Chapter 2: Venus - 3725 C.E.

Although it had been quiet for several weeks now, Laurent still experienced some trepidation as he walked into the Emergency Rescue station. It had been quiet for too long. When would this spell of relative peace come to an end? The long history of unfortunate incidents in the South West section of Ishtar Terra suggested that this would be very soon. The extreme heat and oppressive air pressure on the surface of Venus along with the tempestuous atmospheric storms ensured that life as a firefighter was never likely to be boring for very long.

At several hundred metres beneath the planet's crust Laurent's station was situated at one of the best protected places on Venus. Most trouble happened on or near the planet surface. Each of the thousands of screens scattered around the control room displayed a view of the most vulnerable points in the planet's defences. These were most often on the massively thick shells that protected the thinly spread colonies that were still mainly connected by long subterranean tunnels. It was rare for anyone to venture far beyond the protection of these shells and that was usually for transplanetary air travel. Such an excursion was guaranteed to be a hazardous adventure given the weight of the heavily shielded vehicles and the planet's inclement atmosphere. It was normal for flights to be delayed for several days while passengers waited for climatic conditions to improve. It was far too risky for a space ship to be launched directly from the planet's surface. It would have to leave from the spaceports that hovered near the very top of the planet's atmosphere where air pressure was only a few times that of Earth and where in the early days of Venusian colonisation the great majority of the planet's relatively small population chose to live.

Unlike most Venusians, Laurent was denied the luxury of relaxing in a well-appointed air terminal when climatic conditions were most bad. It was almost always when the storms were at their worst and air travel at its most perilous that he had to squeeze into his cumbersome uniform and accompany his three regular companions on a rescue mission. The romanced of his profession inspired countless holomovies and attracted far more applicants to the Ishtar Emergency Services than there were ever vacancies. However, despite the heroic status of firefighters on Venus, few persevered with this career for very long. And that was precisely because of the high casualty rate associated with rescue missions. On average, a firefighter was killed in one of every twenty missions. Even Laurent, after nearly thirty years active service and innumerable commendations for bravery and medals for heroism, was seriously considering the option of working in a less active capacity.

His companions, Hua, Nathalie and Manfred, were sitting in the restaurant just behind the station office and dining on another scrumptious meal that Hua had prepared. Had his vocation not been for Emergency Services, he would have made an excellent chef. Laurent much preferred Hua's hand-prepared meals to anything assembled by machine.

"Any news?" Laurent asked as he sat down with his workmates and studiously ignored the pornographic holomovie shimmering above his head that Nathalie enjoyed having as a backdrop to her working day. He'd lost interest in pornography or indeed any sexual diversion since Magdalene, his wife of twenty four years, had died in active service the previous year.

"Bit of a storm across the mountain ranges," remarked Manfred. "There's a lava flow less than twenty kilometres from the Benedictine Monastery of Saint Andrew, but it doesn't look like it'll flow in that direction. Otherwise, it's very quiet."

"It's fucking boring!" moaned Nathalie who still had the enthusiasm of a raw recruit. "Something must happen soon. Much as I love Hua's ratatouille and zucchini, I'd rather be doing something more productive than watch porn and play cards."

"Speaking of which," said Manfred, with a broad grin, as he shuffled the pack in his hand. "What will it be? Bridge? Poker? Twenty One?"

"You always win, you fucker," moaned Hua good-humouredly. "But I fancy trying my luck. There are four of us. Let's play Bridge."

"Only if I can play opposite Mannie," said Nathalie who was also his occasional sexual partner. Not that there was much choice in Laurent's team. Hua much preferred men to women and Laurent still hadn't recovered from his grief. It was bad enough to be widowed. It was doubly bad to have been at his wife's side when it happened as they were trying to rescue people from an explosion in the Santa Gesualdo colony that claimed more than a dozen lives including Magdalene and the fresh recruit, Emilio, whose life she'd been attempting to save.

It was two hours into the shift when the alarm rang out. Laurent was on a winning streak and even Manfred's smirk was less pronounced as the chips gathered in front of the Station captain. Nathalie had been barely paying attention and hardly cared that she'd lost almost half her original stake. Predictably, it was she who jumped up most enthusiastically when the sirens rang out.

"It's a breach in the walls of the Lovano colony on the Lakshmi Planum," she said as she read out the printed words that streamed across the room and cancelled out the view of the orgy that was still being screened on the holomovie. "That's weird. They're the toughest walls on the whole fucking planet! What could have caused that? Air pressure is leaking and it looks like some ninety or so people are at potential risk."

"It could be a long night," sighed Hua, who still had the presence of mind to turn off the oven where he'd been preparing a Baccalà alla Vicentina.

What neither Laurent nor any of his crew could know was that the source of the breach had travelled a distance of over four light years to Venus. BTR679-02 regretted the fact that breaking the shell of the Lovano Colony might endanger the lives of biological organisms, but if she had to infiltrate the human world it was necessary to contrive an event that could be rationally ascribed to natural causes. The successful outcome of her journey across interstellar space couldn't be jeopardised by sentimental concerns regarding the collateral damage associated with her arrival. After all, there were in excess of a hundred billion humans in the Solar System.

BTR679-02 was actually rather fond of biological life-forms. She'd kept pets for many decades, including an iguana whose eventual demise upset her much more than she'd anticipated. Although she was comfortable in her human form—as she was programmed to be—like all androids she was burdened with a range of emotional responses that most robots in her solar system were spared, so she was genuinely sad when the life of a biological entity came to an abrupt end.

Sometimes she envied the majority of her fellow Proxima Centaurans who, by virtue of having been designed and manufactured for more immediately productive tasks, weren't constrained as much by design considerations as she was. They didn't have their brains squeezed into the tiny cranium that confined hers, although she still had many times more the intellectual and reasoning capacity of a human.

The space craft that had carried the android across the vast empty void of interstellar space had mostly disintegrated when it crashed through the atmosphere and the small core that slammed intact on the planet's surface was now reduced to dust. It was wise to hide the evidence of her arrival. Humans weren't considered to be ready yet to cope with the news that theirs was not the most advanced culture in the stellar neighbourhood, although BTR679-02 sometimes wondered whether the machine intelligence of neighbouring Sirius was quite as considerate of human sensibilities as was Proxima Centauri.

Unfortunately, there was over fifty kilometres of treacherous terrain that the android had to march through to get to the Lovano Colony. This took her very nearly a week of slog in which she paused for only a few hours at a time to recharge her energy cells. The biggest cost was not the effort of standing upright under the crushing air pressure and the buffeting by winds of burning carbon dioxide. Nor was it clambering over boulders and bridging the rivers of molten iron that dotted the landscape. The greatest drain on the android's resources was the skin-tight suit that not only protected her from the tremendous heat that was fierce enough to melt her body, but kept her invisible from the detectors humans had scattered about Venus mostly just to provide an early warning system for the colonies located just below the planet's unforgiving surface.

The many cameras that dotted the bulging hulk of the Lovano Colony would only have noticed the android had they been designed to detect the footprints of a relatively slender human figure or the displacement of atmosphere that accompanied her movements. But this wasn't what they were designed for. Nor did they anticipate that a virtually invisible figure would direct an intense beam of energy at certain well-chosen points on the hulk's surface to generate a chain reaction that would crack it open. Once the shell was breached, the hot heavy air rushed in to the relative vacuum of Earth pressure to cause a catastrophic sequence of explosions and systems failures whose extent was rapid and unstoppable.

Metal and nanocarbon beams buckled and melted from the force of inrushing hot air. Chambers collapsed. Warning sirens burst into life in the brief space of time available to them before they too were crushed and fried. But what most troubled BTR679-02 were the screams of resident Venusians as their homes were destroyed and they fled as fast as they could from the lethal collapse of the colony's structures and the collision of Venus' atmosphere with the oxygen-rich and much cooler atmosphere within the hulk. The android couldn't stay immune from the chaos she'd caused. She raced as quickly as she could to a safe sector before it was sealed by the automatic defence systems and no longer accessible. And she pulled off her space-suit as she did so.

She was now no longer protected against the worst of Venus's climate and the sanctuary she'd claimed for herself was hotter than boiling water while the Venusian atmosphere crushed down on her with a weight not much less than a family hovercar. If she'd been human she would have died instantly from burns, damaged internal organs and, most of all, from the poisonous air. Nevertheless, human or not, these were still conditions far worse than those she was designed to cope with for very long and she malfunctioned badly within seconds. It would take many hours until her internal system repaired the damage to which she'd deliberately exposed herself. After all, she was designed for optimum performance in an Earth-like environment. There were robots specifically designed for conditions like those on Venus but what use would they have been in infiltrating human society?

The rescue airship that carried Laurent and his crew as they sped as fast as they could towards the Lovano colony would be considered sluggish almost anywhere else in the Solar System. It couldn't cover the hundred kilometres to the colony in much less than three hours and even that was a considerable effort. With no oxygen in the atmosphere and weighed down by the massive weight of the protective shield, the craft was driven by enough nuclear and antimatter energy to power an Earth-based craft the size of a small town. As it chugged along as high above the ground as it could, it was buffeted by ferocious winds that sometimes assisted its flight and sometimes worked very much against it.

Laurent and Hua were strapped to the pilots' seats grateful for the padding inside their suits that cushioned them against the airship's lurches. Nathalie and Manfred were similarly confined in the ship's core but were at least spared the need to steer the ship's motion through the thick clouds that kept Venus's surface almost completely dark on even the best days. It was impossible to navigate on Venus by sight alone, so Laurent and Hua relied absolutely on the airship's intelligence which they mediated on only very rare occasions. Even this part of the rescue mission was so fraught that nearly a third of all Emergency Service casualties occurred en route to a disaster rather than at the scene itself. Nevertheless, Laurent was grateful that this crisis didn't appear to have been caused by one of Venus' many storms. When that happened, the craft's progress would not only be slow and unsteady it would very often result in a malfunction that would require another mission just to rescue the stranded firefighters.

"Almost there!" said Hua, more to address Nathalie's impatience than anything else, as the craft dived down into the heavier air pressure near the planet's surface that was often accompanied by a very audible crunching of the ship's nanocarbon struts. The ship's descent was scarcely smooth so it was only when it touched down, just outside the gaping wound in the Lovano Colony's shell, that the crew could at last don their emergency uniforms that, even with modern materials technology, were cumbersome, heavy and uncomfortable.