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

pouches before she took a hot breath. Then, she wriggled her finger into the sealed hole of the stoma. The atmosphere outside hissed in, hot. Her ears and sinuses ached.
    Her suit crushed against her, and her tank released more oxygen to compensate, while the heat exchanger whirred to full. Almost seven atmospheres of pressure and one hundred and seventy degrees Celsius. Her suit was rated to five atmospheres, and one hundred and fifty degrees. Engineers understood tolerances; the designers would not wear this suit under these conditions.
    But here she was.
    She pushed two hands into the opening, pulling the edge wide to stare down into the sub-cloud haze. The trawler’s cable flexed chaotically in surging winds, as crackles of blue-white arced along its length, shedding charge against particulate debris in the air. The trawler was a beautiful machine, a masterpiece of biological engineering, evolved to live and love this terrible world.
    Marie-Claude wriggled free of the buoyancy chamber and slipped down her cord. The inconstant wind spun her. Her legs and arms swung and jerked as she tried to straighten. She paid out all her cord, until she hung twenty-five meters down the trawler’s cable. She fluttered in the wind, meters from the trawler’s cable, with nothing beneath her for thirty-three kilometers.
    She tried to grab the cable, coming close to its slick, arcing surface. She wished that this was the most dangerous part of her plan, but it was only one part where she might be killed. And the longer she dangled in the wind, the more potential difference she accumulated relative to the cable. Her wet cord, as a conductor, mimicked the trawler’s cable. If she didn’t ground herself on the trawler’s cable again, when she finally reached it, she would shock herself, possibly into unconsciousness.
    The storm rumbled again, shaking her bones. She reached for the trawler’s cable, and almost touched, before an arc of electricity leapt between them, shocking her. She snapped her hand back. The drone approached, its lamps lighting the mist from nearby. And the wind still kept her from the cable.
    She climbed the cord, getting closer to the trawler’s cable. She steeled herself as she grabbed it and electricity convulsed her. Displays in her helmet winked out momentarily. With spasming muscles, she slid her way down the shaft, wrapping her legs around it.
    The repair drone broke through the mist. Two of its three lamps, despite being encased in glass, were dark. Its corroding claw gaped at her.
    Marie-Claude reached her arms around the cable to tie the end of her second parachute cord around it, the one with the hammer and copper wire tied to one end. Rain whirled around her in gusts, discoloring the steel hammer and speckling the copper with powdery, blue-edged holes.
    And then the rain stopped, the wind stilled, and the air brightened.
    She twisted her body to see what was happening. Awe seized her. The haze opened into kilometers and kilometers of clear air. Dark, bruised clouds rimmed the open air, veined with flashes of blue-white lightning. A great vortex, a hundred kilometers across. The center of the storm pierced the bottom of the sub-cloud haze, revealing Venus, unclothed, terrifying and beautiful. A great plane of dark basalt lay beneath the storm, pocked by high, shiny lava domes. And thirty kilometers beneath the center of the storm’s clear air, a flat volcanic mesa shot bright red lava and black sulfuric smoke into the sky.
    Naked Venus. Terrifying. Beautiful.
    She and the drone were sucked into the quick-moving winds scouring the edges of the clouds. Blue-tinged lightning decorated the walls of the great column with branching forks. The drone neared from the side, avoiding the trawler’s shaft. It could measure electrical charge better than Marie-Claude.
    She swung her hammer on the end of its cord and threw. The hammer dragged the wet parachute cord across the few meters and laid it across the top of the