Ishtar Rising Book 1 - Michael A. Martin [2]
Clinging to her console, Paulos shouted to be heard over the surrounding din and chaos. “Beam everyone on Hesperus the hell out now!”
Saadya’s concerns about work setbacks now struck him as trivial. This planet wants to kill us all, he thought. His flesh began to crawl as though inundated by soldier ants, and he wondered if this is what flash incineration felt like.
Then a faint, semimusical tone reverberated in his ears, faded briefly, then returned to build into a labored crescendo.
To Saadya, the overstrained transporter’s keening wail had never sounded so lovely.
* * *
Today
“Computer, run program Saadya Ishtar Endgame One.”
From within the small holodeck, Dr. Pascal Saadya carefully opened an interior hatch and stepped out onto the rugged northern plains of Ishtar Terra. Black, gravel-strewn soil, so far able to support only intermittent patches of scrub vegetation, crunched beneath his boots.
As he always did whenever he ran this scenario, the terraformer reflected anxiously on the six years of his life he had already devoted to Project Ishtar, immersed in its monstrously complex theoretical and preparatory work.
I’ve survived the wait for six years. Surely I can wait a little longer to finish turning this world into the garden it is destined to become. Once the team finishes replacing the equipment that Aphrodite Terra devoured.
The air, already pleasantly warm, caressed Saadya’s face, running its insubstantial fingers through his close-cropped, black-and-gray hair. The scent of wild strawberries wafted on the gentle breeze. He breathed the sweetness deeply into his lungs.
Saadya looked into the brightening sky and smiled. The moon—or rather, iron-gray Mercury, Venus’s new surrogate natural satellite—presented a wide, gibbous disk as she descended slowly near the eastern horizon. Right where I want her to be, he thought. Just where she will need to be if I am ever to take Ishtar all the way to completion.
Turning toward the west, Saadya watched as the morning sun climbed over the steeply sloping prominence of snow-capped Maxwell Montes. The golden sun looked bloated, noticeably larger than it appeared when seen from the small village of his birth near Madras, India.
That was, of course, because Venus lay over forty million kilometers closer to the Sun than did Earth.
The grin on Saadya’s dusky face intensified as he contemplated the enormity—and the sheer rightness—of this project. He gazed into an azure sky, now forever free of its crushing blanket of carbon dioxide. The clouds gathering on the southern horizon promised gentle, life-giving rains. This, he reflected, was how Venus should have been. How she will be, by the time Project Ishtar is finished.
Saadya wasn’t the least bit startled by the sonorous voice that suddenly began speaking directly behind him. “I certainly must give you credit for ambition, Dr. Saadya.”
He turned toward the sound, allowing the rising sun to warm his neck and shoulders. Before him stood three hologrammatic representations of men whose faces were especially familiar to scientists in Saadya’s line of work.
“Good morning, Dr. Seyetik,” Saadya said, bowing slightly toward the distinguished, gray-bearded man who had just spoken. “Please call me Pascal.” This Saadya added despite the fact that the late flesh-and-blood version of Dr. Gideon Seyetik had always addressed him with the utmost formality, a forced politeness that Saadya attributed as much to contempt as to envy. Saadya knew well that the real Seyetik’s ego had been colossal, restless, and fragile in the extreme. During his long life, Seyetik had produced a seemingly endless stream of papers, books, paintings—and refurbished worlds. Blue Horizon, New Halana, and the scores of other planets Seyetik had terraformed would stand for ages as monuments to that ego—masterworks painted on planetary-scale