Acid Sky

by Mark Anson

  Clare went white.

  ‘Captain Alan Hartigan, as her commanding officer, will officiate. Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Hartigan.’

  Hartigan stood forward and thanked the colonel for the opportunity to promote ‘this deserving young officer’ who had shown ‘early promise’, ‘aptitude and common sense’ and other qualities that Clare barely recognised as applying to herself.

  When Hartigan had finished, Donaldson continued: ‘Attention to orders: The President of the United States, acting upon the recommendations of the Secretary of the Astronautics Corps, has placed special trust and confidence in the courage, integrity and abilities of Second Lieutenant Foster. In view of these special qualities, and her demonstrated potential to serve in the higher grade, Second Lieutenant Foster is promoted to the grade of First Lieutenant, United States Astronautics Corps, effective this eleventh day of December, twenty-one thousand and forty-one, by order of the Secretary of the Astronautics Corps.

  ‘Captain Hartigan and First Lieutenant Coombes, would you please come forward and pin on First Lieutenant Foster’s new rank?’

  Hartigan smiled at Clare, who was still wearing an expression of shocked surprise, as he and a young officer removed her gold insignia bars and pinned on the silver ones. The tradition of silver outranking gold had remained unchanged for over two hundred years. When they had finished, they stood back, leaving Clare on her own in front of the Colonel, who led a round of polite applause.

  ‘Captain Hartigan will now administer the oath of office.’

  Hartigan faced Clare, and indicated that she should raise her right hand. At a nod from him, she read off the card that he held up in front of her: ‘I, Clare Judith Foster, having been appointed a First Lieutenant in the United States Astronautics Corps, do solemnly affirm …’ Clare’s voice sounded strange in her ears, as if someone else was saying the words. As she finished, Hartigan stepped back again, and Donaldson continued:

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, First Lieutenant Foster.’ He indicated that she should say something. But what to say? They must know that she would have had no warning. She cleared her throat.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. I am – honoured to receive this promotion, and – and to be here on board your wonderful aircraft this evening. Thank you.’ She came to an abrupt halt, and smiled as winningly as she could. It seemed to do the trick, because Donaldson started to clap, and as the others joined in, waved to his steward to bring the drinks round.

  Clare turned at once to Hartigan, who held up his hands. ‘I know, I know,’ he said, smiling, forestalling her protests. ‘I submitted your assessment from the landing, and your promotion came back right away. I thought it would make a memorable start to your tour here. By the way –’ he handed her an envelope ‘– that’s your official notice of promotion. You can read that later.’

  ‘Congratulations, Lieutenant,’ Donaldson said, raising his glass, ‘not often we have something to celebrate. You’ve given us an excuse to open up the drinks locker.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said, uncertain of what to say. She took a glass of champagne from the steward’s tray, and gulped a mouthful.

  Colonel Donaldson took a long sip of his own drink. He was taller than Clare, and imposing; his square shoulders and upright, confident posture marked him out as someone who was used to commanding other people, and enjoyed it. ‘Come and meet my officers,’ he said, and guided her over to the great sweep of the window, which spanned most of one wall. ‘We always try to watch the sunset here; it’s one of the few treats of being where we are.’

  Clare gazed out across the clouds, to where the swollen Sun had started to slip below the horizon, a dark line of high clouds drifting across its face. The sky was ablaze with brilliant scarlet and orange. Above the sunset, a golden haze darkened to a deep blue, and violet, and finally the blackness of space above them. In the slanting light, the featureless cloud deck below the ship had been transformed into a tumbled landscape of red foam. Great mountain ranges of cloud rolled past beneath, with foothills, ramparts and huge winding valleys that emptied into lakes of darkness.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Clare said.

  ‘I’m glad you think so. I never tire of watching the sunsets here.’

  The young lieutenant that had helped pin on Clare’s insignia came and stood next to her.

  ‘Of course, it’s not real; we’re making sunsets happen every day by flying faster than the planet’s rotation. Incredible that we can come to this planet and recreate our own world’s day and night, by the speed of our flight.’

  Clare looked at him. He was about her age, somewhere in his twenties, with a narrow face and short-cut black hair, and pale blue eyes that you just couldn’t help but stare into. He was the sort of young officer that looked magnificent in a uniform, and Clare was suddenly conscious of her own borrowed outfit.

  ‘My weather officer, First Lieutenant Coombes. If there’s turbulent air on Venus, he can find it,’ Donaldson said dryly. Coombes grinned. ‘Don’t encourage him to talk about this planet, or else you’ll be here all evening.’

  ‘I could do with a reminder of how day and night works here, sir,’ Clare said. ‘I read up about it but it was some time ago.’

  Donaldson smiled good-naturedly and waved his hand for Coombes to continue.

  ‘Well, the planet’s winds at this altitude are moving faster than the planet’s rotating, plus we’re adding our own airspeed to that. The net effect is that we’re moving westward over the planet’s surface at nearly nine hundred kilometres per hour, which is enough to go round the planet in one Earth day at these latitudes.’

  There was a short pause while Clare tried to take all that in.

  ‘We’ve tried other diurnal cycles, but this one works best for the crew – you get a normal cycle of day and night, every twenty-four hours,’ a short and cheerful-looking female officer standing near the captain added helpfully.

  ‘Captain Donahue, medical officer,’ Donaldson said. Clare shook the offered hand, and was introduced in turn to the rest of the officers, who ran communications, logistics and catering, deck operations, maintenance and engineering. ‘And this is our flight operations officer, Captain Shaffer. He looks after everything on the flight deck and in the airspace around the ship.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, sir.’ Clare offered her hand. The flight operations officer was powerfully built, with sandy hair clipped in a traditional Marine Corps style, and a penetrating gaze. He shook her hand in a strong, dry grip.

  ‘You’ll be reporting to Captain Shaffer while I’m away.’ Hartigan smiled apologetically at Clare. ‘The return flight to Earth has been brought forward, so I’m taking some passengers up to the Indianapolis first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes sir.’ She nodded politely to Shaffer, acknowledging her new chain of command, before turning back to Hartigan. ‘Will you be away for long, sir?’

  ‘Well, they want me to stay up there at least until the Denver leaves for Mars, then there’s another two flights due in from Earth with passengers for the other carriers. Should be about ten days I guess.’

  Clare felt slightly uneasy at the sudden change in plans; she had been expecting Hartigan to be here for at least the first few days of her training. Now she would be on her own on a strange ship, reporting to a new commanding officer.

  ‘Don’t worry, Foster, you’ll be well looked after.’ He smiled, as if he had read her mind. ‘And with Captain Shaffer’s permission, you might get to see a spaceplane launch from the carrier. It’s scheduled for dawn, so it should be quite a sight.’

  ‘Sure you can watch, Foster,’ Shaffer said. ‘Buzz at the tower door tomorrow at zero five thirty, say that I sent for you.’

  ‘Thank you sir, I’ll look forward to that.’

  ‘We don’t usually launch until it’s fully light,’ Donaldson added, ‘but this one’s a special case due to the launch window. We’ll be ending our night-time air mining operations early so that we can get u
p above the clouds before dawn.’

  If there was ever a reminder of where they were, that was it, Clare thought, as the steward topped up her glass. The clouds below them were composed of droplets of sulphuric acid, not water. Yet those same clouds contained the raw materials that enabled the carrier to make oxygen, water, and all the other chemicals that it needed to sustain its operations.

  The steward refilled the captain’s glass, then turned to Hartigan, who shook his head regretfully. ‘Flying tomorrow, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’d heard that another of the Mercury mines was closing,’ Donaldson observed to Hartigan.

  ‘Yes, I’d heard the same – Chesterton, wasn’t it? I think in a couple of years there’ll only be Erebus left, at the South Pole. The price of helium-3 has fallen so much, the smaller mines just aren’t economic.’

  ‘What would that mean for us, sir? For the carriers I mean?’ Clare asked Donaldson.

  ‘Well, that’s a good question.’ The captain turned his glass in his hand, watching the rising lines of tiny bubbles. ‘We’d still need stopovers at Venus when there’s no direct launch window for Mars, but we’d certainly see less traffic through here. I suppose there’s a possibility that one of the carriers might not be replaced when it gets to the end of its service life, and we’d manage on two instead of three. Fortunately for us, that decision is a number of years away yet. You’re going on to Mercury next yourself, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir, in April, to Erebus Base – it’s a staging flight back to Earth.’

  ‘Yes. Well, if you get the chance to go round the mine there, I recommend you take it – it’s quite a sight. Massive place, in permanent darkness at the bottom of a crater. I know the mine manager there. Remind me when you’re going and I’ll ask him if he can organise a tour.’

  ‘Thank you sir.’ Clare did her best to sound enthusiastic, but the prospect of a dull tour round a mine at the bottom of a dark crater didn’t really interest her. Now, if it had been on Mars …

  While they talked, the room had filled with the ruddy glow of the sunset outside. Donaldson turned towards the window, and indicated that Clare should do so too. ‘It’s nearly sunset. Keep watching as the Sun goes down.’

  Clare focused on the disappearing arc of red fire that hovered on the world’s rim. It thinned, shrinking to a glowing ember on the horizon. Clare was about to turn away, but just before the Sun sank altogether, a sudden flash of green light stabbed upwards, briefly turning the high clouds a livid green, and was gone.

  A green flash. She’d heard of them, but never seen one before. She stood there, transfixed by the sight, and the irony that her first sight of one had been on Venus, and not on her own world.

  ‘And I think that’s the signal for dinner,’ Colonel Donaldson said with satisfaction. He indicated to his steward to put the lights on, and they moved to sit down at the dining table in the centre of the room. Donaldson sat at the head of the table, and Clare noticed that his place had a small display and intercom set into the table surface next to him, for monitoring the ship’s progress. He inclined his head towards the intercom:

  ‘Helm, captain here. Take us down at your discretion.’

  ‘Descend at discretion, roger sir.’ The reply came from a small speaker set into the table.

  ‘And take it gently; I’ve got guests for dinner.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  There was no discernible movement, but Clare thought she detected a fractional reduction in the distant roar of the engines as the steward brought round the starters. She was seated to the right of the captain, opposite Hartigan, Donahue, and the engineering chief, Neale. On her right was Shaffer, and next to him Crabtree, in charge of deck operations. Several places away, among the more junior officers at the other end of the table, sat Lieutenant Coombes.

  Conversation resumed, punctuated by the bright clinking of cutlery on plates. For Clare, having spent nearly three months on board a space tug eating ready-prepared meals, it was sheer luxury to sit at a table and have a nice meal, and she ate the starter of smoked salmon and potato salad slowly, savouring every mouthful.

  ‘This is delicious,’ she said to the captain.

  ‘Glad you like it. We’ve got quite a good galley here, and these are our potatoes, our dill and our salad leaves – all grown on board.’ He waved his knife over the plate. ‘I’d like to say that that the salmon is ours as well, but that would be pushing credibility.’ There was some polite laughter round the table.

  ‘I’m impressed, sir.’ She knew that the carriers had hydroponics farms, but she hadn’t expected anything like this.

  ‘Of course, everything tastes better here anyway because we’re breathing a normal air mix, at normal atmospheric pressure.’

  Clare nodded. It was difficult to get anything to taste right in the enriched oxygen atmosphere on a deep space vessel. She took another sip of champagne, and turned the glass between her fingers, looking at the bubbles that rose through the pale liquid.

  ‘It’s not real, I’m afraid,’ Shaffer said on her right. ‘We have to recreate it from wine concentrate. We can’t bring heavy glass bottles all the way from Earth, sadly.’

  ‘Another thing on the contraband list,’ Neale added mournfully from across the table.

  ‘And rightly so,’ Donaldson said, eyeing his officers. ‘It’s a mystery to me how many banned items mysteriously manage to arrive here, despite all the checks.’ From the suppressed smiles round the table, Clare didn’t think that it was a mystery the captain was particularly keen on investigating.

  She was beginning to feel a little light-headed, even though she had barely had half a glass. She poured herself some water from the pitcher in front of her, the ice clinking into her glass. She was getting over the shock of her unexpected promotion, and it was pleasant to be the centre of attention. She was actually having a lovely evening, and she didn’t want to spoil it by having too much to drink.

  She took a drink of the water, letting the cool liquid swirl round her mouth. It was slightly carbonated, and fizzed on her tongue as it went down.

  ‘What do you think?’ Neale asked, as she set her glass down again.

  ‘It’s not bad. Is it distilled?’

  ‘Yes, from the refinery process. We carbonate it directly from the atmosphere to give it back some taste. Makes a pretty good coke, too.’

  ‘So this is Venusian air, right?’ Clare indicated the bubbles rising in her glass.

  ‘Pure and unadulterated.’

  ‘Same air as you’ll be flying in, when you’ve acclimatised,’ added Shaffer.

  Clare considered her drink, and smiled. ‘I’m looking forward to that very much, sir. It’s pretty cool, flying in an atmosphere again.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a great place to fly. The one place where you don’t have to worry about any terrain.’

  ‘—because you’d be dead long before you reach any,’ quipped Clare.

  Smiles faded, and an embarrassed silence fell. She remembered suddenly, and cursed herself inwardly as she turned to the captain.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry sir, I—’

  Donaldson waved her words away graciously. ‘There’s no need. We can’t get by here if we’re afraid to talk about things that have happened.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I’d prefer that we hadn’t had the accident, but we have to learn our lessons. We had a USAC investigation team here for nearly eight weeks, looking into every aspect of our operations here, to see if we could have done anything better. Regrettably, it does appear to have been pilot error.’

  ‘Always go round if you’re not established on landing.’ Shaffer looked at Clare soberly.

  ‘I’ll remember that, sir,’ Clare said. The steward was collecting the plates. She wished she hadn’t got onto the subject.

  ‘This is a dangerous place, and we must never forget it,’ the captain said. ‘Sitting here, eating dinner, drinking champagne – it’s easy to forget where we are, so don’t worry about bringing up stuff like that.’<
br />
  Clare nodded, a little more at ease.

  ‘Now, what have we got here?’ Donaldson said as the steward brought in the main course, ‘Doesn’t that look great?’

  Later, Clare stood by the window in the darkness of her cabin, staring out at the scene outside. They were deep in the clouds now; if she craned her neck upwards, the stars had all been swallowed up in the murk. To her left, the dark sweep of the left wing ended in a red light that burned steadily on the distant wingtip.

  Her borrowed dress uniform lay on the bed where she had flung it. It had been a lovely, memorable evening. First Lieutenant Foster. That was what they had called her; that was who she was now. The official letter notifying her of her promotion lay opened on the bedside table.

  She had unpinned the silver bars from the uniform, the insignia of her rank, and she held them now, turning them over in her fingers. Odd that these two small pieces of metal could mean so much to her. A sensation of happiness surged over her, so intense that for a moment she closed her eyes. She loved being in the Corps, the sense of belonging, the feeling of shared danger, but most of all being accepted by her peers. It made the years of training, classrooms, exercises, examinations and mediocre pay seem worthwhile, if only for one evening like this.

  She closed her hand over the insignia. This was hers, she had worked for it, and she had been recognised. Did others feel the same way when they received their first promotion? Maybe some of them took it in their stride, but she had the feeling, the way they had looked at her this evening, that they all knew what this meant to her.

  She would write and tell her parents in the morning; they would get the message when they woke up. She drew the curtain over the window, gathered up the uniform on the bed, and put it all back on its hanger, smoothing out the jacket as it went over the top. She needed to thank Gray for it tomorrow. There was a small dried spot of something on one of the sleeves, and she took a corner of her towel, dampened it under the faucet, and wiped it off carefully.

  After her blunder at dinner, the rest of the evening had passed without incident, and her ill-judged comment seemed to have been forgotten. She had warmed to the captain, and could see why everyone liked and respected him. And the other officers too; Donaldson had a good command team. She wondered if she would be invited for another dinner again. It had certainly been memorable, seeing the sunset over the clouds. And the green flash, too; something she’d never seen before.