The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera by David Afsharirad Read Free Book Online

kilometers above the surface of Venus. Nowhere to refuel or recharge or repair or even stop.
    In the distance below, a flock of spherical, gas-filled photo-synthesizers blew with the wind like pollen. Blastulae. Sometimes storms brought them as high as the photochemical zone, where they quickly died from the changes in pressure. They were small and neutrally buoyant at this altitude. They were not buoyant enough to stop her descent. Maybe if she could put enough of them together?
    Perhaps a kilometer below, in the brown-yellow gloom, a cluster of dark spots moved, backward relative to the wind that carried her. They were much bigger than the blastulae. She tugged at her control lines, turning to get a better view, and hard enough to spill some of the air from her parachute. Her horizontal speed picked up, and she dropped faster. And only because she had turned did she see that the repair drone had followed her.
    Repair drones had not been designed specifically to survive in the cloud deck, but they were hardy. In the photochemical zone, it might have run forever on solar power, but it also cracked sulfuric acid into hydrogen and solid sulfur, which could be recombined later to work in shadow. It could follow her a long time if it could take on enough ballast to sink as fast as she, and if it could survive the heat and acid.
    Marie-Claude gritted her teeth and spilled her parachute. She plummeted. Two hundred meters. Four hundred. Six hundred. She finally let the wires go, and the parachute unfurled. The murk of the burnt yellow clouds hid her from the repair drone.
    And two hundred meters below floated a pod of thirty rosettes, large Venusian plants. Their bulbous ochre heads were composed of six radially symmetric gas-filled chambers, each one a meter across. Sulfuric acid and organic materials collected in the cup formed by the tops of the six chambers. From the center of this cup grew a large triangular frond, a fine black net with which to filter the photosynthesizing microbes from the atmosphere. Beneath the six chambers hung short, heavy trunks which stored nutrients and provided ballast. They hung like weird, rootless trees, orphaned in the vastness of an ocean of cloud.
    Carefully, Marie-Claude matched her horizontal speed and descended, until with uncertain hands and unsteady feet, she landed on one of the rosettes, scrambling to grab its frond before she slipped. The round, woody platform was slimy with decomposing microbes slowly being absorbed by the skin of the rosette.
    The rosette began to sink under her weight, although slower than she’d been descending in her parachute. But, as the pressure increased, so would the buoyancy of the rosette, until she finally stopped descending. And in the meantime, she could hide here from the repair drone. She shook acid rain from her parachute and laid it over herself like a tarp against the drizzling acid.
    She sank into the somber clouds for a long time, as the rain stopped. In the enforced quiet, her arms tingled, as if she wanted to hit something, for a long time. She was going to die. She was sinking into the toxic atmosphere of Venus because someone had decided to kill her. Nervous, angry, baffled tears tickled hot lines onto her cheeks. She cursed the acid. She cursed the world and politics. And she cursed herself for coming to Venus.

    The Americans, Australians, and British still raced against the Chinese for the industrial and economic dominance of Mars. Egypt and Saudi Arabia had taken Vesta and Ceres, and had staked claims on dozens of other asteroids with robotic prospectors. The Russians, perhaps for having lost the Moon to the Americans a century earlier, took it for their inheritance. The first wave of Solar System colonization was complete by the time Québec separated from Canada.
    L’Assemblée nationale decided to make their mark as an advanced nation by colonizing Venus. There was no money to be made on Venus, no resource it could provide to Earth or