by Terry Mixon
“Threat warning!” Pitts suddenly half-screamed as half a dozen lights lit off on their panel. “I’ve got missiles inbound!”
“Anti-radiation, kill the radar,” Saburo snapped.
Brad was already on it. The towers were SAM sites, and they were automated to shoot at anyone who tagged them with radar.
“They’re designed for this muck. We’re not,” Pitts said grimly as she brought the engines to full. Fire encased the shuttle as she maneuvered. “I can’t dodge them.”
“Put us on the ground,” Brad ordered. “If we can’t dodge, we’ve got to hide!”
She made it most of the way down. They were roughly ten meters above the ground when the missile slammed home into their engine assembly. The trip through Venus’s atmosphere had apparently wrecked the detonator and the warhead didn’t go off…but it was enough.
They were still going almost thirty kilometers an hour when they hammered into the top of the plateau.
It took Brad at least a full minute to regain something resembling composure and balance after the impact. Finally, he slowly detached the safety belt and rose to his feet. It was immediately obvious, first, that the shuttle was at an angle and, second, that the shuttle’s gravity plates were off-line.
He almost fell forward into the cockpit window before regaining his balance.
“Pitts, you okay?”
“Yeah,” the pilot replied, her voice muffled. He looked over to see that she’d closed her helmet and had streams of data flickering over the inside of it. “Cockpit screens are gone, but the computer’s still online. I’m checking our status.”
“Keep at it,” he ordered. “I’ll check on the troops.”
He carefully balanced his way up the chairs to the cargo compartment. Saburo was about halfway along the spacecraft, where he’d managed to catch himself on some of the seating. Brad couldn’t see the Colonel’s expression, but he’d known Saburo a long time.
“Seatbelts, Colonel?” he asked carefully.
“You are not as funny as you think you are,” his subordinate snapped.
“Is everyone okay?” Brad replied, ignoring the complaint.
“Yeah. Stiller’s unconscious, but he’ll be awake in a minute or two. Assuming we’ve got a minute or two. Boss?”
“Air in the shuttle is clean, so I don’t think we broke the atmosphere seal,” he told Saburo. “More than that, well…”
“That’s what I’m pulling from the computers,” Pitts announced as she climbed up into the cargo compartment.
Two of the troopers were helping Stiller upright from where he’d hit his head on the side of the spacecraft. Brad took a moment to check the man’s vitals himself, but Saburo had summed it up: he’d been briefly knocked out, but he looked like he’d be fine.
Well, minor concussion, but that barely ranked on their problems right now.
“Good news,” Pitts told him. “We didn’t break the atmosphere seal, and if I were them, I’d assume we were dead.”
“And the bad news is that they have good reason to think so?” Brad asked.
“Bingo,” the pilot replied. “Our engines are wrecked; this shuttle will never fly again. Atmospheric seal is holding, but it’s only rated for about an hour at this depth, and we’ve been down here for fifteen minutes already.”
“So, we have forty-five minutes to come up with a miracle,” Saburo concluded. “Commodore?”
“Well, my bad news is that I disagree with your assessment of how long our suits will last out there,” Brad said dryly as he linked his wrist-comp into the shuttle’s systems to locate where they’d “landed”. “I make it about six minutes. Maybe five.”
“I said they wouldn’t last ten minutes, not that they would last ten minutes,” his subordinate replied. “Any miracles on your mind, boss?”
“I don’t know about miracles, but I can point out some luck,” Brad replied with a chuckle as he used his wrist-comp to project a map of the Sagan Plateau on the shuttle wall.
“This is the plateau and I’m overlaying what we detected on the way in,” he continued. The dome was added as a green wireframe. Six towers, each twenty meters high, went in around it, as did the half-buried surface tubes connecting them to the dome.
Several other items appeared, green marks on the map of the plateau.
“What are those?” Saburo asked.
“Tunnel caps,” Brad replied. “At one point, they’d have been secondary docks for mining ships, quick connections to deploy drills or miners before getting back under cover. Some might have always just been blockers where they broke the surface when mining.
“All of them would have personnel accesses, for safety’s sake, and they’re all interconnected. I’m not sure I’d trust them to have survived—but the dome wouldn’t be safe if any of those tunnels were breached.”
One last icon appeared on the plateau map.
“And we’re here,” Brad concluded. “The closest tunnel entrance is twenty-two meters away. We’re basically swimming in the air out there, but I think we can move twenty-two meters in under five minutes.”
“Cross twenty-two meters, override a five-to-twenty-year-old airlock—while hoping the damn thing still works at all and hasn’t had its security updated—then get everyone in. In under five minutes.” Saburo shook his head as he spoke.
“You have a high opinion of us, boss.”
“Yes,” Brad confirmed. “I also know we don’t have a damn choice. Either we get into those tunnels and take that base, or we all die down here. I know which one I’m choosing.
“How about you, Colonel?”
Chapter Twelve
The airlock door slid open and the atmosphere of Venus rushed in. Until that moment, Brad has not truly understood what “air pressure equivalent to underwater” had meant.
What was filling the airlock around him was technically a gas. Very technically. From the perspective of the man trying to walk into it, however, it was functionally a liquid. He could have swum upward in it if he wanted but instead let the planet’s gravity hold him down.
He was heavier on Venus than he was on most planets, and the tons upon tons of gas pressing down on him didn’t help. Warning lights started lighting up in his helmet, and he inspected each of them grimly.
Warning one: pressure was too high. His combat vac-suit was designed, as the name suggested, for vacuum, but it had optional modules and upgrades to also allow it to function in high-pressure environments. It could survive the current environment for about thirty minutes.
Warning two: temperature was too high. His suit was designed for absolute zero, but it ran primarily off insulation, so controlling heat was a key part of the design. It could protect him in this heat—for about thirty minutes.
Warning three: the suit was literally being eaten by the atmosphere around it. A significant portion of Venus’s atmosphere was sulfuric acid, and the cloud covering the Sagan Plateau right now was even more acidic than usual.
His suit could survive the acid for an unknown period of time, almost certainly under ten minutes, and the damage to the suit would undermine the temperature and pressure protections. The temperature and pressure would make his body irretrievable, but it was the acid that was going to kill him.
For some reason, he hadn’t thought it necessary to get combat vac-suits that could survive immersion into a condensed and superheated vat of sulfuric acid.
“Come on, Commodore,” Pitts told him. “I’m not liking these suit warnings and we’re the last ones out.”
The faceless shape of the pilot’s helmet turned back toward the shuttle as they slowly pushed out against the miasma holding them.
“Damn. Poor girl didn’t deserve this. Without serious protection, she won’t last two weeks. There’ll be nothing left of her.”
“She did her job, Pitts,” Brad replied. He managed to keep any audible strain from his motion across the plateau out of his voice. Given how much effort even the tiniest motion was demanding, tha
t was hard.
“She got us down safely. Now we have to get ourselves back up. And the way home is thataway.” He gestured toward the waypoint on his helmet while taking another laborious step.
“Twenty-two meters. We can make it.”
The pilot fell in behind them as they struggled forward. Brad, at least, did most of his combat training in a full-gravity environment, but nobody could afford to maintain a full gee of artificial gravity all the time.
Most stations, colonies, and starships set their gravity at thirty percent of Earth’s and called it a day. Pitts, it seemed, was rarely out of those environments. She was lagging and they were running out of time.
“Come on,” he told her, opening a panel on the side of his suit. The rope inside hissed when exposed to the “air,” acid eating into its polymers almost instantly. “The rope won’t hold long, but it’ll help me pull you.”
She didn’t argue. She took the other end and hooked it into her suit as Brad pressed forward.
“Saburo, we’re coming in, but I’m basically carrying Pitts,” Brad radioed forward on a private channel. Adding the pilot had barely slowed him down. The advantage, he supposed, to the environment was that she could basically just float and let him pull her.
“Please tell me you’ve got the door open.”
“It isn’t secure, but it’s in terrible shape,” his subordinate reported. “We’re only going to get it open once, so we’re holding for everyone.” Saburo paused. “It’s going to be a tight squeeze, but I am not leaving anyone behind.”
“No, we’re not.” Brad stumbled, barely managing to catch himself before he hit the ground. If he tore his suit…
“You okay, boss?”
“Next time, can someone suggest orbital bombardment as an alternative plan to landing on Venus?” he asked.
“I believe this was a rescue op,” Saburo pointed out. “Otherwise, I’m totally on board with that plan. We see you. Five meters, Commodore. We’re standing by with the outer door open.”
With a sharp inhalation—one now tinged with a hint of fear as more lights began to flash red on his suit—Brad lunged forward with Pitts. Reaching the door, he basically tossed the pilot in.
The rope snapped at the last moment, but one of the troopers was there. Pitts didn’t even have enough time to panic before armored arms grabbed her out of the air and pulled her down.
“You’re okay,” the woman told Pitts. “We’ve got you. You’re okay.”
Saburo gestured them inside. Brad didn’t move fast enough for his subordinate, however, who grabbed him by an arm and yanked him into the airlock.
“Go!” the Colonel barked.
A heavy door slammed shut behind them, a massive metal shutter pitted even on this side.
“Locked down,” a trooper reported. “Seal is clean, somehow.”
They were pressed together, suit against suit, and Brad had to suspect that the acid on each of their suits was rubbing against each other.
“Air system?” Saburo asked.
“Negative,” the same trooper replied. “Refusing to activate. We’re feeding it power, but the motor is toast. It can’t move enough of this crap to stabilize the airlock. Inner door won’t open at this pressure either.”
“I am not dying in here.” Brad wasn’t sure whose panicked voice that was, but he couldn’t let it carry on.
“Belay that Everdarkshit,” he snapped. “Are we talking a hardware block or a software one on the door?”
“Little bit of both,” the tech told him. “Any software is long dead, though. Manual sensor and pressure readers.”
“This is a spaceship lock with an extra heavy door added outside,” Brad pointed out. “Can you relay me a picture of the sensor?”
The tech obeyed and Brad studied the familiar workings. Once, long ago, he’d been an engineer, and he still remembered some of it.
“All right, it’s old enough that I know the unit,” he told the tech with a chuckle. “Any familiarity yourself?”
“I know the software override to force this damn door open. There’s too much pressure on the sensor for me to manipulate it any way I know of.”
“You never worked on a freighter with a shoestring budget, I see,” Brad replied. “You see that gap at the far side of the panel?”
“Yeah, it’s less than a centimeter deep; it’s the input for the sensor reader.”
“Exactly. Stick something in and lever it off.”
A blade appeared in the video feed as the tech obeyed, tearing the sensor panel open. There wasn’t much visible behind it, just the inner workings of a device that was determined to keep the door open.
“All right. Upper left corner, see that panel?” Brad kept his voice very level and calm, hopefully keeping his people from panicking even as he struggled with a moment of claustrophobia.
They had a dozen people in an airlock designed for five. This wasn’t going to end well if they didn’t get the door open.
“Yeah…electrical cover, right?” the tech asked.
“It’s an add-on for this unit to protect against the corrosive muck this place calls air. Get it off, force a connection between the contacts before they corrode. It’ll trigger an override sequence that doesn’t even check to see if the outer door is closed.”
He heard the tech swallow.
“I didn’t think you could make an airlock do that,” he pointed out.
“That’s why it isn’t easy and isn’t advertised much,” Brad said. “But sometimes, you’ve got to break it to fix it cheaply. Make it happen, soldier.”
The people who’d assembled the tunnel cap had known what they were doing. There was probably a factory in one of the aerostat cities that turned regular airlocks into these special-purpose units, and the last thing they wanted was this override activated at the wrong time.
In fact, from the perspective of the designers, what they were doing was a bug, not a feature. They wouldn’t have wanted someone to release an airlock full of Venus’s atmosphere into the tunnels.
There was a limit to how thoroughly you could attach a single panel, though, and that limit failed against the monomolecular cutter in an electronics technician’s emergency kit. You couldn’t have much of a monomolecular blade without a secure end-point, but if you only needed a five-millimeter blade, well…
The panel popped clear and the tech shoved a wad of conductive putty into the gap. There was no attempt at precision; he just filled the electrical box with the conductor.
If they’d been planning on ever using this airlock again, it would have been a terrible idea. As it was, the door unlatched and swung open…and sparks blasted clear of the box as the few remaining intact systems burnt out.
“We’re in,” the tech reported with a long exhalation. “We’re in.”
Brad and his people stumbled out of the airlock into a completely unlit tunnel. The twenty or so cubic meters of Venus’s pressurized air they brought with them exploded along with them, spreading out into the massive tunnel complex with an almost-eager will.
“Dump the suits,” Brad ordered grimly as he checked over everyone’s status reports. “We’re not going to get enough of the acid out of them to stop them degrading, and we might be better off without them.”
About half of the suits’ modules could be retrieved and used separately, and he started on the effort of extracting them from his own suit with a will. An inner armor layer from the helmet became an unsealed combat helmet, with a coms system and projected HUD. Key pieces of armor linked into a harness and went over his body, and a voice-controlled light from his helmet went on his shoulder as he retrieved his weapons from their panels.
“Long arms didn’t survive the trip,” Saburo reported. “Blades, pistols, a few grenades, and special tricks. That’s what we’ve got.”
“Then that’s what we’ll use,” Brad replied. “I don’t suppose we’ve got a map of this warren?” he asked, looking at the tunnel that stretched off in the dim light of the
ir relocated helmet lights.
“There might have been one in the door computer once,” their tech reported. “But…long gone. Looks like all the new owners did was occasionally come by and spray some reinforcement on the outer shutter.”
“I’m surprised the damn thing opened,” Brad admitted. He could do that now that they were safe. “I only gave it fifty-fifty odds.”
“And what in Everdark were we going to do if it didn’t?” Saburo asked after few long seconds of silence.
“Blow the cap off and hope that being underground minimized the environmental effects enough for us to make to a working interior airlock,” Brad said instantly. “Our odds of survival would go way down, but they’d still be above zero.
“And staying in the shuttle had survival odds of zero. We had to take the chance.”
“Right.” Saburo’s voice was dry, but he didn’t argue the point. “So, now what, boss?”
Brad’s helmet was linked into his wrist-comp, but it was still easier to work with the computer itself instead of trying to use voice commands. He brought up the holographic screen and studied it.
“Okay,” he said aloud. “Whatever we paid for the multi-system navigation program we’re running? We didn’t pay enough. Linked into satellites as long as it could, piggy-backing on the shuttle the whole way, then inertial-reckoned us down.
“I know where we are,” he concluded. “And I know where the dome is and I know where the signal we’re here to rescue is.” He smiled grimly. “And fortunately for my peace of mind, they’re in roughly the same place and they’re both that way.”
He pointed along the one tunnel they could see.
“Somewhere through these tunnels is a Cadre base where they captured and interrogated an Agency operative. Fortunately for us, they will have shuttles that can reach orbit. Unfortunately for them, they almost certainly think we’re dead—and while I won’t expect the Cadre to be incompetent enough to not lock their shuttlecraft, I am confident that we can break the locks they’ve got.