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

grabbing arm.
    Electricity cracked across the wet cord. The drone’s last light popped and smoke puffed out.
    Whatever static charge the drone had acquired in the two days in the deep had not been the same as the trawler’s. Now it was.
    Marie-Claude hauled in the drone and lashed it to the trawler’s shaft.
    Thunder rumbled. Deep, bone-touching vibrations quickened primal fears.
    Her fingers trembled as she opened the access panels of the drone and peeled away burnt acid barriers. Half-melted wiring lay over fuses charred in their brackets. She yanked the surviving wires free by the handful and began wiring the trawler shaft above her to the drone’s hydrogen cells. Then, she connected the hydrogen cells to the shaft below the drone. Her fingers tingled as a light current passed through the wires.
    She had to get out of here. The wind whipped the trawler past wrinkled walls of cloud, faster and faster. Marie-Claude struggled up the cord, on aching muscles, to the stoma.
    The clear space opened wider, and the diffuse brightness of the light lent the gloom the tincture of dawn. Venus had spent almost three days testing her. She had survived. Venus respected Marie-Claude now, but had not finished with her. That was Venus’ message in the gesture of opening the clouds. But Marie-Claude would use Venus’ spite against her.
    Her fingers scrabbled at the opening of the stoma, prying, pulling, until she could force her arms in and pull herself up. She kicked. Hard. Fast. Not much time.
    Marie-Claude slipped into the chamber, but did not reconnect her suit to the electroplaque. She untied the parachute cord from her harness. She didn’t want to be close to any of the trawler’s electrical vascular systems. She huddled against the wall, her knees tucked close to her.
    “Renaud?” she asked. “Renaud?”
    Static. Then “Marie-Claude! Are you okay?”
    “Have you got a fix on me?”
    “Yes. It’s really faint.”
    “Keep the fix. I might need a pick-up soon.”
    “The deep-dive vehicle won’t be here until tomorrow, Marie-Claude,” he said sadly, “and even then, I don’t know if we can get close to the storm.”
    “Keep the fix,” she said.
    Thunder boomed closer. Lightning lit the walls of the chamber like a flashlight behind a hand, silhouetting reticulated vasculature. She’d never been close to lightning on Earth, but she felt, even without seeing it, that Venusian lightning was larger, angrier. Soon, the lightning would choose to travel through the stalk of the trawler for part of its journey. She didn’t know what would happen to all the things that parasitized the trawler as a platform upon which to live. They might be burnt to a crisp, cleansing the trawler, or perhaps in the way a forest fire opens ground for new growth, new life might be quickened by the lightning, and given space in which to grow. She did not know if she would survive. She was now a seed in a pod, wondering if the casing was strong enough to survive the trial that preceded birth.
    Distantly, through a wall of static, Renaud yelled. “You’re descending. Are you in a down-draft? Marie-Claude! You’re at thirty-one kilometers and dropping!”
    The world exploded around her. Painful brightness. Bone-shaking noise. Heat. Sizzling shock seizing her muscles. The world became transparent. Fragments of overloaded sensation were simultaneous with a shuddering explosion below. Where the repair drone had been, a bright flash of orange and purple lit the thin floor of the chamber. The trawler shook, as if it were about to come apart.
    Then the world dimmed.
    Lightning cracked farther away, lighting the walls of her world like new moments of creation.
    Her muscles trembled from electrical shock, even though she’d been grounded to the trawler and not in the path of any of the current. She felt heavy. The chamber continued to shake in turbulence. She was heavy. It was not the electrical shock. The chamber shook in the turbulence of its own