As the shuttle hovered scarcely more than three meters above the station’s damaged roof, the air below it shimmered for a moment. The transporter beam dissipated with agonizing sluggishness, finally leaving P8 Blue standing on the roof, her hard carapace exposed to the worst Venus had to offer. Strapped to her back was a large duranium locker that contained—she hoped—everything she needed to rescue whomever she found here.

In addition to the oppressive, caustic air—which, fortunately, Project Ishtar’s force fields had thinned just enough for her to survive, at least temporarily—P8 could feel the intense heat from the magma that was surrounding the building. But she knew that as bad as it was for her, it would be far worse for anyone who lacked the advantage of her carapace. The natural membranes covering her eyes allowed her to see where she was going, and she wouldn’t need oxygen for quite some time. She ran to the edge of the roof, then scuttled over the side, her eight hands having to work harder than she expected to maintain a grip on the structure’s smooth polyduranium alloy.

As she came perilously close to the ground—and to the rising tide of detritus-speckled lava—she found the airlock’s hatch controls. It was a bit tricky entering the code from an upside-down orientation, but she managed, then crawled into the airlock as the door hissed open. Once inside she punched a button on a keypad, feeling greatly relieved once the hatch closed smoothly behind her.

The airlock’s fans had only begun pumping out the Venusian air, enabling the Nasat to speak. Fortunately, the tympanic membrane with which her body produced sound did not require her to exhale any of her precious oxygen. Tapping her combadge, P8 said, “I’ve entered the outer airlock. Can you read me?”

A moment of silence passed, then another, and finally a crackling voice came through. It was Gomez. “—es we re—you—”

“Your signal is weak, but at least we can communicate.” She saw the green light that indicated the outer airlock’s atmosphere was now breathable, as well as the air beyond the inner lock. She realized that at least some of the internal bulkheads must have closed in time to prevent a complete environmental compromise, like that suffered by Ground Station Hesperus. There might be survivors here after all. But with the Venusian atmosphere now cooking many of the station’s interior spaces as well as the external ablative shielding, it was only a matter of time before the interior bulkheads succumbed to the inevitable.

Just like the da Vinci hull did at Galvan VI.

The ground rumbled, reminding P8 of the rising tide of lava outside, a danger that threatened to render all other hazards moot.

Putting thoughts of the da Vinci’s all-too-recent mission in which they’d lost over half their crew to the back of her mind, she said into her combadge, “I’m going in,” and opened the interior airlock and exited into a hallway. She found the air stale and ozone-laced, but at least marginally breathable. Life support must be down, she thought. Only a few of the lights were working. She passed what appeared to be someone’s personal quarters. The doors were open, but she didn’t see anyone inside.

“Hello? Is anyone here?” Her voice echoed in the corridor. Breaking a tricorder out of the sealed tool kit she carried, she activated the device. A smile came to her mandibles almost immediately. Tapping her combadge, she said. “I read eight life-signs, the entire station’s complement. They’re all grouped together. They seem to be stressed by failures in the air-recyclers and other life-support equipment.”

“—opy that,” Gomez’s voice crackled.

P8 made her way into the main control room, but nobody was there. She noticed that anything that wasn’t bolted down had been thrown about by the seismic disturbances. The groundquakes had obviously hit this place hard.

Up a short set of stairs, she saw movement through the broad window of what she assumed was an office. Squeezing her bulk up the stairs, she pounded on the door. Through the window, she saw a group of technicians clustered together in the dimly lit room. Four were fully conscious, two were a bit wobbly, one appeared delirious, and another was unconscious and bleeding from a laceration above his right eye.

When one of them opened the door, P8 entered and set her locker down on the floor. Opening it, she said, “We don’t have much time. I need each of you to get into these EV suits, and quickly.”

As the workers scrambled to don the lightweight emergency suits she pulled from the locker, P8 explained how to seal them. The first man to finish suiting up began pulling the unconscious man into a second suit, while a woman assisted her delirious coworker.

“How are we going to get out of here?” a woman asked, eyeing her suit skeptically. “These things won’t last long outside, even if the air is a bit thinner now.”

P8 wondered why it had taken so long for someone to point that out. But there was little time for explanations. She decided to keep it brief. “If I could get you outside, we might get a transporter lock on you all, if not for all the ionic distortions out there.” To the skeptical woman, she added, “And you’re right—you couldn’t survive long outside, even in an EV suit.”

“Then how—”

“Is that tank on top of the building what I think it is?” P8 interrupted, wishing the da Vinci’s sensors had been working reliably enough to have already answered her question.

“It’s water,” said one of the men. “Mostly for equipment coolant and radiation protection.”

P8 nodded, picking up a small tool kit and a phaser rifle from the locker’s interior. She maglocked the tool kit to her belt and slung the weapon over her hard-carapaced shoulder. “Tank looks to be intact, too. But we’ll need to test it, and quickly. Can you drain it from in here?”

The man looked puzzled, but answered in spite of that. “Yes.”

“Then do it!” P8 couldn’t remember the last time she had pushed her tympanic membrane so hard. But her shout—or perhaps the phaser rifle on her shoulder—seemed to have the desired effect. One of the technicians immediately entered a command into a nearby computer terminal.

If this doesn’t work, we may all be dead very soon.

Another two minutes passed before everyone had completely suited up and checked all seals and connections. P8 then led the group out of the office, with two of them carrying their injured companion. On the main control floor, several inches of water had already accumulated on the deck, flowing down through a hatchway at the room’s far end. From the rush of sound coming from the room beyond, P8 gathered that the bulk of the drainage was headed elsewhere.

Let’s just hope the water inside that tank wasn’t the only thing keeping it from being flattened by the atmospheric pressure out there, she thought.

The group made its way through the hatch and into a room that reminded P8 of the engineering section from some low-tech, pre-Federation Earth starship. From the ceiling, a series of pipes dripped water—the remnants of the contents of the rooftop tank.

P8 shouldered the phaser rifle and trained it on the area around the pipes. The phaser beam cut through the structure, and a neatly circular section of roof about a meter and a half in diameter fell to the deck with a clatter and a splash.

“Get everybody up there,” P8 yelled. “Into the tank!”

One of the men protested, shouting from within his EV suit. “I still say this is crazy!”

P8 nodded. “Maybe. But it’s your best chance to stay alive.”

Using a set of wall-rungs and pipes, the first pair of workers reached the hole and climbed up. P8 could hear a hollow gong sound as they clambered within. Using the flashlight mounted on her middle right arm, P8 shined a light up into the hole. The first two men’s arms emerged from the aperture, and they began pulling up the others.

P8 slung the phaser rifle over her back and grabbed the unconscious scientist, then started to carry him up the walls, bringing up the rear of the party. Balancing carefully, P8 handed the man up to the others, then clung to the lip of the hole for a moment.

A fast search of her toolbox yielded a small magnetic grapnel, which she aimed down at the section of metal she had just cut away. She aimed, fired, and the flukes made contact. Pulling on the grapnel with four of her limbs, she quickly took possession of the metal disk.

Using the phaser to weld the disk back into place took barely another two minutes.

The building shook, as though the molten rock outside had grown tired of being ignored. The already sloping floor suddenly listed even more sharply. Tortured metal creaked and groaned, and P8 could hear a hard wind keening outside. The roof is going.

P8’s combadge crackled. The voice belonged to Commander Gomez. “—ting rough out there, Pattie. How’s it comi—”

Keying her combadge, P8 said, “We’re out of time, sir. Please hit the switch.” And hope my welds hold.

“—ou got it, Pat—” came Gomez’s scratchy reply.

The tank suddenly rang as if something massive had struck it, and then a hum engulfed it, vibrating the polyalloy walls as the Kwolek’s tractor beam—usually used for construction projects—separated the tank from its rooftop moorings.

But there was no inrush of hot carbon dioxide gas. The air was stale but remained breathable. The tank’s seams—including the ones P8 had just created—were holding, at least for the moment. She hoped they wouldn’t fail until after the Kwolek had lofted the tank to an altitude where the temperature and pressure would allow Ground Station Aphrodite’s staff to rely on their environmental suits for survival.

The tank was buffeted from side to side by the increasingly powerful winds. Despite that, P8 Blue felt certain that her plan was going to work. As long as Corsi doesn’t smack into the force fields at the wrong angle on her way back out of here.

“I’ll be damned,” Stevens said with a big grin, looking up from his instruments. “We just caught ourselves eight humans and a pillbug.”

Gomez grinned back. “Tractor beam status?”

“Holding steady,” Tev said.

“Headed for orbit,” Corsi said, anticipating Gomez’s next order. “Course laid in for Ishtar Station. Quarter impulse.”

As they rose through the air, Gomez adjusted one of the console viewers to get an aft view. Below the Kwolek, Ground Station Aphrodite was crumbling and melting into nothingness, shaken apart by groundquakes and consumed by the molten mantle of Venus.

Corsi piloted the shuttle swiftly upward, passing the swirling ochre cloud bands, moving slowly but deftly through the force-field network, and finally grazing the edge of space, where Ishtar Station’s crew managed to beam the people being ferried in the tank to safety.

Gomez keyed the companel and spoke. “Gomez to Captain Gold. We’ve just completed a rather…unorthodox rescue. All crew members of Aphrodite Station are out of danger.”

“Good work, Gomez. Now we just have to save the rest of the planet.”

Gold’s words struck her hard. As Tev beamed P8 Blue back aboard the Kwolek, Gomez’s earlier jubilation had abruptly died. After all, not even both the da Vinci’s shuttles could pull off Pattie’s little trick at all the other ground stations, even if the Nasat engineer could be in two places at once. The planetary force-field network still remained dangerously stalled, geological upheavals threatened to engulf still more of the planet’s crust in very short order, and the transporters remained unable to haul the people stranded elsewhere on the surface out of harm’s way.

Gomez knew that solving those problems had to take priority now that the Aphrodite team was out of immediate danger. Otherwise, she thought, what about the dozen other staffed stations down there? And what happens to Soloman?

She watched in silence as one of her instruments displayed a schematic of the intricately fluctuating nodes and energy lines that made up Project Ishtar’s force-field network. Problem Number One, she decided, scowling at the image.

“You still there, Gomez?” said Gold over the still-open channel, his voice free of static now that the shuttle had made low orbit. Gomez realized with a start that she’d been woolgathering.

“Captain,” she said, suddenly galvanized by a new idea. “I think we may have to try something really risky next….”