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

,” she said.
    “Everyone will be listening to your voice when you’re rescued. Despite the passions, the referendum is no sure thing. The engineering union will almost certainly tip the balance. And you sway the union. You could give us our own nation. Un pays pour nous . We deserve it.”
    “Maybe we do deserve Venus,” she said. “Who but idiots would deserve a burning land wrapped in poison?”
    “You mastered Venus,” Renaud said. “We will tame Venus.”
    “I did not master Venus.”
    “You are learning the ways of the land, like the first coureurs des bois .”
    Coureurs des bois . She tasted the phrase. It was an old one, from the times of the foundation of Québec by France, a word to speak of boys and men raised among the Algonquin and Montagnais natives to become the bridges between the colonistes and the new land. Renaud had used a term laden with history, as politicians and demagogues often do, careless of truth. But his words found a resonance in her heart, unexpected and potent.
    A second radio signal chimed in her helmet, devoid of static and interference. Close. She chilled. The drone had heard her radio.
    “Merde.”
    “What is it?” Renaud demanded, so, so far away, safe in his plane.
    “I thought I’d lost it. But it’s homing in on my radio signal.”
    “The drone can get to you?”
    “It’s probably in worse shape than me, but its tools can break through the walls of the trawler. I’ve got no way to stop it.”
    “Shut down your antenna and radio,” Renaud said.
    “I’m not shutting down the radio. It will already have colocated my signal with the electrical noise of the trawler, but I’m not going to die by myself.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “Venus, the drone, and I are going to have this out.”
    “You just said you couldn’t stop the drone.”
    “I know.”
    “What about the storm?”
    “Be quiet,” she said. “I’ve got to think.”
    She had little left in her tool kit. She pulled out copper wiring, a small knife, clamps of corroding reinforced plastic, a pockmarked screwdriver, and a small steel hammer. She slitted the wire and stripped away the insulation. The copper wouldn’t last long in the rain, or even in this chamber, but she only needed it to survive until the storm.
    For the first time, a rumble, a subsonic vibration, touched her bones. The storm, Venus’ final offer in her negotiations, closed on Marie-Claude.
    She wound the copper wire around the hammer, and then tied one of her two parachute cords to it. She swung the makeshift weapon experimentally on its cord. A flimsy thing against a machine.
    She tied the end of her second, longer, parachute cord to the screwdriver, and then pounded it deep into woody flesh between the six buoyancy chambers, all the way to the rigid, charged spine of the trawler, and wrapped it tightly around. Static tingled through her gloves. She tied the cord to her harness.
    The drone’s signal was very close now.
    She unplugged herself from the trawler’s electroplaque, leaving her suit and its heat exchanger to run on the emergency battery. Perhaps an hour.
    “You got a fix on me, Renaud?”
    His voice crackled. “You’re at thirty-three kilometers and sinking. What’s your plan?”
    “Just keep the fix and keep quiet.”
    The darkened patch on the top of the buoyancy chamber, the photoreceptor, had a dark filament running away from it, toward the axis of the trawler. She followed this line until the tough vegetable skin obscured it. With her screwdriver and her little hammer, she dug into the flesh, being careful not to dig far enough to break the outer skin of the trawler. She tore, following the filament to where it met five similar filaments and dove with them down the trawler’s spine. She whispered a quick, unaddressed prayer, and severed the trunk of filaments with tip of her screwdriver. No more photoreceptors for her trawler.
    She crawled back to the stoma and put her tools back into their little