Mission: Tomorrow - eARC (20 page)

This next tale was a top finalist in the annual Jim Baen Memorial Contest. Its inclusion of Brazilian astronauts immediately caught my eyes but it was the fast pace and steady tension that sold me. Herein Venus is the setting of an accident that puts lives at risk . . .

WINDSHEAR

by Angus McIntyre

Two hundred kilometers above Ishtar Terra, the aeroshell completed its last braking curve and settled into level flight, its flight control systems counting down the seconds until separation. It was still slowing as it passed over Maxwell Montes, hull cherry-red from the heat of reentry. Ionized gases crackled in its wake as it blazed like a meteor across the Venusian sky.

One hundred kilometers high now, its explosive bolts fired automatically. The aeroshell’s hull split cleanly into four segments that folded back like the petals of a flower, revealing the streamlined shape of the recovery dart nestled inside. The dart’s systems came alive as the thin atmosphere kissed its skin and it slipped smoothly into the air like a diver entering water.

The aeroshell was gone now, tumbling on a high-altitude wind. In thirty minutes what remained of it would scatter itself across the surface far below, burned and crushed beyond recognition. High above, the dart spread its wings and flew free.

The dart banked left, searching for a data downlink from the command station in orbit. Diagnostics checked the state of its flight systems, registering a shallow gash in its port canard where something had slashed across it during aeroshell separation. The aircraft’s bioelectronic brain assessed the damage, concluded that the integrity of the wing was unaffected and adjusted its trim to compensate for the additional drag.

Still seventy kilometers up, the dart slid downwards through the thickening atmosphere. Gusts pawed at its surfaces, weak echoes of the tempests below. Its brain sorted radar returns, filtering out the echoes of thunder cells, searching for solid objects. It registered and ignored a hovering aerostat the size of an oil tanker. At last, it found what it was looking for: seven objects shaped like stubby arrowheads, strung out in a loose V.

The dart flared its air brakes and pinged the lead aircraft with a radio pulse. The reply came back at once: come on down, we’re waiting for you.

From the observation deck at the tail of the lead
merleta
, the cloud tops were a choppy froth of whites and grays stretching unbroken to the distant horizon. Even through the tinted glass of a viewport, they were painfully bright.

“Dart’s on its way down,” said Vinicius. “And none too soon.”

Bruno Almeida shrugged. The pickup had been scheduled for two days before but a line of storms had pushed through from the east and the controller had judged conditions too rough for a dart to reach them. Now conditions were finally right and they could go home.

Vinicius chafed at the delay, but Bruno was philosophical. He was sad to be leaving. Riding the
merleta
was an adventure, as close as he or any human could come to standing on the surface of Venus. Fifty kilometers below, the surface was a baking hell, with ninety atmospheres of crushing pressure and temperatures high enough to melt aluminum. Up here above the clouds, conditions were comparatively welcoming—if you overlooked the unbreathable atmosphere, the intermittent drizzle of weak sulphuric acid, and the perpetual squalls.

The data display in his left eye told him that rendezvous was still more than twenty minutes away. He left the observation deck and started to climb the stairs leading to the dorsal passage.

“Where are you going?” asked Vinicius.

“Just going to take a last look from the bow,” Bruno said. “Don’t leave without me.”

“Don’t make me wait,” Vinicius said. He already had his flight suit on, his bag of samples at his feet.

From the narrow passageway that ran along the aircraft’s spine, Bruno could look down on the sloping expanse of the wings and the fat pods of the engines. The
merleta
was approximately triangular, half lifting body and half aerostat, buoyed up by the nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere that filled its internal spaces. For all its size, it was surprisingly light. Most of its weight came from the skeleton of composites that held it together and the tanks in the thick wings, each one filled with a soup of water and photosynthetic blue-green algae. The wings themselves were transparent, allowing the algae to bask in sunlight that came from two directions: from the sun above, and reflected from the clouds below. From a distance, the seven aircraft of the flock looked like butterflies of translucent glass skimming across the cloud tops.

The bow nacelle offered the same view as the rear observation deck, a sheet of white cloud stretching away to the curving horizon under a turquoise sky. Bruno never tired of watching the clouds scroll by underneath, an insubstantial landscape that changed and refreshed itself continuously. Even when the winds carried the
merleta
around to the night side of the planet, the view was just as enthralling. Storms at lower altitudes lit the clouds from beneath with flashes of lightning, and sometimes an eerie phosphorescence outlined the towering cloud stacks. Consensus said it was a chemical reaction, but it made him think of bioluminescent plankton in the waters off Bahia.

“Pick up in five,” said Vinicius’s voice in his ear. Bruno shook himself. He had not noticed the time passing. Reluctantly, he turned his back on the clouds and made his way aft.

On the observation deck, Vinicius was ready to go, suited and helmeted. He waited impatiently as Bruno took his flight suit from its locker, fumbling with the stiff fabric.

The dart was visible now, a gray delta shape against the wispy clouds overhead, wings spread out for low-speed flight. It bore down on them, growing steadily larger. By the time Bruno got his helmet on, it filled half the sky behind them.

“Here it comes,” said Vinicius. “Locked on and ready to dock.”

The wind shear hit almost without warning. Bruno heard the first note of the alarm and grabbed reflexively for the handrail. Through the canopy he saw the dart stagger in the air, its sharklike nose tilting up suddenly. Something dark detached from the aircraft’s port side and whirled away on the wind. The dart plunged downwards.

Afterwards, he had no clear memory of the actual impact. The plastic bubble of his helmet muffled the tearing crunch as the dart smashed into the canopy. With his eyes squeezed shut, he never saw the dart’s port wing tear loose, sending the aircraft cartwheeling. He only felt a muted shock through his feet as the body of the dart slammed into the
merleta
again somewhere further forward, and then everything disappeared in a white and silver explosion as the tailwind whipped fragments of the shattered canopy across the observation deck.

The
merleta
groaned and tilted, and Bruno clung desperately to his handhold as they plunged downwards.

The alarm woke Tania before the end of her allotted sleep cycle. She came awake quickly and blinked her eyes rapidly for a status update. Her field of vision filled with indicator displays. All were green; the space station’s systems were still optimal.

When she reached the bridge, Tom Weatherell was seated at the engineer’s console, talking in the calm voice he used for his school broadcasts.

“. . . happened this morning, about seven o’clock station time. Two scientists from the Euro-Brazilian mission were being picked up from what the Brazilians call a
merleta
, a self-sustaining platform that can stay airborne in Venus’s atmosphere indefinitely. Something went wrong during the linkup, and the platform was damaged. That’s all we know right now, but we’ll bring you updates as we learn more.” He paused for a moment. “Obviously, we may not do much science today, so your teachers will arrange alternative activities for you. This is Tom from Venus, wishing you good studies and signing off for now.”

He cut the channel and turned to Tania.

“How bad is it?” she said.

“Very. One dead for certain.” He nodded towards the microphone. “The kids didn’t need to hear that from me.”

“What the hell happened?”

“The dart that was supposed to lift them to the skyhook crashed into their platform.”

“Jesus.” She struggled not to imagine the scene. “Who was it?” she asked.

“Bruno Almeida and Vinicius Santos—do you know them?”

She shook her head. “Not well.” With just fifty explorers of all nations working around Venus, everyone knew everyone else to some degree, but the separate missions still functioned mostly independently.

“I had Ivar on the comm earlier, freaking out,” Tom added. Ivar was the commander of the E-B mission, sitting up in their command ship in orbit, Tania remembered. In his position, she would have been freaking out too.

“Who died?” she asked.

“Vinicius,” said Tom. “His telemetry’s offline. Bruno says he’s dead.”

“And Bruno?”

“Hurt but alive. But—” He stopped speaking, his face grimmer than ever.

“But?”

“The platform fell. It’s down at forty-eight kay, drifting with the wind.”

The
merleta
swung and lurched on the wind, buffeted by fists of turbulence. In the dorsal passageway, Bruno clung to the handrail and braced his legs against the sides of the passage. Clouds swung crazily overhead and spatters of rain streaked across the clear plastic of the roof. The air outside was dim and misty, with a yellowish tinge.

The telltales on the inside of his visor said there was breathable air in the passage, so he unsealed his helmet cautiously. He smelled burning, faint but acrid, mixed with something fouler. Sulphur compounds, he guessed. It occurred to him that he was the first man in history to smell Venus.

The right arm of his suit was torn open from wrist to elbow and the exposed skin of his arm was pink and tender to the touch. He plucked a thin splinter of plastic from his flesh with clumsy gloved fingers, wincing at the pain.

When he pulled up his feeds, most of the displays flashed red. The worst damage was to the left side, where the tumbling dart had punched through five or six cells. Theory said that equivalent internal and external pressures meant that the lifting oxy-nitrogen mixture inside would bleed out slowly through any tear in the envelope. But theory didn’t cover the possibility of the skin being not simply torn but shredded, or of changes to the aerodynamic profile of the hull. The
merleta
had lost a significant amount of lift.

The worst part was the fall, a nosedown plunge with crosswinds pushing the
merleta
this way and that. It had seemed to take forever and Bruno could do nothing but wait for the moment when the increasing pressure would rupture the remaining air cells and the skeletal remains of the
merleta
would drop towards the inferno below. He wondered whether it would be pressure or heat that killed him and how far above the planet’s surface he would actually die. It would have been a distinction of a kind to be the first living man on Venus, even if only for a few seconds, but he doubted he would reach the surface alive.

To his surprise, the worst had not yet happened. After an hour, the
merleta
’s fall had slowed perceptibly. Eventually, it had settled into a configuration that couldn’t be called stable but which was mostly level, suspended in midair with its tail and one wing tilted down, swaying painfully with every gust.

“Bruno,” said the voice in his head. “You still there, man?”

“Hanging in here,” Bruno said. He grinned mirthlessly at his own joke.

“Listen, Bruno, we’re going to get you out of there,” said Ivar.

“Great,” said Bruno. He pressed his heels against the sides of the passage and pulled himself upwards with one arm. He had to do this every few minutes to stop himself sliding down towards the tail. Vinicius’s body was there, just inside the airtight door. Bruno didn’t want to go down there.

“I’m going to patch you over to HighPoint. They’re going to coordinate everything.”

“Wonderful,” said Bruno. “It was their damned dart did this to us. Big confidence builder.”

Ivar was silent, and Bruno regretted his outburst.

“Okay, thank you, Ivar,” he said.

“No problem.”

“Hey, Ivar—”

“Yes?”

“I—never mind. Nothing.”

“Bruno, this is Tania Stern from HighPoint Industries. I have Tom Weatherell and Mason Cline with me.”

There was no immediate response, and Tania thought for an instant that she’d forgotten to allow for the lightspeed delay, then remembered that Bruno was somewhere over the planet beneath her, not on distant Earth.

At last, the Brazilian responded. “Hello, Tania.”

“Ivar has asked us to coordinate the”—She searched for the right word.—“the response.” She had almost said “rescue,” but it felt wrong to promise something she might not be able to deliver.

“Okay.” Even through the radio, fuzzed by static, he sounded guarded.

“Can you give us access to your platform’s telemetry?” Tania was glad to move on from the awkward pleasantries to exchanging practical information. “If we can see what kind of shape you’re in, then we can work up a plan.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. The high bandwidth antenna’s gone.”

“Is that something you could work on?” Tania asked.

“The rest of their platforms are still flying. He could route via one of them—” Tom suggested.

“If he has line of sight, perhaps a laser—” put in Mason.

Tania silenced them both with a look.

“If you can’t do it, it doesn’t matter,” said Tania. “Just tell us what you can about your situation.”

There was a noise that she thought might have been a laugh.

“Not good,” Bruno said. “I think we fell about ten klicks. Most of the systems are offline.”

“How’s your air supply?”

This time it was definitely a laugh.

“Infinite. I’m sitting on top of several thousand liters of tailored algae. They can make oxygen faster than I can use it.” He paused. “I can even eat the little bastards if I have to.”

“That’s good,” said Tania. “What about the platform? Do you think it’s stable?”

“Not even slightly. I’m getting bounced around pretty badly. I don’t know how much longer it’ll hold together.”