Mission: A Venus Affair

  Mission: A Venus Affair

  By V. A. Jeffrey

  Copyright © 2016

  All rights reserved.

  Artwork by Streetlight Graphics

  An Epistle Publishing book

  The stories contained in this book are works of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, past or present is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved.

  If you haven't picked it up yet,

  don't forget the first book in the Mission series:

  Mission: Flight To Mars

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  Mission series:

  Flight to Mars

  Lights of Langrenus

  Attack on Europa

  Harbeasts of Mars

  Blackguard Conspiracy

  A Venus Affair

  1

  “Please be seated in the main cabin or stay in your private quarters until we have docked. We will arrive at Harlow Station space ship port in one hour,” came the jovial Virtual Voice over the intercom system. It sounded different from the usual placid female voice that was nearly used everywhere. The game show host sound was so slick I could almost see “his” perfect, pearly whites. Even Jonah had started making fun of the Virtual Voice’s inflection and tone the third day into the trip.

  They really should change that voice.

  “Can we visit Harlow Water Park, daddy? Please?” asked Mary from her bedroom intercom device.

  “Yeah, dad. Can we?” Jonah came into the living room just after the Virtual Voice finished the announcement.

  “Mary, where are your manners? If you are going to make requests you need to come outside and talk to dad face to face, please. Now kids, remember what we discussed,” chided Pam. “If we’re going to Harlowe Station Water Park then that means on the first day we arrive at Vepaja we’ll be staying inside.”

  “But-” began Jonah. Mary came pattering to the living room.

  “No buts! Listen to your mom. Besides, the water park here is huge and it takes at least two days to explore. Our ship will only be docked at the Harlow port station for six hours.”

  “Aww!” they both whined. But that was pretty much the end of the discussion.

  Harlow Station was located between an Earth and Venus pathway. Small, gilded, well-to-do, it was mostly an insular gated community of wealthy retirees. It was well kept, full of well-heeled folks – and boring as all get out.

  My own dad would come here to visit my grandparents when I was little and that was before they’d built the water park. There was absolutely nothing to do at Harlow Station back then if you were a kid. Back then, middle-class folks were allowed to live there too. My dad’s folks fit within that range by the time my grandfather had retired as an old cruise spaceship captain. Years later the middle class had been priced out of the station. Now only rich folks could afford to live here.

  The only attraction worth seeing was the water park and it was simply a massive park full of water-based rides with slight variations from one another and a few concession stands dotted here and there. A movie theater pool was added recently. It was a place the retirees could take the visiting grandkids, if they cared to.

  As you can see, I have issues with the place and I wasn’t in any hurry to get off the ship.

  Speaking of the cruise ship, we were riding aboard the Silver Goddess, the flagship of the Star Goddess shipping line, the only space ship line that carried civilian passengers to the planet Venus, and we were making our way comfortably to the famed and beautiful first city on Venus: Vepaja.

  I had rented a large, luxury suite with a living room, dining room, kitchenette and three bedrooms. Jonah gazed longingly out the viewport of the living room, watching hundreds of kids with their parents de-board the ship and enter the station under a vast starry sky.

  “Remember son, we’re going hunting when we get there. Perhaps we’ll catch something,” I said, smiling.

  “Well, I’m not going to die or anything. It just would have been nice, is all. But I’m sure Vepaja will be a lot more fun.” He settled down by the main family console to play Tetris again. That’s the spirit, son! I was definitely going to make up for everything once we arrived. Mary still whined over the disappointment.

  “Come sweetie. Help me with deciding on what we’ll eat for dinner.” Pam was great at redirecting the kids. “Oh, honey, are we’re going to eat in or are we dining at the ship’s buffet hall tonight?”

  “I think we’ll eat in tonight,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “I want pizza, mommy!” Mary pouted.

  “I want pizza too,” said Jonah not turning around from the game. Several stacks of blocks were raining down on the screen and Jonah expertly arranged and moved them to where they might fit best before they reached the piles of blocks on the slowly rising wall or touched the ground. There was a sound at the treat dispenser. One of the ship’s labor mechs was making its way down the hall outside refilling the treat dispensers on our floor.

  “Oh!” Jonah paused the game and jumped up and heading straight for the popcorn dispenser machine for another huge bowl of rainbow popcorn. That was about the only thing that could break his concentration on a good game of Tetris.

  “Jonah! Just a small bowl of rainbow popcorn now. I don’t want you to ruin your appetite for dinner,” Pam warned.

  “I won’t!”

  Having finished combing over the copious notes Robin sent me about Vartan’s future plans for U-net I sat back and watched my family, feeling contented. I was thoroughly enjoying the trip so far. The Star Goddess ships were the fastest civilian space shipping line in the solar system. It cut down the traveling time to Venus from a usual three months to just under one.

  The ship itself was a luxury vacation. Plenty of spacious suites and roomy outside cabins. There were two ballrooms, a large library, a theater, a holo-deck house, family style restaurants and fine dining restaurants, several gyms and an indoor golf course.

  We had a jacuzzi in our room and our luxury suite came with room service. The Silver Goddess was not a beauty in exterior design; it looked like a huge sea tortoise and was large enough to carry three thousand people. It looked more like the Silver Turtle. It was built to withstand the harsh, powerful pressures of Venus’s atmosphere. Venus now had a special, cutting edge bio-dome, equipped with technology built in to regulate the intense pressures there so that humans traveling to or living there would live in an earth-like, pressurized environment. But even so, the ships there looked different and were built with this fact in mind. They had to be when going to and from space and entering inside the bio-dome of the cloudy planet. General climate temperature and atmospheric changes were also set and regulated on the planet by this system.

  I hear that even inside the bio-dome, Venus’s climate is slightly warmer than the climate of the Caribbean.

  “So what else should go along with that pizza? We need to eat some vegetables, you know,” said Pam. Mary made a face.

  “A kale, daikon radish, cucumber and orange salad would be nice, Pam.” Pam smiled and made a note on her data pad with Marybear looking on worriedly.

  “I wouldn’t mind having another jalapeno sunset again,” I shifted in my love seat, glancing sidelong at my wife, who gave me a mildly disapproving look, “but I don’t want to over-do it.” I flexed my bionic arm and began going through the physical therapy exercises for the day. Jonah came over, bringing my medicine bag with the needles and medications. He set the bowl of colorful popcorn aside on a table. He was fascinated with my new arm and also seemed concerned about the healing process, which touched me.


  The arm had healed fine. So far, my body wasn’t rejecting it. I went through my exercises again. These days it wasn’t painful. Jonah poked at the skin gingerly. I still marveled at it sometimes. It looked exactly and nearly felt like my other arm except there were no hair follicles. The skin was smooth and fresh looking and I was noticing the strength in it was far stronger than in my other arm. The funny thing about it was that sometimes at night I could feel my other lost arm, the ghost arm, tingling. It would hurt at times and felt as if there were no limb there until I lifted it up just to be sure the bionic arm was really there. These sensations usually came when I had certain kinds of dreams.

  “I wish I had a bionic arm, dad. So cool.”

  “I don’t know, son. It’s cool what technology and medicine can do for you but it’s usually better to have your own God-given body parts. Be glad yours are still intact. When my real arm got chopped off the pain was something I’d never experienced before. Not ever. I still have a hard time verbalizing what that pain felt like. It was like a thousand, million knives stabbing and ripping at me all at once. Even that description pales in comparison to what I felt.”

  “That sounds like a close explanation, dad. But at least now when someone tries to hurt you, you can smash them a good one!” said Jonah hopefully. I smiled.

  “You’re probably right about that.” I could think of a few dodgy folks out there that needed a good face smashing. But anyway. . .

  With Les Baxter’s Space Escapade album playing in the background and Pam and Mary preparing the dining room table for dinner, I settled down with Jonah to play classic Tetris. And received another sound beating by him again.

  “Dad, don’t break the remote again!” admonished Jonah. I’d gone through two already, not quite understanding my own strength with the bionic arm. The door chime rang.

  “Come in!” I called. The doors opened and in walked a prim, newly polished courtesy mech carrying a large silver tray with a large pepperoni pizza, a salad and a two-liter bottle of dry soda and a carafe of cucumber water.

  “Please set it on the dining room table there,” directed Pam. The mech dutifully obeyed.

  “Yes, madam.” It then turned toward me.

  “Will you and your family be going on excursion to Harlowe Station, Mr. Astor?”

  “No. We’ll be staying here.”

  “Very good, sir. I should inform you that drinks at the Buddha Bar are half price until disembarkation for Vepaja. The jalapeno sunset is seventy-five percent off the regular price until tomorrow.” I perked up.

  “Really?” Pam raised an eyebrow. “How did you know my husband likes jalapeno sunsets?”

  “We received an online room service request to notify Robert Astor when the prices of alcoholic beverages are at happy hour prices or whenever one of the bars on the ship puts them on sale,” it said pleasantly. “Oh yes, and they have a fine selection of scotch to choose from at half price as well. I did not want to forget to add that.” Pam frowned at me, shaking her head.

  “But they have a fine selection of scotches there!” I must have sounded like one of her own kids whining at her. She got out the silverware and checked for spots before setting them on the table, shooting me another disapproving glance.

  “Come with me,” I coaxed. She shook her head.

  “I’m on a green cleanse for this month. No thanks, honey.”

  “Aw come on, Pam!”

  “Let’s eat dinner and we’ll go for a walk on the garden promenade of the ship,” she said. I pretended to sulk. Okay, maybe it wasn’t really pretending.

  “Can we stay here?” asked Mary. She’d run to her bedroom and grabbed her teddy bear.

  “No. You guys are coming with us. This is a vacation. A luxury vacation that your father’s boss is paying for. Let’s enjoy it to the fullest instead of sitting glued to holo-screens in the suite all day.” And that ended the discussion.

  We sat down to eat. Yeah, I’d say the huge time out with the news and entertainment feeds Pam and I had decided on was an excellent idea for the kids. And for us. They were allowed to play some classic games here and there. I just didn’t understand why she suddenly wouldn’t have a drink with me anymore and took up this sudden matronly, moral police attitude whenever I wanted to have one. I looked over at my comlink device and saw a green light beeping. There was a message. I decided that I’d get to it later.

  As the ship’s Virtual Voice system sounded out the last port of call I saw through the wide dining room windows the glass and steel glistening structure of the water park in the distance. It looked like a small city in and of itself. A pretty but rather dull one, I mused. I was glad to leave it in the distance.

  Pam had her data pad by her plate.

  “Now Pam, after you were scolding the kids-”

  “This is different, Bob,” she said gently. “I’m looking over the itinerary.”

  “Let me see it. Let’s do some final planning on what we all want to see once we arrive.” She handed it to me.

  “Oh! I don’t want to forget! I want to visit Crake Shopping Mall.” She looked positively radiant at the mention of the famed mall. Mary beamed as well.

  “Okay. Sure,” I said. I never understood a woman’s fascination with shopping for clothes, skin care stuff or whatever. Or home décor. Pam loved skin care. Spent a small fortune on it. Looking at her, it really paid off, but still. They all came in overly fanciful packaging and half of these ampoules or whatever she called them smelled like lavender. Or roses. And if you’ve seen one gleaming, vast shopping center you’ve seen them all. But if it made her happy I wasn’t going to spoil her fun.

  “And how about the Pyramid of Dreams, guys? I hear that’s supposed to be one of the highlights of everyone’s trip once they get there.” Both of my kids shouted a resounding “yes” at this.

  The Pyramid was an astounding one thousand foot structure, covered in gold and bronze facade bricks. Inside was a mixture of ancient Egyptian style fused with Art Nouveau. It was a luxury hotel with a casino, holo-theaters, vintage film theaters, several Egyptian artifact museums, an interactive aviator museum, holo-deck complex, an indoor desert flower and plant garden and a zoo. One could stay there for the entire trip and simply get lost, it was said. I would have booked rooms inside the Pyramid’s main complex or at least its surrounding satellite lodges on the grounds but all the rooms were sold out! None were available until next year! But we got some very nice accommodations at the Queen Of The Night Hotel.

  Again, we went over what we wanted to do and see each day. We’d be there for two and a half weeks. After dinner, Pam prepared the kids to walk the ship promenade. I looked over my messages again. There was a message from Robin. The new U-net headquarters was up and running and everyone that was officially part of the little group was on their way, including Diamond.

  Robin needed me to call back for an important conference. Pam gave me a curious but knowing look.

  “I’ll take the kids out, honey,” she offered. Pam was no longer angry with these interruptions, of which I was thankful. But no matter what, I was still going to spend time with my family. These things just had to be integrated in, is all.

  “Thanks, honey. I’ll catch up with you soon. I won’t be long.” Pam and the kids were out the door and I finally contacted Robin. A surprising voice that I nearly didn’t recognize came on the line instead. It wasn’t Robin’s. The hologram image jumped alive and the figure before me was sleek, dark and imposing. Looked like he’d had an upgrade. It was Magnum. The mech’s hard, bright cybernetic blue eyes seemed to bore holes into my face as he stared. The Virtual Voice came in before he spoke.

  “This call is coming from the private secured channel of Magnum 9.0.1. Will you accept this call?”

  “I will.”

  “You may begin communications.”

  “Greetings, Mr. Astor,” came Magnum’s rough, no-nonsense voice at the other end.

  “Hello. Didn’t expect to see you.”

 
“Robin is on her way to Langrenus to the new headquarters. Her comlink system is having technical trouble so she instructed me to contact you. I assume she has already contacted you by mail?”

  “She has.”

  “After your holiday is done when can we expect to see you in person at headquarters? You are the first and foremost U-net agent. It is important for you to be present at some point,” Magnum admonished. I felt as if I were being disciplined. I opened my mouth to say something but at first, nothing came out. He was right. I was the first agent. I needed to be there.

  “At the least, probably in about four weeks.”

  “That’s better than nothing. Let me debrief you on what’s happened so far. We’ve received unsubstantiated reports about a threat growing near the perimeter of the solar system from the loyalists, near the outer planets. Somewhere possibly near Saturn but information at this time is not solid. If you can get any information while you are on Venus please inform us immediately. Also, The Boss has finished her main experiments on the creature we captured near the Hussa mine and she is now in the process of building a new and powerful weapon using the DNA of this alien being.” I was stunned to hear it. I shouldn’t have been, but I was. This was a dangerous slope in my opinion. But if we had this at our disposal, what else might we do? Why not use it? We faced extinction. I still didn’t like it.

  This brought back the unpleasant memory of my own forced experimentation. Soon it would be time to face that issue. To find out what was happening to me. I was changing. Subtle changes, not physical ones either, at least not yet. But I wasn’t the same man I was back then. Thanks to Dr. Dorn and his evil, illegal experiments with the Fiorjah alien.

  “Mr. Astor, are you still there?”

  “Oh, uh, yes. Sorry about that, Magnum. I was just thinking of something.”

  “I see. I thought the holo-screen was frozen.” No, just my brain. “Is this hesitation something that has to do with Ms. Vartan’s new weaponized DNA project?”

  “And of the creature we have in captivity? Yeah. I don’t like it.” Very perceptive for a mech. But then, Magnum was something else entirely. Like Will. Almost alive in a way that I couldn’t quite explain.