As Kelvin expected, the groundcar was not headed for any of these places but drove at the customary top speed of twenty kilometers an hour along Central Avenue toward the imaginatively named stone frigate TNS Aphrodite, trusting that its bright yellow flashers and spark-tipped feather feelers would clear the road of walking miners, prostitutes, panhandlers, prophets, pickpockets, and whoever else was walking, shambling, or staggering around, there being no other vehicular traffic at all.
But the groundcar didn’t keep going to Aphrodite. Just before they reached the main gate, the car left the road, turned to the right, and followed the rough track that ran around the outside of the ten-meter-high perimeter fence.
“Oh, don’t tell me,” said Kelvin, craning his neck to look out through a windscreen that was already dappled with splattered orange spore bodies. “Some totally black operation, right?”
“Nope,” said the CPO. “You got to meet someone who won’t submit to the antifungal cleansing routine of the base. Easier to meet out here.”
Kelvin thought about that as the groundcar continued around the perimeter. There was a five-hundred-meter exclusion zone around the fence, but it was hardly needed, as most of Venusport sprawled in the opposite direction. There were just a few shanties nearby. Constructed from very mixed materials, they were almost lost in a jungle of three-meter-tall green tops, the fortunately innocuous fungi that grew everywhere it was not slashed, burned, or sprayed back.
He expected that they were heading now for one of those shanties but was surprised again when the car slanted off and he saw a temporary camp up ahead in the middle of the bare red earth of the exclusion zone: an array of five small domes laid out in approved fashion around a tracked armored command vehicle, with sentries in place some ways out.
There was also a riding lizard tied up outside one of the domes, its head hooded, its blue midsection wrapped with a rather incongruous tartan-colored heater blanket that was hooked up to a big Navy power unit that had been wheeled up next to it.
Kelvin twitched when he saw the lizard, not because of some racial fear of dinosaurs, though it did strongly resemble an allosaurus, but because of what its presence meant.
Venusport was built on the Huevan Plateau, a good five thousand meters up from what was usually called the Deep Swamp, a swamp that stretched for thousands of kilometers in every direction, getting hotter and weirder as it headed toward the distant equator. The lizards inhabited the closer parts of the Swamp and never came up to the relatively cooler plateau unless under human direction, and the humans who farmed the lizards—and other things—only came to Venusport when they needed to trade for something. There was a whole human society out in the Swamp that had at least partially detached itself from modern civilization, trying to fit in with Venus rather than trying to force Venus to become Earth-like. Beyond those settlers, there were humans who had gone even further in their attempts, adapting to Venus in ways that made Kelvin extremely uneasy.
The groundcar stopped, the doors popped, and the CPO pointed to the dome with the lizard tied up outside it.
“Just go in there, Commander. All will be explained.”
“Just like that, huh?” asked Kelvin. “All will be explained.”
“All you need to know, sir,” said the CPO with a wink. “However much that is.”
“Yeah,” said Kelvin sourly. “Thanks, Chief.”
He climbed down, noting that apart from the sentries there was no one moving outside the domes. But there was no real attempt at secrecy, the whole camp was visible from the fringe of Venusport, any passerby outside the secure zone could see it, and more important, could see Kelvin arrive. So it wasn’t likely he was going to disappear into the maw of some black operation that would later be claimed as never having existed in the first place. That was highly encouraging, as was the fact no one had bothered to take his heat-beam or stunner.
The dome was new, sprung straight out of the container, and surprisingly, both its air-lock doors were open, allowing the Venusian humidity, airborne spores, and general discomfort free access, which was odd, considering that the whole point of the domes was to provide a lovely scrubbed and air-conditioned environment.
Kelvin went in, and immediately understood why the doors were open. There were three women gathered around a map-display table. Two were Terran Navy officers: a captain in Terran Navy planetside blues, probably the commanding officer of Aphrodite; and a lieutenant in Venus outdoor camo, sporting a heat-beam in a shoulder holster and a belt festooned with pouches, no doubt containing the latest useless Venusian survival gear developed on Earth.
The third person was the reason the doors were open. She wore a singlet, shorts, and boots of tanned lizard-skin; a broad hat of woven shongar reeds hung on her back from a cord of lizard gut around her neck, keeping company with a breathing mask made of cross-layered sponge-bracken. A pair of goggles fashioned from whisky-bottle glass and a kind of fungal rubber equivalent were pushed back on her shaved head; and she had a heat-beam on one hip and an old-fashioned explosive-projectile pistol on the other, next to a long bush knife.
There were broad blue patches of what the locals called swamp lichen growing on her forearms and up her thighs. More grew on her face, here carefully guided by the sparing use of antifungal agents to grow in concentric circles on her cheeks, across her forehead, and around her neck.
Her face was instantly recognizable to Kelvin. He knew it as well as his own, swamp lichen notwithstanding, because it was his own face. Even though the woman was half a head taller and much broader in the shoulders, she was a variant of the same clone line, and, like all the Kelvin Kelvins, was a veteran of the PPCCF, though in her case, her service had been with the elite commando drop troopers colloquially known as ASAP, which legend had it stood for Air-Space-Any-Fucking-Place. The “F” was silent in the acronym, and so were they, at least until they wanted to be noticed.
“Kel,” said the woman, inclining her head. “How are you?”
“Vinnie,” answered Kelvin. “I’m OK, apart from being drafted again, or whatever’s just happened. And kind of puzzled …”
“You’re wondering why on Earth … or Venus … we need both you and your clone sister here,” said the captain. She came around the table and saluted. This time, Kelvin responded, though not with what could be called parade-ground exactitude. The captain was half a meter taller than he was, and he almost jinked his neck looking up at her. “I’m Captain O’Kazanis, this is my communications officer, Lieutenant Mazith. I’m sorry about the draft business, that came from HQ. I said we could just hire you, but it was felt that it would be better to put this on … ah … more official grounds.”
“Hire me to do what, sir?”
“Go on a damn-fool mission into the Deep Swamp to rescue a bunch of inbred morons who shouldn’t be there,” said Vinnie.
“That does just about sum it up,” admitted O’Kazanis. “But perhaps we might go into the details … Mazith.”
“Yes, sir,” said Mazith. Unlike O’Kazanis, whose height and Greek-Irish name almost certainly indicated an origin in one of the former Pan-European L5 colonies, Mazith had the made-up name and blended appearance of a World Government gengineered new person, of no particular ethnic, racial, or geographic origin. She was probably a clone, too.
“Approximately sixty-three hours ago,” she began, “a private yacht named Jumping Jehosophat, on charter to a fraternity/sorority house of the University of Luna, made an emergency planetfall 312 kilometers southeast of Venusport—”