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  #31: Ishtar Rising Book 2 by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels

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  #34: Collective Hindsight Book 2 by Aaron Rosenberg

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Copyright © 2003 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

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  ISBN: 0-7434-7606-9

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  Chapter

  1

  Stardate 53798.2—First Officer’s Log, Commander Sonya Gomez. The da Vinci’s mission to aid in Project Ishtar, the Venus Terraforming Project, has taken a turn for the worse. While the initial phase of “blowing off” Venus’s turbulent atmosphere with specially designed force fields was successful, an unforeseen consequence has been a series of volcanic upheavals that are threatening the ground stations on the surface—not to mention the viability of Project Ishtar. For now, our primary concern is evacuating the personnel in Aphrodite Station, which is the ground station in the most immediate danger. I am leading an away team in a shuttlecraft to begin that evac.

  As Domenica Corsi and Fabian Stevens piloted Shuttlecraft Kwolek toward Venus, Commander Sonya Gomez sat just behind the cockpit, studying the readouts on the small display in front of her. This is going to be close, she thought, her entire body knotted with the tension that only an urgent engineering crisis could create.

  She swiveled in her chair and looked back at P8 Blue, who was sitting in the specially constructed slope-backed chair near another small bank of instruments.

  “How are those numbers holding up, Pattie?”

  “It’s going to be a rough ride, but we should be able to make it through the force fields with minimal loss of structural integrity,” she said.

  Seated beside Pattie, Lieutenant Commander Tev lifted his gaze from a tactical display and spoke toward the cockpit. “Commander Corsi, make sure you approach the force-field boundary at exactly the calculated angle. Miss it by the smallest margin and you could bounce us off the field lines and back into space.”

  “Or it could be even worse,” Pattie said, clattering her mandibles for a moment and making a strange sound that Gomez translated as her version of splat! “To coin a phrase, we might be squashed like a bug.”

  Gomez smiled at the self-deprecating humor, but Corsi only grunted in response, obviously concentrating on her flying. A little humor certainly didn’t hurt, given the unrelenting grimness of their current situation.

  One of the project’s technicians had provided them with the vibrational frequencies of the force fields, so that they could penetrate them and try to get down to Aphrodite Station before the approaching lava flow destroyed it. If that hasn’t happened already, Gomez thought. Recent sensor readings had revealed that the lava was moving toward the ground station far more quickly than had originally been apparent. And the Kwolek’s passage through the topologically complex, interlacing force-field network was bound to be tricky, even with the vibrational frequency data. And once down, they might have only seconds to effect any sort of rescue, most likely a hastily improvised one.

  “Aphrodite Station, this is Shuttlecraft Kwolek. Please respond.” Gomez keyed several panels on the touchscreen, modulating back and forth across the gamut of usable frequencies, but all that came through was a crackle of static. There wasn’t even an amplitude spike to imply that anyone might be trying to respond. This rescue mission might be completely in vain. But there’s no way of knowing that for certain except by making the attempt.

  “Sensors still show nothing,” P8 said. “But I’m reading some very strong subsurface rumbles, with shear waves, compression waves, and crust motions I’ve never seen before.”

  Great, Gomez thought. “What do you make of it?”

  “I think the lava inundation could accelerate even further,” P8 said. “We’re running out of time.”

  “Doing my best,” Corsi said through clenched teeth. The forward windows revealed only noxious yellow and brown gases that confounded any sense of direction. If one tried to measure the Kwolek’s motion by the available visual cues, the shuttle might as well have been standing still.

  Judging from the feel of the inertial dampers in the deck plating, Gomez knew that Corsi had slowed the shuttle considerably in the last few seconds. Tev checked a panel and announced, “Three hundred meters to outer force-field boundary. Two hundred fifty. One seventy-five. Seventy-five. Fifty. Twenty-five.”

  The atmosphere outside the forward windows had grown so dense, thanks to Project Ishtar’s force fields, that they had the look of a solid wall. Gomez reflexively checked her shoulder harness as Corsi and Stevens flew the Kwolek toward that apparently impregnable barrier at a steeply decelerating rate.

  “Make sure our shield frequencies sti
ll match Project Ishtar’s,” Gomez said.

  “Checking,” Pattie said, tapping at her console with multiple extremities. “We still have a positive match.”

  “Confirmed,” said Tev. “But we still don’t know exactly how passing through multiply interleaved force fields will affect the shield-frequency compatibility.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” grumbled Corsi, turning to glance at Tev.

  “Eyes on the road, Dom,” Stevens said.

  “Force-field boundary now ten meters from ventral hull,” Pattie said, then continued counting down quickly. “Now!”

  For a moment, the Kwolek was suspended in the air, like a fly caught in amber, and then it was pushed downward with tremendous force. Gomez grabbed the edge of her console even as her body slammed upward against the harness. The shuttle’s engines and inertial dampers both let out a sharp whine before the ship wobbled, then finally steadied and quieted.

  “Now that was a ride,” Stevens said with a grin.

  “Did the fields close up all right behind us?” Gomez asked.

  “Yes,” P8 replied. “That jolt we felt was from the superpressurized gases that followed us through the aperture for a nanosecond or so.”

  The viewscreens were clearer now, though the air was tinted a dingy goldenrod hue, as though saturated with pollen. Gomez tried the communicator again. “Aphrodite Station, this is Shuttlecraft Kwolek. Please respond.” As before, nothing issued from the console speakers except a burst of background static. Gomez smacked her palm against her leg in frustration.

  “We’re getting low enough to see something,” Stevens said, pointing forward.

  “That doesn’t look good,” said Corsi, unnecessarily.

  As they descended further, the forward windows presented a relatively unobstructed view of Ground Station Aphrodite—or rather, what was left of it. The roughly disk-shaped, twenty-meter-diameter facility had been built on a small mesa-like bluff. Part of that bluff had crumbled, and had taken a substantial section of the station’s external pressure dome with it.

  And surrounding the partially shattered mesa was an almost blindingly bright, white-hot magma sea.

  “There’s no way anything could still be alive down there,” said Tev matter-of-factly.

  “We don’t know that yet,” said Gomez. “We have to find out for sure. Take us in closer, Domenica.”

  “That lava flow is getting closer, too,” P8 said. “It’s almost reached the facility’s main level.”

  “The sensors are still being confused by the ionized atmosphere,” Tev said. “So unless the survivors get outside, a transporter lock’s out of the question.”

  Gomez nodded grimly. “Then we’re going to have to get them out some other way.”

  “They can’t go out in this soup without being immolated,” Stevens said. “Even the best environmental suit wouldn’t last more than a few seconds out there.”

  Corsi glanced at Gomez. “Even if we could get them outside in EV suits, where am I supposed to land this beast? The roof’s too unstable. It’s barely able to hold up its own weight, let alone ours.”

  Gomez studied the partially collapsed roof, which was glowing a dull red in the places where the Venusian atmosphere had begun to melt it. A structure that looked a lot like a water tank sat precariously on the roof’s far edge. Was there some way to make use of that?

  “I think I know what to do,” P8 said, rising from her chair. Gomez noticed that the Nasat also seemed to be examining the station’s roof very carefully. “And I’m the only one who can do it.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Gomez wanted to know.

  Pattie’s gaze grew intense. “First, I’ll need some of our construction tools….”

  Chapter

  2

  As the shuttle hovered scarcely more than three meters above the station’s damaged roof, the air below it shimmered for a moment. The transporter beam dissipated with agonizing sluggishness, finally leaving P8 Blue standing on the roof, her hard carapace exposed to the worst Venus had to offer. Strapped to her back was a large duranium locker that contained—she hoped—everything she needed to rescue whomever she found here.

  In addition to the oppressive, caustic air—which, fortunately, Project Ishtar’s force fields had thinned just enough for her to survive, at least temporarily—P8 could feel the intense heat from the magma that was surrounding the building. But she knew that as bad as it was for her, it would be far worse for anyone who lacked the advantage of her carapace. The natural membranes covering her eyes allowed her to see where she was going, and she wouldn’t need oxygen for quite some time. She ran to the edge of the roof, then scuttled over the side, her eight hands having to work harder than she expected to maintain a grip on the structure’s smooth polyduranium alloy.

  As she came perilously close to the ground—and to the rising tide of detritus-speckled lava—she found the airlock’s hatch controls. It was a bit tricky entering the code from an upside-down orientation, but she managed, then crawled into the airlock as the door hissed open. Once inside she punched a button on a keypad, feeling greatly relieved once the hatch closed smoothly behind her.

  The airlock’s fans had only begun pumping out the Venusian air, enabling the Nasat to speak. Fortunately, the tympanic membrane with which her body produced sound did not require her to exhale any of her precious oxygen. Tapping her combadge, P8 said, “I’ve entered the outer airlock. Can you read me?”

  A moment of silence passed, then another, and finally a crackling voice came through. It was Gomez. “—es we re—you—”

  “Your signal is weak, but at least we can communicate.” She saw the green light that indicated the outer airlock’s atmosphere was now breathable, as well as the air beyond the inner lock. She realized that at least some of the internal bulkheads must have closed in time to prevent a complete environmental compromise, like that suffered by Ground Station Hesperus. There might be survivors here after all. But with the Venusian atmosphere now cooking many of the station’s interior spaces as well as the external ablative shielding, it was only a matter of time before the interior bulkheads succumbed to the inevitable.

  Just like the da Vinci hull did at Galvan VI.

  The ground rumbled, reminding P8 of the rising tide of lava outside, a danger that threatened to render all other hazards moot.

  Putting thoughts of the da Vinci’s all-too-recent mission in which they’d lost over half their crew to the back of her mind, she said into her combadge, “I’m going in,” and opened the interior airlock and exited into a hallway. She found the air stale and ozone-laced, but at least marginally breathable. Life support must be down, she thought. Only a few of the lights were working. She passed what appeared to be someone’s personal quarters. The doors were open, but she didn’t see anyone inside.

  “Hello? Is anyone here?” Her voice echoed in the corridor. Breaking a tricorder out of the sealed tool kit she carried, she activated the device. A smile came to her mandibles almost immediately. Tapping her combadge, she said. “I read eight life-signs, the entire station’s complement. They’re all grouped together. They seem to be stressed by failures in the air-recyclers and other life-support equipment.”

  “—opy that,” Gomez’s voice crackled.

  P8 made her way into the main control room, but nobody was there. She noticed that anything that wasn’t bolted down had been thrown about by the seismic disturbances. The groundquakes had obviously hit this place hard.

  Up a short set of stairs, she saw movement through the broad window of what she assumed was an office. Squeezing her bulk up the stairs, she pounded on the door. Through the window, she saw a group of technicians clustered together in the dimly lit room. Four were fully conscious, two were a bit wobbly, one appeared delirious, and another was unconscious and bleeding from a laceration above his right eye.

  When one of them opened the door, P8 entered and set her locker down on the floor. Opening it, she said, “We don’t have m
uch time. I need each of you to get into these EV suits, and quickly.”

  As the workers scrambled to don the lightweight emergency suits she pulled from the locker, P8 explained how to seal them. The first man to finish suiting up began pulling the unconscious man into a second suit, while a woman assisted her delirious coworker.

  “How are we going to get out of here?” a woman asked, eyeing her suit skeptically. “These things won’t last long outside, even if the air is a bit thinner now.”

  P8 wondered why it had taken so long for someone to point that out. But there was little time for explanations. She decided to keep it brief. “If I could get you outside, we might get a transporter lock on you all, if not for all the ionic distortions out there.” To the skeptical woman, she added, “And you’re right—you couldn’t survive long outside, even in an EV suit.”

  “Then how—”

  “Is that tank on top of the building what I think it is?” P8 interrupted, wishing the da Vinci’s sensors had been working reliably enough to have already answered her question.

  “It’s water,” said one of the men. “Mostly for equipment coolant and radiation protection.”

  P8 nodded, picking up a small tool kit and a phaser rifle from the locker’s interior. She maglocked the tool kit to her belt and slung the weapon over her hard-carapaced shoulder. “Tank looks to be intact, too. But we’ll need to test it, and quickly. Can you drain it from in here?”

  The man looked puzzled, but answered in spite of that. “Yes.”

  “Then do it!” P8 couldn’t remember the last time she had pushed her tympanic membrane so hard. But her shout—or perhaps the phaser rifle on her shoulder—seemed to have the desired effect. One of the technicians immediately entered a command into a nearby computer terminal.

  If this doesn’t work, we may all be dead very soon.

  Another two minutes passed before everyone had completely suited up and checked all seals and connections. P8 then led the group out of the office, with two of them carrying their injured companion. On the main control floor, several inches of water had already accumulated on the deck, flowing down through a hatchway at the room’s far end. From the rush of sound coming from the room beyond, P8 gathered that the bulk of the drainage was headed elsewhere.