Copyright © 2014 by Garnett Elliott
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, except where permitted by law.
The story herein is a work of fiction. All of the characters, places, and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover images © Angela Harburn, © Philcold; Design by dMix.
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CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
About the Author
Also by Garnett Elliott
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Praise for Garnett Elliott and RED VENUS:
"Garnett Elliott takes the Cold War into space in this rip-roaring planetary adventure tale that wouldn't be out of place in the browning pages of an old issue of Imagination or Imaginative Tales, two of my favorites from the '50s. Check it out!"
—Bill Crider
Anthony Award-winning author
"Garnett Elliott's RED VENUS is an exciting science fiction thriller that is at once pulpy yet high tech, crackles with sharp characterizations, a full-tilt pace, plenty of twisty surprises, and action galore … Oh, and did I mention the hostile planet teeming with fierce, grotesque creatures who fly and crawl and ooze out of the muck to relentlessly stalk and strike at practically every turn? Buckle up tight and get ready for a maximum-G thrust into outer space adventure!"
—Wayne D. Dundee
Author of Fugitive Trail, By Blood Bound and the Joe Hannibal series
"RED VENUS is a solid, old school pulp sci-fi story, equal parts adventure and intrigue. But it's also an insightful 'what if' narrative … a terrifically fast-paced alternate history with great characters and pacing. I loved it, and I'm pretty damn hard to please when it comes to sci-fi."
—Heath Lowrance
Author of Hawthorne: Tales of a Weirder West
PROLOGUE
At the close of World War II, Russian and American forces scrambled to secure the remains of the German V-2 rocket program. An underground hangar at Peenemünde yielded an undreamed of breakthrough; a prototype V-5 fission powered rocket. Both sides seized schematics of the V-5 and other technological wonders contained in the secret hangar, but the Russians made away with the actual engine.
The Space Race had begun.
Efficient, high-powered rocketry soon opened up the rest of the solar system for exploration. Venus and Mars were found to be habitable, after a fashion, and mining colonies from both superpowers probed the rocky depths of Mercury for fissionables. As the Cold War bled into the cold void of space, conflicts were sure to erupt …
CHAPTER ONE
A brilliant silver-white sphere filled the front viewing portals of the Krasnyy Sokol. Off the craft's starboard side the sun flared, transferring its brightness to the swirling, impenetrable mass of clouds below.
Cosmonaut Nadezhda Gura, Ship's Kapitan and pride of the Donetsk Flight Academy, drew an appreciative breath. The Sokol had taken two months to cross the black gulfs between Earth and Venus. Nadezhda had flown longer missions; twice to the Soviet mining colonies on Mercury, and once to a communications outpost among the treacherous asteroid belt. But on those occasions she'd been a humble crewmember, not Ship's Kapitan. The weight of command, coupled with the importance of the Sokol's mission, had threatened to crush her twenty-seven year old ego.
"Current speed?" she said.
On the flight couch beside her, ship's co-pilot Marina Pankov checked gauges. "Almost matching orbit."
"Good. We'll do a flyover of the poles before—"
"Kapitan." Marina's grey eyes widened. "Something on the radar, approaching fast."
"Meteor?"
"Could be. Multiple contacts. Looks like a swarm."
"Evasive."
Both women's hands flew over the controls. Power routed from the Sokol's braking engines to side-mounted jets, sending her careening off at a sharp angle.
"They're still coming," Marina said.
"Meteors don't change course. Those are orbital mines." Nadezhda snapped on the intercom. "Brace for impact." She threw the switch that activated the Sokol's close-in defense grid.
The viewports flashed a dazzling orange as turrets on either side of the ship's delta wings opened up. Heat beams swung out like deadly searchlights, cutting a swath of focused atomic power. Silent explosions jolted the craft. Strapped in, Nadezhda uttered a prayer for the rest of her crew.
The shaking passed. Marina checked her radar scope first, then the gauges. "That got them. But the main engine's breached, bleeding deuterium."
"Shut it down."
"Kapitan, we're already in the planet's gravity well. How are we going to land without engine power?"
"Let me worry about that. If we lose too much fuel, we can't make a return trip." And Moscow won't be sending a rescue anytime soon.
A red-gold braid floated past Nadezhda's forehead. Her own hair. "Gravity's out." The Sokol's fuselage, essentially a streamlined egg, must have stopped spinning.
"Something's wrong with the servos," Marina said.
Nadezhda switched the com back on. "Lev, can you hear me? Report your status."
"We're in freefall, obviously."
Lev's bass voice hadn't crackled over the intercom. The broad-shouldered Georgian came floating up through the connection tube. He had the beginnings of a nasty bruise darkening his jawline.
"You alright?" Nadezhda said.
"Hit a stanchion when you decided to barrel-roll. But nothing broken."
"How about Herr Schmidt?"
"Banged his head, I'm afraid." A smile flickered across Lev's face. "Now he's cranky."
"I want a full damage report, stat."
"Aye, Kapitan." Lev somersaulted in weightless air and pulled himself back down the tube.
"You see anything else on the scope?" Nadezhda asked her co-pilot.
"Negative. Kapitan, who placed those …?"
"Who do you think?"
"But we didn't receive any word they'd be here."
"We didn't tell them we'd be here, either." Nadezhda peered out the viewport at the face of Venus, growing larger by the minute. The bright clouds had taken on a sinister cast. What else was the planet hiding? "I'll send a coded message to Luna Control."
* * *
Exactly nine minutes later Lev returned to the control pod, ashen-faced. He unrolled a tube of schematics and set them against the bulkhead—there was no down currently in the pod. "We've got problems."
"Spare me the dramatics." Nadezhda was feeling rather ashy herself, but saw no need to share it with the crew.
Lev pointed. "We've got a breach here, and here. We can't route power to the retro rockets without blowing most of our fuel load."
"What about auxiliary jets?"
"They're out on the port side. We try to land with them, we'll send the Sokol into an uncontrolled spin."
Nadezhda chewed her lip.
"Kapitan, we can't just glide down without assist. The Sokol's too heavy, and Venus doesn't have a landing strip."
"I'm thinking." She ran her finger along the schematics. "What if I could supply lift right here, beneath the fuselage? Would that work?"
"If we used the atmosphere to brake first, shrug off some of our velocity … but where are you going to get the lift?"
"Ship's boat. The Dn
ieper is designed for re-entry."
"Ah. And you'll be piloting, of course."
"Of course."
Lev frowned.
"You've got a better idea?"
"How about this: we use the Dnieper to tow us out of the gravity well. I suit up, go EVA, and try to fix the breaches in space."
"Sounds about as risky. What if more mines appear? You want me to start blasting while you're out there?"
"I'm more expendable than you."
"You're the engineer, idiot. And with a crew of four, no one is 'expendable.' Not even Schmidt."
Behind them, Marina snorted. "You two can exchange vows later. There's a message coming through."
Nadezhda snatched up the paper strip as it spooled out.
BEGIN. ATTEMPT LANDING. STOP. MISSION HAS PRIORITY. STOP. END MESSAGE.
"What's it say?" Lev said, craning his head to get a look.
"It says we go ahead with my plan. Or you can take it up with Premiere Malenkov himself."
* * *
Nadezhda suited up in zero g and pulled herself along a series of rungs into the cargo hold. She caught a glimpse of the East Berliner, Dr. Schmidt, cradling his injured head when she passed by the habitation area, but only long enough to exchange scowls. Even in space, Schmidt insisted on wearing the crimson uniform that denoted a high-ranking Party member.
She had to maneuver to get through the cramped hold. Along one wall, secured tight to the bulkhead, lay the mission payload: a dozen scientific probes, each the rough size and shape of a torpedo. Nearby glinted the hulking titanium form of Gregor VII, dubbed 'The Tractor' by Luna Control. The robot stood a little less than three meters, a pet project of Dr. Schmidt's. She hoped it could live up to the nuisance of having to haul all its extra weight.
A short tube connected the hold to the ship's hangar, where the needle-nosed Dnieper waited. She slipped inside the boat's cockpit, closed all seals, and activated her helmet radio.
"Marina?"
"Here, Kapitan."
"I'm preparing to disembark. Open the hangar doors."
Servos whined; a rectangle of black space gaped behind her. She hit the toggle for the Dnieper's fission pile. Amber and green lights winked to life across the control board. She waited for the powerful thrum of engines beneath her feet, before stabbing a red button marked RELEASE.
"On my mark, Marina. 3—2—"
Explosive bolts fired. The boat went hurling from the rear of the Sokol, pressing her against the flight couch with the change in thrust. She caught an unimpeded view of her ship through the portal; a sleek ovoid with swept-back wings, stark against the white backdrop of Venus. Shrapnel damage from the mines showed as pockmarks on the port side. She felt them as scars on her own face.
"Kapitan," crackled Marina's voice, "we're approaching the atmosphere."
"I'm going to attach. Hold on."
She eased open the throttle. The Dnieper was roughly one fourth the size of her mother ship, but the Sokol seemed even larger as she maneuvered beneath the fuselage. Magnetic clamps rose from the boat and snapped fast against the ship's hull.
"I'm on," she said. Slung beneath the Sokol's belly, she could see past the nosecone at everything Lev and Marina saw. "Orient for atmospheric braking."
Maneuvering jets fired. It was a calculated risk, drawing on the damaged reactor engines, but the burn took only a few seconds. The Sokol now pointed her nose at an oblique angle away from the thick clouds below.
"About to contact, Kapitan … now."
Orange-red flames engulfed the Dnieper's viewports. Above, the larger ship creaked with the sudden touch of resistance. Nadezhda's body sunk into the flight couch. She felt a stab of panic as roaring echoed through the cockpit. If heat overcame the boat's shielding, the electromagnets holding her to the Sokol could lose their attractive force. The smaller craft would be ripped free.
The flames receded. Weightless, Nadezhda floated up against her restraining straps—but only for a moment. Like a stone skipping across the surface of a lake, the Sokol had risen back into space.
And plunged down again.
The curtain of orange fire returned. Teeth-rattling vibrations shook the Dnieper. Up and down, the process repeated. But the Sokol slowed her pace.
"Nine kilometers a second," Marina said, "eight … we're approaching the night side of the planet."
The exterior blaze died away, quick as it had come. The ship had broken through upper atmosphere, though the shuddering grew worse as the Sokol's wings opened braking flaps. All around stretched murky blackness.
"Still in heavy cloud," Marina said.
"It's like that most of the way down. Use the infra-red beams to find the southern continent."
Sheet-lightning flashed below them. The com crackled. When Marina's voice came back she was out of breath. "I think I've got coastline on the scope, but we're not going to hit it at present angle and speed."
"Kapitan," came Lev's voice, "try one-half power on the lift engines."
"One-half." Nadezhda transferred reactor thrust and opened the throttle. The Dnieper's lift rockets screamed to life, straining to nudge the heavier Sokol upwards.
"Another few seconds," Marina said.
Despite the assist, they continued to plummet through the atmosphere. A brick with wings, Nadezhda thought. Below them stretched the top of a massive storm front. Lightning lit the clouds from within, forming rolling, dappled patterns of white dazzle.
"Glide-path's changed," Marina said. "We should reach the coast on present trajectory."
Nadezhda closed the throttle. "I'll fire another burst when we're a hundred meters up." Too soon and they'd go sliding off course, possibly into the ocean. Too late and the Sokol would flatten like a steel pancake on impact. Interplanetary travel was a complicated tedium of matching orbits and thrust-vectors, but the actual landing remained a seat-of-your-pants endeavor, unchanged from the days of ditching biplanes in open fields.
Down they dropped. The storm clouds reached up to envelope both spacecraft. Rain pattered against the Dnieper's hull, misted the viewing portals. Nadezhda found the faint noise more comforting than the wind whistling across the cockpit.
"Four thousand meters," Marina said. "I think I can see ocean below."
"Turn on the running lights."
A bank of white beams stabbed out from beneath the Sokol's wings. Nadezhda squinted; through cloud-wisps on her front scope, she thought to glimpse a flat, ebon expanse. "Can you see anything on infrared?"
"Coast's due north. We're at three thousand meters, Kapitan."
"I've got the same gauge here. Don't worry."
At two thousand meters her hands felt slick inside her suit's gloves. She forced herself to take measured breaths. A billion rubles to design and build the Krasnyy Sokol, all those years of Cosmonaut training … none of it seemed like enough.
"A thousand meters," Marina said, forgetting her Kapitan's admonition.
"Put the landing gear down." Nadezhda saw a strip of gray against rolling black. Coastline?
"Gear's down."
"Kapitan," Lev's voice broke in, anxious, "when you hit the throttle—"
"I'm the pilot, remember?"
Five hundred meters.
She could see the wave crests, roiling with white foam beneath the ship's lights. Venus was ninety percent ocean, only two continents and a couple archipelagos. All of it crawling with life.
Hostile life.
Two hundred fifty meters.
She remembered growing up as a Young Pioneer. Dress white uniform and red scarf, and the ardent looks the senior Komsomol members always gave her. Nadezhda the early-bloomer. An orange tulip, opening its petals before winter had yet to thaw …
"Kapitan."
She jammed forward on the throttle. Full power. The Dnieper labored to push her big sister up, up. All at once the full weight of the Sokol seemed to come down on her shoulders. Metal groaned.
"Too fast!" Lev shouted.
The Dnieper
was giving all she had. Nadezhda swung the retro rockets' orientation from ninety degrees to forty-five. The little craft pushed back and up. The canopy buckled. Spider-thin cracks threaded across the front viewport, threatening to shatter it.
"Get out of there," Marina said. "If we land wrong, we'll crush you."
"Almost …"
Gray-white sand came looming up. A stretch of unimpeded beach. Perfect for a touchdown.
"That's got it, Kapitan. Get out of there."
She adjusted rockets with one hand, while the other released magnetic clamps. Unencumbered, the Dnieper shot forward, scraping free of the Sokol's belly in a shower of white sparks. Nadezhda jerked back on the flight stick. The boat pulled two G's as it executed a long loop, and came in behind the mother ship. The Sokol had already dropped onto the beach. Landing gear sunk into the wet sand at an odd angle, but the craft was down and blessedly intact.
"Open the hangar doors," Nadezhda said, her voice buoyant. "I'm coming aboard."
CHAPTER TWO
Science Officer and Ship's Surgeon Dr. Konrad Schmidt was not impressed with the landing.
A bandage wrapped around his bald head, he paced the habitation area, lecturing Nadezhda about the eventual demotion she would suffer when he submitted his report to the Party. Marina rolled her eyes. Lev rubbed his knuckles with suggestive menace. But Schmidt rattled on.
"… and if your reckless piloting has damaged any of these scientific probes, our sole reason for being here, I will personally notify the Vostok Academic Chair…"
Nadezhda paid him little attention, focusing instead on the purr of boiling water in her electric samovar. When its cycle had finished, she poured off four steaming cups and dropped in packets of smoked lapsang to steep. "Chai's almost ready. Will you join us for a toast, Dr. Schmidt?"
"A toast to what? Irresponsibility? Abuse of rank?"
"To a successful planetfall."
"Hear, hear," Lev said.
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