Mission: Tomorrow - eARC

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  “That may very well be, Lon, but you will find that your ability to communicate with Ms. Rawal may become compromised by your distance. Our direct link is secure, but I can’t promise that it will be able to accommodate other communications.”

  Hardball already. “You will find that I am just as ‘unprofessional’ as Ms. Rawal, Donna. My counteroffer stands. It’s fair. All I want is 25% of gross profits up front, based on current value algorithms. Take it . . .” I float into the region where stereo is maximized, and sixteen seconds later am gratified to see her sink back a little. “Or leave it.” I’m searching with my fingers for the viewscreen’s connector to dramatically disconnect communications, when the screen goes off by itself, and with it all of the little telltales in that section of the bulkhead.

  I’ve been disconnected.

  A quick check shows that only the electronics connected with communications and entertainment have been shut off, all of which was built onto the underlying Dragon control systems. I guess this means they think that losing my ability to entertain myself and stay connected with home is a significant hardship. And, in a way, it is. For the first time, I feel really alone. There’s a hollowness, a realization that I’m totally on my own out here. It’s hard to explain. I’ve always been connected. My first memories are of the virtual world. Lame though they were, I could always connect with the characters in the interactive games or even experience the older noninteractives. The lag wasn’t a problem, and staying in touch via audiotext was actually a relief in some ways. Now. Nothing. Pretty clever of them, I must admit.

  The cage is basically mechanical and on its own circuit, though, and so I transfer over and strap myself in. I need to think this through, and a little monotonous movement will help.

  I run through the moves I’ve made to secure my position. Bezospace’ knows by now that they can’t kill me, or they lose Ondine. They haven’t even begun to negotiate, so this has to be just to let me know how much power they have over me, and maybe soften me up a bit. Loneliness out here is something I’ve never really worried about before, but eventually it will wear me down, and I might be susceptible to some kind of trick. How long would that take?

  They don’t have a whole lot of time, though. As Ondine approaches the keyhole that will take it on the desired trajectory, it will become more and more difficult to divert it. The Autonomous Unit is not infinitely powerful. Since it’s a proprietary device developed during the Taweret Crisis of 2040, and actually worked in that case, I have a lot of faith in it, but I don’t know exactly how it works. It’s presumed to be some sort of mass driver, but the details, especially of how it gathers and projects material from the surface of the asteroid, are only known to a select few at BS.

  As time passes, Ondine moves ponderously ahead, closer and closer to the point at which it will continue on past the Earth, never to be captured no matter how far into the future the orbit is calculated. Worthless to me, but worthless to them, as well. So they have to make a move soon.

  Exactly twenty-four hours go by, and I’m awakened by the hum of the fans in the communications unit. The viewscreen comes on with a flash and Sutherland solidifies within the light. She looks tired, and the shadows under her eyes look like a light bruising, not a tattoo. Has she been working on this message since I saw her last? I swim over into the field of view.

  “I hope the loss of communications hasn’t been a problem, Lon.” The concern in her voice is indistinguishable from the real thing. “We’re working on it. Meanwhile, I have a new offer for you. It boils down to 15% of the gross after the basic costs of the mission have been subtracted. Fuel, consumables, that sort of thing. Give the go-ahead to Ms. Rawal and we’ll let her handle the details. Considering the problems that have developed with MK212, I think it would be better to get this over with. We wouldn’t want you to be marooned out there.”

  Not nearly enough. “Can you quote me a number? I’m really not expecting anything definite from her, but there is a minimum number I’m looking for.”

  “Sorry. Not until we see what the AU does.”

  I wait about thirty seconds before replying. “That doesn’t work for me. There’s no way I’ll agree to a deal like that.”

  Sixteen seconds later, her jaw firms up and she looks genuinely hurt. “In that case, we are withdrawing the AU and bringing it home. The mission is over. Unless you agree right now, we’ll miss the keyhole. You have sixty seconds to agree.”

  “No deal,” I say. “I think you’re bluffing.”

  “This is not a game, Mr. Innes. Feel free to return to Earth at your convenience. Remember, MK212 must be turned over to the originating office within three months, or usage fees will start to apply. Goodbye and good luck.”

  Another thirty seconds or so, enough time for me to tell her I’ve thought about it and agree, and the screen shuts off. This time the unit doesn’t go completely dead, though. The little green light on the audiotext screen stays on, basically saying, “It’s not too late to change your mind.”

  There’s a shuddering thud from up forward, the sound of the AU detaching itself from the docking mechanism. MK212’s porthole is pointed toward Earth, and if I push my face up against it, I can barely make out the complicated, gold-foil enshrouded shape, rotating slowly, pulling away.

  Now this is a convincing bluff. Or was she telling the truth?

  A week has passed and I’ve put MK212 into eclipse behind Ondine to reduce the damage caused by solar radiation. I don’t know why I don’t just start back, but I feel like staying here is making the statement that I haven’t given up, that I believe they are bluffing. Out the porthole, I watch the silhouette of Ondine against the zodiacal light, and it’s about the only thing that feels real. I’ve gone over the details of the plan so many times that I must have engraved my brain with them. I just don’t see what I could’ve done wrong. There’s no way that BS would give up on this just because of a lousy 25%. If this is just a negotiating tactic, it’s gone on way too long. I’m not going to initiate contact, though. It would be a sign of weakness. My position is airtight. It can’t not work. I won’t give in.

  Or am I going crazy?

  Another few days pass, but I’m really not counting any more. It’s clear that it’s too late to make a deal now. I suppose I might be able to sell my ownership of Ondine to a company with a really far-reaching future plan; if space development continues at the rate it’s been going, it could be of some use. Not enough, though. Not enough.

  At least they could turn the damn entertainment unit back on. What have they got to lose? I could audiotext them and tell them I give up. The green light says I can.

  There’s a whisper louder than the air flow that grows into the hum of fans that I’ve gotten used to not being there. The viewscreen comes on, a blinding light, and a person forms within. It’s not Sutherland. I can hardly believe it. Xandra! And she’s grinning, which looks really strange.

  “You won!” she says, “Twenty-five percent of gross. A couple of caveats, but you basically got everything you wanted.”

  It doesn’t sink in, and then it does. The AU must not have gone very far.

  “Tell them I’m interested in buying MK212 if they’ll sell it for a reasonable price. I’m coming back, but I won’t be staying long.”

  * * *

  Michael Capobianco has published one solo science fiction novel, Burster (Bantam). He is co-author, with William Barton, of the controversial hardcore sf books Iris (Doubleday, Bantam, reprinted by Avon Eos), Alpha Centauri (Avon), Fellow Traveler (Bantam), and White Light (Avon Eos), as well as several magazine articles on planetology and the exploration of the solar system. He served as President of SFWA from 1996-1998 and again in 2007-2008, and is a member of SFWA’s Writer Beware and Contracts Committees. Capobianco has been SFWA’s Authors Coalition liaison since the coalition’s founding in 1993. His website is http://www.michael-capobianco.com.

  This next tale was a top finalist in the annual Jim Baen Memorial Contes
t. 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 i
t?” 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.