Mission: Tomorrow

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  “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.”

  I must be mad, thought Tania. I’m about to wreck a billion-dollar airship trying to save the life of one man. They won’t be able to find a book big enough to throw at me.

  The simulations she had run locally were no more encouraging than the ones that Mission Control had sent over. The huge aerostat was the only piece she had on the chessboard, the only aircraft close enough to reach the stricken merleta, and the only one with enough reserves of gas and ballast to allow it to maneuver up and down through the cloud layers. Tom had sent it wallowing after the Brazilian platform, like a whale chasing a swallow through a tempest. But she was acutely aware that they had only one chance to get it right. Even if wind shear didn’t pull the airship apart, its maneuverability was painfully limited. Squander too much lift and she’d never be able to bring it back up. If that happened, all she would have accomplished was to give Bruno a larger space to die in.

  She came to a decision.

  “Mason, call Bruno. He has to find a way to gain some height.”

  It was getting dark outside, and the interior of the wing was lit only dimly by lights strung along the spars. They glowed like faint stars in the semi-dark. The real stars were invisible, hidden by layer upon layer of dense cloud overhead.

  He knelt at the base of the wing, gathering strength for another attempt. He tried to calculate how many journeys he would need to make. He would have to alternate between wings, crawling out to drain one tank, then dragging himself back to work on its counterpart on the opposite side. Only that way could he keep the merleta balanced.

  “—need you to do what you can—”

  That was one of the men on the command station, his voice was squeezed to the point of unrecognizability on the congested narrowband channel. Yeah, yeah, thought Bruno. Let’s change places, and you can see how easy this is. He wiped sweat from his eyes.

  Tania had explained the plan to him. They had diverted one of their aerostats, an unmanned airship the size of a small town. But the aerostat couldn’t survive in the shear zone, where fast-moving air masses generated ferocious turbulence. He needed to find a way to climb to meet it. That meant shedding more weight.

  On an impulse, he pulled up the command interface again. To his surprise, there was more green than before. Evidently the return to level flight had convinced the merleta’s AI that conditions were less critical than before.

  Hardly daring to hope, he called up the maintenance subsystem. Options that had not been available before were now illuminated. He flipped through screen after screen until he found the page with the controls for the algae tanks. The overlay lit up with a schematic of the merleta’s internal plumbing, a tangled network of lines like the subway map of a small city. The tiny icons representing the vent valves glowed green: responsive to commands.

  He sat back on his heels, forcing himself to remain calm. He needed to plan his next moves carefully.

  “That’s great, Bruno,” said Tania.

  “I can dump pretty much everything,” the Brazilian said. He sounded as if he was smiling. “The only problem is that some of the tanks outboard of the damaged section aren’t responding. The pipes must have self-sealed.”

  “It may not be critical,” Mason observed. “It looks like he can still drain better than eighty percent.”

  “I think I can get those too, though,” Bruno said. “I’m sending the maintenance robots out onto the wings to open the valves manually.”

  Tania closed her eyes. Thank you, she thought. It’s about time we caught a break.

  “How far away is your airship?”

  “It’s still a long way behind you, but it’s picked up a tailwind. You need to start climbing soon.”

  “I’m on it,” said Bruno. “Out for now.”

  Tania looked around and saw Tom and Mason exchanging high-fives. She frowned.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she said. “The hard part is still to come.”

  They nodded and turned back to their instruments.

  With much of its load gone, the merleta was unstable, jolting violently as it climbed. The airframe flexed and moaned in protest. Bruno sat strapped into the command chair, tensing as each impact slammed the craft sideways. It felt like being shaken in a giant’s fist.

  Radar showed the airship creeping closer, a bright dot against a backdrop of swollen thunderclouds. The storms behind the Landis were dissipating now but there were new convection cells boiling up from below, exploding up from the lower atmosphere with frightening speed. He ran the simulations again. The most optimistic projection gave them no more than an hour before the new storm hit, right about the point where the two craft were predicted to come together.

  He resisted the impulse to divert more power to the maneuvering engines. He had to trust the AI to have chosen the best option, balancing speed against the load on the airframe. He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing.

  When the radar showed the airship less than five kilometers away, he freed himself from the chair and started to pull on his flight suit. His hand caught in the torn sleeve and he frowned. That was something else he needed to fix.

  He found tape and some plastic sheeting in the supply closet and used it to improvise a patch, wrapping the tape tightly around his arm. The plastic would not survive the corrosive rain of Venus for long, but it might last long enough to spare him any more acid burns. Satisfied, he pulled on his helmet and checked the oxygen levels in the miniature airpack.

  “How the hell is that thing still flying?” said Mason.

  Seen through the cameras on the underside of the Landis, the merleta was a sorry sight. Fragments of paneling trailed behind the damaged wing and the cluster of antennae on top were little more than tangled wreckage. The faceted canopy of the observation deck had been torn away, only a few shards of clear plastic still clinging to the twisted remains of the frame. Two of the engines were stopped, propellers turning idly in the wind.

  “Buoyancy, baby,” said Tom. “And Brazilian engineering.”

  The image on the screen was the ghostly green of night vision, but it was remarkably sharp. Tania could make out a tiny figure on the rear deck, the plastic bubble of his helmet reflecting the lights of the airship.

  “We see you, Bruno,” she said into the microphone.

  “I can see you, too,” he said. “What do we do now?”

  “Mason’s lowering a cable. If you can fasten it onto something, we’ll try to winch your ship in close enough that we can drop a ladder to you. Think you can do that?”

  “I think so,” Bruno said. “See if you can get it across one wing.”

  “Why the wing?” Mason asked.

  “Just do what he says,” Tania told him. “Tom, hold her steady.”

  The cable dropped into sight in the top right corner of the screen, coiling and twisting in the wind as it fell towards the other vehicle. The end plunged out of sight just ahead of the merleta.

  “Left just a hair,” Mason instructed. “Don’t foul the propeller.”

  The cable started to slacken, draping itself across the wing. “Perfect,” said Bruno. Something spider shaped scuttled across the surface of the wing, reaching for the cable with metal pincers.

  “He’s using a robot to grab the cable,” said Mason. “Smart.” The robot crawled back towards the center of the wing, dragging the cable with it.

  “Got it,” came Bruno’s voice through the speaker. “Want to send me another?”

  The rounded belly of the aerostat loomed above Bruno like a moon about to fall. Flickers of lightning reflected from the rain-wet hull. Tethered beneath the giant, the merleta lurched and jolted, twisting on the anchoring cables. Downdrafts from the airship’s huge propellers battered at Bruno with hurricane force as he scanned the underside for th
e promised ladder.

  “Going to bring you closer,” said Tania’s voice in his ear. “Can you cut your engines?”

  He ordered the AI to stop the last two motors, and the merleta swayed, now simply deadweight dragged behind the larger vehicle. He glanced forward to check that the cables were still holding.

  “Where do I look for the ladder?” he asked.

  “We’re going to open a hatch on the underside,” Tania told him. “Should be almost directly above your head.”

  “Copy.”

  Abruptly, a square of light appeared in the gray expanse overhead.

  “I see it,” Bruno said. “Looks good.” His heart was thumping at the thought of making the climb. He wished he had time to improvise a climbing harness, so that he could simply anchor himself to the ladder and let himself be dragged aboard.

  “Fifty meters to go,” said Tania.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Bruno saw one of the cables suddenly go slack. A moment later, it began to fall, twisting in the air, no longer attached at the upper end. The merleta dropped and he fell heavily to the deck.

  “What the hell just happened?” Tania demanded.

  “I’ve lost the Landis,” said Tom. The image on the main screen blinked out.

  “They found a way back in,” said Mason.

  “Oh, hell no. Not now.”

  She called up the command interface and searched for assets still under her control. A video window popped up in the corner of her field of vision. The miniature face of Derek Kelly looked out at her.

  “I’m sorry, Tania, but we have had to revoke your command,” he said.

  “Not now, you asshole,” she screamed at him. “We were just about to save him. Give it back!”

  It would be three minutes before Kelly would hear her words, another three before he could answer her. Even if he restored control, it would be too late.

  She waved the video away, cutting the recorded message off in mid-sentence.

  “Bruno,” she said. “This is Tania, can you hear me?”

  “— hear you. What’s happening?”

  “We’ve lost control of the airship,” she said. “You have to get aboard now.”

  “— can’t climb. Think . . . my arm —” A ripple of static washed out the rest of his transmission.

  “Listen to me, Bruno. In a few minutes, that ship is going to rise. We’re not controlling it any more. You have to get aboard. It’s your only chance.”

  The main screen was dark but she could see the situation clearly in her mind. The merleta was tethered only by a single cable now, dangling a full hundred meters below the Landis, rocked by the winds. No human being could make such a climb. She almost sobbed in frustration.

  Bruno’s voice came through with sudden clarity. “—have an idea,” he said.

  The sky was almost completely dark, the rising thunderclouds visible only as somber masses against the gray-black murk beneath. The wind tugged at him and the cloudscape swung sickeningly around him as he twisted in the air. Fifty meters below, the battered merleta was still lit brightly by the airship’s spotlights. He watched it spin beneath his boots and fought the urge to throw up. Then the lights went out and the outline of the merleta vanished in the darkness. He caught a last glimpse of the red light at the tip of one wing before an arm of cloud swept across it and hid the aircraft from his sight forever.

  He let himself dangle limply, cradling his injured arm. In the glow of his helmet light he could see the plastic patch on his arm starting to bubble and discolor where the acid rain had touched it. Water beaded on the backs of his gloves.

  A flicker of lightning from below revealed something in the air nearby, like a piece of white rope. When the lightning flashed again he recognized it as a stream of water falling from above. The airship was shedding ballast, dumping water from its tanks so that it could rise.

  Bruno was rising, too. The maintenance robot’s rear legs gripped him under the armpits, the manipulators at the tips digging painfully into his chest. The machine’s other six arms were locked to the cable. It climbed with mechanical single-mindedness, one leg at a time, indifferent to his weight, pulling him inexorably upwards. His helmet knocked against the robot’s carapace as it slowly ascended the cable.

  He twisted his head back and looked up. The hatchway was still open, a glowing rectangle in the darkness above, almost within reach now. He smiled to himself.

  “I’m coming home,” he said.

  Angus McIntyre is a computational linguist by training, with degrees in linguistics and intelligent knowledge-based systems from the University of Edinburgh. Born in London, he now lives in New York, where he works as a software developer. Prior to moving to the United States, he was a researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, working on computational models of language evolution. He has also lived and worked in Milan, Brussels, and Bangkok. He is a graduate of the 2013 Clarion Writer’s Workshop. He is an enthusiastic if not particularly-gifted amateur photographer, likes to travel, and speaks five languages with varying degrees of fluency. He lives in Manhattan with his girlfriend and the world’s least friendly cat.

  Next, in Sarah Hoyt’s fun twist on the time travel trope, three roommates get more than they bargained for when their quest to invent instant package delivery opens a portal in time with surprising results.

  ON EDGE

  by Sarah A. Hoyt

  It was the summer of ’32 and I was living in a dilapidated Victorian in the Colorado Springs suburb of Greater Denver, with two mad geniuses, both of whom were trying to court me.

  As a group we were recipients of the Bezos grant for developing a system of instant package delivery.

  We weren’t the only recipients of the grant, which was structured as both a stipend and a contest. Twenty teams had been given funds sufficient to live on and create a prototype for a year, and the team that created the winning system would get the prize of twenty million.

  We were one of the smaller teams, and also probably the most odd.

  Kenyon was tall and dark-haired, with the sort of complexion that, when exposed to sun, turns a little less pale. Since he was a theoretical physicist and mathematician, exposure to the sun rarely happened.

  Xavier was a little shorter and a lot darker, with broad shoulders and huge hands, which nevertheless were very good at assembling together the tiniest components. He was an electrical engineer. Kenyon and Xavier had been friends since kindergarten and had assembled their first computer together at eleven. Sometimes, I thought they spoke a private language that only other geniuses could understand.

  Me? I was the administrative assistant. Oh, that’s not what they’d called me in the grant application. I believe they’d called me a, general synthesis specialist, and both of them piously believed I could take a lot of information and come up with something new.

  They had no backup for this belief, beyond the fact that I’d taken degrees in math, languages, art, and biology, and I could convert their convoluted theories into smooth write-up that made it all sound sane. Was it sane? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t understand most of what the men said, even when they said it at length.

  But I do remember at the time I thought it was all crazy.

  It was late at night, in summer, and we had the windows open, leading to a slow creeping of the number of mosquitoes in the room. They wormed in through the rips in the ancient screens and clustered around the candle we’d stuck on an old, empty bottle.

  By its light we were sharing a new, full bottle and a loaf of French bread, which constituted our dinner for the evening.

  “You realize,” I said, “what he’s asking for is nothing less than teleportation? A transporter system, if you will,” I said.

  Kenyon nodded. “I think the Alaska University team is trying that thing. Molecular building and stuff.” He waved around with a piece of French bread. “Vats of molecules and nano builder things. Like magic.”

  “And ours isn’t like magic?” I said.


  Xavier was doing something to a circuit board that involved a soldering iron and a great deal of smoke and zapping. He had it pushed right up to the light of the candle. His big hands moved swiftly and with minute precision. “Well, if we’re going to talk about that,” he said. “The only ones who don’t seem like magic are the guys at Pacifica, who are experimenting with fast guided rockets.” He made a face. “Someone should have told them the other name for that is missiles.” He made a gesture with his left hand that seemed to denote the spreading tendrils of an explosion.

  “Yeah, but we are working on what? Teleportation? Magic tricks?”

  There was silence for a long while. Look, maybe it was because it had been so long. A long summer of watching them assemble what looked like a gigantic computer, a long summer of getting the impression both of these very intelligent men were courting me, but never having one of them actually say anything unambiguous enough to be sure, a long summer of listening to them talk in what seemed like a strange code.

  The silence lengthened, so absolute that I could hear Kenyon break a piece of bread. He gestured with the bottle of wine towards my empty glass, and I covered it to indicate I’d had enough. Outside, a cricket chirped loudly and inside, across the large coffee table, Xavier zapped something with the soldering iron.

  Kenyon dug into his pants pocket and took out a coin, flipped it midair. It was a quarter, and it came down, a shining, silvery streak in the candlelight. “Heads or tails?” he asked, but before I could answer, the coin fell, perfectly balanced, on edge.

  He grinned at me. “There is no reason it shouldn’t fall on edge,” he said. “All right, given weight and gravity and surface area, it has a greater probability of falling on one side or the other, but it doesn’t mean that a not-statistically-insignificant number of times it won’t fall on edge.”