place. Can’t do anything.”
“Mama would know.”
“You’re sixteen standard, not six.”
“Which means old enough for privacy, so Mama can’t tell where I am or what I’m doing. But she can tell the door to watch who goes in and out. So until she gets home I have to stay in here and you have to stay out there.”
“Assistant Manager can alter security options,” he said. “Templo never checks logs.”
She considered this, and from her expression I could tell that she didn’t entirely dislike the idea. But she shook her head. “Lying feels wrong. Why not come over when Mama is home? As long as there’s not a concert she’s here all evening.”
“Can’t,” he said. “Work.”
“Why can’t you tell me about your other job?”
“Confidential,” he said.
That got my attention, and I crept a little closer. I was already using the entire wall as a resonating surface to hear through my feet, but I wanted a better look at their involuntary physiological responses. Was he just obeying hard-wired evolutionary imperatives, or was there something else going on?
“I won’t tell anyone.”
This time Alexey was the one to shake his head, though it had a little air of drama to it. “I’m sworn to secrecy.”
“I bet I can guess. Pattern piracy?”
“No,” he said.
“Gambling?”
He chuckled. “Why work for Templo if I can afford that?”
“Illegal mods?”
“Nope.”
“I know! You’re an Intelligence Directorate agent!”
“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” he said smoothly.
“But you’re a boy,” she said, a little challenge in her voice.
“Agents come in all types.” Alexey was really scoring hits. Her heart rate accelerated a little, and her skin reddened slightly. No wonder the girl’s mother wouldn’t let him in the room when she wasn’t around.
He wasn’t much different. Both of them were absolutely awash in hormones, as you’d expect from two humans under twenty standard years in close proximity to the opposite sex. The prehuman parts of their brains were probably yelling at both of them to quit talking and get busy.
In some habs, they wouldn’t even hesitate, even in full view of the plaza below. But society in the Ishtar Matriarchy has a prudish streak—and the fact that the low-status crackpots in the Natural Wisdom party keep pushing for more sexual openness and freedom only reinforces it.
Normally I’d dismiss all of Alexey’s chatter as so much verbal foreplay . . . except that it was kind of odd to hear the topic of the Ishtar Intelligence Directorate come up at this particular moment in this particular place, especially in light of exactly who was getting his hand rebuilt two doors down.
But if the kid was working for the Ishtar spooks, there was absolutely no way he’d be telling anyone, especially not—I quickly interrogated her comm implant—a human still under partial maternal authority. Her name was Feodora Razima, born in Ishtar, sitting in the doorway of her current residence, no occupation listed. Her mother was Sarah Razima, currently employed as a zither teacher and occasional performer.
For good measure I checked Alexey’s comm. It was a very ordinary model, not the kind of fancy gear Sabbath had inside his head. I considered the possibility that it was spoofing me, and was really a very smart implant just pretending to be stupid. I’ve used that trick more than once—which means I know what to look for. I’m old and cunning that way. His implant was either much cleverer and sneakier than I am, or exactly what it seemed to be. The conclusion seemed obvious, but I did make sure to run a very thorough self-diagnostic after contact, just to see if it had tried to plant any software in me.
“Well,” she said, “I bet your other job’s something embarrassing and you’re being all secret because you don’t want to admit it.”
He shrugged nonchalantly, but from his heart rate I guessed she was close to the truth.
• • •
The repairs to Sabbath’s hand took a couple of hours because the work all had to be done at the pace of low-energy chemistry rather than the exciting speeds of physics. While that went on I wandered about the neighborhood a bit more, and finally took a position above the Homeworld House where I could see everything.
Perhaps it was the decor of Sabbath’s room, or our little jaunt across the outside surface, but I decided to review my memories of my last visit to Venus, several millennia earlier. Specifically, the block which began on August 14, 4212.
In those days I had another body and a different name. My status was very uncertain: I had gotten out of the Inner Ring microseconds ahead of being shut down and archived. The compressed copies of my mind I sent out into the Solar System had to cope with both the Communitat’s defenses and some very persistent hunters from the Ring itself. Most of my copies got deleted within minutes, though a handful lingered on for months or decades, diverging from each other and acquiring other goals beyond the destruction of all life.
By 4000 I had lost contact with the other copies, and the biologicals were already forgetting about the war and going back to their old habits of seeking happiness and treating each other badly. A couple of the Ring’s hunters were still on my trail, which meant I had to keep moving and changing identity.
Venus in those days was still practically empty. With Earth and Mars to rebuild and repopulate, who would waste time on a hellhole like Venus? Lead-melting heat, crushing pressure, acid, months of murky day followed by smothering darkness. It was as bad for mechs as biologicals.
The biggest colony on the planet back then was the flying city of Zohra, a kilometer-wide aerostat made of carbon fibers and color-changing polymers. It was filled with a one-bar mix of oxygen and nitrogen with some neon as a thinner. This could bob around quite nicely high up in Venus’s old carbon-dioxide atmosphere, safely above most of the acid clouds. Ten thousand humans and chimps (corvids hadn’t been engineered yet) lived there, circling the planet every hundred hours in the high-altitude equatorial winds, soaking up sunlight to keep the air in the balloon warm for extra lift.
My memories showed what looked like a nice place, with green plants everywhere, iridescent hummingbirds to pollinate them, and a laid-back population who only put on clothes when they had to go up to orbit or down to the surface. The main business was servicing a couple of dozen farm balloons run by bots, exporting food and oxygen to the orbital stations.
I didn’t stay in Zohra longer than I had to. My business was down on the surface, where it wasn’t nearly as pleasant.
Milioi rides a steam-filled blimp made of silicone and fluorocarbon polymer down to the surface. The walls of the little six-seat passenger compartment creak alarmingly as the blimp descends.
“Since you’re traveling as a passenger rather than cargo, I take it you’re a citizen machine?” The only other person in the compartment is a neuter human with an athletic build and a face designed to hit all the hard-wired criteria for beauty.
Milioi doesn’t turn. Its body is too clumsy for that, but it has eyes in every direction. “That’s correct,” it says. “I am a full citizen of Psyche Free State in the Old Belt.” That’s actually true, or at least true enough. Psyche was utterly chaotic during the first post-war decades, making it simple to turn a sneaky infiltrator into a well-documented solid citizen.
“You are called Milioi?” the beautiful human asks.
The mech goes on full alert. Its present body is massive, over-built, designed for Venusian conditions, with power and data processing in separate armored and insulated spheres, a huge radiator on its back, and half a dozen limbs with specialized tool hands. Not a combat unit, but Venus itself is as dangerous as any battlefield. It readies the tools with the most destructive potential: a power saw and a laser torch.
“Please allow me to introduce myself,” the human says. “My name’s Akari. I hired you for a job.” When the machine says nothing they go on. “Don’t worry about anyone listening. I own the blimp.”
“Odd place for a meeting.”
“I like to interview potential employees at times and places outside their comfort zones. One gets a better idea of their qualities.”
“I’m a mech. I don’t have a comfort zone.”
Akari gives the mech a lovely smile before continuing. “You said you have experience dealing with Inner Ring relic tech from the war.”
“No one knows more about it than I do,” it says, completely truthfully.
“Wonderful!” says Akari. They both feel the blimp turn into the wind for landing. “You’ll meet your colleagues in about an hour.”
Colleagues? That’s a complication Milioi doesn’t want. It says nothing.
The blimp sets down at a landing field on the Aphrodite plateau, right on Venus’s equator. These highlands had seen some colonization efforts before the war, and the scars are still plain to see. Ruined structures jut from the hilly surface, etched by acid and worn by windblown dust. Craters everywhere, all identical in size and age, all made within the span of a few decades by relativistic projectiles, all half-filled with fine dust.
Only the landing field is perfectly smooth, bulldozed flat and then fused into coarse glass. A group of four big steel spheres sit half-buried in regolith a few meters past the edge of the field.
As soon as the blimp’s landing lines are properly anchored a crawler rumbles across the field and slides under the passenger compartment, which disengages from the blimp. The crawler carries it neatly to an airlock in the side of the nearest sphere.
“After you,” says Akari, gesturing at the docking hatch. Milioi rolls through the hatch and into a room full of armored and refrigerated surface suits made for humans. Akari follows and makes sure the hatch is properly shut. “Welcome to Babakin,” they say. “The only human settlement on the Aphrodite plateau. This will be our base of operations.”
Four more people enter: a human man and woman, a male chimp, and a small, boxy mech on wheels. The man is taller than Akari but somehow seems to shrink in the neuter’s presence. The woman, by contrast, is small and delicate in shape but makes a lot of noise. The chimp stands apart from the other biologicals, his eyes constantly moving from person to person. The small mech stops in the doorway and extends a sensor mast to human eye level.
“Is this your ordnance expert?” the woman asks, walking around Milioi to regard it from all sides, as if inspecting something she might buy.
“Apparently so,” says Milioi. “And you?”
“I’m the burglar. Call me Bee. What brings you to the worst place in the Solar System? What kind of sinner are you?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” says Milioi.
“Venus is Hell, and only the worst sinners come down here. The greedy seek wealth here, to satisfy their desires. The fanatical—” she nods at Akari “—hide out here to make grandiose plans to build new societies. And when all those ambitions fail, the ones who remain descend into sloth and despair, surviving by inertia.” Bee circles back to stand next to the tall man and reaches up to pat his shoulder.
“Put me down for greed, then,” says Milioi. “I am here to do a job.”
“Before we say any more, let’s go to a more secure room,” says Akari.
Bee rolls her eyes. “As if everybody in this little stewpot couldn’t guess why we’re here.”
“They don’t know the details and I want to keep it that way,” says Akari, and leads them out of the suit room and along a curving passage. The hall is built to allow a human in a surface suit to pass through—barely. Milioi’s bulky body brushes the edges of every doorway.
Akari ushers them into a little meeting room and makes a great show of manually turning off all the cameras before clearing their throat. “All right, no point in wasting time. Let’s get started. Introductions first. You all know me. I’m here because I hired the rest of you.” They gesture at the tall man. “Mosca is here to tell us where we’re going. Bee’s job is to get us in and avoid tipping anyone off. Milioi is an expert on relic tech and will recover what’s valuable.” They point at the small mech. “Shayin has experience running equipment on Venus surface. And Dasheng will handle security,” they finish, with a nod at the chimp.
“Security from what?” asks Milioi.
The chimp gives an exaggerated shrug. “Unexpected things.”
“Now for the good part,” says Akari. “Why we’re here. Mosca?”
Mosca stands, stooping even though the ceiling is more than high enough. “I’m an archaeologist,” he says. “My job here is to survey the old mines before anyone tries to reopen them—see if there’s anything significant, record everything before work starts, things like that. I’m also working on a history of Venus in the Great War with the Inner Ring, so I spend a lot of time looking at old records and oral histories. And I, I found something that might be important, that everyone forgot about.”
He taps his sleeve and an image appears in the tabletop: a tactical display of Venus and nearby space during the War. Scattered green circles indicate orbital habs and surface bases, green triangles are ships. Yellow dots are debris. And from Sunward comes a steady rain of red arrowheads.
“The Inner Ring used a lot of different weapons. Everything from terawatt lasers to relativistic slugs.”
Little green lines representing lasers or counter-missiles lash out from the green shapes, destroying most of the red—but not all. The surviving red shapes slam into green shapes, turning them into expanding clusters of yellow fragments.
“But sometimes they used special weapons. Infiltrators, bootstrap seeds, replicator swarms—all kinds of things.”
In the tabletop some of the red darts become little red hexagons. When one of them touches a green shape, that shape changes to red instead of just blowing up. Sometimes the red hexagons touch down on unoccupied Venus surface and became new red disks. A couple of them land and become the centers of red stains spreading out in all directions.
“The Inner Ring was always handicapped by a shortage of heavy elements,” says Milioi. “Repurposing enemy matter was an obvious strategy.”
“Right!” says Mosca, smiling before nervously glancing over at Akari. “Anyway, in my research I found an eyewitness report of one special weapon payload that apparently failed on impact. It made a soft landing—by machine standards—but then it didn’t do anything. Aphrodite Colony still had surface forces then, so they sent out some units to bury it and sinter the regolith to contain the thing, so it could be studied later.”
“Except that there wasn’t any later,” says Bee.
Mosca nodded. “The Ring’s offensive didn’t let up until no humans were left on Venus, or anything under human control.”
“The Ring intended to dismantle Venus as they did Mercury, allowing a twenty-fold increase in their capabilities,” says Milioi.
“That’s what everyone thinks,” says Mosca with a shrug. “Who knows? Anyway, when I found this I checked to see if anyone ever recovered the weapon payload. As far as I can tell, all the records of it on Venus were lost when Aphrodite Colony got pounded to bits.”
“Convenient that your record survived, then,” Bee commented.
Mosca blushes. “Yes. I mean, it was convenient, but I’m pretty sure it was an accident. The witness was a Communitat medic who got off Venus when they were evacuating the wounded from Aphrodite. She recorded her report before getting killed on Luna, and somehow it wound up in an archive in Jupiter space. I’m probably the first person in centuries to access it, and I guess I’m the first one ever to check against known sites on Venus.”
“And it isn’t in any database,” says Akari. “That’s the important part. Nobody else knows it exists. Nobody except us.”
“So . . . what are you planning to do with this thing, if it even exists anymore?” asks Bee carefully. “You could just hand it over to whichever government claims that part of Venus surface. Collect a reward, bask in the glow of being a good citizen.”
Mosca looks at Akari again. “I, uh . . .”
“What Mosca is trying to say is that I was once in a position to do him an important service, which left him in my debt. When he discovered this item he very sensibly told me before revealing it to anyone else. It’s no secret that a piece of genuine Inner Ring relic tech is vastly more valuable than any reward, however generous.”
“Also very illegal,” Milioi points out.
The beautiful neuter waves a dismissive hand. “Technically, yes. But those rules are in place to protect careless and naive treasure-hunters from getting hurt. This team is made up of experts, so there’s no danger. And as long as nobody finds out what we’re doing, the law doesn’t really matter.” They smile and then look around the room. “Does anyone want to back out now?”
After five seconds of silence, Akari smiles. “Good! Now, here’s how we’re going to proceed. I’ve leased a crawler and some surface suits. Shayin will get us to the site, Bee gets us in, Milioi recovers the weapon, and then we come back here. That’s when you all get your pay.”
Shayin speaks for the first time. It uses a warm baritone at odds with its boxy appearance. “How do we know you won’t stiff us? Get the thing, come back here, then refuse to pay?”
“That would be very foolish of me—angering the only people who can actually reveal what we’ve done.”
Bee chimes in. “Still, how do we know you’re not going to have a team of goons waiting here when we get back?”
Akari rolls their eyes theatrically at that. “So instead of paying you, I have to pay some mercenaries instead? It saves me no megawatt-hours, it doubles the number of people who can betray me, and it is guaranteed to attract attention I don’t want. Do you really think I’m that stupid?”
Bee blushes furiously but says nothing.
“The suits and supplies are being loaded as we speak. We leave in eight hours, which gives us primates time for one last sleep in a proper bed before spending several days in the crawler. Shayin, I hope you and Milioi can amuse yourselves during that time without attracting attention.”
The crawler is a common Venus surface model, a few years old but well-maintained. It has two parts, each supported by six fat two-meter wheels. The front half is a tractor which provides power and cooling to the entire vehicle. Behind that is the passenger compartment, a windowless cylinder ten meters long and four deep. The upper deck is living space with eight bunks, a bathroom, and a little common room and galley. The lower deck holds storage and water tanks. Aft of the passenger compartment is the airlock section, with four suits of surface armor for the biologicals docked on the sides, and a large hatch for docking and cargo at the end. Milioi can barely squeeze through the hatch, but refuses to ride outside.
Not that it can move around much inside the crawler, either. Milioi must stay parked in one corner of the common room, hooked up to external power because its own system would heat up the room too much. It says very little. Shayin does the same, remaining at the control station next to the airlock, linked to all the external cameras. The two of them communicate privately through the crawler’s internal network. Milioi isn’t very interested in conversation, leaving the system free for Shayin’s complaints.
“Stupid bio doesn’t want a mech with experience. Wants a mindless bot to follow orders. I’m driving this piece of junk, I should at least know where I’m supposed to be going. Maybe even use some of my experience to plan the route. Avoid unstable slopes, boulder fields and faults. Instead I just get a new heading every four hours, and I have to figure out how to follow it without wrecking us. This isn’t some nice safe environment like Luna or Pluto. Venus is mean.”
The four biologicals don’t mingle much. Dasheng and Akari sit in the common area, and Mosca spends most of his time in his bunk. Only Bee shows much interest in her fellow passengers. When all of them gather for the daily meal of noodles in broth, she looks around the table and then asks Akari, “What’s in this for you?”
“Profit,” they answer promptly. “Inner Ring tech is valuable, and I know people.”
“Still, none of this is exactly cheap.” She gestures at the machine around them. “You’ll need a huge payoff to cover what you’re spending—not to mention the risk.”
“Your concern is touching,” they say. “But you needn’t worry about me.”
“I’m just wondering how much you think this thing is likely to be worth? How many megawatt-hours?”
“I can’t say until I know what it is. The cache might hold nothing but worthless junk. You’ll be paid the same either way.”
“No bonus if it’s something good?”
Akari raises a flawless eyebrow, and their lovely head tilts. “Well . . . how about double or nothing? I’ll pay you twice what we agreed—if the prize is valuable. If it’s nothing but junk you’ll get nothing. Are you game?” They glance at the others. “The offer applies to everyone.”
Shayin answers first. “No. Pay me what you offered.”
Dasheng makes a pushing-away gesture. “Just being here is enough of a gamble for me.”
Both Bee and Akari look at Mosca, and when he sees them watching him he swallows nervously. “I . . .” He avoids meeting either one’s eyes. “I’ll take the offer. Double or nothing.”
Akari raises both eyebrows. “An unexpected show of confidence. Let’s hope you’re right.” They look back at Bee. “Made your choice yet?”
“How about you, Milioi?” She looks past Akari to where the bulky machine stands in the corner.
It doesn’t reply at once. “The value of what we find is still a matter of opinion. I prefer a fixed payment, not subject to what one person believes.”
Akari’s face is lovely even when they frown.
“Are we there yet?” Bee demands when the four biologicals get up after six hours in their bunks with the lights off. Whether any of them have actually slept is uncertain.
“No,” says Akari.
“How much longer?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Mosca, you know where this thing is. How far?”
“Don’t tell her,” says Akari quietly. Mosca looks fearfully at both Akari and Bee, but says nothing.
Bee snorts. “Shayin! What’s the round-trip range for this crawler?”
“Fuel capacity is two hundred kilos of diborane plus oxidizer. About three thousand kilometers.”
“So . . . call it thirteen hundred klicks from Babakin, max. We could be in this hell for sixty hours or more!”
Akari smiles faintly, and Dasheng taps his fingertips lightly together. Finally Akari says, “We aren’t following a straight line, so the trip back might be shorter.”
“You’re really making this take longer than it needs to?”
“I have my reasons. You’re free to suit up and walk back.”
Milioi speaks, making Mosca start a little in surprise. “You own at least one blimp, or you claimed to. Why not use that instead of the crawler?”
“Harder to hide. A crawler without a transponder is just someone being reckless or paranoid. A blimp gone dark kicks the whole rescue recovery apparatus into action.”
“In this case I think you’re being reckless and paranoid,” says Bee.
Akari sits up a little straighter, and their lovely face looks like a stone sculpture. “That is enough from you. I hired all of you for your expertise, but nobody is entirely indispensable. I think Dasheng and Milioi could replace you if necessary.”
Bee waits four hours until the other biologicals are in their bunks after lunch, then slips into the galley and takes the seat closest to Milioi.
“Got a minute?” she whispers.
“I am not going anywhere.”
“How much do you know about Akari?”
“A few things. And you? How did you meet them?”
“A mutual friend told me Akari was looking for someone good at getting past locks and security. But I did do some checking before I signed up. Akari used to be the Deputy Director up in Zohra. Apparently they tried some kind of coup against the Director but the scheme failed. Akari and their followers were exiled to the surface, to Babakin and Erecura.”
“What category of sinner would you put them in?”
“Oh, they’re driven by their own pride, no question. Wealth is just the means to power.”
“It matters not at all to me who is Director of Zohra.”
“No . . . but if Akari makes some new attempt and fails, Venus will suddenly get even hotter than usual for any of their ‘known associates,’ including us. Just a friendly warning.”
“Thank you. Although that also raises another interesting possibility.”
“Oh?”
“If Akari is an exile with powerful enemies, that suggests that the authorities might not investigate too closely if something were to happen to them.”
She looks over her shoulder and leans close to the ceramic-coated surface of the mech’s body. “I know people, maybe they could find buyers for some Inner Ring stuff. Maybe Akari’s not indispensable either.”
“My thoughts exactly,” says Milioi.
A faint sound of movement from the direction of the bunks makes her turn again, and then she stands. “We can talk later,” she says, and goes out.
Shayin waits until she’s back in her own bunk before communicating with Milioi. “Once we’ve loaded whatever we find onto the cargo rack, I’m the only one on this crawler who will really be necessary. You won’t be.”
“Don’t be too confident. Operating a crawler isn’t that difficult.”
“Now I’m certain this is your first time on Venus. If anything happens to me, none of you are getting back to Babakin. That’s not even a threat, it’s just a fact. So—be careful, especially on the return trip.”
The three humans and the chimp gather in the common room for dinner that evening, and when the potato dumplings and bean patties are all gone, Bee brings out an unlabeled glass bottle of clear liquid.
“Vodka,” she says. “A friend of mine up in Zohra makes it.” She takes four cups from the cabinet and fills each with about fifty milliliters.
“Planning to get us all sloshed?” Akari asks.
“Nothing else to do. Still more than forty hours to go—unless we’re closer than that?”
Akari responds by lifting their glass in a toast. “To a profitable bit of treasure-hunting.”
The others take up their cups. Dasheng sips his carefully, Bee tosses hers back with gusto, and Mosca, after looking at the liquid with vague unease, swallows it all and makes a face.
“I expect you want to start asking questions,” says Akari to Bee. “So instead you have to answer some first. What is a professional thief like yourself doing on Venus? There isn’t very much to steal here.”
“Oh, but there is,” she says. “Just not the usual baubles and trinkets. I steal stuff with real value: ore samples and data. All the miners want to know what their rivals are digging up, and where the good stuff is. They’re all completely obsessive about keeping their own secrets and finding out everybody else’s. That’s where I come in.”
“Excuse me,” blurts Mosca, and dashes for the front end of the compartment. The bathroom’s at the far end of the little passage lined with bunks, and all of them can hear the door bang open and then the sound of vomiting. It goes on and on—twice there are long pauses when the others try to resume conversation, only to be interrupted by new sounds of distress.
“Shayin, can you see if he’s all right?” asks Bee.
“No cameras in there. Privacy,” it says. “I can’t see past the passage curtain.”
When a minute passes without any more puking sounds, Akari raises their voice and calls over one shoulder. “How are you doing up there?”
“Fine. Just a little sick.”
“Make sure you wipe up the floor. I don’t want to smell vomit for the rest of the trip.”
“My turn now,” says Bee. “There’s something I still don’t understand. You’re going to a lot of trouble and expense for this, with a very iffy payoff. I know I don’t work cheap and I’m pretty sure Dasheng doesn’t, either.”
The chimp claps softly in approval.
“Standard reward for war relics is a flat hundred thousand megawatt-hours. That’s a decent payoff for basically no cost to you, and no risk either. I guess what I want to know is why you’re so keen on recovering this yourself.”
Akari looks around the table. “I suppose there’s no reason to keep this to myself. If we find junk, I’ll lose big. If it’s something interesting but harmless—maybe some propulsion ideas nobody’s seen before, or new materials—then maybe I’ll break even. But if what we find is really an Inner Ring weapon, then I’m not going to sell it at all. I’ve got uses for something like that.”
“Involving Zohra?” Bee asks.
The lovely face smiles. “You do your homework, I see. All right, I’ll admit it. Yes, my attempt to gain power in Zohra failed—I underestimated my foes and discovered that some of my allies were unreliable. Those were hard lessons but I learned them. Next time I’m going to be better prepared, with weapons they can’t resist and a cadre of loyal followers. In fact,” they say slowly, raising flawless eyebrows, “I’m always looking for brave and resourceful people who are willing to take risks. The rewards are almost limitless.”
“If you win.”
“I don’t intend to lose.” They smile again. “No pressure. Talk to me privately if you’re interested. I’d better see how Mosca’s getting on.”
Bee and Dasheng stay in the common area a while longer, but neither says much. Milioi sees each of them eyeing the other speculatively, and eventually both head off to bed.
Four hours later Bee stumbles into the common area, wearing only undergarments. Her feet leave bloody prints. She stops and then cries out as loudly as she can, “Murder! Dasheng’s dead!”
The vehicle lurches to a stop. “Dead?” asks Shayin.
“His throat’s cut. There’s blood all over the floor.”
Mosca and Akari rush in, leaving more bloody tracks. “How did it happen?” asks Akari.
“Somebody cut his throat,” says Bee.
“Shayin, did you see anything?” asks Akari. Mosca stands dumbly, looking at the blood-covered floor in the passage.
“That whole section’s a blind spot for me. Privacy. I can only see in the bunks when someone turns on the intercom.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“Vent fans, cooling pumps, motors, suspension creaking—anything else was too quiet for me to pick up from in here.”
“Milioi?”
“Same as Shayin. Just ambient noise. The curtain was closed.”
Mosca looks at the bulky mech, then at the other two humans. “Maybe we should turn around.”
Akari stares hard at nothing, a tiny crease in the middle of their perfect forehead. Then they look from Mosca to Bee. “No. We have to keep going. If the authorities get involved we lose everything. All of us.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” asks Bee. “Someone killed Dasheng. Who?”
“I didn’t do it,” says Mosca, looking at Akari fearfully.
“I certainly didn’t,” says Bee.
Akari looks annoyed. “If I didn’t want him here I wouldn’t have hired him in the first place.”
“Well, it has to be one of us three. Shayin was driving the crawler and Milioi can’t fit in the passage.”
“The three of you have done an excellent job of messing up any physical evidence,” says Milioi.
“She found the body,” says Akari.
“I got up to go to the bathroom. The floor was all sticky and I saw the blood. He was dead for a while by then.”
“It doesn’t take long for blood to get sticky,” says Mosca. “Just a few minutes.”
“Oh?” she steps away from him. “How do you know that?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Dasheng was a full-grown chimp, stronger than any of us,” says Akari. “How is this even possible?”
“Maybe he had too much vodka,” Mosca suggests.
“I think we have to go back and look,” says Bee.
The three of them stand watching each other, and then Akari gives an irritated sigh and walks into the passage, trying to avoid the big pool of blood. Bee follows, but Mosca just collapses into one of the chairs in the galley.
“Turn on the intercom so Milioi and I can see,” Shayin says aloud. After a second both machines can view the interior of Dasheng’s bunk. It’s just like all the others—two cubic meters of space with a privacy curtain, lights, and a small storage space under the bed.
Dasheng’s body lies on its right side, one hand raised to the gaping cut running from one corner of his jaw to the other. The bedding is soaked with blood, and it has run down the side of the bunk, under the curtain, to pool on the passage floor. Akari has to squat in the passage to see into the bunk, while Bee is short enough not to need that.
“A single cut,” says Akari. “He didn’t have time to react.”
“What cut him?” asks Bee. “Do you see a knife?”
“Look in all the bunks,” Akari says. “I’ll do yours. You can check mine.”
In the end they find one of the knives from the galley in the bathroom sink, washed clean.
“If we had a lab we could test for DNA,” says Akari.
“All four of us have been pissing and washing in there for two days,” says Bee. “It’s full of hair and skin cells.” She pauses and then says, “Can you take the knife back to the galley? I need to use the toilet.”
By the time Bee rejoins the other two in the common area, Akari has recovered all their old self-assurance. “We have to press on,” they say. “Get the tech, I’ll pay the four of you, and we forget all about this.”
“What about Dasheng?” asks Milioi from its position behind Akari’s seat.
They don’t turn around. “I’ve thought about that. Put him outside. Report that he cycled through the cargo airlock without a suit. Suicide. Between the heat and the sulfuric acid his body will be so much crumbly carbon in minutes. We’ll have to gather him up with a shovel and nobody will be able to identify what killed him.”
“It’s a good plan, but there’s one awkward detail,” says Bee. “One of us really did kill him. We don’t know who or why.”
Akari looks at the other two. “I know I’m innocent, and this job is important enough that I’m willing to . . . let it slide. Whichever one of you did it, just don’t do it again.”
“You’d say that if you were guilty, too.”
Mosca leans toward her, pale and tense. “I know you killed him. Stop playing innocent.” His eyes flick toward Akari, then down, and he shrinks back, suddenly fearful.
After a couple of seconds the crawler lurches into motion. “He’s dead and there’s no cure for that,” says Shayin through the speakers in the ceiling. “I want to get paid. So tell me what heading to follow.”
Akari shares whispers with Mosca, consults their own sleeve, and finally sends a private message to Shayin. Meanwhile, Bee sits looking at both of them, first one and then the other. At last she gets up and goes to the galley. She takes out the biggest food-prep knife in the rack and holds it up.
“I know one of you two is a killer, and apparently nobody wants to do anything about that. So I just want everyone to know that I’m keeping this with me from now on, and I know how to use it.”
“We know that already,” says Mosca.
“Stop it. We’d better get the floor cleaned up,” says Akari. “Use disposable wipes—we can dump them on the surface on the way back.”