Bursts of static began to appear on the dimmed viewscreens—small squares on a grid seeming to die, fuzzy at the edges and black in the center of each, blooming across the “windows” like a checkerboard. No doubt a section of the module’s armor had been damaged or pried loose—either by the lightning or the debris caught in the high winds—and now the acid rain was taking out the microcameras, not all at once but one by one by one.
With each square that went out, the remaining portions of the grid glowed brighter, but with large areas riddled with black, the room stayed dim. The color of the displays remained gray, as more ash blew into the clouds.
The videoconference had been closed from the other end, but Townsend reached into the projected screen again and opened it back up. “Icarus lander to Daedalus VII,” he announced. “Anybody there?”
Captain Sviderskas drifted into view and sat. “How are you holding on, Commander?”
Townsend sighed. “You know, I’ve been here five months, and I’ve never actually set foot on the surface or seen it without the aid of an electronic viewscreen.”
“It’s Venus, Adam. It’s ninety atmospheres of pressure, 380 degrees in the shade, and it rains sulfuric acid. No matter how good our technology gets, we’ll never have a suit that can withstand those kinds of conditions.”
“I know. Just the kind of thing you get to thinking about. I’m not saying it’s unfair. It just would have been nice.”
Sviderskas just nodded quietly, letting him have his moment.
“Considering how far we’ve come, 380 degrees doesn’t sound all that hot,” Townsend said, turning to look as another square flickered off on the windows.
“Would it make you feel better if we called it ‘over 700 Fahrenheit’?”
Townsend scoffed. “Not really, but thanks for trying.”
An alert bloomed on the display next to the videoconference; the temperature was starting to overwhelm connectors in the pneumatic system that diverted his air from the airlock.
Without acknowledging it, Townsend swiped it away.
As they descended further through the atmosphere, the drones detected a favorable tailwind. ARMORER recalculated the transit path based on this new information, and the estimated time to destination dropped from 88 minutes, 20 seconds, to 83 minutes, then again to 80 minutes, 47 seconds.
***
“You’re applying for Icarus, aren’t you?”
After the video had wrapped up, Diggs had smiled the whole way back into the Grand Hall, through the booths for asteroid-mining missions, specialist positions at companies looking to develop comet-skimmers, and one particularly impressive display for a pair of deep-space telescopes that would orbit Phobos and Deimos. At the far end of the hall, two new booths—proudly displaying the Ariadne and Icarus insignias—had opened, and crowds of cadets were starting to line up in front of both.
“Are you telling me you’re not?” Townsend asked, surprised. “I’d have thought you and I would be competing for this the same way we’ve competed for top honors for four years.”
“This will be more like sports, then. You take the gridiron; I’ll keep the diamond.”
Townsend laughed. The AIAC competed in American collegiate sports, and had even developed something of a storied rivalry with the Air Force Academy based out of Colorado Springs. But while Townsend had taken to American football—and the strapping blond quarterback would have been idolized at most conventional universities—the football games were still wildly overshadowed by the Army–Navy grudge matches fought out by West Point and Annapolis. AFA–AIAC baseball, though, was hotly contested and widely publicized, and Diggs—a lefty first-baseman with a record number of double plays under his belt—was the one who ruled what passed among cadets as a social scene. He never missed an opportunity to remind his roommate, whose team had, four years running, scraped by with barely more wins than losses. He’d even started to keep a collection of balls used in playoff games just to display them around the dormitory quarters.
“Well, if you go in for Ariadne, then that’s space for both of us. Can you imagine—one of us the first person on Venus, the other the first to return from Mars?”
“Well, who else are they gonna give it to?” Diggs playfully threw a punch at Townsend’s arm.
“I don’t know, I think Xochitl Tan has a shot, given that she managed to make it to morning corporate more often than you did,” Townsend said, laughing as Diggs shot him a dirty look.
Both shrank back as they realized Xochitl was within earshot in the Icarus line. She was petite and slight, a year younger than her fellow cadets, but she wore the results of her perfect attendance at corporate exercise in an immediately apparent way. From beneath the severe-cut bangs of her black hair, she shot both boys the dirtiest look they’d ever seen.
Not daring to laugh, Townsend promptly turned away, back to his roommate. “That really would be pretty amazing, though, wouldn’t it?”
“Nah,” Diggs said, approaching the line for the Ariadne booth. “I think it’s about fair.”
***
Another alert flashed on the projected display—the platinum rings that served as connectors on the airlock system had failed, some bursting at the welds, others melting entirely. Only just visible was the tiny plume of air venting from a puncture in the seal. A camera still focused on the airlock showed the glint of platinum on the floor—a puddle that had once been a coupling—indicating that superheated gas had gotten into the system. Warning screens suggested the temperature was already rising to dangerous levels inside the damaged room. Again, Townsend swiped the alerts away, looking instead at the mess of items behind the projected display.
There hadn’t been space in his belongings to try to bring a football with him into space, but Townsend had managed to sneak along a baseball, an old game ball that Diggs had given him before his flight to Mars. He leaned forward to snatch it from the back corner of the desk and noticed his handkerchief still lying on the floor. Setting the ball aside, he picked up the hanky, and then the photo from underneath.
“You still with us, Adam?” came Bayless’s voice.
Townsend gently set the photo back down on the desk and called up the video feed. “I’m here,” he said.
“Darwin thinks we have a workable repair plan,” Bayless said. “We’ve got signoff from Control, and we’ve got a program inbound from coders in Kyoto we’re going to transmit to ARC-2 and ARC-7.”
“All right, let’s hear their plan.”
“It’s my plan,” cut in a Xhosa-accented voice Townsend wasn’t expecting to hear.
“We needed to route comms through Mesektet,” Bayless clarified, “and Nwende’s the only one who had the common sense to suggest a brute-force solution.”
“The danger to the lander comes from exposing the damaged door to the outside atmosphere, yes?” Nwende asked—but rhetorically. “Then your best bet is keeping the evac capsule against the airlock, even if it’s inoperable. ARC-2 is going to push up against the lander from the other side and just run its thrusters, pressing the lander against the airlock as tightly as it can.”
“It can’t keep that up for long,” Townsend started, but Bayless was ready for that one.
“It only has to hold it in place long enough for ARC-7 to deploy its plasma cutter and melt the edge of the seal. You give it a final evacuation order to flush out any outside gases by remote from right there, and then we seal the airlock shut permanently. Everything until the next Icarus capsule gets run through the supply platform.”
Nwende picked up the thread again. “ARC-2 will nearly deplete its fuel supply this way; we don’t think it will be able to make it to the Armadillo, much less back to the orbiter. So the program from Kyoto is going to teach Seven to dismantle Two for parts. The thermal shielding is going to be stripped off the armor and mounted above any other damaged areas of the hull for additional protection.”
“Priority has to go to the flanking panels alongside the commander’s residence to keep acid rain out of the electrical conduit,” Bayless added. And when Townsend tried to give him a clueless look, he dismissed it. “You turned down the brightness, Adam, but I can see the window from here.”
“It’s a good plan,” Townsend said, giving in, then checked the estimate from ARMORER. “I just have to hold out here another forty-one minutes.”
“I did want to take just a minute to talk about Launch Site Beta itself,” Gleason said, her eyes just barely glancing across the prepared notepad resting on her knee.
“Of course,” Ferreira responded, leaning back in comfortable conversation.
“Specifically the fact that nobody here on Mars has actually been calling it ‘Launch Site Beta.’”
The commander chuckled. “I suppose we had that coming, didn’t we? The lunar launch site always felt pretty institutional, so it didn’t really occur to anyone to call it anything other than Launch Site Alpha. But here, we’d already had a little more fun naming our settlements after Martians from literature.”
“Dejah Thoris from Rice Burroughs, Gekko from Heinlein, Ylla from Bradbury—”
“And Oyarsa, guardian angel of Mars in Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet.”
“But those are all pretty formal references.”
“Still, it was our own fault for overlooking perhaps the most famous fictitious Martian.”
“And that’s why, informally, Launch Site Beta is…?”
“Cape Marvin.” Ferreira couldn’t help smiling.
“And are there plans in place for a Gamma site, on Ishtar Terra?”
That question threw the commander, and she took a moment to answer thoughtfully. “As much progress as we’ve made ahead of schedule, the idea of using Venus as an outbound launch point to get any further than Daedalus is still severely premature. Commander Townsend is giving us a lot of great data on the effects of Venusian gravity on our crew, and the psychological toll of a four-month day, but he’s still unable to set foot on the actual soil. All construction work is done by autonomous armored drones.”
“But if need be, he does still have the option of the evac capsule.”
“He does,” Ferreira conceded, glad to see the clock indicating the interview was nearly over. “But if he should use it, that’s the end of his time planetside on any planet. He’s the first data we have on the effects of Venus residency, so we have no way to prep him to reintegrate with Earth standards. Just like you and I are here on Mars for the long haul, he’s got Venus or he’s got space. And we’re grateful for that sacrifice.”
***
On the fiftieth anniversary of the completion of Launch Site Alpha, a full media cadre had shown up at the Beta facility to witness the first launch. They crowded near the jetway for the chance to catch a brief interview, even though a massive viewing deck had been set up for a crowd of spectators.
As Landon Diggs approached the entrance to the Ariadne spacecraft, Riahann walked with him, squeezing his hand as the small gaggle of media specialists that acted as the Martian press corps trained their cameras and microphones on them. Both smiled and waved for the images that would be beamed back to Earth.
One of the writers, a fresh-faced woman in a suit, called out, “Mr. Diggs, how does it feel to be the envy of cadets back on Earth and of the people here who won’t get the chance to return?”
Diggs took a moment to look at his wife, returning her wistful half-smile. Having graduated the academy two years before he had, she had been on Mars when the Ariadne missions were first announced, making her ineligible for a return trip. Diggs kissed her softly on the forehead before turning back to the reporter and answering in his Alabama drawl.
“To be honest, it’s weird for me to think that anybody would be jealous of me, even now. I’m just one of six mission specialists selected for Ariadne, and we’ll all be making this same trip in the next few years. I fully plan on coming back at the first opportunity anyway.”
“Still, the first person to make the return flight—it’s a historic accomplishment.”
“I was already the first man to get married on Mars,” he replied, smiling broadly. “You know the only cleric on Mars last summer was a Jesuit monk?”
The reporter nodded. “Father Jorge Cantàn, who founded the ‘Mission to Mars.’”
“We’re both Southern Baptist, so he had to get special dispensation from the Vatican to preside over the ceremony. I think that’s still my proudest accomplishment—and not because we got a blessing from His Holiness Francis III—but because it gives me one very compelling reason to make the biggest journey of my life all over again.”
Someone behind a camera actually let out an “aww” sound, and Diggs nearly laughed out loud. Riahann blushed and turned away.
“If you want to be jealous of anyone, I’ll confess, I’m still jealous of my old roommate at the academy, Adam Townsend.”
“What’s he done that rivals this accomplishment?” a cameraman asked.
“You should know as well as I do,” Diggs said. “Commander on Daedalus VII, pilot of the Icarus lander. First man on the surface of Venus. I envy him a little when I think of the way he’s a true pioneer in a way that I never could be. He’s the one flying off into the sunset; I’m just the first guy to catch the boat back home.”
A technician came down the ramp, signaling that it was time to embark.
Diggs turned, whispering, “Do you know if they’ll be able to hear or see this in Venus orbit?”
“We haven’t heard from Darwin today, but everything’s being buffered; I can guarantee it’ll be available for them.”
“Great, thanks,” he replied, turning back to the cameras. “Adam, if you’re listening, this trip’s for you, brother.”
With that, he walked away from the crowd to the base of the ramp, pausing to turn to Riahann before he had to let go of her hand. “The next trip is just for you,” he said quietly.
“Just come back safe,” she whispered, and then stole a kiss from his lips. “And say hi to sunny Florida for me before you blast off back here.”
The technician took Riahann’s arm and started walking her back down the corridor, back to the viewing deck for the launch.
Diggs watched her go, holding his left hand up and giving a little twist to his wedding ring, a white gold band that matched her own engagement ring, both smuggled in on a previous supply drop. He looked down, smiling as he considered it, then looked up to make sure she had seen. As she slipped into the elevator that would take her to the viewing area, she held her own hand to her collarbone and flashed her ring back. The doors closed, and Diggs climbed into the command module.
T-minus thirty minutes.
***
An alert tone sounded on ARC-7, triggering ARC-2 to synchronize its systems. In order to adjust from atmospheric transit to overland navigation, the drones would need rapid deceleration. So, in perfect unison, hatches opened in the back and something akin to a parachute deployed. The materials necessary to stand up to the Venusian atmosphere dragged the drones down as they caught air and buffeted them back, rather than hanging up as they would have from fabric on Earth, but ARMORER had adjusted for that.
Time to destination: twelve minutes, thirty seconds.
Townsend grabbed the baseball, experimentally tossing it hand to hand. “Braeden, buddy, are you there?” he asked. He’d left the comms open from his end, and it took almost no time for the video feed to be reestablished.
“I’m here,” Bayless confirmed. Then he cocked his head, showing the first sign of amusement in the past three hours. “Where did you get a baseball?”
“It was my roommate’s, back at the Academy. He collected these, just to rub them in my face, because they’d actually been used in playoff games. He gave me this one the day we got our assignment letters.”
“You didn’t play yourself?”
“No, I played football.”
At that, Bayless tried to suppress an actual laugh. “American football? Like, competitively?”
“Backup quarterback. Is there something funny about that?”
“Besides the fact that you’re not built for it? And you’re Canadian?”
“Yeah, well, I heard it was what the girls were into.”
“Sviderskas said once that you played football—I figured she meant soccer, and when she tried to set me straight, I assumed she was joking. I think I owe her twenty quid.”
After a moment considering the quiet, weighing his thoughts, Townsend sighed. “Listen, I was wondering if we could get any of the communications from Mars. Not the Houston comms—I mean the press feeds, the stuff they’ll be watching on Earth.”
A few seconds went by, then Bayless turned back to him. “You know Mars is behind the sun right now—we’ve got flares interfering with the video. We can get the audio feed from Launch Site Alpha, but there’s a lag time of more than ten minutes.”
“I don’t really care. I just want to be able to hear them get away.”
“All right, hold on,” Bayless said, his face disappearing from the display. With a hiss and pop that harkened back to the days of AM and FM radio, the sounds of the Martian press corps filled the small room. Townsend mopped his brow with the handkerchief one more time as he moved back across the chamber to his bed and stretched out to listen.
With only thirty minutes to go before liftoff is scheduled, Mission Specialist Landon Diggs is coming down the jetway now, accompanied by his wife, GP Officer Riahann Miranda.
With a silent flicker, the last bit of picture from the outside blinked out, leaving the “windows” black and dead. Townsend clutched the baseball and closed his eyes. Beyond the sound of the transmissions from Mars, the squeal and shuddering of the module in the storm echoed from one end of the chamber to the other.
Today’s launch will be the culmination of more than a decade of preparation, and will usher in a new era of space exploration that signals it is now safe for our explorers to live on a distant planet and still return home.
ARC-2’s optical sensors picked up a metallic object in the distance that radio triangulation indicated had to be the Icarus lander. It dipped slightly to the right, course-correcting to aim directly for the end housing the damaged escape pod. Beneath, the former lava flow that had been unbroken for thousands of miles leapt skyward, and both drones briefly rose over the crests of the hills before navigating back down.
At seven minutes from destination, Icarus began transmitting data from inside the damaged zone. ARMORER immediately relayed its warnings to Daedalus: the failure of the cooling system had turned the airlock into an oven, and the atmospheric gases that had managed to leak through the seal were expanding.
The drones plunged into a smoke-gray cloud as it rolled over another ridge of hills, losing visual of Icarus. As they dropped below the cloud, they had to adjust to the darkness cast from above, bright yellow fog settling into the color of tarnished gold. Lightning blinded the sensors again every few seconds.
At four minutes, eighteen seconds from destination, audio sensors began to register the shriek of straining metal echoing through the valley. The whole craft shook as the defunct escape pod faltered, fell away from the airlock, and crashed to the ground in a bronze- and copper-colored cloud of dust and ash. Even as it fell, the doors on the other side collapsed inward under the atmospheric pressure. Dents popped, panels sagged, and conduits twisted and wrenched aside, venting air explosively as the atmosphere blew its way inside.
Aboard Daedalus, a cascade of catastrophic system warnings bloomed over every viewscreen as the audio feed continued to stream toward the surface of the planet.
Mr. Diggs, how does it feel to be the envy of cadets back on Earth and of the people here who won’t get the chance to return?
