Seas of Venus (2 page)

Seven days, four hours, and thirty-four minutes after the last colony ship landed on Venus, Earth's final war triggered a fusion reaction in her oceans. By astronomical standards, the resulting star was both small and short-lived; but it would smolder for thousands of years, and its first milliseconds had been enough to cleanse the planet of life.

Mankind survived in the domes of Venus.

Only in the domes of Venus.

The individual cities were independent and fiercely competitive, though the causes of their conflicts had no more logic to those not involved than did the causes of men's wars through the previous ages. Earth's blazing death throes imposed order of a kind on the wars of Venus, but not even that warning trauma could bring peace.

Nuclear power and weapons were banned, as guns had been banned in Japan during the Shogunate. The ban was enforced with absolute ruthlessness. Domed cities were vulnerable to conventional weapons of the simplest sort. A dome which was believed to harbor nuclear experiments was cracked so that water pressure crushed its inhabitants into the ooze before they could drown.

Apart from that, war on Venus was fought on the surface, and by warriors.

Independent contractors, like the condottieri of Renaissance Italy, built bases and fleets with private funding and staffed them with volunteers. They fought one another for hire, and in the interim they fought the jungles for their very lives.

Domes went to war according to set rules. When battle and mercenaries' blood had decided the point at issue, the losing city ransomed itself to penury. The winning dome recouped the cost of the fleet it hired, and the winning military entrepreneurs collected a comfortable victory bonus.

The losing mercenaries had the amount of their original hire and whatever they had managed to save from the wrack of defeat. That might be enough for them to go on to lesser contracts, desperately trying to rebuild their fortunes; or they might be forced to merge with another company on unfavorable terms.

Sometimes they merged with the fleet which had just defeated them. Business was business.

The fleets seemed a romantic alternative to life in the climate-controlled safety of the domed cities. Civilians aped the dress and manners of the mercenaries or scorned them, but no one in the domes could ignore fleet personnel in their uniforms and their dark-tanned skins.

There was no shortage of volunteers to take up the reality of the romantic challenge. . . . 

A taster of wine, with an eye for a maid,
Never too bold, and never afraid. . . . 
 

—Bliss Carman

The crowd in Carnaval finery burst apart with a collective shriek.

The man forcing his way toward Johnnie through the revelers had a stubble beard and a wild look in his eyes. His left arm clamped a woman against his chest like the figurehead of a packet ship. Her domino mask hung from one ear. There were scratches on her collarbone, and the gauzy blouse had been shredded away from her breasts.

The man's right hand waved a butcher knife with an eight-inch blade.

"All right, you whore!" the man screamed. His dilated pupils weren't focused on anything in his present surroundings. "You want to spread it around, I'll
help
you spread it around!"

The knife slipped like a chord of light-struck ripple toward the woman's belly.

Johnnie's right hand dropped as he swung his hips to the left. The hem of his scarlet tunic had tiny weights in it, so that the ruffed flare stood out as his body moved—

Clearing the pistol holstered high on Johnnie's right hip.

The woman's body shielded all of the madman except his arms and the wedge of face including his staring, bloodshot eyes. The Carnaval crowd was a montage of silks and shrieks surrounding the event.

Johnnie's hand curved up with the pistol; faster than a snake striking, faster than the knife. For an instant that trembled like the sun on dew, the line of the pistol barrel joined Johnnie's eye and the madman's.

The muzzle lifted with a flash and a haze of clean-burning propellant. The sharp
crack
! of muzzle blast slapped through the screams. The madman's right eye socket was empty as his body spasmed backward in a tetanic arch. His arms lashed apart, flinging the woman to one side and the butcher knife to the other.

Johnnie took a deep breath and loaded a fresh magazine from the pouch on his left hip, where it balanced the weight of the pistol. The holographic ambiance faded, leaving behind a large room whose walls were gray with a covering of vitalon, a super-cooled liquid which absorbed bullet impacts within its dense interior.

A red light glowed on the wall above the door. Somebody was in the anteroom, watching the sequence through closed-circuit cameras.

The muscles of Johnnie's lean face set in a pattern scarcely recognizable as the visage of the good-looking youth of a moment before. He holstered his weapon and touched the door control.

"Well," he said as the armored door rotated and withdrew, "are you satisfied, Sena—"

The man in the anteroom wore a Blackhorse dress uniform, with the gold pips and braid of a commander. His only similarity to Senator A. Rolfe Gordon was that both men were in their mid-forties—

And they'd been brothers-in-law before the Senator's wife ran off with a mercenary not long after she gave birth to Johnnie.

"Uncle Dan!" cried Johnnie. He started toward Commander Daniel Cooke with his arms wide . . . before he remembered that what was proper for a boy of nine should have been outgrown by nineteen. He drew back in embarrassment.

Uncle Dan gave him a devil-may-care grin and embraced Johnnie. "What's the matter?" he demanded. "Did I develop skin-rot since I last saw you?"

He stepped back and viewed the younger man critically. "Though I won't," he said, "offer to swing you up in the air any more."

"Gee it's good to . . . ," Johnnie said. "I wasn't expecting to see you."

"I have a meeting with the Senator this morning," Dan explained. "And I thought I'd come a little early to see my favorite nephew."

"Ah . . . shall we go somewhere comfortable?"

"If you don't mind," replied his uncle, "I'd like to watch you run through a sequence or two."

Dan's smile didn't change, but his voice was a hair too casual when he added, "The Senator comes to watch you frequently, then?"

"No," said Johnnie flatly. "Not often at all. But too often."

His face cleared. "But I'd love to show
you
the set-up, Uncle Dan. The screens in the anteroom—"

"I'd prefer to be in the simulator with you," Dan said. He lifted his saucer hat and ran his fingers through his black, curly hair. "Though I won't be shooting."

"There's some danger even with the—" Johnnie began until his uncle's brilliant grin stopped him.

Right, explain the danger of ricochets to Commander Daniel Cooke, whose ship took nine major-caliber hits three months ago while blasting her opponent in Squadron Monteleone to wreckage. 
 

"Sorry, Uncle Dan."

"Never apologize for offering information that might save somebody's life," Dan said. "Got a jungle sequence in this system?"

"This system's got about
everything
!" Johnnie answered with pride as the gray walls dissolved into a mass of stems, leaves, and dim green terror. As the holographic simulation appeared, the climate control raised sharply the temperature and humidity of the air it pumped into the environment.

They were on the edge of a clearing, a dimpled expanse of yellow-brown mud. The surface was too thin to provide purchase for any plants save those which crawled about slowly on feather-fringed roots. Creatures with armored hides had trampled a path around the periphery of the clearing, through the brambles that were now curling to reclaim the terrain.

A bubble rose from the mud and burst flatulently.

"The trouble with the simulator," Johnnie said in a whisper, "is that you
know
there's something there in the mud."

The air was still and as moist as a sponge.

"Which makes it exactly like the land anywhere on Venus' surface," said his uncle, also speaking quietly. "Go on, then."

Johnnie took a step forward. If he'd been expecting to run a jungle sequence, he'd have equipped himself with a powered cutting-bar and a more powerful handgun. . . . 

His left arm brushed aside a curtain of gray tendrils, roots hanging from an air plant to absorb water from the atmosphere—and entangle small flying creatures whose juices would be absorbed to feed the plant. The simulator couldn't duplicate the touch of vegetation, but a jet of air stroked Johnnie's sleeve to hint at the contact.

A swamp-chopper exploded toward them from the oozing muck.

Johnnie drew and fired. His thumb rocked the grip's feed-switch forward even as the first two rounds of explosive bullets cracked out, shattering the creature's stalked eyes.

Johnnie threw himself sideways. He fired the remainder of the magazine as solids which could penetrate the swamp-chopper's armored carapace while the blinded monster thrashed in the vegetation where Johnnie had been.

Genetically, the swamp-chopper was a crab, but ionizing radiation and the purulent surface of Venus had modified the creature's ancestors into man-sized predators. They retained lesser arthropods' unwillingness to die. Despite 18 rounds into its thorax, the creature was still trying to claw through the bole of the holographic tree with which it had collided in its blind rush.

Johnnie slapped a fresh magazine into his pistol and aimed.

Dan put a hand on his arm. "Forget it," he said. "Don't worry about the ones that can't hurt you. Let's—"

"Cooke?" boomed an amplified voice. "Cooke! What are you doing here?"

Both men turned. The red light which glowed in the heart of a thicket of holographic bamboo indicated that someone was in the simulator's anteroom.

"Duty calls, lad," said Dan, rising to his feet. Johnnie shut the system down, just as something green, circular, and huge sailed toward them from the middle canopy.

Dan opened the door. Senator Gordon stood in the anteroom with his legs braced apart and his hands in the pockets of his frock coat. He neither stepped forward nor offered to shake hands.

Dan offered an ironic salute. "Good to see you again, Senator," he said.

"If I'd known you had nothing on your mind but playing foolish games with my son, Commander Cooke," Gordon said, "I wouldn't have bothered making time in my schedule to see you. Particularly at
this
juncture."

Dan ostentatiously shot his cuff to look at the bioelectrical watch imprinted onto the skin of his left wrist. He didn't bother to say that he was still twenty-three minutes early for his appointment because Gordon was already well aware of the fact.

"The games I've come to discuss aren't silly ones, Senator," Dan said coolly.

"For that matter—" he added with a raised eyebrow "—these simulations aren't silly either. Which is why I offered to buy Johnnie a membership to a commercial range."

"Yes, of course," the Senator said. When he was angry, as now, a flush crept up his jowls and across the hair-fringed expanse of his bare scalp. "You'd have had John spending all his time in the warehouse district. No thank you, Cooke. I can afford to accommodate my son's whims in a less destructive way."

"Right," said Johnnie in a brittle voice that sounded years younger than that in which he had been speaking to his uncle. "You got me the simulator, all right.
After
you knew Dan had already taken out a membership for me at Action Sports!"

"Something I've learned over the years," Dan said mildly, "is that the reasons don't matter so long as the job gets done."

He smiled at his nephew, but his face cleared to neutrality as he focused on Senator Gordon again. "But that's not what we're here to discuss . . . and I think your office would be a better location."

Johnnie nodded. "I'm really glad to see you again, Uncle Dan," he said. "Maybe if you have time—"

"No," said his uncle, "I'd like you to accompany us, Johnnie. You see—" and his face segued again from smile to armed truce as his eyes locked again with those of his ex-brother-in-law "—this concerns you as well as the Senator. And everyone else on Venus."

Gordon's face was just as hard as that of Commander Cooke. "Yes," he said after a moment. "All right."

As Johnnie followed the two older men into the elevator to the Senator's penthouse office, his heart was beating with a rush of excitement greater than that he'd felt minutes before in the simulator.

He didn't know what was going on.

But he knew that it wasn't a simulation.

There is a Hand that bends our deeds
To mightier issues than we planned:
Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds,
My country, serves Its dark command.
 

—Richard Hovey

Senator Gordon's office befitted the most powerful man in Wenceslas Dome—and mayhap in all of Venus. The penthouse windows commanded a sweeping vision, down across the city and up to the black ceramic dome.

In the center of the dome hung a ball of white light, framed in black swags: an image of Earth as she had become, and a warning to the generations of Venus why nuclear power had to be banned if Mankind were to survive in this her remaining refuge.

"Sit down, sit down," said the Senator as he stepped behind his broad, ostentatiously empty desk and seated himself.

Johnnie obeyed, his face expressionless. He'd only been in his father's office a dozen times during his life, and he'd
never
before been invited to sit.

The cushion sagged deeply beneath him. He looked across the desk at the Senator and found that he was looking up.

Uncle Dan, moving as gracefully as a leopard, sat on the arm of his chair. The mercenary officer smiled frequently, but there was more humor than usual in his expression as he winked at Johnnie and then returned his attention to Senator Gordon.