Very nice. And as they kept regular hours despite the perpetual night, he merely waited until everyone had gone to bed, and then went out to one of the snowmobiles, checked that it was full of fuel, fired it up, and took off west.

These snowmobiles were neat little things, more like cars on skis than any of the monsters being used for the sequestration work. He had often enjoyed driving them in his first months on Venus, and now he sat back and gave the AI instructions and watched the eerie dim landscape slide by. The snow here had packed down to what they called firn, and his vehicle zipped right along. It would be an all-night drive, so to speak, but then he could come into the next camp when they were getting up. Maybe just drive into the parking lot and jump into another snowmobile and keep going, why not? No one cared about these vehicles on the ice; they were no one’s property. And there was nowhere to go in them.

Or so he told himself as he fell asleep, and when he woke up and had the AI slide them into the parking lot of the next camp, it worked just as he had hoped. Out of that one, into another, off again; no one the slightest bit concerned. “I love Venus,” he told the AI pilot. His old translation belt said it in Chinese, although probably the vehicle’s AI understood English too. The old belt was a sad step down from the spectacles, but in this situation it didn’t really matter.

Two more camps, two more snowmobiles, and he came to a camp he had spotted on the maps, one that had a train line spur that would take him up through the Ut Rupes and the Vesta Rupes and eventually to Colette. As he came into the camp he saw a train, at what passed here for a station, which was just a loading dock and a small building. As he slid up on the snowmobile he saw that they were loading some of the cars from a siding, under big lights. Being in the light of the lamps, they could see little outside that cone of illumination, so he crept up on them, staying in the dark, and in the moment when they were finishing their work he threw a rock at the building by the tracks, and when they went to investigate the bang, he hopped up into the car and ducked down behind the boxes inside. Not long after that he was closed into the car, and felt the train jerk forward with maglev smoothness and head up the long slope to Colette, far above him on the Lakshmi Planum, so ominously named.

He had fallen sleep, and woken up starving, when the car doors finally opened up. He waited for a clear moment, jumped out of the car and hustled away from it. No one around. He wasn’t certain, but after he slipped out of the station he confirmed it: he was inside the dome of Colette. It was the third day since he had left Vinmara, and he felt a little spacy from hunger, but pleased as well.

Now to find Shukra. He could return to his lodge, but that was where Lakshmi’s agent had always met him…. In the end he strolled through the big city streets, trying to look innocent, and went to the offices where he had first been taken by Swan to meet Shukra so long before. Since that first meeting Shukra had always come to him, so Kiran didn’t know where else to go. He had had a lot of time to think about this, but he still wasn’t quite sure of the best approach to take. There was the distinct possibility that he was throwing himself from the frying pan into the fire, but because Shukra had contacted him, and had told him what to look for, it seemed like it could be more like getting out of the fire back into the frying pan, or hopefully off the stove entirely. Anyway he didn’t see how he could avoid the risk of asking someone for help, and Shukra was his best bet. So he walked in the outer door of that first office, and went up to the security desk and said to the trio there, “I’m here to see Shukra, please. Please tell him that I have what he asked me for, and I want to give it to him.”

SWAN AND KIRAN

Taken in by what turned out to be an Interplan ship; cleaned up and fed; slept for twelve hours straight; up and eating again; and after that they were in Venus orbit, and then in a landing craft. The craft fell like a brick to the still-shaded planet, then eased off at the end to thump onto a runway. When they emerged in the big atrium of the spaceport, Swan could see that they had landed outside Colette. There was a view to a rumple of snowy muscular hills to the north, all dim under swirls of dark cloud. Venus!

What had happened in raw space still bulked large in her mind, so that what stood before her eyes now was like a dream. She was separated from Wahram as they went through their medical checkups and then a long security postmortem. The people talking to her were upset; it was obviously necessary to attend to the moment, transparent though it was. Later she could mull over what had happened and what she felt about it. She did not want it to slip away like everything else.

Their hosts brought her a little feast in dim sum style, with tiny plates and morsels of food, no more than a mouthful each, or just a taste, each with a different sauce, until her palate was completely confused, and she felt stuffed after four bites. Her stomach rebelled; it grumbled and queased throughout the conversation that began at the end of the meal.

Many there were drinking liquor and opioid mixers. Swan sipped soda water, watching people carefully. The Venusians there were looking very subdued. A leavening of jokesters, clustered mostly at one table, laughed at the gurneys of food, but the rest looked chastened, even grim. The salvation of the sunshield was all very well, of course, a great victory to be sure. But their defensive systems had failed them, and the danger inherent in the sunshield had been emphasized for all the world to see. Disaster had been staved off this time, but it still hung over them like a sword: a terrible fate, perpetually forestalled by a thing no stronger than a venetian blind, or a circular kite on a string.

One particularly grim part of the room was absorbed in the problem of what had happened to the sunshield’s security; these people were poking at their tabletop’s graphs and talking rapidly to each other. It appeared most of them thought the failure to respond had been caused by an inside job. Wahram rolled into the room in a wheelchair and joined them, his left leg held straight out and swathed in white. He nodded slowly as they spoke to him. Once he glanced over at Swan, as if he had just heard something she would find interesting; then he was deep in it again. Swan would hear about it later, she hoped. Although then it occurred to her that he might feel he had to tell them about her telling Pauline about the group Alex had assembled when she had promised she wouldn’t. How else was the story of what had happened going to parse? Well, in the end her rash act had saved Venus. Not that that meant she wouldn’t suffer for it anyway. Be known as a completely untrustworthy reckless flibbertigibbet qubehead. It wouldn’t be that hard of a case to make.

She sat watching the Venusians. They stayed slumped in their chairs, depressed. She asked some questions and they answered, except sometimes they didn’t.

She came back to something they didn’t seem to want to address: “I suppose you have to stick with the sunshield, now that it’s there?”

One waved a hand impatiently. “Some say no, that we should change.”

“What do you mean? Wouldn’t that take spinning the planet up to some kind of day-night?”

“Yes.”

“But how?”

“The only way there is,” one said. “A heavy meteor shower at a tangent.”

“The verylate heavy bombardment,” someone called from the jokesters’ table.

“But wouldn’t that wreck the surface you have?” Swan said. “Blast away the foamed rock, the CO ₂, the atmosphere—everything you’ve done?”