Just Another Day In The Clouds

Shura spends his days working the bench. Monitoring the results, collecting data. Research.

Research that the company that employs him no longer deems necessary. Too much payout with too little to show for it. Only, this company doesn't do layoffs. Not when there's another way to cash in.

This week's story is...

Just Another Day In The Clouds by M. K. Dreysen

"Did you hear him scream, Sasha?"

I'm not Sasha, that's my grandfather. I know the asshole had heard the others call me Shura.

The nametag, I guess. Alexander right there on my coveralls and the familiarity just took over.

"I know you did, didn't you?" the man I knew as Aleksei continued. "It's not like you could avoid it, now could you?" He walked around my little lab bench, one hand out for the edge, the other wiggling the barrel of the gun.

The one he'd used on Yevgeni. Yeah, I'd heard. "I'll push this into your ass, fire it. And then I'll use the knife to make another hole and do it again."

He'd made his way up from there. One hole at a time, until the inevitable shot through the back of poor Yev's mouth had, I hoped, put him out of this world's misery.

And now Asshole Aleksei had backed me into a corner of my own lab. "Nowhere to run now, Sasha."

Nowhere to run.

****

There's no room for it. We floated there, kilometers above Venera's surface, drifting along wherever the winds took us. And did they take us? I'd spent my first few months writing a log, one of my own rather than the constant stream of data the computers minded.

I'd stopped, but the numbers, hundreds of kilometers per hour... but I couldn't feel it. Our platform sat in one of the great streams, almost as far above the storms as they are above the surface. We rode that great river around Venera. The greatest carnival ride in the solar system.

Yevgeni, me, Viktor, the permanent crew. I minded the spectrometers and the other indirect measures. Yev and Vik worked with the drones, a constant stream of remotes back and forth between here and forever. Rocks, metals, gas samples falling and rising.

And we all wrangled the data, comparing and mining and formatting it so that all those following along back home could get their own updates in a timely manner.

"I'm going to put you on TV someday, Shura."

"Fuck off, Viktor. Cameras are for pretty professors defending their funding."

"You don't think this shit costs money?"

I know it costs money.

We'd just finished our turnaround. Every eighteen months or so, a crew flies out from Earth, parks a warehouse full of exotic metal at the orbital station, and then descends to replace all of the pipes and other bits that have corroded in Venera's atmosphere since the last time they came.

Which used to be every six months. When Yev first started. But he'd slowly replaced all the cheaper, milder steels they'd used at startup. "Cheap bastards," he muttered every time he found a piece of carbon steel.

"They never expected the place to still be running, Yev."

"Dumb fuckers," he would further retort.

This was my third turnaround. I'd started the first one by asking one of the welders why she did it. "Pay's good."

"And?"

She shrugged over her evening vodka, the one or two shots we allow ourselves during weeknights. "Gravity helps."

Which I could see. I could also see, once I'd spent a few minutes with others who made the trip regularly, that sending money home and not having to put up with the other nonsense made up a big part of the rest of the reason, for almost all of them. Lada, Karine, Oleg and Pasha, them I came to know as they cycled through every year and a half.

Aleksei, and another asshole named Karl, they didn't fit. Not even with the other one-timers they'd appeared with this last turnaround. They didn't play chess with anyone other than each other. They laughed and sang on Saturday nights, when everyone who wanted a half-liter instead of just a shot or two got one.

We all sang. But the two assholes sang and laughed and clapped hands on backs and shoulders and asked "Why don't you lift your knees and dance?" without starting the dancing.

Usually, when they finished the main work, then Yev and Vik and I would fan out over the platform, testing and looking and watching.

I can't really listen. Yev can, could, he'd rest his helmet on a pipe and ear on the inside of his helmet and listen for rushing air or steam. That kills my neck for nothing, I can't tell the difference between a leak and the sound of my own breath inside the helmet.

Still, the crews got a couple days break, trashing our little cafeteria while we hunted down the little jobs that they didn't quite finish. The four regulars, they're good, but the one-timers, you never know.

"Why don't you just send them back to the station and fix it yourself?" I asked Lada.

"We're dragging their worthless hides to Luna and Mars next, Shura. Maybe they learn something this way."

Oleg, Lada's fitter and second in command of the little crew, just shook his head at that one. "She knows better. But she always hopes."

"It worked on you," she pointed out.

He grinned through the gap in his teeth. "Yeah, I was dumb enough to stick around though! These fuckers are smart enough to step off at Zemlya orbit and never come back!"

The orbit shuttle fits only a handful at a time, with gear. So Aleksei and Karl decided to stay behind and wait for the second trip, once Viktor had signed off on the work.

I didn't hear. Viktor, I mean. Which probably means Karl did for him on his way to the shuttle. Viktor had gone out for a check on his drones, back to business as soon as the visitors left.

Aleksei started with Yevgeni. In the control room. I'd come to the lab. Because I couldn't think. And now here I was, staring at the barrel of the gun. "He fucked you, didn't he?"

That's what jumped into my mind. Where'd Karl go? And it answered itself.

I saw it in Aleksei's eyes. He turned as soon as the realization that maybe I was right kicked in. The asshole ran to my window, where you could see the shuttle. "How do I... oh," and he punched up the button that opened the connection with the shuttle.

"You're part of it now, Aleksei," Karl said, before Aleksei had a chance. "The company's needs, right?"

Aleksei cursed, then headed for the only option he had. The airlock and the suits that hung there.

I lay there on the floor, too stunned to move. Until the klaxon over the lock bleeped, telling me it had opened to the outer world. I scrambled for the control room, stumbling over Yevgeni's body on my way to the computer. "Orbit, Orbit, mayday mayday."

"Hello, Shura."

Lada answered my call. It should have been one of the Americans, Rosette Leland. "What did you do to them?"

"Relax, they're safe. 'Life-support system malfunction'. They'll recover as soon as we're safely away from here."

"You sound awfully calm that I'm still alive, Lada. Why?"

"Those two fuckups?" She laughed. "You can't communicate with anyone besides me. And your platform won't last long. We've had weeks to insure that everything goes the way it should."

"Why, though?"

Lada shrugged. "Money. Yevgeni and Viktor, and now you, have been here eighteen years without a return. The company could no longer sustain the investment." Lada shrugged. "But the insurance company doesn't need to know that part of it."

The platform shuddered as the shuttle fired away.

I glanced at it through the window. And grinned. Aleksei clung to the outside of the capsule. He'd managed to attach himself with a grapple. The suit would probably protect him on lift. "Looks like you get to figure out how to deal with your two circus freaks now."

"They won't make it. Oleg had a chance to work with the shuttle as well."

I watched the track until it disappeared just over a minute later. "And me?"

"I've been practicing for the cameras, Shura." And then Lada closed the connection.

The computer showed nothing but a "Connecting..." icon after that. Once I'd absorbed that, I made my way to the airlock and my own suit. At least I'd been too short and skinny for the asshole to take that.

I didn't have time to sit and wait. Whatever Lada and Oleg and the others had done, I couldn't trust the platform, home that it had been. Somewhere, time was ticking.

Yevgeni would no more have allowed them to work on the escape craft than he'd have allowed them to wash his socks. "Some things you don't leave to outsiders, Shura," he'd told me after I'd checked out on the little rocket. "We order parts as we need. In batches of three. And we do the work."

Circuits. Fuels, those we cycled on a weekly basis. Metals thickness, signs of corrosion. All three of us, together and separately. The escape craft, three little rockets, I knew them as well as, maybe better than I knew my lab.

****

The capsule has its own connection with the planetary communications network.

I waited until they'd cleared orbit. Each minute a little more terror. I rationalized it, told myself that I'd know if they'd planted explosives. Enough to bring down the platform all at once, anyway. They would only have been able to use small doses, little pieces here and there and let gravity and the winds do the rest.

So I waited until they were gone. I ran back inside only to get a little more food, freeze dried nasty but I'd live. My chess board, my tablet.

Then back into the rocket.

In theory, the escape craft had been meant just to get us to orbit. But eighteen years under Yevgeni's care, along with a few improvements he'd snuck into requisitions, meant I had a few more options than that.

Really, only one.

I drift at L1, waiting. There's regular traffic here every few weeks. I only have to make it one week before the next scheduled maintenance and observation trip. An Australian crew.

Anonymous. Unconnected to the company in any way that I know of. I don't know what I'll ask them to write in their logs. Or where I'll run to. They've already proven how far they'll reach. All I can do is hope that keeping my mouth shut and head down will give me space to live.