February 1st, 2066
It was the first, and last, day of summer when the airships of Venus exploded. Every word of that was a lie. To begin, Venus had no axial tilt, so the seasons were fairly arbitrary. Second, the “day” was longer than the entire year, so it was fairly pointless to use it. Instead, there was an incredibly bad calendar, 255 days with a reverse leap year, that led most people to stick with Earth time. The blimp’s mighty engines moved it against the Venusian winds, so the sun was always in the same place in the sky. Its fragile human cargo was kept sane by the roof, a giant liquid crystal that kept a normal 24 hour cycle. Second, they weren’t airships, as there was no balloon or gondola- since breathable air was less dense than Venusian air, the ships were just one giant elliptical volume, resembling portuguese man o war. Finally, they didn’t quite explode, as there was no oxygen, they just deflated and collapsed while being filled with acidic gas. Dragutin Dragomir had something more important to worry about however.
Some(well, many) questioned the sanity of Borromean Space Airships, the company that colonized the planet. After all, the surface of Venus is one of the only places where you can be burnt, crushed by the air pressure, suffocated by the carbon dioxide, and dissolved by acid simultaneously. However, like on Earth, pressure and temperature decreases with altitude, so where they were, at fifty kilometers up, the temperature and pressure drop from being far too high for the toughest spacesuit, to being acceptable for an unprotected human body. Unprotected, in the sense that you still must wear a wetsuit and breathing mask if you do not want to suffocate and get acid burns. Still, some questioned why they built colonies here, as there are plenty of nice solid objects in the universe, and why they do not just leave a few researchers in blimps to study the planet and the bioluminescent floating cells that inhabited it.
Nevertheless, his airship, High Altitude Venus Atmospheric Colony 121, had a population of 2950 people, nearly at full capacity. 2949 people were running towards the ascent vehicles, docked under the port and starboard edges of the blimp. One was hanging upside down from the bannisters of a support pylon, 800 meters above the ground.
The reason that Venus was settled was mostly gravity- Venus had 91% the gravity of Earth, enough to prevent the bone and muscle atrophy that cost Mars and Luna to treat and required centrifuge cities. Here people could relax in the clouds, away from the tensions of Earth and the population density of Mars. And enough gravity to make Dragutin struggle to not fall.
One day earlier
The drone soared through the skies of Venus, looking for its target. The team they were up against was very good, one of the best in the solar system, and had come all the way from a L4 habitat. Thankfully, their team was used to flying in thin air and microgravity found in the center of their centrifuge habitat, while Dragutin’s team had practiced in the constant hurricane force winds of Venus.
A battering noise was heard, and two batteries read failures. The enemy drone was a plane, in contrast to their team’s quadcopter, that had some kind of primitive cloaking mechanism. So far, they had demolished all competition- Dragutin had never heard of such technology before.
“Dragutin! Go fix the infrared!” barked the team leader, Guanyu Michi Zu, a tall chinese guy who took drone fighting a bit too seriously. He and the other 4 team members sat in black chairs which leaned back, rapidly pressing custom built controllers while wearing VR.
Dragutin took off his VR and put his hands on the keyboard.
“I could fix it”
“Then fix it!”
“But the drone guns are not calibrated to the infrared camera!”
“That was your responsibility!”
“You never let me have the drone! How was I supposed to calibrate it?”
“You could have brought it online by now. If we can see it we can try manual shooting,” sneared Raynard, a red-haired boy who always had vetoed Dragutin’s suggestions.
Dragutin tried to focus on the code. He was unsure what most of it did- Challan, the bald co-programmer that spent all of his free time in coding competitions, could do the job far better than he could, even though he also struggled with convincing the others he needed to have the drone in order to better program it. With Challan, Dragutin was basically useless as a programmer, and he constantly made frustrated attempts to become a builder instead.
Dragutin typed a line to open up a display of the drones power flow.
A small window opened up, showing where all of the drone’s power was going to. The IR camera was not there!
“Its not connected!”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, if you had let me install the sensor packet-”
“It would have thrown off the balance. Guanyu, take it up.”
Dragutin put his headset back on and watched the quadcopter soar up into the skies of Venus.
“Flip!”
Dragutin felt dizzy as the drone inverted, its propellers now pushing it straight down. A loud alarm blared and everything went black for a second before the feed resumed, showing the drone had stabilized.
“We collided with the plane, it didn’t make it decloak though.”
“Detonate the missile,” suggested Raynard. “It will cost us Build Points but since our buddy’s signal is still up we’ll win.”
The drone competition was fought in randomly assigned pairs, and a match would end when both of the opposing teams’ transponders could not be detected. Besides the prohibition of jamming transponders, there were few rules, which made the sport always fascinating to Dragutin. The Build Point system was necessary, however, to prevent the drones from getting bigger each year.
A voice went through all their headsets: “We’re approaching the cloud layer, we’ll lose signal soon. Good luck.”
Guanyu set the guns on random, trying to fire in all directions. They heard a series of whooshing noises above their gunfire every few seconds, each time interrupted by their enemies. The plane was making passes over them, and if Guanyu listened he could detonate while it was right on top of them.
He slid out a stick from the side of his controller with a red button on its tip, and pressed it. Nothing happened.
“Challan, Dragutin, what's going on?”
“There’s telemetry from the bomb but the detonator is not working. I can run a manual command, but the timing won’t be precise enough.”
Dragutin leaned over and whispered.
“The detonator was never reprogrammed to use 80.7 ghz like the rest of the parts, its still on 83. Remember how Rayard was ‘inspired’ by this team’s design for the electronics?”
“So I’ll set the drone to autohover, change the controller channel, and then let him try to detonate?”
There was a sound of bullets and one of the fans failed.
“No! Disarm our bomb, then wide broadcast detonation on 80.7.”
“They probably have encryption but.. Woah there. If you’re right...”
He started typing and then stopped, firmly pressing the enter key. A few tense seconds later, a large explosion nearly broke the microphone. But the video feed was still up.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Team Bob Wins!” the announcer yelled.
The team got off their chairs and streched. It would be another hour before the finals.
Dragutin walked in a calm circle (or rather ellipse) around the edge of the Battle Blimp. HAVACs looked desolate without the buildings, trees, and giant 3-d printers. It was just a giant grey oval with 2 dozen spindly support pillars holding up the canopy high overhead. Walking next to where the LCD canopy met the floor, Dragutin felt all too close to the kilometers of death around him. Several times, he almost tripped on the hundreds of wires that connected outlet hubs on the floor to the drone control setups that dotted the landscape. That this was the original Battle Blimp from 39’ was obvious- a newer one would use induction charging.
Most of the teams were in their seats, practicing or repairing their drones. During a tournament, the repairs would have to be done via robotic avatars in the drone bay below, so Team Bob, having been in the last qualifier of the day, certainly lacked the time to fix theirs properly. Hopefully their partners teams could carry them, like they had done in the last match.
Dragutin was slammed against the blimp wall. He felt the floor shaking beneath him for a few seconds before it died down. Several angry yells filled the ship, before another bump sent him to the ground.
“Attention all competitors! It appears we are under attack by the Ouranosians!” Dr. Manley, the founder of drone fighting, who captained the first crew there back in 29’, sarcastically announced over the intercom, “The turbulence seems to have messed up a good bit of the drones. Go to the buses and we’ll retry next week! Fly safe!”
Dragutin sighed and made his way to the docking port on the starboard side.
On the long bumpy ride back home, he felt bored. He still had 3 full years before he would have enough studies to past the tests and become an asteroid miner, so he could enact the Plan. He figured it only had a one percent chance of working, but what else would he do? Not take over the world?
Anyway, he rolled out his Paper 360, a flexible touchscreen computer, and connected to his HAVAC’s radio antenna. Since his blimp had an actually reliable LCU system, the radio antenna was rarely needed, so he and his drone team would use it for amateur radio. He had a message from Zdeka last night!
Dr. Zdeka Levtaso was a martian neurosurgeon and former Alliance spy that had brought him to Venus from Baltimore when he was 9, after he noticed her putting tracking devices on the cars around the Huxley Institute. Just why she was investigating a mundane synthetic baby company, and why she would take an interest in saving a random Artif remained a mystery to him, but the city was nuked the next week.
Dragutin, this is Zdeka. Be extremely cautious about telling anyone about this message. This is a political issue and is paramount to the future of humanity. I am beyond serious. CHCKBCKN23HRSUseDCRPTNKY 75637892151000124124612476
Immediately Dragutin tried to contain his excitement and began analysing the message. Is this a game? From the brief amount of time he had known her she had been fairly lax and sarcastic, however he doubted she would pull something like this. Did it have something to do with her time as a spy? Come to think of it, Zdeka did once show him her Alliance ID chip, but he was 9 at the time and probably wouldn’t have recognized if it was a fake. She could have been a corporate spy for a rival company, or even a thief marking those cars to be stolen later. Of course, why would she have maintained friendly communications all these years? Also, why did she switch from normal language to abbreviations? Was she forced to stop typing? He resolved to check the radio in 23 hours after the message was sent, which would luckily be during the night cycle of his HAVAC’s dome.
“Darn it!” Dragutin exclaimed. He realized he would not be able to keep Zdeka’s message a secret, as they had all arranged to automatically send their decrypted HAVACs’ radio data with the rest of the team. He could lie and say it was a game, but that would still pique their interest, especially as the others frequently joked that Zdeka had romantic interest in him, despite being almost twice his age at 29, and especially because she sent the message encrypted with the code she had once told him.
He texted his team:
“I don’t know about this recent message, but just in case, we’ll all go to the top of our HAVAC’s central pillar at 2230 tomorrow and check.”
A few years ago, a post on social media revealed that the central pillar of each HAVAC, which still had a spiral staircase for those who wanted to exercise and see the view of the whole city, had a vestigial computer access port with admin powers from its automated deployment phase. This computer port was unmonitored, so the less well behaved members of his team had used it to play pranks on their HAVACs, such as playing music on the PA system and turning the sky red. The captains never found out who did it, but cut off access to those systems.
He was so intent on speculating about the message that he almost missed the pilot announcing his stop.
The bus eventually connected to the port dock of his HAVAC, which was the latest version, being 1 kilometer long, a kilometer tall, and half a kilometer wide. It was powered by a thorium reactor strung under its floor, which was the center of 4 beams which extended a few meters beyond the edge of the blimp, ending in swiveling cylindrical scramjets. Under the blimp, the beams were crisscrossed with carbon fiber ribs of various thicknesses, which prevented the floor from buckling. The HAVAC was currently stationary, held down by the tethered mining machines that brought up regolith for the extraction of uranium hexafluoride, Venus’ main export besides fertilizer (made from the nitrogen and sulfur rich atmosphere and potassium rich rocks).
He strolled into the cavernous interior just as the ceiling went dark for the night. He walked a few hundred meters along the main out road until he came to his house, a small bamboo shack dwarfed by the shiny apartments on either side of him, though of course those were made of bamboo as well, just plastered over. As soon as he was able to convince the android teacher he was mature enough, he had moved out of the HAVAC creche and purchased an empty plot of land, building the shack himself in a few weeks. It was quite plain, just a bed, a poster of SpacePlus history, and a computer, but it was better than having to stay with his classmates all the time.
Dragutin checked what work he had missed by going to the tournament, ignored it, and starting aimlessly browsing the internet while he waited for everyone to go home so he could start the long climb up the tower. The top post took him by surprise- Dr. Nole Ksumi, the man who both invented the Synaplink, constructed the titanic Aldebaran launchers, and created the colonization fleets, was dead at only 91 of sudden organ failure. Perhaps his trips on early vessels without radiation shielding took its toll on him. The report that he ultimately decided against his previous plan to be frozen disappointed him though. Luckily, the Huxley Institute gave consent for all their children’s cryopreservation by default, though if even Ksumi would change his mind, Dragutin feared that he too might in his old age. Of course, if he attempted the Plan, there would be very little chance of him having an old age.
He scrolled down a bit. Canada, which was widely believed to be practically a puppet of the Restoration Empire, had completed its unexpected transition into becoming a Full Isolationist country, banning all emigration from it, closing all international trade and corporations, and jamming all communications with the outside world. It joined Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Madagascar in the countries that had done this since the end of WWIII.
The time was 2203. Barely enough time to get to the top of the tower! He grabbed his Paper 360 and charged outside, running through the 3 circles of roads and buildings into the interior, which was filled with grass, scattered utility structures, and the plain box that was the entrance to the bridge, hanging beneath the blimp like a traditional gondola. He then ran under the industrial ring, a circle 150 meters across in the center of the HAVAC, held aloft by pylons, which processed ores hauled up by the mining machines, which were maintained in large airlocks below the ring. He reached the central park, a grassy area with communal gardens and bamboo groves, and even a pool.
The central pillar came into view, a carbon fiber cylinder that gleamed like ivory in the red safety lights of the staircase that wrapped around it. Dragutin took a deep breath and began the long ascent, the air gradually getting hotter as he climbed. He collapsed at the observation deck, just a few meters below the umbral black ceiling.
It was 1129. He took a panel off the pillar, and revealed a small computer embedded in it. He plugged his Paper 360. First, he checked for surveillance drones, and used a program Challan wrote to make them not fly near the pillar. Hopefully the others had remembered to do the same. He then opened his chat.
Dragutin HAVAC 120 I’m at the deck. Ready to receive the message?
Ronald HAVAC 101 You’re almost late.
Challan HAVAC 103 Radio message is set to be erased from both our Papers and the HAVAC computers as soon as we receive it, so take a screenshot as soon as you get it.
HAVAC 120 Radio Antenna: Anonymous message received from Mars.
Challan HAVAC 103 Decrypted Message: I don’t have much time to talk and it will be unlikely that I will be able to send or receive another message. Nole Ksumi was assassinated, I was forced to forge a death certificate, his briefcase is secure with Mars president. I am kidnapped on Mars by an Imperial group and need rescue ASAP. Do not use any government or organization to do this, do it alone and tell no one. Check your bitcoin account.
Nole Ksumi’s briefcase, which supposedly contained the Synaplink codes, was famously kept locked to his wrist at all times, and the codes themselves were encrypted with an algorithm only he knew. Since Ksumi had been seen at a restaurant just minutes before his death, it was thankfully unlikely the codes had been taken.
Dragutin snapped a screenshot just before the message was erased, then jabbed his Paper quickly as if it would open his bitcoin account faster, while his mind raced over every word he remembered. Then suddenly he heard an enormous hiss, as if a giant snake was screaming at him, and he was thrown backwards, just managing to catch his knees on the platform railing and pull himself up. The evacuation alarms blared, though they sounded faint from up on the platform. If his Paper wasn’t hacked, he would have heard as well, though he could just make it out as it repeated:
MAJOR LEAK FROM METEOR DETECTED, ALL PERSONNEL PREPARE FOR ASCENT EVACUATION.
He then looked up again, and was so terrified he almost fell off the platform once more. A massive gash in the roof just 30 meters from him was letting a stream of hot air in, and a blinding spear of light cut across the landscape below. His eyes began to water from the brightness and acid. Several large drones came into his view, ascending towards the platform and the gash, but all came to a halt far below him. Why weren’t they repairing the gash? Could he even get down before the air became poisonous? He unplugged and collapsed his Paper and began dashing down the steps.
Of course. It was Challan’s program; by restricting the drones he had prevented them from fixing leaks. He had doomed the entire blimp. He stopped 50 meters down, became angry at himself, and turned around.
Wait a minute though. Venus has a thick atmosphere, and a blimp is a small target. In fact, no blimp has ever been hit with a meteor before. The odds of this happening at the same time I disabled the drones is incredibly low, though of course individual low probabilities happen all the time...
He decided to wait a few seconds to test something. There were several more whooshing noises, and more tears opened up in the sky. The liquid crystals then failed, bathing the city in light and ending any more illusion of night. This was no meteor strike, but a deliberate attack- though due to the speed of light, it could not have been triggered by the message. He had to remind himself that this was no time to think- he had to run first. The first real war in 36 years was beginning- and this time, it wasn’t just going to be a world war.