The Venusian Gambit Read online

  Weatherby turned quickly toward his friend, only to see the impish smile he’d come to know well over the years, and the sparkle in his eye despite his wan countenance. “I think I can manage, Finch. I’ll simply avoid repeating your mistakes in affairs of the heart.”

  Lady Anne reached the altar in quick time despite the peach-colored dress that seemed to envelop her. She was flanked by her son, Philip the Count St. Germain, and Weatherby’s daughter Elizabeth. Both Weatherby and Anne had married after they drifted apart, and they were both widowed. Second chances indeed.

  Weatherby took a moment to marvel at both children, now all but grown. Philip had recently been accepted to read alchemy at Trinity College, Oxford, while the young Elizabeth hoped to follow in a few short years, as her intensive readings and studies of the Xan and Venus had already impressed some of the foremost academics of the day. Even for a bookish girl like Elizabeth, reading at Oxford would’ve been impossible but a few short years ago. But when your future stepmother was one of the foremost alchemists in the Known Worlds—and a woman possessing of a formidable personality besides—doors could open. If there was a way for Elizabeth to study at a university such as Oxford, Weatherby had no doubt that his soon-to-be wife would find it.

  Then Weatherby’s gaze fell back upon Anne, and all other thoughts were lost. Amazing how she could still do that to him.

  Weatherby took Anne’s hand and kissed it, receiving a brilliant smile in return. Her blonde hair shimmered in the morning light streaming through the church’s windows, accented by the sparkling motes she had created and placed into her tresses that morning. She looked utterly ethereal.

  Another cough from Bishop North brought their attention to the matter at hand. “Dearly beloved,” he began, “we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honorable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned…”

  Weatherby let the good bishop speak on, not heeding the words, instead holding the hands of the woman he loved for so long. Finch was quite right; there were rarely second chances at first love. To think that she had harbored such feelings for him as well was a revelation. Had the circumstances been different upon their second meeting, Weatherby would’ve married her sooner.

  As it was, four years seemed appropriate, given the nature of their reunion, which involved the need to hunt down and kill her then-husband, the Count St. Germain, who’d been trying to unleash a new alien hell upon the Known Worlds. Even in the most thorough works of etiquette, such circumstances were wholly unheard of.

  “Therefore if any man can show any just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter forever hold his peace.”

  The following silence drew Weatherby and Anne away from each other, turning and smiling toward the small congregation invited to this most intimate affair. A handful of senior officers and their wives, notable alchemists, some of London’s more scandalously intelligent women—it was an eclectic mix of sailors and society, academics and rebels. And they were friends, most importantly. Even Sir James Morrow, well and truly retired for the first time in his life, came down from Cambridgeshire for the festivities.

  Suddenly, from outside the church doors, they heard a faint scream.

  Weatherby looked to Anne, who looked back at him with equal measures of bewilderment, annoyance and amusement. Surely it was a bit early in the day for revelries, but Portsmouth was indeed a major port for the Royal Navy, and revelries for men long at sea knew no clocks.

  It was upon the second scream, and the third, that the murmuring of the crowd began.

  At this juncture, the doors at the rear of the church burst open, and a young man wearing the uniform of a midshipman ran through, racing up the aisle to the gasps of all in attendance.

  Weatherby’s first thought was the sword at his side. Shedding blood in a church was bad form, of course, but one does what one must.

  “Admiral!” the boy panted. “Urgent message from the Admiralty, sir! Portsmouth is under attack! You must…” The boy slowed to a walk, his face turning the color of beets, as realization of the ceremony he’d burst into dawned upon him.

  “Under attack?” Weatherby asked, motioning the young midshipman forward so that he might deliver the message upon the paper clutched in his hand. “Surely not! Would not our pickets have detected an incoming fleet early on?”

  The boy once again found his feet and ran up to the admiral, surrendering his papers. Weatherby snatched it up and began scanning it quickly. He quickly ran pale. “Under the channel…dear God.”

  He looked up at the crowd assembled for what was to be a joyous day. “I am afraid it is true. Portsmouth is currently under attack by a French invasion. Please take your carriages and flee immediately. Head north, either for Oxford or Bristol. Midshipman, escort these people to their carriages and horses, if you please, and get them on their way with all due haste.”

  The boy ran back down the aisle, but the crowd simply gaped at Weatherby, stunned and uncomprehending.

  “Damn you all, go!” Weatherby roared. “The French are upon our very shores!”

  Weatherby’s outburst brought the crowd to its feet and immediately they made for the doors in a perfect rush and panic. Elizabeth and Philip stood close by their parents, unsure as to what else they might do, while Finch stood resolutely by Weatherby’s side.

  And Sir James Morrow remained as well, third bench upon the right side, his weathered hands pulling him upright. “I suggest you get on with it, Tom,” he said gently. “We haven’t much time.”

  Weatherby shook his head sadly before turning back to the bishop with eyes wide and visage most grim. “My Lord Bishop, we will have to delay our ceremony under the circumstances.”

  The clergyman, a wiry and spry man in his early sixties, was understandably taken aback. “Excuse me, my Lord Admiral?” And when Weatherby looked upon Anne, her face bore great surprise—and restrained fury.

  Weatherby squeezed Anne’s hand. “I am afraid, my love, we must away before it is too late.”

  To Weatherby’s very great surprise, Anne pulled him back as he made to leave. “I have waited far too long for this, and will not wait a moment longer. My Lord Bishop, how quickly can you marry us?”

  Bishop North was, by this point, completely at a loss. “I suppose but a minute or two, my lord.”

  “Very well,” Weatherby said. “Pronounce it quickly, then! Finch, keep watch.”

  The good bishop began quickly flipping through his prayer book, reciting the words necessary to join the couple before him in matrimony, even as the tumult outside began to increase. Finch stood in the rear of the church, his head poked through the door, joined by a half dozen officers, armed with naught but swords, who had stayed to protect the couple during the now abbreviated ceremony.

  “Do you, Thomas, take this woman, Anne, to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have…” The bishop trailed off as Weatherby arched an eyebrow. “Do you, sir?” the bishop stammered.

  He turned and gave Anne a soft, sad smile. “I most certainly do.”

  “And do you, Anne, take this man, Thomas, to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

  Tears flowed gently down her cheeks as Anne squeezed Weatherby’s hand. “I do indeed.”

  Suddenly, Finch slammed the door of the church shut and began shoving one of the nearby wooden benches in front of it. “They’re coming!” he shouted.

  Weatherby turned back to the ashen-faced bishop. “Now, if you please, my Lord.”

  The bishop slammed his book shut. “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.” And with that, the clergyman dashed toward the church’s sacristy.

  Weatherby and Anne looked to one another. “We really have horrible timing,” she said. “But we are married.”

/>   “Not yet,” Weatherby said—just before he leaned down and gave her the kiss that was more than two decades late.

  Then the doors burst open.

  Anne gasped as a squadron of French soldiers marched into the church, bayonets at the ready. The fact that their blue and red uniforms were completely soaked was quite secondary to the fact that the soldiers themselves were…dead.

  The soldiers’ skin was stretched thin across their skeletons, so much so that there were tiny tears that exposed white bone to open air. Their lips were peeled back from their teeth, their noses were shrunken, and their eyes were gray and filmy. Under their bicorn hats, the revenants’ hair was limp and stringy. And even from the altar, they could all smell something of the charnel house when the troops entered.

  Yet they marched effectively—indeed, almost as if they were connected by invisible clockworks. And their bayonets certainly looked sharp and ready.

  “Finch!” Weatherby shouted as he drew his sword. “Are these…?”

  “Revenants! Just as we feared!” the alchemist replied as he rushed back to the altar, his blade already drawn. Finch was one of the very few at the Admiralty who thought it possible the French may have gleaned enough alchemical knowledge from Napoleon’s adventures in Egypt five years prior to create mindless but effective soldiers from the corpses of the dead.

  The officers who remained engaged the French squadron with zeal, blocking the center aisle of the church in order to allow the admiral and his bride to escape. Anne quickly gathered Philip and Elizabeth to her and made for the back of the church, following in the footsteps of the bishop. Weatherby and Finch followed, swords at the ready, even as the cries and clashes of steel rang through the hallowed building.

  And that’s when Weatherby saw his old captain and mentor, Morrow, amongst the blue-coated officers, a blade drawn from the old man’s walking stick.

  “James!” Weatherby shouted. “There are too many!”

  The old captain turned and favored Weatherby with a sad smile. “When has that stopped us, Tom? Go! I will take command here.” He then turned to the officers, one of whom had already fallen to the French bayonets. “Men of the Navy! Defend your admiral!”

  And with that, Morrow dove in to the fray, while the others gave a rallying cry and redoubled their efforts.

  “No!” Weatherby cried.

  He moved to join his friend and mentor, but Finch grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “Tom, no,” Finch said quietly, but urgently. “We must fly. Allow James his choice.”

  Choking back tears, Weatherby watched as Morrow deftly parried the first attacker and stabbed the revenant in the heart. Yet while the revenant staggered, the creature nonetheless took the butt of its rifle and smashed it into the side of Morrow’s head.

  The old man fell wordlessly. The other officers continued to fight, but only one managed to fell his opponent, cutting the revenant’s head clean from its shoulders.

  Weatherby quickly slammed the door of the sacristy shut, then fled with his wife and family out the back of the church, and into a world he could never have imagined.

  CHAPTER 1

  December 9, 2134

  The man behind the antique wooden desk looked exhausted and overwhelmed. His gray hair, normally coiffed to perfection, was slightly shaggy looking now. The bags under his eyes weighed on his usually clear, dark, lean face, and the blood-shot eyes themselves spoke of a lack of sleep and the anticipation of more sleepless nights to come. His shirt was rumpled, his tie hanging loosely. The holomonitor in front of him was strewn with folders and documents, videos and messages. His inbox was full of somber condolences, sober good wishes. He scanned the holograms blankly, eyes darting, not seeming to know which specks of data should come first.

  Maj. Gen. Maria Diaz felt bad for him. Historically, there weren’t that many vice presidents called upon to succeed their running mates—certainly none so abruptly as Jackson Weathers. But Diaz figured President Linda Fernandez hadn’t really planned on the cardiac arrest that killed her five hours ago.

  And now President Weathers was sitting at the desk in the Oval Office—a desk made from the timbers of the 19th century Arctic explorer HMS Resolute, and a gift from Queen Victoria some 250 years past. Given what she was about to disclose, she found the desk oddly fitting.

  “General…Diaz, isn’t it?” Weathers said, running a hand over his face. “Didn’t expect to see you here. You still with JSC?”

  Diaz stood at attention and gave Weathers a salute. “Yes, Mr. President. Executive director of Project DAEDALUS.”

  She could see the new president search his memories for a moment while his eyes gave Diaz the once-over. He lingered a bit too long over the curves of her uniform—for a woman pushing sixty, Diaz was still in excellent shape. And Weathers’ reputation for the wandering eye, something of a throwback to late 20th century presidents, was apparently well deserved. Diaz smiled slightly. Let him try. Her wife was a sculptural welder and, if anything, was in better shape than the general. President or not, he’d be pummeled to paste.

  Weathers finally shrugged. “I don’t remember that project. What is it?”

  “You weren’t cleared for it until today, Mr. President. DAEDALUS is the Dimensional And Extraterrestrial Defense, Analysis & Logistical Unified Services,” Diaz said. She started counting the seconds until Weathers’ mind parsed the legalese of the acronym. To his credit, she only got to five.

  “Bullshit,” he said, his tone one of both trepidation and resignation. “Can’t be.”

  “Sorry, sir. It’s true. I’ve put all the background files, reports and videos on your secure server. We need your approval for something that’s pretty critical right now, so if it’s all right with you, I’m going to give you the five-minute version before we get to the latest,” Diaz said.

  Weathers nodded, and off she went, having given the same précis at least two dozen times to other top military and civilian leaders in the U.S. and the European Union, the two governmental partners in JSC’s efforts to explore space. She felt her spiel was good at getting her audiences through anger and denial pretty quickly, though nobody seemed to have a perfect handle on acceptance. Hell, she still needed work on that now and then.

  “In 2132, there was an extradimensional incursion on the planet Mars,” Diaz began. “This other dimension, the one that peeked through, is a mirror of our world in the year 1779, with a few key differences. Over there, folks use a process they believe to be ‘alchemy’ to sail between worlds in wooden sailing ships, and to colonize said worlds, which apparently are quite different from those in our own Solar System in terms of survivability. Yes, there are aliens there too—inhabitants of their very different versions of Venus and Saturn. The dimensional overlap was brought about by an alien in that dimension who had been imprisoned for past crimes against the race of aliens living on Saturn. It took the combined efforts of some of their people—the crew of the English frigate HMS Daedalus—and my team at McAuliffe Base to seal the dimensional rift, which we did.”

  Weathers leaned back in his seat, eyes wide, and didn’t speak for a while as he flipped between reports and images Diaz had sent to his holoprojector. He lingered on the images and vids in particular—a frigate crashed on Mars, a massive alien beast tearing into a bunch of 18th century sailors. Finally, he cleared the images and turned back to Diaz with a haunted look on his face. “There’s a lot more to this story, isn’t there, General?”

  “Yes, sir. The complete files are on your server, sir.”

  “And since you’re just skirting past all that, I assume we have something even more pressing?” the President said. “God help me. Skip to that part.”

  Diaz nodded. At least he wasn’t staring at her uniform anymore. “Little less than six months ago, as you’ll recall, the JSC ship Armstrong reached the Saturn system, the first manned expedition there. You’ll also recall the Chinese got there at the same time.”

  “I remember,” Weathers said. “The Chinese
played chicken with our ship, then ended up conducting some kind of mining experiment that ended up destroying one of Saturn’s moons, right? What was that moon’s name again?”

  “Enceladus,” Diaz said. “And the Chinese didn’t blow it up. One of ours did.”

  “And I suppose I wasn’t cleared for that tidbit because…aliens?”

  “Yes, Mr. President. We have reason to believe that two of the Armstrong crew, along with the lone Chinese survivor, were somehow infected by an extradimensional alien intelligence related to the incursion on Mars. We also believe that there were primitive lifeforms in the oceans under Enceladus’ ice which served as the infection vector, and that the moon’s destruction freed those lifeforms. Subsequently, the Chinese ship flew through the moon’s debris field, then turned and headed back for Earth. Our concern is that they picked up several of these alien entities.”

  “How primitive are they?” Weathers asked.

  “Nothing more complex than viruses, but you know what happens when you catch a virus,” Diaz said. “Sir, we currently theorize that these primitive lifeforms may possess extradimensional properties, allowing them to serve as carriers for cross-dimensional infection and personality displacement—possession, if you will. We think that’s what happened to our people, and we’re obviously concerned that the Chinese ship, the Tienlong, is bringing more of those bugs back to Earth.”

  “And why not just blow it to hell and back?” Weathers said, sounding a bit irked. “If it’s an alien invasion force, even if it is goddamn microbes, I think we’re justified, don’t you?”

  That’s exactly what President Hernandez said four months ago, Diaz thought. “I appreciate the direct approach, sir, but our people believe that if the lifeforms could survive for thousands of years under the ice on Enceladus, blowing them up could very well just spread them around the rest of the Solar System. The Earth, Moon, even Mars could end up getting showered with them. All it seems to take is one of them to make contact, and we’re concerned they might serve as a vector to bring in others once infection and personality displacement takes effect. The possession of the Chinese, in particular, we believe may have occurred prior to their departure for Saturn via a different source.”