Acid Sky

by Mark Anson

  ‘No warning tones or computer announcements?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Umm. Well that certainly suggests that the jettison wasn’t commanded, as there’s an automatic warning tone and a voice warning before it fires.’ He looked thoughtful as he drew out the borescope and handed it back to the technician. ‘Well, we’ll need to do a complete stripdown, but we’ll get to the bottom of it. If it’s one of my team not doing their job, they’ll be cleaning jetpipes for the rest of their tour.’

  Clare stared at the smoke marks where the bolts had fired to sever the engine from its pylon, and the damage to the wing. She wanted to ask if there any way this could have been done deliberately, but she couldn’t ask questions like that, not in front of the chief and his team.

  Besides, she didn’t need to ask; she knew already.

  She found Coombes in the hydroponics farm, below the galley. He was standing amongst a row of tall sweetcorn plants, almost hidden by the foliage and the blaze of reflected sunlight that filled the glasshouse.

  She couldn’t trust herself to speak as she walked towards him. He turned as she approached, and he looked relaxed and confident, but she noticed he backed away slightly as she came up to him.

  ‘I hear you had a nasty accident a little while ago.’ He snapped off one of the cobs of corn and examined it casually. Clare stared back at him as he continued: ‘You were very lucky. Losing an engine like that, with an inexperienced pilot alone at the controls – it doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  ‘I should report you, and whoever’s protecting you, you worthless piece of shit.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ Coombes laughed. ‘That’s where you’re dead wrong, Foster. You report anybody, and you won’t even make it to a hearing. You think you’re smart –’ he spat out the word, and she could see the suppressed fury behind his eyes, ‘but you don’t know jack shit. We’re on an aircraft flying along over the surface of a planet, millions of miles from home. There’s nowhere to hide, and there’s nowhere to get off. You’ve seen what can happen now. You piss me off, you threaten me again …’ he stared at her, his eyes blazing.

  Clare returned his stare as levelly as she could, determined not to be intimidated, but she was worried. Whoever was protecting him had been able to arrange the sabotage to the engine quickly and effectively. She wasn’t certain if it had been intended to kill her or just to scare her into silence, but who knew what else they could arrange, that would eliminate her completely?

  ‘I think you need to tell me something,’ he said softly.

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘You were told,’ he said simply, and looked expectantly at her.

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘I realise this may be hard for you take in, so I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,’ he said quietly, his face hard. ‘You’ve got one more chance.’ He dwelt on the last three words, speaking them slowly.

  ‘You won’t get away with it. The chief’s already found what you did to the jettison mechanism. It’s only a matter of time before they find out it was deliberate. And then it’s you that’ll be saying sorry.’

  Coombes laughed, a really unpleasant, knowing laugh. ‘You think we’re stupid? We’ve altered the flight data recorder. In about two hours’ time, when they’ve finished analysing the recording, you’ll be hauled before Shaffer and the chief, trying to explain why you fired the jettison switch. It’s all there – you armed the circuit, fired it, then set the switches back. We’ve even added the sounds on the voice recorder. Sure, you’ll deny it, but faced with that evidence, nobody’s going to look any further. You’re going home.

  ‘But – if you do as you’re told, poof.’ He spread a hand in mid-air. ‘The data recording’s back to normal. No Foster pressing switches when she shouldn’t. It’ll just look like some unexplained firing of the bolts. You choose.’

  Anger and fear fought inside Clare’s head as she regarded Coombes and his growing smile. They had thought of everything. She just wanted to punch him in the mouth, to see him go down, and give him the kicking of his life, a kicking so bad that—

  ‘I’m still waiting, Foster.’

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. Coombes cocked his head on one side and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I’m – very sorry,’ she said, staring at a spot between his eyes, and wondering what it would feel like to be crushing his testicles under her heel.

  ‘That’s better.’ Coombes looked at her, his eyes triumphant. ‘You touch me again and there’ll be no more warnings. You won’t know when it’s coming. Have you got that?’

  Clare nodded, once.

  ‘I said, have you got that!’ His voice rose to a shout.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ she said, slowly.

  ‘Okay.’ He nodded, as if thinking.

  Clare stood there, saying nothing, dreading what was coming next.

  ‘You need to do something for me now,’ he said, softly.

  You’d better not ask me to put your dick in my mouth, because I might just bite it off, threats or no threats.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You’re going to take this over to the Curtiss, next time you go. Which is tomorrow,’ he added, tossing a small packet over to her.

  ‘I’m not scheduled on a ferry flight tomorrow.’

  ‘You are now,’ he said, and with those few words she realised that someone in the air wing must be helping him. She didn’t show anything on her face as she weighed the packet in her hand.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That doesn’t concern you. What does concern you is making sure it gets there, and leaving it where I tell you to tomorrow, and not speaking to anyone else about it. Believe me; I’ll know if you have.’

  ‘What—’

  ‘That’s all, Foster. You belong to me now. Run along and be a good girl.’ He nodded towards the stairs that led up and out of the farm. ‘Oh, and Foster, before I forget, you know the other night, when you said that I had my “nasty little way” with you? Well, let me tell you something you may not remember. I tied you up, I fucked you in the ass, and you begged me to do it.’ He stopped, his eyes glistening, watching her expression.

  Clare could barely contain her hate. She breathed in through her clenched teeth, and the pulse hammered in her ears. She visualised stuffing the packet down Coombes’s throat, ramming it in hard with her fist. For a moment, nothing else mattered; she would have willingly taken any consequences, just to see him choke and struggle and die in front of her. Nothing would have given her greater satisfaction.

  With a struggle, she controlled her hands from reaching out and grabbing him. He had her for the moment, until she figured out what to do. She turned and walked away, feeling his gloating eyes on her as she walked down the row of sweetcorn, and then the tangled vines of the tomatoes. She set her foot on the lowest step of the spiral stairs that wound upwards, back towards the lower deck. The steps clanged as she went up, and as she went round, she could see that the lines of tall plants hid her from Coombes’s view.

  She desperately needed time to think. Who was helping him? He had to tell them somehow that she had come round. How was he going to make contact? Without conscious thought, impelled by a half-formed idea, she clumped on the stairs as if she was still going up, but reversed her steps instead and came down again, making her footsteps fade away, as if she had climbed out of sight. She reached the floor in silence, and stole furtively to one side, out and away from the stairs and Coombes’s hiding place, until she was behind the black plastic tanks of the water recycling plant where they had first kissed, although the memory was tainted now. A muted swirling noise came from the machinery and the tanks. She crouched down and waited.

  Ten, fifteen minutes passed, and there was no sound from Coombes. So, he was waiting as well. Then came the metallic sound of tools being tidied up. Perhaps he was going to make contact some other way? She had just decided that it was a waste of time, and was about to
make her way out, when she heard the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs.

  The footsteps continued to the bottom of the spiral stairs, scuffed the floor as they stopped, then moved past where she was hiding, heading towards Coombes. They paused suddenly next to her, and for a terrifying moment, she thought she had been discovered, and then they continued off in a different direction.

  The dense foliage in the farm deadened sounds, and the noise from the tanks next to her made it hard to make it out, but she could hear voices. She moved at a crouch, away from the main stairs, closer to the voices, until she could make them out.

  ‘No, she left a while ago. There’s been nobody down here since.’ The voice belonged to Coombes.

  ‘Have you sorted it?’

  Whose voice was that!

  ‘Yes. She’s got the packet for the Curtiss tomorrow.’

  ‘Alright. I’ll alter the rosters to put her on ferry duty, and I’ll go with her, keep an eye on things, see how she’s taking it. If she’s tempted to talk, she’ll talk to me first.’ The voice was terribly familiar, but some part of Clare just refused to believe who it was.

  ‘Is Maintenance sorted?’

  ‘That’s my problem. Yours is staying out of trouble. Next time, you keep your hands off the rookies. She was just upright enough to have reported you, and if she had, you wouldn’t have lasted long. If she’d have pushed you off the deck the other night, that would have saved us a lot of trouble.’

  ‘All right, it’s sorted now.’ Coombes sounded uneasy.

  ‘Yeah, and who had to sort it? Trouble is, you always think with your dick, and I end up having to rescue your stupid ass,’ the voice said contemptuously.

  Suddenly, Clare recognised the speaker. A wave of panic swept over her as she realised who it was. It was impossible! But there he was, talking to Coombes about her!

  It was Shaffer!

  She actually felt dizzy. It couldn’t be! He had got out of the cockpit, seen her off on her first solo, comforted her when she landed, shared a drink with her in the ready room. And he had tried to kill her. She fought off the sensation of fainting, of falling, and she grabbed clumsily at the edge of the plant tray behind her. It was empty, and it slid off the irrigation bench and crashed onto the floor.

  Jesus Christ!

  ‘What the fuck—’

  ‘There’s someone there! I thought you said no one had been in!’

  ‘I – I thought—’

  And then the voices were silenced, and Clare knew with a deathly certainty that Shaffer had shut Coombes up with a wave of his hand, and was questing the rows of plants, looking for her.

  She had to get out. She had to get out. The stairs! It would be the first place they’d go for, to cut off her escape. She had to get as close as she could to the stairs, before creating some distraction so she could make a run for it. You idiot, she told herself, if you could have just kept quiet, they would have gone, and they wouldn’t have known.

  She moved as quickly as she could back to the water processing plant where she had been before. She could see the stairs from here, through the rows of plants, and she could see Shaffer’s head by the curve of the stairs. It turned slowly, silently, seeking her out. He was carrying a spade, holding it in two hands like a raised weapon.

  Then, from some way behind her, a faint sound of movement. She looked back and saw Coombes’s hand reaching round the next corner; he seemed to be creeping around at a crouch, like her. In a moment he would round the corner, look down the row, and see her, and they would get her.

  There was an empty plant pot on the floor near her. She reached out and took it, and lobbed it over the row of plants to land in the next aisle.

  At the sound, Coombes’s hand withdrew, and Shaffer, his face hard, moved away from the stairs. She had to move quickly. Once they saw what it was, Shaffer would turn round, and she was dead.

  She crept forwards. He was still moving away from her, towards the sound. The first step of the spiral staircase was on the other side, and she had to get round.

  ‘Hey!’ Coombes yelled, ‘By the stairs!’

  Clare swung round the stairs and leaped up the steps, two at a time. She heard the hammering of Shaffer’s feet as he covered the few metres in seconds, and a whoosh of air as he swung the spade at her ankles, but he missed, and it clanged hard against the metal of the stairs, making them shake. She raced up the steps to the lobby outside the galley and ran for the front of the ship. Someone yelled at her to slow down. She didn’t stop running until she was in the corridor outside the captain’s day cabin, where she hammered frantically on the door.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  High above the planet, the deep space tug Portland, newly arrived from Earth, moved against the stars in its orbit. Tomorrow they would start preparations for an onward flight to Mars, in a change of plan brought about by the Denver’s troubles. Today though, the tug was relatively quiet as the crew caught up on lost sleep, and the officer on duty sat alone in the command seat on the flight deck.

  Normally, he would have been conducting one of his hourly regular checks of the tug’s systems. Right now, his attention was focused on one of the screens in front of him, showing the cloudscape below.

  The clouds of Venus rarely showed any structure when viewed from this altitude in visible light. In ultra-violet it was a different story, but today there was a feature growing in the atmosphere that could be seen by anyone. Black and growing, it spread like a giant bruise across the snowy whiteness of the clouds.

  ‘Carrier Two-Eight Langley, Space tug Two-Six Portland.’

  ‘Langley control, go ahead.’

  ‘Langley, we’re seeing something in the atmosphere ahead of you, it looks like a large dark swirl against the clouds.’

  The duty commander, Lieutenant Colonel Conway, came over to the orbital communications desk in the main control room. He plugged his headset into the desk.

  ‘Portland, Langley commander here. Can you give us any more information?’

  ‘It’s not like anything we’ve seen before. It could be some kind of atmospheric storm, but if it is, it’s huge. Diameter approximately six hundred kilometres, rotating, cyclonic. It may have something to do with what we think is an eruption on the surface. Sprang up about two hours ago in the Ishtar region. Massive infra-red signature.’

  ‘What’s the track of the storm?’

  ‘Ground track is two six zero, moving slower than the clouds, so we think it’s linked to a surface feature. At your present course and speed, you’ll pass by its southern edge.’

  ‘Roger Portland, thanks for letting us know.’

  ‘You’re welcome. We’ll continue to monitor it. Will let you know if we’ve got anything else on it. Portland out.’

  Conway turned to the chart table in the centre of the room and frowned. Storms on Venus rarely reached into the upper atmosphere, but when they happened, the carriers steered well clear of them. He punched up the long-range weather scan, and eyed the spiralling mass of red and yellow at the edge of the screen. Wind speed markers and isobars clustered round the formation.

  ‘Yates?’

  ‘Yes sir?’ The navigation officer looked up from his console.

  ‘Take a look at this.’ Conway beckoned him over, and indicated the weather display. The younger man stared at it for a moment, and looked back at Conway in concern.

  ‘What is it – a storm?’

  ‘Looks like it to me.’ Conway shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen anything this big before, though. We’ll know more as it gets closer, but I don’t want to hang around to find out. I think we should alter course immediately and go well to the south to avoid it.’

  The navigation officer punched up another display on the table and pointed to the locations of the other carriers. ‘It’s going to disrupt operations, sir. If we go round it, it’ll put us too far away from the Curtiss if a diversion’s needed, and we’re expecting a spaceplane first thing in the morning.’

  Conway
was silent, considering. Eventually he said: ‘Take us round – I don’t like those wind speeds. Inform the Curtiss that we’re having to change course and see if the Wright can’t circle back to be the diversion carrier. And get Lieutenant Coombes up here, we’d better have him take a look at this.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The navigation officer turned to the helmsman at his station nearby. ‘Left turn to heading two three zero.’

  ‘Two three zero, roger.’ The helmsman dialled in the new heading to the autopilot, and the giant craft started a slow and gentle turn to the left.

  Conway watched for a minute as the horizon slowly tilted and the ship moved onto its new course. He eased his shoulders. ‘I’m going to call the captain, let him know what we’re doing.’ He moved across to the command seat in the centre of the room, and called up the captain on the intercom.

  ‘Captain, what is it?’ The voice was filled with irritation.

  ‘Control room, Conway here. Sorry to disturb you sir, but we have an extreme weather formation a few hours dead ahead and we’re going to have to go round it. I’d recommend a very wide margin.’

  ‘What kind of extreme weather?’ the captain’s voice demanded.

  ‘Looks like a cyclonic vortex, sir. Never seen one this big before. Severe windshear warning on the Doppler radar.’

  ‘Keep us well away, then.’

  ‘Yes sir. It’s going to put us on the edge of diversion range from the other carriers, and we’ve got a landing at dawn tomorrow. It might be better to scrub the landing, or ask if the spaceplane can accept a landing on another carrier?’

  There was a pause on the line before the captain answered.

  ‘No, don’t do that. They need to land here.’ The voice from the speaker sounded oddly flat. ‘Can you keep us on the edge of diversion range and still get round that weather?’

  ‘Yes sir. We’re calling the Wright to ask them if they can come round and offer a better diversion.’