The House of Styx Read online

  THE HOUSE OF

  STYX

  Derek Künsken

  First published 2020 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-320-0

  Copyright © 2020 Derek Künsken

  Designed & typeset by Rebellion Publishing

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  PRAISE FOR THE QUANTUM MAGICIAN

  “A boldly ambitious debut.”

  SFX Magazine

  “An audacious con job, scintillating future technology, and meditations on the nature of fractured humanity.”

  Yoon Ha Lee

  “Künsken has a wonderfully ingenious imagination.”

  Adam Roberts, Locus

  “Technology changes us—even our bodies—in fundamental ways, and Kunsken handles this wonderfully.”

  Cixin Liu

  “I have no problems raving about this book. A truly wild backdrop of space-opera with wormholes, big space-fleet conflict and empires.... What could go wrong?”

  Brad K. Horner

  “This brainy sci-fi heist novel uses mathematics like magic to pull you through a caper worthy of Jean-Pierre Melville.”

  The B&N SciFi and Fantasy Blog

  “The Quantum Magician is the type of book you go back to the beginning and read again once you know how everything pans out and have those ‘why didn’t I see that the first time?’ moments.”

  Strange Alliances

  “A delightfully engaging heist story.”

  Caroline Mersey, Science Fiction Book Club

  “The Quantum Magician is a space adventure built on the scaffolding of a classic con job movie (think The Italian Job or Ocean’s Eleven). It hits all the right beats at the right time, and part of the fun in reading it is wondering: what will go wrong? Who will betray who? What will be the reversals? When done well, as in the case of The Quantum Magician, it’s a delight to read.”

  The Ottawa Review of Books

  “The Quantum Magician feels like what would happen if Locke Lamora landed in Bank’s Culture, and if Locke had a lot to say about depraved humans. And I do love me a con artist story! Also? The writing is brilliant, the pacing is damn near perfect, the dialog is fun and snarky, the characters are great, I couldn’t put this book down!”

  The Little Red Reviewer

  “Con games and heists are always hard to write – one like this, which comes out pitch perfect, wrapped in a nuanced and striking sci-fi narrative is, to say the least, a rarity.”

  SF and F Reviews

  “The Quantum Magician is a fabulous debut, it would make the most fantastic movie. It has everything and more, it seriously needs to be read by way more people. Highly, highly recommended.”

  The Curious SFF Reader

  I dedicate this book to my Québécois uncles

  and aunts and grandparents and great uncles

  and great aunts and first and second and third cousins.

  I am rooted in river and field and forest and village with you.

  ONE

  MARCH 1ST, 2255 C.E., 45km above the surface of Venus:

  “We might still be able to patch it,” Pascal’s father said in French over the radio.

  Distant lightning squawked in the radio band. Drops of sulfuric acid fell on the faceplate of his helmet. Yellow mist surrounded them. Few storms began this deep under the clouds, but a big storm could punch all the way down here.

  “I give us five minutes,” Pascal said, “maybe ten.”

  “Give me one minute!”

  A shiver of fear began in Pascal’s stomach. They were cutting it close, despite his estimates.

  Pascal stood on the head of one of the big cloud-living Venusian plants, what they called a trawler. A bulbous head about five meters wide and shaped like a garlic clove contained all the buoyancy of the plant. Beneath it hung a long tail of carbon fiber, ending forty meters below in a woody weight. The trawlers bobbed through the clouds of Venus and even the hot haze beneath, attracting lightning or collecting static charge with their long carbon cables.

  George-Étienne and his children had a dozen trawlers, gathered in a wide herd by adjustable sails they mounted on the heads. They’d grafted additional equipment onto each one, turning each one into a minuscule factory. This one carried tanks and hydrolytic equipment to crack the water out of sulfuric acid. It shouldn’t have sunk this deep, but its woody pumps were failing. Even though Pascal could walk across its whole top in five stretched steps, it was an island, invaluable to surviving in the clouds. And it would soon vanish.

  “Minute!” Pascal said.

  “Câlisse!” George-Étienne swore.

  “Let’s salvage what we can,” Pascal said.

  The haze was inscrutable. Sunlight glowed spongy orange here, with line of sight faltering after a thousand meters. A storm could be right beside them and they’d never see it. Lightning squawked in the radio band again and, shortly, they heard the rumble.

  “Tabarnak!” George-Étienne swore again. “Okay. Pass me a rope.”

  Pascal didn’t feel any better than his father about this. They sold oxygen, water, and the heavy metals they collected from the volcanic ash in the lower cloud decks, but they wouldn’t have money to buy another trawler, and wild trawlers were hard to domesticate. The loss of this one would just make them that much poorer.

  Pascal anchored the middle of the rope around the mast at the top of the trawler and lowered one end to George-Étienne as he began tying the other end to an inflatable bag. The lower end of the rope soon tugged tight, squashing some of the straggly black weeds that colonized the outside of trawlers.

  Pascal pulled up the rope, lifting a steel tank, slick with a water-repellent, high-pH slime to protect it from the sulfuric acid rain. A flexible pipe came out of his pouch. He fitted one end to the tank and the other to the bag, to start inflating it with oxygen. While this went on, he began taking down the sail and untying all the ropes before turning back to pulling up three more tanks and a woody container they’d woven themselves out of the walls and resins of old trawlers. They wouldn’t have the time to turn the remains of this trawler into anything useful.

  “Pa,” Pascal said. “You think we got maybe six minutes?”

  The radio squawking of lightning became more persistent.

  “Oui.”

  “What do you think about cutting off the cable?”

  “We’d never cut it in time,” George-Étienne said, “or hold its weight.”

  “I have two extra float bags,” Pascal said. “I’ve got a saw. Let me try.”

  In his father’s silence, static burst three more times. Lightning crackled somewhere ahead, at their altitude. Was his father doing the same math as Pascal? The time to the storm hitting, versus the time needed to cut through the tough carbon fiber cabling, versus the loss this trawler represented?

  His father grunted, his helmet appearing over the edge of the trawler, slick with sulfuric acid. He climbed up and Pascal gave him a hand. Many acid burns over the years had browned and blackened Pa’s survival suit, and patches held it together in dozens of places.


  “Give me the tools,” George-Étienne said. “I’ll do it. If the storm looks close, you run for the habitat.”

  “I’m stronger, Pa,” Pascal said, “and faster. Trust me. You fill the float bags and salvage everything else.”

  His father hefted the dark float bags.

  “Be careful,” George-Étienne said. “And when I say we run, we run.”

  “Oui, pa,” Pascal said, giving his father one end of a new rope.

  Pascal scrambled down the side of the trawler, slipping on the slime and mushy plants, until he hung from the edge. He had to catch the next footholds by swinging his feet, gripping tight and inching his way down. Brown hanging grasses, dripping with sulfuric acid, colonized the underside of the trawler. He had to find the ropes among them. At the base of the head, he wrapped his legs around the long cable and shimmied down about a meter.

  He locked his legs and pulled free his saw. He had to be careful with anything sharp. Even a pinprick in his suit could let in a drop of acid. Venus had never been interested in colonistes, and took every opportunity to shake them from her skirts. Pascal sawed into the sides of the carbon cabling, making notches around which he tied the rope he’d brought down with him. It was still slack.

  “You can fill the float bags, Pa,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  A gentle tug started, then a hard pull.

  “I’m going to cut fast.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Pascal set the teeth of the saw against the edge of the cable and began cutting.

  The tree-like trawlers began their lives as sprouts barely a meter long, dangling from the undersides of their parent plants. Once on their own in the winds, they took electricity from the clouds and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Enzymes organized the carbon into nanofilaments and kept the buoyant oxygen in the bulbs. When the weight of the trawlers pulled them too deeply into the atmosphere, the cables stopped growing, while the heads grew bigger and bloated with oxygen. When the buoyancy of the trawlers floated them to colder altitudes, their metabolism slowed and the inevitable leaking of oxygen eventually sank them back into the middle and lower cloud decks. The trawlers lived slow, elegant lives in bodies that were never quite the same from one day to the next.

  “Almost done?” George-Étienne asked.

  “Almost halfway,” Pascal grunted, sawing harder.

  “I inflated another float bag. I hope it holds all the weight.”

  The clouds ahead of them were backlit blindingly for a moment before thunder shook their bones. The cable creaked, thousands of its filaments cut and curling. The sawing went faster. The weight on the remaining cables strained to tear them. Between his legs the cable shuddered and he almost slipped.

  “Are you ready?” Pascal asked.

  “Are you ready to jump?” his father said.

  “Itching to.”

  Pascal lay the saw into the cut again. His breath steamed the inside of his faceplate and the drizzle of sulfuric acid rain stopped. A bad sign. Wind pressed against him. He drew the saw along the strands and the world suddenly snapped. The head section shot upwards as the cable and bob plunged downward. The cable holding Pascal snapped and he hung weirdly motionless as bulb and cable vanished from sight.

  The blow wrenched his shoulder painfully, but he still held the saw. His inner thighs stung and he was tumbling in the brown-yellow mist, past the cable, already out of sight of where they’d been. His father’s voice came through the radio, but only a grunt, prodding him. Pascal pressed the release on his wings and the spring extended them and started the little jet motor.

  He suddenly had weight again, and swooped up in a wide arc, following the swirl in the gloom where the float sacs and the cable had sunk.

  “Pa! Are you okay?” he shouted.

  “Oui!” came the response through the static. “I’m towing the supplies. Where are you?”

  Pascal grunted unintentionally.

  “Are you hurt?” his father asked.

  Pascal pulled his legs up awkwardly as he flew to look at where his legs stung. His survival suit was ripped over his inner thighs, as if someone had dragged claws across them. His blood welled—not much in this pressure, but acid rain slicked the opening.

  “Patching my suit,” Pascal said, pulling first aid pads from his suit pockets.

  The pain got worse. He could tell the pain of a cut from the burn of acid. He felt both. He cracked the seals and pulled out carbon fiber gauzes embedded with a paste of sodium carbonate to neutralize the acid. Not big enough, but they would have to do. He pressed one against the inner-thigh of his right leg, unrolled an acid-resistant plastic wrap several times around his leg, then annealed the edges together with a sealant. He did the same for the other leg.

  “Ça va?” George-Étienne called on the radio. “Let me come to get you!”

  “I’m patched,” Pascal said, but then lightning flashed closer. “I’m not far from the cable.”

  He’d lost a lot of height and had drifted with the wind while patching his suit, but he saw the bottoms of three dark float-sacs above him, slick in the yellow light. His father had measured the buoyancy of the bags against the weight of the cable pretty well; they slowly inched upward. Pascal flew close to the base of the cable, climbed until he was about to stall, then cut the power and grabbed tight with both arms and legs. The cable pressed painfully against his wounds, but the weight at the base of the cable formed a partial seat, taking some of the weight off. He wouldn’t be here long; his little island had started sinking again.

  “Where are you?” George-Étienne demanded.

  “Get the salvage back to the Causapscal!” Pascal said. “I’m tying a rope to the cable so I can pull it back. I’m going to need your help when I get there.”

  “Soon?”

  “Soon!” Pascal said, tying a non-conductive rope just above the bob.

  He tied the other end to his belt, started the motor in his jet wings, and dropped into the rain again. Lightning cracked near enough that the haze around him lit bright yellow. The lightning was more dangerous now. The severed cable would attract it, and so would the rope attached to Pascal, non-conductive or not. Enough rain coated it to carry a charge.

  He flew upward, and every time he came to the end of the rope and the tension pulled the cable closer to the habitat, he let himself swoop down, gain more speed and then throttle forward and up again. This was the job of a float-drone. They had some, but not enough to do all the jobs they needed. Up above the clouds, la colonie had more necessities. In the depths, they made do.

  Bit by bit, his salvage came higher and closer, even though he couldn’t see his home through the clouds. Weak radio signals guided him. Five hundred meters to go. Four hundred. Three hundred.

  Then high rumbling sounded outside his helmet and, from ahead of him, lights.

  His father flew past him on thick wings, around the salvage, and then to the rope. George-Étienne grabbed the rope close to the floating cable and tugged hard as he flew, adding to the thrust. Every time he was about to stall, he loosened his grip, letting the rope play through his fingers and, once he got enough speed, tightened his grip and pulled again. They moved faster.

  The big shadow of the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs loomed before them; a great trawler three times the size of the one they’d just lost, with a long cable hanging into the haze. A black gantry hung beneath their habitat all around the central cable. His father darted ahead and landed on that open platform, took the end of a rope and jumped back into the clouds, towards Pascal.

  “Untie!” his father said.

  Lightning flashed ominously close and the thunder rolled over them, the two atmospheres of pressure giving the sound speed and power. Pascal fumbled the rope off his belt and swooped back the way he had come.

  George-Étienne tied a knot between the two ropes, standing nearly straight up as his jet wings keened. The jet wasn’t made to hold a man up, so he was sinking. His father dropped to gain airs
peed and then climbed in tight circles. Pascal got his hand around one of the three sacs and cut the rope. With only two float sacs, the salvaged cable plummeted, yanking hard on the rope George-Étienne had tied, and then bumped softly against the big vertical tail of their home. Sparks and licking blue arcs crackled along it, shorting between the two cables. Their home would generate less electricity for now, but electricity had never been their problem. They needed real building materials and they’d managed to save some. Pascal angled down, pulling the float sac nearer and nearer. The oxygen was too buoyant.

  His father landed on top of the float sac, hands grabbing the material, his jet wing motor whining at full throttle, and they got the sac out of the rain, under their habitat. They tied it to the gantry and then George-Étienne was hustling Pascal into the storm shelter.

  The shelter was just a cage made of conductive trawler cable, with the floor of the gantry beneath and the curving shell of the trawler above them, with its dripping black epiphytic growth drooping over them. It didn’t shelter them against acid, heat, pressure and wind, but it was grounded to the cable beneath the habitat by heavy wires and would survive lightning strikes.

  Lightning boomed beside them, blinding, searing the clouds yellow and white. Then another bolt cracked on the other side. The world outside the cage incandesced. Water and sulfuric acid vaporized off the surface of the habitat. Pascal and George-Étienne gripped each other with a strength born of primal fear. Lightning struck again and again, before the bolts finally began cracking farther off. The booming receded, but its power vibrated in their bones for long minutes.