She said to Arkadi, “I know your captain took things very personally in the war against the libertarians.”
“He disobeyed orders when he staged that raid, yes. But he captured an important warlord and his entourage, and also rescued more than twenty hostages.”
She had to smile at Arkadi’s sudden passion. “You think he’s a hero.”
“One time, two years ago, we had the job of visiting a small island close to the South Pole,” Arkadi said. “Very remote, very desolate. No one lives there, but it is important we have a claim on it. A previous expedition set up a beacon and also landed goats there. The idea was that they would breed and provide a source of fresh meat to any ships that passed by. We were tasked to clean the beacon’s solar panels and replace its storage battery, and also to find out how the goats were doing.”
“I can imagine what Captain Chernov thought about that.”
“He believed that he was keeping the borders of the People’s Republic safe,” Arkadi said. “That is what he told us, at any rate. Well, a small party of us land. We cannot find any trace of the goats. Not so much as a bone. There are pancake crabs everywhere, though, so we think the goats died and the crabs ate them. The island is a volcanic cone, extinct. Black rocks, tangles of thorny bushes, and everywhere pancake crabs. Watching us from under stones, creeping close to us whenever we stop as we climb to where the beacon was placed.
“All the way around the top of the island’s cone there is a thick belt of feather palms. Smaller than the ones on the Big Island, but still much taller than anything else growing there. And there are pancake crabs in the palms. As we make our way through them, the crabs drop on us. They stick to our skin with those suckers they have, we have to prize them off. It is disgusting, but we do not think it dangerous. At the top, there is a caldera, a deep funnel with a lake at the bottom. We find the beacon and do our work. We rest up, and a couple of idiots roll a boulder over the edge. It drops into the lake far below and makes a big splash. And after the ripples die away, there is another splash, more ripples. As if something had woken down there.”
“You found a monster?”
“We did not see anything. Just the splash and the ripples. And we did not have any way of climbing down. So we start back down, and the wind changes direction, and it begins to rain. And then two of us become sick. An allergic reaction to the pancake crabs, we find out later. It rains harder. Rain blowing sideways on the wind. And when we get to the inlet where we left the boat, we find big waves rolling in and the boat has floated off, is riding on the waves at the mouth of the inlet. Captain Chernov strips off and swims out to the boat, but he can’t bring it near the rocks where the rest of us are waiting because the waves are too fierce. And by now the two sick men are very sick indeed, and they can’t swim out. So he motors off to the ekranoplan and comes back with a rocket line, shoots it from boat to shore, and uses it to swing the sick men above the waves to the boat, and everyone is saved.”
“What about the monster?”
“We didn’t go back to look. But while we wait to be rescued, we have some bad thoughts about it. Imagine it creeping up the cliffs inside the caldera, creeping toward where we are sheltering … But the point is, whatever they say about the captain, he is not a monster. He did the right thing, in the war, and the brass punished him because he made them look bad. Listen to that. It isn’t dogs, is it? It is in no way any kind of dog.”
“It doesn’t sound like pigs, either,” Katya said.
The monotonous barking was loud and close now, coming from somewhere beyond a low rise crowned with a clump of bottlebrush trees. Katya and Arkadi watched as Captain Chernov and three seamen made a forking run, passing left and right around the trees, disappearing into streaming whiteness.
Two minutes passed. Three. No shots. No shouts. Katya’s heart beat high as she strained to see into the fog. She badly wanted to know what was making that noise, but her hindbrain was telling her to run far and run fast. Arkadi lit another cigarette, and Katya pretended that she didn’t see the flame of his lighter trembling when he applied it. The barking continued without pause. Eventually one of the seamen appeared on top of the ridge, a shadowy figure in the haze, scissoring his arms over his head to indicate the all clear.
There was a vegetable garden on the other side of the ridge, neat rows of potatoes and cabbage enclosed by a double fence of wire mesh to keep out pancake crabs, green leaves vivid and alien against the purples of the belt of native scrub beyond. And there was a paddock of bare earth inside a fence of wooden stakes and wire where two pigs lay in a muddy wallow, flanks heaving as they hacked and barked. Each time they coughed, bloody froth burst from their muzzles. The bodies of three other pigs lay swollen and rotting nearby, avid crowds of pancake crabs jostling and burrowing into them. Katya caught a strong whiff of ripe decay as she leaned against the fence. It seemed to tint the fog with the monochrome hue of grief.
“Here are your monsters, Doctor,” Captain Chernov told her. “Would you care to examine them?”
The chief petty officer wanted to put the pigs out of their misery. Katya said that they should try to find out what had infected them first and was surprised when Captain Chernov agreed.
“This sickness could be a reaction to a nerve agent,” he said.
“Or something they caught from the local biota,” Katya said.
“Native diseases do not infect people,” Captain Chernov said. “Or pigs.”
“It hasn’t happened yet,” Katya said. “But life on Earth and Venus shares the same genetic code and presumably the same common ancestor. As far as Venusian viruses and bacteria are concerned, people and pigs are no more than new sets of mucous membranes to be penetrated, new masses of cytoplasm to be exploited and subverted.”
“First you hope to find monsters,” Captain Chernov said. “Now you hope to find the Venusian flu. Your expectations are dwindling, Doctor. If you want to make yourself useful, help Mr. Sarantsev search the offices for diaries, logs, any records that might reveal what has happened. Meanwhile, I must look for the missing miners although I am pretty sure I will not find them.”
“Because the Americans took them?”
“I am sure that like all scientists, you believe in logic. And logic tells us that if they are not here, they must be somewhere else,” Captain Chernov said, and told Arkadi to make sure that Dr. Ignatova did not get into any trouble, and roared off with the rest of his men toward the open-cast mine in two trucks.
Katya found a log in the station’s small clinic, found an entry three weeks old that noted two men displaying symptoms of a flulike infection: high temperatures, involuntary movements of the arms and legs, night sweats, recovery within twenty-four hours. By then, more men had become infected. It had swiftly passed through the camp, and everyone appeared to have succumbed, including the station’s chemist, who doubled as its medical officer. In the assay lab, Katya found a photograph showing him standing with his two teenage daughters in front of the First Footstep monument on Big Island: a gangling, sandy-haired man with heavy-framed glasses and a high forehead. She had seen him before. He was one of the men who had been shot to death. His name was Georgi Zhzhyonov.