Acid Sky (6 page)

‘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.’

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.

She put her rank insignia back into their small box and placed it by her bedside, and slipped into bed. She lay there for a while after turning off the light, thinking about the day. The ship moved gently beneath her, disturbed by some eddy in the deep clouds. It was a comforting feeling, and she closed her eyes, listening to the distant roar of the engines.

Outside, the
Langley
raced through the featureless dark outside, its giant intakes gulping in huge quantities of cloud-laden air, compressing and cooling it, extracting the thin mists of chemicals from the sky. The engineering crew, at the rear of the ship, kept an eye on the adsorber columns as they did their silent work, trapping the faint traces of water and acid vapour, and the fuel and liquid oxygen tanks filled slowly with their cold and bubbling liquids.

In the main control room, at the very front of the
Langley
, the duty commander leaned over the radar display, scanning the skies for any sign of trouble, and spoke occasionally to the two other carriers, hundreds of kilometres away in the Venusian night. He glanced at the orbital situation display, and watched the thin turquoise lines of the tugs in their orbits high above the planet. One line arced in from deep space; another flight from Earth was moving into orbit, and the tumbling figures on the display showed its distance and velocity falling as its long journey came to an end.

Underneath the flight deck, in the pressurised hangar, the maintenance team worked on the spaceplane, readying it for its return flight. They had removed one of the engines for its scheduled service check, and were lowering it into a carrying frame. The maintenance chief glanced up at the sleek body of the spaceplane above him, its outspread wings almost filling the hangar.

In the main galley, amidst the clattering of pans and shouting of a busy kitchen, they were making bread rolls for tomorrow morning. A gust of heat came out of the bread oven as the door opened and the first tray went in, then the door slammed shut.

Outside, the
Langley
roared on through the night, its navigation lights glowing like embers in the clouds.

Clare slept.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dawn over the second planet from the Sun.

Clare looked out over the wastes of cloud to the western horizon, where the sky lightened from black to a deep blue. Mercury was a brilliant star in the west, climbing up the sky in its futile attempt to outrun the Sun. Overhead, the night sky still sparkled with the brightest stars, but they were fading one by one, as the light crept upwards on the edge of the world. The tops of the upper cloud deck were silhouetted against the growing light on the horizon, but the world around the flying carrier was dark.

She stood in the flight operations centre, at the top of the air control tower, ten metres above the flight deck. The
Langley
was rising up out of the clouds after its night-time air mining operations. So far, only the control tower protruded, racing through the clouds like the tailfin of some vast animal. The streamlined fairing of the landing radar was next to emerge, turning in the darkness as it scanned the sky. Then, all around her, the huge area of the carrier surfaced through the cloud deck.

From this high vantage point, the enormous size of the
Langley
could truly be appreciated. Clare watched, transfixed, as the flight deck emerged, three hundred metres long, outlined in in a blaze of yellow lights down the edges, and white down the centreline. Then the wings, nearly two hundred metres across, marked out by red and green navigation lights at the wingtips, and with a smaller set of canard wings at the front. Finally, the large ventral fins and rudders, built on the underside to keep the deck area clear, burst free of the clouds, and the
Langley
climbed into the deep blue of the dawn sky.

In the centre of the flight deck, the spaceplane that had brought them here the day before rose slowly into view on the elevator, illuminated from below by the lines of deck lighting. Its giant fuel tanks were filled to their maximum capacity for the long climb to orbit, and held over 150 tonnes of cryogenic propellants, kept liquid under intense cold. A heavy-duty cable snaked up into a port in the belly of the spaceplane, keeping the craft supplied with power until it started its engines. As the elevator reached the deck surface, twenty-four giant steel pins, forced into place by hydraulic pressure, locked the elevator into position and took the load off the lifting rams.

Inside the control tower, the only light came from the various displays that showed the
Langley’s
attitude and position, the weather all round, and the trim of the huge craft. Another display showed the orbital situation of the space tugs circling high above the planet, and the curving line of the ascent trajectory that the spaceplane would take on its climb up to the
Indianapolis
, where it would transfer its passengers to the tug for their return journey to Earth.

Besides Clare, there were only five other people in the flight operations centre: the tower controller, three crewmembers manning various consoles, and Shaffer, the flight operations officer, who stood towards the front windows, watching the deck through binoculars. Clare was a little way back, by one of the side windows. The dark blue flight overalls that she was dressed in were a long way from the formality of last night, but Clare was much more at her ease. She had reported here at 05:30 as Shaffer had suggested, and one of the crewmembers had let her in and shown her where to stand, where she could see everything but not be in anyone’s sight line.

‘Launch window’s open, sir.’ The crewman monitoring the orbital situation display looked up from his monitor.

‘Roger. Let them know.’ Shaffer didn’t remove the binoculars from his eyes as he watched the spaceplane on the flight deck.

‘Orbital One Four Nine, Tower, launch window is open.’

‘One Four Nine, roger. Ready to start engines.’
Clare could hear Hartigan’s voice on the speakers.

‘One Four Nine, clear to start engines. Report when ready for disconnect.’

Clare imagined the scene on board the spaceplane, Hartigan watching the engine RPM come up as his copilot started them in turn. She could see a faint cough of flame from each engine as it ignited, before it was snatched away by the slipstream.

She glanced back to the western horizon. The dark blue of the sky had lightened in the last few minutes, and she could see the whole of the horizon clearly now, extending round the
Langley
.

‘One Four Nine, four good engines. On internal power, brakes on, ready to disconnect.’

‘One Four Nine, ready disconnect.’ The tower controller changed channel. ‘Deck Ops, Tower. Disconnect umbilical and close up.’

‘Deck Ops, disconnect and close, roger.’