The Void Princess 8: Questions and Answers

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Almost two thirds of the way through the journey, Laika turns around to decelerate, and my thin, fragile connection to humanity via that long-distance antenna improves. The data transfer rate isn’t good enough for anything more than flat, vague messages lacking any of the richness and depth of a true soul connection, but that’s probably for the best; it makes it easier to not let my loved ones know where I am. ‘Doing some kind of work on the frontier with shaky communication’ is pretty normal for me, as are long absences from home. Which is kind of sad, when you think about it – I can go to fucking Venus and I don’t even have to put any work into hiding it.

Not that I know yet why I need to hide it. But better safe than sorry.

Venus itself looms larger and larger in Laika’s cameras. Eventually I can make it out without even using the camera’s sun shielding. It becomes impossible to miss even without telescopics, and then difficult to see much else, and then, all of a sudden, it’s time to land.

We briefly debate what to do with our remaining cargo. We’ve consumed about a third of it on the journey so far, as well as lost some precious fluid and gas to cooling. Not ideal, but Laika started the journey carrying his weight again in cargo crates, speed is critical, and dragons in a hurry run hot; even with Laika’s surface to volume ratio, black body radiation can only do so much to cool the various machinery of a dragon trying to make the best possible time. But we’d budgeted for that. The tricy part, the part I hadn’t considered because I hadn’t known we were heading for a fucking planet when we’d started, is the crates.

The crates are shielded against radiation, but not designed to survive a trip down to Venus; besides, they carry our supplies for home, and there seems little point in dragging a bunch of critical supplies into such a gravity well only to have to drag them out again untouched, after… whatever Laika has brought me here to do. On the other hand, there’s not really anywhere to put them. Heading city to city doesn’t have this problem; the gravity’s usually low and there’s usually tether points for large cargo outside the atmospheric shielding. But a planet doesn’t have that. Meaning that the best thing to do is to put the equipment in orbit around the planet, which I’m… not confident about. Forget an AI, these crates don’t have any kind of computer system or propulsion at all, and Laika is still giving me no information on what we’re doing or how long it should take. There’s no way to let the crates self-correct their orbit; we just kind of have to release them and hope that the angle and velocity is good enough that they won’t either crash into the planet or drift off into space before we get back. Besides, how are we supposed to find them when we leave? A handful of crates above an entire planet? Like finding a single bead dropped in a busy city.

Bring as much as will fit inside, Laika advises.

And the rest? There’s over a year’s worth of supplies in the crates. It won’t all fit in Laika, no matter how densely we pack it.

Radio. He outlines the plan with a few simple impressions. The fancy long-range transmitter won’t survive the descent into Venus’ atmosphere. So we bolt it to a crate instead, turn the power far, far down so that Laika can pick up the signal on his native equipment but nothing as far away as colonised space can, and use that to track them. I’m no engineer, but I can use a spanner. It’s perfectly doable.

It hadn’t occurred to me because it’s a stupid thing to do in most cases. Bolting a signal emitter to your stuff and sending it adrift in space is just begging for it to be stolen. But who’s going to steal it out here? How many thieves are taking several-month-long detours to orbit Venus?

I brace for inertia as I spread my solar wings and pull us into orbit with Venus. Now without gravity, I pull the crates forward with my tail and –

Wait. Dammit. Laika pulls us into orbit and pulls the crates forward. Not me.

Yeah, there’s also that little symptom of long isolation with a dragon. We’d learned about it in training, though I’d never expected it to apply to me. Soul bleed.

No, not that kind. I like trashy romance stories as much as the next person, but “soul mates” aren’t real. There’s nobody out there with a soul that’s so perfectly in tune with your own that the moment you meet, you start to inadvertently think each others’ thoughts and feel each others’ feelings and physical sensations as if they’re your own, creating comical hijinks until you eventually realise what’s going on. If you want someone to deeply love and understand you, the universe won’t give it to you – the both of you need to build it yourselves.

Or just sensemeld recklessly until you erode your own defenses, I guess. Like an idiot.

Real soul bleed is both simpler and more complicated than that. It’s a pretty rare condition that occurs to Princesses in constant sensory communication with their dragons for long periods of time. When you’re riding a dragon out in space alone and need to regularly brace for minor velocity adjustments or report things like ‘don’t change anything, I’m currently sipping a coffee’, it’s not long before you end up with a constant open channel of activity and physical state with each other. And a constant stream of information in channel like that that stays open quickly becomes easy to receive and interpret on both sides. And the human mind is pretty adaptable, sensorially speaking – if you give it the same kind of sensory data for a long period of time, it accepts that as one of its senses. If you contribute to the responses to that date, wing angles and camera focus and soforth, it accepts those wings and cameras as part of your body. Do that for several months with no real distraction? Physical separation gets confusing.

It’s a perfectly recoverable condition. When I stop sharing constantly with Laika, my mind will adapt once again. But I’m going to be doing this again on the way back. And then I’ll have to recover again.

At least Laika and I will be really, really good at working together by the end of all this.

Anyway, Laika pulls up the crates and grabs the rear one with his claws. I suit up for a spacewalk and head out to transfer the transmitter and dish. This is old hat by now; I’ve come out here for supplies multiple times over the last eighteen months, and Laika knows exactly where I am and what I’m doing in the same way I know him, so even if my tether fails, I’m in no danger. The dish is a lot bulkier than what I’m used to dealing with, but without gravity, that’s just a question of patience – move things slow, and you can move a lot out there.

Laika holds the transmitter in place with his tail while I bolt it down, and then I start the tedious business of cramming as much stuff as I possibly can into every available storage compartment. Every free space in Laika’s neck and tail is already full of food; the only space left is in the main compartment, so we end up with replacement parts for oxygen and water systems in every drawer, protein bricks securely tied down under the bed, and spare tubing piled in the shower cubicle. Anywhere that I can put something without risking it escaping its bonds and crushing me during descent, I do.

The goal is to have things outfitted so that if we can’t recover the cargo crates, I can make it back to civilisation alive. This requires some sacrifices. All personal items, including anything left over of Lyllania’s, goes in the cargo caravan to make room for more rations. We limit ourselves to one replacement oxygen recycler and one replacement water recycler, even eliminating redundant parts between the two, so I can only hope they don’t both break. We don’t stint on Laika’s fuel – more fuel means more acceleration means faster time, and we can save three day’s travel by sacrificing one day’s food for fuel storage.

It won’t be a comfortable trip home, if we need to make minimum time. Or a safe one. But if we lose the crates, it just might keep us alive.

Might It depends on how long we’re on Venus. On how many days’ supplies we use down there. I decide to start rationing food and keep rationing until we’re back up and have the cargo in orbit safely recovered. Just in case.

Once everything is secure, I strap into the pilot’s chair and brace while I – while Laika speeds up a little, a crate in his arms, dragging the rest. We err on the ‘too fast’ side of orbital velocity; better for the crates to drift a little away from Venus than for the orbit to decay and send them crashing to the ground. We can drift out to pick them up; we can’t do anything about them burning up in Venus’ atmosphere.

And stars, does Venus have an atmosphere.

Over 450 degrees Celsius. 92 standard atmospheres of pressure. NINETY-TWO ATMOSPHERES. Air that moves at over a hundred metres per second, constantly. I have almost no experience with wind but that sounds really bad. Gravity of 0.9g, which is perfectly liveable short-term, but as for everything else, fuck. I skim over the information and suggest to Laika, Hey, maybe this is a really bad idea.

But we’re already dropping toward the planet.

I make sure I’m buckled in very, very securely as I fold away my solar wings and drop down into the boiling sky. I’m buffetted instantly sideways, and the safety restraints cut into my neck and shoulder, but I right myself with a little thrust and open my glider wings and suddenly I’m slicing through the violent storms like butter. Stray wing jolts and shakes me occasionally, but not much; I drop down smoothly, gently, as if I was made for just this.

As if Laika was made for just this. And, I realise, he was.

Laika’s perfectly crafted scales let air swirl around us like a cloud; his highly articulated glider wings adjust moment-by-moment suffer none of his usual problems in an atmosphere this thick. His small size gives the wind a lot less to grab than a properly sized dragon, and he tucks his legs up, streamlined. New filters I’ve never seen in use drop over his cameras and below us I can see the violent swirls and eddies of dust and gas and –

Is that a light? I ask.

It is. Far, far below, something glows on the edge of a pointy piece of earth. What’s the word? Volcano. The edge of a volcano. We drop closer, closer, until it’s us and bare rock and that bright, impossible light, glowing clear blue and far brighter than Laika’s interior lights, although not as bright as the sun that’s been in our view for months.

And we’re heading towards it.

As we fall, it becomes clearer and clearer that that light is our destination. Some distance above it, I bank and counterthrust with all four feet to slow our fall and the wind knocks me violently sideways, digging the safety straps into the other side of my body, until I compensate. I readjust and head, once again, towards the light.

It’s some kind of glowing dome. A settlement? Has to be. Nature doesn’t make things like that… does it? Maybe? It certainly doesn’t look like the surrounding landscape. We touch down, all four feet to the ground, and I’m hit with a new worry, which is that while the cabin seems to have maintained normal temperature throughout our journey, I really, really doubt that my space suit can. Nobody builds a space suit to handle these kinds of conditions. If I have to actually go out there, outside Laika, I’m dead.

But we walk around the dome and, yes, there’s an airlock on one side large enough to admit Laika. The dome itself is sizeable, about 20m in diameter, set up under a hazy atmospheric shield, and as we approach it, it becomes clear that it’s not glowing from internal lighting. It’s covered in some kind of crystal. Something that grows in long, jagged shafts, and glows bright blue.

A naturally glowing crystal? I’m no geologist, but that… doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t sound healthy, at least. It can’t possibly be radioactivity, not that bright in the visible spectrum. Can it?

We slip under the atmospheric shielding and approach the airlock. Temperature control, that needs to be; there’s no other reason to have an airlock under an atmospheric shield like this. Unless it’s a safety backup.

So far as souls go, the whole place is deathly silent. It’s just me and Laika. I can feel Laika’s apprehension at this. Someone is clearly supposed to be here.

Even the airlock is unresponsive to his query. It does, however, operate when he pushes the physical button with his nose.

We move through the airlock, and there are people in here; seven of them, all human, reacting at first with shock and fear and then, upon touching Laika’s soul, confusion and joy. A bony middle-aged woman in a well-worn and slightly stained worksuit runs into the den/storage room that the airlock leads into and throws her arms around m – around Laika’s neck.

“Laika! You’re alive! How… where…?” she brushes my soul, and through Laika’s cameras I see dismay and grief wash over her face.

Of course. She would have expected Lyllania.

I release myself from the chair and climb up out of the airlock between Laika’s shoulder blades, careful not to touch anything metal which might still be dangerously hot from our descent. Laika’s scales are uncomfortably warm, but don’t raise blisters as I slide down his side and, embarrassingly, manage to fumble the landing and almost fall to my knees.

The woman takes my arm to steady me, brushing our souls together to trade IDs. Her name is Flora, and she’s a chemist. She doesn’t wear much else on the surface.

The other six inhabitants of the dome are making their way in through the room’s single door, cautious and confused, if happy to see Laika. Laika touches each of their souls, briefly; not being in the exchange, I have no idea what passes between them.

This is my Princess, he announces, proudly. She will help.

As for me, I’m having trouble keeping my balance. It takes me a moment to figure out why – for the past ten months, Laika’s wings and thrusters have told me what gravity to brace for, in what direction, a constant feed in the back of my mind. Right now, Laika’s not accelerating at all, but there’s still quite a lot of gravity. It’s confusing. I shut off my access to some of Laika’s feeds, which is lie having a limb suddenly go numb, but it does help me pay more attention to my own internal sense of balance. I’ll recover soon enough, I know. An hour maybe. A day if I’m unlucky.

Laika’s associates are all my age or older, somewhat underfed, and tired. They wear old clothes plagued with minor stains and frays. Most of them have trimmed their hair and beards to practical lengths, but it’s clear that they’ve long stopped shaving. Whatever’s going on here, it’s been had, for a long time.

And there are no dragons but Laika. The corner of the storage room that’s kitted out as a den has places for at least two small dragons, and somebody large must have ferried their equipment down in the first place, but right now? Just Laika.

They’ve been stranded.

“How did you survive?” someone – Ereniv, according to her soul, a computer specialist – asks. “Where have you been, Laika?”

Getting help. He indicates me. Seven pairs of eyes stare at me.

I clear my throat. “Laika showed up in Minotaur,” I explain, “and was very insistent that I come and look at some sort of ‘secret’ out here. I’m sorry to say that Lyllania is deceased.”

There’s no surprise at that last part. Not so the first.

“Minotaur?” Ereniv asks. “How’d he get all the way to Minotaur?”

I shrug. “Without further information, I assumed it was because it was Lyllania’s hometown. He’s been able to tell me very, very little about the situation. I have to admit, I understand almost nothing about what’s going on.”

The six inhabitants of the dome exchange glances and have a quick soul-to-soul discussion. I’m not part of it, but it’s not hard to figure out what must be happening. ‘She’s a stranger and we have this Big Secret, should we trust her?’ would be the first question, quickly followed by remarks such as, ‘well, Laika does,’ and more significantly, ‘there’s nobody else, and we’ve been stranded out here until now; we’ll die without help,’ and ‘what’s there to lose? Either she can help us or she’ll be stranded too’. (I accept as a matter of course that they’re not going to simply let me leave again with Laika. Laika wouldn’t let me leave again with Laika what am I supposed to do, manually pilot him against his will all the way back to colonised space? I’d die in the attempt.) I wait patiently for them to reach the conclusion that they have no real options and nothing to lose, and turn to me, as a group.

Flora offers a hand. I shake it.

“Welcome to Venus One, Shana. Let’s talk.” She leads the way out of the den.

Being unsuited in an area that isn’t Laika’s cockpit is… strange. But I know I’ll adapt, same as the loss of balance, same as the choice between confusing Laika’s sensation with my own or cutting them off and feeling half numb and blind. Laika himself can’t fit through the little door into the next room, and settles down in the tiny den; the rest of us head on through into a narrow hall and then through door on the left into a little mess hall.

Inside, the place looks normal, if you can forget that it’s built into a dome on Venus for some reason. The interior walls are some sort of synthetic, a plastic probably, flat and white and with occasional scuffs and scratches. The doors are equally flimsy. It’s the kind of stuff you see in a temporary or recently expanded settlement; cheap to transport and easy to assemble, until it can be replaced with local metals or more hardwearing synthetics. Or torn down and taken away again, in the case of temporaries. As someone who spends so much time with the robust equipment of dragons, these sorts of buildings always make me nervous. If the externals fail…

Well, if the externals fail in this case, it hardly matters. Without the atmospheric shielding and the dome beneath it, more solid walls aren’t going to protect us from a superdense atmosphere hot enough to melt lead. Besides, I know that dome is high quality and shielded to hell – I couldn’t detect a whisper of these six souls from the outside. They’ve been here for years at this point. Even I’m not unlucky enough to have the externals all fail on the day I arrive.

There’s no city, of course. Six people can’t possibly maintain the soul of a city. Just us seven humans and single dragon, out where nobody goes. I’m waved into a seat and within a few minutes, a hot cup of tea is pressed into my hands.

“We ran out of coffee months ago,” Ereniv says with an apologetic grimace.

“Thank you,” I say as everyone sits down around me with their own cups. I can feel Laika in the back of my mind, observing through our bleed – he’s never been able to make sense of my visual data any more than I can make sense of his, but he can interpret what I hear tolerably well. “I brought coffee, but it’s currently in crates in orbit around the planet. We brought down as much travel rations as we can fit into Laika. But if we use them, we don’t have enough to get anybody out of here, which I assume is a priority.”

“Did you make contact with Yuri up there?” someone – Xiana, a doctor – asks.

“Who?”

The disappointment that flashes across everyone’s faces doesn’t look to surprise them. I’m confirming something they already knew.

Yuri is dead, Laika informs me, and from everyone’s expressions I suppose he’s informing them, too. He tried to save me and Lyllania. He couldn’t get out.

“Of course he couldn’t get out!” Ereniv slams her teacup down on the table. “He went into the atmosphere for you? He’s not rated for that! Of course he was going to die!”

Lyllania was there, Laika points out.

“Of course she was, so of course he did. What happened out there?”

My memories are corrupted.

“Oh. Well. Helpful.” Ereniv takes a breath. “At least you’re alive. That’s what matters.”

“Laika showed up at Minotaur almost completely feral, in decent physical condition, carrying Lyllania’s… Lyllania was long deceased. It looked like suicide.”

“Suicide? No. She’d never do that.”

“She’s torn two levers out of Laika’s control panel and shoved them through her own eyes into her brain.”

Sharp intakes of breath all around the table and I remember, too late, that these women haven’t had over a year to inure themselves to this information, and that this was their friend. I try to moderate my tone.

“Whatever happened out there, it was clearly some act of desperation. But I can’t for the life of me think of what would make somebody do that. Laika hasn’t been able to tell me anything. I don’t suppose you know?”

“No,” Flora says. “But it says nothing good about Saru and Valentina’s fate.”

“Who?”

“Our other dragon and princess pair. After Lyllania and Laika went missing and we immediately lost contact with Yuri, Saru and Valentina went for help. They were supposed to re-establish contact with Yuri, or if that turned out not to be possible, to head for colonised space for help. Since you’re back here with just Laika, I’m guessing they never made it.”

“Not that I’m aware of,” I say. I run the numbers. Assume Valentina is similar to Laika; fast little dragon, based on the two hangars in the front den (for Valentina and Laika, I assume), no long-range comms; would’ve found no Yuri (who, if he was a transport dragon in orbit as the situation implied, probably would’ve had long-range comms but was dead somewhere on Venus after rescuing Laika), and flown to Fenrir and sent a distress signal via the Truesoul. Would’ve been moving faster than Laika and I, organ health of the Princess be damned, to save their friends, so less than eight months. The rescue operation would’ve been well underway before I even met Laika.

So, yeah. They didn’t make it.

“Why Laika?” I ask. “The name, I mean. With the dragon naming theme you’ve got going here, isn’t ‘Laika’ kind of a bad omen?”

Ereniv laughs. “That was Lyllania’s little joke. She said that everyone forgets the early pioneers. We wouldn’t have Yuris or Valentinas without Laika, so when she got to building our third dragon, that’s who he became. We all told her it was terrible luck, that we’d all rather be the Yuris and Valentinas thank you very much, but that’s Lyllania for you.”

“And Laika’s the survivor,” Xiana cuts in, “so I guess she showed us.”

“Right.” I try to put things together. “So you guys came to Venus for… some reason.”

“Scientific mission,” Flora says. “There were some unexpected readings from Earth observation posts that the halfkind were curious about. They’re weirdly obsessed with planets. So a group on Minotaur hired a team of chemists and analysts and sent us out here.”

“With Yuri… and with Valentina?”

“Yes.”

“And Laika was built down here.”

“After things got complicated. Yes.”

Complicated. I look forward to hearing about that part. “So the six…” plus Lyllania and Saru and Yuri’s pilot… “nine of you, headed out here to survey Venus.”

“Eight.”

“Yuri’s pilot?”

The team exchange uncomfortable glances. “Lyllania,” someone eventually admits.

“Lyllania was with Laika.”

“Things got complicated.”

“You left Yuri up there alone?”

“He was in full communication with us! A few of us, Lyllania included, were shuttling back and forth while Lyllania was building Laika. She wasn’t supposed to be ground crew at all; she was supposed to be up with Yuri, but then things…”

“Got complicated. Right. So you had Yuri, who’s not built for Venusian atmosphere, and Valentina, who is, and you built a ground survey station and had to bring Lyllania down here to build Laika when things ‘got complicated’. Then something happened that endangered Laika and Lyllania. Yuri tried to rescue them, he and Lyllania died, and Laika got out. Laika, presumably not seeing any way to help on the ground, headed straight for Minotaur to effect a rescue, but he was bound to secrecy for some reason. Why?”

Ereniv shrugs. “I had no idea he was bound to secrecy. I’m not sure why Lyllania would do that, when it was just us down here.”

“Okay, great, another fun mystery. While Laika was missing in action and all three of them presumed dead, Saru and Valentina went for help. They didn’t, so far as we’re aware, make it. Leaving the six of you stranded until we showed up.”

“And where did you come from?” Xiana asks. “You’re obviously not from the survey company.”

“I was on holiday.”

“You were on holiday?”

“In Minotaur. Sister’s graduation party. Then one of the most mysterious dragons I’ve ever seen crashed the party, abducted me, and dragged me off to Venus.”

“And you went with him?!”

“I have a soft spot for dragons. Don’t tell anyone. But if me and Laika are going to go and get help for you, then we need to know what happened to the others, and if Laika’s memories of the event are corrupted, then we need as much information as possible to piece it together by other means. So. How did things get ‘complicated’?

The team have another private soul conversation, a much briefer one this time. Then Flora places something in the middle of the mess table. It’s a long, semitransparent shard of crystal, flat-sided and pointed, about the size of a finger.

“Things really went off the course,” she says, “when we found this.”

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