Mission: Tomorrow - eARC

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  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.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Tania could see Tom signaling to her. She nodded to him.

  “Okay, Bruno, this is what we’ll do. Our people Earth-side are simulating the problem now and working up a plan. We’re going to review, check in with the other missions and find out what resources we have in the cloud layer and here in orbit. What I need you to do is to find a way to send us as much data as you can on the status of your platform. Can you do that?”

  His answer came through chopped and distorted.

  “. . . try.”

  “Good enough. Out for now, I’ll get back to you when I have some news.”

  Bruno looked out from the access door at the base of the port wing. The damaged area of the wing was clearly visible, a tangle of twisted struts and shredded transparent paneling. The closest algae tanks were in fragments.

  Mãe de Deus, he thought, did that thing fly all the way through the wing?

  He thought about the Stern woman in the command ship up above. She had promised to do what she could, but he noticed that she hadn’t said what that might be. She knew it was a bad situation and she hadn’t raised his hopes with empty promises of rescue. He appreciated her honesty. At the same time, he did not entirely trust her. She was still corporate and corporations always put the bottom line first.

  Time to start saving yourself, he thought.

  The problem was that the merleta was too deep in the atmosphere, down in the turbulent zone. It had been designed to glide above the cloud tops, not wallow around in the muck. If he wanted to live, he had to gain some height.

  The first thing to do was to try to patch the damaged sections. Like other rigid and semi-rigid airships on Venus, the merleta leveraged the fact that ordinary air was a lifting gas in Venus’s dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. If he could refill the cells, he could level the craft and maybe even start to ascend.

  The merleta had been assembled in situ in the cloud layer, its skeleton covered by swatches of polymer fabric extruded from purpose-built bioreactors. It was designed to be self-repairing; an onboard synthesizer could extrude new hull panels to be sewn and sealed in place by one of the merleta’s four spiderlike maintenance robots. He could see one through the transparent wing, hunched motionless at the very edge of the damaged section, clinging to the wing rib.

  He brought up a command interface and selected the maintenance panel. The four robots were all marked as idle. He blinked a question at the merleta’s AI.

  Maintenance drones idle because of lack of materials, the AI responded. Bruno frowned.

  Bring material synthesis online, he instructed.

  Synthesizer activation failed, the AI said after a moment. Insufficient power to initiate material synthesis.

  Explain.

  Power generation levels 18% of normal, it answered.

  Bruno started to enter another question, then stopped. He knew what the problem was.

  The merleta was down below the cloud layer now, pitching in the yellow-tinted gloom. The solar cells that generated most of the platform’s power were starved of light.

  “We’ve run multiple simulations,” said Derek Kelly. “The AIs are unanimous. This is not a survivable accident.” He paused for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

  Tania touched her transmit button.

  “Understood, Control. Please ask the AIs to identify the solutions with the highest chance of success,” she said.

  Mason slumped in his seat.

  “Well, that’s that then,” he said.

  “The AIs aren’t infallible,” said Tom.

  “They’re smarter tha
n we are,” Mason said. “At least at this kind of task.”

  They sat in silence, waiting for the response from Earth. When it came seven minutes later, it was unequivocal.

  “The consensus is that there isn’t any course of action that offers a significant likelihood of success,” said Kelly. “The platform is too deep in the atmosphere for a dart to reach it.” He hesitated for a second, then added, “The corporation will not authorize the use of any further resources for a rescue mission.” His image flickered and disappeared.

  “So, what now?” asked Tom.

  Mason stared at him. “Didn’t you hear the man? No further resources.”

  “Tania?”

  Tania breathed out slowly.

  “We need more information about the state of the platform. If Bruno can’t give us a data feed, do you think we could use one of the Explorers to do a low-speed flyby?” she said, ignoring Mason.

  Tom pulled up a shared virtual console.

  “Difficult. In terms of temperature and pressure, it’s already at the edge of the envelope for an Explorer. You’d almost certainly lose the aircraft and you might only get a few minutes of observation time.”

  Mason gestured angrily, filling the shared display with data from the package that had accompanied the video message.

  “Did you even look at this stuff?” he demanded. “Here. ‘Platform will continue to lose altitude and will suffer structural failure once power reserves are exhausted and it can no longer maneuver to avoid local extremes.’” He called up an image of the planet, with the day and night zones marked. A tiny spot of red light marked the location of the damaged craft, creeping slowly closer to the black line of the terminator. “Look. It’s going to go nightside in just a few hours.”

  “Then we need to act before that happens,” Tania said. She waved away the display. “Are you ready to start helping, or do you have other objections to make?”

  “Do you actually have a plan?” Mason asked.

  Tania looked at him. “Yes,” she said. “I believe I do.”

  Bruno crouched in the bunk room that he had shared with Vinicius, bracing himself with his back against the wall. Close to the center of gravity of the merleta, the swings and lurches of the craft were less violent. He could grab a few moments of rest without worrying that he was likely to be battered into unconsciousness.

  His earpiece pinged for attention and he blinked up his personal feed and saw that he had new email. It was from Sandrine, the fourth member of the team. The subject line said simply “Good luck.” He left it unopened in his inbox, along with a half dozen routine messages from home that he could not bring himself to read.

  He died reading his email, he thought. On Venus. That would be a hell of an epitaph.

  The discovery that the ship’s repair systems were unusable had left him feeling numbed and helpless. He had tried to find a way to divert more power to the synthesizer but nothing had worked. It was like playing chess against an implacable and sadistic opponent. Every time you thought you had a possible move, you found yourself checkmated.

  He wondered what Tania Stern and her colleagues were doing. Had they given up on him already, or were their corporate AIs formulating some ingenious plan to rescue him?

  He felt an almost overwhelming desire just to stay here in the bunk room, waiting for the end in relative comfort. Maybe he could even lie down on his bunk. He imagined himself stretched out on the bed in his flight suit, the plastic bubble of his helmet resting on the starched pillow. Too bizarre.

  He pushed the thought away. The planet could kill him, but he would die as an explorer and a scientist, reasoning, observing, fighting until the end. He pulled up the command interface and started to sort through the status feeds, looking for a way to pare them down to the essentials so that they could be uploaded over the narrowband interface. Data first, he thought. Then I can work on shedding some weight.

  “Why now?” asked Tom. “Why send a policy update now?”

  “It’s simple,” said Tania. “They’re serious about us not using any resources.”

  “I can’t launch any of the Explorers.”

  “I doubt that’s all. The skyhook isn’t responding either.”

  She paged through the systems under her control. Everything was locked down. The new policy update had ridden in on the coattails of another video message from Kelly, uploading itself to the command system and rewriting all her access permissions. The update was flagged as a temporary maintenance fix. No doubt it would be revoked once the damaged platform had fallen from the sky.

  “It’s as if they wanted the poor bastard dead,” said Tom bitterly.

  Tania said nothing. It would be convenient for HighPoint if the merleta fell. With the wreckage scattered across the surface of Venus, it would be hard for anyone to say exactly what had happened or how much of the blame lay with the programming of the dart. As a way to dispose of damning evidence, it would be difficult to do better.

  She shook her head. Her corporate masters were not monsters, simply pragmatic. They weren’t trying to murder the helpless Brazilian, just prevent her from pointlessly squandering expensive resources. It comes to the same thing though, she thought.

  She freed herself from her seat restraints and floated towards the central command console. She slid her magnetic key from its pouch.

  “What are you doing?” Tom asked.

  “Executive override,” she said. The cover of the console slid up, exposing a touchscreen. She summoned up the management application.

  Mason blinked, looking worried. “Communications to Earth just dropped,” he said. He stared at her. “Did you do that? Did you just firewall Mission Control?”

  She nodded. “Just making sure that they can’t send us any more updates.”

  “Tania, we are offline. Do you know how serious that is?”

  “Calm down,” she told him. “It’s just a temporary maintenance fix.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Tom grinning.

  “But you’re still shut out,” Mason said. “You haven’t changed anything.”

  “No?” She tapped her way through the message log until she found the record for the update package. She marked the update as corrupt. The screens in the command center flickered for an instant as the system rebooted.

  “This is . . . irresponsible,” said Mason. “I protest.”

  “Your protest has been noted.” She looked at him. “Relax, Mason. If this doesn’t work, I’ll take the blame. And if it does, corporate can take the credit.”

  “I’ve got the Explorers back,” said Tom. “Do you want me to launch one?”

  She shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “Forget the drones. We’re going to use the ‘Landis.’”

  Draining the algae tanks was exhausting work. The interior of each wing was divided into multiple cells in order to minimize potential losses in the event of a puncture. To move from one cell to another, Bruno had to use a utility knife to slash through the tough plastic that separated each one from its neighbors. The damage he was doing would make the merleta unsafe in the long run, but he doubted that this particular vehicle would last long enough for anyone to care.

  There were vent valves on the underside of the wings, but the merleta’s AI had reverted to some sulky emergency mode in which it refused to carry out routine operations. Whoever had trained it must have classified draining the tanks as a maintenance task. Nothing Bruno could do would convince the AI that it might also be part of a strategy for saving the vehicle.

  He needed to rebalance the merleta. It was currently drifting with one wing high, pummeled by every gust of wind, twisting this way and that. If he could drain some tanks in the undamaged wing to counterbalance the ones lost in the collision, it might be possible to get it back onto an even keel. Then it could go back to doing what it did best, gliding with the wind. It might even start to climb.

  Pulling himself along the struts that gave the wings their shape, he reached the first ta
nk. Even stripped down to shorts and T-shirt he was sweating freely. The wings were not climate-controlled and conditions inside were little short of infernal. When he tried to turn the stiff wheel that operated the valve, his sweat-covered fingers slipped on the smooth plastic.

  At last, the valve clunked open and he felt the pipe vibrate under his fingertips. A flushing mechanism kicked in—Bruno said a silent prayer of thanks to the designer who had realized that it might one day be necessary to drain the tanks under more than one bar of pressure—and a hundred liters of water and blue-green algae gurgled through the pipe and spewed out into the Venusian atmosphere. The merleta lurched.

  Bruno stuck his knife between his teeth, gripped the strut, and started to crawl deeper into the wing.

  “Your bosses are trying to route a message to you through us,” said Ivar. “Do you want me to pass it on?”

  “No, Ivar, that’s Okay,” Tania told him.

  “We wouldn’t normally filter anything marked urgent, but the firewall blocks anything above a certain size automatically, so—”

  “I understand. Listen, Ivar, you can just keep filtering that stuff. We’ve taken ourselves out of the loop for the moment so that we can focus on Bruno.” She frowned at the options on the communications console. She would need to block indirect as well as direct messaging.

  “Got it,” said Ivar, sounding doubtful. “But are you sure—” Tania cut him off with a gesture. I’m trying to save your guy, she thought. Don’t second-guess me.

  “Telemetry from the platform shows it in level flight,” said Mason. Once it became clear that Tania could not be swayed, he had stopped working against her and started being helpful.

  “And the Landis?” Tania asked.

  This time it was Tom who sounded doubtful.

  “Holding for now, but it’s going to get bad the further down we go. It’s not built to cope with that kind of turbulence.”